Stuart J. Taylor, Mathematics in Postmodern American Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) ix+308 pp. £109.99 Hb. £89.99 ebook. ISBN: 978-3-031-48670-8
As mathematics appears unreasonably effective in defining and solving problems, we now observe its arresting spread, in real time, into each and every aspect of our life, through its various forms and incarnations – models, data, algorithms. The appeal of mathematics seems simple: it radiates a sense of clarity, defined meaning, total control. If there is something so good and effective, why not rely more on it?
The urge to use more of something if it seems good is an example of linear thinking; the appeal of mathematics as clear and defined all the way through conceives it as a totalised system of knowledge. Neither of these two statements are unproblematic.
Stuart J. Taylor, in his new book, delves into both problems through an interdisciplinary socio-historical literary critical study. He focuses on post-modern American novels, Ratner’s Star (DeLillo), Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon) and Infinite Jest (Foster Wallace). These novels are famous for their encyclopaedic engagement with different domains of knowledge and mathematics, in particular; they are, thus, ‘significant interdisciplinary sites where the connections between mathematics, power, and meaning can be explored.’ (271) Taylor argues that novels’ engagement with mathematics is not marginal and shows that specific mathematical structures – topological, algebraic and ordered – constrain the very fabric of these fictional narratives. However, bringing these concepts to the fore, Taylor also shows how the novels subvert the claim of mathematically inspired total and linear epistemologies.
To make the case, Taylor pieces together several elements. The central stage is given to Bourbaki, a group of French mathematicians, who, in the 30s, appealed to foundational structures (topological, algebraic and ordered) and the axiomatic method to restore, in the face of its foundational crisis, the integrity of mathematics as a system of knowledge. Bourbaki’s influence reverberated across the humanities throughout their structuralist phase; however, for his case, Taylor re-traces also more direct routes of their literary influence: firstly, through Bourbaki’s effect on post-war educational programs in the US and Western Bloc (the ‘New Math’) and, secondly, through the interaction between some Bourbaki members and writers within OuLiPo, the famous French literary group. This solidifies Taylor’s starting thesis that Pynchon, DeLillo and Wallace, the mathematically literate writers, not only were aware of Bourbaki’s mathematics, but that Bourbaki’s mathematics is a fruitful lens for looking at their novels.
The three central chapters of the book expand on this. Chapter 2 focuses on topological structures in DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star. The novel consists of two narratively distinct parts, ‘Adventures’ and ‘Reflections’, which allude to Lewis Carroll and his Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Drawing on DeLillo’s comments on the formal aspects of the novel (the book ‘is a structure and vice versa’) combined with a detailed understanding of topological structures in mathematics, Taylor argues that the novel as a spatial-literary narrative artefact can be modelled as a Möbius strip; such a model, however, reveals the features of this object that defy its assumed delineated and reductive nature. The novel evades the static meaning through ‘reflexive’ and ‘looping’ dynamics of intertextual allusions, thus creating its unsettling aesthetic of non-Euclidean spaces.
Chapter 3 looks at Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow through the lens of algebraic structures, suggesting that they help to bring into greater relief the textual nonlinearity of the novel, giving us a better grasp of Pynchon’s mathematical ‘aesthetics of chaos’. Taylor specifically focuses on the novel’s mathematical inscriptions. Following Northrop Frye, he interprets them as metaphorical images, which prescribe certain transformations of meanings. However, Taylor argues, taken together, they also point at Pynchon’s more general metaphorical strategy of algebraic transformations that challenge the traditional sense of narrative determinism and linearity of chronological progression. In the thematic context of the novel, which is set in the last phases of WW2 and shortly after it, the ‘reversion’, ‘subversion’ and ‘corruption’ of various associative narrative lines set up Pynchon’s case against reductive and linear conceptions of history.
Lastly, Chapter 4 discusses the concept of ordered structures, or sets, in Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest. The novel is famous for its wildly sprawling endnotes, which challenge the smooth unfolding of the narrative. Taylor traces the use of such a strategy back to one of the OuLiPo writers, Jacques Roubaud, who employed it as a pedagogical technique and a form of participatory aesthetics, where the reader is presented with bifurcations and interpolations and is invited to make their narrative choices. Looking at Wallace’s use of this tool and putting it together with Wallace’s explicit interest in mathematical sets and orders (embodied in his popular book on Cantor), Taylor suggests that Infinite Jest can be understood as Wallace’s model of consciousness. The fractured narrativity of the novel, its juxtaposition of narrative perspectives, timelines, stylistic tones, the flood of details and sub-details essentially forces the reader to exercise the value judgements and meta-textual decisions, amounting to a different experience in every case. Such choices can be framed as not just epistemic, but moral, since the need to choose is supposed to shake the reader from the passive consumption of the novel’s content.
Taylor’s study is rich with sources that are potent not only for understanding the book’s central points but also help to appreciate the scope of the interplay between mathematics and literature, history, sociology and general cultural development. At the same time, the deep engagement with the substance of mathematics helps to go beyond the surface of the analogy that post-modernist American fiction somehow manifests an affinity with structuralist and post-structuralist thought. Instead, it redirects attention to the works of literature themselves and explores plausible and, not least important, fruitful frameworks of reading and interpretation of the marked novelistic works. This, eventually, does exemplify the affinity between the literary and scholarly work of the time; however, it shows that this affinity emerges from the very narrative fabric of the text. The book is a veritable contribution to the study of literature and mathematics, as it indeed helps us to appreciate how the ‘figurative potential of mathematics in literature enriches our imaginative conceptions of space, time, and being /…/ while resisting weaponized, quantified simplifications of the world’ (272).
Anatolii Kozlov, University College London
