Nina Engelhardt (University of Edinburgh)
Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day explores the drastic and traumatic changes in the traditional worldview in turn-of-the-century Europe, such as occasioned by the First World War, the beginning of modernism, the epistemological crisis, and by broader social and political developments. The novel not only examines the changing world directly through these manifestations, but the extent of the irretrievable loss of belief in certainty and security and the pluralisation of worldviews and worlds is exemplified by its portrayal of the development of mathematics, traditionally deemed to be the most objective and stable science.
According to Galileo Galilei’s famous proposition, nature was a book written in the language of mathematics; it was thought to reliably represent reality and to constitute an indispensable tool to learn about nature. Thus, when the notion of mathematics changed around the turn of the century, so did the understanding of reality, and vice versa. Accordingly, when around 1900 mathematical branches and concepts were discovered that did not apply to the given world and even contradicted the conditions of the taken-for-granted, the so-called foundational crisis of mathematics has repercussions and parallels in the “real” world: As formulated in Against the Day: “The political crisis in Europe maps into the crisis in mathematics. […] The connections lie there […] – hidden and poisonous. Those of us who must creep among them do so at our peril.” Thus, Against the Day’s – and this paper’s -”creeping among” the perils of the crisis from the perspective of mathematics allows drawing conclusions for the “real” world as well. Furthermore, the novel uses the consequences of this crisis in mathematics as an analogue for its own proceedings, and it becomes clear that only by understanding the mathematics can we get to the core of Against the Day’s vision.
The “new” mathematics traced in Pynchon’s novel no longer constitutes a stable and unambiguous language through which reality can be perceived and described, but competing and contradictory mathematical concepts being equally sound and “real” inside the system of mathematics lead to a notion of mathematics as a human construct, self-contained and self-referential rather than representing the given world. Against the Day most notably describes this changed perception of mathematics – from securely providing certain knowledge about the world to the uncertainty and confusion of the foundational crisis – by the “war” between the mathematical schools of Vectors and Quaternions, and testifies to the explosiveness of the unsettling mathematical discovery by introducing the powers inherent in mathematics as one of the reasons of the outbreak of the First World War and the consequent destruction of the familiar world.
While contributing to the end of the world as traditionally conceived, the multiple mathematical worlds also point towards a new concept of mathematics, allowing for plurality, imaginative freedom and creativeness – qualities more usually associated with literary fiction. Against the Day’s own proceedings mirror the consequences drawn from the crisis in mathematics, thus re-evaluating the traditional contrast between diametrically opposed mathematics and literature. Furthermore, the two disciplines’ converging in the plurality, indeterminateness, and freedom of fiction relates closely to Against the Day’s vision of reality.
Against the Day thus presents mathematics as contributing to broader cultural developments of a loss of certainty and stable meaning, and as forming part of the novel’s celebration of the plurality and freedom in the world as found in fiction – be it mathematical or literary.