edinburgh critical studies in modernist culture

MODERNISM,
FICTION AND
MATHEMATICS
NINA ENGELHARDT
MODERNISM, FICTION AND
MATHEMATICS
 Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture
Series Editors: Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley

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Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy
and the Occult
Leigh Wilson
Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts
Sam Halliday
Modernism and the Frankfurt School
Tyrus Miller
Lesbian Modernism: Censorship, Sexuality and Genre Fiction
Elizabeth English
Modern Print Artefacts: Textual Materiality and Literary Value in British
Print Culture, 1890–1930s
Patrick Collier
Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers’ Series and the
Avant-Garde
Lise Jaillant
Portable Modernisms: The Art of Travelling Light
Emily Ridge
Hieroglyphic Modernisms: Writing and New Media in the Twentieth Century
Jesse Schotter
Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics
Nina Engelhardt

Forthcoming
Modernism, Space and the City
Andrew Thacker
Slow Modernism
Laura Salisbury
Primordial Modernism: Animals, Ideas, Transition (1927–1938)
Cathryn Setz
Modernism and the Idea of Everyday Life
Leena Kore-Schröder
Modernism Edited: Marianne Moore and The Dial Magazine
Victoria Bazin
Modernism and Time Machines
Charles Tung

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MODERNISM, FICTION AND
MATHEMATICS

Nina Engelhardt
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in
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 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements vi
Series Editors’ Preface viii
List of abbreviations ix

Introduction: All that Counts – Modernism, Fiction, Mathematics 1

1 Mathematics and Politics: Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day 24
2 Mathematics, Language, Structure: Hermann Broch, The
Sleepwalkers 59
3 Mathematics, Epistemology, Ethics: Robert Musil, The Man
without Qualities 93
4 Mathematics and Fiction: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow 126
Conclusion: Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics 157

Glossary 164
Bibliography 170
Index 186
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am thankful for and would like to acknowledge those who contributed

to shaping this research project. First of all, I would like to thank Randall
Stevenson from whose ideas and support I have profited enormously in the
course of this project. The insightful comments and suggestions on chapters
and presentations were immensely helpful in framing my ideas, and the general
support, advice and encouragement were invaluable, both in the imagi-
nary heights and along the real axis of the project. Simon Malpas and Paul
Crosthwaite also offered much appreciated support over the years. I would
like to thank the series editors Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley as well as
Adela Rauchova at Edinburgh University Press for their patience and support.
For offering time and space to exchange ideas, work together, and find rest
and diversion, I particularly thank Christin Höne, Julia Hoydis, Kelly Kawar,
the PhD community at the University of Edinburgh, my colleagues from the
a.r.t.e.s. research lab, and the mathematicians and scientists who generously
offered information and criticism, most of all Harald Engelhardt and Michael
Harris. For providing events, encouragement and inspiring conversations along
the research process, I thank the British Society for Literature and Science, the
International Pynchon Week and, not least, the Work in Progress Seminars at
the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh where this
project began.
Rather predictably, these acknowledgements, too, end with more private
thanks. If the general fact is not unusual, my individual experience has been

vi
 acknowledgements

singular and so are the people that have made it so. While writing this book,
a couple of forks in the path have changed my life for the better: my brother
who taught the valuable lesson that things are what they are and that it never
is too late; and forming a small, temporary community with S., helping each
other along a part of our ways. From the first to the very last, my family has
been with me in this: most directly involved with this book was my father in
whom, with his interest, dedication, mathematical understanding and liter-
ary curiosity, I have had a much valued ‘Doktorvater’ over the years. But this
research has been interrelated with other parts of my life that also demanded
attention, put up ‘real’ challenges, and were the source of much motivation
and happiness, and yes, sometimes grace. My biggest thanks lie here and go
to my parents and my sister: for continuous support and opening up singular
chances, for helping realise what began as possibilities and wild flights of
fancy, and for being there in the complexities of life. For my own, singular
case, my family – real, complex, sometimes purely improbable, and remaining
delightfully surprising in their anarchical behaviour – is the best of all possible
families.

I wish to thank the following publishers for permission to quote:

From The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch, published by Martin Secker.
Permission granted by Penguin Random House Group Limited.
From Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, published by Jonathan Cape.
Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited.
From Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, published by Vintage, 2007.
Copyright Thomas Pynchon, 2006. Permission granted by Melanie Jackson
Agency, LLC.
Part of Chapter 4 appeared, in different form, in Orbit: A Journal of
American Literature, 2.2 (2014) as ‘Gravity in Gravity’s Rainbow – Force,
Fictitious Force, and Frame of Reference; or: The Science and Poetry of Sloth’.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.7766/orbit.v2.2.80

vii
 SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

This series of monographs on selected topics in modernism is designed to

reflect and extend the range of new work in modernist studies. The studies in
the series aim for a breadth of scope and for an expanded sense of the canon of
modernism, rather than focusing on individual authors. Literary texts will be
considered in terms of contexts including recent cultural histories (modernism
and magic; sonic modernity; media studies) and topics of theoretical interest
(the everyday; postmodernism; the Frankfurt School); but the series will also
reconsider more familiar routes into modernism (modernism and gender;
sexuality; politics). The works published will be attentive to the various cul-
tural, intellectual and historical contexts of British, American and European
modernisms, and to interdisciplinary possibilities within modernism, including
performance and the visual and plastic arts.

Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley

viii
 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AD Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

DSW Hermann Broch, Die Schlafwandler
GR Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
MM Robert Musil, ‘The Mathematical Man’
MoE Robert Musil, Mann ohne Eigenschaften
MwQ Robert Musil, Man without Qualities
SW Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

ix
 To my parents
Für meine Eltern
 INTRODUCTION: ALL THAT COUNTS –
MODERNISM, FICTION, MATHEMATICS

‘Mighty are numbers; joined with art, resistless.’1 The quotation from
Euripides’ play Hecuba joins the two elements at the heart of this book, and
it expresses the pleasure resulting from the combination of mathematics and
literature – domains that are often regarded as alien or opposed to each other.
The context of the quotation reveals, however, that it does not refer to the rela-
tion between maths and fiction, but is a threat that, with cunning, Hecuba’s
numerous fellow Trojan women will help her ‘master men’ and avenge her
son.2 The suggestion that number bears power also relates to the argument of
this book: mathematics is generally regarded as certain and true and believed
to constitute authoritative knowledge; yet, literature draws on the privileged
position of number and calculation for its own purposes and in the course
thereof questions the established power structure of the disciplines.
If mathematics and literature are often viewed as diametrically opposed, a
focus on modernist interrelations between these fields might appear particu-
larly surprising: science and modernism can seem mutually contradictory, since
modernism is commonly understood to react against a modernity rooted in
the scientific revolution and Enlightenment valuation of reason. And as Isaac
Newton’s immensely influential Principia Mathematica (1687) signals in its
very title, early modern inquiries into nature allocated a central role to math-
ematics and established its place at the extreme end of scientific rationality.
On the other hand, however, the abstractness of maths has provoked ques-
tions about its relation to reality, and it has been understood to deal with ideal

1
modernism, fiction and mathematics

c­ onstructs that escape the restrictions of the given world. This book explores
how literature draws on the contradictory image of maths and reflects the
sometimes surprising relations between the fields. With this focus, I seek to help
redress an imbalance in scholarship: mathematics has received far less attention
in the humanities than other sciences. While scholars from a range of disciplines
have explored Charles Darwin’s work on evolution, the principles of quantum
mechanics or Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity and their connections with
modernist literature and the arts, similarly decisive developments in mathemat-
ics are less widely remembered. But these also shaped modern worldviews, and
reverberations in the works of philosophers, artists and literary writers suggest
that we have to pay greater attention to the cultural relations of mathematics
and more closely consider its place among manifestations of modernism.
In what follows, I explore the meeting of modernism and mathematics
from the perspective of history of maths and with a main focus on literature,
that is, on works of fiction that engage with modern maths as part of broader
developments in the first half of the twentieth century. In Hermann Broch’s
novel trilogy The Sleepwalkers (1930–32), Broch’s integrated essay introduces
‘research into first principles of modern mathematics’ as ‘the clearest example’
of a ‘sweeping revolution in the style of thinking’, and Robert Musil’s The
Man without Qualities (1930/32) establishes maths as ‘the new method of
thought itself, the mind itself, the very wellspring of the times’ (SW 481, MwQ
35).3 Thomas Pynchon’s novels Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and Against the
Day (2006) take the exploration of the period to a postmodern vantage point.
The latter novel echoes the exemplary role that maths occupies in Broch’s and
Musil’s assessments of the early twentieth century, when Yashmeen, one of a
number of characters practising maths, suggests to her colleague Kit to view
the time in terms of a connection between their field and the First World War:
‘The political crisis in Europe maps into the crisis in mathematics. [. . .] The
connections lie there, Kit – hidden and poisonous’ (AD 668). Taking a longer
temporal perspective, Gravity’s Rainbow places maths at the core of a trans-
formation of the modern Western world that begins with Newton’s work in
the scientific revolution and reaches its culmination in the Second World War.
The novels by Pynchon, Broch and Musil, considering the twentieth century
from perspectives that can be roughly distinguished into modern and postmod-
ern, also reflect their engagements with maths in their literary forms. Taking
a closer look at the maths will thus help us appreciate modernist and post-
modernist innovations in literary style and form. At the same time, when the
texts interrelate mathematical and literary developments, they point to char-
acteristics shared between these fields and advance the notion of mathematical
modernism: they support the idea that maths does not only become modern
but modernist, that apart from undergoing a process of modernisation, it is
part of modernist culture.

2
 introduction

The field of modernist studies has opened up to diverse alternative modern-

isms in recent years, strengthening the focus on international and interdiscipli-
nary perspectives and situating literary modernism within its cultural, social
and institutional contexts. Scholars also pay increasing attention to the scien-
tific environment and have overturned the well-rehearsed view that modernist
writers were generally opposed to scientific ideas. ‘Although the modernists’
unsympathetic representations of science are significant, they are only half of
the story’, Michael Whitworth argues, and a growing body of work emphasises
that writers traditionally viewed as opposed to science, such as Joseph Conrad,
D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, respond to its modern devel-
opment with enthusiasm as well as antipathy.4 Other modernist writers openly
celebrate science and advocate its method as a way to modernise literature. In
a ‘Meditatio’ of 1916, for instance, Ezra Pound pits notions of impersonality,
objectivity and authority in science against a moribund literature:
[I]f we can’t write plays, novels, poems or any other conceivable form
of literature with the scientist’s freedom and privilege, with at least the
chance of at least the scientist’s verity, then where in the world have we
got to, and what is the use of anything, anything?5
He explicitly laments literature’s belatedness: ‘Literature in the nineteenth and
the beginning of the twentieth centuries was and is where science was in the
days of Galileo and the Inquisition.’6 Pound’s suggestion to remake literature
according to the model of the sciences corresponds to the last out of the three
kinds of literary response to scientific developments that Tim Armstrong dis-
cerns in Modernism: A Cultural History: ‘texts which register shock; texts
which incorporate the new science into their depiction of the world; and texts
which deploy science at the level of poetics’.7 The novels by Pynchon, Broch
and Musil each include elements of all three categories: they reflect the enor-
mous changes brought about by science and technology, integrate new science
in the depiction of their worlds, and revaluate literary form in view of modern
mathematics.
Scholarship on modernism is surprisingly underrepresented in literature and
science studies, as the field continues to be dominated by a focus on Victorian
literature that the pioneering works of Gillian Beer and George Levine estab-
lished in the 1980s. Even regarding this well-explored era, Alice Jenkins notes
a lack of scholarship on mathematics: ‘Very little attention indeed [. . .] has
been given by literary scholars to the workings of mathematics in Victorian
culture. This is a problematic absence from both Victorian studies and litera-
ture and science studies.’8 Whitworth points to the special characteristics of
mathematics that partly explain its similarly marginal position in studies of
modernist literature and science: in contrast to the applied sciences and their
close ties to technology, maths seems ‘removed from the conventional concerns

3
modernism, fiction and mathematics

of literature, allowing the fewest possibilities for metaphorical exchange’.9

Yet Whitworth concludes that modernist writers employ models and meta-
phors from pure science not primarily in terms of theme but that engagement
with it manifests in literary form, and in this practice mathematics appears
as an apt interest of modernist writers: as a formal science that works with
abstract concepts and not with the empirical methods of the natural sciences,
it precisely lends itself to considerations of structure and form.10 As we shall
see, the novels by Pynchon, Broch and Musil engage with maths as topic and
metaphor as well as on a structural level, and examining the texts affords an
insight into the role of pure science in innovations in literary form. But, with
its focus on maths, this book directs literature and science studies to a field that
more generally puts into question the division between the two cultures: as a
formal or structural science, mathematics holds an exceptional position in the
relation of the (natural) sciences and the humanities. Where C. P. Snow in his
talk ‘The Two Cultures’ (1959) famously laments a dangerous drifting apart
of the disciplines, the physicist and philosopher Bernd-Olaf Küppers suggests
that the structural sciences abstract from reality and are therefore best suited
to building a bridge between the natural sciences and the humanities.11 This
proposition points us towards the specificity of mathematics and its unique
place in the relationship between the disciplines that receives particular atten-
tion with its modern development.

Mathematics and its Relation to Nature

‘[T]he layman does not conceive it to be any part of his aesthetic and cul-
tural duty to understand the least thing about mathematics’, Norbert Wiener
lamented in 1956.12 If the hurdles for non-professional engagement with math-
ematics can be high, on the other hand, the discipline itself only very gradually
opened up to non-mathematical considerations: historical, social and cultural
studies of maths developed noticeably later than comparable examinations of
the natural sciences. When such studies finally emerged in the mid-1970s, they
had to overcome considerable difficulties. Conducting a sociological analysis
of maths in Knowledge and Social Imagery (1976), David Bloor described it
as ‘perhaps the most difficult of all the obstacles to the sociology of knowl-
edge’, and he admitted that, compared to the natural sciences, there were few
examples he could give.13 Similarly, the field long remained overlooked in the
history of science, and the few mathematicians writing on the development
of their discipline tended to explain the roots of modern theories rather than
examining historical material on its own terms. Ivor Grattan-Guinness asserts:
‘they confound the question, “How did we get here?”, with the different ques-
tion, “What happened in the past?”’14 This confusion arises from the excep-
tional epistemological status of mathematics, which also is a reason for its
relative neglect in historical and cultural studies: mathematics is traditionally

4
 introduction

seen to aggregate eternal truths that are independent of exterior factors and
therefore not in need of contextualisation.
The view that mathematics constitutes general and incontrovertible truth
goes back to ancient Greece in the sixth century bc. Pythagoras and the
brotherhood he founded held that numbers exist independently of the natural
world, and the realisation that they describe many phenomena, from musical
harmonies to planetary orbits, led them to proclaim that the universe itself
was c­onstructed of whole numbers. For the Pythagoreans, mathematical
learning was therefore driven by the hope to discover fundamental truths
and gain godly knowledge. Given that from Pythagoras onwards mathemat-
ics appeared essential to understanding the order of nature and the heavens,
many philosophers and scientists agreed with the view that it was a human
duty to pursue this discipline; a notion also expressed in a quotation ascribed
to Plato: ‘He is unworthy of the name of man who does not know that the
diagonal of a square is incommensurable with its side.’ Two thousand years
after Pythagoras, Galileo Galilei similarly asserted that human beings could
reach the highest truth and participate in God’s knowledge through math-
ematics. In a well-known phrase, he echoes the ancient Greek belief in number
as the key to nature:
Philosophy is written in this grand book – I mean the universe – [. . .]
but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the
language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written
in the language of mathematics.15
When Galileo understands mathematics as the language of the Book of Nature,
he takes it to represent the physical world and to derive its truth and meaning
from this relation to reality. Following from this link is the assumption that
everything written in the language of mathematics stems from nature and
therefore exists. In the sixteenth century Nicolaus Copernicus was among the
first to argue not only for the equivalence of maths and reality but to grant
priority to mathematical truth: ‘Copernicus only offered entirely abstract
mathematical arguments. No matter how contrary to natural philosophy the
motion of the earth may seem, Copernicus insisted, it must be true because
the mathematics demands it. This was revolutionary.’16 While Copernicus
himself held maths to describe truths about the physical world, his contempo-
raries understood his heliocentric system as a model only and more generally
regarded mathematics as merely an auxiliary construction to gain knowledge
about nature. Thanks to this misreading the Catholic Church did not challenge
Copernicus, while, when Galileo took up Copernicus’s work and insisted on
the physical reality of the mathematical description, he met with opposition
and was put under house arrest by the Inquisition. Questions about the truth
of maths and its relation to nature thus had far-reaching consequences in the

5
modernism, fiction and mathematics

sixteenth and ­seventeenth centuries as mathematics began to challenge the

explanatory system of Christianity and rival physical reality itself.
Galileo’s programme of a detailed study of nature based on mathematics
began to replace the practices of natural philosophy and its aim to provide
an explanation of the entire system of the world. Later, protagonists in the
Enlightenment movement that highly valued reason and scientific method simi-
larly accorded mathematics a prominent place: Thomas Hobbes developed the
view that reason is calculation, and Immanuel Kant accounted for the successes
of mathematical truths that described nature so adequately by creating for it a
new category of knowledge: synthetic judgement a priori. Mathematical knowl-
edge is synthetic as a calculation puts together different facts and arrives at new
knowledge: for example, the elements 5 and 7 add up to 12, a new element.17
And since mathematical knowledge is not derived from experience, it consti-
tutes knowledge a priori. As such it is independent of context, and any math-
ematical description of the world could be regarded as absolutely certain and
true. Pierre-Simon Laplace formulated the extreme consequences of believing in
a mathematically describable world in 1814, when he asserted that theoretically
an intellect – later called ‘Laplace’s demon’ – could know all determinants of
the universe and express it in a single formula according to which past, present
and future could be calculated. A single mathematical formula would thus
encompass the whole universe at all times, and mathematics as the description
of all space and time would be the true language of reality.
The view of mathematics as the most certain science and perfect language
of nature was dominant until the mid-nineteenth century. From the perspec-
tive of the early 1900s, the mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré
summarised: ‘Mathematical truths are derived from a few self-evident proposi-
tions, by a chain of flawless reasonings; they are imposed not only on us, but
on Nature itself. By them the Creator is fettered.’18 However, at the time of
outlining this traditional understanding, Poincaré had witnessed the discovery
of new concepts that drew attention to the fact that not all of mathematics has
counterparts in nature and a rethinking of its relation to reality had begun to
take place. In geometry, which had been based on five intuitively true axioms
formulated by Euclid in the third century bc, mathematicians constructed new
systems that contradicted the established rules: violating Euclid’s parallel pos-
tulate, in these geometries there is no pair of straight lines that are at constant
distance from each other. Farkas Bolyai warned his son János about the con-
sequences of developing a non-Euclidean geometry, and his dramatic language
illustrates that the failure of the seemingly self-evident parallel axiom affected
not only mathematics but also the general sense of certainty:

I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and
joy of my life. [. . .] I turned back when I saw that no man can reach the

6
 introduction

bottom of this night. I turned back unconsoled, pitying myself and all
mankind.19

Unabashed, János Bolyai published his findings of non-Euclidean geometry in

1832, and when Bernhard Riemann later showed that infinitely many geom-
etries that are not Euclidean can be constructed, there was overwhelming proof
that a fundamental premise of the field was not correct. Poincaré summarised
the reactions: ‘If several geometries are possible, they say, is it certain that our
geometry is the one that is true?’20 The coexistence of several systems showed
that the traditional Euclidean geometry is not more true than other, equally
possible systems, but that the definition of its axioms ‘can only be more con-
venient’.21 The discovery of non-Euclidean geometries thus gave rise to ques-
tioning mathematics as the language of nature that arrives at certain truths
about the world.
If worrying concepts appeared in geometry, mathematicians even more
readily identified fundamental questions in algebra. In 1831 William Rowan
Hamilton stated that ‘[n]o candid and intelligent person can doubt the truth
of the chief properties of Parallel Lines, as set forth by Euclid in his Elements’,
while in algebra ‘it requires no peculiar scepticism to doubt, or even to disbe-
lieve, the doctrine of Negatives and Imaginaries’.22 The idea of debt renders the
concept of negative quantities quite readily graspable, but the counter-intuitive
‘existence’ of imaginary numbers meant that their wide acceptance did not
come about until well into the nineteenth century. The very term ‘imaginary’
points to questions about the reality and existence of these numbers – an issue
we will further examine in Chapter 1. Since discoveries of alternatives to the
taken-for-granted geometry and algebra suggested that reference to physi-
cal reality could not adequately prove mathematical existence, it came to be
seen as relying on coherence in the system itself: ‘mathematicians fashioned
for themselves a new image of the subject: autonomous, abstract, largely axi-
omatic, and unconstrained by applications even to physics’.23 The notion that
maths does not have a direct representational relationship with nature is a
main feature of its modern development, and the release from the constraints
of realist representation had enormous implications for the discipline and
beyond. The mathematician Marshall Stone even claims it to mark ‘one of
the most significant intellectual advances in the history of mankind’.24 But the
modern view also elicited great concern when a question arose from the reali-
sation that mathematics does not rest on its relation to nature: what are the
foundations of mathematics that guarantee its truth and meaning?

The Foundational Crisis of Mathematics

This question – what are the foundations of mathematics that guarantee its
truth and meaning? – is at the core of the so-called ‘foundational crisis of

7
modernism, fiction and mathematics

mathematics’, which took place from the 1880s to about 1930. With notions
of truth, meaning and existence at the root of debates, the upheaval was not
purely mathematical but also marked by philosophical concerns. The sense of
crisis accordingly registers in talk about mathematics, for example in philo-
sophical works or in speeches and prose writing by practising mathematicians
such as David Hilbert, whose description of the situation as ‘intolerable’ indi-
cates what was at stake: ‘If mathematical thinking is defective, where are we
to find truth and certitude?’25 The foundational questions also immediately
impacted on the development of the discipline: it split into the schools of logi-
cism, formalism and intuitionism, each attempting to set mathematics on new
foundations. Logicism, founded by Gottlob Frege in 1884, views maths as part
of logic; the formalist school around Hilbert understands it as a self-contained
formal system; and intuitionism with its founding father L. E. J. Brouwer iden-
tifies human intuition as the foundation of maths.26 All three schools share in
the characteristic modern development: they do not claim a direct representa-
tional relationship between mathematics and nature. But an antagonism inside
this modern movement incited the foundational crisis, which mainly played
out between the schools of formalism and intuitionism. In a highly influential
monograph from 1990, Herbert Mehrtens situates the mathematical conflict in
a wider cultural and social context and advocates understanding it as part of
modernist discourse: ‘“Modernism” and “counter-modernism” are the terms
for two opposing forms of the self-understanding and style of mathematics.’27
Before turning to relations between mathematical and literary modernism, a
closer look at the formalist school, which Mehrtens equates with modernism,
and at the counter-modernist intuitionist stance will bring into view wider
implications of the opposed foundational positions.
Formalists and intuitionists drew fundamentally different conclusions from
the independence of modern mathematics from physical reality and its con-
sequent want of foundations. Intent on saving the progress made in the nine-
teenth century, formalists were prepared to circumvent problems by accepting
looser notions of mathematical meaning and truth. When Hilbert describes
maths as working with symbols that ‘have no significance in themselves’ in
the manner of ‘a game played according to certain rules with meaningless
marks on paper’, he takes existence and truth to reside in the absence of
contradictions in the mathematical system.28 Limited only by a rule against
inconsistency, formalist mathematics is entirely free in its development: ‘the
essence of mathematics is its freedom’, as Georg Cantor put it.29 Unrestrained
inside its own system, formalist mathematics claims no relation to any non-
mathematical origin or meaning, and limited to manipulating its symbols, it is
unresponsive to any demands for extra-mathematical truth or value. Thus, in
the formalist understanding, mathematics always points back to itself: it ‘has
no “reason” apart from itself. “Truth” cannot be saved.’30

8
 introduction

Counter-modernist intuitionism, as Mehrtens’s term already implies, is a

reaction against the modernist view, addressing precisely the question that
formalism excludes: ‘Where is the reference of mathematics to stable reality,
which endows it with value and meaning?’31 In his speeches and prose writing
Brouwer, the figurehead of intuitionism, emphasises the moral dimension of
mathematics: ‘Let the motivation behind mathematics be the craving for the
good.’32 To ensure genuine value and meaning, he set out to construct the
subject from scratch, claiming that ‘man builds up pure mathematics out of
the basic intuition of the intellect’.33 This means that, in Brouwer’s intuition-
ist view, maths is a construct of the mind, and the human being, as the link
between maths and the world, justifies its truth and meaning. When positing
intuition as the origin of mathematical truth, Brouwer compromises its rela-
tion to reason; indeed, he asserts: ‘mathematics is independent of the so-called
logical laws (laws of reasoning or of human thought)’.34 Thus, while formalism
attempts to build an independent mathematics on rational foundations, intui-
tionism abandons logic and traces maths to a human origin, which connects it
to the world and allows advancing a moral practice. Hilbert complained about
the resulting restriction of mathematical freedom and about the ‘subjectivism
[. . .] which, as it seems to me, finds it [sic] apex in intuitionism’ and appeared,
to him, to destroy and disfigure mathematics.35 On the other hand, Brouwer
objected to the abandonment of truth and value by the formalist school. As
Mehrtens puts it: ‘The difference between modernist and counter-modernist
mathematics boils down to the question: reality and eternal truth or creative
freedom and freedom from contradiction?’36
The speeches and prose writings of Hilbert and Brouwer show that the
points of conflict between modernist and counter-modernist orientations were
not purely mathematical but that they addressed philosophical questions and
included moral arguments. In an overview of the crisis in maths and its split
into conflicting schools, Ernst Snapper draws attention to the role of emotional
reasons, contending that the arguments were ultimately ‘grounded in a deep
sense as to what mathematics is all about’.37 Feelings about what mathemat-
ics ought to be dominated the last phases of the crisis in the 1920s, when the
conflict between modernist and counter-modernist orientations came to a head
in a personal clash between Hilbert and Brouwer and their supporters. By that
time, intuitionism had gained philosophical support and the majority of math-
ematicians accepted it as a valid foundational theory. However, since intui-
tionism dismisses established theorems and introduces others that do not hold
in classical mathematics, most practitioners, unwilling to sacrifice a substantial
part of well-working traditional methods, rejected it and agreed with Hilbert’s
objection to Brouwer’s programme: ‘With your methods most of the results of
modern mathematics would have to be abandoned, and to me the important
thing is not to get fewer results but to get more results.’38

9
modernism, fiction and mathematics

If intuitionism failed the practice test, Kurt Gödel proved the impossibility of
accomplishing the formalist programme, demonstrating that Hilbert’s aim to
define a complete and consistent set of axioms as the foundation of mathemat-
ics cannot be realised. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem refers to formal systems
whose axioms allow doing arithmetic – a qualification that is often ignored in
popular accounts of Gödel’s theorem and its application to non-mathematical
contexts. Yet, illustrating its structure in a non-technical example can clarify
the argument: the truth value of the sentence ‘This sentence is unprovable’
is undecidable. If the sentence is taken to be true, it is unprovable, meaning
that its correctness cannot be proven. If by contrast the statement is taken to
be false, then it should be provable, but it can only be proven to be unprov-
able, thus leading to a contradiction. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem uses a
comparable metalanguage in maths to demonstrate that every foundational
system contains undecidable sentences, and it follows that defining a complete
and consistent foundation of mathematics is impossible. With this verdict,
Hilbert’s programme had failed, but when Gödel published his work in 1931
the sense of crisis had already subsided and most mathematicians were content
to use the flawed but nevertheless well-working formalist approach rather
than resort to the restrictive and inconvenient intuitionist framework. As the
historian of mathematics Dirk van Dalen puts it, Hilbert ‘won the conflict in
the social sense’ even though he ‘had lost it in the scientific sense’.39 The foun-
dational crisis of mathematics thus did not end with a solution or clear winner,
but its questions and the coexistence of contradictory positions ceased to be
perceived as problematical. That the crisis was not resolved but simply faded
from view further suggests that it was not a purely scientific upheaval but that
much of the sense of uncertainty derived from its implications for notions of
meaning, truth and value and could not be appeased with mathematical means.
The philosophical and moral questions in modern mathematics connect it with
similar concerns in other fields at the time and constitute a basis for locating
maths in the cultural context of modernism.

Mathematical Modernism
Moritz Epple remembers the 1980s as a time when it was common in
European maths departments to talk about a mathematical modernism and
compare transformations in maths around 1900 with modernist developments
in literature, painting or music.40 The publication of Mehrtens’s monograph
in 1990 introduced the topic into scholarly discussion, and his comparison
between characteristics of maths and modernist art continues to animate
debate. Mehrtens writes: ‘The two common traits of the various modernisms
that I identify as central are, first, the autonomy of cultural production and,
second, the departure from the vision of an immediate representation of the
world of experience.’41 The independence of mathematical development and

10
 introduction

the turn away from a direct representational relation to physical reality are
regular features in definitions of mathematical modernism and its analogies
with movements in the arts. Jeremy Gray draws on these characteristics to
prepare the basis of his argument that modern mathematics relates ‘to the rise
of modernism in cultural spheres such as painting, music, and literature’ and
should be viewed as a cultural phenomenon:
Modernism can be defined as an autonomous body of ideas, pursued
with little outward reference, maintaining a complicated, rather than a
naïve, relationship with the day-to-day world and drawn to the formal
aspects of the discipline. It is introspective to the point of anxiety; and is
the de facto view of a coherent group of people, such as a professional,
discipline-based group, who were profoundly serious in their intentions.
As a philosophy (taking the term in its broadest sense) it is in sharp con-
trast to the immediately preceding one in each of its fields.42
This definition of modernism, as carefully phrased as it may be, is indicative
of a challenge: as the concept of modernism is far from clearly defined in any
one discipline, how is it possible to identify common modernist characteristics
across different fields? Leo Corry notes this problem in his contribution to the
essay collection Modernism in the Sciences, where he also criticises searching
for preconceived modernist characteristics rather than developing these from
mathematics itself. The former is an explicit method in Mehrtens’s approach;
he explains that he ‘chose the term “modernism” for mathematics to be able
to embed the history of science into its cultural context’, and Gray similarly
draws on the already available framework of modernism to explore math-
ematical trends.43 Working with fuzzy and changeable concepts and facing
the difficulty of examining relations between fields without preconceptions is
common in any interdisciplinary research, but it may be particularly challeng-
ing in view of the relatively short tradition of cultural and historical studies on
mathematics.
Coming to the study of science and the arts from a literary perspective, Gillian
Beer in her seminal essay ‘Translation or Transformation?’ includes mathemat-
ics, the field seemingly furthest removed from literature, when setting out her
argument that the relations between the fields go beyond straightforward influ-
ence of science on literary subject matter but that there always is a two-way
traffic between disciplines. So, while, for example, Marjorie Hope Nicolson in
the mid-twentieth century did pioneering, if now largely forgotten, work on
the effects of science on literary production, and Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s
influential examination of modern painters’ engagement with non-Euclidean
geometry similarly leans towards a one-way model of influence, Beer also con-
siders exchange in the reverse direction. She uses Benoît Mandelbrot’s fractal
geometry to show that cultural influence affects the terminology and thereby

11
modernism, fiction and mathematics

the reaction to mathematical concepts: Mandelbrot employs Gothic terms to

describe his fractals, and names such as ‘Cross Lumped Curdling Monsters’ or
‘Knotted Peano Monsters, Tamed’ represent the unsettling nature of the struc-
tures while also rendering them more familiar. Investigating mutual impact
without granting precedence to either side as sole origin of the other is now the
established standard in literature and science studies.
In cultural studies of mathematics the two-way traffic approach is not
common and scholars distances themselves from any notion of influence: ‘the
mathematical [changes] described here and the better-known artistic ones hap-
pened independently’, Gray insists.44 He is wary of the temptation to overstate
analogous developments in different fields, cautioning scholars ‘not to collapse
into the arms of a generalization so sweeping that Picasso sits on the page with
Einstein and Noether’.45 At the same time, researchers agree that the modern-
ist transformation of mathematics is too pervasive to exclusively examine it
in tightly focused analyses and that only broader strokes can do justice to its
import and the similarities between developments in maths and modernist
culture. Several historians favour an approach that explains these simultane-
ous movements by supposing an underlying field or general process, with
Corry proposing to identify the common ground of various modernist devel-
opments by focusing on the historical processes shared across all fields.46 It is
not clear what such a process would look like or how it could be determined
except by examining its concrete implementations, that is, the very phenomena
it is supposed to occasion. However, scholars stress the importance of institu-
tional and disciplinary changes in this context and point to the distinctiveness
of German mathematics, in which much of the modernist transformation took
place.
When William Whewell coined the word ‘scientist’ in 1833, it signalled the
emergence of a community of professionals, and by the 1860s members of this
profession were no longer expected to also be experts in literature and vice
versa. The tendency towards specialisation also informed the development
of mathematics, where practitioners paid increasing attention to differences
between their field and the natural sciences. In nineteenth-century Germany
the sciences and humanities similarly formed into separate domains, yet,
though broadly similar to the British course in terms of specialisation, German
mathematics took a distinct route in its institutional and disciplinary develop-
ment. While British mathematics focused on application and thus maintained
a closer connection to the natural sciences, the German counterpart was char-
acterised by pure, abstract considerations and philosophical concerns: it was
marked by ‘the preference for a strictly theoretical orientation, the concentra-
tion on narrowly defined specialities or branches of mathematics, and in many
cases a close attention to the philosophical presuppositions of the advocated
theories’.47 The University of Göttingen, the centre of mathematical research

12
 introduction

around 1900, profited from an unparalleled connection between mathema-

ticians and philosophers, and this close contact productively informed the
debate around notions of truth, meaning and existence that crucially informed
the modernist transformation of maths. In the 1920s the close exchange
between German-speaking philosophers and mathematicians continued in
the Vienna Circle up to its disintegration in the politically charged climate of
the 1930s. The respective focuses on applied and abstract mathematics and the
different degrees of institutional proximity with philosophy also influenced the
resources available to mathematically interested laypersons. At the close of
the nineteenth century, the history of mathematics had a firm place in German
mathematical culture, while it was side-lined in the British focus on empiricism
and only received some modest attention after the Second World War with
the foundation of the British Society for the History of Science.48 The different
institutional and disciplinary conditions in Britain and Germany go some way
in explaining the leading role of German mathematics in its modernist trans-
formation and, accordingly, in Pynchon’s, Broch’s and Musil’s literary visions
of maths in modernist culture.
Since the first publication on mathematical modernism in 1990, several
scholars have proposed modifications to Mehrtens’s approach. Where the
pioneering study focuses on the German context, Gray extends the analysis
across national and disciplinary lines. Epple also supports Mehrtens’s interpre-
tation but criticises his concentration on external historiography: ‘His sources
are mainly the programmatic declarations of the mathematicians involved
and the documents of their institutional activities. Mehrtens [. . .] makes no
claims about the internal construction of modern mathematics.’49 He also
points to the limitations of focusing on mathematics as a language and extends
the analysis to concrete acts in mathematical practice, using the example of
abstract and concrete writing to support Mehrtens’s conclusions with a view
to mathematical construction itself.50 Calls for further studies mainly address
scholars in the history of mathematics; yet, with this book I hope to show that
literary studies also open up rewarding sources of inquiry and contribute a
fruitful perspective to research on modernist mathematics.

Mathematics, Art and Fiction

‘[M]athematics, though classified as a science, is equally an art.’51 Brian
Rotman’s remark in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science
follows in a tradition of comparing mathematicians with artists, which
received a boost with the realisation in the nineteenth century that it is pos-
sible to consciously construct new mathematical structures, for example non-
Euclidean geometries. G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology (1940) gives
a sustained account of this view when drawing heavily on the comparison with
the arts to explain what mathematics is and why it should be pursued. ‘I am

13
modernism, fiction and mathematics

interested in mathematics only as a creative art’, Hardy declares and proclaims

both to share a common aesthetics, claiming that ‘[t]he mathematician’s pat-
terns, like the painter’s or the poet’s, must be beautiful [. . .]. Beauty is the first
test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.’52 For
Hardy, the aesthetic dimension is the main reason to practise pure mathemat-
ics: he praises its capacity to create ‘“[i]maginary” universes [which] are so
much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed “real” one’, and asserts
that since it has no immediate connection to the real world, maths ‘must be
justified as art if it can be justified at all’.53 Other practitioners in the early
twentieth century similarly highlighted creativity in their field and suggested
it to share qualities with the sphere of art: Poincaré held that ‘mathematical
reasoning has of itself a kind of creative virtue’, and Hermann Weyl proposed
that ‘“[m]athematizing” may well be a creative activity of man’.54 Outside the
discipline, too, the decades around 1900 saw the appearance of concepts that
consider mathematics as a human construct and tool to deliberately create
imaginary universes. I here introduce such views in the philosophical works
of Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Cassirer and Hans Vaihinger,
before turning to the literary perspective on connections between mathematics
and fiction in Chapters 1 to 4.
‘This complete reliability of mathematics is an illusion, it does not exist, at
least not unconditionally.’55 The decidedly negative terms in which the math-
ematician Oskar Perron summed up the situation in 1911 express the sense of
anxiety that marks the years of the foundational crisis. As the basic assump-
tions of maths were under revision, the ‘growing appreciation of error leading
to a note of anxiety, hesitant at first but persistent by 1900’ tied in with feelings
of a loss of confidence in other domains.56 In the non-mathematical sphere, the
sense of crisis and questioning of absolute certainty, finding their height in the
First World War, were prominently associated with the nihilistic thinking of
Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘The present European War is [. . .] even called “Nietzsche
in Action,” or the “Euro-Nietzschean (or Anglo-Nietzschean) War”’, William
Salter asserted in 1917.57 Nietzsche’s writing resonated widely when it pro-
nounces a crisis of the foundations of Western thought and the necessity for a
‘revaluation of all values’: ‘the weight of all things must be determined anew’.58
It also expresses a commonly held view when connecting the diagnosis of a
decline of Christian faith with the demand for certainty in other areas, with the
greatest hopes being invested in the scientific domain. Arguing that, together
with faith, the rules of what is considered morally good and valuable disap-
pear and trigger modern disintegration, Nietzsche proposes mathematics as
best suited for establishing new grounds for truth. He demands to ‘introduce
the subtlety and rigour of mathematics into all sciences’, with ‘sciences’ – from
German Wissenschaften – encompassing both the natural sciences and the
humanities.59 The proposal that ‘[m]athematics is [. . .] the means to general

14
 introduction

and final knowledge of humanity’ can be read as a celebration of its role in

establishing a completely scientific view and an alternative to religion, but
Nietzsche also discusses aspects of its modern development that are in conflict
with this notion: he acknowledges that the most certain science is itself part of
the modern crisis of foundational beliefs.60
Nietzsche qualifies his professed confidence in mathematics when he draws
on it to rethink the very certainty of knowledge and develop the idea that
reality cannot be perceived directly but is always interpreted. According to his
perspectivism, ‘facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. [. . . The
world] has no meaning behind it, but countless meanings.’61 Even mathematics
is caught up in this process and produces interpretations rather than getting to
the facts of reality directly: ‘logic (like geometry and arithmetic) applies only
to fictitious entities that we have created’.62 Nietzsche thus does not take maths
to constitute Truth or to stand in a representational relationship to nature,
and elsewhere in his writing, he describes it to be not a language of fact but a
language of fiction: ‘The arithmetic formulas, too, are only regulating fictions
which we use to simplify and arrange real events to our proportion.’63 Indeed,
he considers the ‘fiction’ of mathematics to be ‘false’ and to distort the world:
[O]ur fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements (to
which synthetic judgments a priori [e.g. mathematics] belong) are the
most indispensable to us, that without granting as true the fictions of
logic, [. . .] without a continual falsification of the world by means of
numbers, mankind could not live.64
According to Nietzsche then, mathematics is not true, but it is claimed to be
so because it is indispensable to life. It is consistent with this view of maths
as a ‘false’ but necessary fiction that the foundational crisis subsided in the
pragmatic practice of acknowledging the unsolved problems while holding on
to the still beneficial tools. Influenced by Nietzsche, other philosophers further
developed the idea of maths as a useful fiction.
Inspired by Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler connects the crisis in mathemat-
ics with a wider sense of deterioration in his controversial The Decline of the
West, published in 1918 and 1922. He regards maths not as incontrovertible
truth but as a field that evolves and changes in accordance with the spirit of
the time and differs between cultures. So, while concepts such as irrational
and imaginary numbers are deemed ‘impossible, futile and senseless’ in certain
periods, in other cultures or times the same ‘mathematical [. . .] way of think-
ing is right, convincing, a “necessity of thought”’.65 From the changeableness
of what is considered mathematically valid, Spengler concludes that ‘[t]here is
not, and cannot be, number as such. There are several number-worlds as there
are several Cultures’.66 Following from the idea that ‘there are more math-
ematics than one’, any one instance of mathematics – any mathematic – cannot

15
modernism, fiction and mathematics

be said to be objective and absolute: mathematical ‘[t]ruths are truths only in

relation to a particular mankind’.67 With this verdict, Spengler declares maths
to be a part of culture and subject to historical change, just like art, philosophy
or politics. Indeed, he claims that all expressions of a period are intercon-
nected: ‘[d]eep relations were revealed between political and mathematical
aspects of the same Culture’, and ‘[e]very philosophy has hitherto grown up
in conjunction with a mathematic belonging to it’.68 In Spengler’s view, then,
mathematics does not inhabit a special position among the disciplines; since it
has styles and style-periods, he understands it as essentially belonging to the
sphere of art: ‘The mathematic, then, is an art.’69
Where taking up Nietzsche’s perspectivism leads Spengler to claim that a
monolithic ‘“Mathematics” is an illusion’ and that any specific implementa-
tion is an art, Ernst Cassirer refers to the contemporary mathematical discus-
sion itself to argue for considering maths not in terms of absolute truth but of
language and art.70 Viewing maths as a symbolic form that represents the ‘ideal
relations’ of systemic structures, Cassirer situates his comparison with lan-
guage and art in the re-examination of ‘fundamental doctrines’ and ‘the con-
flict between “formalism” and “intuitionism” in its present acute form’.71 If
the former fields construct ‘a peculiar and independent, self-contained world of
meaning according to an inherent formative law of [their] own’, mathematics is
similarly characterised by adherence to its own rules that take precedence over
physical reality: it ‘builds up this [natural] world according to its structure and
so teaches us to understand it through the laws that prevail in it’.72 According
to Cassirer, the introduction of ideal elements that have no empirical corre-
spondence, such as points without extension or imaginary numbers, results in
a detachment of mathematics and the real world but does not inhibit its useful-
ness. Rather, the ‘unquestionable fruitfulness of the ideal elements’ enhances
the discipline.73 With the notion of useful yet empirically non-existent ideal
formations, Cassirer reflects Nietzsche’s view of mathematics as a necessary
fiction. However, he also proposes that since the concept of number expresses
the rational method in general, the mathematical crisis impacts on the very
foundations of knowledge: as modern maths limits itself to working inside its
self-created structures, it is ‘[f]or the purposes of knowledge of nature, in the
positivistic sense of the word, [. . .] a constant danger’.74 Turning away from
physical reality and ‘let[ting] the empirical determinateness of being disappear
into the freedom and caprice of thought’, the discipline at the foundation of
knowledge is at the core of a general epistemological crisis.75
Hans Vaihinger, one of the first academic philosophers to engage with
Nietzsche’s work, further examines the relation between mathematical ideals
and fiction in The Philosophy of ‘As If’, published in 1911. Claiming that ‘all
ideals, logically considered, are fictions’, Vaihinger argues that the ideal ele-
ments of mathematics, such as ‘negative numbers, fractions, and irrational

16
 introduction

and imaginary numbers’, are paradoxical fictions and that mathematics as a

whole is ‘based upon an entirely imaginary foundation, indeed upon contradic-
tions’.76 He portrays the twentieth century as a time that makes particularly
heavy use of such elements: ‘Modern mathematics is characterized specifically
by the freedom with which it forms these fictional constructs.’77 Due to its
productive employment of imaginary and paradoxical properties, modern
maths constitutes a model for other areas: Vaihinger responds to the state-
ment ‘Freedom is only an entity of thought’ by declaring that living without
the imaginary is impossible and that human beings have to retain the ideal
of freedom ‘just as the mathematicians, for example, retain imaginary ideal
points in spite of their inner contradiction’.78 Modern maths with its character-
istic independence from physical reality thus provides an exemplar to areas of
twentieth-century life that lose room for manoeuvre, for example when being
increasingly dominated by processes of rationalisation. In this way, Vaihinger
establishes the case of modern mathematics as a forerunner of a more general
valuation of the fictional.
The works by Nietzsche, Spengler, Cassirer and Vaihinger are examples
of philosophical engagement with mathematics at the time of its modernisa-
tion, and they form part of the modernist culture in which it is proposed to
participate. Philosophers in the later twentieth century further develop the
implications of viewing maths as based upon fictions, both for the field itself
and in view of its exemplary status for other areas of knowledge and life. In
1980 Hartry Field introduced a sustained theory of mathematical fictionalism.
Developed in Science without Numbers, fictionalism maintains that mathemat-
ical theories refer to objects that do not exist and that they therefore cannot
be said to be true. Field compares the notion of mathematical truth to that of
literary fiction where statements are correct according to the conditions set out
in the text but not in reference to reality. For example, the statement ‘Oliver
Twist lived in London’ is true when considered in the fictional universe of
Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, but it is not true in reality since Oliver Twist is
a fictional character and never existed. Accordingly, Field explains:
[T]he fictionalist can say that the sense in which ‘2+2=4’ is true is pretty
much the same as the sense in which ‘Oliver Twist lived in London’ is
true: the latter is true only in the sense that it is true according to a certain
well-known story, and the former is true only in that it is true according
to standard mathematics.79
Field asserts that fictional mathematics can be useful despite its lack of truth
and that maths is precisely an advantageous but not a necessary part of science.
He demonstrates his conviction that maths is not indispensable but only facili-
tates formulating and working with scientific theories, by exemplarily refor-
mulating Newton’s gravitational theory without reference to mathematical

17
modernism, fiction and mathematics

entities. The proposition that there can be science without number challenges
the view that mathematical theories must be true because they are so extremely
useful in empirical science. This common contention is formally formulated
in the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, and Field’s fictionalism was
largely rejected precisely because it does not offer a convincing explanation of
what Eugene Wigner calls the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’.80
While Wigner accepts the ‘miracle of the appropriateness of the language
of mathematics [. . . as] a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor
deserve’, the physicist and philosopher Gerhard Vollmer puts forward a com-
bination of reasons for the applicability of mathematics to the world: math-
ematics describes structures; nature is structured; mankind is adapted to the
structured world through evolution and can recognise some of these structures;
and, finally, language, logic and mathematics are tools to formulate structures
that cannot be recognised directly, for example because they are too large or
too small.81 Although mathematical fictionalism did not find wide acceptance,
it triggered a lot of response and shows how early twentieth-century philo-
sophical theories that relate mathematical existence with fiction can suggest
general comparisons between the ontological status of maths and literature.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou explicitly takes mathematics to onto-
logical concerns when he argues that number is not ‘an operational fiction’
but that ‘[n]umber is a form of Being’.82 He develops this statement from the
view that maths has no direct relation to reality and ultimately refers to and
thus ‘is’ itself, so that ‘[i]n mathematics, being, thought, and consistency are
one and the same thing’.83 For Badiou, maths is thus not a fiction fruitfully
employed to gain knowledge, but he claims that ‘mathematics is ontology –
the science of being qua being’.84 The physicist Max Tegmark advances this
notion from the scientific side: in his controversial Mathematical Universe
Hypothesis, he argues that physical reality is a mathematical structure.85
Badiou’s and Tegmark’s views can be summarised in Badiou’s assertion
‘mathematics = ontology’, and they complete the transition from philosophical
concern with the role of mathematical fictions for knowledge to examining
maths in terms of being.86 If, roughly speaking, over the course of the twentieth
century epistemological questions regarding mathematics and fiction yield to
ontological interests, Brian McHale has argued for a similar shift of dominant
in view of modernist and postmodernist literary fiction. The possible relations
between epistemological and ontological concerns in maths and in literature
are the topic of Chapters 1 to 4.

Modernism and Mathematics: Modernist Interrelations in Fiction

This book explores relations of mathematics and modernism with a focus
on literary fiction and its negotiations of the place of maths in historical and
cultural contexts and in innovations in literary form. Pynchon’s Against the

18
 introduction

Day and Gravity’s Rainbow, Broch’s The Sleepwalkers trilogy and Musil’s
The Man without Qualities all accord maths and the philosophical questions
accompanying its modern development a central place in their visions, while
their distinct temporal and cultural perspectives invite comparison. The works
of the Austrian authors Broch and Musil are part of the modernist culture
in which mathematics is understood to participate, and they are, moreover,
produced and set in the German-speaking context in which much of its trans-
formation took place. As a contemporary American writer, Pynchon presents
the period of crisis from a temporal as well as spatial distance. His novels
engage with discoveries in modern German mathematics and are partly set in
the country, but Against the Day and Gravity’s Rainbow also point to their
times of production as periods of cultural and disciplinary redefinition. Each
of the texts includes mathematics in an encyclopaedic attempt to present the
assumptions underlying Western culture and compares it to modern and mod-
ernist movements in various other fields. Contrasting their different temporal
perspectives and comparing Broch’s and Musil’s modernist stylistic experimen-
tations and decisive developments in Pynchon’s postmodernist practice will
illuminate the role of mathematics in innovations in novelistic form.
The non-chronological order of the chapters taps into the productive
comparative potential of combining texts that explore modernism and math-
ematics from different perspectives. Chapter 1 on Pynchon’s Against the Day
focuses on interrelations between mathematics and politics as domains that
are both shaken by crises of fundamental beliefs and in need of review. From
a postmodern vantage point, the novel explores diverse paths of development
that were still open at the turn to the twentieth century, and, reactivating pos-
sibilities from an informed later position, it provides an almost ideal basis for
the examination of Broch’s and Musil’s perspectives closer to the time’s actual
unfolding. Their works are similarly set against the background of the First
World War, but, written when the legacies of the war could still be felt and
the foundational debate of maths was just subsiding, the texts are themselves
part of the modernist renegotiation of mathematical knowledge and its place
in culture. Chapter 2 on Broch’s The Sleepwalkers analyses relations between
mathematics and turn-of-the-century scepticism of language and investiga-
tion of form, while the examination of Musil’s The Man without Qualities in
Chapter 3 focuses on the place of maths in epistemological and ethical ques-
tions. Chapter 4 sets the engagement with modernist mathematics into broader
context when examining the rise, fall and transformation of Enlightenment
thinking and science in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. This last chapter also
zeroes in on a subject that runs through all sections: the interrelations of math-
ematics and fiction.
Examining ways in which texts incorporate mathematics as part of mod-
ernist fiction and culture, this book adds a literary perspective to studies of

19
modernism, fiction and mathematics

mathematical modernism. The analysis and historicising of their relations also

points to the specific conditions of studying mathematics in the wider field of
literature and science: particularly in view of its modern transformation when
its distinct characteristics gain prominence, the need for a more specialised
study of mathematics becomes compelling. And, not least, exploring math-
ematics in the works of Pynchon, Broch and Musil affords deeper insights into
their literary visions and allows us to appreciate that, indeed, ‘[m]ighty are
numbers; joined with art, resistless’.

Notes
  1. The quotation circulates in this form that associates mathematics and art, par-
ticularly among mathematicians; see, for example, the collection of mathemati-
cal quotations by Robert Moritz, Memorabilia Mathematica; or the Philomath’s
Quotation-book (New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 246. However, a more
common translation is: ‘Numbers are a fearful thing, and joined to craft a desper-
ate foe’ (Euripides, Hecuba. The Plays of Euripides II, trans. Edward P. Coleridge
(London: Bell, 1891), p. 157).
 2. Euripides, Hecuba, p. 157.
 3. ‘the clearest example’: ‘am deutlichsten’ (DSW 533). I quote from published
English translations and occasionally amend a quotation and give the original in
a footnote. Where texts are not available in English, I use my own translation and
cite the original in a footnote.
 4. Michael H. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake: Relativity, Metaphor, and Modernist
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 130.
  5. Ezra Pound, ‘Meditatio’ [1916], in Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to
James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (London: Faber &
Faber, 1967), pp. 69–74.
  6. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber &
Faber, 1954), p. 316.
  7. Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge and Malden, MA:
Polity, 2005), p. 117.
  8. Alice Jenkins, ‘George Eliot, Geometry and Gender’, in Literature and Science, ed.
Sharon Ruston (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), pp. 72–90.
 9. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. 198.
10. Whitworth, Einstein’s Wake, p. 234.
11. Bernd-Olaf Küppers, Physik der Geschichte? Zur Annäherung von Natur- und
Geisteswissenschaften (Paderborn: Universität-Gesamthochschule Paderborn,
1991), p. 104.
12. Norbert Wiener, I Am a Mathematician (London: Gollancz, 1956), p. 62.
13. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1976), p. 2.
14. Ivor Grattan-Guinness, ‘Does History of Science Treat of the History of Science?
The Case of Mathematics’, History of Science, 28.2 (1990), 149–73 (p. 157).
15. Galileo Galilei, et al., The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, trans. Stillman
Drake and C. D. O’Malley (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1960),
pp. 183–4.
16. John Henry, The Scientific Revolution and the Origins of Modern Science
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), p. 17.
17. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, 2nd edn
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 52–3.

