Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction

1. Dynamic Fiction and the Field of Action: Mimesis, Metaphor, Model, and Metachaotics

1 CHAPTER 1 DYNAMIC FICTION AND THE FIELD OF ACTION: Mimesis, Metaphor, Model, and Metachaotics He remembers now that he forgot to tell her, back there when they were doing love and physics, about the sundry “multiverse” theories that have been popping up lately in scientific journals like . . . well, alternative universes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ah, so, he ventures. Then, presently: Complementarity is the nub of it, wouldn’t she say?: The key to Father Time’s cupboard? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There is (he nevertheless tells her presently) a narrative alternative universe, an alternative narrative universe . . . . —John Barth, On With the Story Aristotle’s suggestion in The Poetics that the function of art is to imitate reality assumes that reality and its mimetic counterparts are easily recognized over time, whether in a script, a picture, or a dramatic production. This principle of mimetic representation was challenged by Modernists who saw themselves as being true to a very different notion of what constitutes “the real.” This daring twentieth-century artistic movement , which considered itself superior to those preceding it, was dependent upon new ideas about the mind, industrialization, recent technological developments, the principles of new physics, and much, much more that characterized this revolutionary age. It opened doors “to greater democracy, progressive technology and critical freedom—and also the main vista to cosmic speculation” (Jencks 159). Although some Modernists were opposed to the encroachments of technology and science, others happily incorporated their images and principles in their art, and this inclusion became one of the issues that helped to shape new conceptions and forms of art. One of the first to announce the importance of the technological to modern letters was Ezra Pound, the chief spokesman for the Modernists, who in Patria Mia (1913) not only said that science, technology, and industry were worth incorporating into fiction, but specifically linked the machine to the novel. “It is,” he claimed, “the novelist’s business to set down exactly manners and appearances: he must render the show, he must, if the metaphor be permitted , describe precisely the nature of the engine, the position and relation of its wheels” (33). Although Pound may have been merely describing society in terms of the rhetoric of the machine, Cecelia Tichi believes that the statement bonds “the novel to contemporary technology per se” (466) even to the point that “the novel [is] a machine” (471). “His definition of the novel as machine,” she claims, “shifts emphasis from story to functional design, from narration to construction. The values of modernism, as he and others knew, claimed kinship with those of engineering—functionalism , efficiency, stability, utilitarianism, design, and construction” (476). In a sense Tichi is correct, as indicated by Pound’s statements about the poet: “The poet or the artist—and this is a distinction I can never get the prose stylist to recognize—the poet is a sort of steam-gauge, voltameter , a set of pipes for thermometric and barometric divination” (33). Poetic divination here is specifically equated with advanced technological understanding and production. In another sense Tichi is wrong, for Pound’s written statement could not have influenced his generation. Although Pound’s statements may have been symptomatic, even prophetic, of the writings of early Modernism, this particular manuscript was lost by the publisher until 1950, so its influence can hardly be demonstrated , except as it represents a general cultural awareness beginning to dominate the opening of the century. Pound, however, was only one of several people of that generation in the United States who linked technology to the arts. As Charles Jencks points out, Modernists of all stripes embraced a “machine idolatry” (53), and the so-called “Machine Aesthetic,” with all its implications of efficiency and power, especially dominated the field of architecture in the 1920s. As one of the chief spokesmen for the next wave of American Modernists, William Carlos Williams in his 1948 speech entitled “Poetry as a Field of Action” maintained that though literature continued to be mimetic, the human conception of reality itself had changed because of BEAUTIFUL CHAOS 2 recent technological developments. Although Williams articulated this view when Modernism was well into its middle age, his statement sums up much of what had been happening in American literature since Ezra Pound. He argued that poetry, if it was to keep pace with discoveries about the mind and advances in human perception, knowledge, and understanding, should reflect this reality based upon the new physics: With the industrial...