Pynchon's major novels and Conic sections

[matthew cissell]

Hi John,

I first came across some material that he had put up some time back but
they were really just the preliminary steps. I guess he took a couple of
years and made it part of a bigger book. Here's a link from back in 2008:
https://webusers.imj-prg.fr/~michael.harris/Pynchon.pdf   Just a pdf but
you can see the idea.

The price seems real fair so I think buying it is best. However, to peruse
a good part of the chapter one may find it on Google books:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=UZGSBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA137&lpg=PA137&dq=michael+harris+math+pynchon+conic+sections&source=bl&ots=sMlkL_8LFH&sig=N1uVdeImnufBLv9QVnpZq_SgILY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjCvNitidzMAhVBHxoKHaGLDMkQ6AEIKTAC#v=onepage&q=michael%20harris%20math%20pynchon%20conic%20sections&f=false

The chapter starts on page 128 I believe.

The idea of a structuring device that can be read through his major works
is not hard to swallow when you consider that Pynchon's "creative project",
that he then saw as 3 or 4 novels, came to him in the 60's, the same time
that Georges Perec and others were starting to use "strictures" and
constraints that shaped their novels. After literature had been stripped of
its traditional elements (think Beckett, Ionesco and the rest) it was time
to play with those elements in a new way (e.g, Italo Calvino, Julio
Cortazar, and others).

Prof. Harris has certainly read a good bit of Pynchon material (more, I
suppose, than any Pynchon scholar has read of p-adic and analytic
properties of period integrals and values of L-functions), it would be
interesting to know how many other math profs and buffs are also readers of
Pynchon.

Have a good day sir.

MC

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 2:16 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is great, Matthew. So much math in here I don't understand but am
> rabbit-holing into, but the idea that the structuring of M&D can be
> read through elliptical orbits is enough to make me want to read the
> thing again. Has Harris published any chapters online or should we
> seek out the book?
>
> On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 9:20 PM, matthew cissell <mccissell at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 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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