Pynchon's major novels and Conic sections

[matthew cissell]

Hello P-listers,

I've been meaning to share this but am only now getting around to it.
Please forgive me if this has already been posted by someone else.

There is a mathematician named Michael Harris who published a book about a
year ago called "Mathematics without Apologies: Portrait of a Problematic
Vocation" (Princeton UP, 2015). That might not sound like our cup of meat
but turn to chapter 5 "An Automorphic Reading of Thomas Pynchon's AD" in
which he posits that M&D has the ellipse for structure and that AD is
marked by hyperbolae.

 I will add to that by pointing out that on page 591 Kit is being informed
that "worship of the number four, currently the rage in certain European
circles, "not to mention ellipses and hyprebloae," -- loosely allied, in
fact, as a sort of correpondent group [...]" The fact that they are joined
in Yashmeen's direct speech quote but then broken off by the dash that is
then followed by "loosely allied" complicates the parsing, after all
hyperbolae and ellipses are allied in that they are both conic sections.

Prof Harris proposes that the structure of the novel resembles "a hyperbola
whose two arcs are joined by a sinusoidal curve". I am more inclined to
agree with those reviewers and readers that noted a very elliptical nature
to the book in that characters and narratives come back around like comets
in so many ways. Why, even La Jarretiere comes back around (along with OIC
Bodine). So while granting the hyperbola, I'll argue for the importance of
the ellipse. Would it not be better to see a number of intersecting
ellipses as the narrative structure?

I also think that Prof. Harris makes a mistake in trying to include VL in
this reading because I don't consider it one of his major novels, that is
to say that it is not one of the 3 or 4 novels he was thinking to life in
the 60's and 70's.

Ciao
MC
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