20
 introduction

18. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, trans. W. J. G. (London and Newcastle on
Tyne: Walter Scott, 1905), p. xxi.
19. Jeremy J. Gray, János Bolyai, Non-Euclidean Geometry, and the Nature of Space
(Cambridge, MA: Burndy, 2004), p. 51. Mathematical concepts not immediately
relevant to the argument are explained in the glossary (see here the entry ‘non-
Euclidean geometry’). The glossary also holds definitions of frequently used math-
ematical terms.
20. Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, p. 48.
21. Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, p. 50.
22. William Rowan Hamilton, ‘Theory of Conjugate Functions, or Algebraic Couples;
with a Preliminary and Elementary Essay on Algebra as the Science of Pure Time’,
The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, 17 (1831), 293–422 (p. 294).
23. Jeremy J. Gray, Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 305.
24. Marshall Stone, ‘The Revolution in Mathematics’, The American Mathematical
Monthly, 68.8 (1961), 715–34 (p. 716).
25. David Hilbert, ‘On the Infinite’ [1925], in Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected
Readings, ed. Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964),
134–51 (p. 141).
26. For a very readable description of the nature and respective failures of the three
mathematical schools, see Ernst Snapper, ‘The Three Crises in Mathematics:
Logicism, Intuitionism and Formalism’, Mathematics Magazine, 52.4 (1979),
207–16.
27. See Herbert Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik: Eine Geschichte des Streits
um die Grundlagen der Disziplin und des Subjekts formaler Systeme (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990). Here quoted from: Herbert Mehrtens, ‘Modernism
vs. Counter-Modernism, Nationalism vs. Internationalism: Style and Politics in
Mathematics, 1900–1950’, in L’Europe mathématique: histoires, mythes, iden-
tités, ed. Catherine Goldstein, Jeremy Gray and Jim Ritter (Paris: Éditions de la
Maison de l’homme, 1996), 518–29 (p. 519).
28. Hilbert, ‘On the Infinite’, p. 143; Hilbert qtd in David M. Burton, The History of
Mathematics: An Introduction (Boston et al.: McGraw-Hill, 2007), p. 621.
29. ‘das Wesen der Mathematik liegt gerade in ihrer Freiheit’ (Georg Cantor, ‘Über
unendliche, lineare Punktmannigfaltigkeiten V’, Mathematische Annalen, 21.4
(1883), 545–91 (p. 564)).
30. ‘der Diskurs der Mathematik keinen “Grund” hat außer sich selbst. Die “Wahrheit”
ist nicht zu retten’ (Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik, p. 520).
31. ‘Wo also ist der Bezug der Mathematik zur festen Wirklichkeit, der ihr Wert und
Sinn gibt?’ (Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik, p. 436).
32. Brouwer qtd in Dirk van Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist: The Life of
L. E. J. Brouwer; vol. 1: The Dawning Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999),
p. 82.
33. Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, ‘On the Foundations of Mathematics’ [1907], in
L. E. J. Brouwer: Collected Works, vol. 1, ed. Arend Heyting (Amsterdam and
Oxford: North-Holland, 1975), 15–101 (p. 53).
34. Brouwer, ‘On the Foundations of Mathematics’, p. 72.
35. Hilbert qtd in Dirk van Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist II, pp. 578–9.
36. ‘Der Unterschied zwischen Moderne und Gegenmoderne spitzt sich auf die
Frage zu: Wirklichkeit und ewige Wahrheit oder Gestaltungsfreiheit und
Widerspruchslosigkeit?’ (Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik, p. 237).
37. Snapper, ‘The Three Crises in Mathematics’, p. 212.
38. Hilbert qtd in Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist II, p. 491.

21
modernism, fiction and mathematics

39. Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist II, p. 639.

40. See Moritz Epple, ‘Kulturen der Forschung: Mathematik und Modernität am Beginn
des 20. Jahrhunderts’, Wissenskulturen: Über die Erzeugung und Weitergabe von
Wissen, ed. Johannes Fried and Michael Stolleis (Frankfurt am Main: Campus,
2009), 125–58 (p. 129).
41. Mehrtens, ‘Modernism vs. Counter-Modernism’, p. 521.
42. Jeremy J. Gray, ‘Modernism in Mathematics’, The Oxford Handbook of the
History of Mathematics, ed. Eleanor Robson and Jacqueline Stedall (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 663–83 (p. 663); Jeremy J. Gray, ‘Modern
Mathematics as a Cultural Phenomenon’, in The Architecture of Mathematics, ed.
José Ferreirós and Jeremy Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 371–96
(p. 374).
43. Mehrtens, ‘Modernism vs. Counter-Modernism’, p. 521.
44. Gray, Plato’s Ghost, p. 14.
45. Gray, ‘Modernism in Mathematics’, p. 383.
46. Leo Corry, ‘How Useful is the Term “Modernism” for Understanding the History
of Early Twentieth-Century Mathematics?’, in Science as Cultural Practice:
Modernism in the Sciences, ca. 1900–1940, ed. Moritz Epple and Falk Mueller
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, forthcoming 2020).
47. José Ferreirós Domínguez, Labyrinth of Thought: A History of Set Theory and its
Role in Modern Mathematics (Basel and Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 2007), p. 7.
48. Ivor Grattan-Guinness, ‘The British Isles’, in Writing the History of Mathematics:
Its Historical Development, ed. Joseph W. Dauben and Christoph J. Scriba (Basel:
Birkhäuser, 2002), 161–78 (p. 176).
49. Moritz Epple, ‘Styles of Argumentation in Late 19th Century Geometry and the
Structure of Mathematical Modernity’, in Analysis and Synthesis in Mathematics:
History and Philosophy, ed. Michael Otte and Marco Panza (Dordrecht and
Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1997), 177–98 (p. 191).
50. Moritz Epple, Die Entstehung der Knotentheorie: Kontexte und Konstruktionen
einer modernen mathematischen Theorie (Braunschweig: Vieweg und Teubner,
1999), chap. 7.
51. Brian Rotman, ‘Mathematics’, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and
Science, ed. Bruce Clarke and Manuela Rossini (London and New York: Routledge,
2011), 157–68 (p. 157).
52. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology [1940] (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), pp. 115 and 85.
53. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology, pp. 135 and 139.
54. Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, p. 3; Hermann Weyl, Philosophy of Mathematics
and Natural Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 219.
55. Perron qtd in Jeremy J. Gray, ‘Anxiety and Abstraction in Nineteenth-Century
Mathematics’, Science in Context, 17.1/2 (2004), 23–47 (p. 41).
56. Gray, ‘Anxiety and Abstraction’, p. 23.
57. William Mackintire Salter, ‘Nietzsche and the War’, International Journal of
Ethics, 27.3 (1917), 357–79 (p. 357).
58. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer
[1889], trans. Duncan Large (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 3, and Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science [1882], ed. Bernard Williams,
trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 152.
59. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 148.
60. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, p. 148.
61. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. Walter
Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. 267.

22
 introduction

62. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 280.

63. ‘Die arithmetischen Formeln sind ebenfalls nur regulative Fiktionen, mit denen
wir uns das wirkliche Geschehen [. . .] vereinfachen und zurechtlegen’ (Friedrich
Nietzsche, ‘Posthumous Fragments’, NF 1885, Gruppe 38 [2], in Nietzsche Source;
Digital Critical Edition, ed. Paolo D’Iorio (1885), Web, 30 May 2012, n. pag.).
64. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil [1886], trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(London: Penguin, 2003), p. 35.
65. Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality, trans. Charles
Francis Atkinson (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 67.
66. Spengler, The Decline of the West, p. 59.
67. Spengler, The Decline of the West, pp. 59 and 46.
68. Spengler, The Decline of the West, pp. 47 and 56.
69. Spengler, The Decline of the West, p. 62.
70. Spengler, The Decline of the West, p. 67.
71. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity [1910],
trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey (Chicago and London:
Open Court, 1923), p. 3.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 3: The Phenomenology of
Knowledge [1929], trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press and
London: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 357.
72. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, pp. 383 and 384.
73. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, p. 391.
74. Cassirer, Substance, p. 116.
75. Cassirer, Substance, p. 116.
76. Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If’: A System of the Theoretical, Practical,
and Religious Fictions of Mankind [1911], trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge,
2000), pp. 57 and 51.
77. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If’, p. 148.
78. Vaihinger, The Philosophy of ‘As If’, p. 44.
79. Hartry Field, Realism, Mathematics and Modality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 3.
80. Eugene P. Wigner, ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural
Sciences’, in Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays (Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT, 1970), 222–37 (p. 222).
81. Wigner, ‘Unreasonable Effectiveness’, p. 237; see Gerhard Vollmer, Wieso können
wir die Welt erkennen? Neue Beiträge zur Wissenschaftstheorie (Stuttgart and
Leipzig: Hirzel, 2003), pp. 121–42.
82. Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge: Polity,
2008), p. 211.
83. Alain Badiou, ‘Platonism and Mathematical Ontology’, in Briefings on Existence:
A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, ed. and trans. Norman Madarasz (New
York: State University of New York Press, 2006), 89–100 (p. 95).
84. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York:
Continuum, 2005), p. 4.
85. Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of
Reality (London: Penguin, 2015).
86. Badiou, Being and Event, p. 6.

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modernism, fiction and mathematics

MATHEMATICS AND POLITICS:

THOMAS PYNCHON, AGAINST THE DAY

Against the Day, Modern Mathematics, Anarchism

Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006) is set in the period between
the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the aftermath of the First World War. Akin
to the World’s Fair itself, the novel takes stock of the world and its possible
futures: it is, as Louis Menand put it in a review, ‘a kind of inventory of the
possibilities inherent in a particular moment in the history of the imagination.
It is like a work of science fiction written in 1900.’1 On closer examination, the
statement only partly applies to Against the Day: while science fiction creates
a future version of the world, Pynchon’s text is clearly rooted in world history,
exploring events such as the First World War, the decline of anarchism, and
the foundational crisis in mathematics. But Pynchon’s novel goes beyond his-
torical events when also examining diverse paths the world could have taken,
contrasting different worlds and multiple futures that were open at the turn
of the century. With its combination of historical and exuberantly fictional
elements, it looks at the 1880s to 1920s both with the eyes of the contempo-
rary and of the historian, and this double temporality also informs Against
the Day’s engagement with mathematics: Pynchon draws on its development
in the decades around 1900 to explore political concerns in the twenty-first
century and uses it as a metaphor for a new balance of the real and the imagi-
nary in his postmodernist literary practice.
Pynchon’s immense novel combines, interrelates and contrasts plotlines and

24
 thomas pynchon, against the day

different worlds over more than a thousand pages. It begins and ends with the
Chums of Chance, a group of aeronauts who reside in a universe of boys’ books
adventures and inhabit the most fictional storyline of the novel: the conditions of
the Chums’ world differ from the earthly laws of other plotlines and their closer
correspondence to historical reality. Lew, a character in a set of more realistic
conditions, asks: ‘“But you boys – you’re not storybook characters.” He had
a thought. “Are you?” “No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly,” Randolph
supposed’ (AD 41). Since ‘Nelly Bly’ is the pen name of the journalist Elizabeth
Jane Cochrane and Wyatt Earp better known as a novel hero than as his real-
life model, Randolph’s comparison underscores the Chums’ higher degree of
fictionality but nevertheless existing relation to the actual world. Combining
aspects of the real and the imagined, the Chums take a look into the world’s
future: on their way to the World’s Fair, they lose sight of the grounds and take
a detour over the Chicago stockyards, where they observe herds of cattle that
are being driven to the slaughterhouse: they see ‘that unshaped freedom being
rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a pro-
gressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led
to the killing-floor’ (AD 11). When the Chums’ route does not lead to the Fair’s
exhibition of the period’s achievements and promises of a progressive future but
to visions of slaughter, it foreshadows the path of the world in the novel and
also in historical reality, mirroring a world that deprives itself of open routes
until almost all possibilities collapse, the final turn leading to the First World
War. ‘The world came to an end in 1914’, a character expresses the feeling that
reverberates through Pynchon’s novel and that echoes modernist reactions to
a conflict that marks the end of a period of optimistic belief in progress and in
the positive results of reason and scientific method (AD 1211). The opening
of Against the Day introduces the role of mathematics in this revaluation of
Enlightenment values, emphasising that the inevitable arrival at the slaughter-
house comes as a result of geometrical regulation in the ‘straight lines and [. . .]
right angles’ of a mathematical coordinate system, a ‘Cartesian grid’ (AD 11).
If the opening passage points to mathematics as a means to rationalise and
determine a one-way street towards future reality, in the course of Against the
Day maths also emerges as part of an opposite movement towards uncertainty
and openness. As the discipline enters a phase of modernisation in the nine-
teenth century, the questioning of fundamental concepts, including the notion
of mathematical reality itself, results in a foundational crisis that is unsettling
but also opens up formerly unthinkable possibilities. The growing sense of
anxiety, so Yashmeen explains in a conversation with fellow mathematician
Kit, mirrors the political situation:

The political crisis in Europe maps into the crisis in mathemat-

ics. Weierstrass functions, Cantor’s continuum, Russell’s equally

25
modernism, fiction and mathematics

i­nexhaustible capacity for mischief – once, among nations, as in chess,

suicide was illegal. Once, among mathematicians, ‘the infinite’ was all
but a conjuror’s convenience. The connections lie there, Kit – hidden and
poisonous. (AD 668)

The crises in maths and in politics respectively threaten established forms

of existence, and the two domains further connect in Against the Day when
both include movements that explore benefits of the resulting uncertainty.
These are based on changed ideas about representation: as discussed in more
detail below, Yashmeen lists concepts that are part of modern mathematics’
departure from a direct representational relationship to the world, while, in
the political domain, turn-of-the-century anarchism rejects representation and
advocates self-organisation among equals. Anarchism and modern mathemat-
ics thus map into each other regarding an abandonment of arche, a term that
is variously translated as ‘origin’, ‘ground’ or ‘foundation’. With the added
prefix, anarche denotes absence of rule or first principle. ‘An-archistic’ in
terms of its loss of foundations, modern mathematics forms part of Against the
Day’s exploration of anarchism across the twentieth century, from its failure
as political movement to its transformations into cultural forms of resistance.
Anarchism is a consistent concern in Pynchon’s writing, but the topic gains
urgency in Against the Day when, in the double temporality typical of his
work, the novel connects historical manifestations and the terrorist attacks
of 9/11. The engagement with twenty-first-century affairs motivates a shift in
Pynchon’s postmodernist practice, which the novel reflects in its explorations
of foundationalism and anarchism. In view of a modern transformation of
mathematics, Against the Day develops possibilities of non-complicity with the
establishment and explores a process encapsulated by David Weir’s comment
that ‘anarchism succeeded culturally where it failed politically’.2 Yet, at the
same time as tracing the perpetuation of anarchist ideals into the cultural
realm, Against the Day emphasises commitment to political action and respon-
sibility to the real that, while present in Pynchon’s previous novels, is unprec-
edented in degree and clarity. To newly calibrate the relation between the real
and the imaginary in literature, Against the Day establishes the concept of
complex numbers as a poetological model. Using maths to explore worrying
developments of rationalisation as well as positive potential inherent in the
absence of foundations, and employing it in an effort to adapt literary fiction
to the demands of the twenty-first century, Against the Day is indeed aptly
described as the ‘most mathematical’ of Pynchon’s novels.3
Examining Against the Day’s engagement with modern mathematics in view
of the novel’s reappraisal of anti-foundational movements and its negotia-
tions of the possibilities and responsibilities of literary fiction, the discussion
to follow takes account of intricate links between the mathematical and the

26
 thomas pynchon, against the day

political. Interrelations of the two domains have only a short history of being
acknowledged, since Western culture has been dominated by a Platonic under-
standing of maths as a realm of absolute truths that is independent of worldly
concerns. Growing attention to its political dimension begins only with the
questioning of received views during the foundational debate around 1900
and forms part of the argument that modern mathematics has to be considered
in view of modernist culture. In Pynchon’s work, connections between seem-
ingly remote fields are characteristic and afford much of the texts’ interpreta-
tive potential. Studies exclusively focused on any one area, while contributing
important insights, at times fail to discuss their wider implications, so that
research on Pynchon’s use of science can seem irrelevant to examining his
political concerns or, indeed, detrimental to it. In Pynchon and the Political
Samuel Thomas laments:
[I]nnovative and unsettling discussions of freedom, war, labor, poverty,
community, democracy, totalitarianism and so on are often passed over
in favor of constrictive scientific metaphors and theoretical play. Much
of the urgency and force of Pynchon’s writing [. . .] is nullified by this
‘thermodynamical gloom’ (SL 14).4
Yet, as Yashmeen’s belief in a connection between the crises in these fields
suggests, discussing science does not ‘nullify’ the urgency of Pynchon’s writing
but is integral to appreciating his vision of the political. In Against the Day,
the political cannot be separated from the mathematical – the novel’s negotia-
tions of developments and possibilities in the early twentieth and twenty-first
centuries require viewing the two together.

Foundational Crises
In its most sustained mathematical passage, Against the Day introduces
the foundational crisis that, as Yashmeen suggests, mirrors the impasse in
European politics, and it displays the disorientation that developments in
maths provoke in and beyond the professional sphere. The section illustrates
the shattering of the mathematical world and its implications by framing the
passage with non-scientific instances of losing a reality thought secure, for
example connecting the situation in maths to a drastic change in Yashmeen’s
personal life: having to leave Göttingen for an uncertain journey through
Europe, she feels ‘expelled from the garden’ of this centre of research and also
from what she considered to be mathematical reality:
[W]e must discard everything, not only the objects we possess but every-
thing we have taken to be ‘real,’ all we have learned, all the work we
have put in, the theorems, the proofs, the questioning, the breath-taken
trembling before the beauty of an intractable problem, all of which was
perhaps illusion. (AD 746)

27
modernism, fiction and mathematics

Yashmeen and Kit’s visit to the ‘Museum der Monstrositäten’ – German for
‘Museum of Monstrosities’ – then details the loss of paradisiac certainty in
maths and its implications for rational thought and our sense of reality.
The museum of mathematical monstrosities points back to the novel’s
beginning at the Chicago World’s Fair and the dissolution of its promises in
a vision of slaughter, when it constitutes ‘a sort of nocturnal equivalent of
Professor Klein’s huge collection of mathematical models on the third floor
of the Auditorienhaus’ (AD 710). Felix Klein’s models made up the main part
of the mathematical exhibition at the World’s Fair; an important step towards
recognition of the discipline, which not only in Klein’s eyes suffered from ‘the
custom to regard modern mathematical speculation as something having no
general interest or importance’.5 As the historians Karen Parshall and David
Rowe explain, the presence of Klein’s exhibition at the Fair signalled a change:
it ‘implicitly conveyed an assumption that mathematics and mathematical
research were embedded at least as deeply in culture as architecture or litera-
ture or any other human intellectual endeavor’.6 The World’s Fair also saw a
first international congress of mathematics, where Klein celebrated the state of
his field in a speech: ‘I wish on the present occasion to state and to emphasise
that in the last two decades a marked improvement from within has asserted
itself in our science, with constantly increasing success.’7 In Against the Day’s
embedding maths in its encyclopaedic show of the world and its possibilities,
the German museum figures as a dark equivalent to Klein’s presentation when
the exhibited ‘monstrosities’ put into question the nature of mathematics and
its linear development: it is ‘a strange underground temple, or counter-temple,
dedicated to the current “Crisis” in European mathematics’ (AD 710–11).
The museum building and surrounding landscape indicate its place outside
the en-lightened rational world: seemingly constructed from a ‘black sub-
stance’ left over ‘after light [. . .] had been removed’, the museum is set in the
‘witchlike’ brushland near the Brocken, a hill famously associated with the
supernatural (AD 711, 710). The architecture also points to the fact that only
insiders can appreciate the crisis: the subterranean museum ‘could not be read
from any exterior, because there was none, beyond an entranceway framing
a flight of coal-black steps sloping downward in a fathomless tunnel to crypts
unknown’ (AD 711). Although the text then indeed turns to insider knowledge
of the history of maths, a connection between ‘the great Crisis that continued
to preoccupy mathematics even to the present’ and cracks in the fictional world
of Against the Day ensures that even readers without mathematical expertise
can appreciate the wider relevance of the foundational crisis and Günther’s
exclamation: ‘How could anyone’s nerves here remain unafflicted?’ (AD 713,
711). The exhibit ‘Discovery of the Weierstrass Functions’ points to the math-
ematically and emotionally upsetting developments that motivate the name of
the Museum der Monstrositäten: the functions discovered by Karl Weierstrass

28
 thomas pynchon, against the day

in 1872 behave counter-intuitively so that practitioners referred to them as

‘Weierstrass’s monster’ and responded with shock. ‘I recoil with dismay and
horror at this lamentable plague of functions which do not have derivatives
[namely the Weierstrass function]’, Charles Hermite professed.8 Exhibiting dis-
coveries that violated traditional understandings, introduced objects formerly
thought impossible, or point to paradoxes, the museum displays a modern
mathematical world that requires reconsidering what is possible and real. The
passage set at the museum then suggests that the developments in maths also
have implications for views on literary fiction and its relation to the world:
the mural ‘Professor Frege at Jena upon Receiving Russell’s Letter Concerning
the Set of All Sets That Are Not Members of Themselves’ points to dramatic
consequences of self-referentiality in maths, and an immediately following
metafictional episode reveals similar hazards in literature. Given its importance
to the vision of literary fiction, it is worth looking at the concept of the ‘set of
all sets’ in more detail.
A set is a basic concept in set theory, which was crucially developed by Georg
Cantor in 1874 and promised to be a foundational theory, meaning that all of
mathematics ‘could be recast in the language of set theory and derived from its
principles’.9 Many professionals agreed with David Hilbert that this would put
maths on a secure basis and prove the certainty it had always been believed to
exemplify: ‘No one shall drive us out of the paradise which Cantor has created
for us.’10 Based on this confidence, Hilbert could celebrate mathematics as a
model for ‘the continuity of the development of science’ at the International
Congress in 1900 and ended his introduction with a flourish:
This conviction of the solvability of every mathematical problem is a
powerful incentive to the worker. We hear within us the perpetual call:
There is the problem. Seek its solution. You can find it by pure reason,
for in mathematics there is no ignorabimus.11
In Against the Day, a character echoes Hilbert’s statement that set theory had
put maths on secure foundations, remarking of Cantor that ‘he may have led
us to [. . .] paradise, as Dr. Hilbert has famously described it’ (AD 702). In
the Museum der Monstrositäten, however, the installation that shows Hilbert
at the International Congress is already overshadowed by ‘the precipitously
darkening sky of an approaching storm’ (AD 712). Frege’s mural illustrates the
reasons for the dark prospects, showing the moment of his receiving a letter
from Bertrand Russell that dealt serious blows to Hilbert’s positive evaluation
of the situation of maths. Frege had built on Cantor’s work to further develop
modern symbolic logic as a foundational theory, but when he was just about
to publish his major oeuvre Russell noted an unsolvable problem that meant
the failure of the project. Namely, in set theory, the question whether the ‘set
of all sets that are not members of themselves’ is a member of itself reveals a

29
modernism, fiction and mathematics

paradox: if it is a member of itself then it is by definition not one of the sets that
are not members of themselves; at the same time, if the ‘set of all sets that are
not members of themselves’ is not a member of itself then it logically is to be
counted towards the sets that are not members of themselves. This, and further
antinomies that similarly emerge when applying a concept to itself, meant
that set theory could not solve the problem of foundations, and it thus had
devastating effects on the mathematical community. Frege himself stated that
Russell’s paradox had ‘shattered one of the foundations of his [Frege referring
to himself] construction’, and the unsolved foundational questions changed
Hilbert’s optimism to despair: ‘If mathematical thinking is defective, where
are we to find truth and certitude?’12 When in Against the Day a psychiatrist
complains that ‘Cantor, the Beast of Halle, who seeks to demolish the very
foundations of mathematics, bring[s] these Göttingen people paranoid and
screaming to my door’, the novel draws attention to the personal and social
ramifications of the loss of belief in the certainty of maths and any knowledge
built on it (AD 702).
Against the Day establishes a connection between unsettling developments
in maths and in literature when it introduces readers to a literary equivalent of
the self-referential turn in modern maths; namely, a metafictional awareness
of the novel’s own fictionality. The mathematical excursion is set at the con-
clusion of a chapter, and the passage reveals a crack in the foundations of the
novelistic world, before the chapter break further disturbs the flow of reading.
In a direct address, maybe to the reader, a disembodied voice explains:
The next time you visit, it might not be exactly where it stands today.
[. . .] Because the cornerstone of the building is not a cube but its four-
dimensional analogy, a tesseract. Certain of these corridors lead to other
times, times, moreover, you might wish too strongly to reclaim, and
become lost in the perplexity of the attempt. (AD 715)
If the cornerstone of the museum is four-dimensional, it escapes the framework
of reality, and so does the warning voice when breaking the fourth wall that
veils the fictional nature of the novel world. With its knowledge of different
spaces and times, the voice might be an authorial one, a notion further sug-
gested by its calling its creations ‘Children’ and claiming: ‘You know who
I am’ (AD 715). Proposing that certain ways lead to other times, the voice
acknowledges that readers at the end of the chapter, exhausted after a tour
de force through events in the history of mathematics, might be tempted to
close the book at this convenient incision and reclaim their own time. But it
also suggests that the insights into the foundational crisis are likely to affect
readers and leave them struggling to retrieve their previous state of believing
maths uncomplicatedly certain and true. And even if not every reader might
appreciate the just-witnessed ground-breaking events in maths, the metafic-

30
 thomas pynchon, against the day

tional rupturing of the novel world conveys their impact on questions of reality
and certainty. Apart from illustrating the consequences of self-referential and
other monstrous developments, Against the Day here also suggests the need to
reconsider the foundations of literary fiction: if self-referentiality destroys the
certainty of maths, it also challenges the truth of the fictional world and opens
up questions about its relation to readers’ reality. Based on their similarly
world-shattering self-referential turns, Against the Day then explores paral-
lels between maths and literary fiction regarding their potentials not to undo
worlds but to build alternative ones. When constructing these without recourse
to stable foundations, modern maths and literature support anti-foundation-
alist movements that in the political domain are associated with anarchism.
If the metafictional ending of the chapter conveys even to mathemati-
cally uninterested readers a sense of shaking grounds and clashing worlds,
Yashmeen’s personal fate relates the situation to political developments. At
the same time as learning that all she has taken to be real in the mathematical
world might have been an illusion, she becomes aware of the similarly crum-
bling landscape of European politics and discovers anarchism as a movement
that takes account of the absence of a common foundation or arché (AD 746).
For Yashmeen, mathematics, politics and the sense of crisis described in a ter-
minology of foundational architecture come together at the grave of Bernhard
Riemann, one of the initiators of the modern transformation in maths: when
paying respect to Riemann, Yashmeen remembers stories about the stranniki,
anarchistic Russian pilgrims who are also called ‘underground men’. The sub-
terranean existence of the stranniki signals their detachment from the world:
‘they were no longer responsible to the world, let alone the Tsar [. . .]. The
Government feared them more than it feared Social Democrats, more than
bomb-throwers’, Yashmeen explains (AD 745). While direct opposition still
acknowledges the existence of official structures, the stranniki pose a threat to
the very foundation of politics when ignoring any form of power and respon-
sibility to the world. Their spatial location underlines the ground-breaking
consequences of creating their own set of conditions. Hiding ‘down under
the house’, the underground men open up new spaces and thus compromise
former certainties: ‘Floors that had once been solid and simple became veils
over another world. It was not the day we knew that provided the stranniki
their light’ (AD 745). The use of architectural vocabulary connects the descrip-
tion of the stranniki’s anarchism to the earlier passage on the foundational
crisis in mathematics, and Yashmeen’s musings at Riemann’s grave tightens
the relation in view of their comparable opening up of alternative states.
Where the underground men shape a subterranean world, Riemann revealed
new spaces in geometry: he constructed non-Euclidean geometries, that is,
curved spaces whose properties differ from the Euclidean space formerly taken
for granted. With geometry literally being the measurement of the earth – from

31
modernism, fiction and mathematics

ancient Greek gê- (‘earth’) and -metría (‘measurement’) – his work can be seen
to describe other worlds. Riemann geometry, foundational questions in math-
ematics, and the anarchistic stranniki thus all reveal cracks in what is perceived
as real.
When Against the Day connects political and mathematical developments
towards anti-foundationalist views, it reflects the historical situation in the
early twentieth century where shared vocabulary underlined relations between
crises in these fields. Hermann Weyl, a protagonist in the foundational discus-
sion, fanned the flames with his 1921 paper ‘On the New Foundational Crisis
of Mathematics’, choosing political terms to proclaim: ‘Brouwer – that is the
revolution!’13 With this, Weyl, who had been a student of Hilbert and his
formalist programme, signalled a drastic switch in allegiance when supporting
L. E. J. Brouwer, the founder of rivalling intuitionism. In his counter-attack,
Hilbert continued the use of political terminology:
Brouwer is not, as Weyl thinks, the revolution, but only the repetition
of an attempted coup (Putsch) by old means [. . .] which now, where the
power of the state is so well armed and strengthened by Frege, Dedekind
and Cantor, is all the more from the beginning doomed to failure.14
Taking up Hilbert’s term, intuitionists began to call themselves ‘Putschists’, a
further indication, so Dirk van Dalen argues, that mathematicians connected
the crisis in their field to the pressing political situation in Germany with its
various coups. The marked interest of a non-specialist audience further sug-
gests that mathematical questions about truth and certainty fed into concerns
with the unstable situation in 1920s Germany:
The actual appearance of the great revolutionary [Brouwer] in the lecture
halls in Berlin caused a furore. [. . .] The lecture hall was filled till the last
seat – intuitionism and foundations became the talk of the town. Even
the newspapers followed the events with interest. [. . .] The lectures were
attended by a mixed audience, consisting of students, professional math-
ematicians and interested laymen.15
Weyl confirmed that more was at stake than mathematical questions alone.
With hindsight, he argued that decisions in the foundational crisis were not
made on purely rational grounds but in view of wider concerns: mathemati-
cians ‘are not indifferent to what their scientific endeavors mean in the context
of man’s whole caring and knowing, suffering and creative existence in the
world’, he explained.16 Not least, questioning mathematics means threatening
the ‘paragon of truth and certitude’, as Hilbert phrased it, and can reinforce
anxieties about socially and politically unstable situations.17
The use of political terms, the interest in and beyond the professional com-
munity, and the reflections of practitioners suggest that the political instability

32
 thomas pynchon, against the day

in Germany gave an urgency to debates about the foundations of mathematics.

Van Dalen goes so far as to conjecture that, in a politically stable atmosphere,
the mathematical conflict would not have escalated: ‘without the First World
War, there would not have been a conflict [. . .] without the political complica-
tions there would not have been the fateful act’ – the fateful act being Hilbert
dismissing Brouwer from the editorial team of the journal Mathematische
Annalen, thus forcing mathematicians to take sides in the conflict between
formalism and intuitionism.18 In a similar vein, Herbert Mehrtens aligns the
subsiding of the foundational debate with political stabilisation in Germany:
Beginning in the mid-1920s, the public and sometimes emotional debate
around the crisis transformed into a specialist discourse among basic
researchers. With the consolidation of the Weimar Republic, this crisis
passed too. The question of meaning, which had become public as a
political concern, dissolved into private interpretation.19
Interrelations between the mathematical and the political crises in 1920s
Germany and the more politically stable situation of the Weimar Republic thus
also help explain why the foundational crisis could abate without a solution
or winner.
As is typical of Pynchon’s fiction, Against the Day literalises and exaggerates
historical connections, here between the crises in maths and politics. Indeed,
the novel suggests that maths is part of the First World War and accordingly
responsible for the world coming to an end. Contradicting G. H. Hardy’s
famous assertion that ‘[r]eal mathematics has no effects on war. No one has
yet discovered any warlike purpose to be served by the theory of numbers’, in
Pynchon’s novel a weapon draws its dangerous power directly from a math-
ematical expression: the ‘Quaternionic Weapon [is] a means to unloose upon
the world energies hitherto unimagined’ (AD 609).20 When an element of
Quaternions seems to cause a massive explosion that may constitute the First
World War ‘collapsed into a single event’, Against the Day sets mathematics at
the very core of the political conflict and the annihilation of reality (AD 895).

The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics and the Anarchism of

the Imaginary

Quaternions, used to create the Quaternionic Weapon and upset the world
in the First World War, are also crucial to Against the Day’s vision of
modern mathematics as a domain of imaginative possibilities and model for
cultural anarchism. They are set at a particularly deep level of the Museum
der Monstrositäten: following the sign ‘zu den quaternionen’ – ‘Towards
Quaternions’ – Kit descends dark stairways to an installation that shows
William Rowan Hamilton formulating the concept in 1843 (AD 712). The
discovery of Quaternions is not usually treated as part of the foundational

33
modernism, fiction and mathematics

crisis of mathematics, yet the inclusion in the Museum and the earlier descrip-
tion of Hamilton as a forerunner of ‘the real maniacs [who] have gone into
foundations work’ mark Pynchon’s intention to use it in this way (AD 601).
Since Against the Day presents Quaternions as the deepest tier of the crisis and
employs them in its discussion of anarchism and as an image of the nature of
literature in the twenty-first century, it will be useful to look at the concept
in some detail. Against the Day itself humorously acknowledges that some
kind of mathematical knowledge is needed to understand the unfolding of
the novel and that readers might not possess or be particularly inclined to
acquire it. Reef’s reaction to Yashmeen explaining the mathematics of roulette
is demonstrative boredom: ‘She was interrupted by the thud of Reef’s head on
the table, where it remained. “I don’t think he’s been following this,” she mut-
tered’ (AD 967). Reef seems to absorb the lessons during his sleep, however,
and begins to win at the game – instilling hope, maybe, that laypersons might
also somehow profit from the mathematical material in the text. Indeed, as we
shall see, Against the Day showcases the real benefits of attending to fanciful
mathematical concepts.
The Quaternion formula reads: a + bi + cj + dk; with a, b, c and d being
variables that can take on any real number, and i, j and k denoting imagi-
nary numbers. The imaginary unit i is defined as i = √−1, which is equal to
i2 = −1. This contradicts the rule in the real number system that a square
cannot be negative: 12 = 1 and (−1)2 = 1. Mathematicians therefore felt uneasy
about the nature and existence of imaginary numbers, claiming that such
numbers had to be assumed instead of being found by observation of nature.
The seventeenth-century mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz illustrates the problem: ‘I did not understand how [. . .] a quantity
could be real, when imaginary or impossible numbers were used to express
it.’21 Complex numbers, which combine the real number a and the imaginary
element bi into the complex number a + bi, similarly disconcerted Leibniz: he
saw them as ‘amphibian[s] between being and not-being’, and mathemati-
cians shared his scepticism regarding their reality and existence well into
the nineteenth century.22 For instance, George Airy declared: ‘I have not the
smallest confidence in any result which is essentially obtained by the use of
imaginary symbols’; George Boole spoke of ‘the uninterpretable symbol √−1’,
and Augustus De Morgan concluded his proof of the nonexistence of imagi-
nary numbers with the words: ‘We have shown the symbol √−1 to be void of
meaning, or rather self-contradictory and absurd.’23 However, mathematicians
who questioned the existence of imaginary numbers did not necessarily contest
the usefulness of the symbol. Carl Friedrich Gauss even suggested that the ten-
dency to view imaginary numbers as problematic could be traced back not to
inherent characteristics but to the unfortunate labelling: the term ‘imaginary
number’ highlights questions of existence, whereas the alternative he proposed

34
 thomas pynchon, against the day

– ‘lateral number’ – does not. Gauss’s renaming did not come to general rec-
ognition, but the geometrical representation of complex numbers aided the
imagination and somewhat reconciled mathematicians to imaginary numbers:
a complex number (a + ib) can be depicted as a point on a two‑dimensional
coordinate plan – with the x-axis showing the real part (a) and the y-axis the
imaginary part (ib).24
Against the Day places complex numbers at the beginning of the math-
ematical crisis when, in the Museum der Monstrositäten, the exhibit showing
Hamilton carve the Quaternion formula into Brougham Bridge in Dublin
includes a ‘pocket-knife part real and part imaginary, a “complex” knife one
might say’ (AD 713).25 The non-mathematical meanings of the terms ‘real’ and
‘imaginary’ are present throughout the novel, not least when, shortly before
the description of Hamilton’s complex knife, the imaginary is cautiously
connected to fiction: the museum displays combine painted murals with real
objects that are set in front of them, and when items at the intersection are
partly three-dimensional and partly painted, they ‘could not strictly be termed
entirely real, rather part “real” and part “pictorial,” or let us say “fictional”’
(AD 712). The further explorations of the real and imaginary elements of
Quaternions thus also have implications for related questions of representation
in art, not least regarding Against the Day itself.
Given that Quaternions employ three imaginary elements, John Graves
wrote to Hamilton that there was ‘something in the system that gravels me. I
have not yet any clear views as to the extent to which we are at liberty arbitrar-
ily to create imaginaries, and to endow them with supernatural properties.’26
Hamilton and other mathematicians indeed fiercely discussed the nature of
Quaternions, and the debate both reflected and contributed to the develop-
ment of a modern understanding of maths as a self-referential domain that
does not represent the given world but is independent of physical reality.
Pynchon’s novel considers such concerns in view of identifying spaces for
freedom and alternatives in maths. If Graves worried about the reality of
Quaternions, in Against the Day Pléiade raises a related question when asking:
‘“but what is a Quaternion?” Hilarity at the table was general and prolonged.
“What ‘is’ a Quaternion? Ha, hahahaha!”’ (AD 604–5). The answer illustrates
what Graves called the ‘supernatural properties’ of imaginary numbers and
suggests that, understood as independent of physical reality, maths opens up
spaces of possibility. Namely, in a practical demonstration, Dr Rao shows that
Quaternions can be used in calculations of a vector’s lengthening and rotation
in space: he conducts a Quaternion-Yoga-movement that becomes ‘contrary-
to-fact’ and has him reappear in a different place and as a slightly different
person; he is taller, for example, or has changed the colour of his skin or hair
(AD 605). He explains that the potential for altering his appearance resides in
the imaginary element:

35
modernism, fiction and mathematics

[Quaternions work] among axes whose unit vector is not the familiar and
comforting ‘one’ but the altogether disquieting square root of minus one.
If you were a vector, mademoiselle, you would begin in the ‘real’ world,
change your length, enter an ‘imaginary’ reference system, rotate up to
three different ways, and return to ‘reality’ a new person. (AD 605)

Dr Rao thus demonstrates a Quaternion to be a concept that combines real

and imaginary elements in order to arrive at altered states of reality.
Quaternions can be understood as ‘plotting complex numbers along three
axes instead of two’, as Barry Nebulay explains in Against the Day; that is,
they are an extension of complex numbers to the third dimension, used to
describe points in space (AD 605). But Hamilton disliked this geometrical
interpretation. In the 1853 preface to his Lectures on Quaternions, he states
to have ‘felt dissatisfied with any view which should not give to [imaginar-
ies], from the outset, a clear interpretation and meaning; and wished that this
should be done, for square roots of negatives, without introducing considera-
tions so expressly geometrical’.27 Hamilton therefore devised a new notation
which replaced the complex number a + ib with a couple (a, b):

[I]n the theory of couples, the same symbol √−1 is significant, and
denotes a possible extraction, or a real couple, namely [. . .] the principal
square-root of the couple (−1, 0). In the latter theory, therefore, though
not in the former, this sign √−1 may properly be employed.28

Hamilton thus circumvented the ‘disquieting’ nature of √−1 by taking it to

represent an unproblematic operation on a ‘real couple’. But having dispensed
with the geometrical interpretations of Quaternions, Hamilton considered it
necessary to identify a link between algebra and physical reality in order to
guarantee the interpretation and meaning of algebraic symbols. Given that
geometry was seen as the science of space, Hamilton’s solution was to treat
algebra as the science of time, arguing that seemingly symbolical and uninter-
pretable expressions ‘may pass into the world of thoughts, and acquire reality
and significance, if Algebra be viewed as not a mere Art or Language, but
as the Science of Pure Time’.29 More precisely, Hamilton saw the temporal
element as ‘Order in Progression’.30 Quaternions illustrate this idea particu-
larly clearly: unlike in the real number system where the order of multiplica-
tion has no effect (a*b = b*a), in the case of the non-commutative Quaternions
it bears information as it changes the algebraic sign: i*j = −j*i. Here, the time of
calculating with an element in relation to the next element is crucial. In the case
of Quaternions, Hamilton attributed the three imaginary elements to the three
dimensions of space and the real element to time. Thus, he argued, the
Quaternion ‘may be said to be “time plus space”, or “space plus time”: and in
this sense it has, or at least involves a reference to, four dimensions’.31 Against

36
 thomas pynchon, against the day

the Day draws on Hamilton’s interpretation when Barry Nebulay considers

‘the three vector terms as dimensions in space, and the scalar term as Time’
and when the Quaternionic Weapon gains its dangerous power from the scalar
term and is therefore described as ‘[a] weapon based on Time’ (AD 626). As
we shall examine in more detail below, not least with reference to Hamilton’s
allocation of meaning, Quaternions form part of the novel’s various scientific,
pseudo-scientific and non-scientific ways of reconsidering space and time.
Having found a way to argue for the significance and meaning of the symbol
√−1, Hamilton maintained that Quaternions represented reality better than
any other mathematical system. His colleague Peter Guthrie Tait seconded
that they eluded the artificiality of other mathematical systems and consti-
tuted an absolutely natural one: ‘To me Quaternions are primarily a Mode
of Representation [. . .]. They are, virtually, the thing represented [. . .].
Quaternions, in a word, exist in space, and we have only to recognize them.’32
Tait stressed the relevance of Quaternions as basic parameters of experience,
namely as representing, or indeed being, the three dimensions of space and the
additional dimension of time:
I have always considered (after perfect inartificiality) their chief merit:
– viz. that they are ‘uniquely adapted to Euclidean space, and therefore
specially useful in some of the most important branches of physical
science.’ What have students of physics, as such, to do with space of more
than three dimensions?33
Pynchon found Tait’s argument ingenious enough to quote it in Against the
Day – having Heino Vanderjuice add: ‘I invite your attention to “as such”’
(AD 365). However, the novel follows the historical development in which
Hamilton’s attribution of algebra to time did not become widely accepted and
Tait’s belief that Quaternions exist in space was superseded by the modern
understanding of the independence of mathematics from physical reality.
Even Hamilton ultimately admitted that ‘there is a sort of symbolical science,
or science of language, which well deserves to be studied, abstraction being
made for a while of meaning, or interpretation; and forms of expression being
treated as themselves the subject-matter to be studied’.34 Hamilton’s reluctance
to abandon his claims for a representational relationship between Quaternions
and physical reality is rooted in his concern about truth: regarding ‘Algebra
as an Art, or as a Language: as a System of Rules, or else as a System of
Expressions, but not as a System of Truths’ merely asks about its useful-
ness and replaces the weightier question: ‘Is a Theorem of Algebra true?’35
If algebra is understood not as a system of truths but as comprising diverse
structures with different rules, the existence of imaginary numbers ceases to be
problematical. The explanation for the curious nature of √−1 then is that nega-
tive square roots are not part of and therefore do not exist in the real number

37
modernism, fiction and mathematics

system but are defined and thus real in the system of complex numbers. But
Hamilton lamented the loss of certainty: when working from the assumption
that numbers are not true but ‘that numbers, called imaginary, can be found
or conceived or determined, [. . .] [i]t must be hard to found a S cience on such
grounds as these’.36
As Quaternions relinquished claims of representation and existence in
space, abandoned the rule of commutativity, and sported not only one but
three imaginary elements, they ‘broke bonds set by centuries of mathematical
thought’, so Michael Crowe explains in A History of Vector Analysis, a likely
source of Pynchon’s.37 In Against the Day, a character’s question whether
‘beyond the third [. . .] do dimensions exist as something more than algebra-
ists’ whimsy?’ echoes Hamilton’s concern regarding the actual existence of the
four dimensions Quaternions were thought to represent (AD 677). But when
the novel employs Quaternions to explore nineteenth-century developments
towards a break with mathematical orthodoxy, it does not only give voice to
laments concerning lost truth and meaning but also renders fruitful the trans-
formation in maths for the rejection of political representation in anarchism.
Fittingly, the passage introducing Quaternions as part of foundational work
also develops their role for notions of anarchism:
They found Root’s quarters, which like Kit he seemed to be sharing with
a dozen or so others of the Hamiltonian persuasion. Clothing in a wide
selection of colors, sizes, and degrees of formality littered the available
floor space. ‘Take your pick I guess. Closest we’ll see to Anarchism in our
lifetime.’ Back down in the Salon, the noise and centrifugal jollification
had picked up markedly. ‘Maniacs,’ cried Root, ‘every one of us! Fifty
years ago of course more than today, the real maniacs have gone into
foundations work, set theory, all abstract as possible, like it’s a race to
see who can venture out furthest into the borderlands of the nonexistent.
[. . .] Grassmann was German and hence automatically among the pos-
sessed, Hamilton was burdened with early genius and in the grip of a first
love [namely Quaternions] he could never get beyond.’ (AD 601)
In the novel, Quaternionists of the ‘Hamiltonian faith’ indeed describe them-
selves as anarchists who work in independent and self-organised local groups:
‘Anarchists always lose out [. . .]. We were only [. . .] drifters who set up their
working tents for as long as the problem might demand, then struck camp
again and moved on, always ad hoc and local’ (AD 147, 599). The anarchist
minority fights the ‘Quaternion Wars’ against the Vectorists, who use a dif-
ferent mathematical language to calculate similar problems (AD 590).38 The
Vectorists are described as ‘Bolsheviks’, not only because they are the majority
but because they adhere to a centralised order when vectors always refer to the
origin of a coordinate system with the axes x, y and z: they ‘grimly pursued

38
 thomas pynchon, against the day

their aims, protected inside their belief that they are the inevitable future, the
xyz people, the party of a single Established Coördinate System, present every-
where in the Universe, governing absolutely’ (AD 599). Unlike vectors, for
which the origin of a coordinate system provides a stable point of reference,
Quaternions do not lead to one unified governing viewpoint. Not referring to
the origin (arche) of a reference frame, Quaternions are an-archistic and afford
multiple viewpoints by working spontaneously and locally.
In Against the Day, the anarchism that Quaternionists claim for their subject
and externalise in their maniacal World Convention fails – in mathematics as
in politics a unified viewpoint defined by a governing frame of reference is more
easily manageable. In a phrase that echoes Josiah Willard Gibbs’s prediction of
a rivalry between Hamilton’s methods and those of other mathematicians, the
Quaternionists in Pynchon’s novel connect the loss of a representational rela-
tionship in their anarchist mathematics to forfeiting their own reality: ‘“Face
it. The Kampf ums Dasein is over, and we have lost.” “Does that mean we
only imagine now that we exist?” “Imaginary axes, imaginary existence”’ (AD
598–9).39 Relating mathematics to questions of existence, Against the Day
locates in it a potential to create new forms of being and, as we shall see below,
to open up alternative worlds. Based on the examination of the anarchist and
imaginary existence of Quaternions and their supporters, the next sections
further explore the ontological implications of modern maths and examine
these in relation to anarchist possibilities in other imaginary domains, not least
in the literary fiction Against the Day itself.

