From Entanglements to Appropriations: Mathematics with Modernist Literature

In a 1972 interview, Binoy Majumdar, an experimental Indian poet of the Bengali language and a practicing mathematician, observed how for a number of years, mathematics had completely colonized his imagination, so much so that he could not create poetry. Mathematics happened to him as thought compulsion and it left very little room for anything else. However, he pointed out how similar mathematics and poetry were as two equally unannounced guests in his mind: "When poetry wants to come, it will come. Mathematics too has its own time of arrival."¹ The mathematical and the literary are both creative acts enlivened by the automatism of human imagination and abstraction. But this does not mean they have an unruffled rapport. As Majumdar's case shows, mathematical imagination can block the poetic and vice versa. Three recent books variously complicate this dialogue of mathematics and modern literature.

Ciaran McMorran's Joyce and Geometry approaches the relationship between mathematics and modernist literature through geometry. It offers a complex framework of spatiality for James Joyce's literary experiments with novelistic settings in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Geometry is applied on the Earth and its measurements in a geodesic turn as we trace Joyce's cartographic depiction of the urban space of Dublin, Ireland and the rest of the world. We travel between geometry and mapmaking, not to mention the astral mathematics of heavenly bodies in close textual readings of Joyce's most esoteric formal engagements with the mysteries of time and space. What the book successfully foregrounds in this narrative experiment is Joyce's provocative and often playful interpenetration of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries that produces errors in imagining the visual field and makes the geometric map untenable in a certain sense.

McMorran's study begins with Galileo's famous moment of considering our physical universe as a grand book, written in the language of mathematics. Another important work for McMorran is Euclid's Elements that geometrically formalizes the visible world by measuring its places and mapping its contents. The introduction wades through the existing quasi-mathematical readings of Joyce. It points toward the philosophical history of Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces in geometry, especially the Henri Poincaré intervention that relativizes the truth-value of multiple geometric systems in the twentieth century. This move remains crucial to McMorran's argument about the intermeshed geometric systems in Joyce. We are introduced to the rectilinear and the curvilinear spaces of Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries as "modes of thought" available to Joyce through Giordano Bruno, who challenged Euclid and whose works Joyce had studied as part of his academic curricula (4). Bruno questions Euclidean rectilinearity in an attempt to "disprove the existence of the infinitely straight line" on the basis that any exactness in the world is a sensory illusion (4). This dialectic of linearity and nonlinearity is at the heart of McMorran's exploration as it attempts to demonstrate how Joyce's works enact the mathematical torsion of squaring a circle and circling a square through narrative form and spatial matrices of the depicted world. Geometry as a descriptive language for the world that can be mobilized to inscribe space in a topographical sense is a fundamental claim that runs through the book.

Chapter one engages with the "Night Lessons" section of Finnegans Wake. But before we go there, let me mark the interesting intersection between mathematics and religion that Mc-Morran pursues through biographical lines of inquiry into Joyce's education. The Irish writer had to pass two separate exams on Euclid's Elements for his matriculation at University College Dublin in 1899. If we take the Euclidean system as universally coherent without the Poincaré insight into the relativistic plurality of geometric...