Poe Möbius: An Exploration of Poe’s Fractal Universe

Ruth M. Harrison Poe Mobius:An Exploration of Poe’s Fractal Universe Edgar Allan Poe’s anticipation of the twentiethcentury infatuation with paradox, chaos theory, and self-referenceis articulated in variouspassages of Eurekaand developed in detail in hisfiction and poetry. Yet recent critical treatments of Eureka attempt to debunk him as a scientificwriter. Peter Swirski might seem to be an exception, as he describesPoe as“aphilosopher and a Romanticman of letters who tries to hammer out a not always easy alliance with nineteenthcentury science”;in the end, however, Swirski chooses to “approach Eurekaas a systematiccollectionof hypotheses”that he holds to be “rife with inconsistencies, errors, and misconceptions.”’Recentwriters about literature and chaos theory such as Harriet Hawkins, N. Katherine Hayles, and Gordon E. Slethaug do not consider Poe’swriting, even though he seems an obvious candidate for such analysiswith his interest in structure, order, and design and the turbulence caused by murder, opium, and death.2 Joan Dayan’s study of the dash is the only analysis of Eurekaincluded in Eric W. Carlson’scollection Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe.’ Swirski uses David Ketterer’s proclamation that deception is ‘“the most consistent and dominant aspect of Poe’s work’”to suggestthat Poe in his scientificforayswas consciouslyout to deceive, that he had no real understanding of ~cience.~ In answer to Swirski’squestion, “DoesEureka,among its numerous flaws and errors, accomplish anything ?”5I suggest that Poe transcends the limitations of nineteenthcentury scientific models. In Eureka as well as in his poetry and fiction, I find evidence that Poe’s intuitions range far ahead of the science of the day. Poe’s imaginings have parallels ,almostmodels, in the familyof notions from our own time that I apply to his work in this essay. In the firstpages of Eureka,Poe useswhat had become his trademark emblematic structure, a multidimensional looping or twisting of a paper document or letter. The letter to which he draws his reader’sattention isphysically twisted or folded into a glass bottle said to have been found sometime in Poe’spast, floating on the Mare Tmebrarum (seaof darkness).The letter is dated 2848,so that, by a twist in the fabric of time, it traces a path between Poe’s future-and that of his readers-and his past,reachingbackasfarasAristotle (PT, 1263). With Poe’s interest in structure and design, and his conviction of the interconnectedness of things, it is not surprising that he would find in a mathematical figure, the strange loop, an image that simultaneously incorporates his written text, represents his interest in decoding the secrets of the universe, and servesas a decoding tool. In the 1979 book a d e l , Eschq Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas R. Hofstadter discusses self-reference and interplay between different levels in Bach’s musical compositions and parallel ideas in M. C. Escher’s drawings and Kurt Godel’s theorem .6Hofstadter names the strange-loopphenomenon that occurswhenever,by moving upward (or downward) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started. Strange loop, M o b i u s strip, chaostheq,fractal,and strangeattractorare allmathematical termsrelated through the notions of feedback , looping, iteration, transformation, and boundary crossing. Recent discussions of fractals and chaos theory are also expressions of interest in a program or formula that runs again and again with each successive iteration performing an o p eration on the output of the precedingstep. These mathematical and scientific notions are here em- Poe’sFractal Universe 33 ployed as analogues that provide a fresh way of understanding the richness and complexity of Poe’swriting.If Bach is the musicianof the strange loop, Escher the illustrator,and G d e l the mathematician ,then-in thelabyrinthsof “TheDomain of Amheim,” in the perspective-shifting t w i s t s of “ThePurloinedLetter,”“TheFall of the House of Usher,”and “Ligeia,”and in the sleightsof mind in “WilliamWilson,”to name a few-Poe proves himself to be its poet. Consider Poe’s observationin Eureka regarding “the truth o f Original Unity as the source-as the principle o f the UniversalPhomena” (PT,1288).In his effort to create a unified theory to explain the universe,Poe uses the...