In his 1907 autobiographical narrative, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams observes an emergent scientific and philosophical tenet growing in popularity among his contemporary generation of scholars.1 In his own summation, it claims “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man” (Adams xxxi). Imbedded in this statement is a notion that undermines the principles of Newtonian physics—those which had formerly proven the physical world and the natural events therein to be calculable systems of predictability and overarching order. It is from Adams’ divergent school of logic that the scientific theory of chaos eventually derives.2 Yet from a metaphysical point of view, the sentiment espoused by such a statement—that chaos is the ruling force of nature and order is merely a construct of false hope—ostensibly aligns with a bleak and nihilistic perspective of the world, and especially of human life. This very sentiment is also a strikingly accurate representation of western thought in the early twentieth century, the beginnings of the modernist period that emerged during the First World War. In Europe, this era ushered in a period of inconceivable destruction and loss with the onset of the Great War, and the result was a devastated generation trying to make sense of life in the midst of shattered worlds and world-views. While the United States was not as severely affected by the horrors of WWI, they were still, in a raw and tangible sense, recovering from the effects of their own Civil War which had occurred less than 50 years before. The national disunity that marked the Civil War also, in many ways, marked the recovery process—particularly for the southern states which experienced the uprooting and decay of their long-established cultural systems and ways of life.
While it is certain that the events of this period impelled human thought toward a likely rulership of chaos in nature, they also appear to have propelled it with equal force in the opposite direction, reinforcing Adams’ notion that “order [is] the dream of man”—and not merely a dream, but a quest. In the midst of the intense chaos that defines the lost generation, this period is also replete with attempts of mankind to envision, create, and reclaim order in new and progressive ways.3 Many artists of the era, although often producing pieces representative of chaos’s reign in the world, actually served to order the disordered by creating fixed and concrete visions of life, more easily approachable to the questioning modernist mind. In the visual arts, pioneers of abstraction and surrealism such as Picasso and Dalí began introducing distorted, obscure, and arguably disturbing impressions of reality to reflect their times. Likewise, in the performing arts, Stravinsky’s rough and disorderly The Rite of Spring ballet and accompaniment peaked in popularity in the wake of WWI, whereas before it had been met with riots and severe criticism. In literary arts, poetry and other mediums experienced shifts toward unordered systems in form and content, as seen in the emergence of stream-of-consciousness narration and the subjects of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. By observing chaos and portraying chaos, these modernist artists, in turn, created their own forms of order through works of art—works defined by uncontainable thoughts and ideas pieced together into individual and concrete visions.
This phenomenon is reflective of a recent scientific discovery known as Parrondo’s paradox. Originally observed in the context of game theory, it was later applied to the physical sciences and posits that “a dynamics combined by more than two discrete chaotic dynamics in deterministic manners can give rise to order when combined” (Fulai 1). It is more commonly known as a physical and mathematical idea that for certain dynamic systems “chaos + chaos = order.”4 Comparatively, as modernist artists of the early 20th century strove to represent, often mimicking, chaos in their works as a means grappling with the natural reality of its presence in the world, the result was ordered art—chaotic observations of reality brought together into manageable visions of life for both artists and outside interpreters. In this essay, I apply the metaphysical idea behind Parrondo’s paradox to the western, intercontinental literary world of the early 20th century, specifically observing authorial representations of chaos in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury. By comparing how the authors portray the evidence of a chaotic world in their respective novels, and specifically how they appear to reconcile the implications of chaos in the subjects of unwelcome change, ever-passing time, and death, it is evident that underlying the prominent theme of chaotic decay in each narrative, the authors ultimately create an overarching vision of beauty, order, and hope.
