Pynchon, Fractals, and Chaos

[Timothy C. May]

Basileios Drolias wrote:

> On Mon, 15 May 1995, Bonnie Surfus (ENG) wrote:

> > I wonder--for any of you who went to Warwick--how much, if any, was 
> > devoted to the study of chaos theory in Pynchon's work?  I don't mean 
> > just to mention that he was/is aware of chaos theory, but to the extent 
> > of tracing fractal images or even the text as fractal (whole.)  This last 
> > could address the WWII theme issue, I think, esp. as Pynchon treats the 
> > War as an almost inconceivable whole, almost personified being or formation.

> It would be quite interesting to find fractal / chaotic text influences 
> in TP. However one should be very careful since the whole idea about 
> fractals, chaos, dynamical systems etc, although it's been around for 
> about 100 years it's only over the past two decades that it has gained 
> popularity. A fractal structure can be observed in other books 
> (Ulysses? Finnegans Wake? A la recherche du temps perdu? more?) having to 
> do I think with a certain writing style and not with scientific 
> influences. If I had the time I would check the contents of Scientific 
> American or Science during the 50ies, 60ies for possible references that 
> might have influenced TP.

I know Bonnie has said she is tired of defending the idea that Pynchon
was influenced by work on fractals and chaos theory, but the whole
theme is too important to ignore.

And this is one of the few things on this list that I have some direct
background in, not being from the literary side of the fence.

Some points:

* First of all, it's important to realize that fractals and chaos are
not really the same thing, though they are often mish-moshed together
into a kind of "new physics" that encompasses the "fractal, chaotic
structure" of things.

* Several writers, notably Borges, have explored labyrinthine,
recursive structures. Others, notably Joyce, have written in web-like,
intensely hypertextian flows of incredible complexity. Pynchon uses
both styles, of course.

* Although we now "see" both fractals (self-similarity at multiple
scales) in lots of things, and although we "see" chaos almost
everywhere, such was definitely not the case in the 1960s, and even
well into the 1970s. I'm not talking here about when Mandelbrot may
have published his earliest papers, or about when the "butterfly
effect" in weather forecasting was first described, but instead I am
talking about public perception (even amongst technical folks).

* Awareness of fractals really began to hit around 1977-8, when Martin
Gardner published columns about fractals and "1/f noise" in his
"Mathematical Games" column in "Scientific American." This was almost
certainly the first time most scientists and engineers would have
gotten exposure to the whole idea. (There were no other popular
accounts up to that time, and any technical papers were very obscure
and their importance was unrealized.) Mandelbrot published a slim
volume on fractals in the late 70s, but his first really big book was
"The Fractal Geometry of Nature," published around 1982-3...that's
when I got my copy, and I was the only one I knew in Silicon Valley
who knew about this stuff.

* Conclusion about Pynchon and fractals: His fiction may have
instances of "self-similarity" (same structure at different scales,
e.g., sections of chapters mirror larger structures), but not many.
And nothing in works prior to "Vineland" suggest any attempt to use
fractals as a literary device. (Not that "Vineland" does, either, but
it postdates Mandelbrot's popularity, so I don't consider it germane
to the issue of whether Pynchon anticipated fractals or was aware of
the work done.)

* Chaos theory has a much longer history, effectively dating back to
Poincare's work on the stability of the solar system (to wit, will the
orbits of planets remain stable or "chaotically" evolve into a
situation where, say, Venus is fired off into interstellar space!).
Also, work on the "three body problem" (predicting the orbits of 3
masses around each other) showed that no closed solutions could be
found.

Pynchon was surely aware of this aspect of "chaos"--though it was not
called that before the late 1970s--and one can see echoes of it in, of
course, the random rocket fallings in London, with the (apparent)
correlation to sexual escapades.

* The modern interpretation did not come until the 1980s, when the
work of Poincare, Feigenbaum, and others got integrated and things
like "period-doubling" were understood. This was the golden era of
dripping water faucets, roulette wheels (done by some local Santa Cruz
folks, who were probably gone before Pynchon arrived in the area), and
the "Chaos Cabal."

In summary, I don't see Pynchon as presciently realizing the fractal
nature of the world, except insofar as many writers have had insights
about the recursive, self-referential, multiply-connected nature of
things.

But Pynchon in many ways is a "modern" writer, with his sensibilities
informed by developments in information theory. (As I once wrote in a
post in response to Bonnie Surfus, the influence of information theory
is a much more pervasive influence on Pynchon. Entropy is the obvious
connection, explicitly made, but the whole Shannon motif is
omnipresent.) 

--Tim May


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