On "Time, Order, Chaos"

I found particularly interesting J.T. Fraser's essay wherein he observed that the "Triad Cantor Set; it has a dimension of 0.6309" (7n), which is uncannily close to the Fibonacci ratio of 0.618, the ratio of the simplest kind of fractal. Considering my previous comparison of the distribution of words as being similar to a Cantor Set, it would be interesting to see if one could get the dimensionality of word distribution to see if it would be somewhere near these two numbers. I personally have no idea how one could possibly go about doing this, considering my poor background knowledge of mathematics, but it should be possible. Also, I found his observation that "the hierarchical theory of time recognizes five stable, hierarchically nested integrative levels of nature. By hierarchically nested is meant that each integrative level subsumes the functions and structures of the one or ones beneath it, and each adds to the potentialities of its predecessors certain new degrees of freedom" (10). I found this interesting both from the point of view of understanding how new instincts can arise through the combination of old ones, and from the point of view of understanding how meaning can arise through the various hierarchical levels of the novel, from the phoneme, through the sentence-level, to the plot.

Paul A. Harris' essay on Perec I have found particularly useful in thinking of new ways of teaching my rhetoric class. I recently applied the idea of constraints used in the essay, particularly Perec's refusal to use "e" in one of his novels, in my rhetoric class, making my students write just a paragraph without using an "e", and the results were remarkable. Naturally, the paragraph they wrote without "e" were, for the most part, stilted (there was one exception, where the writer actually wrote a very beautiful passage), but in the essays I had them write afterward, to tell me what they thought of the exercise, all the students said it was a great exercise, that helped them really think about their writing, and they recommended I use that pedagogical technique in my next class I teach. In the case of the novel, the essay shows just how important rules are to creation. And if the arbitrary rules can be important to creating new, interesting styles, just imagine how important the natural rules of language must be.

Argyros says in his essay that evolution is "a process of complexification that incorporates its past as the fine grain of the present" (139). Is this, perhaps, one way of defining one of the parameters of a great novel? Also of interest was the comments on the nature of metaphor as the comparison of higher umwelts with lower umwelts (141). This idea is particularly interesting for writers to think about in their writing, helping them to create more and better (and more interesting) metaphors.

Finally, I found Thomas Weissert's essay on narrative quite interesting, especially in light of the work I am doing on poetics as an instinct (and my tying it to the narrative instinct). Narrative helps us separate what is important out from the noise, and helps us turn noise into meaning. Especially when we engage in ritual. One could even look at the ritual of a story as: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, tragedy ensues; while it is the noise surrounding this ritual that makes this ritual into Romeo and Juliet verses The Sorrows of Young Werther. This is because "we use filtering and preconceived structures to obtain the narrative identity. We use the identity to recognize subsequent changes in the identity and, depending on the level of nature we describe, the changes define the meaning we can attribute to the narrative. The changes come from the background noise that to some degree obscures our view of the repetition of the pattern. So it is from the noise that we ultimately get meaning" (171). Furthermore, this noise "drowns out the possibility of divining meaning precisely, if at all. But without noise there can be no meaning. This noise represents a level of fuzziness beyond which we cannot see" (172). The ritual of boy meets girl, etc. gives information, but it does not give meaning, while each of the specific examples given do carry meaning (though the meaning of each is indeed ambiguous). One could apply this too to such chaotic patterns (noise) in word distribution as I discovered in my own novel, which would show how such word patterns both make my novel more, not less, ambiguous, and simultaneously more meaningful.