Mathematical Worlds
Against the Day illustrates the contested reality of imaginary numbers and
the notion of modern mathematics’ independence of physical givens with the
concept of an ‘“imaginary” mirror-world’ (AD 558). The novel thus treats
science not only as a way to know the world but to create new ones, adding
to the epistemological concern a commitment to ontological questions that
becomes prominent in the later twentieth century.40 At the same time as cel-
ebrating the world-building potential of maths, however, Against the Day
also emphasises its restrictions, and, taken together, the possibilities and limits
of mathematical creations provide a mirror to the novel’s revaluation of the
powers and responsibilities of art in the twenty-first century.
Clearly committed to plurality, Against the Day features various ways of
doubling perspectives, people and worlds: characters possess the ability to be
in two places at once; the crystalline structure of Iceland spar causes double-
refraction by splitting light rays, while the magical instrument La Doppiatrice
uses the same process to divide a person into two; and a ship separates into
the civilian Stupendica and its secret counterpart, the dreadnought Emperor
Maximilian. A librarian identifies such doubling as the ‘sub-structure of

39
modernism, fiction and mathematics

reality’ and relates the effect of Iceland spar and the reflection of essential
duality in mathematics:
[Iceland spar brings about the] doubling of Creation, each image clear
and believable. . . . And you being mathematical gentlemen, it can
hardly have escaped your attention that its curious advent into the world
occurred within only a few years of the discovery of Imaginary Numbers,
which also provided a doubling of the mathematical Creation. (AD 149)
If Iceland spar provides ‘that all-important ninety-degree twist’ to light that
renders invisible the subterranean world of the ‘Hidden People’, imaginary
numbers similarly displace their ‘“imaginary” mirror-world’ along the verti-
cal: in a coordinate system, the greater the imaginary element, the higher it is
set on the vertical y-axis, which is therefore also called the imaginary axis (AD
149, 558). Maths thus visualises what the leader of the mathematical-spiritual
order T.W.I.T. describes in more general terms: the ‘[l]ateral world-sets, other
parts of the Creation, [that] lie all around us’ can be found ‘“somewhere not
on the surface of the Earth so much as–” “Perpendicular”’ (AD 248, 1163).
The perpendicular axis accordingly denotes distance from the surface as well
as imaginary value, and the Chums of Chance further relate these two aspects
to the literary imagination: soaring above the earth in their airship and living
in a storybook world with its own conditions, they lead a highly fictional exist-
ence. As the novel links the mathematical imaginary and the literary fictional,
the nature and use of the mathematical mirror-world in Against the Day illu-
minate the potential of fictional literature to double existence without escaping
the demands of the real.
Against the Day introduces the traditional belief that mathematics consti-
tutes universal truth and is independent of historical and cultural contexts.
Supporting this notion, Quaternions unite a ‘band of varying ages and nation-
alities, whose only common language [. . . was] that of the Quaternions’, and
the Chums of Chance experience maths as an international language:
‘The Italian number that looks like a zero, is the same as our own
American “zero.” The one that looks like a one, is “one.” The one that
looks like a two–’ ‘Enough, cretin!’ snarled Darby, ‘we “get the picture”!’
(AD 589, 273–4)
Next to trusting in its universality, several characters start out with a belief
in a separate mathematical world, a Platonic realm of absolute truth where
mathematical objects exist and of which the physical world is only an
imperfect shadow. Yashmeen describes her initial conviction in such terms:
‘Mathematics once seemed the way – the internal life of numbers came as a
revelation to me, [. . .] – a reflection of some less-accessible reality, through
close study of which one might perhaps learn to pass beyond the difficult given

40
 thomas pynchon, against the day

world’ (AD 841). Similarly, Kit finds in Vectorism glimpses of ‘transcend-

ence, a coexisting world of imaginaries, the “spirit realm”’ and hopes to dis-
cover an alternative to earthly reality where the powerful capitalist Scarsdale
Vibe threatens his family (AD 759). Upon Kit’s retreat into maths, Professor
Vanderjuice observes that ‘[w]hen human tragedies happen, it always seems
as if scientists and mathematicians can meet the situation more calmly than
others’ (AD 366), echoing G. H. Hardy’s famous conviction that ‘[w]hen the
world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable
anodyne’.41 Yet, if the Quaternionic Weapon invalidates Hardy’s belief in
the irrelevance of mathematics to war, the developments in Against the Day
also reveal flaws in his strategy to evade reality. In the course of the novel, Kit
learns that trying to access the Platonic realm of abstract mathematical truths
is futile: the promises of transcendence ‘had not shown Kit, after all, a way to
escape the world governed by real numbers. His father had been murdered by
men whose allegiance [. . .] was to that real axis and nothing beyond it’ (AD
759). The emphasis on real numbers and the real axis suggest that maths is not
a separate realm but implicated in the world that it is hoped to transcend, and
Yashmeen’s experience similarly stresses its relevance to the real. Her highly
abstract work is a ‘refuge’ from reality, but it finds unexpected applications
and helps her manage the given world, for example by winning at roulette and
using Riemann’s work on multiply connected spaces to walk through walls
(AD 558). Like Kit, she is expelled from the safety of her studies, and their visit
to the Museum der Monstrositäten details why any belief in a perfect realm
of mathematical existence and truth has to fail: as experts discover modern
maths to itself be fundamentally disturbed by unknowability, uncertainty and
paradox, it becomes futile to seek refuge there and mathematicians instead
approach psychiatrists for help in the real world. The metafictional shaking of
fictional reality points to a comparable situation concerning literature: escap-
ist retreat into fiction is impossible since, sooner or later, the end of a chapter
upsets the novelistic world.
If modern developments shake belief in an ideal mathematical realm, they
also lead to greater acknowledgement of the cultural dimension of maths. In
Against the Day, the idea of a transcendent mathematical realm animates hope
to find in Quaternions a means to pass beyond time and thus death, and the
failure to do so points to the fact that mathematical concepts themselves are
not outside time but that their existence depends on specific historical condi-
tions. In accordance with Hamilton’s view that Quaternions refer to ‘time plus
space’, in the novel the so-called scalar or real part of a Quaternion is related to
time: ‘any energy encountered inside that term might be taken as due to Time,
an intensified form of Time itself’, Barry Nebulay explains, and Dr Rao details
that it signifies ‘the merciless clock-beat we all seek to escape, into the pulse-
lessness of salvation’ (AD 626). Quaternions inspire hope for ­transcendence

41
modernism, fiction and mathematics

when their scalar part promises ways to manipulate time. Considering that
its movement is linear from past to future, a reversal of direction seems to
many characters the one way of change. Mathematically, this means turning
the arrow of time by 180 degrees, so that time flows from future to past. Yet,
Quaternions do not work with a one-dimensional axis but with four dimen-
sions, and even in the two-dimensional system of complex numbers, the pos-
sibilities of turning proliferate: next to the x-axis that can be viewed as the
one-dimensional arrow of time, there is an ‘additional axis whose unit is √−1’
and enables rotations by any angle in a two-dimensional plane (AD 147). As
Dr Rao explains in dazzling mathematical diction:

[M]appings in which a linear axis becomes curvilinear – functions of a

complex variable such as w = ez, where a straight line in the z-plane maps
to a circle in the w-plane, [. . .] do suggest the possibility of linear time
becoming circular, and so achieving eternal return. (AD 147)

Converting linear input in the z-plane to curvilinear output in the w-plane,

Quaternions can bend time, encouraging hope for immortality in a circular
recurrence. Yet, ultimately, the aim of transcendence is to arrive at a timeless
condition, and characters in Against the Day do attain forms of timelessness:
at Candlebrow U. the Chums ‘would find exactly the mixture of nostalgia
and amnesia to provide them a reasonable counterfeit of the Timeless’, books
may be ‘[o]utside of time’, and Cyprian reflects on a ‘“convergence” to a kind
of stillness, not merely in space but in Time as well’ (AD 457, 149, 1076).
Mathematics is not a means to such timelessness in Against the Day; the
temporal element of Quaternions might be used in the Quaternionic Weapon
to bring about the end of time as we know it, but instead of transcendence
Quaternions promise only circular recurrence.
As characters become disillusioned with the promises of an ideal mathemati-
cal world and the ability of Quaternions to transcend time, the novel shows
the concept to itself be dependent on a specific time period for its existence:
developed by Hamilton in 1843, contended during the Quaternion Wars,
and passing into imaginary existence, Quaternions are a product of a specific
historical moment and its social and cultural contexts. Seeming universal-
ity gives way to different beliefs in the ‘Quaternion Wars’ where experts of
the ‘Hamiltonian faith’ oppose specialists of a ‘semi-religious attachment’ to
Vector calculation (AD 147, 177). As the religious terminology suggests, the
war between the factions does not primarily concern mathematical truth but
originates in pre-formed beliefs about how the world ought to be:

Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists thought

they know of God’s intention – that space be simple, three-dimensional,
and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, that it be

42
 thomas pynchon, against the day

assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all end for
end, defining the axes of space as imaginary and leaving Time to be the
real term [. . .]. Of course the Vectorists went to war. (AD 599)

The social and cultural motivations directly affect mathematical existence

when, on the losing side, Quaternions and their supporters cease to exist
outside the imaginary. The mirror-world built in maths thus should not be
understood as an ideal Platonic realm but as a world that provides refuge for
aspects of maths that are no less correct than other concepts but do not fit the
dominant political, social and cultural views. In other words, Against the Day
uses Quaternions to show that a system of seeming universality and absolute
truth is at least partly constructed by social factors.
Quaternions hold an important place in discussions on the social aspects
of scientific knowledge not only in Against the Day but in the history of
science studies, too. When Pynchon’s novel employs a concept that features
prominently in the debate about scientific knowledge and the ontological
status of mathematical objects, it calls up the context of the 1990s ‘Science
Wars’ where supporters of scientific realism clashed with postmodern scholars
advocating understanding scientific concepts as social and cultural constructs.
Mathematical examples are sparse in the sociology of science, since the
dominant view of maths as universal and true long precluded investigation.
In one of the first studies on the sociology of maths in 1976, David Bloor
complained about the ‘enormous amount of work [that] is devoted to main-
taining a perspective which forbids a sociological standpoint’.42 Aiming to
remedy this state of affairs, Bloor examines Hamilton’s work on algebra in
view of the social, political and philosophical contexts of his time and argues
that it depended significantly on these factors.43 Other studies use Hamilton’s
construction of Quaternions to illuminate the production of knowledge in
theoretical practice as opposed to the better-explored experimental sciences,
and Andrew Pickering more generally establishes Quaternions as an example
of the culture of science – that is, as one of ‘the “made things” of science [. . .
such as] scientific facts and theories’.44 Viewed not as being found in nature
or pre-existing in a Platonic realm but as ‘made’ in specific historical and
cultural circumstances, Quaternions feature as one of the most prominent
mathematical examples in postmodern accounts of scientific knowledge. As
we have seen, Against the Day employs the concept in a comparable way,
presenting it as undermining the notion of the universality of mathematical
knowledge, and not only as made but as itself making (imaginary) worlds. Yet,
the presentation of the social embeddedness of maths in Pynchon’s novel does
not embrace arbitrary constructions of concepts and is not subject to accusa-
tions of freewheeling relativism that were levelled against science studies in the
1990s. Against the Day’s cautious approach to notions of maths as a social

43
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and cultural c­ onstruction becomes particularly apparent when comparing it to

Pynchon’s treatment of the idea in his earlier novel Mason & Dixon. We shall
therefore take a brief look at this novel published during the ‘Science Wars’
in 1997, before further examining the world-building potential of maths in
Against the Day.
Mason & Dixon calls into question the universal nature of mathematics
much more drastically than Against the Day when even the basic geometrical
element of the circle is open to cultural and religious construction: ‘It was five
and a Quarter Degrees that the Jesuits remov’d from the Chinese Circle, in
reducing it to three hundred sixty’.45 This alternative geometry, which might
have arrived from another planet together with China, indeed measures a dif-
ferent world: the 365,25-degree circle opens up additional space that is not
available when measuring in standard Enlightenment geometry but that, in
Pynchon’s novel, really exists. Similarly, adhering to the outdated time meas-
urement after the 1752 calendar reform releases a different reality: while in
the new calendar September 2 is followed by September 14, some characters
live through the eleven missing days. Alternative mathematical concepts and
measurement systems thus open up other spaces and times, ultimately creating
different worlds.46 In Mason & Dixon, the cultural specificity of mathematics
includes even its most basic elements such as the circle and numbers, which
have to be ‘transnumerated’ outside their culture of origin.47 This aspect is
far less pronounced in Against the Day, where even the Chums in their higher
imaginary existence note the international nature of number. When only more
complex concepts depend on mathematical faiths based on preformed assump-
tions about the world, the socio-cultural constructedness and world-building
potential of maths emerges as subject to stricter conditions, and, as we shall see,
the twenty-first-century novel explores the possibilities of alternative maths and
worlds built from these with a new emphasis on their rootedness in the real.
In Against the Day, the Axiom of Choice works as an illustration of the
necessary connectedness of mathematics to earthly conditions, showing that
its constructions are not arbitrary departures from the world but remain tied
to the real:
[Kit] was presented with a startling implication of Zermelo’s Axiom of
Choice. It was possible in theory, he was shown beyond a doubt, to take
a sphere the size of a pea, cut it apart into several very precisely shaped
pieces, and reassemble it into another sphere the size of the sun. (AD
1212)
What appears as strikingly counterintuitive and initially provoked strong criti-
cism by professionals is now widely accepted as the Banach–Tarski paradox.
The example in Against the Day is commonly used in the philosophy of science
to illustrate the strange implications of the paradox:

44
 thomas pynchon, against the day

One of the amazing results in the Banach­–Tarski paper implies that a

solid ball of any size can be cut up – in theory – into a finite number of
pieces that can be reassembled to make a ball of any other size. In other
words, ‘a pea can be cut up to make the sun’!48

Unlike other antinomies, for example those discovered in set theory,

the Banach­ –Tarski paradox does not question accepted assumptions of
modern maths, and no mathematical inconsistency compromises Professor
Vanderjuice’s far-reaching conclusion from Zermelo’s Axiom of Choice in
Against the Day: ‘you see what this means don’t you? [. . .] the world we think
we know can be dissected and reassembled into any number of worlds, each
as real as “this” one’ (AD 1212). Supporting the notion that mathematics does
not transcend the real or build arbitrary imaginary worlds but that it remains
rooted in the world and creates alternative states of it, the Axiom of Choice
exemplifies what several characters realise over the course of the novel: maths
always comes back to the real, even if a sojourn into mathematical realms can
change reality in the process. Yashmeen employs mathematical insights to
solve problems in her real life, Dr Rao uses the ‘“imaginary” reference system’
of Quaternions to reappear in a different place and as a different person, and
Kit learns that a reassembled and counterintuitively changed world can be as
real as the one taken for granted (AD 605). Recreating what is thought to be
‘the’ world, mathematics incorporates possibilities of plurality and freedom,
but without stable foundations and not completely independent of reality, it is
neither a tool for transcendence nor for random construction.
Against the Day very carefully presents modern mathematics as constructed
in specific contexts and lacking the certainty and universality that might seem
to define it. Although precisely not embracing a notion of complete social
constructedness that is associated with the postmodern faction in the ‘Science
Wars’, maths in its modern notion does become comparable to other fields
of knowledge in Pynchon’s novel. Given that in Against the Day the math-
ematical and the political map into each other in view of shared crises and
movements towards an-arche, the opportunities and limits of world-making in
modern maths lend themselves to examining politically relevant strategies of
tapping into imaginary existence to break the world into pieces and recreate it.

The Modernist Transformation of Anarchism into the

Imaginary Domain
This section turns to the more immediately political implications of the inter-
relations of maths and politics and aims to show that the mathematical dis-
cussion does not ‘nullif[y]’ the urgency of Pynchon’s writing but is integral to
Against the Day’s vision of the political.49 More specifically, it examines the
crisis and failure of political anarchism and its transformation, considers these

45
modernism, fiction and mathematics

developments in view of the mathematical discussion, and argues that both can
be understood in the terms of David Weir’s thesis of modernism’s ‘aesthetic
realization of anarchist politics’.50 In light of the modernist transformation of
anarchism into the realms of maths and art and its implications for Pynchon’s
political engagement, I then consider in what ways Against the Day marks a
shift in Pynchon’s postmodernist practice.
In Against the Day, anti-foundationalist movements do not only find expres-
sion in mathematics, but anarchism develops into different forms after its
political failure, which a character predicts to come about with the First World
War: ‘A general European war [. . .] would be just the ticket to wipe Anarchism
off the political map’ (AD 1053). Webb Traverse, a miner using explosives to
protest against big corporations, is the most active anarchist in the novel, and
his aims appear in a positive light, as a laudable protest against unfair power
distribution, suppression, systemic violence and the tycoon Scarsdale Vibe as
the embodiment of capitalist evil. Robert McLaughlin explains that by pitting
Webb’s terrorist activities against a repulsive system of inequality and evil,
Against the Day ‘sets something of a trap for readers, inviting us to sympathize
with, even root for, acts of violence’.51 Kathryn Hume even goes so far as to
argue that Pynchon himself condones violence by showing again and again
that ‘[d]ynamiting capitalist structures is worthy of a particular kind of saint
in Against the Day’s spiritual economy’.52 It does, at least, not require much of
a stretch to detect a certain sympathy with anarchist views when a character
counters the challenge ‘how can anyone set off a bomb that will take innocent
lives?’ with the question: ‘If you are not devoting every breath of every day
waking and sleeping to destroying those who slaughter the innocent as easy as
signing a check, then how innocent are you willing to call yourself?’ (AD 97).
Webb’s death by the hands of arch-capitalist Vibe signals the decline of politi-
cal anarchism: his children do not step into his shoes, and Against the Day
then traces the – successful and unsuccessful – transformation of anarchism
into other forms.
Outside mathematics where Quaternionists work in small-scale groupings
against systems that ‘govern[] absolutely’, the family unit is Pynchon’s primary
example of an anarchist, that is, small and self-organised, community (AD
599). Characterised as likely to unselfishly forgo profit in order to provide
others with unconditional help, family is not restricted to biological kinship
here, but committing totally to another person’s welfare creates a family-tie of
some sort. Moreover, where the non-representational nature of Quaternions
questions foundations and leads to their imaginary existence, anarchism finds
new imaginary expressions in literature, music and painting. Gratuitous aid is,
so Fleetwood points out, not a frequent occurrence on earth but more preva-
lent in literary fiction: ‘I used to read Dickens as a child. The cruelty didn’t sur-
prise me, but I did wonder at the moments of uncompensated kindness, which

46
 thomas pynchon, against the day

I had never observed outside the pages of fiction’ (AD 187). Next to literature,
a character proposes music as a form in which a functioning anarchistic society
is possible. With its emphasis on improvisation, the early twentieth-century
phenomenon of ‘Jass’ shows ‘the most amazing social coherence, as if you all
shared the same brain’ and thus constitutes a realisation of anarchistic ideas in
music (AD 417).
Together with the examples in mathematics, literature and music, the
painter Tancredi’s artistic anarchism forms part of a transformation from the
violent political to the cultural plane. Tancredi shares the Futurists’ demand
for a new form of art that responds to the changed conditions of the modern
world, and he directly refers to the Futurist programme that celebrates engag-
ing with science and technology and exalts ‘aggressive action’.53 Importantly
however, Tancredi implicitly distances himself from the praise of violent
means: ‘He sympathized with Marinetti and those around him who were
beginning to describe themselves as “Futurists,” but failed to share their attrac-
tion to the varieties of American brutalism’ (AD 657). Instead of using brutal
methods, understood in its double meaning as artistic movement and violent
quality, Tancredi hopes to change and redeem the world through peaceable
modernist art. Unlike Webb’s violent anarchist attacks then, he does not try to
kill Scarsdale Vibe with bomb explosions but commits a purely artistic attack
with paintings which are ‘like explosions. He favored the palette of fire and
explosion. [. . .] “He’s a sort of infernal-machine specialist”’ (AD 658). More
precisely, Tancredi’s paintings reveal a counter-side of reality by rearranging
‘dot[s] of color which become the basic unit of reality’ and thus create what
Dally thinks of as ‘a contra-Venezia, the almost previsual reality behind what
everyone else was agreeing to define as “Venice”’ (AD 660). In his anarchist
attack, the reorganisation of foundational elements of reality is supposed to
show Vibe the unfoundedness of his power: ‘Some define Hell as the absence
of God, and that is the least we may expect of the infernal machine – that
the bourgeoisie be deprived of what most sustains them’, Tancredi explains
(AD 659). However, the an-archist vision does not change Vibe’s views of the
world; Tancredi is shot and maimed before he gets the picture to him, and Vibe
only revels in his ‘victory over Anarchist terror’ (AD 834).
When Tancredi identifies with modernist artistic programmes and objects
to violent action, his attack provides a literal exposition of Weir’s thesis that
‘anarchism succeeded culturally where it failed politically’.54 Weir examines
how modernist art begins to exhibit elements of aesthetic anarchism, for
example in its tendency towards fragmentation. This transformation becomes
concrete with Tancredi’s transfer of Webb’s bombings to the sphere of art
where paintings are ‘like explosions’: the violent detonations of Webb’s bombs
literally turn into Tancredi’s ‘palette of fire and explosion’ (AD 658). However,
Tancredi’s modernist aesthetic form of anarchism is an ambiguous successor

47
modernism, fiction and mathematics

of Webb’s morally difficult use of violence. On the one hand, the non-violent
examining of the world’s foundational elements and the reimagining of Venice
as a contra-city shows alternatives to taken-for-granted reality. On the other
hand, Tancredi might be ‘a virtuous kid, like all these fucking artists’, but his
attack on Vibe remains unsuccessful and, showing ‘a curious reluctance to
speak of what the design might actually do’, not even Tancredi himself seems
able to pin down the expected effects of his art (AD 836, 659). Unlike Webb’s
terrorist actions that also harm innocent people, virtuous artistic anarchism
does not entail such ethical difficulties, but the lack of effectiveness puts into
question the transformation to the aesthetic plane as a way to realise anarchist
ideals. Tancredi’s painted announcement of the absence of God and shatter-
ing of reality into the basic unit of dots – the artistic revelation of the lack of
foundations and consequent fragmentation – might evade the ethical quandary
of violent action but comes with its own problems of ineffectiveness.
The contrast between Webb’s violent actions and Tancredi’s ineffective
anarchism by art, and the only imaginary existence of Quaternions and their
questioning of mathematical representation, have implications for the political
potential of literature. The failure of non-violent means to initiate change also
applies to language, which at the turn of the century is subject to a pervading
scepticism or Sprachkrise (see also Chapter 2). Seeing the ineffectiveness of
voicing his discontent through language, Webb turns to the more direct expres-
sion of explosives, which, so the leader of the mathematical-spiritual order
T.W.I.T. holds, ‘may easily open, now and then, passages to elsewhere’ (AD
248). Webb thus ‘always expressed himself more by way of dynamite’, and his
son understands ‘that in each explosion, regardless of outcome, had spoken the
voice Webb could not speak with in the daily world’ (AD 356, 528). Against
the Day also reflects the impossibility of verbalising ungraspable reality when
it does not represent the First World War but marks its arrival through the
explosion of the Tunguska Event: ‘the explosion arrived, the voice of a world
announcing that it would never go back to what it had been’ (AD 878). The
basic sound structure or signifiant communicates the death of former reality,
and the war, condensed into one explosion, changes the world drastically. With
the contrast of verbal and, on the other hand, explosive means of communica-
tion and change, Against the Day questions the reliability of literary language
and raises concerns about the effectiveness of its own medium as well as about
its stance on expression by way of dynamite. Significantly, Against the Day
does not end with a palette of fire and explosion – it differs from Tancredi’s
artistic expression and also from Pynchon’s earlier novel Gravity’s Rainbow
where, in a formulation including readers in the imminent destruction, a rocket
is about to fall on ‘us’ (see Chapter 4). Instead, Against the Day closes with a
vision of the Chums of Chance preparing to fly towards grace. To appreciate
this ending, we have to examine how it relates to anarchist issues in Against

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 thomas pynchon, against the day

the Day, to the freedom identified in imaginary realms of modern maths, and
to questions about the effectiveness of political engagement through art.
Against the Day draws attention to its own fictionality when it begins and
ends with the storyline of the Chums of Chance and highlights their ambigu-
ous ontological status. The Chums’ flight on the first page – and with it the
novel’s setting off – is marked as a disconnection from the everyday world
and as an ascent into the imaginary, into fictional realms. The first pages also
introduce the topic of anarchism, doing so with explicit reference to fiction.
Against the Day thus immediately calls attention to literature as a domain of
anarchist expression and emphasises the fictional nature of the presentation
that is to follow. Indeed, Lindsay’s comment on the destination of the Chums
of Chance also applies to the readers’ trajectory through the novel: ‘the inexo-
rably rising tide of World Anarchism, [is] to be found particularly rampant,
in fact, at our current destination’ (AD 6). Following this warning is the reas-
surance that encounters with anarchism will occur only in the realm of fiction:
the dog Pugnax reads Henry James’s novel about anarchism, The Princess
Casamassima, whereupon Lindsay describes anarchism as:
‘a sinister affliction to which I pray we shall suffer no occasion for expo-
sure more immediate than that to be experienced, as with Pugnax at this
moment, safely within the fictional leaves of some book.’ Placing upon
the word ‘book’ an emphasis whose level of contempt can be approached
perhaps only by Executive Officers. (AD 6)
The emphasis on the literary nature of the encounter with anarchism contin-
ues outside Lindsay’s speech when Pugnax, the reading dog clearly signalling
the fictional nature of the entire episode, fails to identify a human smell in
Lindsay and thus underlines the fact that the Chums of Chance are of ambigu-
ous ontological status even in the reality of the book Against the Day. And
when a couple of sentences later an authorial voice explains that the airship is
powered by an ‘anemometer’ that violates scientific laws but that ‘my young
readers may recall from the boys’ earlier adventure (The Chums of Chance
at Krakatoa, The Chums of Chance Search for Atlantis)’, the episode further
stresses the fictional side of the Chums’ existence (AD 7). Thus, the introduc-
tion of anarchism is twice removed: the first encounter takes place in a novel
that itself occurs as part of a markedly fictional adventure series. The box-
structure then draws attention to the fact that Against the Day itself is a novel
and that any anarchism about to occur does so in the realm of fiction.
The Chums’ destination is indeed a state of rampant anarchism and is, as
we are assured in the beginning, met with only in fiction. The Chums become
anarchists themselves in the sense of giving uncompensated help to any popu-
lation in need. Ignoring national boundaries and politics altogether, they are
‘declared enemies of whatever is in power now’ and do not expect recognition

49
modernism, fiction and mathematics

or reward for their ‘supranational’ commitment: ‘Their motto was “There,

but Invisible”’ (AD 1152, 1217). The reassurance that anarchism remains
safe ‘within the fictional leaves of some book’ turns to disappointment when
the Chums’ conversion to anarchism leads to the most hopeful ending of any
Pynchon novel: ‘They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is
coming to part the sky. They fly toward grace’ (AD 6, 1220). The stereotypical
happy ending in a mass wedding of all the Chums, the simultaneous births of
children to all couples, and the hopeful flight towards a bright future might
be appropriate to the serial adventures of storybook characters, but it is not a
likely destination outside of fiction. The close relationship between anarchism
and fiction that is highlighted at the beginning and ending of Against the Day,
then, suggests that the novel’s anarchism has to be thought of in light of its
emphatically imaginary existence. So, when Seán Molloy claims that the novel
advocates transcending politics altogether and bases his view on the, as he
claims, apolitical status of the Chums’ flight towards grace, his interpreta-
tion has to be reconsidered to take account of the tight connection between
anarchism and imaginary heights.55 Greater attention to the expressly fictional
nature of the presentation of anarchism also eases Hume’s malaise regarding
what she claims to be Pynchon’s call to violent action. When she deplores the
explicitness of ‘this anarchist and Catholic Pynchon’ who presents only the
two alternatives of ‘entering a convent and becoming a dynamiter’, she loses
sight of the overt fictionality with which the topic of anarchism is introduced.56
Just as mathematics in Against the Day cannot be thought without considering
both its real and its imaginary components, discussions of politics gain com-
plexity when attending more closely to the transformation of political action
into artistic forms of anarchism. At the same time, the contrast between violent
action and ineffectual art means that the anarchism of Against the Day cannot
be seen only in the light of its emphatically imaginary existence but has to be
considered in view of its complex relation to the real and the responsibilities
that come with it. This is the topic of the next section.

Complexity in Against the Day

Anarchism and political questions around it gain new urgency in the wake of
the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and critics have viewed Pynchon’s more decidedly
political stance in Against the Day as part of a more general shift towards the
real. This new emphasis informs Sascha Pöhlmann’s suggestion: ‘We may have
to stop calling Thomas Pynchon a postmodern writer.’57 Pöhlmann stresses
that Pynchon’s texts are still postmodern but that Against the Day with its
determinedly political tone forcefully goes beyond the limitations of postmod-
ernism: ‘this is not to claim that Pynchon’s writing is not postmodern, but
that it is also other things, and that it seems more and more inappropriate to
limit one’s view of these texts to a postmodern framework’.58 Taking a closer

50
 thomas pynchon, against the day

look at the relation between the real, the imaginary and the fictional through
the lens of the novel’s engagement with mathematics elucidates the shift in
Pynchon’s practice: it clarifies his stance on the modernist transformation of
anarchism into aesthetic and imaginary realms, and illuminates his concern
with the possibilities and responsibilities of art in the twenty-first century.
Against the Day employs mathematics to illustrate the necessary interrelation
of the real and the imaginary and draws on it as a poetological metaphor – that
is, as an image of the principles of literature in the twenty-first century. In the
novel, Yashmeen notices the indispensability of a constitutional real element
even in her arcane research into Riemann’s zeta-function and the ‘whole
“imaginary” mirror-world’ of which this complex function takes account (AD
558). The zeta-function is part of the still unsolved Riemann hypothesis – a
famous conjecture about the location of the function’s zeros: it states that
the zeta-function has so-called trivial zeros at the negative even integers (−2,
−4, −6, etc.) and so-called non-trivial zeros at complex numbers with the real
part ½. Geometrically, this means that, in a complex coordinate system, all
non-trivial zeros lie on a line that is parallel to the perpendicular y-axis and
goes through the value ½. Yashmeen sees this vertical line as the backbone of
the complex realm and its combination of real and imaginary values: ‘“There
is also this . . . spine of reality.” Afterward she would remember she actually
said “Rückgrad von Wirklichkeit”’ (AD 679). Yashmeen’s imagery suggests
that the spine holds up and connects different imaginary values and relates
these to earthly reality. Metaphorically, the common real part ½ links sets of
conditions with higher or lower imaginary components to the real, for example
connecting the Chums’ storybook universe and the earthly world engaged in
war. Any world with an imaginary value is thus necessarily complex in the
sense of combining real and imaginary elements. When in Against the Day
Hilbert takes up Yashmeen’s idea of the spine of reality and formulates it into
the ‘celebrated Hilbert-Pólya-Conjecture’, the concept constitutes part of the
spine of reality of the novel itself: Hilbert and the Hilbert–Pólya conjecture are
part of the history of mathematics and act as a bridge between the novel world
and readers’ reality (AD 679). More generally speaking, the novel’s excursions
into mathematics and multiple imaginary domains are all rooted in historical
actuality, making Against the Day a ‘complex’ text.
A connection to the real is not in itself a laudable characteristic; it is open
to facilitate acts of kindness as well as abuse. It is the real rather than the
long-questioned imaginary element of Quaternions that is used in a weapon
to destroy the known world and its seemingly self-evident conditions, and
the Chums of Chance recognise the perpendicular dimension ‘as a means
for delivering explosives’ (AD 1218). At first sight, Lindsay only comments
on the ambiguity of access to the third dimension, but the suggestion that a
higher setting on the perpendicular imaginary axis may be used for anarchistic

51
modernism, fiction and mathematics

action also points to the danger of dismissing the imaginary as inconsequen-

tial. In the paragraph preceding its happy ending, Against the Day illustrates
the potential of the imaginary and its relevance to the real in relation to the
mathematics of complex numbers. When estranged Kit and Dally are about to
meet after long separation and get another chance of happiness, the paragraph
ends: ‘May we imagine for them a vector, passing through the invisible, the
“imaginary,” the unimaginable, carrying them safely into this postwar Paris
[. . .]. A vector through the night into a morning’ (AD 1217). The implied
answer is affirmative: of course, we may imagine a happy ending for them,
not least as we follow the Chums’ approach to grace immediately afterwards.
The mathematical terminology of imaginaries and vectors further supports the
suggested answer: if imaginary elements are usefully employed in mathemat-
ics then, so the implication, other forms of working with the imaginary – and
not least literary fiction – might similarly be of real consequence. Indeed, the
mathematics of complex numbers provides a proof for Yashmeen’s conviction
that ‘[w]e can do whatever we can imagine’ when the imaginary is a realm of
productive transitioning between two real states (AD 987). Where Dr Rao
uses the Quaternionic ‘“imaginary” reference system’ and Yashmeen draws
on ‘something that would allow access to a different . . . I don’t know, “set of
conditions”? [. . .] Unreal, but not compellingly so’ (AD 605, 694) to travel to
different places, stepping into the imaginary constitutes productive routes in
non-mathematical contexts, too. The Chums of Chance draw on the power
of the imaginary to secure their escape when they ‘chose lateral solutions,
sidestepping the crisis by passing into metaphorical identities’ (AD 471). Kit
similarly benefits from access to imaginary domains when travelling through
the real and imaginary territories of mystical Shambhala and, after a process
that is ‘like the convergence of a complex function’, emerges into a state that
might see him and Dally as a happy couple once again (AD 1214).
The phrase that describes the end of Kit’s journey as a merging of real and
imaginary realms identifies the characters’ problem-solving as equivalent to
a mathematical strategy formulated by Jacques Hadamard: ‘the shortest and
best way between two truths of the real domain often passes through the
imaginary one’.59 With the metaphor of complex numbers, Against the Day
emphasises connections of the imaginary with the real, and the mathematical
relevance of the imaginary puts into perspective the questioned effectiveness of
literary fiction. While the potential of art to change reality remains ambiguous
in the novel, Yashmeen’s opinion that after exploring other sets of conditions
we ‘return to the bourgeois day and its mass delusions of safety, to report on
what we’ve seen’ and her mathematically inspired conviction that ‘[w]e can
do whatever we can imagine’ provide a fairly good brief for readers, who,
putting down the book with its happy ending in imaginary heights, step back
into their day with a vision of what the world might be (AD 1058, 987). The

52
 thomas pynchon, against the day

novel’s mathematical explorations and questioning of the value of art thus

do not advocate connecting to the real by abandoning the imaginary. Rather,
Against the Day challenges and renegotiates the place of fiction in a changed
world, using concepts and imagery from maths to suggest that the imaginary
remains a necessary and powerful part of literature but that a core connection
to the real is needed to save it from excesses of self-referentiality which, as the
passage at the Museum der Monstrositäten shows, threaten to destroy worlds.
In view of the importance of anarchism for Against the Day’s turn to the
real and the repositioning of Pynchon’s postmodernism, it is worth reiterating
that the fragmented, plural style of Pynchon’s novels constitutes a form of nar-
rative anarchism. Graham Benton summarises: ‘Pynchon’s formal techniques
– which favor heterogeneity over uniformity, spontaneity over conformity,
and fragmentation over consolidation – align with an anarchist aesthetic that
reflects a sustained skepticism toward all typologies and classifications of
genre.’60 The postmodernist form of Against the Day also illustrates Weir’s
thesis of the translation of anarchism from the political to the cultural domain
when it exhibits ‘all the variety, multiplicity, and freedom of human expres-
sion that anarchism encouraged in the past’.61 Yet, while Against the Day
with its various plotlines, styles and genres constitutes such an aesthetic way
of perpetuating the anarchist agenda, Pynchon goes a step further than the
modernist writers Weir examines: he does not practice anarchism by describ-
ing fragments of the given world but sets multiple possible and coexisting
worlds side by side. Importantly, these worlds always remain related to the
one understood as real and indeed are the world, reassembled into different
but nevertheless real forms. Thus, on the one hand, Against the Day illustrates
a further development of Weir’s thesis of the transformation of anarchism
into art; on the other hand, the juxtaposition of worlds and attention to the
interrelatedness but distinctiveness of the real and the imaginary communicate
the insufficiency of aesthetic anarchism and the need for real political action.
Significantly, the Chums of Chance’s flight to grace in imaginary heights is
possible only after they acknowledge their responsibility to the earthly world.
They are in danger of losing touch with it and are not even aware of the First
World War, as if ‘in soaring free from enfoldment by the indicative world
below, they had paid with a waiver of allegiance to it’ (AD 1149). Only after
the Chums reduce wartime suffering by providing anarchist help do they
find a balance between journeys into imaginary heights and return to earthly
reality, and only then do they approach grace. McLaughlin’s statement that
fiction after 9/11 concerns itself with ‘the complex role of fiction in a culture
where literature of any kind, but especially serious literature, seems less and
less relevant’ (my emphasis) thus appropriately describes Against the Day in
more than one sense: the novel asks about the value of fiction in a time of
real urgency, and, drawing on the metaphor of complex numbers, illustrates

53
modernism, fiction and mathematics

the connection between the real and the imaginary and the need for both to
account for a complex world.62
The complex relations of the real, the imaginary and the fictional in math-
ematics, politics and literature demonstrate that there is more to Against the
Day than the all-pervasive polarity between light and dark at first suggests.
Reminiscent of Pythagoras’s Table of Opposites, Against the Day presents
contrasted pairs: day and night, light and ‘counter-light’, the ‘Anti-Stone’ that
brings death but at the same time freedom which is ‘counter-Death’, cities as
well as a ‘counter-City’, and, next to Earth, a ‘counter-Earth’ (AD 653, 89,
419, 279, 658, 1147). The ‘unyielding doubleness of everything’ not least
shows in the both good and bad aspects of anarchism (AD 1074). Yet, as the
novel develops in view of mathematics, the contrast of basic elements cannot
be considered outside the context of the fictional. It does not stop at setting
elements against each other or conflating them, but the one-dimensional
opposition of positive and negative, of presence and absence, is complemented
by another dimension: the perpendicular imaginary.63 Neither positive nor
negative themselves, imaginary numbers indicate a further dimension where
the opposition does not apply. The imaginary does not merge or alleviate the
contrast of presence and absence on the real axis, but it provides a domain that
can connect and change real magnitudes. The mathematical model thus shows
in unprecedented clarity the complexity of worlds in Pynchon’s writing: what
is (+1) and what is not (−1) is completed by what could be, by lateral, imagi-
nary worlds (±√−1).
Modern mathematics is central to Against the Day’s negotiation of politi-
cal questions around foundations and anarchism and its invitation to ‘rethink
what the political actually is’: using concepts and metaphors of maths, Against
the Day urges us to view the imaginary as part and a further dimension of the
political and to account for both components of the complex world – the real
and the imaginary, always interrelating, influencing and changing each other.64
Maths itself gains political significance when on the smaller level Quaternions
constitute an anarchist alternative to centrally governing systems, and, more
generally, modern maths in its foundational crisis is in a state of an-arche that
occasions a sense of uncertainty but also allows for creative new constructions.
Reconsidering modernist movements towards anarchist absence of founda-
tions in light of limitations that become obvious in a later political landscape,
Against the Day combines concerns from the early twentieth and the early
twenty-first centuries. The novel’s double temporality and its interrelation of
historical and fictional elements signal that only by considering issues with
adequate complexity can anti-foundationalist movements save themselves
from self-referentiality and serve as constructive ways to rebuild the world.
The concept of complex numbers becomes a metaphor for political and literary
approaches to the world, and the relevance of maths to literary developments

54
 thomas pynchon, against the day

also shows when it shares with it modernist features such as a loss of tradi-
tional foundations, questioning notions of representation, a self-referential
turn, and focus on the possibilities of imaginary domains. Presenting maths
as part of modernist movements and metaphorically encompassing a later
reappraisal of the complex nature of anarchism, Against the Day illustrates
the continued relevance of the history of maths around 1900. The next chap-
ters focus on texts from the first half of the twentieth century to examine the
beginnings of viewing maths in terms of modernist culture and, vice versa, of
framing modernist literature in terms of mathematics.

Notes
  1. Louis Menand, ‘Do the Math: Thomas Pynchon Returns’, review of Against the
Day by Thomas Pynchon, The New Yorker, 27 Nov. 2006.
  2. David Weir, Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), p. 5.
  3. Menand, ‘Do the Math’, n. pag.
  4. Samuel Thomas, Pynchon and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 12.
Quotation from Pynchon’s introduction to his short-story collection Slow Learner.
  5. Felix Klein, ‘The Present State of Mathematics’, in Mathematical Papers Read at
the International Mathematical Congress held in Connection with the World’s
Columbian Exposition Chicago 1893, ed. Eliakim Hastings Moore, Oskar Bolza,
Heinrich Maschke and Henry White (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 133–5
(pp. 133–4).
  6. Karen V. H. Parshall and David E. Rowe, ‘Embedded in the Culture: Mathematics
at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893’, The Mathematical Intelligencer,
15.2 (1993), 40–5 (p. 45).
  7. Klein, ‘The Present State of Mathematics’, p. 134.
 8. Letter to Stieltjes, qtd in Joseph L. Doob, ‘The Development of Rigor in
Mathematical Probability (1900–1950)’, The American Mathematical Monthly,
103.7 (1996), 586–95 (p. 586).
 9. Marcus Giaquinto, The Search for Certainty: A Philosophical Account of
Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), pp. 136–7.
10. David Hilbert, ‘On the Infinite’ [1925], in Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected
Readings, ed. Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964),
134–51 (p. 141).
11. David Hilbert, ‘Mathematical Problems’, trans. Mary Winston Newson, Bulletin
of the American Mathematical Society, 8.10 (1902), 437–79 (pp. 437 and 445).
12. Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Jena: Pohle, 1903),
p. 253. ‘eine der Grundlagen seines Baues erschüttert’ (Hilbert, ‘On the Infinite’,
p. 141).
13. Hermann Weyl, ‘On the New Foundational Crisis of Mathematics’ [1921], in
From Brouwer to Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in
the 1920s, ed. Paolo Mancosu (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1998), 86–118 (p. 99).
14. Hilbert qtd in Dirk van Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist: The Life of
L.E.J. Brouwer; vol. 2: Hope and Disillusion (Oxford: Clarendon, 2005), p. 486.
15. Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist II, pp. 544–5.
16. Hermann Weyl, ‘Mathematics and Logic’, The American Mathematical Monthly,
53.1 (1946), 2–13 (p. 13).

55
modernism, fiction and mathematics

17. Hilbert, ‘On the Infinite’, p. 141.

18. Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist II, p. vii.
19. ‘Die öffentliche, zum Teil leidenschaftlich geführte Debatte um die Krise verwandelte
sich seit Mitte der zwanziger Jahre in einen Fachdiskurs unter Grundlagenforschern.
Mit der Konsolidierung der Weimarer Republik ging auch diese Krise vorüber. Die
Sinnfrage war als politische öffentlich geworden, löste sich in private Sinngebung
auf’ (Herbert Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik. Eine Geschichte des Streits
um die Grundlagen der Disziplin und des Subjekts formaler Systeme (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 294).
20. G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology [1940] (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), p. 140.
21. Leibniz qtd in Paul J. Nahin, An Imaginary Tale: The Story of √−1 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 26.
22. Leibniz qtd in Adrian Rice, ‘Inexplicable? The Status of Complex Numbers in
Britain, 1750–1850’, in Around Caspar Wessel and the Geometric Representation
of Complex Numbers, ed. Jesper Lützen (Copenhagen: Reitzels, 2001), 147–80
(p. 150).
23. George Airy, ‘Supplement to a Proof of the Theorem that every Algebraic Equation
has a Root’, Transactions Cambridge Philosophical Society, 10 (1858), 327–30
(p. 327). George Boole, An Investigation of The Laws of Thought on Which
are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities [1854] (New
York: Dover, 1958), p. 69. Augustus De Morgan, On the Study and Difficulties of
Mathematics (Chicago and London: Open Court and Kegan Paul, 1910), p. 152.
24. The changing sense of a number’s reality can be illustrated more clearly with
the case of irrational numbers. The Pythagoreans feared deadly consequences
when talking about irrationals since these are not part of the system of rational
numbers: irrationals cannot be expressed by fractions or be written down, as their
decimals go on indefinitely without repeating themselves. From a contemporary
viewpoint, irrational numbers are comparatively unproblematic: for example, the
irrational number √2 can be drawn as the diagonal of a square with side length 1,
or π be described as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. The case
of irrational numbers demonstrates that the understanding of a number’s reality
is changeable and that it can be said to be real only in relation to a mathematical
reference system while a match with physical reality is irrelevant. The explanation
for the imaginary nature of imaginary numbers, then, is that negative square roots
are not part of and therefore do not exist in the real number system but are defined
and thus real in the system of complex numbers. In other words, a number’s exist-
ence depends on the number system in use and, in effect, all numbers are equally
real or unreal. The fact that the relevance of imaginary numbers to the physical
world is not intuitive made their acceptance more difficult.
25. The description closely follows Hamilton’s own account of his discovery of
Quaternions (see Hamilton’s letter to his son, dated 5 August 1865; see also
Thomas L. Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 293–4).
26. Graves qtd in John C. Baez, ‘The Octonions’, Bulletin of the American Mathematical
Society, 39.2 (2002), 145–205 (p. 146).
27. William Rowan Hamilton, Lectures on Quaternions (Dublin: Hodges and Smith,
1853), p. 2.
28. William Rowan Hamilton, ‘Theory of Conjugate Functions, or Algebraic Couples;
with a Preliminary and Elementary Essay on Algebra as the Science of Pure Time’,
The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, 17 (1831), 293–422 (pp. 417–18).
29. Hamilton, ‘Theory of Conjugate Functions’, p. 422.

56
 thomas pynchon, against the day

30. Hamilton, ‘Theory of Conjugate Functions’, p. 297.

31. William Rowan Hamilton, ‘Elementary Sketch of the Nature of that Conception
of Mathematical Quaternions, which is Developed more in Detail by Sir W. R.
Hamilton, in his recently published Volume on Lectures on that Subject’, in Life
of Sir William Rowan Hamilton III, ed. Robert Perceval Graves (Dublin: Hodges,
Figgis & Co., 1889), 635–7 (p. 635).
32. Peter Guthrie Tait, ‘On the Intrinsic Nature of the Quaternion Method’ [1894], in
Scientific Papers II (London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 392–3 (p. 393).
33. Tait qtd in American Association for the Advancement of Science, Proceedings of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 40 (1891), p. 80.
34. Letter to Graves, 30 April 1846, qtd in Robert Perceval Graves, Life of Sir William
Rowan Hamilton II, 3 vols (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co, 1882–9), pp. 521–2.
35. Hamilton, ‘Theory of Conjugate Functions’, p. 295.
36. Hamilton, ‘Theory of Conjugate Functions’, p. 294.
37. Michael J. Crowe, A History of Vector Analysis: The Evolution of the Idea of a
Vectorial System (New York: Dover, 1994), p. 31.
38. For a historical account of the Quaternion Wars, see Hankins, Sir William Rowan
Hamilton, p. 319.
39. Gibbs wrote to Thomas Craig in 1888: ‘I believe that a Kampf ums Dasein is just
commencing between the different methods and notations of multiple algebra,
especially between the ideas of Grassmann & of Hamilton’ (qtd in Crowe, A
History of Vector Analysis, p. 161).
40. See Chapter 4 for Brian McHale’s work that uses Pynchon’s writing to develop
a distinction between modernism and postmodernism: where modernist novels
pose epistemological questions and negotiate the knowability of the world but are
less concerned with the ontological stability of reality, postmodernism focuses on
ontological issues.
41. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology, p. 143.
42. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Chicago and London, University of
Chicago Press, 1991), p. 84.
43. David Bloor, ‘Hamilton and Peacock on the Essence of Algebra’, in Social History
of Nineteenth Century Mathematics, ed. Herbert Mehrtens, Henk Bos and Ivo
Schneider (Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1981), 202–32.
44. Andrew Pickering and Adam Stephanides, ‘Constructing Quaternions: On the
Analysis of Conceptual Practice’, in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew
Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 139–67.
Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 3.
45. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Picador, 1997), p. 629.
46. For a further discussion of mathematics in Mason & Dixon and its role in ques-
tioning the truth claims of history and science, see Nina Engelhardt, ‘Scientific
Metafiction and Historiographic Metafiction: Measuring Nature and the Past’,
in Twentieth-Century Rhetorics: Metahistorical Narratives and Scientific
Metafictions, ed. Giuseppe Episcopo (Naples: Cronopio, 2014), 145–72, and Nina
Engelhardt, ‘Scientific Metafiction and Postmodernism’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik
und Amerikanistik: A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture, 64.2 (2016),
189–205.
47. Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, p. 142.
48. Anita Burdman Feferman and Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 43.
49. Thomas, Pynchon and the Political, p. 12.
50. Weir, Anarchy and Culture, p. 169.

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modernism, fiction and mathematics

51. Robert McLaughlin, ‘After the Revolution: US Postmodernism in the Twenty-First

Century’, Narrative, 21.3 (2013), 284–95 (p. 292).
52. Kathryn Hume, ‘The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon’s Against the Day’,
Philological Quarterly, 86.1–2 (2007), 163–87 (p. 180).
53. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ [1909],
in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, NE and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 187–9 (p. 187).
54. Weir, Anarchy and Culture, p. 5.
55. Seán Molloy, ‘Escaping the Politics of the Irredeemable Earth-Anarchy and
Transcendence in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon’, Theory & Event, 13:3 (2010),
n. pag. Literature Online, Web, 14 Apr. 2014.
56. Hume, ‘The Religious and Political Vision of Pynchon’s Against the Day’, p. 164
and p. 165.
57. Sascha Pöhlmann, ‘Introduction: The Complex Text’, in Against the Grain:
Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives, ed. Sascha Pöhlmann (Amsterdam and
New York: Rodopi, 2010), 9–34 (p. 33).
58. Pöhlmann, ‘Introduction: The Complex Text’, pp. 9–10.
59. Jacques Hadamard, The Mathematician’s Mind: The Psychology of Invention in
the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 123.
60. Graham Benton, ‘Daydreams and Dynamite: Anarchist Strategies of Resistance
and Paths for Transformation in Against the Day’, in Pynchon’s Against the Day:
A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, ed. Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2011), 191–213 (p. 191).
61. Weir, Anarchy and Culture, p. 259. Weir argues that the characteristics of frag-
mentation and autonomy consolidate in culture only when their survival in the
political domain is threatened. On the other hand, it could be argued that a
unidirectional national politics allows for more easily accommodating uncertainty
in other domains; an explanation employed by van Dalen in his account of the
acceptance of contradictory mathematical philosophies during the politically stable
Weimar Republic.
62. McLaughlin, ‘After the Revolution’, p. 294.
63. In The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa notes the repressed possibilities in between the
certainties of 0 and 1 with a metaphor from mathematics: ‘She had heard all
about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided.’ In Against the Day,
the emphasis is not on the space between poles but on the role of the imaginary,
which goes beyond oppositions (Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (London:
Picador, 1979), p. 125).
64. Thomas, Pynchon and the Political, p. 152.

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 hermann broch, the sleepwalkers

MATHEMATICS, LANGUAGE,
STRUCTURE: HERMANN BROCH,
THE SLEEPWALKERS

Like Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, Hermann Broch’s trilogy The
Sleepwalkers, published in German from 1930 to 1932, brings together modern
mathematics and the First World War in its search for a literature that could
respond to the pressures of its time. While Against the Day has a focus on politi-
cal implications, The Sleepwalkers primarily draws on maths in terms of struc-
ture: it employs maths as a formal language and structural science to frame the
experience of a period of crisis, and, more subtly but importantly, a competition
of methodologies in modern maths informs the innovative form of the trilogy.
This chapter is accordingly concerned with ways in which the foundational
debate in mathematics connects with ideas of literary style and form. Its focus
on structure does not involve the use of number as an organising element – a
strategy that is, for example, explored by Oulipo, a group of mathematicians
and poets founded in the 1960s, but that plays no role in The Sleepwalkers.
Instead, as part of its modernist attentiveness to matters of form, Broch’s work
engages with research on the relations of maths and language and with the new
approaches that emerge with it: the formalised language of analytic philosophy
and literary formalism’s concentration on language as the basic building block
of texts and its aim for a scientific method of studying literature. An orienta-
tion towards the methodology of the modern sciences is evident both in Broch’s
fictional and his extensive non-fictional work, and The Sleepwalkers illustrates
his central claim that ‘literature has to submit to the spirit of the epoch, to its
scientificity, [. . .] and it does so by becoming polyhistoric’.1

59
modernism, fiction and mathematics

In his demand to integrate various fields of knowledge in an encyclopaedic

approach to the period, Broch stresses the leading role of modern science,
which he takes to be exemplary in its methodological and structural advances.
As a consequence of this focus, it is irrelevant for Broch whether a literary text
addresses scientific topics directly, as long as it is suffused with what he calls
the ‘spirit of scientific thinking’. With The Sleepwalkers, where direct refer-
ences to science are relatively sparse even though contemporary mathematical
debates permeate its structure, Broch attempts to distance himself from writers
who lack this ‘real sense of science’: in his view, authors such as André Gide,
Thomas Mann and Robert Musil ‘take science to be a crystalline block from
which they break off some piece or other to garnish their narratives, mostly
in improper places, or to equip a scientist-character with it’.2 H. G. Wells, a
proponent of science as the subject of fiction, openly acknowledged his need
to convey science-related information in an artificial manner: ‘I had very many
things to say. [. . .] I began therefore to make my characters indulge in impos-
sibly explicit monologues and duologues.’3 As we shall see below, James Joyce
is a writer who escapes Broch’s censure and whose Ulysses is profoundly influ-
ential for Broch’s concept of a modernist literature in the spirit of scientific
­thinking, and Chapter 3 shows that Broch shares a more similar approach with,
and holds more admiration for, Musil than this remark might seem to suggest.
Yet Broch’s view that his approach is different from that of other writers high-
lights his aim to integrate science in the structure of narrative. As a science of
structure, mathematics can offer a particularly advantageous approach here,
as well as providing a means to examine the underlying patterns of the period
and the relations between different forms of knowledge. While contending that
other avenues are possible, Broch claims that maths has particular explanatory
power and stresses that for himself, ‘probably because of my mathematical-
constructivist disposition, a different way is hardly practicable’.4
As a consequence of Broch’s aversion to characters presenting ready-made
discourses on science, The Sleepwalkers does not feature scientists (although
Broch is not against employing scientist-characters per se; he does so in The
Unknown Quantity and A Methodological Novella, for example). Instead,
the last book of the trilogy contains an essay that offers abstract analyses of
topics also addressed in the fictional strands of the novels and proposes that
mathematics occupies a crucial role in coming to terms with changes in the
early twentieth century. The essay first diagnoses a widespread transforma-
tion in the ‘logical structure of thought’ and then continues: ‘We have before
our own eyes the clearest example of such a process in the research into first
principles of modern mathematics’ (SWIII 481).5 It is a commonplace in Broch
scholarship, yet bears repeating, that the integrated essay does not constitute
an exclusive interpretative key to the trilogy: it cannot comment on it from the
outside but is itself part of the novels and implicated in what it might seem to

60
 hermann broch, the sleepwalkers

analyse. Nevertheless, the essay usefully puts into words the ‘great question’
that The Sleepwalkers pursues across its three novels and for which it suggests
mathematics as an example and model for possible responses: ‘The great ques-
tion remains: how can an individual whose ideas have been genuinely directed
towards other aims understand and accommodate himself to the implications
and the reality of dying?’ (SWIII 374). The First World War features as only
one expression of a ‘sweeping revolution in the style of thinking’ that the
trilogy explores across political, social and psychological developments (SWIII
481). The essay clarifies the claim that examining modern maths, rather than
any other approach, offers the best chance to understand the period and its
changes. It explicitly sets out what is also evident from The Sleepwalkers as
a whole, namely the view that a period is characterised by a specific style. As
the underlying structure of thinking is understood to ‘uniformly permeate[] all
the living expressions of the epoch’, a change in the style of thinking similarly
affects all areas (SWIII 397). Accordingly, it is possible to follow a develop-
ment in any one area of thought and apply its structure to other fields by way
of analogy, so that when research into its foundations brings about a change
in the style of mathematics, a similar transformation should be detectable in
all other areas of expression, be it in architecture, politics, ethics or literature.
Since mathematics is a structural science that abstracts from empirical
reality to describe general relations, it is, in the terms of The Sleepwalkers, the
field in which change can best be observed and lends itself to understanding the
course of modern reality and its crisis in the First World War. The integrated
essay thus presents maths as an example of wider developments, almost as a
condensation of the epoch. Fittingly, the notion of a central expression of a
time is described in mathematical terms: according to the theory, each style of
a period has a unique ‘ornament’ which ‘becomes the formula of style itself,
and with that the formula of the entire epoch and its life’ (III 398). With the
suggestion that mathematics does not present itself as eternal truth but changes
across periods, The Sleepwalkers echoes Oswald Spengler’s contention in The
Decline of the West that each epoch has a definitive style that also shows in
a historically specific mathematics. In contrast to Spengler’s cyclical model,
Broch’s trilogy presents the turn-of-the-century period not as a regress into
a former state but as a disintegration into nothingness, an endpoint never
reached before. Characterising the wartime-style as having lost its ornament
and thus expressing only the absence of a common point of reference, Broch’s
trilogy proposes maths as a model of a state of absolute dissolution for which
it might then also work as a guide to regeneration.
The Sleepwalkers spans the period from 1888 to the 1920s, presenting
the time as approaching complete rationality while simultaneously tracing a
development of mathematics, a primary expression of reason, from a classi-
cal realist to a contradictory modern notion. In the first part of the trilogy,

61
modernism, fiction and mathematics

Pasenow or The Romantic – 1888, maths plays virtually no role; this absence
emerges as significant in the context of the other novels, as it indicates the still-
unproblematic character of this tool of rational investigation. In Esch or The
Anarchist – 1903 August Esch’s attempt to respond to the chaos of the new
century with numerical means fails, and the disintegration of ordering systems
reaches its end in Huguenau or The Realist – 1918: Wilhelm Huguenau works
his way through wartime without regard to any supra-individual meaning, and
the theoretical essay questions the very foundations of mathematics. Unlike the
approach of a number of recent studies, what follows here is not intended to
develop in detail the cultural context of The Sleepwalkers so as to situate the
text, and similarly this is not an exercise in tracking down Broch’s scientific
sources and reading material. Rather, I examine Broch’s trilogy in view of
scientific and philosophical discourses that are relevant to the interpretation
of the novels and affect our ability to understand the trilogy, its engagement
with mathematical material, and its negotiation of relations between maths,
modernism and literature. With a main focus on ways in which mathematics
features as a structural model in The Sleepwalkers, this chapter shows how the
trilogy presents maths as deeply implicated in the cultural development and,
secondly, explores the role of its modern transformation for the form of the
trilogy and Broch’s conception of modernist literature. In other words, this
chapter examines modernist innovation in novelistic form through the trilogy’s
recourse to foundational research in mathematics as the ‘clearest example’ of a
general development (SWIII 481).

