Topological Structures and Allusion in Ratner’s Star

This chapter examines intersections of mathematics and literature within encyclopedic narratives by Don DeLillo. My interdisciplinary approach draws upon the case of Nicolas Bourbaki, whose ‘encyclopedic’ treatise, Éléments de mathématique, provides an important cultural touchstone for contemporary visions of mathematics as a totalized system. One group of Bourbaki’s three ‘great’ or ‘mother-structures’—topological structures—is used to analyse DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star. Though Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star has long been recognized as structured upon the history of mathematics, considering how this encyclopedic novel alludes to its intertexts through the figure of the Möbius strip reveals its fundamentally topological structure. Such a structure models DeLillo’s system of allusion, by which the novel communicates with John Barth’s ‘Frame Tale’, the history of mathematics, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. This reading prepares the reader for further explorations, in subsequent chapters, of the difficult equations in Gravity’s Rainbow through the concept of algebraic structures, as models of Thomas Pynchon’s metaphorical processes, and of David Foster Wallace’s use of enumerated endnotes in Infinite Jest and Everything & More, understood through ordered structures as Wallace’s hierarchical manipulation of narrative containers as mathematically informed cognitive models. By regarding the topological, algebraic, and ordered structures of mathematics as modelling DeLillo, Pynchon, and Wallace’s figurative strategies—respectively, of allusion, metaphor, and cognition—the interplay between mathematics and encyclopedic narrative can be better appreciated.