Pynchon's major novels and Conic sections

[Mark Kohut]

yeah, interesting as shit stuff.......
My only question, as a non-mathematition but who has read about the
philosophy of math and statistics, actually is:

How do other major big novels look when the plot is laid out
mathematically? Moby Dick, Magic Mountain, Proust, etc.

Math patterns in the world are real, mathematicians will always say.....one
q is which comes first, math or world.

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 7:20 AM, 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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