Chaos, Fractals & GR & Litcrit

[LOT64 at aol.com]

     Tim says, we must bring systems to a text to ( I paraphrase) understand
it.  JSC agrees, but questions bringing new, external systems that ( I
paraphrase) distort it.  Bonnie says that her first reading of GR was too
influenced by critics and her second reading is of a different text
altogether.  Hopefully we are all reading the same text, but we all bring our
own system, or ideology, or axe-to-grind, or personal experience to the same
text and in reading it create a new text in our  mind.  As different subjects
 join with the same object new syntheses are created.   Any work of art, to
be enduring, must have what the semioticians call a multivalence of
signification.  There has to be a certain ambiguity and a certain
elusiveness.  A great work will be able to wriggle out of the snare of any
analytical trap.  It will not be able to be enclosed in one explanation.  But
there must be  underlying essences or truths or ideas that are inherent in
the work.  There must be interpretations that are correct.  Maybe not one,
maybe several, but there are interpretations that are simply wrong. 
     The great fractal debate has offered quite a bit of food for thought.
 While feasting, I've also been thinking about the purpose of literary
criticism.  This is very subjective, of course.  For me the most important
function is analytical.  I'll read a novel or poem and it will hit me in an
intense vital way.  It will perform its artistic alchemy in me.  Then, the
next thing I want to know is, "how did they do that?"  A well written essay
will, for me, explain the strategies of the text and give me an inkling of
how this particular way of putting together words, sentences, paragraphs,
lines. stanzas, chapters...whatever help to produce the effect the book has.
 The next most important function, again for me, is when I've read something
and I don't get it but feel something is there.  Then I look for a critic who
can explain the work.  That's really valuable because it can open me up to
appreciation of an artist I was unable to get.  That to me is the greatest
value of literary criticism.
     Of course, there is good criticism that analyses literature to explicate
a social, historical, or political milieu.  That can be valuable.  But it is
not about the literature, it's using the work to make other points.  For me,
a critical approach must illumine the work in a new way.  
   Anyway, are systems destructive or necessary?  This is the same debate
that takes place over language.  We see something in nature.  We name it-
killing it.  It's a flower.  So then a rose is the same as a pansy is the
same as a lily.  They are all flowers.  The only reason to name something is
to gain control over it.  The paradox is that to learn about and appreciate
something we name it, systematize it, analyse it, dissect it, destroy it.
 Film is the same thing.  24 times per second it takes a fluid dynamic
subject and freezes it, distorts it, captures its soul.  Western culture is
caught in this paradox.  To understand things, to gain power over them we
must destroy them.  Isn't that what litcrit is?  A work of art gains some
magical power over me, its beautiful, its strange, I can't explain it. So
then I have to learn all I can about it, analyse it, discuss it, explain it.
 I always thought that it was to appreciate the work but now I'm thinking
this is just a way to free myself from it.  To break its uncanny hold over
 me.  

    During the Bannana Breakfast, Pirate arranges the chains of molecules of
the various bannana delicacies into seductive aromas.  Later Jamf arranges
the molecules to produce Imipolex G.  Our control of molecules through
systems like cooking or science can be used to produce widely differing
results.  Its true, systems, our ideologies, distort our world view, keep us
from seeing things as they are; but without any world view, without any
system we are blind and can see nothing.  Isn't that the paradox every artist
and every work of art wrestles with?