Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction

7. Iteration

123 CHAPTER 7 ITERATION Way the world is. Somebody can wake up and sneeze somewhere in Arkansas or some damn place and before you’re done there’s wars and ruination and all hell. You dont know what’s goin to happen. —Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses One of the surprising consequences of the modern version of the Darwinian theory is that apparently trivial tiny influences on survival probability can have a major impact on evolution. This is because of the enormous time available for such influences to make themselves felt. —Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene BILL MOYERS: When Columbus arrived, how many Native Americans were there throughout the hemisphere? MICHAEL DORRIS: Over a hundred million. In the United States in the 1910 census, it was down to two hundred thousand people because of diseases. There were diseases that existed in Europe, Asia, and Africa that had never come to the Americas before. The first time a European, Asian, or African came over here and sneezed, these diseases and bacteria were introduced into the networks of the Americas, and most Indians were gone before the Europeans had any conception they were here. —Betty Sue Flowers, ed., Bill Moyers: A World of Ideas Whereas recursions tend to emphasize degrees of similarity to earlier phenomena of a similar sort and, in the instance of fiction, are often juxtapositional in nature, in chaos theory iteration involves “the continual reabsorption or enfolding of what has come before” (Briggs and Peat 66). It is not merely another round, cycle, or reiteration of the same thing; it uses the information of previous cycles, and thus accounts for changes caused by accretion and deletion. Such iterations commonly create a feedback mechanism, which becomes the “loci of stability” (Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas 1985 389). This pattern of stability through homeostatic iterations probably accounts for methods of basic learning and expectations of order among human beings, but such basic learning can just as easily lead to disorder. Iterations, like energy and noise, will not by any means, then, automatically lead to harmonious order. As we have seen, artistic and literary acts are almost by definition both recursive and iterative, but iteration is especially characteristic of works that self-consciously explore their own antecedents and limits. This iterative playing with conventions is a common feature of postmodern art and architecture with their self-distorting, ironic, replicative mirroring of traditional forms and characterization (Jencks). The finial of the Johnson Building in New York City, for instance, functions as an ironic comment on contemporary modernistic skyscrapers that have no elaboration, ornamentation , or embellishment as well as a wistful tribute to the elegant styling of decorative structures and furnishings of eighteenth-century New York. This conscious playing with, and commenting upon, earlier forms serves as recollective and interpretive invention in modern art, architecture, and literature; it simultaneously evokes the previous patterns and strategically veers away from them. Such instances of philosophical , literary, and artistic self-referential and metachaotic iteration are very like those great self-referential cycles or loops of evolution described in Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagen’s Microcosms. These self-looping iterations can be described as “self-referent paradoxes” which in nature constantly reenter themselves (Briggs and Peat 66, 67). Iteration, then, is a basic fact of science, an important foundation stone in chaos theory, an inherent part of the writing and reading process in literature, and fundamental to art and architecture. In a feedback loop, a single iteration is never identical to any of its previous incarnations. Whenever a form or mode provides feedback, the new iteration goes through its own cycle and acquires information from previous loops. Indeed, time and context always change, however slightly, such iterations, and the new iterations depend as much—perhaps even more— upon what has been omitted as what has been added: “that transformative ‘part,’ the incipient whole, is the ‘missing information’ which through iteration traces out the system’s unpredictability. The shape it traces is the strange attractor” (Briggs and Peat 75). Iterations, then, are both like and BEAUTIFUL CHAOS 124 unlike their predecessors, and their unlikeness results from both certain new information that has been added and old information that has been deleted. Literature, of course, has been telling readers that before science gave the process its own vocabulary, but in literature and in system theory differences or discrepancies are often minimized and all but edited out by the emphasis...