Modern Mathematisation and Disintegration of Values

Broch’s trilogy covers a time span comparable to Pynchon’s Against the Day
in closing its main plot with the German revolution at the end of the war and
pursues one of its plotlines to 1926 in the epilogue. But, published from 1930
to 1932, The Sleepwalkers is written from the perspective of a time when the
legacies of the war were still felt and the foundational crisis of mathematics
just drew to a close. Exploring the period’s disorientation and sense of need
for renewal and reflecting these through its form, the trilogy is considered one
of the most important modernist works in literature in German. Yet, though
often mentioned in the same breath as Robert Musil’s The Man without
Qualities and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which similarly include
up-to-date scientific knowledge in an encyclopaedic compilation of contempo-
rary discourses, Broch’s trilogy has not received the same general recognition;
a fact that might be explained with the comparatively conventional first book
of the trilogy and the less readily approachable abstract discussion in the last
novel. However, it is precisely the essayistic chapters and the relationship
between the three novels that is crucial to the questioning of the foundations
of the period, which also features in Musil’s and Mann’s modernism. As part

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of their self-reflective views to the epoch, the texts by Broch, Musil and Mann
address epistemological considerations that dominate scientific and philosoph-
ical research in the early twentieth century. It will therefore be useful to situate
Broch in the discussion of his time, while we shall take a closer look at the
place of mathematics and literature in epistemological debates in Chapter 3.
Broch engaged extensively with epistemological debates in the years before
writing The Sleepwalkers. He enrolled at the University of Vienna aged forty
to follow his lifelong interest in mathematics and philosophy and during his
studies from 1925 to 1930 took courses with members of the Vienna Circle,
thus coming into contact with a major movement in the contemporary debate
on epistemology and philosophy of science. The Vienna Circle, which included
the mathematicians Hans Hahn and Karl Menger and the philosophers Moritz
Schlick and Rudolf Carnap with whom Broch studied, discussed foundational
questions of mathematics as well as philosophical implications of modern
scientific developments.6 United in their aim to make philosophy scientific by
placing it on a basis of modern logic, members of the circle excluded as non-
scientific the transcendental and the spiritual. In an emphatic statement on
the exclusion of metaphysical questions, tellingly entitled ‘The Elimination of
Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’, Carnap complained that
the metaphysician ‘produces a structure which achieves nothing for knowledge
and something inadequate for the expression of attitude’.7
Broch criticised the anti-metaphysical approach of the Vienna Circle’s
logical positivism and in a series of essays denounced the sole concentration
on logic and scientific philosophy. In one of these papers, which he might have
developed towards a doctoral dissertation in the philosophy of mathemat-
ics, Broch presents mathematicians’ perspectives on the foundations of their
field and compares these with philosophical positions, which he describes as
predominantly positivist in their occupation with correspondence between
thought and reality.8 The historical survey of maths that the essay provides,
and its focus on foundational problems and epistemological concerns, are
typical of Broch’s mathematical studies. While early scholarship viewed Broch
as a polymath and offered his education at the University of Vienna and the
numerous references to scientific topics in his essays and letters as evidence of
his mastery of the material, the recognition of his predominantly historical and
philosophical interests has led to a more critical view of his scientific expertise.
It acknowledges that Broch’s essays at times demonstrate remarkable math-
ematical knowledge but stresses that the non-technical writings do not enable
us to determine the exact level of his command of the theories.9 Accounting
for Broch’s mathematical expertise is of more than biographical interest. It
suggests that The Sleepwalkers is part of a culture of notable engagement with
mathematical questions in which Broch, extraordinarily well informed about
certain scientific topics but not a professional mathematician, felt in a position

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to participate. With the trilogy his engagement takes a new form: profoundly
inspired by the questions discussed in the Vienna Circle, but dissatisfied with
their reduction of knowledge to its logical and scientific foundations, literature
seemed to him a way to address the excluded mystical-ethical domain and to
reformulate the role of mathematics in the period.
‘Disintegration of Values’, the title of the essayistic chapters in the final part
of The Sleepwalkers, points to the ultimately ethical concern that animates the
theoretical analysis and its turn to foundational research in mathematics as
the most promising way to understand the period. Where parts one and two
present Pasenow’s and Esch’s struggles through an increasingly anarchical
world, the breakdown of value-systems is complete in the last novel and the
consequences of losing their ordering function manifest in a loss of commu-
nity, meaning and, ultimately, reality. Failing to adapt to a value-free post-war
world, Pasenow and Esch, the representatives of past worldviews, die. The
‘unchivalrous’ war erodes the military value-system to which Major Pasenow
clings, and, without its guidance, he is incapable of action, finally becoming
a ‘living and motionless puppet’ and being taken advantage of by Huguenau,
the personification of a period without values (SWIII 618). Similarly, a belief
in self-sacrifice that is associated with Esch breaks down in wartime, and his
attempt to save the injured Pasenow results in their falling into the hands of
Huguenau who uses the latter for his own plans and murders Esch. In a society
of Huguenaus, where people are entirely ‘free of human obligations’ and take
themselves as the only points of reference, the world disintegrates into a multi-
tude of disconnected personal realities (SWIII 350). The theoretical essay sums
up the situation of wartime with the questions: ‘Can this age be said still to
have reality? Does it possess any real value in which the meaning of its exist-
ence is preserved?’ (SWIII 559).
The Sleepwalkers also traces the increasing disintegration through its style
and thus implicates literary fiction in the general process of fragmentation. The
first part adheres to a conventional realist style and develops so predictably
that, to echo Broch’s statement about the prostitute Ruzena who drops from
the narrative after Pasenow abandons her, the central character’s ‘fate is [. . .]
calculated with almost mathematical exactitude’.10 Equally predictable is the
conventional love plot, so that the novel can end: ‘How this came about need
not be told here. Besides, after the material for character construction already
provided, the reader can imagine it for himself’ (SWI 158).11 In the second
part, the focus on Esch’s inner life and a subjectively distorted diction reflect a
turn away from the outside world and shared value systems, and the absence
of any common organising principle then shows in Huguenau with its multi-
ple, disintegrated plotlines that are only partly linked and stylistically diverse.
As the language and structure of the novels act as an immediate indication of
disintegration, when the essay suggests the ‘clearest example’ of mathematics

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to illuminate the modern crisis, the foundational debate in maths promises to

also shed light on changes in the period’s literature.

Mathematics and Language: Keeping Book of the Modern World

The Sleepwalkers introduces mathematics as one of two ‘great rational vehicles
of understanding in the modern world, the language of science in mathematics
and the language of money in book-keeping’ (SWIII 484). The triad of maths,
language and bookkeeping evokes Galileo Galilei’s celebration of maths as the
language of the Book of Nature, and The Sleepwalkers takes up this notion
of realist recording and traces it to a modern reconsideration of the rational
vehicles’ relations to language and physical reality. As Broch’s trilogy reflects,
the modernisation of maths and language go hand in hand: both research
in maths and turn-of-the-century attempts to rationalise spoken language
follow agendas of formalisation and grounding in logical foundations. The
dream of an unambiguous language that could ensure perfect communication
manifests in a large number of artificial languages, with over forty systems
proposed in the years between 1880 and 1907.12 Several of these share per-
sonnel with foundational research in mathematics: in 1903 Giuseppe Peano
created ‘Latino sine flexione’, a simplified version of Latin, and Louis Couturat
refined Esperanto – first introduced in 1887 and the probably best-known
artificial language today – to ‘Ido’ in 1907. The crossover between maths and
ideal language goes back to work by Gottlob Frege, who suggested logic as
the basis of both fields. He thus founded the mathematical school of logicism
and laid the groundwork for a modern philosophy of language. With his so-
called ‘concept-script’ or ‘concept notation’, Frege developed an ideal language
based on the model of mathematics and its definite rules, and published it as
Concept Notation: A Formula Language of Pure Thought, modelled upon that
of Arithmetic in 1879. Frege’s aim was to strip language of its ambiguities and
rhetorical embellishments and to then use this ideal system of expression for
foundational research into maths:
I started out from mathematics. The most pressing need, it seemed to me,
was to provide this science with a better foundation. [. . .] The logical
imperfections of language stood in the way of such investigations. I tried
to overcome these obstacles with my concept-script. In this way I was led
from mathematics to logic.13
Frege’s repeated turns to spoken language in his research encouraged philoso-
phers to draw on logic not only to examine mathematical objects but also to
analyse knowledge about the world that is expressed in everyday language.
Frege’s ‘linguistic turn’ thus eventually led to the establishment of philoso-
phy of language as a new discipline and to the rise of analytic philosophy
with its aim to clarify discourse by explicitly setting out the assumptions and

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structure of an argument. As part of their examination of the logical structure

of talk about the world, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore developed the
mathematical symbolism that distinguishes analytic philosophy from earlier
philosophical writing. In its highly technical style and symbolic language, ana-
lytic philosophy combines the formalism of maths with research into everyday
language as the basis of understanding and representing the world. Although
Broch was critical of analytic philosophy’s restriction to matters of logic and
science, mathematics in The Sleepwalkers does not feature as a straightforward
tool of deplorable rationalisation. Rather, when the trilogy puts a focus on
modern maths itself, it brings into view questions about its scope of applica-
tion, its relation to language and reality, and possible entanglements with the
non-rational.
Before the last part of the trilogy turns to mathematics in a more abstract
discussion, The Sleepwalkers introduces changes in the rational means of
gaining knowledge of the world in relation to the system of bookkeeping.
In the middle part, Esch is a bookkeeper dedicated to the realist notion that
reverberates in Galileo’s phrase; like the early modern natural philosopher, he
is convinced of the direct representational relation between the numbers and
calculations in his books and reality: ‘disorderly accounts meant a disorderly
world’ (SWII 216). He believes correct bookkeeping to be essential to ascer-
tain order in reality, but the system of accounting is in confusion even at the
opening of the novel, and Esch grows convinced that the world in the new
century has become too incomprehensible to be described with his perfect
bookkeeping. Since the books and anarchical reality no longer comply with
each other, Esch sets out to instil order and balance entries in the Book of
Nature according to the ‘upright book-keeping of his soul’ (SWII 236). Doing
so, he expects to arrive at right – correct as well as morally good – solutions to
worldly problems. For instance, Esch believes that he has to save the assistant
of a knife-thrower who is, so he feels, wrongly put in danger during the per-
formances. He aims to free Ilona from the hazardous acts as well as from any
sexual exploitation, and even renounces having a relationship with her himself.
But he is appalled when this sacrifice is not balanced by a corresponding gain:
[H]e was conscious of some discrepancy in his calculations. He had given
up Ilona, yet he was supposed to look on while Erna turned away from
him [. . .]. It was against all the laws of book-keeping, which demanded
that every debit entry should be balanced by a credit one. (SWII 215)
Esch thus experiences that the new century’s lawless disorder renders all
attempts of traditional bookkeeping futile: there always remains an ineradi-
cable error, a ‘contradiction so colossal and so terrible that it cannot even be
put down to a book-keeping error’ (SWII 314). The straightforward account-
ing Esch encounters at work therefore falsifies the more complicated Book of

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Nature that just cannot be contained in the rational system. Coming to see his
job as a ‘prison of hypocritical ciphers and columns’, he leaves his employment
and renounces the realist attempt to keep the books of the world as inadequate
(SWII 217). Up to this point, Esch’s development falls into the pattern of
modernist scepticism of rational systems, which is based on their inability to
account for inner, emotional or, in other words, human aspects of life. The
Sleepwalkers shares its critical attitude towards an exclusive rule of reason
with many other modernist works, but here numerical and calculatory systems
emerge not as the cause of the disintegration in the early twentieth century but
as part of it. Instead of dismissing his system as too limited, Esch clings to and
modifies it, and thereby reflects a historical development in mathematics that
the last novel then explores as a model for the period at large.
Esch reacts to the failing of traditional bookkeeping by developing a new
understanding of the relation between number and nature. As he loses his
naively realist faith in the direct correspondence between the characters in his
books and reality, he feels obliged to achieve the balance by introducing an
element outside of rational accounting, maintaining that the ‘glaring error in
the books [. . .] could only be put right by a wonderful new entry’ (SWII 190).
Since the ineradicable error in the books is always to one party’s disadvantage,
Esch understands that willingly taking on the consequences of the error and
thus ensuring the balance constitutes the ‘wonderful new entry’ and leads to
the correct solution. Repeatedly in novels two and three, Esch proclaims his
insight: ‘that’s the only thing left to do, to sacrifice oneself [. . .]; a decent man
must sacrifice himself or else there’s no order in the world’ (SWII 290). He
sacrifices himself by committing to the wrestling business that replaces the
knife‑throwing and in this way saves Ilona from the daggers, by accepting that
Erna is not a compensating credit entry to his loss of Ilona, and by abandoning
his plans to emigrate to America, which he imagines to be a well-ordered new
world. When Esch gives himself in marriage to the old and infertile widow
Mother Hentjen, this greatest sacrifice balances the account. The wonderful
entry in this calculation is essential: ‘the sacrifice had to be, had to grow even
greater along with his devotion to this ageing woman, so that the world might
be put in order and Ilona might be shielded from the daggers’ (SWII 273).
His life correctly balanced with help of a non-rational and individual deed of
sacrifice, Esch reaches some kind of personal stability in a reality no longer
graspable by numerical means.
In the context of the first part of the trilogy, Esch’s mathematical bookkeep-
ing appears as a surrogate for Pasenow’s nineteenth-century faith in social
and religious order. Yet, the use of religious imagery in the second novel sug-
gests that the figure of Esch does not stand for the modern narrative of reason
replacing traditional beliefs. Ultimately, Esch does not hold a disinterested
view or support the ideal of rational order, but, driven by what he considers to

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be morally correct and putting sacrifice at the core of his personal system, he
could be said to ‘shape his own religion’.14 Esch does not aim for the extreme
rationality of a ‘mathematically perfect life’, then, as do, for example, the
citizens in Evgeny Zamyatin’s novel We. This dystopian text, written in 1920
and published in English in 1924, illustrates the modernist concern about a
growing rationalisation of life that threatens to curtail inner freedom and to
take over even moral considerations: ‘Only the four rules of arithmetic are
unalterable and everlasting. And only that moral system built on the four rules
will prevail’, the narrator-protagonist explains the order governing totalitar-
ian OneState.15 In contrast to such dystopian visions of a mathematisation of
ethics, Esch’s moral demands triumph over calculations and alter the system
of accounting. If the classical view of numerical languages stresses their infal-
libility, either celebrating or deploring it, The Sleepwalkers introduces the
­possibility that they might be imperfect and part of modern disintegration.
Esch’s conviction of the moral obligation to supplement a rational system with
the personal, human element of self-sacrifice then prefigures the presentation
of mathematics in the final part of the trilogy, which develops implications of
its modern crisis for the understanding of reality and literature.
In the fifteen years between the events depicted in Esch and the wartime
setting in Huguenau, the shifts in accounting have reached their conclusion
and severed any relation to the actual world. Knowing ‘that in the store, as in
life, that perfect order can never be achieved which he maintains in his books’,
the bookkeeper no longer concerns himself with calculating numbers as rep-
resentations of real counterparts but restricts his view to the system of book-
keeping itself (SWIII 368). His reaction to discrepancies between the accounts
and the Book of Nature is to turn away from reality: if an ‘error has occurred
not in the books but in the stocktaking in the storeroom, then the head book-
keeper simply shrugs his shoulders, and his lips wear a pitying or sarcastic
smile, for the stocktaking lies outside his province’ (SWIII 368). The world
of bookkeeping holds particular appeal in its order and regularity as well as
in its meaning – all entries and calculations work together to the final result,
the balance at the end of term: ‘this intricate maze of established connections
between account and account [. . .] in which not a single knot is missing, is
symbolized at last in a single figure’ (SWIII 368). The orderly world of the
books thus culminates in the unity of the final result that comprises all other
figures and expresses the whole in a single number. As the calculations assume
aspects of divinely granted unity and certainty, the generalised character of
the accountant in Huguenau prefers his books to confusing reality. When the
bookkeeper then attempts to make reality comply with the rational, ordered
world of accounting, the assumed relation between books and nature reverses
that in the previous novel: where Esch expects his books to mirror reality, is
disappointed and adjusts his system, the accountant in Huguenau gives prec-

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edence to the order of the books and aims to make reality conform to it. Here,
the rational vehicle of understanding is also one of domination and a symptom
of the changed conditions in wartime, which is ‘so rational that it must con-
tinually take to its heels’ (SWIII 541).
While bookkeeping is the main source of imagery in Esch, the second
novel also begins to put into question the rational domain of mathematics.
Increasingly disillusioned by the injustice he perceives, Esch loses his trust in the
logic of the world’s order, and he begins to doubt the last stronghold of ration-
ality and systematisation: mathematics itself. Questioning even basic forms of
calculation and grappling with the suddenly unstable meaning and relation of
numbers, he concludes ‘that it was mere chance if the addition of the columns
balanced’ (II 339). Not only is the balance of debit and credit fortuitous, but
uncertainty spreads to the calculations themselves; like Esch, the Voyager, a
personification of the wish to escape the anarchy of the world, ‘believes no
longer in the correctness of addition sums’ and ‘doubts that two and two
make four’ (SWII 224–5, 295). Yet, like bookkeeping which is challenged and
transformed, mathematics becomes questionable but is not abolished: the nar-
rator’s assertion that ‘they do not dare [. . .] to invoke that terrible revolution
of knowledge in which two and two will no longer be capable of addition’ does
not claim that the system of mathematics is wrong but suggests that inherent
paradoxes render it unfit for application to the world (SWII 295). Thus, even
before introducing mathematics directly in its third part, the trilogy shows the
questions and uncertainties raised in the foundational crisis to filter through
to number-based disciplines and to result in the impossibility of rationally
accounting for the world. In the second part of The Sleepwalkers calculation is
not invalidated, then, but Esch begins to trace a development at whose end the
language of maths no longer constitutes truth.
In the war setting of Huguenau, the decline of mathematical certainty mani-
fests in questions concerning its foundations: ‘the research into first principles
of modern mathematics [. . .] achieved a revolution of mathematical method
whose extent cannot yet be estimated’ (SWIII 481). Like bookkeeping, maths
emerges as an entirely self-referential system that is independent of physical
reality, when it is described in the essay as arising ‘from that single and exclu-
sive concentration on its own value-system and from that esoteric of expres-
sion’ (III 484).16 And if, in the eyes of the accountant, reality has to adjust to
the perfect order of the books, the essay develops the precedence of structure
over reality in theoretical terms: ‘reality submits to the erection of the most
impossible theoretic structures, – and so long as the theory does not itself
declare its bankruptcy it will be supported with confidence, and reality will
take a subordinate role’ (SWIII 482–3).17 In other words: the structure con-
structs reality. A revolutionary change in the structure of thinking, and conse-
quently in conceptualisations of reality, takes place when the logic of thought

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turns towards itself and ‘is compelled to revise its own basic principles’ (SWIII
481). If a structure breaks down for structural reasons and not due to changed
conditions in the world, it is appropriate that the essay turns to foundational
concerns in mathematics to answer its question about the cause of the First
World War: according to its theory, this drastic change cannot be explained
by concrete political, historical or social processes, but it derives from a logical
revision of the basic principles of thought. The theoretical reflections in the
essayistic chapters thus establish that the developments initiated by founda-
tional research in mathematics provide a model for understanding change in
the modern structure of thinking and the reality it con-structs.
The last book of The Sleepwalkers links rational and literary ‘vehicles of
understanding’ when Esch turns from his work with numbers and accounts to
relating to the world as editor of a newspaper. In accordance with his initially
realist notion of bookkeeping, Esch expects newspapers to report real events
that render the world understandable; as editor, he consequently leads a ‘fight
for precise evidence of the world’s doings, and against the false or falsified
book-keeping entries which people tried to fob off on him’ (SWIII 370–1).
When in the chaos of war keeping track of events is impossible, the newspaper
performs a similar self-referential shift as mathematics and accounting, and
turns into a means to create its own ‘patriotic reality’ dictated by the Censor’s
office (SWIII 369). Pasenow’s doubt that his leading newspaper article has
any effect illustrates the questionable connection of literature to the world,
and readers of the novel are bound to agree with him since only fragments
of Pasenow’s article appear in the text and his argument necessarily remains
sketchy. Rational keeping book of the world is impossible, then, in accounting
and mathematics, as well as in factual journalistic writing. But, if maths is pre-
sented as the model of the period’s disintegration and crisis of representation,
its not yet determinable revolution in method might also lead the way towards
a solution. Indeed, as we shall see below, The Sleepwalkers proposes math-
ematics as an example for formal innovation and reflects this in the structure
of the trilogy.

Language: The Structure of Crisis and Renewal

To draw nearer to The Sleepwalkers’s vision of mathematics as a model for
renewal through form, we have to come back to the interconnected develop-
ments of its foundational questions and research into language. Bertrand
Russell rediscovered Frege’s work on mathematical logicism and language in
the early 1900s, bringing it to the attention of a wider audience and further
developing formal logic in the Principia Mathematica, written together with
Alfred North Whitehead. Published from 1910 to 1913, the Principia was
immediately noted for its philosophical relevance – so much so that it left the
authors disappointed with the lack of attention to their innovative mathemati-

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cal techniques – and it introduced modern mathematical logic to an audience

that included artists and literary writers.18 With a focus on the cultural history
of mathematics and the visual arts, Lynn Gamwell examines ways in which
logic found its way into British art via the reception of Russell’s work, and she
points to the Bloomsbury Group as a fertile ground for his ideas. Although
none of its members was trained in the symbolic notation used in the Principia
Mathematica, the circle around Virginia Woolf, the art critic Roger Fry and the
painter Vanessa Bell accessed the ideas via Russell’s introduction and reviews
of the book, some of which were very prominently placed, for example on
the front page of the Times Literary Supplement.19 Through these channels
mathematical logic and philosophical questions attached to it inspired various
projects in the Bloomsbury Group, from Fry’s art criticism with its emphasis
on a work’s formal properties to Woolf’s engagement with Russell’s logical
atomism, that is, the theory that truths depend on irreducible atomic facts and
analysis should start from simpler notions to reconstructing more complex
ones. But the reach of logicism goes far beyond the Bloomsbury Group. In
1920s literary criticism, I. A. Richards developed the formalist technique of
breaking down objects of study into small units into the method of literary
close reading, which came to prominence with New Criticism in the middle
decades of the twentieth century. And, regarding Russell’s work towards
perfect mathematical logic in particular, T. S. Eliot claimed that it also inspired
greater attention to clarity in everyday language: ‘the work of logicians has
done [much] to make of English a language in which it is possible to think
clearly and exactly on any subject. The Principia Mathematica are perhaps a
greater contribution to our language than they are to mathematics.’20
Broch, aware of Russell’s work and its profound influence on the Vienna
Circle, discusses it in his essay on the foundations of maths, and he reflects
on the interrelations between mathematical and linguistic questions in ‘Hugo
von Hofmannsthal and his Time’ (1947). This long essay is far more about
the intellectual climate of Europe in the decades around 1900 than about
the Austrian writer himself, and it expresses Broch’s conviction that Frege
stands at the beginning of a transformation that extends beyond mathematics
and defines the period: ‘Who [. . .] was aware at the time of the revolution in
scientific axiomatics being prepared in the work of Gottlob Frege and Georg
Cantor – not to mention the fact that work of this kind penetrates a wider
circle of knowledge.’21 By tracing Hofmannsthal’s time to roots in mathemati-
cal logicism, Broch also stresses connections of maths and language, given
that Hofmannsthal’s ‘Lord Chandos Letter’ is almost synonymous with the
turn-of-the-century crisis in language: published in 1902, the fictional author
of the letter gives voice to modernist distrust of language when deploring that
he ‘grew by degrees incapable of discussing a loftier or more general subject
in terms of which everyone, fluently and without hesitation, is wont to avail

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himself’.22 He identifies a loss of unity as the reason for his inability to express
himself and notices that going back to the smallest units results in a disintegra-
tion of meaning: ‘My mind compelled me to view all things occurring in such
conversations from an uncanny closeness. [. . .] For me everything disinte-
grated into parts; no longer would anything let itself be encompassed by one
idea.’23 Analytical attention to language here leads to a sense of disintegration,
even if the eloquent formulation of the problem already points to the possibil-
ity of reframing the fragmentation in positive terms.
As in the Chandos Letter, which claims that language and ideas break down
together, in The Sleepwalkers mistrust in mathematical and spoken language
goes hand in hand with the disintegration of order and value systems. While,
in Pasenow, characters notice obstacles to comprehending each other but also
enjoy a nevertheless existing feeling of community and mutual comprehension,
for Esch everyday language disintegrates at the same rate as the ordering system
of bookkeeping and he resolves to replace his native German with unblemished
English. The phrasing that describes Esch’s future wife’s unease regarding
the missing connection of language to reality echoes the famous phrase from
the Chandos Letter that words ‘crumbled in my mouth like mouldy fungi’:
‘She had expressed her point of view, but her last words had fallen from her
lips, like tattered feathers, so that she herself scarcely recognized them’ (SWII
250).24 In the final part, scepticism of everyday language intensifies to the
point that Esch despairs of communication and, in fragmentary sentences that
mirror the disintegration he deplores, berates Huguenau for still believing in
the accuracy of language: ‘Express myself precisely, express myself precisely,
it’s very easy to talk like that . . . as if a man can give a name to everything . . .
[. . .] until you know that all names are false you know nothing’ (SWIII 360).
Over the course of the novels, then, the loss of certainty in language questions
the possibility to communicate and to grasp reality, order it and imbue it with
meaning, and various plotlines illustrate what Dr Flurschütz, a doctor in a war
hospital, explicitly expresses: ‘all that is written and said has become com-
pletely deaf and dumb’ (SWIII 586).25
Language scepticism in the trilogy includes mathematics, the ‘sole unam-
biguous language’: it has become a ‘dumb language’ as it no longer allows for
elucidating nature; it is ‘not a means to an end’ but, only referring to itself,
solely follows the logic of its own system (SWIII 484). Self-referentiality and
intra-systemic coherence also are issues in early twentieth-century research on
non-mathematical language: if inquiry into mathematical signs is known by
the name of formalism, structuralism is its counterpart in everyday language,
originating with Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic method of examining the
system of language without regard to its referent in the real word. In Saussure’s
theory, a sign has two aspects: the signifiant or sound structure, and the sig-
nifié, the mental concept this sound evokes. The referent does not figure in the

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system, and, as the relation to reality is not considered a part of language, it

does not occasion the meaning of a sign. Instead, meaning depends on the rela-
tion to other signs in the system of language itself: the word ‘cat’ names the
animal not because it has a natural connection to it, but because the signifier
‘cat’ is different from other signifiers such as ‘hat’ or ‘mat’. The Sleepwalkers
presents a corresponding picture of ‘dumb’ mathematics, depicting both maths
and everyday language as self-referential and having no meaning and value in
the world. Precisely because of this consequence, L. E. J. Brouwer deplored the
self-referentiality that David Hilbert’s influential approach had established in
maths: ‘Formalism [is a] meaningless series of relations to which mathematics
are reduced.’26 Tracing the historical interconnections of language and founda-
tional research in mathematics to the 1920s will introduce attempts to recover
the properties of meaning and value and illuminate how The Sleepwalkers
employs maths as a model not only for the loss but also for the possible resto-
ration of meaning.
The relation between mathematics and language received increasing atten-
tion in the 1920s and is, as Herbert Mehrtens argues in his influential study,
at the very core of the foundational debate and the opposed positions for
which he coined the terms ‘modernist’ and ‘counter-modernist’ mathematics.27
Broch had an already well-developed interest in the foundational debate by
the 1920s and further engaged with its questions at the University of Vienna,
where the Vienna Circle was profoundly influenced by Russell’s thought and
by his student and collaborator Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work on the limits of
language. In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein contrasts
what can be said and what cannot be expressed in language. In his view, sen-
tences of logic and mathematics are always tautologies and therefore ‘sense-
less’ (sinnlos). Broch, who at the time of writing his trilogy encouraged fellow
author Franz Blei to study Wittgenstein’s work, similarly notes that maths is
an independent, tautological field of knowledge. Terming it a ‘dumb language’
that carries no meaning, The Sleepwalkers mirrors Wittgenstein’s proposition
6.124: ‘The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or
rather they represent it. They have no “subject-matter”.’28 In contrast to sense-
less propositions, ‘non-sense’ for Wittgenstein is that which cannot be put into
words and remains outside of language. Since the mystical is inexpressible,
he ends the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with the proposition: ‘What we
cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.’29 As he believed that he had
solved all philosophical questions, Wittgenstein abandoned his work in the
early 1920s and his infrequent contributions to debates in the Vienna Circle
took the form of turning his back and reciting poetry. But L. E. J. Brouwer’s
1928 lecture ‘Mathematics, Science and Language’ at the University of Vienna
might have inspired Wittgenstein to return to philosophy. As the founder of
the school of intuitionism, Brouwer stands for an alternative to logicist and

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formalist positions, and he introduced a view of mathematics, science and lan-

guage that differed profoundly from that proposed by Frege, Russell and the
logical positivists. As Brouwer’s criticism also applied to Wittgenstein’s work,
it is not unlikely that it encouraged his return to philosophy, and the questions
and solutions raised by intuitionism certainly interested Broch and inform the
presentation of language scepticism in his trilogy.
Crucially, Brouwer and the intuitionist school he founded contest the very
notion of mathematics as language. In his Vienna talk, Brouwer turns against
‘a false belief in the magical character of language’, a criticism levelled against
the equation of mathematics with its symbolic representation: in formalism,
maths ‘is’ its language – anything that can be constructed in mathematical lan-
guage without contradicting the rules of the system ‘magically’ exists.30 That is
to say, for the formalists mathematical existence and meaning depend only on
the position of signs in a system that is self-contained and internally consistent.
Against this belief, Brouwer holds maths to be a thought-construction outside
of language. He does not dispute that it is expressed and communicated in
a kind of language, but claims that this language is already removed from
its true, prelinguistic nature. The intuitionist school defines itself in view of
this notion of maths as prelinguistic thought-construction: ‘Intuitionism [. . .]
highlights the existence of pure mathematics independent of language.’31 If not
creating existence with its language, maths has to originate elsewhere, outside
of its formal structure. Brouwer locates this origin in the individual human
mind and holds that pure mathematics can be intuited, for example in medita-
tion where numbers reveal themselves directly: ‘Mathematics is a free creation,
independent of experience; it develops from one single a priori Primordial
Intuition.’32 Since the human consciousness that brings about mathematics
is part of reality, it relates its product, namely mathematical language, to the
world. This connection to reality then ensures that maths can be applied to
scientific explanations and guarantees its value. The turn to intuition thus
connects mathematics to the world and rescues it from the loss of truth and
meaning that it experiences in the formalist school.
Brouwer’s attempt to liberate real mathematics from its expression is part of
his more general scepticism of language. He was engaged in the Dutch Signific
Movement, which propagated linguistic reform and, as Brouwer remembers,
first came together in 1915 ‘under the startling impression of the false slogans
with which this war was waged’.33 Viewing language as an instrument of
conflict that creates divisions and misunderstandings, the group stated its first
aim as: ‘To coin words of spiritual value for the languages of western nations
and thus make those spiritual values enter into their mutual understanding.’34
Members of the movement here assume a direct relation between words and
values and treat language as a way to instil Europe with common spiritual
concepts that the war has put under pressure or eradicated. But Brouwer took

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a more negative attitude, regarded language as a mere means to transmit will

from one person to another, and was convinced of the impossibility of direct
communication between people.35 He consequently aimed to redefine the most
basic units of thought with ‘intuitive significs’: similar to his work on numbers
as the foundational parts of mathematics, intuitive significs is ‘concerned with
the creation of new words, which form a code of elementary means of com-
munication for the systematic activity of a new and holier society’.36 Tracing
maths and everyday language to intuition liberates them from problematical
aspects and ensures a value and meaning that is lost in formalist conceptions.
Brouwer’s intuitionism thus counters the modern language crisis and fears of
disintegrating meaning with what historians of mathematics call a ‘counter-
modernist’ recovery of the properties that formalists give up as lost. Or, viewed
from a purely mathematical perspective, intuition as the originating and legiti-
mating source of mathematics saves it from being part of the modern crisis of
language in the first place.
Since The Sleepwalkers presents mathematics as mirroring a loss of everyday
communicative means, the introduction of an intuitionist position in the
theoretical essay holds implications for language at large: ‘research into math-
ematical first principles, pursuing the questions “what is number?” and “what
is unity?” has reached a point at which it has found itself compelled to accept
intuition as the only way out of its difficulties’ (SWIII 563–4). And, indeed,
the epilogue presents a vision in which a similar move to intuition might save
the value of everyday communication and, through it, community and value.
This last part of the theoretical essay proposes that the irrational element of
intuition is common to everything: the ‘irreducible residue of the irrational’ is
the ‘zero-point’ that is part of any order, even of the supposedly most rational
systems of bookkeeping and mathematics (SWIII 626, 645). And as intuition
is a human trait shared by all people, it ensures a connection between them
and ‘provides in the unity of thought a common denominator for all human
speech’ (SWIII 564). The trilogy can therefore end with the vision of a common
voice that expresses shared experience, namely that of complete disintegration:
‘from our bitterest and profoundest darkness [. . .] there sounds the voice that
binds all that has been to all that is to come, that binds our loneliness to all
other lonelinesses’ (SWIII 648). When it is a voice that announces hope, dis-
integration ends in a vision of community- and value-building language that,
like intuitionist mathematics, originates in the common element of intuition.
Although the final voice might be taken to signal a hopeful future, the ten-
tative phrasing in which the trilogy presents intuitionist solutions suggests
that the turn to intuition does not constitute a model solution but is, rather, a
troubleshooting move: maths is described as ‘compelled’ to ‘accept’ intuition
as the ‘only way out’ of its crisis, and the novel’s final turn to language can
similarly appear as a wished-for stopgap rather than a credible solution to the

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time’s disintegration. Indeed, resorting to intuition seems to go contrary to the

‘logical structure of thought’ that the essay presents as exemplary of the peri-
od’s development; it appears as an intervention from the outside, motivated
not by intra-systemic developments but by non-mathematical anxieties about
meaning and value. The saving recourse to intuition thus echoes Esch’s concept
of the bookkeeper’s non-rational, individual sacrifice that guarantees the order
and correctness of the system. And, as the trilogy establishes with Esch’s case,
the introduction of an individual element into the rational system originates
primarily from a wish for its continued use and value in the world.
The shift to an intuitionist notion of mathematics in The Sleepwalkers might
not be obvious to all readers, but the contrast between the pessimistic ending
of the main plot that is in concert with the disintegration depicted over the
course of the three novels, and the optimistic vision announced by a common
voice based on intuition has left many readers puzzled and unsatisfied. Some
hold, as Erich Herd does, that the ending does not develop from what comes
before and thus destroys the trilogy’s choreographic symmetry, or feel, like
Jürgen Heizmann, that the reconciliatory conclusion cannot balance the sense
of disintegration.37 Other scholars, in the tradition of pioneering works by Leo
Kreutzer and Hartmut Reinhardt, contend that the hopeful ending is in concert
with the rest of the trilogy – not emerging from its content but coherent with its
overall structure.38 As the foundational debate of mathematics is immediately
concerned with form and content, and the trilogy engages with formalist and
intuitionist positions on relations between language (structure) and meaning
(content), maths provides a way into analysing the contrasted endings and the
form of The Sleepwalkers as a whole.

Structure: Bringing the Self into Form

Hofmannsthal’s ‘Lord Chandos Letter’ is an example of a text that expresses
language scepticism but does so in such eloquent style that it reaffirms the
power of language while questioning it. Although Lord Chandos claims to have
lost the ability to recognise a ‘deep, true, inner form’ that goes beyond organis-
ing subject-matter and is itself a source of meaning and as such ‘as marvellous
as music or algebra’, the clearly structured letter does not formally reflect the
disintegration it portrays.39 Other modernist texts similarly mourn a loss of
unity and, in their nostalgic look back to what cannot be recovered, integrate
disparate elements into a new whole. We will take a closer look at the dynamics
between fragmentation and reintegration in the discussion on Musil’s The Man
without Qualities in Chapter 3, and focus here on a narrative intuitionist turn
in The Sleepwalkers that has received much scholarly attention but is rarely
considered in view of mathematics. Doing so will give a more nuanced picture
of how maths functions as a way to both model and question literary structure
in Broch’s trilogy and thus points towards a new novelistic form.

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As we have seen, The Sleepwalkers presents the turn to the human being and
their intuition as a response to disintegration even in maths, and the integrated
essay explains it as part of a general principle: the principle of the ‘product
of products’ that ‘provides intuition with its logical legitimation’ (SWIII
564). The ‘product of products’ is an epistemological concept reminiscent of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism, which, as discussed in the introductory
chapter, is based on the view that the world has no intrinsic truth but takes on
different meanings depending on the perspective from which it is observed. The
Sleepwalkers, in its essayistic chapters and across its various plotlines, similarly
suggests that human beings cannot conceive the world directly but that it is
always mediated: reality is shaped and produced by ordering structures such as
religion, bookkeeping, mathematics or language. Even more, reality is always
several steps removed: it is ‘“a product of products,” “a product of products of
products,” and so on in infinite iteration’ (SWIII 563). Accordingly, reality can
only be grasped, or rather, as the essay develops, reality only exists as a product
of a ‘value-positing subject’ that acts as a point of reference (SWIII 561). This
principle ‘probably extends right into mathematics’, or, to be more precise, to
intuitionist maths, where the human mind is taken to ‘produce’ mathematical
language (SWIII 563). Unusual for its overall focus on mathematical ideas, the
essay also illustrates the principle with an example from modern physics:
[M]ethodologically regarded, to define a thing as the ‘product of a
product’ is nothing else than to introduce the ideal observer into the field
of observation, as has been already done long since by the empirical sci-
ences (by physics, for example, in the Theory of Relativity). (SWIII 563)
The Sleepwalkers only addresses in passing the analogy between the world as a
product of a specific perspective and the way modern physics accounts for the
observer in the process of measurement, but a preoccupation with the theory
of relativity in Broch’s letters and particularly in his essay ‘James Joyce and the
Present Age’ (1936) has received much attention and is recognised as central
to his vision of modernist literature. Yet, as we shall see, even if Broch’s views
on literature and relativity might ‘be regarded as one of the most important
theoretical statements of the aims and methods of the Modernist novel’, The
Sleepwalkers with its use of mathematics draws a distinct picture of modern
science and its relation to literature.40
In his essay on Joyce, Broch explicitly connects the discovery in physics to
literary fiction, explaining that it ‘can give no offence to the theory of relativ-
ity if we draw a parallel with literature’.41 He compares classical measuring
to the realisation in modern physics that the act of observation can affect the
result. For example, in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, the result of an
observation depends on the frame of reference in which the observer is based.
In Broch’s words:

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But the theory of relativity has revealed that in addition to this, there
exists a basic source of error, namely, the act of seeing in itself, the act of
observing per se, so that, consequently, in order to avoid this source of
error, both the observer and his act of seeing – an ideal observer and an
ideal act of seeing – must be drawn into the field of observation; in short,
that for this, theoretical unity of the physical object and the physical act
of seeing must be established.42

Broch translates this situation in physics to the literary domain, explaining

that the classical novel employs language as an unproblematic instrument and
implies it to objectively ‘measure’ and realistically represent the world. He
then positions himself against literary naturalism and particularly its founder,
Émile Zola, and explains why, in his view, modern physics demonstrates the
misguidedness of this approach:

[I]t is not permissible simply to place the object under observation and
do nothing other than describe it; but that representation of the subject,
in other words ‘the narrator as idea’, and not the least the language with
which he describes the representational object, belong to it in the role
of representational media. What he [Joyce but also referring to Broch
himself] seeks to create is a unity of representational object and represen-
tational means.43

It is no secret that, with his praise of Joyce’s method, Broch also intended to set
out his own ideas, and scholars have examined the intricate narrative structure
of The Sleepwalkers in light of his discussion of modernist representation in
Joyce’s work and the key concept of ‘the narrator as idea’.
‘Broch has succeeded in translating the theory of relativity into fictional
terms by making the reader experience the relativization of the world.’44
Theodore Ziolkowski arrives at this evaluation based on a connection that
arises between two of the multiple, disintegrated strands in the last book
of Broch’s trilogy. In the course of Huguenau, a link emerges between the
theoretical essay and the ‘Story of the Salvation Army Girl’, which addresses
the ultimate non-rational topic of love in a first-person narration and lyrical
style. The narrator of the latter chapters, Dr Bertrand Müller, states to be
working on a thesis on the disintegration of values and is thus suggested to
be the author of the essay ‘Disintegration of Values’. Chapters across the two
dissimilar episodes share common topics and at one point begin almost identi-
cally: the opening question ‘Can this age be said still to have reality?’ echoes
the beginning of a section in the other strand – ‘Can this age, this disintegrat-
ing life, be said still to have reality?’ (SWIII 559, 557). While identical phrases
appear across all plotlines and novels, the close proximity and prominent place
of the repetition strengthens the suggestion that Müller composes the essay.

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In a second step, it is understood that, if Bertrand Müller is to be seen as the

author of the essay, he also composes the trilogy at large: since ‘Disintegration
of Values’ refers to events in the main plot, it ‘becomes clear that Bertrand
Müller has to be pictured as the narrating I of the whole trilogy’.45 If readers
accept that Müller composes the essay, the reading process reveals that they do
not get directly at the reality presented but that the novels depend on Müller’s
subjective perspective and are products of his consciousness. Through the step-
wise disclosure of Müller’s function in the trilogy, The Sleepwalkers showcases
its theory of a necessarily mediated reality and of the impossibility to separate
the subject and the object of observation. At the same time, it draws attention
to the relation between the narrative content and the form of the trilogy.
Broch does not illuminate details of his notion of the ‘narrator as idea’ or of
its possible significance for his own fictional writing. Ernestine Schlant, among
others, therefore criticises its place in the interpretation of relativity and the
function of Bertrand Müller in The Sleepwalkers. Arguing that the innovative
nature of the concept is lost if the ‘narrator as idea’ is taken to be a concrete
character, she instead proposes that it shows in strategies indicating that the
novel is a construct and defined by a specific style and perspective: it ‘is present
in any device which draws attention to the fact that the novel is a deliberate,
“scientific” construct, expressing not only narrative content but cognizance of
stylistic and technical limitations as well as those of perspective’.46 Schlant also
questions that Broch meant to refer to relativity theory and suggests that his
descriptions make more sense in view of quantum mechanics and the indeter-
minacy principle, where the act of observation is of central importance and the
unity of object and subject more immediately relevant.47 To refute this view,
Ruth Bendels compares Broch’s writing to contemporary texts on relativity
theory and its epistemological consequences and persuasively argues that he
referred to Einstein’s theory deliberately and informedly.48 What this debate
shows is that the concept of the ‘narrator as idea’ does not derive organically
from concepts in relativity theory and even less so from the isolated allusion to
relativity in The Sleepwalkers. Moreover, a focus on Broch’s engagement with
literary relativity runs the risk of overlooking the role of mathematics in favour
of the better-known, if in the trilogy less prominent, concept of physics. So, if,
as Ziolkowski argues, the theoretical chapters of Broch’s trilogy set out what
is at the ‘structural heart of his fiction’, we have to look not to relativity theory
but to the more sustained engagement with mathematics, and this leads us to a
revaluation of the very notions of structure and its ‘heart’.49
Broch points to shared features of modern physics and mathematics that
also motivate the reference to relativity theory in the trilogy:

[T]he present shock of the total world, on the one hand the almost
earthquake-like one in all exterior events, on the other hand the, as it

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were, precise revolution in the central field of cognition, in physics and

the fundamental research in mathematics, almost unequivocally points to
a common root: [. . .] the deposition of previous absoluteness.50

Hilbert similarly compares the methodologies of maths and physics to explain

his formalist programme: ‘we must, I am persuaded, make the concept of
specifically mathematical proof itself an object of investigation, just as the
astronomer considers the movement of his position, the physicist studies the
theory of his apparatus, and the philosopher criticizes reason itself’.51 Here,
and similarly in Broch’s essay and The Sleepwalkers, a questioning of basic cer-
tainties is closely associated with concern about the absoluteness of knowledge
as it is understood to depend on the knowledge-gaining process. To explain
the role of the observer, Broch uses the image of the theatrical ‘stage of cogni-
tion’: knowledge is not just presented on stage but requires active participation
of the audience, and this turns the spectator into a ‘mathematical person’ in
maths, into a ‘physical person’ in the sciences, and into a ‘linguistic person’ in
language-based processes of cognition.52 As Broch specifies, the ‘mathemati-
cal person’ is radically abstract, and similarly the ‘physical person’ points to
a conceptual entity: ‘It is, of course, not a matter of an empirical observer but
of an abstract one, the “observer as such”’.53 The participation of the audi-
ence as an entity producing knowledge is therefore necessary in all forms of
knowledge, if formulated in mathematical symbols or everyday language. Yet,
maths inhabits a particular position when there is only one step in the ‘produc-
tion line’: in maths, there is no ‘product of a product of a product’.54 In other
words, understanding maths as produced by an abstract mathematical person
and translated into language from intuition, it constitutes the simplest example
of a process common to all forms of knowledge.
As Ziolkowski emphasises, The Sleepwalkers can make readers ‘experience
the relativization of the world’ – if by picking up and accepting the indications
that Müller composes the essay and the trilogy, readers have to reconsider
what they have read and view it as the product of a subjective perspective.55
This productive readerly participation exemplifies an understanding of form
as process. As Raymond Williams explains, next to the idea of form as static
and superficial ‘outward shape’, form can be viewed as ‘an essential shaping
principle’, and this motivates the participatory role of the audience as neces-
sary to realise the formative process.56 Henry S. Turner accordingly proposes
that form ‘should be understood as a verb rather than a noun, as an active
relation among significant parts that are apprehended through a transaction
between that artefact and its readers, viewers, listeners or speakers’.57 Taking
up Turner’s argument in her study on science and literary form, Janine Rogers
elaborates for the case of literature: ‘Form, I contend, should be understood
as an experience and an action, which means that it should be recognized as

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both a writerly and a readerly activity.’58 The Sleepwalkers illustrates readers’

involvement in actualising form when they are crucial to viewing the trilogy as
a unified whole, and it also supports Rogers’s notion of form as a ‘connective
value’ between science and literature: if the process of identifying a forming
consciousness links readers and Müller as the fictional author of the trilogy, it
also connects the trilogy and mathematics in a shared intuitionist turn.
However, as suggested above, in Broch’s trilogy intuitionist mathematics
and the related processes of unification in human consciousness are presented
as possibilities but not as givens: Bertrand Müller emerges as the author and
origin of the trilogy only in concert with the reader’s participating interpreta-
tion, and it is possible not to pick up the clues that he composes the essay or to
deem them not convincing enough. Thus, while identifying Müller as the uni-
fying consciousness constitutes an option that readers wishing for an overall
unity might feel tempted to embrace, it does not need to be realised. That
the unifying move does not appear as obvious or necessary is consistent with
the reluctant introduction of intuitionist solutions in the text. Mathematics
is ‘compelled’ to turn to intuition as a way out, the principle of a product of
products only ‘probably’ extends to maths, and moreover the saving powers of
intuition are ambiguous when they are introduced in the theoretical chapters
but do not translate into practice (SWIII 563). For example, the ninth part
of the essay concludes with the hopeful picture of the ‘continuing unity of the
world, a unity of man, illuminating all things, still surviving and imperishable
through all eternities of space and time’, but the beginning of the next chapter
at least questions the unity of man: ‘Dr Flurschütz was helping Jaretzki to fit
on his artificial arm’ (SWIII 565).59
The possibility of ‘bringing oneself into form’, of the reader actualising a
whole by participating in the forming process and acknowledging Müller’s
producing consciousness as an origin, recreates on the level of form what the
trilogy introduces with the models of bookkeeping, mathematics and lan-
guage: an intuitionist turn to the inner self, tied not to a physical person but
to abstract underlying intuition. The incorporation of the reader into textual
form might share with relativity theory a focus on the role of the observer, yet,
considered in the light of the trilogy’s more sustained view to mathematics, it
does not appear as inevitable. Rather, if in maths the intuitionist interpretation
triggered opposition from the formalists, so its markedly tentative introduction
in The Sleepwalkers renders it ambiguous. The next section therefore takes a
closer look at the alternative, namely formalist ideas of structure, and shows
how the trilogy considers form not only as a carrier of meaning that is ulti-
mately activated by human consciousness but as meaningful in itself.

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Structure: The Value of Pure Form

In a letter written shortly after completing the last part of The Sleepwalkers,
Broch professes to seek insights through writing in new forms even though
running the risk of alienating his readers: ‘Writing means aiming to win
knowledge through form, and new knowledge can only be created through
new form.’60 The formal innovations in his trilogy, such as the turn to human
consciousness that mirrors the structure of intuitionist movements in math-
ematics, are testament to this practice. But, if a shift to intuition can reaffirm
content, meaning and value, the competing model of formalism suggests
another way of using form to confront the modern absence of foundations.
The Sleepwalkers illustrates the potentialities of concentrating on structure
itself with the character Gödicke who, as a bricklayer turned soldier, dies in
the First World War, is resurrected and then concerns himself with recreating
his soul, life and identity. Gödicke’s disintegration is an analogy of the world
falling apart in war and also of stylistic fragmentation in the novel Huguenau.
His resurrection then suggests renewal and can be seen as a self-interpretation
and self-justification of the trilogy, setting out the value of literature in a period
of crisis. Viewing the character of Gödicke in the light of formalist maths
and its contrast to intuitionist notions clarifies the trilogy’s competing drives
towards complete disintegration and, on the other hand, promise of a reinstitu-
tion of unity. This contrast then illuminates how The Sleepwalkers reflects the
split into modernist and counter-modernist mathematics in its own structure
and puts into question the very idea of stable form.
Gödicke, having died on the battlefield and then risen from the dead, per-
sonifies the disintegrated post-war period where disparate self-centred realities
do not form into a unity. Having lost connection to his former existence, he is
deprived of the basis of his life and unable to build up his identity; all he can do
is erect a structure that might encourage future constructions: ‘Ludwig Gödicke
the bricklayer had, so to speak, built a scaffolding for the house of his soul, and
as he hobbled about on his sticks he felt himself to be merely a scaffolding with
supports and stresses on all sides’ (SWIII 382). Gödicke erects only the support-
ing framework, the form and possibility of a future building, while the actual
content of his life remains impossible to construct. The substance of his past
even threatens to destabilise the new framework: when his former life returns as
an ‘intruder’ in the form of a postcard from his wife, the past recurs as ‘bricks’
of content that cannot be used for building the scaffolding (SWIII 437). Since he
cannot integrate the past, Gödicke blocks it out, together with any input from
outside reality: ‘the man Gödicke must see nothing, hear nothing, eat nothing’
(SWIII 438). Isolated from the world and uninhibited by any real content,
Gödicke solely concentrates on the construction of the framework, and the scaf-
folding exists autonomously, ‘in itself and by itself’ (SWIII 382).

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The Gödicke-strand is saturated with architectural terminology and shares

this vocabulary with the foundational debate in mathematics, particularly
with formalist formulations of maths as a self-contained structure that, as
a language referring only to itself, is pure form. But, more importantly, it
shares with formalist maths and other formalist movements an emphasis on
the value of concentrating on structure to the exclusion of content. Indeed,
with his championing of mathematical form independent of its relations to
meaning or reality, Hilbert turned the work on form into the very subject
matter – the content – of maths. Given its independence from the real world,
Hilbert and his colleagues understood formalist mathematics as a structure of
pure possibility and work on it as extending this framework of potentiality
to increase its reach and power.61 Paul Bernays, Hilbert’s closest collabora-
tor in the 1920s, explains that possibility, rather than reality, is crucial in a
mathematical system: ‘the axiom system itself does not express something
factual; rather, it presents only a possible form of a system of connections’.62
Hilbert similarly emphasised the need to extend the system beyond the imme-
diately applicable: ‘The mathematician will have also to take account not
only of those theories coming near to reality, but also [. . .] of all logically
possible theories.’63 Work on the language of maths thus is geared towards
finding descriptions and theories that develop new possibilities of mathemati-
cal expression, regardless of their applicability to the world. In an essay from
1934 Broch takes up this line of argumentation and stresses the creative
potential of maths, contending that it ‘includes every conceivable logical
structure that could exist [. . .], or more correctly, every new discovery in
mathematics expands its range but defines a new possible logical structure
for the real world as well’.64 In Broch’s view, then, maths might even open up
new avenues in reality; so not only does he reject the understanding of maths
as a representation of the world, but he suggests that its generation of pos-
sibilities has part in creating reality.
The notion of extending possibilities for the real world through formal-
ist manipulation of an autonomous structure informs the presentation of
Gödicke’s scaffolding and his attempts to regain reality and the unity of his self.
As the turn away from the world liberates modern mathematics and widens
its possibilities, so Gödicke’s scaffolding can grow precisely by disregarding
its surroundings. Moreover, as he embodies disintegrated wartime reality, his
work on a structure for the possibility of prospective content inspires hopes of
similarly constructing the framework for a future of the world. In the eyes of
Esch’s Bible group, Gödicke accordingly stands for the promise of regeneration
and personifies the divine new entry that Esch deems indispensable for future
development: he answers Esch’s demand ‘for the son who shall build the house
anew . . . only then will the mists thin away and the new life will come’ (SWIII
500). While, at the end of the trilogy, the German revolution overthrows the

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old world order and Huguenau’s generation manages to exist only in their
respective egoistical realities, Gödicke might finally achieve reintegration into
the world. His ability of foresight grows with the height of his scaffolding, and
he comments on the events of the revolution from the elevated viewpoint of
his construction and moreover gaining distance when ‘standing on the hillside,
which he had chosen as a coign of vantage’ (SWIII 607). While Gödicke does
not take in any input from the outside when he sets out to rebuild himself – he
‘must see nothing, hear nothing, eat nothing’ – having elevated himself over the
war events, he obeys the call ‘Ludwig, it’s the dinner-hour, come down from
the scaffolding’ (SWIII 438, 608). Abandoning the self‑contained framework
for the intake of nourishment, he might begin to build the content of his self,
so that the concentration on the scaffolding as a creation of possibilities and
the suppression of content promises the possibility of eventual renewal – even
if it does not actually arrive there.
Even before the suggestion of Gödicke’s potential reintegration into the
world, his self-contained framework has value and meaning: it fulfils ‘real
purpose, since invisibly in the centre of the scaffolding, and yet also in every
single supporting beam, the ego of Ludwig Gödicke was precariously sus-
pended and had to be preserved from dizziness’ (SWIII 382). In other words,
Gödicke becomes the self-contained scaffolding itself, and the structure of the
possibility of future content is itself existence. The epilogue arrives at a similar
change in perspective, turning the focus from a solution to the possibility of
solution when suggesting that ‘the mere hope of wisdom from a Leader is
wisdom for us, the mere divination of grace is grace, and [. . .] our goal remains
approachable, [. . .] and the renascence of values is fated to recur’ (SWIII
648).65 The hope to conquer disintegration thus derives from the possibility of
regeneration rather than renewal itself. With the notion that structure does not
only order content but has creative potential, The Sleepwalkers intensifies the
understanding of form as process rather than static shape: it is clear that ‘form
does things’ when the framework constitutes identity for Gödicke and the
formal possibility of a future becomes the solution to modern disintegration.66
Therefore, as Turner clarifies, ‘form is never simply a tool of knowledge: it is
an attribute of being, a category of ontology’.67 This is particularly evident in
formalist mathematics, which exists and creates through pure form: a math-
ematical entity exists in its formal description, and absence of c­ ontradiction is
being. In this sense, to repeat the quotation by Alain Badiou from the intro-
ductory chapter, (formalist) ‘mathematics = ontology’ and, in Broch’s words,
‘[t]he possibility of mathematical being is purest ontological knowledge [. . .]:
it brings the necessity of being and logical possibility to perfect identical evi-
dence’.68 In this way, literature and mathematics indeed meet in form or, to
take up Rogers’s term, form works as a connective value: in both, it is part of
poiesis or making; both speaking poetically and mathematically is to create

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the thing one describes. And when, as Moritz Epple emphasises, the ‘produc-
tive imagination’ of mathematical acts receives considerable attention with
its new style in the twentieth century, it is with the emergence of a modern
mathematics in particular that the capacity for poetic creation connects maths
and literature.69
Formalism, with its claim that form provides a privileged perspective to
the study of mathematics, art or literature, has come to stand for an ahistori-
cal position that is unconcerned with political and social issues. As Susan J.
Wolfson emphasises in her re-evaluation of formalism and its reception, much
of the criticism is not aimed at the focus on form itself but precisely levelled
against considering form as ‘the product of any historically disinterested,
internally coherent aesthetics’.70 The Sleepwalkers, engaging with the period
and its turn towards maths and language that initiated formalist perspectives,
gives a strong sense of the inevitability of logical development across all fields
of knowledge. But it also draws attention to the historicity of form, suggesting,
with a view to the ‘clearest example’ of mathematics, that even the structures
of supposedly stable systems are open to revision and implicated in the period’s
grappling with the loss of unity, meaning and value. Indeed, maths appears as
part of the modern crisis and its turn to intuition as motivated not by inner-
mathematical logic but by general anxieties about loss of reality and value:
depicting a mathematics ‘compelled’ to accept intuition as ‘the only way out’,
The Sleepwalkers presents it as influenced by, and in turn changing, histori-
cally specific mindsets, aims and beliefs.
Contrasting formalist and intuitionist ideas in mathematics, language, value-
systems, and regarding its own structure, The Sleepwalkers cannot be said to
have a clear-cut ‘structural heart’ in relativity theory or elsewhere, but struc-
ture and form themselves are under reconsideration and open to diverse devel-
opments: complete disintegration, the promise of unification in intuition, or a
focus on creatively enhancing formal possibilities. Regarding Broch’s trilogy
as a whole, the creative potential of the formalist approach that Gödicke
personifies clarifies the unexpectedly reconciliatory ending: even if the counter-
modernist prospect of regaining unity and value through intuition might
remain unconvincing, theoretically envisioning it in the essayistic epilogue and
introducing the possibility of viewing Bertrand Müller as a unifying conscious-
ness correspond to building a framework that creates the prospect of future
content and might thus advance the world on its way to an unattainable vision.
As in the foundational debate of mathematics, then, The Sleepwalkers presents
competing formalist and intuitionist views with advantages and disadvantages
without offering a solution or winner. What is clear, however, is that ideas of
reliable structure and form have to be abandoned in favour of acknowledging
their being part of historical and cultural changes – in mathematics, in value-
systems and in literature.

