Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction

6. Juxtapositional Symmetry: Recursion, Scaling, and Fractals

97 CHAPTER 6 JUXTAPOSITIONAL SYMMETRY: RECURSION, SCALING, AND FRACTALS “But our beauty lies,” explained Metzger, “in this extended capacity for convolution. A lawyer in a courtroom, in front of any jury, becomes an actor, right? Raymond Burr is an actor, impersonating a lawyer, who in front of a jury becomes an actor. Me, I’m a former actor who became a lawyer. They’ve done the pilot film of a TV series, in fact, based loosely on my career, starring my friend Manny Di Presso, a one-time lawyer who quit his firm to become an actor. Who in this pilot plays me, an actor become a lawyer reverting periodically to being an actor. The film is in an air-conditioned vault at one of the Hollywood studios, light can’t fatigue it, it can be repeated endlessly.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He only smiled back. “One of your endless repetitions.” —Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 History is a Mandelbrot set, as infinitely subdivisible as is space in Zeno’s paradox. No interval past or future but can be partitioned and sub-partitioned, articulated down through ever finer, self-similar scales like the infinitely indented coastlines of fractal geometry. —John Barth, On With the Story Energy in a living system and noise in an information system may be systematically turned into heat, work, and coded information, or, conversely , they may remain as random behavior without discernible pattern or message. Seemingly random behavior, however, might well involve a complex pattern too fine for humans to decipher without special assistance from, say, a computer. This is in itself remarkable, but even more marvelous than the existence of a single complex structure is the possibility that it can be variously repeated, whether in nature, mechanics, mathematics , society, literature, or art. Such replication in the instance of chaotic systems is called recursion or recursivity and in information theory redundancy. Although some people tend to use the terms recursion and iteration interchangeably, the two should not be confused. As Clifford A. Pickover observes, recursion refers to the replication of acts, occasions, and patterns within a given object, subject, or system, whereas iteration involves the ongoing incorporation of various changes wrought by successive repetitions . Recursions may be on the same scale or, indeed, they may be mirrored (self-similar) across level and scale, from the largest and most complex to the smallest and seemingly most simple, for “self-similar objects contain within themselves miniature copies of themselves . . . , [and] the beautiful consequences of self-similarity are intricate, finegrained patterns, now generally called fractals” (198). Although the distinction between recursion and iteration in mathematics and science may be quite clear, in literature and art it is more problematic . Because of the necessity for creativity in art along with the recognition of patterns, everything, I am tempted to say, is both recursive and iterative, following familiar patterns of plotting but trying to incorporate individual differences. But for the practical purposes of my argument, I would like to draw a distinction. Some narratives—those that I would call recursive—depend to a great extent for the meaning of the text upon the reader’s awareness of an original pattern, whether used in a straightforward way or ironically, whereas other narratives—those that I would call iterative—rely more upon the reader’s conscious awareness of the differences caused by successive repetition. Repetition, leading to recursion, is at the heart of literature, for in a real sense fiction is an act of representation that uses and repeats the general language structure, even while it reproduces some aspect of oral and written forms, related literary pieces, basic experiences in life, and cultural concepts . In other words, a novel attempts at some level to reproduce language, literature, culture, and experience, even while it is language itself. This is a primary form of recursion, which in certain instances might be more self-consciously articulated than in others. Such repetition is similar to redundancy in so-called “error-correcting codes,” “accomplished by the introduction of redundancy that is not repetitive but is instead like linguistic redundancy in that it involves relations of structure, correlations between different elements or features of the message” (Paulson, Noise 60). BEAUTIFUL CHAOS 98 Paulson refers to these recursions with error-correcting codes as “structural couplings,” and finds them useful in the process of decoding texts (146). How novels carry out basic representation and hence the meanings attributed to that recursivity...