Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction by Gordon E. Slethaug (review)

Italy's most belovedwriters, and why, still today—15 years after his death—Levi's books still frequendy appear on the Italian best-selling lists. % Gordon E. Slethaug. Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory andMetachaotics in RecentAmerican Fiction. Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 2000. 206p. Linda Lizut Helstern Southern Illinois University, Carhondale Since N. Katherine Hayles first tantalized the critical establishment ofthe potential ofchaos theory a decade ago, chaos-based studies have proliferated. Ifcanonicalworks from Milton toJoyce have been viewed through its lens, remarkablyfew studies have addressed works ofthe contemporary writers who actually lived and witnessed the computer revolution that brought chaos theory into being. Gordon Slethaug's BeautifulChaos: Chaos TheoryandMetachaoticsin RecentAmerican Fiction makes an importantgesture toward filling this gap. Slethaug reflects on works by a cross-section of nine American writers of the past four decades, including Thomas Pyncheon, John Barth, Don DeLiIIo, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy. The works under consideration derive largely, though not exclusively, from the period between 1985 and 1995, when chaos theory achieved its largest popular following. Slethaug's approach owes much to Hayles; he does not, unfortunately , follow her rigorous historicity as he touches upon the several theories from modern physics that Hayles subsumes under the general heading "chaotics." While most have nothing to do with chaos theory per se, in its order-in-chaos or chaos-to-order manifestations, Slethaug tends to draw analogies that render these theories as interchangeable parts. His study achieves complexityas much from the need to sort out what properly accrues to chaos theory (or dynamical systems theory, as it is known to scientists and mathematicians) as from thewide range of applications—factual, conceptual, metaphorical, and structural—that Slethaug proposes. In spite ofhis greater interest in chaos as content—works byscientificallysavvy writers who take as their subject the intricate interplay between order and disorder —Slethaug devotes roughly equal space to explorations ofform. After a brief initial overview of select scientific theories since 1850 and of the critical studies that informed his work, notably Tom LeClaire's studies of the systems novel, Slethaug organizes his study largely around the vocabulary ofchaos theory. Using The Crying ofLot 49 as a baseline, he begins with "orderly systems," once viewed as normative, and in subsequent chapters offers a meditation on one or more key IM * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * SPRING 2002 Reviews terms, such as "iteration," "strange attractors," or the less familiar "juxtapositional symmetry." Among these, he embeds a chapter on information theory, though Claude Shannon's work predates chaos theory by some two decades. Grounded in Hayles' assertion thatwe live in a period with an increasing tolerance for disorder , Slethaug's close readings begin and end by focusing on characters' perceptions ofdisorder. Oedipa Maas with her fixation on order becomes his negative touchstone . The truth of the matter, it should not be forgotten, is that chaos theory with its revelation ofthe intricate mathematical intertwining oforder and disorder did not render the ordering process itselfpasse. Lorenz and Feigenbaum succeeded where Oedipa failed. Their important contributions to this multi-faceted theory, ironically enough, were posited on fortuitous observations, using new computer technology, oforder in what had always appeared to be random. Slethaug's vocabulary-based approach leads to a major weakness in this study, for Slethaug largely ignores theworkings ofchaos theory, how its discrete elements relate to one another. His synoptic chapter, finally, owes more to Bakhtin than to chaos theory. Beyond this, Slethaug relies heavily on readers' preexisting knowledge to inform his work, while virtually eliminating mathematics from his discussion . Inasmuch as chaos theory at its most persuasive is a theory ofnonlinear mathematics, this is highly problematic. While taking pains to distinguish between iterations and strange attractors, for example, Slethaug does not point out that strange attractors result from thousands upon thousands ofiterations ofan equation graphed in multi-dimensional, topological phase space, which has nothing to do with space as we know it. He compounds the potential for misunderstanding when he equates maps of characters' beginning-to-end journeys with their point-to-point logic and attractors, constructed by a process that is not only infinite but appears utterly random during the graphing. While Slethaug clearly explicates the role ofstochastic process in creating the...