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The Language and Structure of Modernism:

Mathematics and Literature
As the above has shown, The Sleepwalkers suggests that modern maths and
literature develop in parallel and relates characters’ worldviews to compet-
ing notions of mathematical existence, truth and meaning. Pasenow’s belief
in value-systems that order and make sense of the world corresponds to the
realist belief that the universe can be understood through mathematics as the
language of the Book of Nature; Esch’s adding a wonderful new entry into
bookkeeping to ensure the system’s usability in an anarchical world com-
plies with the counter-modernist notion that the value of maths can be saved
only by the introduction of the non-rational human element of intuition; and
Huguenau’s concentration on himself as his own value-system relates to the
self-referentiality of formalist maths that does not lend itself to create outside
value. Modern mathematical positions then also inform the two scenarios of
the future introduced in the epilogue: a world stagnated in the unreality of
countless egoistical realities bears traits of the formalist turn to the system
itself, and the hopeful outlook based on the theory of unifying non-rational
feelings mirrors counter-modernist mathematics’ recourse to intuition. The
stylistic characteristics of the novels – the realist style in Pasenow, the expres-
sionist diction and concentration on the protagonist’s inner life in Esch, and
the focus on formal disintegration in Huguenau – and the simultaneously exist-
ing possibilities of putting hope in the openness of form or in the unifying force
of a central narrative consciousness, implicate literature in the development
exemplified by maths.
While establishing parallels between modern literature and maths, The
Sleepwalkers also illuminates their specific functions in the comprehension and
formation of reality. Even if maths can be understood as language, it differs
from literature in the way it lends itself to examining the place of human
beings. Mathematics might be employed as an example, even ‘the clearest
example’, of the ‘sweeping revolution in the style of thinking’, but its symbolic
expression is not suited to personal communication (SWIII 481): it is, as Broch
stresses, ‘largely detached from the mathematician; he cannot interpret subjec-
tively with it, [. . .] it is a precise, mute, de-subjectified language’.71 In Broch’s
experience with Viennese logical positivism, the increasingly mathematised
sciences and philosophy suffer a similar fate, and, since they cannot address
the individual and the irrational course of the world, no longer fulfil a com-
municative function: according to Broch, the sciences have become mute too.72
Given what he calls the self-restriction of the scientific sphere, Broch claims
that it is the role of literature to cover the areas no longer encompassed by
science, namely the irrational aspects of life.73 Literature can achieve this since,
so he argues, it does not rely on language as the sciences do, but exists in the

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tension between words and lines. Like intuitionist maths that is understood to
be expressed in language but to exist independently of it, literature is thus able
to point to the dream-like, to that which Wittgenstein in his Tractatus excludes
from philosophy and relegates to passing over in silence. When modern litera-
ture has to account for the irrational but also for the spirit of scientific think-
ing, it unities these opposed aspects and can satisfy human beings’ ‘desire for
the totality of the worldview’.74
In Broch’s fictional and non-fictional writings on language, literature and
science that he develops over several decades and that include modifications
and contradictions, it can be challenging to locate mathematics – a structural
science that is part of many scientific endeavours but in its abstractness can
also be close to the creative possibilities of literary fiction. That it takes an
unstable position among the two cultures and moreover veers between formal-
ist and intuitionist conceptions indicates that Broch uses maths not as a fixed
model but as a field in which controversies crystallise and that therefore lends
itself to exploring change in the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, when
The Sleepwalkers employs foundational research in maths to address questions
of structurality itself and relates these to developments in literary form, includ-
ing its own, it suggests modern maths to model ways of finding new forms of
cultural expression. More precisely, when Broch’s trilogy presents the modern
transformation of maths as an example of the period’s style of thinking and its
foundational debate as proposing possible future scenarios, it does so in ways
that we could call modernist, counter-modernist or Romantic, and postmod-
ernist. The term ‘counter-modernist’, introduced by Mehrtens, designates the
recovery of meaning, values and relation to the world that is lost in formalist
mathematics, and it includes a celebration of unity and totality that in liter-
ary studies is more commonly identified as characteristic of Romanticism. But
more important to criticism is Broch’s anticipation of postmodernist character-
istics. Little is to be gained by labelling The Sleepwalkers ‘through and through
a modern work’ or hailing it as postmodern, but the move from structuralism
to post-structuralism provides a useful schema to grasp how modern math-
ematics works as a model for narrative innovation in The Sleepwalkers.75
In his seminal talk that introduced post-structuralism, Jacques Derrida
sets out the consequences of thinking the ‘structurality of structure’.76 In The
Sleepwalkers where maths exemplifies the ‘structure of thought’, research into
its ‘first principles’ similarly concerns the structurality of structure and puts
into question the ‘fundamental ground’ of (mathematical) reality (SWIII 481).
As Derrida explains, when the structurality of structure begins to be thought,
the centre of a structure becomes a problematical concept: the centre ‘which
is by definition unique, constituted that very thing within a structure which
while governing the structure, escapes structurality’.77 Derrida concludes that
a centre does not exist and contrasts two reactions to the resulting openness of

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a post-structural situation: a negative or nostalgic position attempts but fails

to regain stable truth and origin, while, on the other side, an affirmative view
embraces the loss of foundations and the unstoppable proliferation of mean-
ings. The nostalgic view designates a modernist perspective, while the joyful
acceptance of unlimited play of meaning constitutes a postmodernist position.
Derrida’s exploration of structure can help clarify the partly contradictory
ways in which modern mathematics works as a structural example and model
for narrative. The Sleepwalkers proposes a counter-modernist or Romantic
solution to the questioning of structure and the disintegration of meaning,
value and reality when the possible readerly realisation of Bertrand Müller as
unifying narrative consciousness introduces an extra-systemic entity that takes
on the centralising function. Even this move does not recover Romantic unity,
however, but opens up the textual structure to multiple meanings residing in
multiple readers. In contrast, formalism can take the form of mourning the lost
centre without replacing it, or of finding hope in creatively using the absence
of an origin to build a framework of possibility. Not least, setting next to each
other intuitionist and formalist possibilities, Broch’s trilogy reflects the founda-
tional split in modern mathematics with a formal indeterminacy that suggests
a postmodern acceptance of pluralism.
The Sleepwalkers employs its ‘clearest example’ in its experimentation with
narrative structure and literary form and presents the modern development
of maths as relevant to the path literature takes to respond to pressures in the
early twentieth century. While in Broch’s eyes his trilogy is to compensate for
a mathematisation of philosophy, its structure reflects the tensions between
content and form that animates modern maths in its foundational opposition
of formalism and intuitionism. Using maths not as an example of certainty but
as a model of responding to a loss of unity, The Sleepwalkers employs it in a
specifically modern notion and locates in it the very irrational and transcen-
dental that the mathematised sciences and philosophy no longer encompass.
Presenting maths as addressing the non-rational along with questions of rep-
resentation, language and form that similarly animate modernist literature,
the trilogy considers it as part of the crisis of the period and of determining
possible futures. It thus establishes maths not only as modern but as modern-
ist, that is, as part of culture and as sharing central concerns and features with
modernist literature.
The Sleepwalkers addresses the challenges of reconstituting a world experi-
enced as having become disintegrated and unreal in wartime with a view to ten-
sions between increasing rationalisation and a resurgence of intuition, between
form and content, and between language and meaning created in between
words and lines. Following this chapter’s focus on interrelations between lan-
guage and mathematics and ways of employing maths as a model for novelistic
form, the next chapter turns to Musil’s The Man without Qualities to examine

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in more detail the role of mathematics in attempts at fusing rationalism and

mysticism and thus respond to modern questions of epistemology and ethics.

Notes
 1. ‘die Dichtung [.  . 
. muß sich] dem Geist der Epoche, muß sich seiner
Wissenschaftlichkeit unterordnen, [. . .] und sie besorgt dies, indem sie polyhis-
torisch wird’ (Hermann Broch, Das essayistische Werk und Briefe 1913–1951:
Kommentierte Werkausgabe 9/1, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 209).
  2. ‘die Wissenschaft ist ihnen wie ein kristallener Block, von dem sie das eine oder das
andere Stück abbrechen, um damit ihre Erzählung an zumeist ungeeignetem Ort zu
garnieren oder einen Wissenschaftler als Romanfigur damit auszustatten’ (Broch,
Das essayistische Werk und Briefe, p. 148).
  3. Herbert George Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions
of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866) (Philadelphia and New York: J. B.
Lippincott, 1967), pp. 418–19.
 4. ‘aber für mich ist, wahrscheinlich infolge meiner mathematisch-konstruktivis-
tischen Anlage, ein anderer Weg kaum gangbar’ (Broch qtd in Materialien zu
Hermann Brochs ‘Die Schlafwandler’, ed. Gisela Brude-Firnau (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 45).
  5. ‘the clearest example’: ‘am deutlichsten’ (DSW 533). The pagination of the trilogy
is continuous, but quotations will be identified as belonging to part I, II or III.
  6. For a list of university courses taken by Broch, see Paul Michael Lützeler, Hermann
Broch: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), pp. 96–8.
 7. Rudolf Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of
Language’ [1932], in Logical Positivism, ed. A. J. Ayer, trans. Arthur Pap (New
York: The Free Press, 1959), 60–81 (p. 80).
  8. Hermann Broch, ‘Die sogenannten philosophischen Grundfragen einer empirischen
Wissenschaft’ [1928], Philosophische Schriften 1: Kritik, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 131–46. About the status as doctoral
dissertation, see Paul Michael Lützeler and Michael Kessler, eds, Hermann Broch
Handbuch (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2016), p. 99.
 9. Carsten Könneker, ‘Moderne Wissenschaft und moderne Dichtung. Hermann
Brochs Beitrag zur Beilegung der “Grundlagenkrise” der Mathematik’, Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 73 (1999),
319–51 (pp. 331–2). Ruth Bendels, Erzählen zwischen Hilbert und Einstein:
Naturwissenschaft und Literatur in Hermann Brochs ‘Eine methodologische
Novelle’ und Robert Musils ‘Drei Frauen’ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann,
2008), pp. 67–8. For an account of Broch’s mathematical knowledge, see Willy
Riemer, ‘Mathematik und Physik bei Hermann Broch’, in Hermann Broch, ed.
Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main.: Suhrkamp, 1986), 260–71.
10. Hermann Broch, Briefe: Dokumente und Kommentare zu Leben und Werk, ed.
Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), p. 89.
11. ‘das Schicksal [. . .] ist ja schon [. . .] mit ziemlicher mathematischer Exaktheit
errechnet’; ‘need not be told here’: ‘muß nicht mehr erzählt werden’ (DSW 149).
12. Herbert Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik: Eine Geschichte des Streits um
die Grundlagen der Disziplin und des Subjekts formaler Systeme (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 527.
13. Gottlob Frege, ‘Notes for Ludwig Darmstaedter’ [1919], in Posthumous Writings,
ed. Hans Hermes, Friedrich Kambartel and Friedrich Kaulbach, trans. Peter Long
and Roger White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 253–7 (p. 253).

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14. Ernestine Schlant, Hermann Broch (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1978), p. 46.
15. Evgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Clarence Brown (New York: Penguin, 1993), p. 4
and p. 111. For a detailed discussion of mathematics in We, see Leighton Brett
Cooke, ‘Ancient and Modern Mathematics in Zamyatin’s We’, in Zamyatin’s
We: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Gary Kern (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988),
149–67; T. R. N. Edwards, Three Russian Writers and the Irrational: Zamyatin,
Pil’nyak, and Bulgakov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Nina
Engelhardt, ‘Mathematics between Totalitarian Order and Revolution: Yevgeny
Zamyatin’s We’, in Imagine Maths 5: Between Culture and Mathematics, ed.
Michele Emmer et al. (Bologna: Monograf, 2016), 91–101.
16. ‘eindeutigen Gerichtetheit auf das eigene Wertgebiet und aus einer Esoterik des
Ausdrucks’ (DSW 538).
17. ‘reality will take a subordinate role’: ‘die Wirklichkeit ordnet sich ihr unter’ (DSW
536).
18. Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development (London: Routledge, 1993),
p. 86.
19. Lynn Gamwell, Mathematics + Art: A Cultural History (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2016), p. 212.
20. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Monthly Criterion, 6.4 (1927), 289–91 (p. 291).
21. Hermann Broch, Hofmannsthal and His Time: The European Imagination, 1860–
1920, trans. Michael P. Steinberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),
p. 53.
22. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, trans. Mary Hottinger (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1952), pp. 133–4.
23. Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, p. 134.
24. ‘Sie hatte ihre Meinung gesagt, aber schon die letzten Worte waren ihr vom Munde
zerflattert, wie zerschlissene Federn, so daß sie selber kaum sie erkannte’ (DSW
281). Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, p. 134.
25. ‘has become completely deaf and dumb’: ‘taub und stumm geworden’ (DSW 647).
26. L. E. J. Brouwer, ‘Intuitionism and Formalism’ [1912], Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society, 20.2 (1913), 81–96 (p. 83).
27. See Herbert Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik: Eine Geschichte des Streits
um die Grundlagen der Disziplin und des Subjekts formaler Systeme (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1990).
28. Broch, letter to Franz Blei, 1931, qtd in Paul Michael Lützeler, Hermann Broch
und die Moderne: Roman, Menschenrecht, Biografie (Munich: Fink, 2011), p. 29.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F.
McGuinness (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 76.
29. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 89.
30. L. E. J. Brouwer, ‘Mathematics, Science, and Language’ [1928], in From Brouwer
to Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s, ed. Paolo
Mancosu (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 45–52 (p. 49).
31. Brouwer, ‘Mathematics, Science, and Language’, p. 50.
32. E. L. J. Brouwer, ‘On the Foundations of Mathematics’ [1907], in L. E. J. Brouwer:
Collected Works, vol. 1, ed. Arend Heyting (Amsterdam and Oxford: North-
Holland, 1975), 15–101 (p. 97).
33. L. E. J. Brouwer, ‘Synopsis of the Signific Movement in the Netherlands: Prospects
of the Signific Movement’, Synthese, 5.5 (1946), 201–8 (p. 201).
34. Brouwer, ‘Synopsis of the Signific Movement’, p. 201.
35. Walter P. Van Stigt, ‘Brouwer’s Intuitionist Programme’, in From Brouwer to
Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the 1920s, ed. Paolo
Mancosu (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 1–22 (p. 3).

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36. Brouwer, qtd in Dirk van Dalen, L. E. J. Brouwer: Topologist, Intuitionist,

Philosopher. How Mathematics is Rooted in Life (London: Springer, 2013),
p. 264.
37. Eric Herd, ‘Hermann Brochs Romantrilogie Die Schlafwandler (1930–32)’, in
Hermann Broch, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1986), 59–77 (p. 75). Jürgen Heizmann, ‘A Farewell to Art: Poetic Reflection in
Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil’, in Hermann Broch, Visionary in Exile: The 2001 Yale
Symposium, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Rochester, NY and Woodbridge, Suffolk:
Camden, 2003), 187–200 (p. 188).
38. Leo Kreutzer, Erkenntnistheorie und Prophetie: Hermann Brochs Romantrilogie
‘Die Schlafwandler’ (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1966) and Hartmut Reinhardt,
Erweiterter Naturalismus: Untersuchungen zum Konstruktionsverfahren in
Hermann Broch (Cologne: Böhlau, 1972).
39. Hofmannsthal, Selected Prose, p. 131.
40. Adrian Stevens, ‘Hermann Broch as a Reader of James Joyce: Plot in the Modernist
Novel’, in Hermann Broch: Modernismus, Kulturkrise und Hitlerzeit, ed. Adrian
Stevens, Fred Wagner and Sigurd Paul Scheichl (Innsbruck: Institut für Germanistik,
1994), 77–101 (p. 101).
41. Hermann Broch, ‘Joyce and the Present Age’ [1932], in A James Joyce Yearbook,
ed. Maria Jolas (Paris: Transition, 1949), 68–108 (p. 88).
42. Broch, ‘Joyce and the Present Age’, p. 88.
43. Broch, ‘Joyce and the Present Age’, p. 89.
44. Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘Hermann Broch and Relativity in Fiction’, Wisconsin
Studies in Contemporary Literature, 8.3 (1967), 365–76 (p. 376).
45. Es ‘wird deutlich, daß Bertrand Müller als das Erzähl-Ich der ganzen Trilogie vor-
zustellen ist’ (Paul Michael Lützeler, Hermann Broch – Ethik und Politik: Studien
zum Frühwerk und zur Romantrilogie ‘Die Schlafwandler’ (Munich: Winkler,
1973), p. 74).
46. Schlant, Hermann Broch, p. 51.
47. Ernestine Schlant, ‘Hermann Broch and Modern Physics’, The Germanic Review,
53.2 (1978), 69–75 (pp. 69–70).
48. Bendels, Erzählen zwischen Hilbert und Einstein, pp. 108–9.
49. Ziolkowski, ‘Relativity in Fiction’, p. 367.
50. ‘daß die gegenwärtige revolutionäre Erschütterung der Gesamtwelt, einerseits die
geradezu erdbebenhafte in allem äußeren Geschehen, andererseits die sozusagen
präzise Revolution im Zentralgebiet der Erkenntnis, in der Physik und in der
mathematischen Grundlagenforschung, schier unzweideutig auf eine gemeinsame
Wurzel hindeutet’ (Broch, Das essayistische Werk und Briefe, p. 471).
51. David Hilbert, ‘Axiomatic Thought’ [1918], in From Kant to Hilbert: A Source
Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, vol. 2, ed. William Bragg Ewald (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 1105–15 (p. 1115).
52. Broch, Das essayistische Werk und Briefe, p. 97.
53. Broch, Erkennen und Handeln: Essays, Band II, ed. Hannah Arendt (Zürich:
Rhein-Verlag, 1955), p. 194.
  ‘Natürlich handelt es sich da nicht um den empirischen Beobachter, sondern
um einen abstrakten, um den “Beobachter an sich”’ (Broch, Briefe 3 1945–1951:
Kommentierte Werkausgabe 9/1, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 3834).
54. Broch, Erkennen und Handeln, p. 202.
55. Ziolkowski, ‘Relativity in Fiction’, p. 376.
56. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 138.

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57. Henry S. Turner, ‘Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice
Versa): Reflections on “Form”’, Isis, 101.3 (2010), 578–89 (p. 582).
58. Janine Rogers, Unified Fields: Science and Literary Form (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), p. xvi.
59. ‘unity of man’: ‘Einheit des Menschen’ (DSW 624).
60. ‘Dichten heißt, Erkenntnis durch die Form gewinnen wollen, und neue Erkenntnis
kann nur durch neue Form geschöpft werden’ (letter to Daisy Brody, 25 Nov.
1932) (Hermann Broch, Briefe 1, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main.:
Suhrkamp, 1974–81), p. 223).
61. Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik, p. 457.
62. Paul Bernays, ‘Hilbert’s Significance for the Philosophy of Mathematics’ [1922], in
From Brouwer to Hilbert: The Debate on the Foundations of Mathematics in the
1920s, ed. and trans. Paolo Mancosu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),
189–97 (p. 192).
63. David Hilbert, ‘Mathematical Problems’, trans. Mary Winston Newson, Bulletin
of the American Mathematical Society, 8.10 (1902), 437–79 (p. 454).
64. Hermann Broch, ‘The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age’ [1934], in Geist and Zeitgeist:
The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age. Six Essays by Hermann Broch, ed. and trans.
John Hargraves (New York: Counterpoint, 2002), 41–64 (p. 45).
65. ‘annäherbar’ (DSW 715).
66. Turner, ‘Lessons from Literature’, p. 586.
67. Turner, ‘Lessons from Literature’, p. 584.
68. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London and New York:
Continuum, 2005), p. 6. Broch: ‘Die Möglichkeit des mathematischen Seins
ist die reinste ontologische Erkenntnis [. . .]: in ihr ist Seinsnotwendigkeit und
logische Möglichkeit zur vollen identischen Evidenz gebracht’ (Hermann Broch,
‘Zum Begriff der Geisteswissenschaften’, in Die unbekannte Größe (Zürich: Rhein-
Verlag, 1961), 261–75 (p. 270)).
69. Moritz Epple, Die Entstehung der Knotentheorie: Kontexte und Konstruktionen
einer modernen mathematischen Theorie (Braunschweig: Vieweg und Teubner,
1999), p. 209.
70. Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Reading for Form’, in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson
and Marshall Brown (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2006),
3–25 (p. 6).
71. Hermann Broch, Geist and Zeitgeist: The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age. Six Essays
by Hermann Broch, ed. and trans. John Hargraves (New York: Counterpoint,
2002), p. 181.
72. Hermann Broch, ‘Kommentare’, in Die Schlafwandler: Eine Romantrilogie
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 719–35 (p. 729).
73. Broch, ‘Kommentare’, p. 731.
74. Broch, ‘Kommentare’, p. 732.
75. Graham Bartram, ‘“Subjektive Antipoden”? Broch’s Die Schlafwandler and Musil’s
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’, in Hermann Broch: Modernismus, Kulturkrise und
Hitlerzeit, ed. Adrian Stevens, Kurt Wagner and Sigurd Paul Scheichl (Innsbruck:
Institut für Germanistik, 1994), 63–75 (p. 75).
76. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’,
in Modern Criticism and Theory, 2nd edn, ed. David Lodge and Nigel Wood
(Essex: Pearson, 2000), 89–103 (p. 90).
77. Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, p. 90.

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 robert musil, the man without qualities

MATHEMATICS, EPISTEMOLOGY,
ETHICS: ROBERT MUSIL, THE MAN
WITHOUT QUALITIES

‘Musil?!! In a talk, I called his approach “rational writing”, writing from

reason. It is the opposite of my own abilities.’1 Hermann Broch’s force-
ful attempt to distinguish his own literary projects from The Man without
Qualities by fellow Austrian author Robert Musil only draws the more atten-
tion to similarities between their works. Musil, having read an abstract of
Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, expressed concern that such overlaps could be
extensive.2 And indeed, like Broch’s The Sleepwalkers trilogy – and Pynchon’s
much later Against the Day – Musil’s work explores the development of
European society towards the First World War, the disintegration of tradi-
tional values and Enlightenment beliefs, and, not least, the role of mathemat-
ics in these processes. Like Pynchon and Broch, Musil sets The Man without
Qualities against the historical and mathematical developments of the 1880s
to 1920s and beyond, but, unlike these works, its actual plot spans only one
year. It approaches the First World War, yet, though overshadowed by the
imminent catastrophe, never arrives at its outbreak in August 1914. The
period is thus condensed into one year, and similarly the setting in the state
Kakania, a name based on an abbreviation for the monarchy of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, illustrates a wider situation in modern Europe: ‘On the
pretext of describing the last year in the life of Austria, it raises questions
about the meaning of modern man’s existence and responds to these in a
completely novel way, which is light and ironic but also philosophically deep’,
Musil sets out his project in an autobiographical sketch.3 In a further step of

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condensation, The Man without Qualities introduces mathematics as ‘the new

method of thought itself, the mind itself, the very wellspring of the times and
the primal source of an incredible transformation’ (MwQ 35). As in Broch’s
trilogy then, The Man without Qualities accords maths a privileged position in
understanding modern existence. The two Austrian works differ in more than
their writing styles, however, and this chapter examines further relations of
maths and modernist literature when arguing that, for Musil, maths becomes a
model not only of exactitude but also of vagueness and that in this paradoxical
double-function it serves to inspire the critical trust needed to adapt epistemol-
ogy, ethics and aesthetics to a time of profound change.
The assertion in The Man without Qualities that mathematics should be
considered as the source of modern times and the method of thought can
appear rather surprising. Although the protagonist, Ulrich, works as a math-
ematician before he embarks on a year-long holiday from life, only modest
space is dedicated to direct engagement with maths in Musil’s enormous text
that, designed as two books consisting of two parts each, remains a fragment.
Both parts of book 1, ‘A Sort of Introduction’ and ‘Pseudoreality Prevails’,
were published in 1930, and the first part of book 2 appeared in 1932 as ‘Into
the Millennium [The Criminals]’. A further twenty chapters were submitted
to the printer but withdrawn in 1938; next to these so-called galley chapters,
we have a fair copy of six chapters of a revised version as well as additional
versions and chapters of this continuation of the first part of book 2. The envi-
sioned last part, ‘A Sort of Ending’, exists as a copious collection of notes, a
selection of which was published together with the galley chapters and revised
versions in 1978.4 Famously labelled a novel without a plot, The Man without
Qualities can be described not only as unfinished but as unfinishable: there is
no possible conclusion that would complete the scant storyline and turn the
fragment into a closed whole. Musil explains the sparse plot with his focus
on ethics: ‘People want Ulrich to do something. But I’m concerned with the
meaning of the action’ (notes 1764). Like other modernist works, The Man
without Qualities abandons plot and traditional narrative as these imply a
direction and coherence that cannot be found in disintegrating reality, and
it also shares with Broch’s The Sleepwalkers and other modernist novels a
concern with the absence of a moral framework that gives action meaning.
Musil’s philosophical novel consequently introduces various partial solutions
to its central question of how to live a moral life in a time when scientific and
technological progress radically transforms its conditions.
The role of mathematics in this moral endeavour is twofold. On the one
hand, it is the shaping power of science and technology and, through it,
modern society, and it also stands for one side in a characterisation of the time
as dominated by diametrically opposed epistemological approaches: the period
is split into ‘mathematics and mysticism’, Ulrich contends (MwQ 837). In his

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diaries, Musil similarly describes the early twentieth century as a time of epis-
temological polarities: ‘rationality and mysticism are the poles of the time’.5
Although maths here constitutes the symbolic extreme of rational engagement
with the world, Ulrich ultimately pursues it in view of fundamental human and
moral questions:
If someone had asked him at any point while he was writing treatises on
mathematical problems or mathematical logic [. . .] what it was he hoped
to achieve, he would have answered that there was only one question
worth thinking about, the question of the right way to live. (MwQ 275)
And Musil explains about his work: ‘I have written about certain connections
between moral and mathematical thinking on several occasions; not in a con-
ventional manner, indeed, but I’m nevertheless happy to be able to point out
that these exist.’6 Unlike the traditional identification of maths and rationality,
the moral dimension of maths in Musil’s work is closely tied to its modern
development and to the potential of its new methods to transform thinking and
thereby arrive at the right way to live.
Across his diaries and novelistic writing, Musil uses ‘mathematics’ and
‘rationality’ interchangeably to name the opposition to mysticism, and schol-
ars looking at maths in his work often do so to better understand the pres-
entation of rational approaches to the world. Apart from a few exceptions,
the specific role of mathematics in the contrast of rationality and mysticism
is not considered, so Dale Adams rightly criticises.7 To do exactly that, this
chapter examines the specifically modern nature of maths in The Man without
Qualities, including its historical development into a logicist-formalist and an
intuitionist school. It explores how the novel fragment employs this modern
notion to elaborate on the falsely perceived antagonism between rationality
and its various Others and on abortive attempts at synthesising them. Rather
than only presenting maths as exemplifying the side of rationality, the text uses
it to transform the binary opposition into a relation described by a circle where
the poles of rational maths and mysticism take diametrically opposed posi-
tions but are connected by transitional states on the circumference. The Man
without Qualities introduces this dynamics between clear-cut distinctions and
a more complicated relation between elements in relation to law. To make law
practicable, it is based on the belief that ‘between two contraries there is no
third or middle state’ (MwQ 261): a murderer will either be declared responsi-
ble for their actions or insane and therefore not guilty. Yet, such clear distinc-
tions can be difficult to make in individual cases as these are more accurately
examined taking into consideration nature’s ‘peculiar preference’: ‘Natura non
fecit saltus, she makes no jumps but prefers gradual transitions’ (MwQ 261).
In what follows, I look precisely at the gradual transitions of maths in view of
demands for exactitude and pragmatic vagueness, and examine how it works

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as ‘the primal source of an incredible transformation’ in three interrelated

domains: epistemology, ethics and aesthetics.
As we saw reflected in the novels by Pynchon and Broch, various thinkers
perceived the beginning of the twentieth century as, in Ulrich’s terms, splitting
into ‘mathematics and mysticism’. Europe experienced immense scientific pro-
gress and technological change that transformed city life, the workplace and,
with new transport and communication systems, the sense of space and time.
At the same time, it saw a wave of attraction to the irrational, the emotional
and the supernatural: Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis introduced the study of
the unconscious and the drives of the id, scientific concepts such as the fourth
dimension and the aether seemed to confirm the existence of realms beyond
the immediately experienced, and séances fed into the wish to connect with the
spirit world and the dead. The perceived gap between rational-technological
and emotional-mystical approaches to the world animated philosophy and
art in the early twentieth century, and Musil’s metaliterary The Man without
Qualities reflects on fictional efforts to locate literature between the spheres
of ‘mathematics and mysticism’. His own literary style, which Broch called
‘rational writing’, displays a split in language that reflects opposed exact-
scientific and imprecise everyday approaches. Famously, the first eleven lines
are taken up by a meteorological description:
A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a
high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination
to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres
were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate
relative to the annual mean temperature. (MwQ 3)
The technical account is then rephrased in everyday language: ‘In a word that
characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it is a bit old-fashioned: It was
a fine day in August 1913’ (MwQ 3). As the more immediately graspable
rephrasing suggests, technically exact language is not always preferable, and
in his non-fictional work too, Musil does not advocate that literature merely
turn to scientific diction. Rather, it is to employ science as a method, to say it
with Ezra Pound’s famous modernist dictum, to ‘make it new’. According to
Musil, ‘all intellectual daring today lies in the natural sciences. We shall not
learn from Goethe, Hebbel, or Hölderlin, but from Mach, Lorentz, Einstein,
Minkowski, from Couturat, Russell, Peano . . .’8 Self-consciously exploring
how to learn from modern mathematics in matters of conflicting epistemolo-
gies and literary aesthetics, The Man without Qualities contributes to estab-
lishing its place in modernist culture.

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Mathematics and Morality

As a mathematician Ulrich is, so Thomas Sebastian claims, ‘so well informed
that the reader is forced to take several crash courses in scientific theory to
appreciate the author’s relentless appropriation of scientific ideas’.9 Sebastian’s
example, namely ‘Ulrich’s familiarity with “the law of the large numbers”
[which] demonstrates the author’s declared intent to make him “a man
equipped with the most advanced knowledge of his time”’, is rather unhappily
chosen, considering that the law of large numbers was described by Siméon
Poisson in 1835, thus hardly constituting an instance of the most advanced
knowledge in 1913.10 Yet, we learn that Ulrich’s knowledge is indeed up to
date when he is concerned with contemporary questions regarding the foun-
dations of maths: ‘He was one of those mathematicians called logicians, for
whom nothing was ever “correct” and who were working out a new foun-
dational theory’ (MwQ 939).11 Ulrich’s orientation suggests that it is not a
specific mathematical law but rather the philosophy of maths that is at the core
of his appropriation of scientific ideas, and this indirect employment makes
a crash course in scientific theory even more necessary. Based on the earlier
overview of formalist and intuitionist approaches to rebuilding mathematical
foundations (see Introduction and Chapter 2), I examine the presentation of
a specifically modern notion in relation to Ulrich’s main reason for practising
maths. To repeat his moral objective: ‘he was writing treatises on mathemati-
cal problems or mathematical logic [. . . to think about] the question of the
right way to live’ (MwQ 275). Taking a closer look at the maths is not a sterile
exercise, then, but immediately bound up with ethics.
Ulrich identifies as a logicist, and The Man without Qualities presents logi-
cism as contributing to a modern loss of essence when it does not describe
the inner qualities of nature but refers only to mathematics itself. Working
in a self-contained field, mathematicians resemble ‘racing cyclists pedaling
away for dear life, blind to everything in the world except the back wheel
of the rider ahead of them’ (MwQ 37). The fact that Ulrich retires from the
outside world to do his mathematical work further emphasises its disconnec-
tion: ‘He had drawn the curtains and was working in the subdued light like
an acrobat in a dimly lit circus arena rehearsing dangerous new somersaults
for a panel of experts before the public has been let in’ (MwQ 115). Removed
from nature into an artistic sphere, Ulrich devises new moves that have to be
approved by the mathematical community before being released for applica-
tion to the world. And Ulrich reflects the self-referential turn of modern maths
in his own life: realising that his ‘connections to the world had become pale,
shadowy, and negative’ and that he has lost the capacity to apply his abilities,
the eponymous man without qualities reverts to the realm of his own thoughts
and decides to take a year-long holiday from life (MwQ 285–6). Ulrich is not

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prepared to embrace logicist self-referentiality and relinquish the possibility of

impacting the world, however, as an encounter with fellow scientist Dr Strastil
shows. Embarking on a more commonplace holiday to the mountains, Strastil
implies that she has no more direct relation to physical reality than modern
maths: she asks indignantly ‘what she needed nature for. [. . .] She could lie
on the mountain meadow for three whole days without stirring’ (MwQ 940).
Feeling no inclination to interact with or act upon nature, Strastil lives the self-
containment of logicism, while Ulrich’s reply that a farmer would be bored
when lying on the grounds he usually ploughs illustrates his belief that nature
has to be worked on in order to bear fruit and maths should help achieve these
results.
The exchange between the two scientists further connects mathematical
and moral concerns when Strastil advocates ‘feeling on a sufficiently elemen-
tary level’, just after pointing to foundational debates that negotiate notions
of mathematical possibility, correctness and truth (MwQ 940). Strastil asks
Ulrich whether he thinks a mathematical deduction possible, and she explains
her own standpoint: ‘I don’t think Kneppler’s deduction is mistaken, it’s just
that it’s wrong’ (MwQ 939). Claus Hoheisel maintains that Musil here criti-
cises scientific discourse and makes fun of the restrictedness of the scientific
approach.12 While Strastil, described as a scientist with ‘an exceptionally
developed capacity for abstract thought and a notably retarded understanding
of the soul’, is obviously ridiculed, on a different level her distinction between
‘mistaken’ and ‘wrong’ points to the serious matter of the problematic transfer
of precise mathematics to everyday language: ‘She might have said with the
same firmness that she did consider the deduction mistaken but nevertheless
not essentially wrong. She knew what she meant, but in ordinary language,
where the terms are undefined, one cannot express oneself unequivocally’
(MwQ 941, 939–40). We will come back to issues of precision and vagueness
below, but more important in this context is Strastil’s suggestion that maths
is not a field of indisputable statements, but that evaluations of correctness
and truth can differ according to personal conviction. Indeed, when the math-
ematical community is divided into the schools of logicism, formalism and
intuitionism, the decision whether a deduction is proclaimed right or wrong
can depend on the adherence to a particular school, and it makes a difference
whether there is a mistake in Kneppler’s deduction or Strastil disagrees with his
fundamental understanding of what mathematics is.
As a logician wanting to determine the foundations of maths, for Ulrich
‘nothing was ever “correct”’, and he advocates going back to the ancient Greek
roots of logic before considering truth in maths (MwQ 939). Accordingly, his
response to Stastil’s question about Kneppler’s deduction is a shrug. The fact
that mathematicians can have disparate opinions or none at all questions the
possibility of truth in general, and the foundational queries in maths mirror

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doubts that animate what we could call ‘foundational research’ in Kakania:

only sure that it is not the country it used to be, Kakania sets up the Parallel
Campaign, a group with the aim to determine the essential being of Austrian
culture. The campaign is to define the country’s innermost character and
exhibit Kakania’s unified nature in a celebration planned to make 1918 ‘a
jubilee year for our Emperor of Peace’ (MwQ 79). The jubilee year is then
expected to free a unifying force and enable the modern world to find its true
being, but the futility of the campaign is immediately obvious to readers: the
year 1918 was hardly one of celebrating any ‘Emperor of Peace’, and equally
evidently The Man without Qualities does not achieve unity – it remains a
fragment.
Uncertainty in maths and the unsuitability of logical approaches to deter-
mine essential character in nature or Kakania have immediately moral con-
sequences in the case of Moosbrugger. Having murdered several women, he
waits for the authorities to agree whether to sentence him to death or declare
him insane. His diminished responsibility constitutes a problem for legal
categories, which allow either convicting culprits as guilty or declaring them
mentally incapacitated, and his case induces a re-examination of the interre-
lated notions of reason and responsibility. Ulrich’s father, a lawyer, explains
the connection: ‘as the intellect and reasoning power develops, the will comes
to dominate desires or instincts [. . .]. Any willed act is accordingly always the
result of prior thought and not purely instinctive’ (MwQ 343). The legal term
‘accountability’ shares an etymological root with ‘to count’; a relation that
Gwyneth Cliver is at risk of overstating when she declares that ‘the concept of
sanity grows directly out of at least arithmetical, if not mathematical, capac-
ity’.13 Nevertheless, the text does exploit the suggestive connection between
rationality, accountability and mathematics. It strengthens the shared relation
of law and maths to reason when a calculation exercise constitutes part of
the court’s evaluation of Moosbrugger’s accountability: while persons clearly
irresponsible of their actions are thought to have no grasp of mathematics and
‘when asked to multiply 7 times 7 stick out their tongue’, Moosbrugger’s abili-
ties cannot be dismissed as easily. Asked to add fourteen to fourteen, he replies:
‘Oh, about twenty-eight to forty.’ This ‘about’ gave them trouble, which
made Moosbrugger grin. It was really simple. He knew perfectly well
that you get twenty-eight when you go on from fourteen to another four-
teen; but who says you have to stop there? Moosbrugger’s gaze would
always range a little farther ahead, like that of a man who has reached
the top of a ridge outlined against the sky and finds that behind it there
are other, similar ridges. (MwQ 263, 259)
Moosbrugger’s idiosyncratic calculation clearly deviates from the traditional
rules, but it is not entirely wrong. Moreover, his inability to stop at a right

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answer points to the problems encountered in modern maths where attempts

to determine its correct basis give rise to ever further questions. The associa-
tion of Moosbrugger’s calculation with an unending succession of obstacles
thus implies that, since the grounds of maths itself are found to be elusive, it
is no longer an entirely reliable means to determine reason. Indeed, if in law
there is a belief that ‘between two contraries there is no third or middle state’,
this assumption is no longer a given in modern maths: logicists and formal-
ists do work from the premise that either a proposition is true or its negation
is true, but the school of intuitionism does not accept the so-called ‘law of
excluded middle’ as an axiom. Moosbrugger’s case thus relates mathematics,
accountability and reason on several levels: basic arithmetic is expected to
determine the offender’s accountability but reveals a more complex situation
than expected, and the controversy on possible states in between a binary
opposition compares to the foundational debate between different mathemati-
cal schools (MwQ 261). Since Moosbrugger’s condition of diminished respon-
sibility can be judged only once the grounds on which to determine reason are
agreed upon, his case also depends on foundational research in mathematics,
which thus becomes a vital moral task.

Epistemology: Between Mathematics and Mysticism

Set in a period when art and philosophy widely reflect diverging attraction
to science and technology and, on the other hand, to irrational, emotional
and supernatural perspectives, The Man without Qualities presents Ulrich as
having been born at a time of ‘growing rationality’ that gives rise to the idea
that ‘life could be lived with precision’ (MwQ 235, 265). While he continues
to value this rational approach to knowledge and life, in 1913 the majority of
Kakanians have turned to the pole of mysticism and explain all problems with
the rule of cold calculation. Described in an exaggerated tone as ‘screaming to
have their sores rubbed with soul’ and defining the soul as ‘that which sneaks
off at the mention of algebraic series’, these adherents to the pole of mysti-
cism and their simplified understanding of maths are clearly ridiculed (MwQ
269, 106). Sympathy lies with Ulrich’s response: he asks for ‘bringing together
again what had fallen apart’ in a synthesis of mathematics and mysticism
(MwQ 648). Musil discusses possibilities of countering diverging mindsets in
his non-fictional work too and coined the ungainly neologisms ‘the ratioïd’
and ‘the non-ratioïd’. The ratioïd denotes any knowledge ‘that science can
systematize, everything that can be summarized in laws and rules; primarily,
in other words, physical nature’.14 The non-ratioïd, by contrast, is that which
escapes systematisation and can be understood only in individual situations,
and it encompasses values, ideas and aesthetics. Musil’s unwieldy terminol-
ogy reveals his intention not simply to oppose a rational and a non-rational
domain or, indeed, mathematics and mysticism, but to contrast a sphere ruled

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by intellectual cognition and law and, on the other hand, a realm dominated by
immediate intuitive knowledge and not by rules but by exceptions. As we shall
see, maths in The Man without Qualities is precisely not an incarnation of the
ratioïd, but it involves both domains and can therefore lend itself to exploring
notions of synthesis.
In the early twentieth century Henri Bergson’s philosophy presents the
probably most popular criticism of the belief that science could measure
and explain all phenomena, and Musil names him – along with Friedrich
Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Otto von Bismarck – as exemplifying major trends
in modern thinking.15 While Musil stressed that he had not read Bergson’s
work and that similarities between their views could give only the appearance
of influence, Bergson’s popularity meant that Musil could not help being aware
of his focus on the inner self that apprehends experience through intuition and
whose spiritual essence escapes analytical examination. In a similar manner to
Musil, Bergson distinguishes between rational analysis rooted in the intellect
and focused on material reality, and the immediate and absolute knowledge of
a thing in intuition. The widespread reception of Bergson’s philosophy helps
appreciate that The Man without Qualities articulates a general feeling with
its opposition of maths and mysticism, but discussing Musil’s text in view of
Bergson also has another point: his writings allow us to see how the juxtapo-
sition connects with attributions of national characteristics during the First
World War. To repeat the quotation from the beginning of this chapter, The
Man without Qualities explores ‘the meaning of modern man’s existence’, but
aspects of Bergson’s writing alert us to the fact that Musil’s text also addresses
a specific situation and locates maths in between rival Prussian and Austrian
mindsets. Although the novel fragment charts only the pre-war situation, it
makes clear that the inability to synthesise opposed ratioïd and non-ratioïd
orientations will lead to war. In historical reality, the opposed perspectives
entered war propaganda through Bergson’s philosophy, and his thinking was
applied to military matters in sometimes peculiar ways: ‘The French military
took his ideas of an animating force in life – l’élan vital – to argue that spirit in
soldiers was ultimately more important than weapons’, Margaret MacMillan
reports.16 But with the little-known propagandist speech ‘The Meaning of the
War’, Bergson also participated directly in connecting his concepts of matter
and spirit to the warring parties.
Bergson delivered the speech as president of the Académie des sciences
morales et politiques in December 1914, and it is clearly aimed at strength-
ening the belief in the moral righteousness of the First World War and
France’s ability to win. Like Musil, he presents Otto von Bismarck, the ‘Iron
Chancellor’ who built up a powerful German Empire at the expense of Austria,
as the personification of a mindset: ‘There was a man on the spot in whom the
methods of Prussia were incarnate [. . .]. He had just removed the only obstacle

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modernism, fiction and mathematics

which could spoil his plan; he had got rid of Austria.’17 For Bergson, the sepa-
ration from Austria is not only of political significance, but it means severing
ties to its mentality and cementing Prussian characteristics of mechanical dis-
cipline, rigid method, automatism and precise information. The Man without
Qualities similarly presents Prussia as the epitome of intellectual discipline
and as contrasted to Austria, which has managed to preserve its feeling. Even
Arnheim, a German character modelled on the industrialist Walter Rathenau
and seemingly connecting economics and the soul, ultimately turns out to
reside in Vienna not to escape rationalism but to sell oil and guns. Where
Ulrich demands to use mathematical knowledge to live morally, Arnheim’s
preparations to benefit from war stand for merely materialistic exploitation of
science and technology. Bergson similarly singles out a Prusso-German inabil-
ity to respond to scientific progress with corresponding advance in the domain
of the soul:
Each new machine being for man a new organ – an artificial organ which
merely prolongs the natural organs – his body became suddenly and
prodigiously increased in size, without his soul being able at the same
time to dilate to the dimensions of his new body. From this dispropor-
tion there issued the problems, moral, social, international, which most
of the nations endeavoured to solve by filling up the soulless void in the
body politic by creating more liberty, more fraternity, more justice than
the world had ever seen. Now, while mankind laboured at this task of
spiritualization, inferior powers [. . . i.e. Prusso-Germany] plotted an
inverse experience for mankind. What would happen if the mechanical
forces, which science had brought to a state of readiness for the service
of man, should themselves take possession of man in order to make his
nature material as their own?18
In other words, where other European states work to spiritualise matter,
Prussia is guilty of mechanising spirit: throughout its history there is ‘the con-
tinuous clang of militarism and industrialism, of machinery and mechanism, of
debased moral materialism’.19 When Bergson ends by predicting the victory of
French spiritual principles over Prussia’s materialist doctrine, his speech rein-
forces the connection between the violent conflict of the First World War and
the irreconcilability of what Ulrich associates with mathematics and mysticism.
Given that the conflict between epistemological orientations threatens to
result in war, for The Man without Qualities the year 1913 is the last oppor-
tunity to mend the split. As Allen Thiher notices, it ‘sometimes appears,
indeed, that Ulrich actually wants to leave the modern world to go back to
the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century and to reunite the irrec-
oncilable epistemologies that emerged then’.20 The quest for reintegration
occupies Ulrich during his year-long holiday from life: roughly speaking, the

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first book presents his exploring possibilities of synthesis from a rational per-
spective, and book two focuses on his turn to mysticism. Both approaches fail.
Ulrich does experience synthesis in what he calls the Other Condition when
his sister Agathe, a female version of himself, makes him whole: he enjoys
‘ecstatic moments in which a split has not yet occurred’ and where morality
exists ‘without interruption’ (MwQ 931, 898). This synthesis cannot serve as
a model for moral living, however, since it entails withdrawing from reality
into an Other Condition and losing the possibility of effecting change. Ulrich’s
attempts to instil precision in the domain of feeling and thereby adjust emo-
tions to the progress made in science similarly fall short. In the first chapter, a
statistical assessment of a traffic accident allows bystanders to see the incident
as a necessary part of a general picture and relieves them from the need to
feel unsettled or touched. Transforming calamity into an event that takes an
‘entirely lawful and orderly’ place in an organised system, the use of science is
shown not to heighten the truth and freedom of feeling but to stifle it (MwQ
5). The subsequent chapter illustrates the similar failing of Ulrich’s employ-
ing maths to determine the right way of living: observing passers-by from his
window, he tries to calculate the effort of taking part in the flow of traffic and
estimates that, summed up, such everyday actions create more energy than
isolated extraordinary deeds. In the light of this everyday heroism, Ulrich
concludes the futility of his inborn wish to become an important man; that is,
his precise examination of life leads to a new evaluation of his ambitions. But
a little later Ulrich abandons mathematical measuring of actions since it leads
to favouring objective criteria over the imprecise values of real genius and
greatness.
The brief sketch above shows that, when The Man without Qualities intro-
duces maths as ‘the new method of thought itself [. . .] and the primal source
of an incredible transformation’, this does not refer to a superficial transfer
of mathematical precision to other domains (MwQ 35). Rather, one has to
‘take flight’ (MwQ 897) from the level that scientific knowledge has reached
and transcend it, so Ulrich understands, and Musil uses similar imagery in
an essay to make the point that there is a difference ‘whether one [. . .] as a
half-scientific person whose imagination is gripped by the pleasures of science
writes a pseudoscientific novel [. . .], or whether one really goes all the way
to the end of the trampoline of science and only then jumps’.21 It is in this
latter way that mathematics continues to play a decisive role in Ulrich’s moral
endeavour. More precisely, maths is part of a strategy to deal with the lack of
a central organising idea that afflicts Austrian culture and, on an individual
level, prevents Ulrich from settling on any personal quality. Peering through
her wedding ring, Ulrich’s friend Clarisse ponders: ‘if we could be cut open our
entire life might look like a ring, just something that goes around something.
[. . .] There’s nothing inside, and yet it looks as though that were precisely

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what matters most’ (MwQ 401). The imagery of the empty circle helpfully
illustrates that Ulrich’s attempt to live with mathematical precision fails to fuse
opposed parts of life at the centre of the ‘circle of questions [. . .]: “How should
I live?”’ (MwQ 972). But the circle also describes an alternative understand-
ing of the relation between antithetical positions: the binary opposites are not
taken as endpoints of a one-dimensional opposition that have to be merged in
the middle, but they take antipodal positions that are contrasted but also con-
nected by the circumference. The extremes of rational maths and mysticism
are joined through intermediate positions on the circle, enabling not a fusion
at the centre but a transition between the poles. In what follows, I take a closer
look at the presentation of maths in The Man without Qualities to argue that
it appears not solely as the incarnation of Prussian rationality, but as a much
more ambiguous domain that has ties to the domain of mysticism. In this dif-
ferent way of accounting for the ratioïd and the non-ratioïd, modern maths
proposes a response to disintegration that, so Musil suggests with the novel
fragment and elsewhere, constitutes a model for literary fiction.