Representing Chaotic Systems through Dynamic Narratives
Jo Alyson Parker uses the term “dynamic narrative” to identify literary works which possess what she calls “narrative structures [that] resemble chaotic nonlinear dynamical systems” (Parker 21). In her book, Narrative Form and Chaos Theory, Parker argues that certain narratives, like the physical systems of chaos theory, are dynamic in that they “pla[y] games with repetition, order, and duration…[and] pointedly implicat[e] the reader in the process of meaning making” (29). Like mathematical equations, they are also models of reality, created for interpretation as a means of prescribing some form of order to observable phenomena in the external world. In her study, she analyzes four exemplary texts including Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. In observing these texts, Parker believes them to have “emerge[d] from concrete issues with which the writers attempt[ed] to deal,” explaining that the “disorderly order” of the narratives “serves as a deliberate resistance to the cultural determinations of their time” (29). For Faulkner, she identifies the issue as reverberations of racial inequality in the southern United States after the Civil War. For Woolf, she posits it is an issue of writing as a woman, writing in defiance of “traditional, male-authorized sentence and sequence” (89). I would add to both the broader cultural issues of the authors’ time and spaces: for Faulkner the decay of the old south in the aftermath of the Civil War, and for Woolf the devastation of Europe through WWI. In all cases, there is disruption and disorder in the cultural matrix of their time.5
Applying Parker’s narrational observations to To the Lighthouse and The Sound and the Fury, equally evident (as in their other aforementioned novels) is the implementation of chaotic literary devices, or rather devices that model dynamical physical systems.6 Both authors employ stream of consciousness narration and repetition of crucial events and themes. The order of the narratives is often disruptive, unbalanced, and seemingly random at times. In The Sound, the plot-line jumps sporadically between time and space, relaying similar events through various perspectives, and portraying, at times, characters’ nearly uninterpretable and chaotic perceptions of the world. Similarly, Lighthouse is unbalanced in structure; the first section, although depicting only one day in the narrative, occupies half of the novel’s length, while the second section covering ten years of time in the narrative, only occupies twenty pages. Time and space, in this manner, appear to be intentionally unordered and nonlinear, as do the human perceptions of reality, as “thoughts, memories, images, sounds, and emotions” are “interfus[ed]” between characters and scenes in both texts, all reflecting the ideology of modernism (Kern 167).
This modernist ideology, as Georg Lukács explains, is characterized by a “lack of objectivity” in mankind’s perception of the world, manifesting in a null “distinction between abstract and concrete potentialities” of life and meaning (Lukács 110, 107). In short, chaos appears to rule as the only evidential law of nature; all that was once objective is undermined and now entirely subjective, including literary processes. Lukács identifies the “rejection of narrative objectivity, the surrender to subjectivity” in literary realms as “tak[ing] the form of Joyce’s stream of consciousness,” among other devices (107). Yet even in these literary representations of the chaotic, abstract world of modernism, the authors evidently desire, as Alice van Buren Kelly observes from Woolf, “to reveal the order hidden behind the daily blur, to bring together through some delicate arrangements, some central line, the opposing aspects of life, variously defined” (van Buren Kelly 75). Likewise, Aliz Farkas identifies systems of cohesion in Benjy’s section in The Sound, arguably the most difficult section to interpret, which she claims were intentionally woven into the narrative by the author like “a finely sewn, varicoloured patchwork,” in order to “help the reader keep track of the events” across time and space; thus producing forms of order in representational chaos—“disorderly order” in Parker’s terms (Farkas 168; Parker 29). Across these texts there are several ways in which chaos is represented and order is surmised, as these critics observe, and among them are the symbolic implications of three overarching themes—change, time, and death.
“What can it all mean?”: Chaos as Unwelcome Change
Both Woolf and Faulkner experienced cultures of unwelcome change in their times, although in different spheres and contexts, and these cultures appear in the content of their novels. For Woolf, and particularly evident in Lighthouse, the pivotal factor of change is found the middle section, “Time Passes,” which spans ten years in the narrative and hinges around WWI. As Stephen Kern observes, “Woolf describes that period with obvious reference to the destruction of the war…track[ing] the fragmentation of things in the house… [and] paralleling the fragmentation of Europe during World War I” (Kern 157, 161). In the first section, “The Window,” before the second segment unleashes the forces of chaos on the family members and summer home, Mrs. Ramsay, observing the particular innocence, blissful inexperience of her children in their stable environment, quietly laments, “They were happier now than they would ever be again” (Lighthouse 59). Indeed, the nature of the first section is that of a captured moment in time, a fixed point encircled by an eternity of chaos and change. Just before expressing this sense of the impending ruin of her children’s innocence, Mrs. Ramsay particularly observes the virtues of two of them: “Prue, a perfect angel with the others, and…she took one’s breath away with her beauty. Andrew—even her husband admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary” (58). By highlighting the gifts of these children—beauty and intelligence, order in the body and mind—Woolf in turn reinforces the notion of the inexplicable, random, and careless ways of chaos in human life. For we learn in the second section, as the house falls into disrepair over the subsequent years, that Prue and Andrew die young and suddenly, one in childbirth and the other in the sporadic blasts of WWI.
