An Automorphic Reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (Interrupted by Elliptical Reflections on Mason & Dixon)

This chapter focuses on Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day. The prominence of mathematics in this book is exceptional even for Pynchon. Two of the main characters are at least part-time mathematicians; Hilbert, Minkowski, and Gibbs make cameo appearances; and several chapters are set in the Göttingen mathematics department. Inger H. Dalsgaard suggested that “a novel like Against the Day may be read in non-linear fashion, in keeping with the operations of a time machine.” No critic, however—not even the “seventeen of the foremost heavyweights from over forty years of Pynchon criticism” who contributed to the Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon—seems to have taken seriously the possibility, which is explored in this chapter, that his narrative style might in fact be quadratic.