Transitions: From Maths to Mysticism . . . and Back Again

Moosbrugger’s unusual but strangely accurate understanding of mathematics
is removed from rational grasp and brings maths closer to the sphere of his
madness or, more generally, the opposite of reason. This introduces a sense of
diminished rationality in maths, and The Man without Qualities more imme-
diately relates it to reason’s Others at the transition from the first to the second
book. The last chapter of book one, entitled ‘The Turning Point’, indicates a
change in Ulrich’s life, punctuated by his father’s death. Ulrich is relieved of
the ties with traditional morality that his father represents, and he also closes
the chapter of rational research regarding the question of the right way to live
when, shortly after the funeral at the beginning of book two, he finishes ‘his
interrupted mathematical investigation’ which ‘may well be the last piece of
work that reaches back to that time’ (MwQ 782, 783). In fact, it is implied
that rational investigation destroys the old order embodied by Ulrich’s father
and to leave the remnants in a mess: when, according to his father’s last wish,
the body is put ‘at the disposal of science; after which anatomical intervention
it was only natural to assume that the old gentleman had been hurriedly sewn
up again’, the unity of the world of the father is literally destroyed by science,
and the community of mourners at the funeral is not held together by an intact
entity, but ‘at the center of this great, beautiful, solemn pageantry, was an unti-
dily recobbled object’ (MwQ 772). The situation also illustrates the state of the
modern world which has lost the moral order formerly guaranteed by God the
Father and substitutes the empty place at the centre with a multitude of con-
tradictory ideas that do not fit together properly. Moreover, the concurrence of
the funeral and the completion of Ulrich’s last mathematical problem invites a

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comparison with the situation of maths where research has destroyed the body
of orthodox beliefs and left it in pieces fought over by different foundational
schools. When intuition plays an important role in the solution of Ulrich’s
mathematical problem, it signals the move from his rational investigation of
the right way to live to pursuing more mystical ways.
Working on his last mathematical question, Ulrich solves it helped by a flash
of intuition. The solution is thus not entirely part of the semicircle of reason,
but such intuitive answers are, Ulrich understands, ‘prompted by some stimu-
lus outside the scope of everyday scientific activity’ and are ‘never purely intel-
lectual’ (MwQ 748, 782). Nevertheless, the conclusions intuition arrives at are
no less true than rational deductions, and intuition can, indeed, even be more
accurate, the narrator suggests. Arnheim gives the example of playing billiards
to illustrate that intuition can answer problems that are irresolvable by precise
means: taking account of all the determining forces of a billiard shot results
in incalculable complexity: ‘we are abandoned by reason!’, Arnheim exclaims
(MwQ 622).22 In contrast, dismissing reason from the outset and hardly think-
ing about playing the ball, the task almost solves itself. His similarly intuitive
solution makes Ulrich experience that intuition may take precedence over
reason even in maths.
The implications of relating mathematics to intuition on a basic level are
profound, as the history of intuitionism and its role in the foundational debate
reveal. While logicism and formalism refer only to rational means to secure
the foundations of their field, intuitionism reacts against the implications of
a purely logical or formal basis, and its founder L. E. J. Brouwer claims that
‘mathematics is independent of the so-called logical laws (laws of reasoning or
of human thought)’.23 As Jeremy Gray explains, the foundational dispute thus
also revolves around the question ‘whether mathematics could be regarded as
rational’, and intuitionism implies its participation in the realm of reason’s
Others.24 As examined in more detail in the introductory chapter and the
discussion of Broch’s The Sleepwalkers, the different evaluations of the place
of reason in logicist-formalist and intuitionist mathematics have implications
for the notions of knowledge, truth and value, and they thus affect Ulrich’s
investigations into the right way to live. While formalists ‘stripped mathemat-
ics of any meaning at all’ and it consequently has no intrinsic truth or value,
intuitionism related it to reality via the human intuition, which then guarantees
its value in the world.25 The young Brouwer describes maths as a near-mystical
realm characterised by unity: ‘it develops from a single aprioristic basic intui-
tion, which may be called invariance in change as well as unity in multitude’.26
And he emphasises the relation to mysticism when explaining that ‘math-
ematical understanding is something like “yes” or “no” just like sleeping is
something like “yes” or “no”’ and that ‘[m]athematics justifies itself, needs no
deeper grounds than moral mysticism’.27

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The well-known case of Brouwer shows that the connection of mathematics

and mysticism in The Man without Qualities is not without precedent, but that
it negotiates questions that were being discussed in the scientific and public
sphere in the years prior to its publication. Moreover, when Ulrich’s mathe-
matical practice approaches the pole of mysticism and thus gets close to a state
of morality ‘without interruption’, this echoes Brouwer’s insistence on a moral
dimension of maths. He intended to call his doctoral dissertation ‘The Value of
Mathematics’ before settling on the title ‘On the Foundations of Mathematics’,
and he demanded to pursue it not for its own sake but in view of moral value:
‘Let the motivation behind mathematics be the craving for the good.’28 In The
Man without Qualities, Ulrich shares the intuitionist concern with value when
his mathematical work is ultimately directed at finding the right way to live,
and he consequently toys with the idea of transferring his intuitive insight
from maths to life. Yet, seeing that purely intuitive ideas are only an excuse
for ‘all those who could not justify what they did by logic’, he dismisses it as
a comprehensive means of explanation and once again concludes that neither
rational nor non-rational approaches are successful but that a synthesis of the
two poles of life is needed (MwQ 595). Significantly, however, Ulrich’s experi-
ence of non-rational solutions in maths reveals that the opposition between
the poles is not absolute but that maths itself can pass over into the mysti-
cal domain. In its intuitionist notion, maths inhabits a transitional position
between the extreme of reason and the pole of mysticism.
That maths takes an intermediate position between polar extremes informs
Cliver’s statement that ‘the engagement with mathematics seems to adversely
affect the sanity of Musil’s characters and in fact displaces the very distinc-
tion between the rational and the irrational’.29 Yet, the relation between
maths and the characters goes deeper than allowed for by Cliver. Clarisse
and Moosbrugger are not overexposed to maths, but it is their engagement
with underlying rational-logicist and intuitionist perspectives that encourages
their escapes into the unambiguousness of their own minds and appearances
of madness. As developed in relation to Broch’s The Sleepwalkers in Chapter
2, logicist-formalist and intuitionist perspectives are divided on the question
whether mathematics is to be seen as a language. Moosbrugger and Clarisse
address related positions in their respective language scepticism. Clarisse’s
words disintegrate into meaningless components: ‘My darling – my duck-
ling – my ling! Do you know what a ling is? I can’t work it out’ (MwQ 773).
Moosbrugger similarly despairs of the unreliability of words, even if not
reaching Clarisse’s eloquence: all the ‘words he did have were: hm-hm, uh-uh’
(MwQ 428). Nor does he engage in the rational dissection of language that
reveals its meaninglessness, but, in contrast, is overwhelmed by the significance
and power of words:

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It had happened that he said to a girl, ‘Your sweet rose lips,’ but suddenly
the words gave way at their seams and something upsetting happened:
[. . .] there was a rose sticking out of it [her mouth] on a long stem, and
the temptation to take a knife and cut it off, or punch it back into the
face, was overwhelming. (MwQ 259)
The quotation illustrates how ambiguous figural language aggravates the
incomprehensibility of the world and runs counter to Moosbrugger’s need for
clarity and unity that he achieves by killing the disconcerting Other, namely
women. We can note common structures between Clarisse’s breakdown of
language into its basic units, revealing its arbitrariness and inherent meaning-
lessness, and developments in formalist-logicist maths. And Moosbrugger’s
seeking refuge from the ambiguous nature of language in perfect mysticism
mirrors the intuitionist belief in the prelinguistic nature of meaning. There is
a risk of overstretching the connection between positions in the foundational
debate and the characters’ versions of modernist language scepticism. Yet, in
early drafts to the book, Musil more clearly presented Ulrich as a logician – a
plan he dropped because he found it too difficult to communicate – and in the
first chapter, entitled ‘Dream of a Logician’, connected maths and speechless-
ness when a man bites off a woman’s tongue. The draft thus more clearly
implicates maths in problems of communication and in the epistemological
crisis that derives from being unable to trust language, a major means of repre-
sentation. The wider implications of mathematical positions thus suggest that
it is not ‘an overzealous exploration of rational mathematics [that] ironically
leads to [characters’] flirtation with irrational thought’, but with a view to
intuitive, moral and prelinguistic aspects, The Man without Qualities presents
maths itself as moving away from the pole of pure reason and crossing over
into the realm of mysticism.30
Next to the crossover from the pole of mathematics as the extreme of reason
to the pole of mysticism, Musil’s novel fragment presents a corresponding
transition from the individuality of mysticism to the generality of maths. A
childhood memory shared by Agathe and Ulrich points to the opposition
of general maths and a concrete individual: when a house is being built in
the garden, the young siblings plan to smuggle slips of paper with beautiful
verses into the walls, but as they do not come up with a poem Agathe copies
an arithmetic sentence from her schoolbook and Ulrich writes ‘I am’ and
adds his name (MwQ 768). Apart from highlighting the opposed qualities of
impersonal maths and an individual name, the contributions also exemplify
a division inside modern maths: forced to act when the walls ‘were already
rising out of the foundations’, Agathe throws her arithmetic sentence into the
building pit and thus helps construct a building on ‘mathematical grounds’; in
contrast, when Ulrich slips his name into the wall, the individual is involved

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in the building – corresponding to the place of the human being in intuition-

ist maths (MwQ 767). Shortly after remembering his childhood decision to
become part of the construction, Ulrich translates the intuitionist impulse to
solving his mathematical problem.
The memory might inspire Ulrich’s solution by intuition, but, pitting against
each other the generality of mathematics and a concrete individual, it also leads
him to reconsider the convergence of maths and mysticism. That is, immedi-
ately after finding an intuitive solution to his last mathematical problem,
Ulrich reminds himself that progress does not rely on the inner qualities of an
individual: ‘what it finally amounts to is something remarkably impersonal
[. . .] everything serves an evolution that is both unfathomable and inescap-
able’ (MwQ 784). Having accepted that maths remains impersonal despite the
intuitive part in his final exercise and does therefore not lend itself to making
a personal impact on the world, he plunges himself into the city crowd where
he comes to feel that individual achievement is not only insignificant in science
but that in general ‘it is not oneself that matters but only this mass’ (MwQ
785). Individual characteristics dissolve in the face of the multitude which
can display completely different qualities. The narrator muses: ‘Water, for
instance, is less of a pleasure in excessive than in small doses, by exactly the
difference between drowning and drinking’ (MwQ 321–2). In a world where
personal destiny is, as Ulrich feels, displaced by collective processes, a general
meaning might emerge from statistical description. Agathe even suggests statis-
tical order as a means of transcendence: ‘wouldn’t it be lovely to be dissolved
by statistics? [. . .] It’s been such a long time since love could do it!’ (MwQ
785). Walking among the city crowd, Ulrich indeed feels that being part of an
impersonal mass could include one into a greater significance. Instead of the
individual, the average or most probable would carry meaning. Probability
becomes a key concept in the chapters not published in Musil’s lifetime, where
Ulrich proposes that the advance of the average person means that ‘gradually
“probable man” and “probable life” would emerge in place of “true” man and
life’.31 Considering the traffic accident in the very first chapter, however, where
the bystanders come to think of the victim not in terms of his true life or death
but in relation to accident probabilities, it remains doubtful whether the sig-
nificance of statistics is a satisfactory alternative to dissolving in love. It is not
a mathematical way to achieve the Other Condition, then, but – connecting
random single cases and a general order, the meaningful and the meaningless
– statistics constitutes a transformative step between the realms of mysticism
and rational maths.
The presentation of transitional states breaks down the binary opposi-
tion between mathematics and mysticism, and a potential synthesis has to
take account not only of the poles but also of the crossovers between them.
As we have seen, considering The Man without Qualities in the historical

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mathematical context shows that it is not primarily characters’ exposure to

maths that relates it to the irrational, but that mathematics itself encompasses
non-rational elements. It is not solely part of the pole of rationality but also
participates in at least two states of transition: mathematical exactitude draws
on intuitive and mystical elements, while linking individual cases to the regu-
larity of a general law marks the corresponding transition from mysticism to
rational maths, or, in Musil’s less memorable terms, from the non-ratioïd to
the ratioïd. Given that maths features both as the extreme of reason and in
transitional states, it does not lend itself to a synthesis of the poles. Rather, its
modern development suggests that it could be used as a method of answering
the circle of questions ‘How should I live?’ from various positions – that is, it
responds to the circle of questions with a circle of answers. As the next sec-
tions develop, it is in this less unequivocal way that modern maths works as
a model for moral living and writing, and introduces in the domains of ethics
and aesthetics an appreciation of the vague.

Transitions in Literature: Between Mathematics and Mysticism

When The Man without Qualities presents mathematics as taking different
positions between analytical exactitude and mystical states outside of lan-
guage, it speaks to Megan Quigley’s reassessment of the influences on literary
modernism: she aims to rectify the impression that literary modernism was
shaped more by the mathematised language of analytic philosophy than by
pragmatism’s ‘re-instatement of the vague’.32 As discussed in Chapter 2, the
introduction of mathematical symbols in analytic philosophy, for example by
Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, answers the wish for concrete, precise
language in philosophical reasoning. Russell defines the ‘process of sound
philosophizing’ as ‘passing from those obvious, vague, ambiguous things,
that we feel quite sure of, to something precise, clear, definite’.33 In his talk
‘Vagueness’, he contrasts common speech with the more precise language of
logic and his own attempt to invent ‘a special language with a view to avoiding
vagueness’.34 Many modernist writers celebrated precise expression, among
them T. S. Eliot who, as mentioned in the last chapter, lauded Russell and
Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica as ‘perhaps a greater contribution to our
language than [. . .] to mathematics’.35 Against this tradition in literary criti-
cism, Quigley explains modernist experimentation focusing on authors who
embrace ‘the elusive and the unfixable’ and revel ‘in “psychological commen-
taries,” indecisiveness in plot and action, and “absolute” vagueness in style’.36
Where she explores vagueness relating to subjective perception in works by
Virginia Woolf, James Joyce’s verbal punning, and Henry James’s engage-
ment with his brother William James’s pragmatist philosophy, the opening
of The Man without Qualities presents itself as a direct challenge to Russell’s
‘process of sound philosophizing’: the first paragraph moves from the technical

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l­anguage of a meteorological description to the unspecific phrase ‘It was a fine

day’. To most readers, the latter expression is more useful, and the novel frag-
ment thus immediately introduces the productiveness of vagueness and quali-
fies Dr Strastil’s later complaint that one cannot express oneself unequivocally
in ordinary language. From its beginning, then, Musil’s text presents vagueness
as a potentially practical choice and vindicates trust in its usefulness.
Pragmatism, with its focus on the practical effects of science, language or
beliefs, is intimately connected to vagueness. Indeed, pragmatism can be seen
as the opposite pole of foundational research and its aim for certainty: it is ‘the
attitude of looking away from first things, principles, “categories,” supposed
necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts. So
much for the pragmatic method!37 The author of this description, William
James, is one of the founding fathers of pragmatism and uses vagueness as a
tool in his philosophy. He argues that vagueness in language adequately rep-
resents a vague reality and accordingly aims for a ‘re-instatement of the vague
to its proper place in our mental life’.38 As even precise means of representa-
tion could only record the vagueness of reality, James shifts his focus from the
conditions of language to its effects:
You must bring out of each word its practical cash-value, set it at work
within the stream of your experience. It appears less a solution, then,
than as a program for more work, and more particularly as an indication
of the ways in which existing realities may be changed.39
As The Man without Qualities suggests in its opening paragraph, the ‘cash-
value’ or effects of words might be greater if using non-specific language. We
will come back to the metaphor of the cash-value below and relate it to the
notion that fictional assets open up scope for changing existing realities. But,
before turning to pragmatist trust in fictional credit, a brief look at the presen-
tation of literature in The Man without Qualities reveals how its various posi-
tions between the epistemological opposites mirror modern maths’s circling
around the poles and questioned impact on the world.
Just as Ulrich employs mathematics to determine the right way of living, he
considers the possibility of living ‘like a character in a book’ and thus achiev-
ing an ethical existence (MwQ 646). This aesthetic strategy emerges as far
from clear-cut when, like maths, literature takes various positions between the
epistemological extremes. Maybe least surprisingly, the novel fragment pre-
sents literature as a means to express individuality and apprehend unity that is
associated with the pole of mysticism: the poet is presented as ‘the voice of the
inner life’, who feels himself to participate in a ‘great irrational power’ and to
be the medium of ‘the mysterious whole’ (MwQ 323). Ulrich voices criticism
of this notion of literature when complaining about the ‘emotional excess’
of writing and its inadequate response to a time dominated by scientific and

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technological progress (MwQ 1042). Like maths that comes to be associated

with Moosbrugger’s madness, literature threatens to tip over into dangerous
irrationality; for example when literature relates to Moosbrugger through the
figure of the philosopher Dr Meingast. Where Moosbrugger attains a quasi-
mystical feeling of unity through sexual offence and murder, Meingast, whose
writings are hoped to make the world into a mystical whole, is compared to an
exhibitionist: Clarisse calls an exhibitionist a ‘swine’ and Meingast connects
this to his own behaviour and Clarisse’s identical exclamations in their youths
(MwQ 857). Associated with Moosbrugger via the sexual offender, Meingast’s
writing towards a mystical whole is suggested to result in killing the Other that
threatens to destabilise his unambiguous worldview. The capacity of literature
to get closer to unity and inner order thus also makes it vulnerable to insanity
and disconnect from the world. At the same time, the proposed introduction to
rationalise handwriting with the shorthand system Oehl and the ‘“Thirty-five
Mile” poem’ that celebrates the flight over the English Channel at thirty-five
miles per hour constitute merely rational responses to the reality of the period’s
scientific progress and disregard the moral request to change the world for the
better (MwQ 436).
While literature at the poles of mathematics and mysticism appears flawed,
writing also marks the transition between general order and the individual
views related to mysticism. Narrative as the ‘thread of the story’ of life can be
a primary means to bring the chaos of reality into a ‘unidimensional order, as
a mathematician would say’ (MwQ 709, 708–9). But maths no longer proves
reliable and the ordering function of narrative similarly fails: the contradictory
pre-war society is no longer narrative, and the thread of the story manages
to order only the individual domain. Correspondingly, writing can turn the
individual into the general when it establishes a distance from life. Ulrich holds
that, if people lived life in an aesthetic manner, ‘more or less as they read’,
this would give them the critical distance necessary to change it (MwQ 399).
Yet, completely living life as art entails an inability to interact with reality: the
exhibitionist is unable to talk to the girl he observes, since ‘[h]is imagination,
ready to conjure up any possibility that could even be suggested by a woman,
became fearful and awkward when confronted with the natural possibility of
admiring this defenseless little creature’ (MwQ 860).40 And, more drastically,
Ulrich understands the suggestion that ‘our existence should consist wholly of
literature’ to imply that ‘reality ought to be done away with’ (MwQ 397, 396).
Modelling life on literature thus does achieve a distance from individual life,
but the aesthetic detachment detrimentally affects the ability to change reality.
In the metaliterary discussions in The Man without Qualities, writing takes
on various positions on the circle that connects the poles of mathematics and
mysticism. Taking positions between the rational and the irrational, the indi-
vidual and the general, the exact and the vague, literature does not emerge as

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a synthesis of fundamental elements of life but, like maths, as a way to explore

aspects from different perspectives. Presented as part of the poles as well as
of transitional states, and subject to pragmatic considerations of its effects on
the world, the epistemological and moral potential of literature mirrors that
of maths, and solutions developed in relation to mathematics reflect back on
fiction. Accordingly, the next section takes a closer look at how pragmatist
dealing with vagueness in maths informs Musil’s vision of modernist literature,
before the last section turns to examining, in the light of the mathematical dis-
cussion, essayism as a literary answer to the modern circling around opposed
tendencies.

Mathematics and Pragmatist Use of Possibilities

With a focus on the practical cash-value of words by which reality may be
changed, William James considers the possibilities language opens up rather
than how it represents reality. The Man without Qualities similarly lauds what
it calls a sense of possibility over a sense of reality and uses monetary imagery
to stress that the same amount of possibility opens up vastly different options:
‘To try to readily distinguish the realists from the possibilists, just think of a
specific sum of money. Whatever possibilities inhere in, say, a thousand dollars
are surely there independently of their belonging or not belonging to someone’
(MwQ 11). Possibilities remain the same whatever the balance in the bank
account, and they have, to use James’s term, ‘practical cash-value’:
the sense of possibility could be defined outright as the ability to conceive
of everything there might be just as well, and to attach no more impor-
tance to what is than to what is not. The consequences of so creative a
disposition can be remarkable. (MwQ 11)
The sense of possibility dominates the novel when Ulrich contemplates various
approaches to life during his year-long holiday, and it permeates the text down
to the level of grammatical structure when the subjunctive of possibility is the
dominant mood. Modern maths is part of this presentation as it encourages the
sense of possibility: not directly referring to the physical world, it opens up a
vast domain of alternative structures. In his study on mathematics and modern-
ism, Herbert Mehrtens explicitly refers to the sense of possibility in The Man
without Qualities and characterises modern maths in young Ulrich’s terms as
quasi set in the subjunctive.41 As maths exemplifies foundational research as
well as the opposite focus on possibility and its creative consequences, further
examining its role in Musil’s writing can shed light on modernism’s oscillation
between the certainty of precise methods and trust in productive vagueness.
When talking about the creative potential of possibilities, it is not a big step
to consider it in relation to fiction. Musil encountered the idea that math-
ematical structures constitute fictions when writing his doctoral thesis on Ernst

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Mach, a physicist and philosopher whose work was also known to the found-
ers of pragmatism. Mach is a precursor to constructivist approaches to science
and for example holds that the mathematical concept of the continuum is a
useful fiction and should be employed as such: ‘There can be no objection to
such a system, considered as a fiction merely.’42 When Mach suggests to use
a convenient fiction as long as it does not contradict experience, his position
and Musil’s evaluation of it can appear surprising if we expect a stereotypi-
cal division between a scientist’s view on truth and a literary perspective. As
Thiher summarises: ‘the writer defends the truth of reality against the scientific
epistemologist for whom the knowledge of laws or recurring functions is essen-
tially a fiction created by autonomous scientists’.43 The potential fictionality
of maths is not a focus of Musil’s dissertation, even though he was deeply
involved with mathematics at the time. In later essays and his creative work,
however, Musil engages with the possible relation of maths to fiction and the
epistemological and ethical consequences. He thus participates in a discussion
that animates both the sciences and the humanities in the decades around
1900. To bring up again some positions that are more closely examined in the
introductory chapter: on the mathematical side, Georg Cantor puts freedom at
the heart of maths, Henri Poincaré states that ‘mathematical reasoning has of
itself a kind of creative virtue’, and in the non-mathematical sphere Friedrich
Nietzsche, Ernst Cassirer, Oswald Spengler and Hans Vaihinger engage with
ideas of employing maths as a means to turn incomprehensible reality into
understandable fictions.44
Musil’s essay ‘The Mathematical Man’ from 1913 explores relations
between maths, fiction and literature in a humorous and exaggerated tone.
Here, too, maths exhibits what in The Man without Qualities is called the
sense of possibility: it is described as an ‘ideal intellectual apparatus whose task
and accomplishment are to anticipate in principle every possible case’ (MM
40).45 The hyperbolic speaker, not to be confused with Musil himself, explains
that although maths conceives cases other than reality, one of its ‘remarkable’
consequences is that it creates life: ‘All the life that whirls about us, runs, and
stops is not only dependent on mathematics for its comprehensibility, but
has effectively come into being through it and depends on it for its existence’
(MM 41). Like The Man without Qualities, the essay presents maths not only
as the pinnacle of reason but depicts it as more ambiguous, as also relying
on non-rational elements and suffering from questionable foundations. And
since maths is used extremely widely, from calculations in building houses and
machinery to predicting the rise in populations, problems in its foundations
threaten the very basis of existence:

[T]he pioneers of mathematics formulated usable notions of certain

principles that yielded conclusions, methods of calculation, and results,

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and these were applied by the physicists to obtain new results; and finally
came the technicians, who often took only the results and added new
calculations to them, and thus the machines arose. And suddenly, after
everything had been brought into the most beautiful kind of existence,
the mathematicians [. . .] came upon something wrong in the fundamen-
tals of the whole thing that absolutely could not be put right. They actu-
ally looked all the way to the bottom and found that the whole building
was standing in midair. But the machines worked! We must assume from
this that our existence is a pale ghost; we live it, but actually only on the
basis of an error without which it would not have arisen. (MM 41–2)
Despite its crisis, maths does not lose its affinity with precision or reason,
but, as Justice Kraus points out, in ‘The Mathematical Man’ it appears as
‘the epitome of rationality and simultaneously a structure without a base. It is
systematic and anti-systematic at the same time.’46 Moreover, notwithstanding
the sense of crisis and the ‘ghostly existence’ that originates from foundational
questions, Musil’s humorous essay arrives at a pragmatic celebration of the still
useful mathematical methods. These might have been developed on an erro-
neous basis but nevertheless enable productive developments: maths ‘makes
it possible under favourable circumstances to perform in a few moments an
operation that one could in principle never complete, like the enumeration of
an infinite series’, and it gives rise to machines and other aspects of life that
‘in principle’ could not arise out of thin air (MM 40). The ambiguity of maths
does not injure its results, then, and mathematicians’ continued belief in their
field is praised as an exemplary response to modern uncertainty.
‘The Mathematical Man’ presents mathematicians as responding to foun-
dational problems with a pragmatist focus on its productive consequences
– that is, they face the crisis in their field by holding on to its achievements
and continuing to use a challenged but still operational system. The conclu-
sion of the essay establishes this as a model for literature. By shifting attention
to the questioned but useful tool of reason, the period’s dull literature, which
the essay describes as exclusively focused on feeling, could find invigoration:
‘in their field they [mathematicians] do what we ought to be doing in ours.
Therein lies the significant lesson and model of their existence; they are an
analogy for the intellectual of the future’ (MM 42). The mathematical model
that Musil’s essay devises is not primarily one of precision, then, but it is led by
pragmatic considerations: its uncertain foundations are epistemologically and
ethically acceptable since the system continues to work and sustain life. Here,
maths, the ideally precise language of analytic philosophy, features as a model
for pragmatically embracing uncertainty.

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Mathematics and Trust in Fiction

That ‘The Mathematical Man’ advocates following mathematicians’ contin-
ued trust in their field despite questioning its foundations illustrates, quite
literally, the ‘fundamental importance of trust to an understanding of modern
societies’ (my emphasis).47 John Attridge argues that ‘the moment of cultural
modernism more generally, [was] characterized by a concern with the question
of trust, and especially with how trust, like “human character”, might be said
to have changed, and even to have entered a period of crisis’.48 Where Musil’s
essay depicts confidence in maths as necessary to creating life, Attridge cites
Georg Simmel as an early twentieth-century view on the importance of trust
in society. Like James, Simmel notes the openness of possibilities that money
encapsulates – superficially a number on a piece of paper, money has ‘as its
content the most objective practices, the most logical, purely mathematical
norms, the absolute freedom from everything personal’.49 The closeness to
objectivity, logic and maths does not guarantee its truth and value, however;
money works on trust: the trust that it can be spent later at the same value.
Early copper coins from Malta that could be exchanged for real silver pieces
acknowledge that the value of the coins depends on their acceptance: they
bear the inscription non aes sed fides – ‘not money but trust’. Simmel uses this
example to illustrate a more general need for trust in society:

Without the general trust that people have in each other, society itself
would disintegrate, for very few relationships are based entirely upon
what is known with certainty about another person, and very few rela-
tionships would endure if trust were not as strong as, or stronger than,
rational proof or personal observation.50

Simmel does not argue here that maths relies on faith, as Musil’s essay does,
but equating the strengths of confidence and rational proof he contends the
insufficiency of any purely intellectual evidence. In both Musil’s and Simmel’s
views, the possibilities that ultimately enable life depend on trust and a crisis
of trust threatens existence.
In modern societies that see the questioning of traditional certainties, trust is
no longer a given but in need of justification itself – it enters a period of crisis.
Pragmatist philosophy provides such justification by arguing that the produc-
tive effects of placing trust in systems warrants doing so in the first place.
So, the advice in ‘The Mathematical Man’ to continue making use of maths
introduces a view that finds clear expression in one of the key texts of early
pragmatist philosophy, William James’s Pragmatism (1907):

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts
and beliefs ‘pass’, so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes

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pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-
face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses
like a financial system with no cash-basis whatever.51

James here explains that truth relies on a credit system and only, we could add
taking up his imagery from an earlier quotation, has ‘cash-value’ if it is trusted.
Truth depends on confidence as it rests on inaccessible foundations, but trust in
it is warranted in James’s view, since, theoretically, it could be verified, even if
this is not possible in practice. This notion of secure credit ultimately relies on
a gold standard – that is, it resembles a monetary system in which the value of
a banknote is directly linked to a gold reserve for which it could, theoretically,
be exchanged. In contrast to James’s trust in at least theoretical verifiability, in
Musil’s essay there is no far-off point at which face-to-face correspondence still
holds, and the modern mathematical man has to hold on to beliefs even though
they no longer pass unchallenged. As Rob Hawkes points out, it is precisely the
absence of such stable grounds that ‘makes trust so crucial. Under the condi-
tions of modernity, we cannot know, so we have to rely instead on trust’.52
Musil, Simmel and James all identify trust as a way to deal with the epis-
temological crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, Musil
does not agree with the implication of James’s view that trust could take the
place of knowledge, and neither do ‘The Mathematical Man’ and The Man
without Qualities point to ultimately secure grounds of truths. In Musil’s texts,
confidence does not entail abandoning foundational research, but trust is com-
bined with persistent questioning of the grounds and limits of knowledge. It is
such critical trust that modern mathematicians exemplify in Musil’s essay: they
examine their field as well as maintain confidence in reason, acknowledge that
they stand in mid-air but continue their work. As Cornelia Blasber emphasises,
keeping the problematical foundations in view is a moral quality for Musil:

Musil considered mathematicians the pathbreakers of a new epistemol-

ogy because they seemed to pair a sharp intellect with an extraordinary
moral quality, namely, the courage of wanting to penetrate the founda-
tions of their own science and the rational worldview even at the risk of
undermining their own foundations.53

Only in combination with a reflection on the conditions and limits of knowl-

edge-making does trust in reason make mathematics and its practitioners
exemplars of the right way to live. The modern crisis of trust thus partly turns
into trust in crisis – both in the sense of maintaining confidence in times of
crisis but also of trusting in the value of disturbing foundational questioning.
By paradoxically joining critical examination and trust in the usefulness of
its outcomes, modern maths connects tendencies respectively associated with
analytic philosophy and pragmatism.

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To some degree, The Man without Qualities is a literary implementation

of the mathematical model developed in ‘The Mathematical Man’ and its
negotiation of foundational and pragmatist orientations. Where, in the essay,
confidence in the usefulness of reason does not entail abandoning foundational
research, the novel fragment similarly advocates rational examination, empha-
sising its role again and again in various responses to the absence of central
ideas in Kakania and Ulrich’s personal life. Similar to his aim of connecting
‘mathematics and mysticism’, Ulrich attempts to join knowledge with faith
since he understands that ‘people’s goodness and beauty come from what they
believe, not from what they know’ (MwQ 897). The relation between rational
knowledge and faith, which Ulrich also calls ‘knowledgeable intuition’, has
to be re-established in the early twentieth century (MwQ 898). He learns,
however, that as in the case of maths and mysticism, a synthesis is not prac-
ticable, and that his theoretical analysis is stifling and a simple man far more
likely to succeed.
When opposing knowledge and faith, stifling theory and enabling prac-
tice, The Man without Qualities portrays trust without simultaneous critical
examination in decidedly negative terms. In the Moosbrugger case, while the
scientific enquiry of psychiatrists describes Moosbrugger’s mental state in
detail but reaches no practicable conclusion, juridical precision works with
‘the imaginary concept of cumulative law’ and, disregarding Moosbrugger’s
actual mental state, renders possible a verdict based on the fiction of absolute
responsibility (MwQ 267). Law here exemplifies the ratioïd domain where all
cases fit rules, while for psychologists every case is an exception. The opposed
responses also denote the extremes of absolute trust in an imaginary concept,
namely law, and, on the other hand, utmost focus on critical examination.
Ulrich is convinced that practicality will ultimately decide Moosbrugger’s
fate and result in his execution, suggesting that people dispense with critical
evaluation of the reality of facts in favour of the feasibility granted by trusting
fiction even in matters of life and death. Next to leading to ethical quandaries,
trust and practicality can also, and maybe surprisingly, perpetuate stagnation,
as it does in the case of the Parallel Campaign. On the one hand, the Parallel
Campaign develops quickly even without an actual aim, that is, without
having determined a fundamental idea that expresses the essence of the epoch.
Documents are collected and increase in number, so that Count Leinsdorf
considers the Campaign to be progressing well. But while propositions are
amassed, their value cannot be judged until the essential aim of the Campaign
is settled. Suggestions are therefore marked ‘Fi’ for being filed for later deci-
sion. Leinsdorf praises the technique of filing when it averts an impasse in the
Campaign’s meetings: a member ‘has come up with a really saving idea; we’ve
decided to continue this evening’s meeting another time’ (MwQ 1130). As
‘one of the basic formulas of the structure of life’, ‘Fi’ does not enable action

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but leaves worrying pragmatic gaps (MwQ 243). Since the Count’s comment
closes the second book, it also emerges as a formula of the novel fragment itself
and thus as a literary manifestation of mathematicians’ holding fast to their
field despite foundational concerns. Whereas Leinsdorf’s naive belief is ridi-
culed, with its self-ironic meta-comment the novel fragment takes on modern
maths’s strategy of critical trust: building on faith while simultaneously exam-
ining its own conditions.
While The Man without Qualities is critical of unlimited trust, its waning
emerges as a main problem of the period in crisis. Like Simmel and James,
Musil connects the notion of trust with the concept of credit and explores the
modern period as a time that does not only struggle with confidence in any
concrete belief but suffers a loss of trust itself. A production credit allows real
transactions to be performed with fictive capital, despite missing funds, and
pre-war Kakania adapts the religious phrase ‘Credo ut intelligam’ – ‘I believe so
that I may understand’ – to the time with the translation: ‘O Lord, please grant
my spirit a production credit!’ (MwQ 575). While its citizens acknowledge
that belief is necessary for spiritual growth and for any action to be performed
successfully, Kakania is unable to believe in itself and has lost confidence in
an enabling fiction. It is ‘the first country in our present historical phase from
which God withdrew His credit’: ‘So what has been lost? Something imponder-
able. An omen. An illusion’ (MwQ 575, 56). In other words, in a credit crunch
of belief in pre-war Kakania, the country does not lack anything concrete but
the loss of fictive capital renders it unable to act. A comparison with Bergson’s
similar application of economic terms to a rationalised country clarifies that
the loss of trust entails both material and spiritual dimensions. In a short article
that Bergson wrote a month before his propagandist speech discussed above
and on a similar topic, he sets out the economic and spiritual loss of credit
as a cause of Germany’s inevitable downfall: Germany ‘has money, but her
credit is falling, and one does not see where she is to borrow’.54 While Bergson
begins with the notion of financial and material credit, he extends his concept
to the moral sphere. The two connect when Germany’s moral force ‘is only the
confidence which her material force inspires in her’, and it is therefore limited
to that material force and cannot replenish itself.55 Opposed to Germany and
its self-imposed moral blockade that hinders the emergence of new life, France
can rely on the sympathy of other countries and renews its moral force by
finding value outside the material. That the country keeps ‘her credit intact’
will be the source of France’s ultimate victory, so the article concludes.56 In
Musil’s and Bergson’s writings, then, credit and the illusion on which it is
based are central to the reality of a nation’s disintegration or survival. The loss
of credit, that is, the loss of trust in a fictive element, leads to stasis and defeat.
As we have seen in ‘The Mathematical Man’, Musil uses maths as an area
in which critical trust averts stagnation. Echoing the essay, the narrator in

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The Man without Qualities presents maths as a field that ‘sometimes resorts
to the absurd in order to arrive at the truth’ and whose non-realistic elements
nevertheless have cash-value in the world: scientists come up with hypotheses
and mathematical symbols and ‘the technicians use all these fictions to build
up a world of new things’ (MwQ 826, 553). Ultimately based on mathemati-
cal fictions, the physical world cannot work without trust in the validity of
the imaginary. More broadly, when rationalisation can be grasped in terms
of failing spiritual credit, the fictive nature of this loss – a loss of imaginary
rather than real funds – suggests that the truth of fiction in general might be
at stake. Attridge sets out: ‘questions of trust intersect with the main lines of
modernist culture, focusing in particular on language, complexity, sincerity
and fictional truth’.57 Regarding fictional truth, the literary critic I. A. Richards
reconsiders the value of literary fiction in his 1926 Principles of Literary
Criticism and manifesto Poetry and Science, where he contrasts ‘the scientific
use of language’ in empirical writing with fiction’s ‘emotive use of language’
that is not verifiable.58 But many modernist writers claim their fictions to be
true precisely because they do not try to get close to empirical reality and
illustrate flawed individual perspectives and inner worlds. The notion that a
fictive or absurd element could allow approaching and impacting on the world
animates modernist writers to abandon conventions of literary realism, and a
number of authors, including Musil, consciously aim to redefine fiction as a
moral force for change. As we have seen, for Musil this redefinition of fiction
is intimately bound up with modern mathematics, not least because it answers
to two major, and seemingly opposed, instances of modern crisis: the failing
of reason and the loss of trust. Paradoxically combining critical questioning
of its foundations and confidence in its usefulness, modern maths connects
the approaches of analytic philosophy and outcome-focused pragmatism.
The next section analyses how in its form The Man without Qualities reflects
simultaneous examination of its conditions and trust in the credit of fiction,
thus translating the model of modern mathematics into literary aesthetic.

Aesthetic Transitions; or Essayism: Running in Circles

The above referred to Ulrich and Agathe’s shared childhood experience of
planning to write poems and, unable to do so, putting an arithmetic sentence
and Ulrich’s name on two slips of paper, and it related the episode to formalist
and intuitionist tendencies in maths. On a broader level, the idea of compos-
ing a literary piece splits into a general mathematical part and an individual
component, and the possibility of combining both aspects in literature is
implied. Explicitly in its discussion and also through its style, The Man without
Qualities suggests essayism as a literary form in which such a combination can
be achieved. Essayism has received intense scholarly attention, but it is never-
theless worth reiterating key characteristics of the essay upon which Musil’s

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concept draws. An essay is a literary form that does not attempt to provide a
full picture of an issue but examines it under specific aspects: ‘A composition
of moderate length on any particular subject, [. . .] a composition more or less
elaborate in style, though limited in range.’59 Ulrich’s idea of essayism as a
strategy of life proposes to examine the right way of living in the manner of a
literary essay, considering an issue from several perspectives without encom-
passing it entirely. Although partly following the literary model, the novel
fragment emphasises that the ‘translation of “essay” as “attempt”’ or ‘trial,
testing, proof; experiment’ invokes scientific methods and the mathematical
examination of possibilities (MwQ 273).60 Drawing on roots of essayism in
science and in literature, the essayist is neither a scientist ‘who wants the truth’
nor a writer ‘who wants to give free play to his subjectivity’ but a man ‘who
wants something in between’ (MwQ 274). The Man without Qualities displays
characteristics of essayism when Ulrich examines aspects of life and morality
from rational and mystical perspectives and his views are further explored
through reflections in other characters. The novel fragment is an amalgama-
tion of perspectives and alternatives to the point that, as Thiher notes, ‘[a]t
times the novel ceases to be a narrative to become something like an encyclo-
pedia that includes a series of essays’.61 In a metafictional comment, the narra-
tor acknowledges: ‘The story of this novel amounts to this, that the story that
ought to be told in it is not told’ (notes 1760).
In his non-fictional work, Musil describes essayism as a never complete
method of reaching ‘the strictest form attainable in an area where one cannot
work precisely’.62 He here exhibits an attitude that, in the quotation at the
beginning of this chapter, Broch calls ‘rational writing’: the aim for precision.
At the same time, Musil acknowledges that vagueness is a necessary charac-
teristic both of the problem and the form in which it is discussed. And, as
the opening paragraph of The Man without Qualities shows, vague everyday
language can have a clearer meaning and thus a greater cash-value than precise
scientific expression. Indeed, Musil’s focus is not primarily on rational writing
as Broch claims, but on literature’s potential for change that derives from ‘a
combination of exact and inexact, of precision and passion’ (MwQ 272). The
relation to reality and impact on it is crucial, as Musil emphasises in his non-
fictional work on essayism:
It takes its form and method from science, its matter from art. [. . .] [I]t
proceeds from facts, like the natural sciences [. . .]. Except that these facts
are not generally observable, and also their connections are in many
cases only a singularity. [. . .] But the essay does present evidence, and
investigates.63
That the essay ‘proceeds from facts’ meets Ulrich’s concern for reality and a
critical evaluation of it; even in the first book, he contemplates ‘with revul-

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sion’ that purely logical thinking resembles ‘piling one ladder upon another, so
that the topmost rungs teetered far above the level of natural life’ (MwQ 649,
648–9). As Musil formulates elsewhere: ‘If I want to have a worldview, then I
must view the world. That is, I must establish the facts.’64 Crucially, then, trust
in a system is not to replace facts but it is part of critically determining them.
Critical trust, based on a methodology of constant questioning, is never to lose
sight of its relevance to reality.
The concept of essayism is part of the level of plot when Ulrich discusses it,
of the level of form when The Man without Qualities can be characterised as
an unfinished succession of essays on the overarching topic of how to live in
modern reality, and of the metaliterary level of aesthetic reflection on modern-
ist responses to the challenges of the time. To some degree, essayism emerges
as a literary answer to the exemplary behaviour of modern mathematicians
that ‘The Mathematical Man’ humorously advertises, and it also constitutes an
ethical approach: ‘For me, ethics and aesthetics are associated with the word
essay’, Musil explains.65 As in literature, essayism in the ethical domain does
not advocate any particular action but continuous exploration. Using maths
as an example of a method of exploration rather than in terms of content, The
Man without Qualities employs it in a pragmatist manner. As William James
sets out, pragmatism works with theories to increase possibilities and openness
rather than to narrow down an answer:
Theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we
can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occa-
sion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our
theories, limbers them up and sets each one at work.66
‘Unstiffened’ by pragmatic acceptance of uncertainty, maths becomes a model
not only of exactitude but also of vagueness, and in this paradoxical double-
function it serves to inspire the critical trust needed to adapt epistemology,
ethics and aesthetics to a time of rapid change. Maths thus takes on a medi-
ating or bridging function between seeming opposites, not least between the
domains of science and literary fiction. As the symbolic extreme of rationality,
maths is a shorthand for one of the two cultures, but it also emerges as a way
of transitioning between these and thus connecting them. Thus, the seemingly
straightforward advice to literary writers to see in mathematicians’ continued
trust in reason a ‘significant lesson and model of their existence’ yields to a
much more ambiguous mathematical model in The Man without Qualities:
taking on diverse positions at the opposed poles as well as at transitions on the
circumference, maths appears not as a precise but as a vague model and show-
cases the simultaneous need for pragmatist trust and analytic foundational
examination (MM 42). Modern maths is precise and vague: bent on founda-
tional analysis and on pragmatist ways to keep it working, it is both absurd

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and eminently useful in reality. It is precisely this encompassing of ambiguities

that suggests maths as ‘the new method of thought itself’ and as a model to
literary writers (MwQ 35).
The focus on method and movement rather than on giving final ‘answers to
enigmas’ coheres with the incompleteness of the novel fragment and Ulrich’s
belief in the value of continued preoccupation with the ‘whole circle of ques-
tions [. . .]: “How should I live?”’ (MwQ 972). As the narrator sets out, the
open-endedness of the examination is preferable, since ‘a thing wholly encom-
passed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept’ (MwQ 270). The
German word for ‘scope’ – Umfang – also signifies a circle’s circumference and
thus relates the strategy of complete explanation to diminishing the circle to
a centre (MoE 250). In contrast, essayism, giving only partial answers, main-
tains the scope of the object of investigation. Concerning the relation between
part and whole, this means that parts do not form into a closed whole, yet all
perspectives, even those from diametrically opposed poles, are connected in
the whole circle of life and its ever-open questions. When regarding Musil’s
request to read the text ‘twice, in parts and as a whole’ in view of the fact that
the novel has remained a fragment, it similarly becomes clear that the whole is
not to be understood as determinate but as the total of ever-changing reality
(notes 1766).
The presentation of a specifically modern mathematics in The Man without
Qualities works to support both rationality and fiction in the early twentieth
century, and it suggests that, if maths relies on reason as well as on trust in
fictional concepts, then an analogous state in literature might promise simi-
larly consequential outcomes. As an aesthetic as well as epistemological and
ethical model, modern maths is deeply implicated in Musil’s modernism, and
encompassing modernism’s opposed tendencies of precision and vagueness, of
foundational research and pragmatist trust, of Prusso-German mathematical
rationality and mysticism, we can usefully talk of modernist maths in Musil’s
work. Following the chapters on Broch’s The Sleepwalkers and Musil’s The
Man without Qualities as texts produced at the height of modernism and in
close relation with a specifically (Prusso-)German mindset, in Chapter 4 we
turn to a view from a greater cultural and temporal distance that sets the mod-
ernist developments into a broader context, from the beginnings of modernity
in the scientific revolution to the postmodern period.

Notes
 1. ‘Musil?!! Ich habe seine Art in einem Vortrag “rationales Dichten” genannt,
Dichten aus der Ratio. Es ist der Gegensatz zu meinen eigenen Möglichkeiten’
(Hermann Broch, Briefe: Dokumente und Kommentare zu Leben und Werk, ed.
Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), p. 345).
  2. Musil qtd in Karl Sigmund, Sie nannten sich der Wiener Kreis: Exaktes Denken am
Rand des Untergangs (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015), p. 177.

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  3. ‘Unter dem Vorwand, das letzte Lebensjahr Österreichs zu beschreiben, werden die
Sinnfragen der Existenz des modernen Menschen darin aufgeworfen und in einer
ganz neuartigen, aber sowohl leicht-ironischen wie philosophisch tiefen Weise
beantwortet’ (Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke II. Prosa und Stücke. Kleine
Prosa, Aphorismen, Autobiographisches, Essays und Reden, Kritik, ed. Adolf Frisé
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1978), pp. 950–1).
  4. In the following, quotations from the parts not published in Musil’s lifetime are
marked ‘galley’, ‘drafts’ or ‘notes’. Citations from the fair copy, which is not
included in the translation by Wilkins and Pike, are my translations and the
original is given in a footnote.
  5. Robert Musil, Diaries 1899–1941, ed. Mark Mirsky, trans. Philip Payne (New
York: Basic Books, 1998), p. 216.
  6. ‘Ja, ich habe sogar einige Male über gewisse Zusammenhänge zwischen morali-
schem und mathematischen Denken geschrieben; zwar nicht in herkömmlicher
Weise, aber es freut mich doch, darauf hinweisen zu können, dass es auch eine
solche gibt’ (Musil qtd in Sigmund, Sie nannten sich der Wiener Kreis, p. 181).
  7. Dale Adams, Die Konfrontation von Denken und Wirklichkeit: Die Rolle und
Bedeutung der Mathematik bei Robert Musil, Hermann Broch und Friedrich
Dürrenmatt (St. Ingbert: Röhrig Universitätsverlag, 2011), p. 45.
  8. Robert Musil, Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike
and David S. Luft (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 13.
  9. Thomas Sebastian, The Intersection of Science and Literature in Musil’s The Man
without Qualities (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), p. 64.
10. Sebastian, The Intersection of Science and Literature, p. 64.
11. ‘Fundamentallehre’ (MoE 865).
12. Claus Hoheisel, Physik und verwandte Wissenschaften in Robert Musils Roman
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. (dmoe) Ein Kommentar, Diss. (Berlin et al.:
European University Press, 2004), p. 385.
13. Gwyneth Cliver, ‘Maddening Mathematics: The Kinship of the Rational and the
Irrational in the Writing of Robert Musil’, Journal of Romance Studies, 7.3 (2007),
75–85 (p. 84).
14. Robert Musil, ‘Sketch of What the Writers Knows’, in Precision and Soul: Essays
and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), 61–7 (p. 62).
15. Robert Musil, Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, ‘A Conversation with Robert
Musil’, The Transatlantic Review, 8 (1961), 9–24 (p. 19).
16. Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York:
Random House, 2013), p. 258.
17. Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Life & Matter in Conflict (London:
Fisher Unwin, 1915), p. 20.
18. Bergson, The Meaning of the War, pp. 34–5.
19. Bergson, The Meaning of the War, p. 33.
20. Allen Thiher, Understanding Robert Musil (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 2009), p. 232.
21. Musil, Precision and Soul, p. 67.
22. ‘der Verstand läßt uns einfach im Stich!’ (MoE 570).
23. Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, ‘On the Foundations of Mathematics’ [1907], in
L. E. J. Brouwer: Collected Works, vol. 1, ed. Arend Heyting (Amsterdam and
Oxford: North-Holland, 1975), 15–101 (p. 72).
24. Jeremy J. Gray, Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 407.
25. Herbert Breger, ‘A Restoration That Failed: Paul Finsler’s Theory of Sets’, in

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Revolutions in Mathematics, ed. Donald Gillies (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1992), 249–64 (p. 253).
26. Brouwer, ‘On the Foundations’, p. 97.
27. Brouwer qtd in Dirk van Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist: The Life of
L. E. J. Brouwer; vol. 1: The Dawning Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999),
pp. 83 and 84.
28. Brouwer qtd in Dalen, Mystic, Geometer, and Intuitionist I, p. 82.
29. Cliver, ‘Maddening Mathematics’, pp. 75–6.
30. Cliver, ‘Maddening Mathematics’, p. 75.
31. ‘Durchschnittsmenschen’; ‘das Durchschnittliche ist immer auch etwas
Wahrscheinliches’; ‘nach und nach der “wahrscheinliche Mensch” und das “wahr-
scheinliche Leben” anstelle des “wahren” Menschen und Lebens emporzukommen
begännen’ (MoE fair copy 1209).
32. William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Holt, 1910), p. 254.
33. Bertrand Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, in Logic and Knowledge:
Essays, 1901–1950, ed. Robert Charles Marsh (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), 175–281 (p. 179).
34. Bertrand Russell, ‘Vagueness’, in Russell on Metaphysics: Selections from the
Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. Stephen Mumford (London and New York:
Routledge, 2003), 211–20 (p. 213).
35. T. S. Eliot, ‘A Commentary’, The Monthly Criterion, 6.4 (1927), 289–91
(p. 291).
36. Megan Quigley, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and
Language (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 6; Megan Quigley,
‘Modern Novels and Vagueness’, Modernism/Modernity, 15.1 (2008), 101–29
(p. 104).
37. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking;
Together with Four Related Essays Selected from The Meaning of Truth (New
York, London and Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1949), pp. 54–5.
38. James, The Principles of Psychology, p. 254.
39. James, Pragmatism, p. 53.
40. ‘jede Möglichkeit’ (MoE 791).
41. Herbert Mehrtens, Moderne Sprache Mathematik: Eine Geschichte des Streits um
die Grundlagen der Disziplin und des Subjekts formaler Systeme (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), pp. 403 and 57.
42. Ernst Mach, Principles of the Theory of Heat, ed. Brian McGuinness, trans.
P. E. B. Jourdain and A. E. Heath (Dordrecht et al.: Reidel, 1986), p. 73.
43. Thiher, Understanding Robert Musil, p. 46.
44. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, trans. W. J. G. (London and Newcastle on
Tyne: Walter Scott, 1905), p. 3.
45. Robert Musil, ‘The Mathematical Man’ [1913], in Precision and Soul: Essays and
Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1990), 39–43. From here on abbreviated in the text as
‘MM’.
46. Justice Kraus, ‘Musil’s Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, Cantor’s Structures
of Infinity, and Brouwer’s Mathematical Language’, Scientia Poetica. Yearbook for
the History of Literature, Humanities and Sciences, 14, ed. Andrea Albrecht et al.
(Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010), 72–103 (p. 89).
47. John Attridge, ‘Introduction: Modernism, Trust and Deception’, in Incredible
Modernism: Literature, Trust and Deception, ed. John Attridge and Rod Rosenquist
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 1–20 (p. 1).
48. Attridge, ‘Modernism, Trust and Deception’, p. 2.

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 robert musil, the man without qualities

49. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, trans. Tom Bottomore and David Frisby
(London and New York: Routledge, 1978), p. 128.
50. Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, p. 179.
51. James, Pragmatism, pp. 207–8.
52. Rob Hawkes, ‘Bogus Modernism: Impersonation, Deception and Trust in Ford
Madox Ford and Evelyn Waugh’, in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism:
Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, ed. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer and
Christine Reynier (New York and London: Routledge, 2017), 175–86 (p. 177).
53. Cornelia Blasber, ‘A City “Under Glass”: Vienna in Robert Musil’s The Man
without Qualities’, in Vienna: The World of Yesterday, 1889–1914, ed. Stephen
Eric Bronner and F. Peter Wagner (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), 150–67
(p. 153).
54. Bergson, The Meaning of the War, p. 43.
55. Bergson, The Meaning of the War, p. 46.
56. Bergson, The Meaning of the War, p. 44.
57. Attridge, ‘Modernism, Trust and Deception’, p. 4.
58. I. A. Richards, The Principles of Literary Criticism (London and New York:
Routledge, 2003), p. 250. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (New York: Norton,
1926).
59. ‘essay, n.’, The Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, March 2017), Web, 5 Apr. 2017.
60. ‘essay, n.’, The Oxford English Dictionary.
61. Thiher, Understanding Robert Musil, p. 265.
62. Musil, Precision and Soul, p. 48.
63. Musil, Precision and Soul, p. 49.
64. Musil, Precision and Soul, p. 155.
65. Musil, Precision and Soul, p. 48.
66. James, Pragmatism, p. 53.

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modernism, fiction and mathematics

MATHEMATICS AND FICTION:

THOMAS PYNCHON, GRAVITY’S RAINBOW

‘Yes, sort of German, these episodes here’ (GR 285, emphasis in the original),
the narrator states at one point in Gravity’s Rainbow. Set predominantly in
Great Britain and Germany in the year between September 1944 and 1945,
Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel acknowledges its German focus even before
Tyrone Slothrop, the closest we get to a main character, enters the country
after the war. Its culture is pervasive in the text, as Thomas Moore observes,
It is a quite remarkable fact about a novel so wholly American in its
general personality that nearly all of its most important sources, father
figures, oracular voices, and invited guests are German-speaking: from
the mythological Nibelungen, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and
other ancients resurrected by Wagner, to Leibniz, Goethe, and Wagner
himself, through Rilke, Freud, Jung, Max Weber, and the great twen-
tieth-century physicists (Planck, Einstein, Heisenberg), to Rathenau,
Stinnes, and the men of I. G. Farben, to the Weimar moviemakers, all the
way through National Socialism and to Rocketman Wernher von Braun.1
The narrator’s comment on the German flavour of the novel follows one of
three equations in mathematical notion that are printed in Gravity’s Rainbow.
Next to a well-known probability distribution and a formula that amounts to
a mathematical joke, the second equation presents maths in all its fascinating
and intimidating complexity:

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 thomas pynchon, gravity’s rainbow

d2 w dw 0L 0R
 1d* 1 (s1 2 s2) a5 2 sß (GR 284)
dt 2
dt 0a 0ß 3
Slothrop encounters the equation as part of his education on the mathematics
and technology of the V-2 rocket, a German weapon developed by Wernher
von Braun during the Second World War and used in attacks on London,
among other targets. Slothrop, who has a special connection to the rocket,
is fed information on the V-2 and then sent to post-war Germany to locate
the mysterious Rocket 00000. Getting to know the mathematical language of
rocket flight and learning German are linked for Slothrop: ‘Well, these days
Slothrop is even dreaming in the [German] language. Folks have been teaching
him dialects [. . .]. Along with the language teachers come experts in ordnance,
electronics, and aerodynamics’ (GR 285). Associating German with the lan-
guage of technology and the remarkable instance of mathematical notation
in the text, Gravity’s Rainbow calls up an image of German technocracy that
takes particularly inhuman forms during the Second World War. Pynchon’s
novel thus picks up where the German-speaking texts by Hermann Broch and
Robert Musil leave off: at the dangers of a German mindset tied to mathemat-
ics and the question of whether aspects of modern maths lend themselves to
resisting rationalisation and promoting ethical action.
Although Gravity’s Rainbow establishes a relation between mathemati-
cal and Nazi thinking in Germany, it also presents the Second World War
as only the culmination of concepts and thought structures having emerged
three centuries earlier, during the Age of Enlightenment. Pynchon’s novel, for
example, traces the prerequisites for building the V-2 rocket back to the seven-
teenth century when mathematicians developed the scientific concepts needed
to describe and control its flight path. Following a well-established narrative,
Gravity’s Rainbow relates the beginning of the Enlightenment to the publica-
tion of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Published in 1687, it spread,
according to Alexis Clairaut’s assessment in 1745, ‘the light of mathematics
on a science which up to then had remained in the darkness of conjectures and
hypotheses’.2 Alexander Pope’s famous epitaph consolidates the link between
Newton and the Enlightenment: ‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: /
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.’3 While Enlightenment thinkers
celebrated mathematics as illuminating the laws of nature, it acquired a more
ambiguous image in the course of modernity. The development culminates
in Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s criticism of excessive focus on
Newton’s legacy: ‘the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’,
they write in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).4 Gravity’s Rainbow imme-
diately acknowledges modern anxieties about excessive rationality when its
first sentence – ‘A screaming comes across the sky’ – announces the destruc-
tive consequences of scientification and, in particular, German technological

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­ evelopments such as the rocket (GR 3). When this chapter takes account
d
of Gravity’s Rainbow’s use of science from the seventeenth to the twentieth
centuries, it sets the literary illustrations of interrelations between mathematics
and modernist culture in the broader context of modernity, from its founda-
tions in the Enlightenment to its postmodern legacies.
The negotiation of mathematics is crucial to Gravity’s Rainbow’s move
beyond modernism and its pioneering features that have come to exemplify
postmodernist literature. Martin Paul Eve calls Pynchon the ‘godfather
of American postmodernity’, and, according to Ali Chetwynd, the 2012
Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon ‘constitutes an extended claim
that Pynchon’s career can stand for the precedence of postmodernism’.5 In
that Companion, Brian McHale contends: ‘we might go so far as to say,
not that postmodern theory depends on Pynchon’s fiction for exemplifica-
tion, but that, without Pynchon’s fiction, there might never have been such
a pressing need to develop a theory of literary postmodernism in the first
place’.6 Gravity’s Rainbow is as much a key text in the emergence of litera-
ture and science studies as it is of literary postmodernism. Analyses of science
in Pynchon’s work ‘promoted the interdisciplinary study of literature and
science, and thus played a role in the founding of the Society for Literature
and Science in 1985’, so Lance Schachterle remembers.7 Gravity’s Rainbow
in particular, so Alan Friedman claims, has invigorated the field: ‘Gravity’s
Rainbow demonstrates more clearly than any other work of modern fiction
how science can be incorporated as a tool for metaphor and style.’8 The two
aspects that Pynchon’s 1973 novel has come to epitomise – postmodernism
and literary engagement with science – cannot be viewed in isolation. Rather,
this chapter shows how its employment of modern maths illuminates the need
to investigate the status of reality and explore new literary ways to engage
with it. Putting relations between maths and fiction at its centre – a topic that
has run through the previous chapters – the discussion of Gravity’s Rainbow
shows that a renegotiation of mathematics is a decisive factor in the novel’s
introduction of postmodernist features.

