Harriet Hawkin's "Strange Attractors"

Where to even begin with my admiration of Hawkins’ book? I managed to take nineteen pages of notes from this small book. Is it possible for an author to be completely right about literature? Perhaps not – but for my money, Hawkins comes closest to anyone I have read, particularly in the way she applies chaos theory to analyzing literature. She points out that chaos theory is an excellent way to analyze literature, since “deterministic chaos is the context, the medium we inhabit in everyday life, ubiquitously allowing for, and indeed mandating individuality as well as unpredictability within a physically determined order” (2). Considering this, we can immediately see how chaos theory
helps to explain why, after centuries, certain works maintain their operational fangs and claws and terrible beauty. They are the artistic equivalents of deterministic chaos, and as such evoke chaotic responses, contradictory interpretations, altogether different generic adaptations. Therefore, as in the artistic tradition itself, their complex metaphorical signifiers keep on floating around in the minds of individual readers (and generations) long after the text was first read. (8)
Chaos theory helps explain why certain works have long-term value both within and among cultures. More complex works create more and more ways of seeing the text, breed different interpretations, have people arguing about the text for centuries (sometimes even millennia). Any work that creates a large number of interpretations is, according to this theory, a great work that has lasting value.
Hawkins further shows how complex works create those who attempt to emulate that work – usually in the creation of less complex works. An example she gives is Milton’s Paradise Lost, of which Crichton’s Jurassic Park was a less complex emulation – which itself had a less complex emulation in the movie version. She points out that another one of the ways of knowing a work is a great work of art is to see how many times people try to replicate it. Most of the replicants will be less complex than the original, and will, therefore, just as likely be forgotten. But occasionally, there will come along works of art which go beyond mere emulation to create another highly complex work of art that will itself inspire future emulation.
The above work for older works, but how can we determine if a new work is sufficiently complex enough to fit her definition of a lasting work of value? She does not come right out and way, but she does give several hints. “When a fractal is viewed on any scale, comparably complex details emerge. And comparably complex details likewise emerge in individual lines, books, actions, and characterizations, as well as on the mythic, narrative and temporal scales of a complex nonlinear work” (18). One way of seeing if a work meets this level of complexity is to ask yourself what it would take to write up a set of instructions to have a writer write any given work. A work is complex if the “instructions” on how to write it (as romance publishers give their writers) would be longer than the work produced (13). This brings us back to theory, because one could, in a sense, see literary analysis as an attempt (actually, various attempts by various people) to write parts of the instructions on how to write any given work of literature. Using psychological analysis, for example, one could learn various elements of the psychologies of the characters in the work (let us say, a novel). Marxist analysis could point out the various class concerns the author had in mind. Things like formalism and structuralism could show on a formal and structural level how the novel was constructed. Poststructuralism could point out what the author left out and suggest why. And one could even go back to older theories and see what they have to say about works of literature, since “even as chaos theory calls into question comparatively exclusive [italics hers] critical paradigms, it also allows for a retroactive, retrospective understanding of earlier artistic and critical insights commonly brushed aside as outmoded or as too obvious to need further thought” (19). One could go on and on.
Chaos theory shows both how these all work together to create a set of instructions for the reader to both enter the text, to understand better various elements of it, and for potential writers to understand how and why an author did what they did in a given work. And it also provides its own elements to the instructions. For example, Hawkins points out that the butterfly effect helps explain how “an inadvertent dropping of a handkerchief, or someone else’s otherwise insignificant incapacity to tolerate alcohol ( as in Othello) – can exponentially compound with other effects and give rise to disproportionate impacts” (16). She proposes this in opposition to “linear-minded moralists [who] have sought to charge tragic heroes and heroines with correspondingly [italics hers] great (quid pro quo) crimes, vices, sins and fatal flaws,” pointing out that “as chaos theory demonstrates, and as had long been obvious in ordinary life (as in comic as well as tragic art) very small, morally neutral, individual effects” (16) can, as noted above, result in huge, tragic effects.
Further, the themes and conflicts of a potentially great work of literature must themselves be complex, while “it simultaneously establishes what chaos theorists term nonlinear replications, iterations, self-similarities – that is, regular irregularities, structural correspondences (symmetries) and (asymmetrical) contrasts – between characters and actions” (61). Such a work would also seem to never have satisfactory interpretations, because “In complex works of art, as in the fractal formations of nature, there are interactive effects within interactive effects, and the whole is larger than the sum of its parts. The holistic interaction between components cannot be analytically dissected precisely because analysis requires segregation” (77). One cannot consider a single chapter of the lengthy instructions of a work to be the complete instructions. This in particular puts deconstruction in a delicate position, since it does not acknowledge emergent properties in its analysis of a work’s smallest parts.
In the end, a great work of art is great because it replicates the complexities found in nature. That is the very reason why it satisfies: the various arts “are not literal representations, but [are] metaphorically satisfying because they ‘work like nature’” (83). All the elements found in a work of great art, “iterations, recursions, self-similarities, symmetries and asymmetries [are] operative in the nonlinear systems of nature, in contrast to the regularities and predictabilities of comparatively linear (generically determined) systems and fictions such as formulaic romance novels” (88). The instructions for such formulaic novels can be written up in an area smaller than the novels that are created. The instructions for the creation of even a relatively small work, like Milton’s Paradise Lost, would take up volumes. This is perhaps why it takes so many people longer to enjoy and appreciate great works of literature – but when they do, that is also why “in the long run, the survival of a complex literary “fractal” . . . continuously resonates, on multiple scales – imaginative, aesthetic, intellectual, orderly and disorderly – in the minds and memories of individual readers of successive generations, in very much the same way it continues to resonate in the artistic tradition” (103).