Conclusion: Literary Legacy of Mathematical Structures

This chapter concludes the study of intersections of mathematics and literature within encyclopedic narratives by Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and 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. The pseudonym for a group of world-leading French mathematicians working in the middle of the twentieth century, Bourbaki attempted to create a definitive mathematical textbook from three foundational structures. Bourbaki’s article ‘The Architecture of Mathematics’, often considered a manifesto for the group, details three ‘great’ or ‘mother-structures’—topological, algebraic, and ordered structures—which together encompass the entirety of mathematical activity and theory. While playing an important part in Bourbaki’s project to unify, encircle, and totalize mathematics, these structures also reveal how encyclopedic narratives utilize the figurative efficacy of mathematics to challenge such epistemological exhaustion. 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. The difficult equations in Gravity’s Rainbow can be seen, through the concept of algebraic structures, to model Pynchon’s metaphorical processes. Finally, Wallace’s use of enumerated endnotes in Infinite Jest complements his interest in Georg Cantor’s mathematical set theory, explicated in Everything & More: understood through ordered structures, Wallace’s hierarchical manipulation of narrative containers are revealed to be mathematically informed representations of consciousness. This chapter concludes by considering recent examples of American fiction—from DeLillo, Pynchon, and Wallace, as well as from Mark Danielewski, Nicola Barker, Christine Brooke-Rose, Lucy Ellmann, Helen Dewitt, Rachel Cusk, and Zia Haider Rahman—which utilize topological, algebraic, and ordered structures, demonstrating continuing relevance of the interplay between mathematics and encyclopedic narrative.