Algebraic Structures and Metaphor in Gravity’s Rainbow

This chapter examines intersections of mathematics and literature within encyclopedic narratives by Thomas Pynchon. 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’—algebraic structures—is used to analyse Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Expanding on the preceding chapter’s exploration of topological, Möbian structures of allusion in DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, algebraic structures here permit analysis of metaphor in Pynchon’s work. Thus, the difficult equations in Gravity’s Rainbow are compared with similar structures in works by Bunyan and Catherine Asaro to highlight mathematical models of Thomas Pynchon’s metaphorical processes. This reading prepares the reader for further explorations, in subsequent chapters, 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.