I’ve been doing some more reading and reflecting on the bloody, sweetened history of this glorious country and its industry. Abram Lyle was born on Thursday 14th December 1820 in Greenock to Abram and Mary. His father’s enterprises made barrels and casks, and Abram apprenticed with wooden vessels there. Eventually, he would own a fleet of giant versions of these coops, dozens of ships crowding the firth of Clyde. The ships would transport ‘goods’ up and down and back and forth across the Atlantic, profits, of course, accumulating in the process. Apparently devout to the point of zealousy, Abram chose to anoint his golden syrup product – his name’s great flagship – with half of Samson’s riddle to the Philistines of Timnah:

“Out of the eater came something to eat,

and out of the strong came something sweet” (Judges 14:14).

How they were supposed to solve this riddle is beyond me. The answer lay in an event that only Samson (and a lion) was party to:

“As they [Samson, mum, and dad] approached the vineyards of Timnah, suddenly a young lion came roaring toward him [Samson, who is now, apparently, alone]. The Spirit of the Lord came powerfully upon him so that he tore the lion apart with his bare hands as he might have torn a young goat. But he told neither his father nor his mother what he had done. … Some time later, … he turned aside to look at the lion’s carcass, and in it he saw a swarm of bees and some honey. He scooped out the honey with his hands and ate as he went along. When he rejoined his parents, he gave them some, and they too ate it. But he did not tell them that he had taken the honey from the lion’s carcass” (Judges 14:5-9).

So, anyway, Samson uses this rigged game to justify slaughtering a bunch of people he deems unworthy, which is a little ironic given the sugar industry’s reliance on enslaved bodies worked to death – sweetness pouring forth from defiled corpses. I wonder which part Abram felt he would play in this drama… Easton Lee offers a counter riddle in “Cane Piece Blues” (From Behind the Counter, 1998) in a land “with a myriad secret places” where “sweet sugar can turned sour vinegar | and my mother | old before her time … where now I sit to hide my swelling shame”. Neither tears nor the miracle of sweet life from violence “does not soften | the hard unforgiving earth”. Lee’s poetry stirs the rot and demands we all take a great whiff.

For all its lack of nutrients, Lyle’s golden syrup is certainly symbolically rich in this context – the ambrosial Manna of the pagan astral gods, refined after and fueling a great and terrible Exodus; from “powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines, smelling of semen all under the garden” – a potent brew, and one that made his fortune (after a while) after setting up shop in London town, much to the chagrin of Henry Tate – sugar merchant behemoth whose slave treasure laid the foundations for our celebrated museums and galleries which bear his name. Their bitter living rivalry was resolved in a posthumous merger, Tate & Lyle’s white gold bringing sweetness and, eventually, deep cavities to the Greenock docks in the jaws of the Clyde.

It Wisnae Us. If I ever thought much about Scotland’s role in the horrors of human slavery, that was probably a fair summary of my position: it wisnae us. Now, while researching something that was (I thought) totally separate from my previous work, I’m beginning to grapple with the truth about Scotland (particularly Glasgow) and slavery. Stephen Mullen’s brilliant 2009 book has served as a trusty guide, peeling back the lamina of a city that wasn’t always what it appeared to be. The first European Capital of Culture in the U.K.; the second city of the Empire. Bogle, Buchanan, Cunninghame, Dunlop, Glassford, Oswald, Stirling, Ritchie. The unnamed millions on the other end. People made Glasgow, alright.

I’m thinking about what would’ve happened if Robert Burns’s Kilmarnock Edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect hadn’t been such a roaring commercial success. I can vaguely see him hunched over parchment, turning lives into black figures tabulated in neat rows and columns. Abacus, numbers in the sand. Lament, lament. Mullen does a great job tearing open the imposing, glittering façade of the Enlightenment – there is so much that was rationalised away as a natural order, a greater good – and casting light on architectural and political margins. In the alleys between the mansions, the sprawl domesticated by bodies piling, there are accounts to be reckoned.

I’ve always felt a little uneasy with the ‘Age of Improvement’, as it was then known. Not least from the fact that I hail from Kirkcaldy, birthplace of Adam Smith, “a small Town in Scotland the place of my nativity”. I walked the same beach as Smith did, though rarely thinking of governmental riches. His name was that of the theatre where I debuted as a musical-theatre “actor” – an amateur role in Annie Get Your Gun – and I’ve always liked how hole-punched comp tickets, those market-free bullet-pierced paper tokens, were called “Annie Oakleys”. In honour of his great celebrity, one school in the town organises its pupils into the house of Adam Smith (other house including one in honour of that Dickensian anti-Semitic historian Thomas Carlyle; my school preferred farms to famous folk). Smith opposed slavery, of course, yet did so in unnerving economical terms, and still maintained Andrew Cochrane as a close friend. He, like so many other (and more vociferously abolitionist) ivory tower wards, was eventually ridiculed by the populists as a “weak interested theorist” – just as today we’re told the real country has “had enough of experts”. The rational is not enough and, in abhorrent hands, can be a devastating tool.

Very early thoughts of how all this relates to other work: beginning to explore new ways of interrogating the rule of mathematics and enumeration in capitalism’s transnational ‘power geometries’ – topological arrangements of tobacco, sugar, and enslaved/indentured people’s spaces in proximity to abstract rationalising matrices. Revolutionary cycles of triangular trade. Following up with T. M. Devine’s edited collection Recovering Scotland’s Slavery Past; Michelle Harrison’s King Sugar; Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood; and the various works from the sugar archive of Absent Voices.