In this manner, Woolf demonstrates that change is chaotic, constantly in motion, often unpredictable, and in such cases, entirely uncontrollable. Mrs. Ramsay, too,—the heartbeat of the story—dies unexpectedly in her sleep. It is for these forms of unwanted change, change that is incurred by death, war, familial and cultural devastation that at the ten-year reunion, Mr. Ramsay repetitively stews on his new reality, telling Lily “You find us much changed” (148). Likewise it is for this change that Lily ponders, “How aimless it was, how chaotic, how unreal it was,” the reality of the absences at the summer home, of death and loss (146). For Lily, the artist of the narrative, such unwelcome change leaves her with one powerful question that reverberates throughout the final portion of the novel: “What can it all mean?” (145). The process she endures of creating her painting over the fragmented course of ten years reflects her desire to turn a chaotic perception of reality into something concrete and unchangeable, “to make something beautiful and unified out of her canvas and paint,” as she is unable to do so in the medium of her wandering thoughts (Kern 164). In a modernist fashion, her painting is abstract, as she portrays Mrs. Ramsay by a “triangular purple shape” which Mr. Banks argues “no one could tell it for a human” (Lighthouse 52). This form is demonstrative of the fragmentation she feels, yet the whole is nonetheless a singular, unified, and unalterable image of her reality. Lily’s artistic view is ostensibly a reflection of Woolf’s, who explains that in her own creative writing process
[Putting severed parts together] is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy […] a constant idea of mine […] that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art: that we are parts of the work of art (“A Sketch” 70).
Although depicting a world of chaos and unwelcome change—the world she, too, sees and feels so powerfully—Woolf strives behind every line to explore how one can create their own order, and “unify [one’s] world aesthetically through art” (Kern 165).
In a similar manner, Faulkner witnessed, and with conflicting sentiment, experienced what John T. Matthews calls the “seismic upheavals that formed [southern] modern life […], disruptions [that] caused […] confusion and ambivalence, as one predominant way of life gave way to another” (Matthews 1). After the Civil War, the general worldview of the southern United States was shattered as “‘Yankee’ progress and change” infiltrated the social and political spheres, uprooting the “old mythologies that exalted the antebellum ideal of plantation life (Wetta 78; Matthews 4). Faulkner’s acknowledgement of this change, of its necessity and its impact on the southern way of life manifests within The Sound and the Fury through the image of the Compson family’s decline, and the chaos that defines it. With the narrative in continuous, and often incomprehensible motion, the structural image it offers to the reader is a downward spiral full of debris and senselessness, reflecting Lily’s resounding question, “What can it all mean?” (Lighthouse 145). The Shakespearean reference of The Sound’s title offers a similar picture: “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, /And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (Shakespeare V.v.24-28). It is this sentiment of chaos’s rule over human life, of a fragmented search for meaning in the midst of tumult that Faulkner’s narrative captures.
A fundamental moment of unwelcome change in the Compson family’s lives is when Mr. Compson sells Benjy’s pasture to pay for Quentin’s Harvard education and Caddy’s wedding. This exchange not only marks the the diminishment of the Compson property and influence, but also of the family’s stability, encompassing an ironic expression of the chaotic ends that change often entails. The money put toward Quentin’s education was wasted because of his early death by suicide; that which went toward Caddy’s wedding was squandered, too, by the couple’s early divorce. Thus, the sale of Benjy’s pasture ultimately occurred in vain and accomplished nothing but further diminishment of the family’s influence and constancy. The recognition of this torments Quentin before his death, which is evident through Quentin’s repetitive recollection of his father’s words, “We have sold Benjy’s pasture…for a fine sound” (The Sound 60, 110 italics original). The prestigious name, “Harvard” is the fine sound for which Benjy’s pasture is sold—an empty sound as it was purchased in vain. Just before his suicide, Quentin acknowledges the vanity of it, “A fine dead sound we will swap Benjy’s pasture for a fine dead sound.” (110).
