Ordered Structures and Cognition in Infinite Jest

This chapter examines intersections of mathematics and literature within encyclopedic narratives by David Foster Wallace. 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’—ordered structures—is used to analyse Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Expanding on the preceding chapters’ exploration of topological, Möbian structures of allusion in DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star and algebraic structures of metaphor in Pynchon’s use of mathematics in Gravity’s Rainbow, ordered structures in this chapter form the basis of analysis of Wallace’s models of cognition in Infinite Jest. Incorporating interdisciplinary readings of Georg Cantor’s transfinite mathematics, this chapter compares Wallace’s cognitive strategies and endnotes in both Infinite Jest and Everything and More with Oulipian writer Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London. This reading prepares the reader for further explorations of topological, algebraic, and ordered structures in recent American fiction in the concluding chapter of the monograph. 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.