It’s been 515 days since I submitted my dissertation “in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Literature”. I’ve decided to record my post-doc thoughts and feelings here – for reflection if not for posterity – and aim to write something here every week. At the moment, the University and Colleges Union is in industrial dispute with employers, with members currently striking for the second time in as many months. Emotions are high and raw. So, this seemed like as good a time as any to consider where I’ve come from, the present crucible, and where the compass needle now points. It’s not going to be particularly pretty or well-edited prose – then again, a log was once a clumsy, heavy chunk of wood, floating helplessly – but I’m certain no one else is going to be reading this.

My doctoral dissertation examined intersections of mathematics and literature within (mainly American) encyclopedic narratives. It was the most difficult piece of writing I’ve ever undertaken. I named it ‘Encyclopedic Architectures: Mathematical Structures in the Works Of Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace’. I should probably say a little about what mathematics has to do with literature and how it’s been read in this context. While mathematics has been represented throughout the history of literature  during the last eighty years – which saw the rise of the information age, whose technological advances are underpinned by  mathematical logic, from micro-chip computing algorithms to geostationary satellite communications – fiction has become increasingly concerned with its representations of mathematical ideas, images, and practices. Studies of literature have tended to consider the latter as an eternal, platonic ideal, rather than historically contingent practice; the critical development of the latter – from models by Gillian Beer, through those of Joan L. Richards, Helena M. Pycior, A. D. D. Craik, Daniel J. Cohen, to Uri Margolin, Mathew Wickman, Brian Rotman, Steven Connor, and Mary Poovey – provide multiple avenues of interdisciplinary comparison. These investigations of the institutional foundations of both scientific and artistic practice compliment a broader institutional turn in literary studies, as exemplified by such texts as Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009) as well as more established historiographical veins that include Edward Grant’s The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages (1996).

More recently, then, literature and science studies have acknowledged and situated historical points of cultural crossover. This approach permits a reconfiguration of, for example, the conventional timeline of structuralism in the humanities to acknowledge cross-discipline exchanges. Indeed, although it is rarely emphasised, the history of humanities’ structural movements in the latter half of the twentieth century – from the early work of Saussure and Jakobson to later developments by Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, and Foucault – was bridged by the revolutionary mathematical work of the Bourbaki group in the 1930s. My use of mathematics, then, drew upon the case of Nicolas Bourbaki, whose ‘encyclopedic’ treatise, Éléments de mathématique, I argued, provides an important cultural touchstone for contemporary visions of mathematics as a totalised system. The pseudonym for a group of world-leading French mathematicians working in the middle of the twentieth century, Bourbaki attempted to create a definitive mathematical textbook from three foundational ‘structures’. Their 1948 article ‘The Architecture of Mathematics’, often considered a manifesto for the group, details three ‘great’ or ‘mother-structures’ – topological, algebraic, and ordered structures – which together (they claimed) encompass the entirety of mathematical activity and theory. While playing an important part in Bourbaki’s project to unify, encircle, and totalise mathematics, these structures also reveal how encyclopedic narratives utilise the figurative efficacy of mathematics to challenge such epistemological exhaustion.

I found that reintegrating mathematics into the structuralist timeline enabled fruitful dialogues between this structuralist science and (post)structuralist artistic works. By treating mathematics not as an unlikely and alien adjunct to post-war culture, but within this larger intellectual context, it became clearer how mathematically informed postmodern fictions at exactly this point in history – especially those by the key, mathematically literate postmodern authors upon whom this study focuses, namely, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace – are working in a cognate fashion to other fields undergoing structuralist revolutions. Here are a few examples. Though Don DeLillo’s 1976 novel Ratner’s Star has long been recognised as structured upon the history of mathematics, considering how this encyclopedic novel alludes to its intertexts through the figure of the Möbius strip reveals its fundamentally topological structure. The difficult equations in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) can be seen, through the concept of algebraic structures, to model Pynchon’s metaphorical processes. Finally, Wallace’s use of enumerated endnotes in Infinite Jest (1996) complements his interest in Georg Cantor’s mathematical set theory, explicated in Everything & More (2003): understood through ordered structures, Wallace’s hierarchical manipulation of narrative containers are revealed to be mathematically informed representations of consciousness.

So, I was trying to articulate the overlooked ways in which representative mathematical concepts inform signature literary developments of Gravity’s Rainbow, Ratner’s Star, and Infinite Jest – key postmodern works whose formal challenges reflect society’s increasing reliance on calculation, and also reveal the contingency of mathematics on cultural and political changes over the last fifty years. The stock market, the internet, the codes that, with computed accuracy, keep planes in the sky and drop weapons of mass destruction: the technological revolutions of the last century – facilitated by mathematics – have fundamentally altered our perceptions and representations of the world. At a wider angle, then, by tracing the influence of the structural turn in mid-twentieth-century mathematics through the (post)structural revolutions in the social sciences and humanities, I was trying to suggest how postmodern U.S. fiction – through its devices of allusion, metaphor, and sensibility – responded and continues to respond to the increasing cultural influence of mathematics.

That’s probably enough for now. It wasn’t as straightforward (if that’s the word) as it may appear, but it’s now the brightest star in the sky (or the heaviest anchor in the depths) and, I think, a useful point of orientation.