The sale of Benjy’s pasture coincides with Caddy’s loss of virginity, another factor marking unwelcome change in the family. Caddy’s virginity is representative of the siblings’ childhood innocence (like the Ramsay children in Lighthouse), and the pure, stable structure of the Compson’s longstanding home. Yet this family stability hinges upon her purity, which once lost, renders the family incapable of recovery, marking the beginning of their chaotic decline. The necessity of Caddy’s purity for family success is a reflection of old traditions that equate feminine virtue with virginity. Losing her virginity, the purity of southern tradition, is an unredeemable societal scandal for which she alone bears responsibility. This is clear in Quentin’s lament, “Why couldn’t it have been me and not her who is unvirgin” (50). The term “unvirgin” marks the nature of the unwelcome change that Caddy brought upon the family—no longer pure, no longer icons of southern idealism. Thus, with the early image of Dilsey trying to brush off the mud from Caddy’s undergarments, Faulkner foreshadows not only Caddy’s fall, but the fall of the entire family. Dilsey’s apparent awareness of Caddy’s looming downfall echos Mrs. Ramsay’s prophetic sentiments toward her maturing children, “Why must they grow up and lose it all?” (Lighthouse 59). Dilsey’s role as attempting to mitigate the impending decline of the family is clarified in Faulkner’s explanation in the 1933 introduction to The Sound:
Dilsey with the mudstained drawers scrubbing the naked backside of that doomed little girl–trying to cleanse with the sorry byblow of its soiling that body, flesh, whose shame they symbolised and prophesied, as though she already saw the dark future and the part she was to play in it trying to hold that crumbling household together (“An Introduction” 231).
Dilsey, like Mrs. Ramsay, can see that the future holds dark and foreboding mysteries, the effects of chaotic change which no one can prevent. As she watches the Compson family disintegrate, she herself remains steadfast. Dilsey is The Sound’s image of stability in the midst of chaos, as Faulkner evidently intended her character to be: “There was Dilsey to be the future, to stand above the fallen ruins of the family like a ruined chimney, gaunt, patient and indomitable” (ibid. 231). While Dilsey cannot prevent the destructive change for the Compson family, she herself withstands it, she endures as a fragment of order in the midst of a whirlwind of chaos. It is not that she is unaffected by change, but that change is unaffected by her; she moves through and with it in harmony, and in turn maintains order in her world.
Chaotic Decay and the Dynamics of Time and Death
Recalling Henry Adams’ observations, embedded in the implications of metaphysical chaos, is a parallel notion that all things over time tend toward disorder and decay. This notion derives from the second law of thermodynamics (see footnote 1), for which N. Katherine Hayles explains, “[Adams] used classical thermodynamic arguments to demonstrate that the world and human intellect were running down, […undergoing] entropic decline” (Hayles 87). While Adams envisioned this entropic phenomenon broadly across history, it is also applicable in more specific arenas of life; particularly in the concept of death. The popular phrase and prominent thought of modernism that insinuates ‘from the moment of birth we begin dying’ reflects this notion of continuous decay over time.7 In this manner, time and death are interconnected, the former a vehicle for the latter, and both ostensibly servants of chaos. The implications of time and death are crucial elements of Lighthouse and The Sound, manifesting throughout the texts in symbolic imagery and, specifically in The Sound, as motifs like a clock or a chiming bell.