Physico-Theology and Mathematico-Ethical Concepts in

Gravity’s Rainbow
Like Musil in The Man without Qualities, Pynchon connects ethical and
mathematical thinking in Gravity’s Rainbow. The title relates the scientific
concept of gravity to the biblical image of the rainbow, which signifies God’s
promise not to destroy the world in another Flood. The novel thus places itself
in the tradition of physico-theological discourse. Eighteenth-century physico-­
theology links the study of nature to that of religion, for example using scien-
tific knowledge to argue for the existence and wisdom of God. Newton’s work,
and particularly the Principia Mathematica in which he formulated the law

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of universal gravitation, quickly achieved a leading position in this context:

‘soon after its publication his work became closely associated with the cause of
Christian apologists’.9 Theological implications of Newton’s work on gravity
also inform the criticism by the German mathematician and philosopher
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the clash between Newton’s
and Leibniz’s views, which animated English–German conflict in the early
eighteenth century, signals the beginning of a scientific and moral competi-
tion that finds its heights in the Second World War. Pynchon’s novel does not
only trace its roots in physico-theological debates, however, but brings these
up to date with twentieth-century knowledge and develops new, postmodern
mathematico-ethical positions.
Newton’s and Leibniz’s thinking signal the increasing importance of math-
ematics across all branches of seventeenth-century natural philosophy. As
Paolo Mancosu points out: ‘the mathematical method [. . .] represented for
many authors a guarantee of clarity and order in the development of a disci-
pline’.10 Newton’s Principia Mathematica acknowledges the importance in its
title and pioneers a mathematical engagement with gravity that had effects far
beyond immediately scientific applications. The universal character of gravi-
tation that Newton posits means that it applies to the heavens as well as to
earth, leading to the far-reaching conclusion that the order presumed to rule
the heavens should similarly govern the below and that all natural phenomena
should be calculable. As further laws and regularities were formulated, the
universe increasingly appeared to be mechanistic and science a means to reveal
its predetermined development. By the beginning of the nineteenth century
Pierre-Simon Laplace maintained the drastic view that the ‘discoveries in
mechanics and geometry, added to that of universal gravity, have enabled it to
comprehend in the same analytical expressions the past and future states of the
system of the world’.11 Laplace’s mention of gravity confirms the decisive role
of Newton’s discovery in the advent of deterministic views and the belief in a
world ruled by causality and predictable by science.
Given the significance that Gravity’s Rainbow accords to Enlightenment
science and mathematics, I disagree with John Stark’s opinion that ‘Pynchon
refers most often to scientific information that was discovered or became impor-
tant during World War II.’12 Indeed, Pynchon goes back to Enlightenment
science to retrieve alternative views that were suppressed by later develop-
ments, and recovers their potential. Considering this, Friedman’s identification
of three coexisting scientific images is more helpful: ‘the eighteenth-century
clockwork universe, the nineteenth-century statistical rules [. . .], and the
essential uncertainties of twentieth-century quantum theory’.13 These con-
cepts line up on a scale between two extreme positions in Gravity’s Rainbow:
connectedness, control and paranoia are linked to the determinateness of
mechanical explanations in science, while, on the other side, randomness,

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freedom and anti-paranoia do not allow making meaningful connections

between phenomena. The novel uses the concepts of gravity, the infinitesimal
calculus and probability theory to highlight positions between the extremes of
these worldviews and explore possibilities to undermine perspectives that have
become dominant.
Gravity’s Rainbow uses the concept of gravity and its relation to mechanism
and determinism as a metaphor for the inescapable force that a privileged
group, the Elect, exercises over the disadvantaged majority of the Preterite.
Gravity is a main metaphorical force when underpinning causality and accord-
ingly belief in the Elect’s ability to control the Preterite, but characters also try
to overcome it physically. ‘Does no one recognize what enslavement gravity
is[?]’, Achtfaden wonders and hopes to defeat it with the help of a rocket (GR
540). Like von Braun, the German engineer mainly responsible for developing
the V-2, various characters in the novel dream that the rocket might ‘free man
from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet.
It will open to him the gates of heaven’.14 Although von Braun was brought
to the United States after the Second World War to engineer the first vehicle
to the moon, rockets in Gravity’s Rainbow do not leave the planet behind or
lead to heaven but bring death and destruction. The metaphorical flight from
gravity, that is, escaping the control of the Elect to lead a free, self-determined
life, is similarly futile. Slothrop realises the extent of Their control when
learning that, as a toddler, he was conditioned to respond to the rocket with
an erection. Conditioning deliberately creates a causal relationship between
phenomena and thus constitutes a tool to increase control. In the novel,
Edward Pointsman, among the strongest advocates of causality, follows in the
footsteps of Ivan Pavlov and forcefully turns mere correspondences into cause-
and-effect relations. In Pavlov’s famous experiment of classical conditioning,
a dog is presented with food while a bell rings. The sight of the food causes
the dog to salivate, while the bell has no effect on the animal. The salivation
and the bell have no causal connection then but only occur ­simultaneously.
With a certain amount of repetition however, the dog starts to salivate when
hearing the bell, even when there is no food. Thus, the correspondence of the
ringing and the dog’s salivation has become a causal relation: the ringing of
the bell causes the dog to salivate. As Friedman points out, Gravity’s Rainbow
presents conditioning as an extension of Newtonian mechanism: ‘the behavior
of the dogs can be described entirely in terms of forces (now physiological and
psychological) and universal laws (such as conditioned reflex)’, just as in the
wake of the Principia Mathematica the universe came to be seen as completely
comprehensible in terms of physical forces and laws.15
True to his Pavlovian training, Pointsman pursues the theory that Slothrop
was conditioned to respond to rockets with an erection and that, therefore,
Slothrop’s sexual encounters cause the rockets to fall where they do. The

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consequences of Pointsman’s explanation are far-reaching: if there is a causal

stimulus, ‘then the rockets follow from it, 100% of the time. No exceptions.
When we find it, we’ll have shown again the stone determinacy of everything,
of every soul’ (GR 101). In such a mechanical explanation, effects can be con-
trolled by manipulating the stimuli that cause them, and Pointsman accord-
ingly concludes the necessity of controlling the stimulus Slothrop: ‘he is [. . .] a
monster. We must never lose control’ (GR 171). In contrast to the Elect whose
conditioning forcefully turns correspondences into causal relations and thus
enables control, the narrator admits: ‘The rest of us, not chosen for enlight-
enment [. . .], at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to
detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute
Korrespondences’ (GR 699). Correspondences can be accidental and do not
provide a meaningful causal explanation between the phenomena they relate,
so the Preterite are not in a position to execute control and institute change.
The contrast between the Elect’s unchecked control and the Preterite’s inef-
fective reliance on Kute Korrespondences underlies the novel’s central ethical
notion, namely the necessary coexistence of opposites. With a nod to the role
of Newton’s work for physico-theology, Gravity’s Rainbow introduces the
ethical idea in reference to his third law of motion. Newton’s law states that
an action always occurs together with a simultaneous reaction of opposite
direction; it thus constitutes a scientific formulation of William Slothrop’s
theological insight that ‘[e]verything in the Creation has its equal and oppo-
site counterpart’ (GR 658). Tyrone Slothrop’s forefather criticises the Puritan
doctrine that a small group receives God’s grace and rules over the others,
and he argues holiness for those not chosen for divine salvation, seeing them
as a necessary counterpart to the Elect, who rely on the passed-over mass to
distinguish themselves. The narrator presents William’s insight as connected to
Newton’s scientific discovery that forces always arise in pairs: ‘It was a little
early for Isaac Newton, but feelings about action and reaction were in the air’
(GR 657). While Newton’s discovery became widely influential, William’s cor-
responding realisation is suppressed: the theological potential of the discovery
in physics is not realised. The interrelation of science and ethical positions
remains central to understanding the Slothrop family, however, and, as we
shall see in the next section, with a secular and mathematical focus it offers
explanations for Tyrone Slothrop’s eventual disappearance from the text and
for further postmodernist features of the novel.

Mathematics and Fiction: Gravity

In accordance with William Slothrop’s call to taking account of opposites,
Gravity’s Rainbow recovers physico-theological positions apart from the
dominant Newtonian interpretations. Pynchon particularly draws on Leibniz’s
objections to Newton’s work on the force of gravity and uses discoveries in

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twentieth-century physics to transform notions of eighteenth-century physico-

theology into a modern mathematico-ethical position. With the recovery
of lesser-known alternative views and taking into account modern science,
Gravity’s Rainbow puts into question the notion of gravity as a force and sug-
gests that the metaphorically connected force of the Elect might similarly be
less certain than it appears. Thus, Pynchon uses competing scientific and math-
ematical views to develop a modern mathematico-ethical position that offers
tentative possibilities for resistance.
Leibniz opposed Newton’s conception of a universal gravitational force,
largely because of its philosophical and theological implications, and formu-
lated his objections in a lengthy letter exchange with Samuel Clarke, a defender
of the Newtonian view. Leibniz criticised the very idea of a force of gravity,
since to attract matter gravity would have to have a determined origin and
Newton was precisely unable to clarify its source. Newton claimed: ‘to us it is
enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we
have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the
celestial bodies, and of our sea’.16 But, as he admitted in a letter to Richard
Bentley, ‘the cause of gravity is what I do not pretend to know’.17 Leibniz was
not satisfied with Newton’s taking observable phenomena – apples falling
down from trees, for example, and not upwards – as evidence that ‘gravity
does really exist’, and he criticised that, as explanation is lacking, adherents to
this idea have to believe that gravitational attractions are ‘effected by miracle;
or else have recourse to absurdities, that is, to the occult qualities of the
schools; which some men begin to revive under the specious name of forces;
but they bring us back again into the kingdom of darkness’.18 Since the cause
of gravity remained obscure and belief in it unwarranted in Leibniz’s view,
he dismissed Newton’s premise: ‘it is a strange fiction to regard all matter as
having gravity’, Leibniz held and proposed an alternative explanation of gravi-
tation that carries different theological implications.19
For Leibniz, gravity appears to have an attractive effect only while the rela-
tion between apparent cause and apparent effect could be different. In other
words, Leibniz argues that there is no force of gravity but that God harmonises
events into a ‘constant and regulated relation’.20 The philosopher of science
Ian Hacking summarises this idea: ‘actively rejecting any law of gravity,
Leibniz had the idea of “constant conjunction”. Minds and bodies “express”
each other, and one body, in being, as we say, “affected” by another, is better
described as “expressing” the other.’21 In Leibniz’s words: ‘One thing expresses
another, in my manner of speaking, when there is a constant and regulated
relation between what is true of the one and what is true of the other’ (my
translation).22 Such a relation does not necessarily describe a cause-and-effect
connection, then, but the correlation only ‘give[s] the appearance of causal
interaction’ while really being harmonised by God.23 This understanding also

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gives rise to different ethical implications: while in Newton’s view of a force

of gravity causal relations strengthen a mechanistic worldview and threaten
human freedom and self-determination, Leibniz’s concept of a constant and
regulated relation does not imply causality and therefore leaves room for free
will. With his own notion of gravitation, Leibniz could accordingly argue that
human beings are free and morally responsible for their actions.
In the terminology of Gravity’s Rainbow, Leibniz’s ‘constant and regulated
relation’ is a ‘Kute Korrespondence’. The term is introduced precisely as a
contrast to what Leibniz calls the occult force of Newtonian gravity: unlike
the Elect Lyle Bland who learns to control ‘eerie’ gravity when leaving his
body and ‘flying’, the disadvantaged majority of people are ‘at the mercy of a
Gravity’ they do not really understand and ‘must go on blundering inside our
front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences’ (GR 698, 699). The opposition of
eerie Newtonian force and Leibnizian correspondence mirrors the contrast
between control and powerlessness, but the competition between different
understandings of gravitation also challenges the belief in causality on which
the control of the Elect is based. If universal ‘gravity does really exist’, then it
legitimately gives rise to the belief in causality and mechanism that the Elect
exploit.24 If, however, as Leibniz proposed, ‘it is a strange fiction to regard all
matter as having gravity’, the power of the Elect is based on a correspondence
that has become constant but that might potentially change and thus allow for
liberation from Their system.25
The character Gottfried eludes the grip of gravity when, as the first pas-
senger in a rocket, he experiences that ‘Gravity dips away briefly’ (GR 901).
This reminds us of his namesake Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s rejection of
gravity as a causal force, and, further mirroring Leibniz’s theory, the flight
in Gravity’s Rainbow reaffirms the constant relation: ‘This ascent will be
betrayed to Gravity’ (GR 900). Gottfried might enjoy a moment of free flight,
but it is clear that the rocket will not elude the ‘enslavement’ of Gravity, the
capitalised, personified force that stands for the Elect (GR 540). Regardless of
whether it is understood as a Newtonian causal force or as a Leibnizian Kute
Korrespondence, then, gravity has very real consequences that Pynchon’s novel
does not deny. What Gottfried’s ascent does achieve, however, is to uphold
the possibility of free flight: he ‘rises on a promise, a prophecy, of Escape . . .’
and keeps alive its theoretical possibility (GR 900). Correspondingly, the
realisation that the Elect’s control might be based not on a causal force but
only exploit a correspondence upholds the possibility of freedom and self-
determination. Viewing gravity and its theological and ethical implications in
historical context thus helps specify that, even though it might be physically
undefeatable – Lyle Bland has to leave his body behind to float and Gottfried’s
technologically induced flight is temporary only – gravity is not a force
unproblematically in control, and by metaphorical extension neither are the

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Elect. Indeed, in accordance with twentieth-century scientific developments,

Gravity’s Rainbow proposes that gravity is not a force at all but rather, to use
Leibniz’s words, ‘a strange fiction’.26
The narrator in Gravity’s Rainbow points to the fact that the cause of
gravity remained obscure until the twentieth century, claiming that we are
‘at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and
measure’ (GR 699). In the nineteenth century the correspondence between sci-
entists James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday reiterates the points made
by Newton and Leibniz over two hundred years earlier: discussing ‘the great
mystery [. . .] how like bodies attract (by gravi[ta]tion)’, Maxwell argues for
‘get[ting] over that difficulty [. . .] by simply admitting it [i.e. gravity]’, while
Faraday takes a position closer to Leibniz’s when warning against using the
term ‘force’ and criticising people ‘who receive that description of gravity as a
physical truth’.27 The exchange illustrates that, as David Darling summarises,
for scientists before the twentieth century ‘gravity was no more than an empty
name for a phenomenon they didn’t really understand’.28 Albert Einstein’s
work finally significantly advanced the knowledge about gravity. With his
theory of relativity, he could explain Newton’s inability to give the cause of
gravitation and partly affirmed Leibniz’s understanding of gravity as a ‘strange
fiction’. Pointing to the changed notions of time and space to which Einstein’s
theory gave rise, Lyle Bland rises ‘out of his body, about a foot, face‑up’ and
feels that his gravity-defying journeys are travels in time as well as space: ‘The
Bland who came back to rejoin the inert white container he’d seen belly-up
on the sofa, thousands of years beneath him, had changed forever’ (GR 697).
Travels in time – ‘thousands of years’ – and space – ‘beneath him’ – take up
Einstein’s idea of four-dimensional space-time and gesture towards the related,
and profoundly changed, understanding of gravitation that the theory of
relativity introduces. While numerous critics have noted the importance of
relativity theory for Pynchon’s writing, there is an overwhelming focus on new
notions of space and time, and its impact on the understanding of gravity, the
scientific concept in the title of the novel, has remained surprisingly under-
examined. A closer look at the implications of Einstein’s work reveals how
Gravity’s Rainbow brings gravity-based physico-theological interpretations
up to date with modern developments and shows that mathematics plays an
important role in this process.
Crucially for physics and for Gravity’s Rainbow’s Elect who base their
power on it, Einstein dispensed with the understanding of gravity as a
force. According to the theory of relativity, there is no physical force that
attracts objects, but Einstein explains the effects as due to distortions in four-­
dimensional space-time. As Arthur Eddington, the foremost populariser of
the theory of relativity in the 1920s, explained: ‘Einstein’s law of gravitation
controls a geometrical quantity curvature in contrast to Newton’s law which

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controls a mechanical quantity force.’29 In the well-known story of Newton

sitting under a tree and formulating his law of universal gravitation after
seeing a falling apple, he concludes that the apple falls to the ground because
the force of gravity attracts it. Since the cause of attraction remained obscure,
Eddington explains, ‘Newton had to invent a mysterious force dragging the
apple down.’30 In contrast, according to the theory of relativity, the apple falls
down not because of a force that attracts it, but it moves because of a curva-
ture in space-time. The mass of the earth creates a ‘dent’ in space-time, and
the apple has no choice but to follow the curve and come to rest in that dent.
Einstein thus replaces the understanding of gravity as a force with a geometri-
cal explanation. Gravity, treated as a physical phenomenon by Newton, turns
into a mathematical issue.
Gravity’s Rainbow refers to another modern scientific concept when
introducing physico-theological thinking in relation to Newton’s law on the
­correspondence of action and reaction: the equivalence principle in the theory
of relativity. The equivalence principle states that in accelerating surroundings
the effects of inertia equal those of gravity. And with the character Tyrone
Slothrop – who carries ‘sloth’ or inertia in his very name – the novel illustrates
that inactivity can be as harmful as oppression by the Elect. The Slothrop
family has a history of failing to act: although at first ‘assimilated in life to the
dynamic that surrounded them’, they ‘did not prosper . . . about all they did
was persist’ while the world around them moves on, and instead of following
the progress west, ‘out of some reasoned inertia the Slothrops stayed east’ (GR
33, my emphasis). But Tyrone Slothrop falls prey not only to physical but also
to moral inertia. As one of the seven capital sins, sloth has religious meanings,
and most importantly for Pynchon is the Puritan interpretation of sloth as the
absence of conviction and inactivity in the face of suffering. He refers to this
Puritan view in a newspaper article from 1993: ‘Sloth – defiant sorrow in the
face of God’s good intentions – was a deadly sin.’31 Tyrone Slothrop becomes
slothful according to this religious meaning of the word: he ceases to care
about others and grows less and less able to act as the novel progresses. When
he is being handed a bomb with a lit fuse, for example, he does nothing except
think: ‘Gee, sometimes I wish I wasn’t so indecisive’ (GR 817). Saved from his
predicament, Slothrop does not help his rescuer who is abused and tortured
in his stead, but he ‘slips away, [. . .] dragging reluctantly, off of his grease-
chevroned head, the shining wig of innocence . . .’ (GR 818). Allowing others
to suffer by failing to act, Slothrop becomes guilty, and his example constitutes
a translation of Einstein’s equivalence principle to ethics: in physics the effects
of inertia can equal those of gravity, and in the moral domain the effects of
sloth can equal those of the Elect’s control.
Physico-theology, which in the wake of relativity theory and loss of religious
belief can be better understood as a connection of mathematical and ethical

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ideas, sheds light on Slothrop’s trajectory through Gravity’s Rainbow: while

the post-war world quickly changes around him, he becomes more and more
divided between different possibilities until he ceases to act, only appearing in
scattered references in the text and ultimately completely disappearing from the
novel. In an attempt to save Slothrop from his growing inertia, Seaman Bodine
tries to persuade him to care and take action, that is, to defy inertia that equals
gravity and fly. In contrast to his friend’s sloth, Bodine praises the questionable
actions of the bank-robber John Dillinger that at least are a protest against the
unsatisfactory state of things: ‘he still did what he did. He went out socked
Them right in the toilet privacy of Their banks. Who cares what he was think-
ing about, long as it didn’t get in the way?’ (GR 879). According to Bodine,
Slothrop’s inertia remains a bloodless enterprise as it bars him from acting on
the world. He therefore wants Slothrop to have a cloth stained with Dillinger’s
blood and to understand that ‘what we need isn’t right reasons, but just that
grace. The physical grace to keep it working’ (GR 879–80). Bodine fails to
reinfuse Slothrop with blood, however, and he remains emotionally inert: short
of the human feeling and active frame of mind to fight the system of the Elect
and keep up with the quickly changing post-war world, he is weighed down by
gravity-like sloth and lacks the ‘physical grace to keep it working’ (GR 880).
Slothrop could also be said to lack the ‘mathematical grace’ to keep it
working, since in relativity theory gravity is understood to be a geometrical
concept. By failing to view gravitation as a geometrical issue, he misses the
opportunity to revive Leibniz’s notion of it as ‘a strange fiction’ and the ethical
freedom this entails. The historical reception of Einstein’s theory does recover
Leibniz’s idea and language, as we can, for example, see in a mathematics
textbook from 1938: ‘Today it is believed by many scientists that gravitational
force is merely a fiction and that we live in a type of space in which the behav-
ior of bodies can be explained without recourse to that fiction.’32 If anything,
the contemporary understanding is even more radical; for instance, the physi-
cist Michio Kaku states: ‘In some sense, gravity does not exist; what moves
the planets and the stars is the distortion of space and time.’33 Since, however,
gravity appears to act as a force, it is now scientifically termed a fictitious
force: inside a certain system it is experienced as a force, but when observing
the system from the outside, the effect of gravitation can be revealed not to be
due to a force but, for example, due to inertia in accelerating surroundings.
In analogy, Slothrop could notice the fictitiousness of the force bearing him
down if stepping outside his frame of reference, and he could then, like Bodine,
conclude that it is possible to act against the Elect. Only considering his own
view, however, he becomes convinced of the universality of gravity and his
non-action furthers its effects. Lacking the mathematical and ethical ability
to consider the relativity of viewpoints and expose claims to universal laws as
fictitious, Slothrop becomes part of the problem himself.

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The notion of fictitious force might seem to imply that gravity is merely
a fiction that a change in perspective could dispel or whose effects could be
evaded. Einstein warned against such inferences:
[W]e might easily suppose that the existence of a gravitational field is
always only an apparent one. We might also think that, regardless of the
kind of gravitational field which may be present, we could always choose
another reference-body such that no gravitational field exists with refer-
ence to it. This is by no means true for all gravitational fields, but only
for those of quite special form. It is, for instance, impossible to choose a
body of reference such that, as judged from it, the gravitational field of
the earth (in its entirety) vanishes.34
Gravity’s Rainbow is equally cautious not to deny the very real consequences
of gravity. Bland does not achieve bodily flight, and Gottfried’s ascent can
only promise escape but not achieve it: the rocket will descend, regardless of
whether it finds its path due to a force, a ‘constant and regulated relation’, or a
‘strange fiction’. Pynchon’s novel does not propose the possibility of opting out
of gravity, then, but highlights the value of staying critical of the inevitability
of forces, suggesting that by taking an outside position, apparently inevitable
and real aspects can be discovered to be subject to specific conditions.
With over four hundred characters and a multitude of voices and perspec-
tives, Gravity’s Rainbow does not offer a stable frame of reference itself but
forces readers to compare points of view, and metafictional passages remind
them of the world outside the novel, encouraging an outside perspective from
which the Elect’s force can be identified as fictitious and inertia as adding to
its effects. This does not dispute the inescapability of the force that characters
experience inside the novelistic system, but it at least questions its seem-
ingly irrefutable reality and reveals the Preterite to have some impact on the
situation: they are free and morally responsible to avoid inertia. Gravity’s
Rainbow’s use of a twentieth-century understanding of gravity thus recovers
possibilities of free will and moral responsibility that Leibniz championed with
his idea of correspondence against Newton’s belief in causality and force. But
the freedom not to add to the effects of gravity can give rise to very limited
hope only: it does not curtail Their control but merely keeps in view the pos-
sibility of an alternative. In correspondence with the impossibility to physically
overcome gravity, characters do not escape the control of the Elect: although
Seaman Bodine and several others launch a Counterforce, their actions achieve
very little, doing nothing more than annoy the Elect with jokes and pranks.
However, these helpless actions prevent the force of the Elect from becoming
universal and, keeping in view its fictitiousness, maintain the possibility of
freedom if not freedom itself. Thus, reshaping the tradition of ­physico-theology
in view of modern mathematical and ethical ideas, Gravity’s Rainbow uses the

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notion of scientific fictitiousness to revaluate the reality of domination and

uphold the possibility of freedom without questioning the reality of practical
constraints. Gravity has to be grasped as a mathematical rather than physical
concept in order to identify its fictitiousness, and Gravity’s Rainbow draws on
further concepts to establish a relation between maths and fiction and explore
implications for literary writing.

Mathematics and Fiction: Infinitesimal Calculus

The different understandings of gravity as Newtonian force, Leibnizian ‘con-
stant and regulated relation’, and Einsteinian fictitious force illustrate a move
from apparent causality to fiction, as well as a shift in focus from physics to
mathematics. Gravity’s Rainbow emphasises that, in contrast to the physical
sciences, maths does not aim at causal explanations and uses mathematical
concepts to further develop how identifying fiction in seemingly fully deter-
mined systems might open up possibilities for resistance and change. In this
way, the novel’s presentation of mathematical functions and, in particular, the
infinitesimal calculus works to propose possibilities inherent in Enlightenment
maths, pointing to a path that does not lead to the disaster of a fully enlight-
ened earth but, including uncertainty and fiction at its core, towards possibili-
ties of freedom.
Establishing relations between phenomena is a key concern of both physics
and mathematics. But, unlike physics, maths does not offer reasons for the
relations it describes. Characters in Gravity’s Rainbow, trying to make sense
of their surroundings and find ways to influence their future, nevertheless
seek explanations for a functional relation between rocket hits in London and
marks on a map in Slothrop’s office with which he seems to record his sexual
encounters in the city. The distribution of rocket hits matches the marks on
Slothrop’s map: ‘The two patterns also happen to be identical. They match
up square for square’ (GR 100–101). The relation between the patterns is
therefore organised by a function, that is, a rule that relates to each element
x exactly one element y: each mark on Slothrop’s map is assigned a corre-
sponding site of impact on the map of London. The textbook Introduction to
Mathematics explains that functions correlate quantities but do not make any
statement as to the nature of the relation by using the example of two columns,
one giving the value of Siamese imports from the United States in each year of
a period of time, and the other showing the number of marriages in New York
City in the same years: ‘Thus to each amount of imports in the table there is
made to correspond a definite number of marriages, and vice versa. The cor-
respondence is therefore a functional relation.’35 The obvious arbitrariness of
the relation between the two columns is of no concern to mathematicians: ‘the
definition of a functional relation does not require that one variable should
be the cause of the other. It only requires that to each value of one variable

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there shall correspond a value of the other variable.’36 The textbook points out
that the correspondence between Siamese imports and New Yorker marriages
is ‘a functional relation of no practical value. No one would think of basing
any predictions on it.’37 This is certainly not true in the paranoid universe of
Gravity’s Rainbow: in order to explain the matching maps, several characters
speculate that Slothrop was conditioned to respond to the rocket with an erec-
tion or that he directs the rockets at will.38 But Gravity’s Rainbow exposes
the dangers of giving in to the desire for causal explanation: in analogy to
the notion of gravity, the connection between the maps turns out not to be a
cause-and-effect relation and ultimately not a correspondence either, but to be
based on a fiction.
In an essay Bernard Duyfhuizen collects clues that indicate the problematic
nature of Slothrop’s map. For example, Pointsman’s post-war investigations
reveal ‘a number of cases where the names on Slothrop’s map do not appear to
have counterparts in the body of fact’ (GR 323). Several of the names do not
correspond to actual women in London, and the remark that the names on the
map ‘are mostly all first names, you see, the, the Xs without the Ys so to speak’
points to the similarly functional relation between the maps and the assumed
but missing counterparts in reality (GR 324). As an abstract science maths is
not concerned with questions of reality, and, so it turns out, neither is Slothrop
when telling stories about his amorous adventures: he remembers ‘the gentle-
manly reflex that made him edit, switch names, insert fantasies into the yarns
he spun’ (GR 360). Such reminiscences reveal that his map refers to stories,
and, as Duyfhuizen argues, readers have to dismiss explanations of – causal or
kute – relations between rocket hits and Slothrop’s amorous adventures and
‘realize the map’s fictional quality’.39 As in the case of gravity, then, what some
characters interpret as a causal connection is better described as a mathemati-
cal function and, ultimately, suggested to have a basis in fiction.
References to functions in Gravity’s Rainbow highlight the fact that maths
does not lend itself to the control exercised by the Elect. Bland’s use of an eerie
physical force of gravity is contrasted with the Preterite’s inability to control
their surroundings and their living with ‘Kute Korrespondences, [. . .] trying
to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on
the tremendous and secret Function’ (GR 699). Even if the powerless majority
could connect all correspondences into a mathematical function, they would
not arrive at the deeper meaning they crave since functions offer no explana-
tions of the relations they describe and consequently no way to influence these.
On the other hand, however, mathematics as a realm of non-necessity pro-
poses openness to alternatives, and Gravity’s Rainbow further explores the,
not least ethical, possibilities inherent in mathematical views. The novel closely
connects these possibilities with the realm of fiction, and with the presentation
of the infinitesimal calculus it illustrates that fiction is at the heart of one of the

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major mathematical achievements of the Enlightenment period. The implica-

tions of this are profound: Enlightenment maths appeared to be a perfectly
rational and entirely transparent area of knowledge that Newton could use as
a base for his physics and that consequently underlies the physico-theological
views of the period. Uncertainty or fiction in maths could consequently under-
mine the mechanical view of the world on which the Elect base their power and
put into question their moral prerogatives.
Gravity’s Rainbow refers to the infinitesimal calculus as an instrument to
calculate a rocket’s path and to determine the moment when fuel is cut off,
after which the rocket begins its descent. The description of the point of fuel
cutoff, the so-called Brennschlusspunkt, as ‘a point in space, a point hung
precise as the point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall’,
alerts to the artificiality of determining a single moment in a continuous move-
ment: of course, the Rocket does not hang motionless, and the apex of its path
cannot be dissociated from its launch or fall (GR 360). This both mathematical
and philosophical issue features in another controversy between Newton and
Leibniz, in which they quarrelled over who was first to invent the calculus and
also over the basic interpretation of what the calculus is and does. Newton
understood motion as a continuous process and the parabolic curve of a
rocket’s trajectory as described by a moving point, namely the rocket. In con-
trast, Leibniz regarded the curve as made up of discrete points: the parabola
is pieced together from an infinite number of separate points that have no
spatial extension but are infinitesimally small. Unlike Newton’s notion of con-
tinuous motion, Leibniz’s description of a rocket’s path divides it into discrete
­positions – an idea that Gravity’s Rainbow takes up in the Brennschlusspunkt
as a point in space independent of the rocket’s launch or fall. Leibniz’s oppo-
nents argued that it is impossible to break up a continuous movement into
components and vehemently opposed his use of infinitesimals. This math-
ematical concept remained highly disputed up to the twentieth century, and in
Gravity’s Rainbow it features as an example of the value of fiction in maths
and ethical systems related to it.
A formal definition of an infinitesimal reads: ‘An infinitely small quantity or
amount, a quantity less than any assignable quantity’ (OED ‘infinitesimal’).
In other words: an infinitesimal number is not quite zero but smaller than any
determinable number. As the definition does not point to a stable existence
but only to a shifting and ungraspable ‘smaller than’, the nature and reality
of infinitesimals was highly contested when the term was coined in the seven-
teenth century, and uneasiness regarding their elusiveness persisted over the
next centuries. As philosopher of mathematics John Bell sets out, infinitesimals
were ‘[d]erided by Berkeley in the eighteenth century as “ghosts of departed
quantities”, in the nineteenth century execrated by Cantor as “cholera-bacilli”
infecting mathematics, and in the twentieth roundly condemned by Bertrand

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Russell as “unnecessary, erroneous, and self-contradictory”’.40 In view of

Newton’s rejection of their use, Leibniz admitted that infinitesimals do not
really exist but contended that they, like any part of an infinite, constitute
useful fictions: ‘I maintain, strictly speaking, that an infinite composed of parts
is neither one nor a whole, and it is not conceived as a quantity except through
a fiction of the mind.’41 Leibniz argued for the practical usefulness of such
‘fictions of the mind’, and Gravity’s Rainbow accords the concept of infinitesi-
mals a similar value, not least in view of its ethical vision.
The infinitesimal calculus can be used to determine a rocket’s path, despite
being based on the indeterminate ‘ghosts of departed quantities’ and ‘errone-
ous, and self-contradictory’ ‘cholera-bacilli’ of mathematics. Indeed, to use
Leibniz’s terms, a rocket explodes at its target because of calculations with a
‘fiction of the mind’. Obviously, then, even though fiction enters mathematics
with infinitesimals, they cannot be discarded as ineffectual. In the novel, the
engineer Pökler accordingly understands that the reality or fictivity of infini-
tesimals is not significant when determining the moment of fuel cutoff by use
of the fiction that the time span ∆t (delta t) becomes zero: ‘The important thing
is taking a function to its limit. ∆t is just a convenience, so that it can happen’
(GR 188). Despite the fact that the term ∆t never actually becomes zero, the
calculus treats it as effectively doing so and arrives at results with practical
consequences. In this respect, as the literary scholar James Earl puts it, ‘[t]he
delta-t is not just another mathematical tool, it is a compromise with reality’
– that is, it realises what is by definition indeterminable.42 However, despite
its intricate relation to reality, ∆t is precisely ‘just another mathematical tool’
and an example of how Gravity’s Rainbow uses the discipline at the forefront
of Enlightenment scientification to introduce ideas of the ‘real’ value of fiction.
Amir Alexander conducts research on the historical reception of infinitesi-
mals and argues that infinitesimals implied maths not to be entirely rationally
ordered and thus encouraged questioning other seemingly fixed systems, not
least giving rise to movements advocating social and political change. In con-
trast, ‘[t]o groups invested in the existing hierarchy and social stability, infini-
tesimals seemed to open the way to sedition, strife, and revolution’.43 Gravity’s
Rainbow similarly locates in infinitesimals a notion of other possibilities and
a space for change. These ideas take on a mathematico-ethical dimension for
readers when, at the end of the novel, a falling rocket threatens to destroy a
cinema, and ‘we’ – a term referring to the cinema audience but also includ-
ing the reader – wait for a disrupted film to start again (GR 902). Mirroring
the break in the film’s continuity, the rocket ‘reaches its last unmeasurable
gap above the roof of this old theatre, the last delta-t’, and this disruption of
motion might open up a possibility for change (GR 902). In the infinitesimally
small moment when impact is just about to arrive, there remains time, so the
narrator points out, to overcome sloth and act and show compassion. The

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closing words of the novel – ‘Now everybody’ – invite participation and, refer-
ring to an earlier song that advocates treating people as partners rather than
passing them over, work towards infusing the uncaring Neuters of the world
with human feeling: ‘just turn to the Glozing Neuter nearest you, even your
own reflection in the mirror, and . . . just . . . sing,
[. . .]
Maybe we should stick together part o’ the way, and
Skies’ll be bright-er some day!
Now ev’rybody –’ (GR 902, 802)
At the close of the novel, with the reader only a moment away from putting the
book down and returning to their reality, the text suggests that ‘fictions of the
mind’ such as infinitesimals and literary works such as Gravity’s Rainbow are
indispensable for keeping open possibilities that might never lead to the reality
of escape but at least maintain hope for a brighter future. This is not a hopeful
ending, not a vision of grace as in Against the Day, but a call to recognise
one’s freedom to take moral responsibility for (non-)action and not become
part of the problems associated with gravity. Like gravity, which cannot be
overcome regardless of whether it is understood as force or fictitious force,
the mental fictions of infinitesimals and literature offer no viable escape but
demonstrate the value of an outside view that can question reality and reveal
hidden possibilities.

Mathematics and Fiction: Probability Theory

When Gravity’s Rainbow focuses on the possibility of freedom rather than
freedom itself, questions arise regarding the relation of this possibility to
reality and its chances of becoming real. Pynchon’s novel draws on probability
theory as a mathematical way to gauge the likelihood of an outcome in order
to explore the possibilities inherent in the less-than-certain states it describes.
It roundly condemns naively literal ‘calculations’ of future possibilities, doing
so with reference to Leibniz’s attempt to use mathematics for real-life decision-
making. Leibniz, an early proponent of probability theory, argues for turning
to a theory of games in cases that lack causal explanations and transfers the
mathematical concept of combinatorial analysis to questions such as politics.
For example, he uses calculation to determine the future king of Poland: he
sets out four possible candidates, establishes the political reasons for electing
each of them, and weighs their respective chances. As Jérémie Griard clarifies,
Leibniz does not calculate probabilities but weighs political reasons; a process
that Leibniz nevertheless describes as ‘a type of mathematics’.44 Indeed,
Leibniz aimed to submit all decision-making to mathematics, as he writes in
‘Art of Discovery’ (1675):

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The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as

those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance,
and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us
calculate, without further ado, in order to see who is right.45

To many modernist thinkers such a mathematisation of all areas of life

and the implied, overly literal connection of maths and ethics felt threaten-
ing, and apprehensions of a rule of rationality not least inform Adorno and
Horkheimer’s warning of a ‘fully enlightened earth [that] radiates disaster
triumphant’.46 Gravity’s Rainbow highlights the futility of straightforwardly
applying mathematical means to non-scientific domains of life. In the novel,
Brigadier Pudding employs Leibniz’s combinatorial analysis to determine
possible developments in European politics, and he despairs as ever-changing
reality makes it impossible to keep up with the task: ‘“Ramsay MacDonald
can die.” By the time he went through resulting party alignments and pos-
sible permutations of cabinet posts, Ramsey MacDonald had died’ (GR
90–1). Moreover, Pudding’s predictions do not fit the actual development:
‘the permutations ’n’ combinations of Pudding’s Things That Can Happen in
European Politics [. . .] don’t give Hitler an outside chance’ (GR 328). Too
slow and disregarding unlikely scenarios, Pudding’s combinatorial analysis
fails for similar reasons as Leibniz’s attempt to calculate the royal election: not
only did Leibniz’s essay appear too late to have any influence on the election,
but none of the four candidates he considered was chosen. Instead, a fifth man
– the outside chance – became king. Recalling Leibniz’s practice, Pudding’s
use of combinatorial analysis attests to the attractiveness of seeking security in
calculating future developments, while his failing points to the impracticality
of Leibniz’s method.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, Roger Mexico and Edward Pointsman personify the
contrast between probabilities and the certainties of cause-and-effect relation-
ships. Pointsman accepts only unambiguous, reliable relations between causes
and the effects these determine and is therefore said to ‘only possess the zero
and the one’, numbers which in probability theory denote events that certainly
will not take place (0) or that will certainly occur (1) (GR 64). In contrast to
Pointsman’s deterministic answers, Mexico, the ‘Antipointsman’, provides
statistical explanations that cover the realm in between the certainties of abso-
lute presence and absolute absence: all uncertain probabilities are expressed
by fractions; for example, the probability to obtain ‘heads’ when flinging a
coin is ½; the probability to roll a six with a die is 1⁄6 (GR 64). While zero and
one denote certain events and therefore constitute reliable prognoses for the
future, all other probabilities indicate the chance of an event only and are not
predictions: despite knowing the probability of an event, it is impossible to tell
whether a coin will show heads or what number is rolled; and obviously the

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coin will not show half heads, half tails. Yet, as Mexico explains in Gravity’s
Rainbow, regarding a large number of cases, statistics seems to forecast an
outcome: when throwing a die many times, approximately a sixth of the rolls
will show the number six. This does not mean that predicting an individual
event is possible, however; the statistical rule applies only if considering a large
number of cases. As during the Second World War rockets fall on London in
large numbers, Mexico can plot their distribution, noting down how many hits
a quadrant of the city has received. As the distribution follows a statistical law,
some characters think that he is able to predict where the next rocket will hit,
but Mexico insists that he cannot forecast individual events: ‘It’s not precogni-
tion [. . .] all I’m doing is plugging numbers into a well-known equation, you
can look it up in the book and do it yourself . . .’ (GR 64). A hundred pages
later, the so-called Poisson equation is given in the text, and a mathematically
inclined reader could indeed plug in the numbers and dispel all doubts as to the
difference between the unpredictability of an individual event and the calcula-
bility of a large number of cases (GR 166).
Even statistically unlikely possibilities can occur in individual cases, and in
Gravity’s Rainbow improbable events happen very often indeed: ignored by
Brigadier Pudding’s calculations, Hitler comes into power, Ludwig is reunited
with his lemming Ursula against all odds, and Slothrop recovers his lost har-
monica in a journey down a toilet. The statistical unpredictability of individual
events and the possibility that even highly unlikely events become real harbour
potential for resistance. Mexico, having joined the Counterforce that opposes
the Elect, uses his mathematical background to threaten his ex-girlfriend’s new
partner, Jeremy. He confronts him with: ‘Little sigma, times P of s-over-little-
sigma, equals one over the square root of two pi, times e to the minus s squared
over two little-sigma squared’ (GR 841). And Jeremy is right to feel unsettled
as the formula describes the so-called normal distribution, the most common
probability distribution: it has a peak at the mean value, and the probability of
events outside the mean decreases symmetrically on both sides. Significantly,
although probabilities further distanced from the mean value can quickly
become very small, they never actually become zero: in an event described by
the normal distribution, no outcome is completely unfeasible. Accordingly, as
Lance Schachterle and P. K. Aravind convincingly argue, by citing the equa-
tion Mexico draws attention to the fact that, however small the probability
of succeeding against the Elect, he might pay Jeremy back.47 Indeed, after the
encounter, Mexico and Bodine demonstrate the power of the outside chance
when subverting a dinner of the Elect by talking about invented dishes that are
both alliterative and highly disgusting. Their protest might not be very effective
in destroying Their system, but it creates, at least, a moment when the Elect
are not in control.
The frequent occurrence of improbable events stresses the fact that prob-

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abilities are not predictions of the future: already Aristotle argues in his Poetics
that ‘it is probable that improbable things occur’.48 Or, as sociologist Elena
Esposito maintains, ‘[r]eality is improbable, and that is the problem’, since
even the most likely future development is by no means guaranteed.49 As a
probability does not refer to the future reality and does not eradicate uncer-
tainty, the question arises as to how it relates to reality. Esposito elaborates
that probabilities indicate possible futures, some with higher, others with
lower probability of actually taking place. Since probability theory takes into
account all possibilities rather than predicting the future course, it opens up
a domain apart from the actual or real, and in this sense, probability theory
encompasses fictive realities – imaginable but not actualised versions of
reality.50 Since the alternative, fictive realities of probability theory do not
compete with real reality, Esposito compares the workings of probability
theory to literary fiction and its creation of worlds that are coherent according
to fictive premises.51 In other words, describing consistent worlds apart from
the given, literary fiction and probability theory have comparable relations to
reality. It is in this sense that we can say that mathematical probabilities are
not predictions but fictions.
The seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries saw the conception of prob-
ability theory as well as the rise of the novel, making this Age of Reason a
decisive period for the valuation of fictive systems. Following the premise that
fiction had to seem like fact, the early novel introduced realistic characters and
settings, to the extent that readers of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe took the
text to be a record of real events, written by the protagonist. Like the contem-
poraneously emerging probability theory, then, the early novel sets a possible
and realistic reality next to real reality. In a book on early modern conceptions
of the nature of truth, Barbara Shapiro argues for the related emergence of
realistic novelistic reality and the notion of truth created by probability theory,
and Esposito similarly contends that at the time when, with the early novel,
fiction approaches reality, the conceptualisation of probability theory and the
consequent concern with fictive future realities means that mathematics takes
a turn towards fiction.52 Both Shapiro and Esposito assert that a new relation
to reality emerges when the domains of fiction and fact converge, and that with
the emergences of the novel and probability theory formerly uniform reality
comes to be seen in terms of a coexistence of different possible and realistic
realities. The result is a ‘pluralism of realities’, as Esposito calls it, a variety of
realities that might be fictive but that each claims the status of reality rather
than of fantasy, hallucination or arbitrary creation.53 In other words, literary
fiction and probability theory can be understood to disturb the notion of a
determinate reality and point towards plural actualisations that all take the
status of possible reality. So, if, as historian of science Lorraine Daston claims,
‘it has been one of the glories of mathematical statistics that it can deal with

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events in which conditions weaker than causation obtain’, probability theory

and literary fiction also deal with events in which conditions weaker than
reality obtain.54
Gravity’s Rainbow revisits early modern questions about the relation of
probabilities to reality in terms of twentieth-century experiences and draws
from it conclusions for literary fiction. The novel explores ways in which
conditions weaker than causation can extend to questions of reality, and it
is populated by entities in conditions weaker than existence: the dead com-
municate from the afterlife, the minds of hallucinating characters shift in and
out of realities, Slothrop scatters into small parts, and gravity turns out to be
a fictitious force. The universe of Gravity’s Rainbow is thus not determined
only by what is, but conditions weaker than existence have to be taken into
account. Drawing on the similar relationships of probability theory and fiction
to reality, the novel presents probability theory as a way of dealing with being
that is neither fully present nor fully absent and uses it to perform the move
from the epistemological questions that emerge when attending to conditions
weaker than causation, to ontological concerns about conditions weaker than
existence. Thus, mathematics is a vital part in a development that, as Brian
McHale has argued, makes Gravity’s Rainbow a quintessential postmodernist
text.

Mathematics, Fiction, Ontology: Towards Postmodernism

Gravity’s Rainbow is decisively plural and attentive to different realities,
sporting hundreds of characters and a great variety of voices and perspectives
including those of animals, objects and existences beyond death. In an influen-
tial study of the novel’s diverse worlds, Brian McHale shows that readers can
never fully trust the text, as passages read as real turn out to be characters’
fantasies or hallucinations: ‘the minds of Gravity’s Rainbow give us access
only to provisional “realities” which are always liable to be contradicted and
cancelled out’.55 For example, the narrator first describes how: ‘A fly lands
belly-up on the front fender of Roger’s motorcycle, thrashes ten seconds, folds
its veined and sensitive wings, and dies’ (GR 748). A few sentences later, this
course of events is cancelled by a different fictional reality: ‘The fly, who was
not dead, unfolds its wings and zooms off to fool somebody else’ (GR 748).
McHale argues that with the destabilisation of novelistic ontology, Gravity’s
Rainbow performs the decisive move from modernism to postmodernism: ‘The
breakthrough [. . . comes in] Gravity’s Rainbow, where, no longer constrained
by the limits of modernism, he [Pynchon] will freely exploit the artistic pos-
sibilities of the plurality of worlds, the transgression of boundaries between
worlds.’56 He defines the difference between modernist and postmodernist
texts as precisely a shift towards concern with being and away from questions
of knowledge about reality. Where modernist texts ask what can be known

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in the world, the ontological questions of postmodernist texts go along the

lines of: ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is
to do it?’57 While texts usually contain both epistemological and ontological
concerns, a dominant of one over the other can serve to distinguish modernist
from postmodernist works.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, Thanatz’s puzzled query aptly summarises the ques-
tions arising from the novel’s different worlds that coexist and turn into
each other: ‘Isn’t this an “interface” here? a meeting surface for two worlds
. . . sure, but which two?’ (GR 791). Thanatz’s experience of a meeting of
unknown worlds is symptomatic of the precarious and plural nature of reality
in Gravity’s Rainbow and also applies to the relation between states with dif-
fering degrees of reality and fiction. The domains are not clearly distinguish-
able but, so the novel illustrates not least with the example of mathematics,
interfaces connect and put into question the distinction between reality and
fiction: probability theory regards states weaker than existence and proposes
fictive realities, calculus employs the mental fiction of infinitesimals to initiate a
compromise with reality, drawing on the impossible to arrive at real outcomes,
and gravity turns out to be a fictitious force but to nevertheless be inescapable.
When Gravity’s Rainbow closes in the fiction of an infinitesimal ∆t, it gives
readers a chance to realise the potential for change inherent in maths. The
direct addresses to readers in the final paragraphs draw attention to the coex-
isting levels of novelistic fiction and reality, and Gravity’s Rainbow encour-
ages readers to take advantage of this crossover and use the singular point of
the ending, where continuity is broken, not just to jump back into their ‘real
reality’ but to realise the 300-year-old attempt to acknowledge the importance
of both realities and fictions.
Moreover, Gravity’s Rainbow employs probability theory as an interface
between an epistemological and an ontological dominant, from regarding rela-
tions weaker than causation to questioning being in view of conditions weaker
than existence. Mexico suggests:
[T]here’s a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as
far as it will go. That for science to carry on at all, it must look for a less
narrow, a less . . . sterile set of assumptions. The next great breakthrough
may come when we have the courage to junk cause-and-effect entirely.
(GR 104–5)
Here, Mexico does not speak as a scientist in the Second World War who would
probably be familiar with decisive developments in twentieth-century physics,
but he assumes a state of mind much closer to the opposition of the concepts of
causality and probability in the seventeenth century. Where Pointsman’s deter-
minism and Mexico’s statistical view play out a conflict from the beginnings
of modern science, Enzian, a Herero who witnessed the q ­ uasi-extinction of

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his people, fully embraces – and exaggerates – the twentieth-century discovery

that, on the subatomic level, existence is only probable: ‘Well, I think we’re
here, but only in a statistical way. [. . .] [O]ur own chances of being right here
right now are only a little better than even – the slightest shift in the prob-
abilities and we’re gone – schnapp! like that’ (GR 430). Twentieth-century
scientific developments reveal that, on the subatomic level, prediction is pos-
sible only in probabilities, not due to human beings’ limited knowledge but
because unknowability is intrinsic in the basic building blocks of the universe.
While in classical physics an object exists in a specific place and time, an object
in quantum physics exists in probabilities only: it has a certain probability of
being at a certain place at a certain time. It is not only our knowledge that is
uncertain here, but being itself. Hacking emphasises: ‘Quantum physics takes
for granted that nature is at bottom irreducibly stochastic.’58 As probability
replaces determination and causal relations on the subatomic level, Mexico is
right in saying that science has to adapt a less ‘sterile set of assumptions’ than
cause-and-effect and accept the randomness of existence that Enzian, having
survived the genocide ordered by the German General Lothar von Trotha on
the Herero, is particularly apt to understand: ‘Forty years ago, in Südwest, we
were nearly exterminated: There was no reason. Can you understand that? No
reason’ (GR 430). Replacing cause-and-effect with statistics means jettisoning
possibilities for meaningful explanation, and, more drastically, Enzian suffers
the uncertainty of living in probabilities as an ontological situation. Readers
of Gravity’s Rainbow are similarly subject to a feeling of perpetual ontologi-
cal danger when experiencing multiple possibilities and continuously shifting
degrees of reality and fantasy, hallucination and fiction: what has been taken
as novelistic reality might be eradicated with the next sentence ‘schnapp! like
that’.
McHale claims the genre of science fiction to be ‘the ontological genre
par excellence’.59 Science fiction is usually concerned with meetings of dif-
ferent planets and civilisations and thus precisely foregrounds the concern
with worlds that characterises postmodernist fiction according to McHale.
Gravity’s Rainbow is not science fiction in the classical sense, and the juxtapo-
sition of worlds is much more pronounced in Pynchon’s later novels. Rather,
Gravity’s Rainbow is ‘science fiction’ when it begins to address notions of
fiction in science and to explore mathematics as a realm independent of physi-
cal reality – a process Pynchon continues in Mason & Dixon and Against the
Day (see Chapter 1). In this respect, Pynchon is careful to distinguish maths
from the natural sciences: where physics stands for cause-and-effect relation-
ships that can be exploited by the Elect, maths encompasses greater uncertainty
but also greater freedom. Not representing physical reality or causal connec-
tions but Kute Korrespondences and using fictive elements in concepts such as
infinitesimals, there resides potential in mathematics for alternative states and

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realities. Comparing the positions of Newton and Leibniz again illustrates the
difference. Where Newton ropes in mathematics for explaining the real part
of existence, exploring what we could call, with Leibniz, the fictive aspects of
maths opens up realms apart from the existing: probabilities, infinitesimals
and ­fictitious forces, and even a complete mathematical world. And, fittingly,
Leibniz is closely associated with the idea of possible worlds that permeates the
novel. The first to introduce this term, he held that there are several possible
worlds out of which God chose to create the actual world. Thus, Leibniz does
not only stand for the identification of fictions in mathematics and for suspect-
ing the fictivity of a gravitational force but also for the idea of a plurality of
worlds.
In the seventeenth century mathematics itself takes on the status of reality
as its descriptions are trusted to be more real than physical ones: most impor-
tantly, even without being able to determine a physical cause of the force of
gravity, the mathematical explanation is taken to prove its existence. Isaac
Barrow, a contemporary of Newton, consequently held: ‘mathematics, as it is
vulgarly taken and called, is co-extended and made equal with physics itself’.60
A little later, Camille Falconet identified a competition between the reality of
maths and the physical world:
There is, so to say, two very different worlds; one mathematical, the
other physical. The mathematical [. . .] only exists in the ideas of the
geometer: he supposes the infinitely small, dots without dimensions, lines
without width [. . .]; as well as vacuum and gravitation. [. . .] But nothing
of this can be found exactly in nature [. . .] and this is a strange illusion
to abuse of the abstractions in transposing them in the physical world as
if they were real beings.61
Falconet aimed to counter what he saw as his contemporaries’ tendency to
bypass the real world in favour of maths: ‘instead of accommodating their
ideas to Nature, they want to submit Nature to their ideas’, he complained.62
His was far from the only voice in the seventeenth century to deplore the fact
that, while specific mathematical concepts such as probability theory contrib-
uted to considerations of a pluralism of realities, more generally the growing
importance of maths introduced a competition between physical reality and an
independent mathematical world.
Calling mathematics and physical reality ‘two very different worlds’,
Falconet offers a neat formulation to explore the idea that the relation between
maths and reality gives rise to a main concern of postmodernism and science
fiction, namely the juxtaposition of worlds. The Enlightenment engage-
ment with maths thus already foreshadows ways in which Pynchon’s works
draw out the ontological implications of ‘science fiction’. More precisely, for
Pynchon, in the tradition of Falconet and other seventeenth-century thinkers,

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not science fiction but what we could call ‘maths fiction’ is the ontological
genre par excellence, since mathematics opens up a different world and con-
fronts physical reality with an alternative. So, Gravity’s Rainbow does not only
identify fictional concepts in maths but it also reactivates the idea that maths
constitutes a different world – an idea that remained suppressed by the grand
narratives of Enlightenment rationality and physical reality. When Gravity’s
Rainbow shows how with its mathematical discoveries the Enlightenment wit-
nesses conflicting concepts of truth and reality, it suggests that the age misses
an opportunity to widely acknowledge the interrelations of reality and fiction
and the plurality of worlds. With this ontological focus on the world of math-
ematics, the maths fiction of Gravity’s Rainbow accords this specific science
a crucial place in its development of a postmodernist response to the grand
narratives of modernity.

