Mathematical Clinamen in the Encyclopedic Novel: Pynchon, DeLillo, Wallace

Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest are examples of the encyclopedic novel: evoking the encyclopedia’s hermetically sealed vessel of knowledge while resisting and challenging ideas of epistemological totalisation. Moreover, rather than being hermetically sealed texts, these circling narratives encourage subsequent generative readings, emphasising their resistance to encircled totalisation and rectilinear determinism. This motion of resistance evokes the clinamen, the unexpected swerve of atoms that results from the inherent indeterminacy of the physical universe and, for Lucretius, a foundation for individual free will. Examining Pynchon, DeLillo and Wallace’s mathematical imagery (respectively, precession, reflection and inversion), this chapter explores how these authors activate the clinamen through mathematics as part of a liberating movement within an apparently closed literary system.