Narrative Calculus

Or, how I smuggled mathematics into literary analysis

Too bad that C. P. Snow guy made such a huge splash when he assessed the entire project of human knowledge production as a sort of culture war between two distinct camps: the arts and the sciences. If mathematics acts both as the logic that grounds all scientific disciplines and the principle of their separation from the humanities, then any attempt at bridging these territories would require a method of conversion between mathematical and aesthetic objects.

I had my work cut out for me.

Diegesis

Perhaps mistakenly, I thought I needed a word for what I was doing, so I pilfered the term “diegesis” from cinema studies. It is traditionally used to identify the part of a performance that is native to the story, distinguishing it from any external enhancements. Extra-diegetic components such as music, spotlights, frames, etc. populate a border area that the audience can experience along with the diegetic components, but which they usually understand aren’t really part of the story.

Then I fiddled with that border concept a little bit, reimagining diegesis almost as the interdependence between objects and their spaces. I considered this interplay as a precondition for a “story world” to emerge. This was a bit of a gambit: it reduced the story world to an empty container, evacuated it of its content and formalized it.