Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction

CONTENTS

vii CONTENTS Preface xi Acknowledgments xxxi Chapter 1 Dynamic Fiction and the Field of Action: Mimesis, Metaphor, Model, and Metachaotics 1 Chapter 2 Orderly Systems: Growth, Competition, and Transgression 27 Chapter 3 Entropic Crisis, Blockage, Bifurcation, and Flow 45 Chapter 4 Turbulence, Stochastic Processes, and Traffic 61 Chapter 5 Energy, Noise, and Information 79 Chapter 6 Juxtapositional Symmetry: Recursion, Scaling, and Fractals 97 Chapter 7 Iteration 123 Chapter 8 Strange Attractors 147 Chapter 9 Synoptic Study: “The Coded Dots of Life” 163 BEAUTIFUL CHAOS viii Notes 187 Bibliography 193 Index 201 ix PREFACE Things begin, things end. Just when we seem to arrive at a quiet place we are swept up, suddenly, between the body’s smooth, functioning predictability and the need for disruption. We do irrational things, outrageous things. Or else something will come along and intervene, an unimaginable foe. Abe Skutari, after years and years of peddling door-to-door in rural Manitoba, is drummed out of business by Eaton’s Mail Order. Who would have expected such a thing? So what does he do but borrow money from the Royal Bank—the first such loan ever made to a son of Israel—and open his own retail establishment on Selkirk Avenue in Winnipeg, specializing in men’s workclothes and footwear, garden supplies and bicycles. A door closes, a door opens; Mr. Skutari’s own words. —Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Introduction to the Text In John Guare’s play Six Degrees of Separation, the black youth Paul shows up late one night at the door of Flan and Ouisa Kittredge, wealthy white New York art dealers and socialites. Ostensibly a victim of a stabbing incident in Central Park, he asks for their help and, in turn, fashions their evening into a delightful experience of good conversation, close camaraderie , and fine eating. This part of the experience is pleasurable for the BEAUTIFUL CHAOS x Kittredges, for it is amicable, entertaining, and—despite Paul’s tumultuous and turbulent arrival—orderly. That orderliness is, however, shortlived , for, according to Paul himself, in his happiness at gaining access to their home and their unqualified acceptance, he surreptitiously sneaks out and picks up a gay hustler, bringing him back to the apartment, forever disrupting his own life and that of his hosts. Closely aligned with the imagination, Paul brings with him the mysterious forces of instability and disorder, which go hand in hand with those of pattern and order. Indeed, he is clearly identified with the framed two-sided Kandinsky that hangs in the Kittredges’ apartment: one side, “geometric and somber” (3), suggesting order, has objects well placed and balanced on the canvas; the reverse side, “wild and vivid” (3), representing disorder and chaos, has random splashes of various colored paint. At the play’s end, Ouisa admits to a special affinity with Paul, for she, too, is “all random” (118). Despite Flan’s statement that he is a gambler and that consequently he might also share something special with Ouisa and Paul, he prefers pursuing a stable and orderly existence, which he considers feasible with his financial earnings from brokering art. Inseparable, the two sides of the picture and the two perspectives of the main characters depict the intricate relationship of order and chaos: chaos coming out of order, order coming out of chaos, order and chaos inherent in each other, or chaos neatly and inextricably enfolded within order. Randomness and order are self-referential iterations, each reflecting and reversing the other, simultaneously held together and pulled apart. In the context of this play the two sides of the picture and the Kittredges’ marital relationship bear out the supposition that “stability and change are not opposites but mirror -images of each other” (Briggs and Peat 68). Despite their tension, randomness , and pattern, chaos and order exist in co-dependency, and the artistic imagination activates, engages, and enhances them. Itself a carefully crafted and cohesive drama about the prevalence of disorder in life and the effects of exceptional turbulence introduced into a normal family and social life, Guare’s play, like many other works of late twentieth-century art, is governed by, provides a reaction to, or makes sense only within, the context of stochastic processes and chaos theory. Although conceptions of chaos and order have circulated at least since the earliest narratives of Babylonian, Greek, Biblical, Hindu, and Chinese cultures, it was when James Gleick in 1987 published Chaos...