Closing the Circle: The Ethical Limits of Mathematics and Fiction

Gravity’s Rainbow constitutes a world in which historical reality and exuber-
antly imaginative writing, mathematics and fiction, and various discourses,
possibilities, probabilities and realities coexist, connect and turn into each
other. Not least, it brings together its own opposed halves of mathematical
description and narrative exploration. Before reading the novel, its title might
seem to forcibly combine a scientific term with a poetic image, bringing to
mind John Keats’s famous accusation that, through its scientific investigation,
Newton ‘had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow’.63 Conversely, Newton
might have claimed gravity to belong only to the scientific sphere. In the course
of Gravity’s Rainbow, however, the respective attributions to the domains
of science and literature are reversed: the rainbow, similar in form to the
parabola-shaped path of a rocket, is related to the mathematical concept of the
calculus, while gravity is revealed to be a fictitious force.
The link between the rainbow and the rocket’s trajectory goes further when,
like the rainbow which appears to be a semicircle but would form into a full
circle if it did not meet the horizon, the Rocket 00000 does not end with its
explosion: it passes underneath the earth, completing the other half of its path
to arrive at its starting point as the reborn Rocket 00001. The calculus, which
can be used to calculate the rocket’s flight trajectory, cannot represent this
complete circular passage: a function demands that each value x corresponds
to only one value y, so it can describe a semicircle and a parabola, but not a
circle where a point on the horizontal middle axis corresponds to two values
y – one on the upper semicircle, one on the lower semicircle. A circle can be
described by mathematical means, of course, but not in the language of the cal-
culus as employed in Gravity’s Rainbow. The novel’s maths is thus insufficient
to take account of the Rocket’s complete route, and its metaphorical burial
and dark passage through the earth is instead rendered in a Herero myth: the

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Herero believe that the sun lives until in the evening it is speared to death and
colours the sky red. Then, ‘under the earth, in the night, the sun is born again,
to come back each dawn, new and the same’ (GR 383). Relating the sun’s
death and rebirth, the Hereros’ story addresses a part of existence that the
enlightened calculus cannot cover.
The image of the complementarity of science and story in Gravity’s Rainbow
illustrates an idea that similarly informs Jean-François Lyotard’s argument in
The Postmodern Condition: ‘scientific knowledge does not represent the total-
ity of knowledge; it has always existed in addition to, and in competition
and conflict with, another kind of knowledge, which I will call narrative’.64
Lyotard’s limiting the relevance of science and his valuation of small, contra-
dictory narratives fuelled the association of the postmodern with relativism
and led to accusations of his abandoning objective truth. The misleading
attractiveness of systems that do not accord with reality is not limited to stories,
however, but in Gravity’s Rainbow appears most clearly in Pointsman’s belief
in the causal connection between Slothrop’s sexual encounters and the rocket
hits, which eventually turns out to be unfounded in ‘the body of fact’ (GR
323). Moreover, while Pynchon’s novel questions and expands any notion of
objective truth, it is also cautious not to abandon the reality of facts. Indeed,
it is worth pointing out again that, when Gravity’s Rainbow moves from a
modernist to a postmodernist stance in close connection with a nuanced view
of the mathematical and ethical value of fiction, its explorations of ontologi-
cal uncertainty and plurality do not lead to unbounded relativism. As set out
in Chapter 1, Pynchon’s Against the Day is extremely careful not to suggest
the possibility of abandoning the real: even its flights to the greatest imagina-
tive heights are stabilised by what Yashmeen calls the ‘spine of reality’. And
Gravity’s Rainbow, too, emphasises the precedence of ‘real reality’ and the
ways in which, as Esposito notes in relation to probability theory, ‘[t]he rela-
tion to the world serves as the corrective to fiction’.65 The novel illustrates
that the facts of the world limit mathematical fiction when an engineer reports
a problem with the Rocket, complaining that the measured data indicates a
much smaller value than the calculated pressure of 40 atü. Enzian, although
most attuned to living in probabilities and conditions weaker than existence,
argues for dismissing the calculation in favour of the reality of the facts: ‘What
are these data, if not direct revelation? [. . .] How do you presume to compare
a number you have only derived on paper with a number that is the Rocket’s
own?’ (GR 374–5). When declaring the precedence of reality, Enzian acts as a
voice of caution, pointing out that the facts of reality inhibit both the construc-
tion of purely fictional and of entirely mathematical systems.
The use of gravity in Pynchon’s novel further clarifies the limits of fictional
and mathematical systems. Although gravity is exposed as a fictitious force,
the novel does not present the possibility of physically escaping it: Gottfried’s

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flight is temporary, Lyle Bland travels in his mind only, and the Counterforce
is nowhere near overcoming the system of the Elect. Attentive to the inevi-
tability of gravitational effects to which the inertia of inaction and careless-
ness further add, Gravity’s Rainbow does not embrace complete ontological
uncertainty or relativity. What is possible, so the novel suggests, is to realise
that what was considered to be a force and therefore inescapable might not
be as all-encompassing as previously thought. Although this does not show a
clear path to escaping the very real effects of gravity, it can at least keep alive
hope for alternatives and the work of counter-movements. So, when bring-
ing Enlightenment physico-theology up to date, Gravity’s Rainbow’s modern
mathematico-ethical perspective promotes a postmodernist proliferation of
worlds and establishes that seemingly universal forces can be found not to be
so, but it also shows that there are physical facts that no change in reference
frames can deny. Even more important than physical facts, however, is the
gravity of ethical concerns. The metaphorical use of gravity suggests that a
proliferation of perspectives is not to lead to inertia, but that the exact nature
of reality, its perspectives, causes and meanings, have to take a backseat: what
ultimately matters is commitment to some kind of action that maintains com-
passion and the ‘physical grace to keep it working’ (GR 880). In this respect,
the ethical dimension of gravity even takes precedence over the ontological: in
view of ethical demands, questions of reality are secondary. Thus, long before
the 1990s criticism of scientific relativism and, in the 2000s, the call by Bruno
Latour and others to move beyond the dichotomy of fact and fiction and
establish a ‘fair’ position, Pynchon’s novel highlights the ethical dimensions of
science, fiction and of doing nothing.66
Gravity’s Rainbow with its use of various concepts from modern maths –
from the Enlightenment period to the Second World War – sets into broader
context the specifically modernist features explored in earlier chapters. Focusing
on the relation of maths and fiction that has also run through the discussions of
Against the Day, The Sleepwalkers and The Man without Qualities, the novel
addresses the roots and legacies of modernist maths: considering gravity in
terms of geometry reveals it to be a fictitious force; calculus makes use of the
‘fiction of the mind’ of infinitesimals to arrive at ‘real’ solutions; and probabil-
ity theory sets several fictive realities next to each other. With these examples
across its modern history, Gravity’s Rainbow suggests that mathematics does
not only lend itself to rationalisation and technological invention but similarly
supports the ‘reality’ of fiction. It thus contributes to the novel’s postmodern-
ist dedication to a plurality of possibilities and, indeed, worlds. Gesturing to
the seventeenth century when maths becomes an instrument of physics as a
decisive fork in the path, and to the twentieth century when a new focus on
mathematics recovers its potential to deal with uncertainty and fictive con-
cepts and points the way forward to a postmodernist pluralisation of reality,

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Gravity’s Rainbow takes account of the inextricable relation between modern-

ism, its roots in early modernity, and its postmodernist legacies. The novel
keeps closely in view the aberrations to which mathematical mindsets and
their applications in science and technology have given rise over four centu-
ries, and it ends with only an infinitesimal moment of hope – a mathematically
described moment that is almost but never really inexistent and whose minute
probability does not alleviate demand for compassion and action. Where
Gravity’s Rainbow uses the combined force of physical forces and imaginative
grace to argue for the reality of ethical demands but gives little reason for hope,
Pynchon invests maths with more positive potential in Against the Day: here,
it might help us to, in some way at least, ‘fly toward grace’ (AD 1220). Until
then, however, Gravity’s Rainbow suggests that maths and literature, allowing
us to identify outside perspectives and moments of chance and change, can at
least help us maintain the physical grace to keep it working.

Notes
 1. Thomas Moore, The Style Connectedness: Gravity’s Rainbow and Thomas
Pynchon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), p. 196.
  2. Newton ‘a répandu la lumière des Mathématiques sur une science qui jusqu’alors
avait été dans les ténèbres des conjectures & des hypothèses’ (Alexis Clairaut, ‘Du
système du monde, dans les principes de la gravitation universelle’, in Histoire
de l’Académie royale des sciences, année M. DCCXLV, avec les mémoires de
mathématique & de physique (Paris: L’Imprimerie royale, 1745), 329–64, p. 329).
  3. Alexander Pope, ‘Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’, in Collected Poems, ed. Bonamy
Dobrée (London, Melbourne and Toronto: Dent, 1983), p. 122.
  4. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans.
John Cumming (London and New York: Verso, 1997), p. 3.
 5. Martin Paul Eve, ‘Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and the Problems
of “Metamodernism”: Post-Millennial Post-Postmodernism?’, C21 Literature:
Journal of 21st-century Writings, 1 (2012), 7–25 (p. 8). Ali Chetwynd, Review
of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc
Herman and Brian McHale, College Literature, 39.4 (2012), 142–5 (pp. 142–3).
 6. Brian McHale, ‘Pynchon’s Postmodernism’, in The Cambridge Companion
to Thomas Pynchon, ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 97–111 (p. 97).
 7. Lance Schachterle, ‘Introduction’, in Joseph W. Slade, Thomas Pynchon (New
York: Peter Lang, 1990), vii­–x (p. ix).
  8. Alan J. Friedman, ‘Science and Technology’, in Approaches to Gravity’s Rainbow,
ed. Charles Clerc (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 69–102 (p. 100).
  9. John Gascoigne, ‘From Bentley to the Victorians: The Rise and Fall of British
Newtonian Natural Theology’, Science in Context, 2.2 (1988), 219–56 (p. 221).
10. Paolo Mancosu, Philosophy of Mathematics and Mathematical Practice in the
Seventeenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 3.
11. Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities [1814],
ed. E. T. Bell (New York: Dover, 1951), p. 4.
12. John O. Stark, Pynchon’s Fictions: Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of
Information (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1980), p. 46.
13. Friedman, ‘Science and Technology’, pp. 94–5.

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modernism, fiction and mathematics

14. Walther von Braun qtd in Walter Sanders, ‘The Seer of Space: Lifetime of Rocket
Work gives Army’s Von Braun Special Insight into the Future’, Life (18 November
1957), 133–9 (p. 133).
15. Friedman, ‘Science and Technology’, p. 77.
16. Isaac Newton, The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, vol. II, trans.
Andrew Motte (London: H. D. Symonds, 1803), p. 314.
17. Richard Bentley, The Works of Richard Bentley, vol. 3, ed. Alexander Dyce
(London: Macpherson, 1838), p. 210.
18. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson, trans.
Mary Morris and G. H. R. Parkinson (London and Vermont: Everyman, 1995),
p. 377.
19. Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, p. 228.
20. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Briefwechsel zwischen Leibniz, Arnauld und dem
Landgrafen Ernst von Hessen-Rheinfels, ed. C. L. Grotefend (Hanover: Hahnsche
Hof-Buchhandlung, 1846), p. 109.
21. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early
Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference, 2nd edn (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 184.
22. ‘Une chose exprime une autre (dans mon langage) lorsqu’il y a un rapport constant
et reglé entre ce qui se peut dire de l’une et de l’autre’ (Leibniz, Briefwechsel,
p. 109).
23. Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 49.
24. Newton, Mathematical Principles, vol. II, p. 314.
25. Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, p. 228.
26. Leibniz, Philosophical Writings, p. 228.
27. Lewis Campbell and William Garnett, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell; With
Selections from His Correspondence and Occasional Writings, 2nd edn (London:
Macmillan, 1882), pp. 203 and 289.
28. David Darling, Gravity’s Arc: The Story of Gravity, from Aristotle to Einstein and
Beyond (Hoboken: Wiley, 2006), p. 141.
29. Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan,
1929), p. 133.
30. Arthur Eddington, The Theory of Relativity and Its Influence on Scientific Thought
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1922), p. 25.
31. Thomas Pynchon, ‘Nearer, My Couch, to Thee’, The New York Times Book
Review (6 June 1993), p. 57.
32. Hollis R. Cooley et al., Introduction to Mathematics: A Survey Emphasizing
Mathematical Ideas and Their Relations to Other Fields of Knowledge (London,
Bombay and Syndey: Harrap, 1938), p. 597.
33. Michio Kaku, ‘Theory of Everything’, Nova Science Now. Available at <http://www.
pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/secretlife/physical-science/michio-kaku/> Trans­ cript at
<http://p-i-a.com/Magazine/Issue6/MichioKaku.htm> (last accessed 21 June 2017).
34. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory, trans. Robert W.
Lawson (New York: Henry Holt, 1920), p. 82.
35. Cooley et al., Introduction to Mathematics, p. 263.
36. Cooley et al., Introduction to Mathematics, p. 263.
37. Cooley et al., Introduction to Mathematics, p. 263.
38. Even concerning reality, the mathematics textbook rather overestimates the hold
of rationality: during the 2010 Football World Cup, Paul the Psychic Octopus
was said to predict the outcome of Germany’s matches by taking food from the
container with the flag of the winning team. Paul was right on each occasion, and
the correspondence between his preferred food container and the victorious team

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can be described as a functional relation. Not only was this obviously arbitrary
relation taken to predict the result of the matches, but threats to cook Paul for
dinner if he did not pick the right team attest to the even less rational idea that
the octopus could actually influence the outcome. Although obviously part of an
entertaining hype and not to be taken too seriously, the incident shows the attrac-
tion of promises to predict and influence the future.
39. Bernard Duyfhuizen, ‘Starry-Eyed Semiotics: Learning to Read Slothrop’s Map
and Gravity’s Rainbow’, Pynchon Notes, 6 (1981), 5–33 (p. 20).
40. John L. Bell, The Continuous and the Infinitesimal in Mathematics and Philosophy
(Milan: Polimetrica, 2006), p. 17.
41. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Leibniz–Des Bosses Correspondence, ed. and
trans. Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 2007), p. 53.
42. James W. Earl, ‘Freedom and Knowledge in the Zone’, in Approaches to Gravity’s
Rainbow, ed. Charles Clerc (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983),
229–50 (p. 241).
43. Amir Alexander, Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped
the Modern World (New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2014), p. 24.
44. ‘qu’il y a une espece de mathematique’ (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Sämtliche
Schriften und Briefe 1/13, ed. Akademie der Wissenschaften Göttingen (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2010), p. 551). Jérémie Griard, ‘The Specimen Demonstrationum
Politicarum Pro Eligendo Rege Polonorum: From the Concatenation of
Demonstrations to a Decision Appraisal Procedure’, in Leibniz: What Kind of
Rationalist?, ed. Marcelo Dascal (New York et al.: Springer, 2008), 371–82
(pp. 378–9).
45. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, ‘The Art of Discovery’ [1675], in Leibniz: Selections,
ed. Philip P. Wiener (New York: Scribner’s, 1951), 50–8 (p. 51).
46. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 3.
47. Lance Schachterle and P. K. Aravind, ‘The Three Equations in Gravity’s Rainbow’,
Pynchon Notes, 46–9 (2000), 157–69 (p. 168).
48. Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Stephen Halliwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995), p. 135.
49. ‘Die Realität ist unwahrscheinlich, und das ist das Problem’ (Elena Esposito, Die
Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007),
p. 50).
50. See Esposito, Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität, p. 21.
51. See Esposito, Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität, pp. 55–6.
52. Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A
Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and
Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
53. See Esposito, Die Fiktion der wahrscheinlichen Realität, p. 68.
54. Lorraine Daston, ‘The Doctrine of Chances without Chance: Determinism,
Mathematical Probability and Quantification in the Seventeenth Century’, in The
Invention of Physical Science: Intersections of Mathematics, Theology and Natural
Philosophy since the Seventeenth Century, ed. Mary Jo Nye, Joan L. Richards
and Roger H. Stuewer (Dordrecht, Boston, MA and London: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1992), 27–50 (p. 47).
55. Brian McHale, ‘Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity’s
Rainbow’, Poetics Today, 1.1–2 (1979), 85–110 (p. 91).
56. Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1996),
pp. 24–5.

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57. Dick Higgins qtd in McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 10.

58. Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), p. 2.
59. Brian McHale, ‘Change of Dominant from Modernist to Postmodernist Writing’,
Approaching Postmodernism, 21 (1986), 53–79 (p. 67).
60. Isaac Barrow qtd in Antoni Malet, ‘Isaac Barrow on the Mathematisation of
Nature: Theological Voluntarism and the Rise of Geometrical Optics’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, 58.2 (1997), 265–87 (pp. 280–1).
61. Camille Falconet qtd in Yves Gingras, ‘What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?’,
History of Science, 39 (2001), 383–416 (p. 402).
62. ‘au lieu d’accommoder leurs idées à la Nature, ils voidroient soumettre la Nature
à leurs idées’ (Camille Falconet, ‘Preface’, in Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle,
Théorie des tourbillons cartésiens (Paris: Guerin, 1752), iii–xxxi (p. xxxi)).
63. John Keats qtd in Benjamin Robert Haydon, The Autobiography and Journals
of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Malcolm Elwin (London: Macdonald, 1950),
p. 317.
64. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge,
trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1984), p. 7.
65. ‘Der Bezug zur Welt dient der Korrektur der Fiktion’ (Esposito, Die Fiktion der
wahrscheinlichen Realität, p. 114).
66. Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), 225–48 (p. 243).

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 conclusion 

CONCLUSION: MODERNISM, FICTION

AND MATHEMATICS 

In his 2015 overview of the study of literature and science from the early
modern period to the present, Martin Willis identifies the topic of mathematics
as a gap in scholarship:
One distinct scientific discipline that has played only a small role in litera-
ture and science criticism is mathematics. Despite being central to many
other sciences [. . .] that literature and science scholars have investigated,
pure (rather than applied) mathematics has not received the same atten-
tion which its status in the sciences afford it.1
Differences between pure and applied mathematics become particularly evident
in modern maths when a close relationship with philosophy and the discovery
of concepts without direct counterparts in nature encourage the discipline to
turn away from application and towards self-referential concerns with math-
ematical existence, truth and meaning. As the specific characteristics of maths
and its exceptional relation to physical reality gain attention with its modern
transformation, the need to account for the unique status of mathematics in
the spectrum of the disciplines becomes urgent in studies of twentieth-century
literature and science. At the same time, maths becomes a necessary and fruit-
ful concern of modernist studies.
With its focus on Pynchon’s, Broch’s and Musil’s imaginative negotiations
of the place of maths, this book reflects the notion of mathematical modern-
ism through the lens of interrelations with literary fiction, and it thus helps us

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understand the modernist condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of

literature and mathematics studies. The novels accord maths and its modernist
development a central place in their visions and employ it as interrelated with
and exemplary of transformations in the modern West, the wider loss of abso-
lute truth, and the increasing scepticism towards Enlightenment values. More
surprisingly, however, they also explore the freedoms and opportunities that
the mathematical crisis implies and relate the growing acceptance of imaginary
and fictional concepts to the possibilities of literature and their own literary
practices. Engaging with questions of representation and the value of fiction
for a highly rational field, the novels use maths and its history to provide new
perspectives on reason and on modernist experimentation with literary form.
The texts reflect challenges to traditional perceptions of maths, negotiate the
place of a new modernist mathematics, and explore the fruitfulness of consid-
ering shared characteristics of maths and literature.
Broch’s The Sleepwalkers trilogy most explicitly considers maths as a
structural science that lends itself to exploring changes in the very notion of
­structure, including opposed ideas of complete dissolution and finding cohesion
in intuition. With reference to these modern and counter-modern positions, the
trilogy connects the foundational debate in mathematics to ideas of literary
form and uses it as a model for its own narrative structure. Similarly con-
cerned with opposed ways to approach the world, Musil’s The Man without
Qualities does not suggest that it is possible to decide for either a ratioïd,
logicist-formalist or a non-ratioïd, intuitionist outlook but presents maths as
a model for productively dealing with the unsolvable contradiction by incor-
porating the aims and methods of both exactitude and pragmatic vagueness.
Standing for ideal precision and, at the same time, pragmatically embracing
uncertainty, mathematics answers to two main aspects of modern crisis: the
failing of reason and the loss of trust. Combining the two equally challenged
concepts into critical trust, Musil’s novel fragment does not propose a solu-
tion but a way to avert stagnation in crisis, that is, a way to keep it working
by drawing on the method of essayism that includes aspects of both science
and literature. Pynchon’s novels demonstrate the continued relevance of mod-
ernist maths for postmodernist considerations. Gravity’s Rainbow explores
ways in which mathematics incorporates fiction as part of its challenging the
dominant status of one-dimensional rational reality, and Against the Day uses
maths to locate in the modern crisis of representation a promise of possibilities
inherent in imaginary domains. Both novels are careful to keep in sight the,
to use Pynchon’s expression that reminds us of the German dimension of all
the texts, ‘Rückgrad von Wirklichkeit’ that ensures continued relation to the
real and its responsibilities (AD 679). Pynchon’s, Broch’s and Musil’s literary
visions thus point to unrealised potential that lies in aspects of uncertainty and
fictionality in maths that Enlightenment rationality has suppressed. Suggesting

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that Enlightenment beliefs have to be re-examined and adjusted to the situa-

tion in the twentieth or twenty-first century, each of the works examined here
contrasts negative associations of rationalisation with notions of modernist
mathematics as a domain of an-archistic liberation from foundations.
On a more general level, the notion of a mathematical modernism rein-
forces the ‘growing awareness of the need to understand modernism as a
more diverse field; characterized by an aesthetic and ideological challenge that
goes beyond a narrow canon of writers and works’ and, we could add, disci-
plines.2 Attention to mathematical modernism and literature engaging with
it also leads to questioning interpretations of modernism as mainly focused
on negative aspects of modernisation and instrumental rationality. Fiction
written in and about the period, as well as mathematical prose texts of the
time, reconsider the foundations of reason and rediscover neglected aspects of
rational domains, including, counter-intuitively, non-rational and imaginary
­dimensions. Modernist literature does not only combat a spiritually impover-
ished rationality, then, but locates in it ways to avoid becoming complicit with
problematic developments of rationalisation. Examining the place of maths
thus leads to a more nuanced understanding of modernism’s complex engage-
ment with its Enlightenment roots and processes of modernisation.
Attention to maths also provides new insights into responses to the first of
eight fundamental problems that Michael Whitworth identifies as motivating
modernist writers: ‘How can we justify art in a world dominated by commerce,
quantification, and instrumental rationality?’ As Whitworth explains, ‘[n]o
modernist would have put the question in exactly this way, because “instru-
mental reason” is a phrase indebted to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment’.3 Indeed, reason retains more ambiguous connotations in some
areas of early twentieth-century thinking, not least in those aware of challenges
to the foundations of mathematics. Mathematical discussions at the time and
modernist engagements with maths also suggest that the opposition between
art and what came to be called instrumental reason was less entrenched than
in later assessments: mathematics could be seen as a main tool of rationality
but also as an art independent from reality and its demands. The question of
the role of art in a rationalied world is, so Whitworth points out, related to
what Andrew Brighton calls the ‘inaugurating problem’ of modernism, namely
‘the status and possibility of imaginative and ethical consciousness in a culture
dominated by modern rationality’.4 Where his phrasing implies an opposi-
tion, texts engaging with modernist maths explore the imaginative and ethical
dimensions of precisely this most rational discipline. They thus resist a ration-
alisation of reason, that is, the tendency to see maths and reason as means
of rationalisation only. Viewing maths on its own terms, the texts identify in
it imaginative and ethical potential and explore new relations to reality and
fiction.

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modernism, fiction and mathematics

Texts engaging with a specifically modernist mathematics can suggest

alternatives to the dominant reaction to a changed relation between reason
and reality. Up to the twentieth century, reason was understood to exist in
the real world in various manifestations: ‘This view asserted the existence
of reason as a force [. . .] in the objective world – in relations among human
beings and between social classes, in social institutions, and in nature and its
manifestations.’5 Max Horkheimer argues that this theory of objective reason
posits a ‘universal rationality from which criteria for all things and beings were
derived. The emphasis was on ends rather than on means.’6 The theory that
reason is inherent in reality is not least put into question by the realisation that
mathematics is not a direct expression of the physical world. Reason being
unmoored from a foundation in reality, it becomes, so Horkheimer holds,
a subjective faculty of the mind and shifts to instrumental rationality. While
various modernist texts derive from the dissociation of reason and reality an
argument for questioning the rule of instrumental rationality, works focusing
on maths also draw attention to the rationality of fiction: as rationality does
not imply reality, it supports a much broader realm of possibilities or, indeed,
fictional realities.
The novels by Pynchon, Broch and Musil engage with a specifically modern-
ist maths that exhibits characteristics such as self-referentiality and a sense of
crisis, but also view maths in its connections to the larger period of modernity,
considering its roots in the Enlightenment and relation to postmodern ideas of
structure and writing. As developed in detail in Chapter 4, in the wake of the
rising importance of maths in the scientific revolution, not least initiated by
Newton’s Principia Mathematica, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century think-
ers contemplated the implications of valuing abstract mathematical reasoning
over empirical observation of reality. To quote Camille Falconet again: ‘There
is, so to say, two very different worlds; one mathematical, the other physical.’7
Falconet and other Enlightenment thinkers pondered the possibility of trans-
posing mathematical abstractions to the physical world ‘as if they were real
beings’, and while questions regarding the legitimacy and value of this other
world never completely vanished, they revived when around 1900 mathemati-
cians aimed to prove the foundations of their field with purely mathematical
means and without recourse to physical referents.8 Reactions to the failure of
this attempt and the resulting foundational crisis demonstrate that the uncer-
tainties regarding the world of maths unsettle the real world too. No longer
understood as a Platonic realm of ideas and absolute truth, mathematics now
appears as flawed but still constitutes a domain apart from the real that sug-
gests alternatives to the given. For the novels by Pynchon, Broch and Musil, the
value of maths lies precisely in its deficiencies, meaning that occupying oneself
with it does not equal escape into a perfect world but engagement with possi-
bilities that are imperfect but full of potential to illuminate and change the real.

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In a historical account of the relationship of maths and empirical investiga-

tions of the world, evocatively entitled ‘What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?’,
Yves Gingras traces it from Aristotle’s argument that mathematical exactness
cannot be found in physical matter and maths consequently not be a method
in the natural sciences, to a revival of physicist David Bohm’s declaration in
the mid-1980s that ‘the current emphasis on mathematics has gone too far’.9
Indeed, the conflict between mathematical and empirical approaches, referring
to what Falconet calls two ‘very different worlds’, continues to take place at
present. Current examples include the demand in climate research to do more
work ‘with the help of a pick and shovel (as opposed to a computer)’.10 While
it would go too far here to examine ways in which mathematical computer
models can be considered as fictions, the conflict between empirical and theo-
retical research shows that debates regarding the relation of maths and reality
have a long and continuing history and share with literary scholarship con-
cerns with representation.
The examination and historicising of modernist interrelations between
maths and fiction point to implications for the field of modernist studies.
Attention to informed engagements with mathematics can encourage nuanced
views of modernism’s reaction to the growing rule of instrumental rational-
ity: while, generally speaking, modernist fiction questions the uninhibited
rule of reason, texts focusing on modernist maths also reveal its limits and its
making use of imaginary aspects. The examination of the mathematical novels
and their contexts also contribute to distinguishing the specific conditions of
studying maths in the wider field of literature and science. Not least, the com-
parative analysis of the works by Pynchon, Broch and Musil reminds us that,
if the relationship between literature and reality and the usefulness of fiction
continues to be debated, so are the relationship between mathematics and the
physical world and its role in the natural sciences. The novels use these ques-
tions around maths to explore similar concerns in relation to literature and its
potential value at times when political turmoil and threatening scientific pro-
gress demand attention to the real. Since modernist maths and literary fiction,
both lacking a direct representational connection to nature, have a comparable
relation to reality, the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’ might point
to a similarly ‘unreasonable’ but undeniable relevance of literature for real
concerns.11 In this respect, the notion of fictional elements in mathematics is of
central interest as it strengthens hope that responses to the crisis of modernity
could be achieved with the help of fiction but without abandoning the ben-
efits of rational investigation. Against the Day, The Sleepwalkers, The Man
without Qualities and Gravity’s Rainbow suggest that awareness of the history
of maths can help avoid repeating the Enlightenment’s mistake of failing to
acknowledge the potentials of fiction and the plurality of worlds.
It is notable that all four literary works discussed here show concern with

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the relevance of fiction for the real world and establish strong connections
between mathematics and ethics. They thus stand in the physico-theological
tradition that, since early modernity, views religious issues as related to sci-
entific ones, but the works by Pynchon, Broch and Musil relocate religious
to secular ethical questions and the examination of the physical world to the
exploration of possibilities: the translation of physico-theology to a mathema-
tico-ethical focus entails shifting emphasis from existence to possibility, from
what is to what could be. Pynchon’s, Broch’s and Musil’s works examine both
maths and literature as realms of possibility that can have real effects: in the
modernist understandings of maths as well as in literary fiction, working with
language extends possibilities and makes worlds. Given that maths, the peak
of rationality, can be seen as a different world but also as crucially related to
understanding and creating reality, it lends itself to modernist and postmod-
ernist renegotiations of rationality, reality and fiction.
Let me conclude the circle of this book with a story. When Michael Faraday
received a scientific paper by James Clerk Maxwell in 1857, he admitted that
the younger scientist’s much more mathematical approach intimidated him: ‘I
was at first almost frightened when I saw such mathematical force made to bear
upon the subject.’12 If even the celebrated scientist Faraday respectfully feared
the power of maths, it might seem unsurprising that laypersons and scholars
in the humanities have shied away from it, even in the field of literature and
science, in what Steven Connor has diagnosed as a ‘contemporary allergy to
number in the humanities’.13 Yet, the second part of Faraday’s confession can
give hope to the growing number of literary scholars working with mathemat-
ics: ‘I was at first almost frightened when I saw such mathematical force made
to bear upon the subject and then wondered to see that the subject stood it so
well’ (my emphasis).14 The novels by Pynchon, Broch and Musil impressively
demonstrate that literary fiction stands the force of maths exceedingly well and
indeed thrives on it, maybe particularly when exposing this force as, in some
aspects, fictitious. Not least, their works, engaging with and at the same time
establishing the notion of modernist mathematics, are evidence of the truth of
this book’s opening statement: ‘Mighty are numbers; joined with art, resist-
less.’ q.e.d.

Notes.
  1. Martin Willis, Literature and Science (New York: Palgrave, 2015), p. 166.
  2. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska, ‘Approaching Modernism’, in Modernism,
ed. Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John
Benjamins, 2007), 1–8 (p. 6).
  3. Michael H. Whitworth, ‘Introduction’, in Modernism, ed. Michael H. Whitworth
(Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 3–57 (p. 6).
  4. Qtd in Whitworth, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.
  5. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 2.

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 conclusion 

 6. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 2.

  7. Camille Falconet qtd in Yves Gingras, ‘What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?’,
History of Science, 39 (2001), 383–416 (p. 402).
  8. Falconet, qtd in Gingras, ‘What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?’, p. 402.
  9. Falconet qtd in Gingras, ‘What Did Mathematics Do to Physics?’, p. 406.
10. Jon Lloyd and Elmar Veenendaal, ‘Are Fire Mediated Feedbacks Burning Out of
Control?’ Biogeosciences Discuss (2016), 1–20, p. 15.
11. Eugene P. Wigner, ‘The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural
Sciences’, in Symmetries and Reflections: Scientific Essays (Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT Press, 1970), 222–37 (p. 222).
12. James Clerk Maxwell, The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell,
vol. 1, ed. Peter Michael Harman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
p. 548.
13. Steven Connor, ‘Blissed Out – on Hedonophobia’, Talk at the Pleasure Symposium,
De Montfort University, 25 June 2012. http://stevenconnor.com/blissedout/ (last
accessed 10 February 2016).
14. Maxwell, The Scientific Letters and Papers, p. 548.

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GLOSSARY

Banach–Tarski paradox: A theorem in set-theoretic geometry published by

Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski in 1924. The theorem implies that, in theory,
a solid ball can be cut up into a number of pieces and then be reassembled to
make a ball of any other size. This inspired the informal phrase that ‘a pea can
be cut up and reassembled into the sun’. Although contradicting intuition, the
Banach–Tarski paradox does not put into question accepted assumptions of
modern mathematics. It can be proven using the axiom of choice, an axiom of
set theory formulated by Ernst Zermelo in 1904.

calculus: The calculus is a branch of mathematics concerned with change, for

example motion. Examples of application are calculations with velocity, accel-
eration, arc length and centre of mass. Independently from each other, Newton
and Leibniz invented the calculus in the seventeenth century.

combinatorial analysis: Combinatorics is a branch of mathematics concerned

with the theory of combinations and permutations. It is the study of structures
and different ways of arranging objects according to specific rules.

commutativity: Commutativity means that in a calculatory process the order

of the elements can be changed without affecting the result. For example:
4 * 3 = 3 * 4, or a + b = b + a. The multiplication of Quaternions is not commu-
tative, but: i * j = −j * i.

164
 glossary 

complex number: A complex number has the form x + yi and consists of a real
unit (x) and an imaginary unit (yi). A complex number can be interpreted as a
vector in a plane which starts from the origin and goes to the point x + yi with
x units on the real x-axis and y units of the imaginary number axis i, which is
the perpendicular y-axis.

continuum, Cantor’s continuum: The term ‘continuum’ refers to real numbers.

Cantor compared the sizes of infinite sets and formulated the hypothesis that
there exists no set whose power is between the power of the set of integers and
the power of the set of real numbers. Cantor could not prove his hypothesis,
and it was later shown that Cantor’s continuum hypothesis can neither be
proved nor disproved in the framework of standard set theory.

delta t, ∆t: Delta denotes a small quantity, here the difference in time (t). In
calculus, delta t can become infinitesimally small, so that delta t corresponds
to a moment in time that approaches zero.

fictitious force: Fictitious forces, also called ‘pseudo forces’, arise when a
change in the frame of reference reveals that what is experienced as a ‘force’
does not exist. For example, a person sitting in an accelerating car feels a
‘force’ that pushes them into their seat. Viewed from inside the car and its
accelerated reference frame, there exists a force. However, an observer from
the outside understands that the effect is due to the acceleration of the car and
not to an external force. The outside observer does not need to refer to a force
to explain the phenomenon, while for the passenger being pressed into the seat,
the experience of a ‘force’ is real. From the inside, the passenger cannot deter-
mine whether the force they experience is real or fictitious. See also Principle
of Equivalence.

function: A function relates an input value to exactly one output value.

Functions can be visualised as graphs.

imaginary number: The term ‘imaginary number’ is sometimes used as a

synonym for ‘complex number’ which consists of a real part (x) and an imagi-
nary part (yi): x + yi. More specifically, the term ‘imaginary number’ refers to
the element i of a complex number: i2 = −1, or also: i = √−1. Negative squares
are defined in the complex number system, but not in the real number system;
imaginary numbers were therefore said to ‘not exist’. Imaginary numbers can
be thought of as set on an axis perpendicular to the real number line.

incompleteness theorem: The incompleteness theorem states that mathemat-

ics cannot be proven complete and consistent. There are always statements

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modernism, fiction and mathematics

in mathematics that are regarded as true but cannot be proven. The theorem
was formulated by Kurt Gödel in 1931 and ended the hope that the formalist
programme could determine the foundations of mathematics.

infinitesimal: An infinitesimal is an infinitely small quantity, a value that is

approaching zero but is infinitesimally greater than it.

integer: A whole number, such as 1, 2, 3, . . .

irrational number: An irrational number is a real number that cannot be

expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers. Examples are π and √2.

law of excluded middle: The law of excluded middle states that either a
proposition is true or the negation of the proposition is true. It is also known
as ‘tertium non datur’, meaning that there is no third possibility between the
proposition and its negation. Intuitionist mathematics does not accept the law
of excluded middle as an axiom.

law of large numbers: The law of large numbers is a theorem in probability

theory, stating that over a large number of cases, the average value will be close
to the expected value. For example, when flinging a coin, the outcome of a
single throw cannot be predicted, but over a larger number of cases, heads and
tails will come up equally often.

non-Euclidean geometry: In non-Euclidean geometries Euclid’s parallel pos-

tulate does not hold, that is, parallel lines can meet and, as an implication of
the inapplicability of the parallel postulate, the angular sum of a triangle is
not necessarily 180 degrees. For example, geometry on the globe is elliptic:
on the globe, a triangle can be defined by two longitudinal lines, which meet
at the pole, and the equator connecting them. Since longitudes cut the equator
at right angles, the two angles at the basis of the triangle already sum up to
180 degrees. When the angle at the pole, where the two longitudes intersect, is
added, the angular sum of the triangle is greater than 180 degrees, thus con-
tradicting Euclid’s postulate. Non-Euclidean geometries were discovered in the
nineteenth century.

normal distribution: The normal distribution is the most common probability

distribution. The function is shaped like a bell with the peak at the mean value
and probabilities decreasing on both sides of the mean value.

parallel postulate: Euclid’s axiom states that in a geometric system there

are two straight lines that are at constant distance from each other. In non‑­

166
 glossary 

Euclidean geometry, which was discovered in the nineteenth century, the par-
allel postulate does not hold.

Poisson distribution: The Poisson distribution is a probability distribution

describing the probability that a given number of events occur in an interval of
time or over a number of experiments. For example, if on average two goals
occur in a football match, there might be matches with 0 goals and others with
4 goals; the Poisson distribution describes the probability of seeing a match
with no goal, 1 goal or 2 goals etc. The Poisson distribution was introduced by
Siméon Poisson in 1837.

principle of equivalence: This principle in relativity theory states the equiva-

lence of gravitational and inertial mass. A thought experiment by Albert
Einstein illustrates the principle: If an elevator floats in space, a person inside
it is suspended in mid-air, while in an elevator on earth, a person stands on the
floor due to gravity. If the elevator in space accelerates, the person inside stays
at the same spot while the elevator floor comes closer. As the floor pushes into
the person, they come to rest on the floor and experience the sensation of a
gravitational force – as the person does not accelerate but remains inert, they
experience the change in the position of the surrounding elevator as a force
pushing them to the ground. This shows that in accelerating surroundings,
the effects of a person’s inertia is equivalent to the effects of gravity. See also
Fictitious Force.

Quaternion: Quaternions are hypercomplex numbers and extend the complex

number system from two to four dimensions. While complex numbers describe
the location of points on a plane, Quaternions describe the location of points
in space. A Quaternion consists of a scalar or real part (a) and the remain-
ing vector or imaginary part: a + bi + cj + dk, whereby i, j, and k are imaginary
numbers. Quaternions were discovered by William Rowan Hamilton in 1843.

Quine–Putnam indispensability argument: W. V. Quine and Hilary Putnam

argue that mathematics is indispensable to science and that, because we can
apply mathematical entities such as numbers, sets and functions to great effect
in the empirical sciences, we can believe that these entities exist. In short,
the argument states that mathematical objects exist since they are immensely
useful in the empirical sciences.

rational numbers: A rational number can be expressed as a ratio of whole

numbers, for example ½, 4⁄7, etc. In contrast, irrational numbers cannot be
expressed as ratios of whole numbers.

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modernism, fiction and mathematics

real number: The real number system includes rational and irrational numbers,
but does not include complex or imaginary numbers. Real numbers can be
considered as points on the number line.

Riemann hypothesis: See Zeta-function

Russell’s paradox: Russell’s paradox was discovered by Bertrand Russell

in 1901. It concerns the question of whether the set of all sets that are not
members of themselves is a member of itself. As the question cannot be
answered but any answer creates a paradox, it demonstrated that set theory
leads to contradictions.

scalar: ‘Scalar’ is a term defined by William Rowan Hamilton to describe the

scalar or real part of a Quaternion. A scalar is a variable that can be expressed
as a real number and has only quantity, not direction. In contrast, a vector has
both quantity and direction.

set theory: Set theory studies mathematical sets, that is, collections of objects.
Nearly all mathematical objects can be formulated in set theory, proposing
it as a possible foundational theory of mathematics. Set theory was devel-
oped in the nineteenth century, but in the early twentieth century, para-
doxes such as the Russell paradox were discovered and challenged the belief
that a secure foundation of mathematics could be established through set
theory.

third law of motion: The third law of motion is one of three physical laws for-
mulated by Newton. It states that to every action there is a reaction of equal
force in the opposite direction: ‘actio = reactio’.

indeterminacy principle: The indeterminacy principle, also known as the uncer-

tainty principle, was formulated by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg
in 1927. It concerns the smallest scales of nature, subatomic particles, and
states that it is impossible to precisely measure the position and momentum of
a particle at the same time: the more precisely the position of a particle is meas-
ured, the less precisely can its momentum be determined, and vice versa. This
is not a practical problem of measurement, but at the subatomic level there is
a ‘fuzziness’ in nature itself.

variable: A variable stands for a value that may vary. It usually refers to real
numbers. In a complex number x + yi, the values x and y are variables, whereas
i is not a variable but a constant: i is always √−1.

168
 glossary 

vector: A vector is characterised by its length and by its direction. It can be

imagined as a directed line in a coordinate system, originating in one point and
pointing to another.

Weierstrass function: The Weierstrass function was formulated by Karl

Weierstrass in 1872. By proving that there are continuous functions that are
nowhere differentiable, the Weierstrass function challenged popular belief in
the mathematical community.

zeta-function / Riemann’s ζ-function: The zeta-function considers the distri-

bution of prime numbers in a complex number system. The famous Riemann
hypothesis, formulated by Bernhard Riemann in 1859, is about the distribu-
tion of the zeros of the zeta-function. While it can easily be shown that the
zeta-function has zeros at the negative even integers such as −2, −4, −6, . . .,
Riemann conjectured that the non-trivial zeros occur at complex values that
vary in their imaginary component but all have the real part ½. The conjecture
has remained unproven to today.

169
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 INDEX

Against the Day, 19, 24–58, 151, 158 86, 87–8, 158; see also Brouwer;
analytic philosophy see philosophy, analytic intuitionism
anarchism, 26, 31–2, 38–9, 45–50 credit see money
transformation into cultural realm, crisis of mathematics, 7–10, 14–16, 25–6,
45–50, 53, 159 27–33, 33–5, 69–70, 113–14, 158, 160
Axiom of Choice, 44–5 and metafiction, 30–1, 41, 111–12
see also Brouwer; formalism; Hilbert;
Bergson, Henri, 101–2, 118 intuitionism
Bloomsbury, 71
bookkeeping, 65–70, 75, 81 Derrida, Jacques, 87–8
Broch, Hermann: The Sleepwalkers, 19, determinism see causality
59–92, 93, 158 disintegration, 14, 61–2, 62–5, 72, 75–6,
Brouwer, Jan Egbertus Luizen, 8–9, 32–3, 82–5, 88, 106–7, 115, 118; see also
73–5, 105; see also intuitionism fragmentation; mathematics: uncertainty

calculus, infinitesimal, 138–42, 150–1 Einstein, Albert see theory of relativity

Cantor, Georg, 25–6, 29–30 Enlightenment, 1, 6, 127, 129, 138, 140
Cassirer, Ernst, 16 critique of, 25, 44, 127, 129, 138–40,
causality, 129–33, 138–9, 143, 145–8; 143, 150, 152, 158–9, 161
see also correspondence; function, epistemology, 4–5, 16, 63, 77, 94–6,
mathematical 100–4, 110–12, 114, 116, 147
Chandos Letter, 71–2, 76 essayism, 119–22, 158; see also
combinatorial analysis, 143 pragmatism; vagueness
complex numbers, 34–8, 50–5; see also ethics, 9, 46–8, 64, 68, 94–5, 97–100, 102,
imaginary numbers; Quaternions 103–4, 106, 110, 116, 118–19, 122,
correspondence, 130–3, 138–9; see also 128–31, 131–8, 142, 150, 152, 159,
function, mathematical 162; see also gravity; inertia
counter-modernism, mathematical, 8–9, excluded middle see middle state

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 index

fictionalism, mathematical, 17–18; see also The Man without Qualities, 19, 93–125, 158
mathematics: fiction Mason & Dixon, 44
First World War, 14, 19, 25, 70, 101–2 ‘The Mathematical Man’, 113–16
force, 130–7, 151–2 Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, 18
form, 4, 18–19, 51–4, 59, 62, 70–3, 76–81, mathematics
82–5, 87–8, 119–22, 146–50, 158; see as art, 13–14, 16, 37
also formalism British, 12
formalism cultural dimension of, 4–5, 8, 10–18,
literary 59, 65, 71, 85, 87, 88 40–4, 85
mathematical, 7–10, 32, 73–4, 80, 82–5, and fiction, 13–18, 113, 131–8, 138–42,
100, 105, 158 142–6, 146–50, 152, 158, 160, 161
foundations of mathematics see crisis of and freedom, 8, 9, 16, 17, 45, 136–7,
mathematics 142, 148, 158; see also mathematics:
fragmentation, 47–8, 64, 94; see also fiction; possibility; self-referentiality
disintegration; uncertainty German, 12, 33, 126–7
Frege, Gottlob, 8, 29–30, 65, 70, 71 history of, 4–5, 13, 28–30, 51, 55, 85,
function, mathematical, 138–9 161
as language, 5–6, 10, 16, 37, 40, 65–76,
Gödel, Kurt, 10 80, 86–7, 96, 98, 106–7, 109, 162
gravity, 128–9, 130, 131–8, 151–2 and metafiction, 30–1
Gravity’s Rainbow, 2, 19, 126–56, 158 as model, 3, 4, 17, 54, 60–1, 67, 70, 86,
87–8, 94, 103, 114, 117, 121–2, 158
Hardy, G. H., 13–14, 33, 41 and modernism see modernism,
Hilbert, David, 8–10, 29–30, 32, 51, 80, mathematical
83; see also formalism and morality see ethics
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 71–2, 76 and natural sciences, relation to, 1–2, 4,
158–9
imaginary numbers, 7, 15, 17, 34–7, 39–40, and nature see mathematics: reality,
54, 65n; see also complex numbers; relation to
Quaternions as non-rational, 67, 75–6, 86, 88,
incompleteness theorem, 10 104–6, 109, 113–14, 159; see also
inertia, 135–6, 152 intuitionism; mysticism
infinitesimals, 140–1; see also calculus, and reality, relation to, 1–2, 4–7, 10, 26,
infinitesimal 39, 44–5, 66–70, 74, 86, 97–8, 144–6,
intuitionism, 7–10, 32, 73–6, 77, 81, 85, 149, 160–1; see also mathematics:
105–8, 158 as art; modernism, mathematical;
self-referentiality
James, William, 110, 112–14, 115–16, 121 schools of, 7–10
sociology of, 4–5, 43–4
Klein, Felix, 28 as structural science, 4, 18, 61, 87, 158
Kute Korrespondence see correspondence and uncertainty, 10, 14, 25–6, 69,
98–100, 113–14, 121, 138–42,
Language 142–6, 158, 160; see also crisis
artificial, 65 of mathematics; disintegration;
philosophy of, 65–6 mathematics: and fiction; probability;
scepticism of, 48, 71–6, 106–7 vagueness
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 129, 131–3, unreasonable effectiveness of, 18, 161
136–7, 140–3, 149 metafiction, 30–1, 41, 111–12; see also
literature and mathematics studies, 2, 3–4, self-referentiality
11–12, 157 middle state, 58n, 95, 99–100, 117
logical positivism see Vienna Circle modernism and science, 1, 3–4, 20, 161
logicism, 7–10, 65, 70–1, 97–8, 100, 105, modernism, mathematical, 2, 7–13, 13–20,
106–7 45–55, 88, 122, 157–9, 160, 161, 162;
Lord Chandos Letter, 71–2, 76 see also formalism; mathematics: and

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modernism, mathematical (cont.) relativity theory see theory of relativity

freedom; mathematics: and reality, Riemann, Bernhard, 7, 31–2, 41, 51; see
relation to; ontology; self-referentiality also zeta-function
money, 115–16, 118–19 Riemann hypothesis see zeta-function
Musil, Robert Russell, Bertrand, 25–6, 29–30, 66, 70–1,
The Man without Qualities, 19, 93–125, 96, 109
158
‘The Mathematical Man’, 113–14, 116 science fiction, 24, 148–50
mysticism, 40–1, 45, 73, 88, 94–6, 100–4, Science Wars, 43, 45, 151
104–9, 110–11; see also transcendence self-referentiality, 10, 16, 29–31, 41, 53,
54, 68–70, 72–3, 82–4, 86, 97–8,
Newton, Isaac, 127, 128–9, 131, 132–3, 111–12, 118, 157
134–7, 140–1, 149 September 11 attacks, 26, 50, 53
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14–15 set of all sets, 29–30
non-Euclidean geometry, 6–7, 31–2 Signific Movement, 74
The Sleepwalkers, 19, 59–92, 93, 158
ontology, 5, 7, 18, 39–40, 44–5, 84–5, 86, sloth see inertia
146–50, 152, 160 Spengler, Oswald, 15–16
statistics, 103, 108, 143–6, 148
perspectivism, 15, 77–80, 137; see also structural science, 4, 18, 61, 87, 158
theory of relativity structuralism, 72–3, 87–8; see also
philosophy, analytic, 65–7, 109 formalism
physico-theology, 128-131, 131-8, 152, structure, 18, 59–61, 69–70, 76–89,
162; see also ethics 158
politics, 16, 24–7, 31–3, 43, 45–50, 53, 54, synthesis, 95, 100–1, 103–4, 108–9,
58n, 142–3; see also anarchism 117; see also unity
possibility, 25, 28, 33, 35–6, 42, 44–5,
58n, 81–5, 88, 112–13, 115, 121, 133, theory of relativity, 77–9, 134–7
136–8, 139–42, 142–6, 149, 152, 160, time, 36–7, 41–2, 44
162; see also mathematics: and reality, transcendence, 40–1, 45, 88, 94–6, 100–4,
relation to; ontology; probability 104–9, 107–8; see also mysticism
postmodernism, 26, 43, 54, 50–5, 87–8, trust, 69, 72, 107, 115–19, 121–2, 146,
128, 146–50, 151, 152, 158, 162 158
post-structuralism, 87–8
pragmatism, 109–10, 112–19, 121, 158 uncertainty see mathematics: uncertainty
probability, 108, 142–6, 147–8, 151 unity, 68, 72, 75–6, 78–9, 81–3, 85, 87–8,
Pynchon, Thomas 99, 104–5, 107, 110–11; see also
Against the Day, 19, 24–58, 151, 158 synthesis
Gravity’s Rainbow, 2, 19, 126–56, 158
Mason & Dixon, 44 vagueness, 109–10, 120–1, 158; see also
pragmatism
quantum physics, 148 Vaihinger, Hans, 16–17
Quaternions, 33–43 vector, 38–9, 42–3
and time, 36–7 Vienna Circle, 13, 63, 73
in sociology of mathematics, 43–4
Weierstrass, Karl, 25, 28–9
rationalisation, 25, 65, 68, 101–2, 111, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 73–4
118–19, 159
reason, 1, 6, 9, 25, 29, 61–2, 67, 70, 93, Zermelo, Ernst see Axiom of Choice
95, 99–100, 104–5, 114, 116, 158–60 zeta-function, 51

188