Pynchon, Fractals, and Chaos

[Bonnie Surfus (ENG)]

Thanks, Tim.  Your catalogue, or rather timeline, is useful.  And 
educational.  

May I just clear a few things here?  This, I responded earlier to Basil, 
is a debate in which many trajectories rally for our 
attention/attraction.  Sorry to be so kute with my diction, but it's hard 
to avoid anymore.  Basically:  I, as a reader with some stake in the 
meaning of GR within the negotiation of meaning that includes my 
knowledge, see fractal images.  Fractal images have been shown te exist 
throughout the physical world, which includes our own 
physiological/psychological matrices that execute our epistemological and 
hermeneutical orientations.  My long and short term memory is aware of 
fractals, both explicity discussed and appropriated within scientific and 
literary discourse communities as well as within my own strange 
trance-inducting ruminations on the raindrops that dashed agains the car 
window when we'd drive in the rain--the patterns they'd make.  My reading 
of GR, my very personal reading of GR, includes a vision of fractals that 
operate almost as syntactic links (so far--to page 153--on the second 
read) between episodes (stated as such, and sub-episodic action, as well.)
Whether or not Pynchon was aware of fractals when he wrote GR is 
irrelevant.  It is interesting, and despite what any may think, I think 
possible that he was influenced, consciously or not, by work that emerged 
as published descriptions of fractals, chaos theory, or associated work.  
But it need not be published works that influenced Pynchon, in my 
thinking anyhow--as well as in Hayles'.  She explains by way of examining 
Saussure, first explaining that her _The Cosmic Web_ is concerned with 
"literature, however, . . . my major emphasis is on how literary theory 
and form have been shaped by the change of paradigms."  She is describing 
a "field view of language," that, she says, has its foundations in 
Saussure's 1916 Cours de linguistique generale.  She says "When Saussure 
argued that the entire linguistic structure changes with the addition or 
the omission of a single lexical unit, he conceived of language as an 
integrated, nondivisible whole, that is to say, as a unified field 
composed of parts by not reducible to the sum of its parts" (CW 22.)  
Moving towards a notion of the cultural matrix or cosmic web, she says 
"That Saussure's proposals are remarkable similar in spirit to those 
occurring about the same time in physics and mathematics does not require 
that Saussure knew of Einstein's 1905 papers or read Principia 
Mathematica.  Indeed, to suppose that such parallels require direct lines 
of influence is to be wedded to the very notions of causality that a 
field model renders obsolete.  A more accurate and appropriate model for 
such parallel developments would be a field notion of culture, a societal 
matrix which consists (in Whitehead's phrase) of a 'climate of opinion' 
that makes some questions interesting to pursue and renders others 
uninteresting or irrelevant."  She adds that this "climate of opinion" 
guides intellectual inquiry, and that "such a history would insist that 
we not be misled by a causal perspective into thinking of corrspondences 
between disciplines as one-way exchanges, for example, by asserting that 
the change in scientific paradigms caused a shift in literary form.  In a 
field model, the interactions  are always mutual:  the cultural matrix 
guides individual inquirey at the same time that the inquiry helps to 
form, or transform, the matrix" (CW 22-3.)
 
You may be interesting in the final essay in the book: "Caught in the 
Web:  Cosmology and the Point of (No) Return in Pynchon's Gravity's 
Rainbow."    She also devotes a chapter to :  Pirsig, D.H. Lawrence, 
Nabokov, and Borges.

Sorry for the lenghty quotes, but Hayles speaks so well on the subject 
and these passages seem to express a bit of what I'm suggesting about 
fractals and a cultural matrix or climate of opinion that may have been 
interesting or influential (directly or not) for Pynchon.  But if we do 
look to hard at these issues, then we are guilty of buying into false 
causality, or just believing to much in a rigid cause-and-effect that 
might be more dream-like and mysterious than we give credence to.  

"Oh dodgy--very dodgy."

This is not an offensive, I hope you know.  In fact, if anything, it's 
counteroffensive from my perspective as once again I've spent too much 
time on this and not enough on my work (but then, my exam is geared to 
address my studies and I've pretty much been guaranteed a PYnchon and a 
chaos question,  or some (secret) integration of the two.)

Thanks for listening.

Bonnie