In Quentin’s section of The Sound, time is inescapable. Images of clocks, watches, and the sounds of ticking noises, church bells, and chimes permeate the chapter. It is evident Quentin has an obsession with time, always asking the hour, always hearing its marks, and more profoundly, always anticipating its end in his own life—his death. Moments before his suicide, Quentin observes this profound connection between time and death: “A quarter hour yet. And then I’ll not be. The peacefullest words. Peacefullest words. Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum. Somewhere I heard bells once” (The Sound 110). Note that Quentin’s death-thoughts are framed by two markers of time—his countdown to death and the sound of bells. In an assessment of Faulkner’s literary influences, Floyd Watkins claims that “[o]nce Faulkner asked his publishers to send him the works of Donne, but if he studied Donne, he never demonstrated his knowledge of the seventeenth-century poet” (Watkins 107). I disagree. The association of bells with death that is so apparent in The Sound is evidence to suggest that Faulkner likely read and alludes to John Donne’s Meditation 17: “This Bell tolling softly for another saies to me thou must die” (Donne 445). The bell is a reminder that all lives will eventually come to an end, and to hear the death-bell of another is to hear it also for oneself, as every person’s time will come. The bell is also a marker of time, the ever-progressing force that pushes all living humanity toward death. Likewise, after Jason loses Miss Quentin in a chase, and the sheriff is unwilling to help him track her down, a similar scene plays out: “The sheriff watched him drive away, turn, and rush past the house toward town. The bells were ringing again, high in the scudding sunlight in bright disorderly tatters of sound” (The Sound 189). As Jason drives off it becomes clear, through the ominous reminder of ‘disorderly tattering’ bells, that there is nothing left for him in life but his impending death and the subsequent erasure of the Compson family name.
While the Compsons strive unsuccessfully to order their lives within the construct of linear time, Dilsey demonstrates a distinctive manner of living beyond it. In his book, What is Time?, G. J. Whitrow posits that “the invention of a mechanical clock […] greatly influenced the belief in the quasi-geometrical homogeneity and continuity of time,” which is a modern conception of time, where time is naturally a force beyond human comprehension (Whitrow 55). In other words, the mechanical clock is a human construct created as a means of linearly ordering the force of time, which in its natural state is likely dynamic. To the Compson family, order is built on their understanding of linear time—reminiscing past glory days, counting down present moments, and making vain plans for a bleak future—all of which reflect Adams’ notion of entropic decay. For Dilsey, however, while time remains beyond her control and comprehension, the order in her life is not built upon it. This is evident through the image of her personal clock:
On the wall above a cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamp light and even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand, a cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its throat, struck five times. ‘Eight oclock,’ Dilsey said (The Sound 171).
Of all the clocks, church bells, and watches present in The Sound, Dilsey’s means of telling time is three hours behind—a clock with only one hand that struggles even to chime—and yet she always knows what time it really is. Thus, Dilsey’s order is not built on external factors but an internal stability. She does not live in the past nor in the future, but abides in the present, allowing time to move her harmoniously where it will, as she does with change. This is how she is able to look upon the Compson family’s decay, “like a ruined chimney, gaunt, patient and indomitable” and say, “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin” (“An Introduction” 231; The Sound 185). She lives beyond and through time, and in this manner maintains order in her world. Thus, while Faulkner depicts primarily the fall of a southern family into ruin, his story is framed by Dilsey’s vision of the family and her outward stable perspective. She who is able to see the grand picture of time and decay provides order to the narrative and the chaotic events therein.
The notion of time leading toward decay is a prominent theme in Lighthouse as well. Mrs. Ramsay, in particular, notices time passing swiftly beyond her reach and control. At the close of the dinner party scene, she makes a singular effort to capture the moment, fully embracing it as she knows that it—like all precious things in life—will not last.
With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta’s arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. (Lighthouse 111).
The image of a moment in time transforming from the present to the past echoes Adams’ entropic observations of human history—the dissolution of something ordered and concrete into something disordered and abstract. It is with this realization that Mrs. Ramsay “felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered; to detach it; separate it off,” and fixing her eye upon elm branches outside the window observes, “Her world was changing: they were still” (112-113). Mrs. Ramsay feels the dynamic nature of time altering her world and ushering her ever forward toward change and ultimately death. Amidst the heaviness of this chaotic reality, she responds by isolating individual objects and capturing the stillness there as a means of applying stability to her own changing world. In doing so, she makes time appear to stand still for a moment, similar to what Lily does with her painting, as they both, “like Woolf herself, struggle to make shape out of chaos” (Kern 168).
In the second section, “Time Passes,” the notion of time is inextricably linked to death and decay. Sporadically woven into the eloquent descriptions of the decaying summer home over the course of ten years are small, seemingly inconsequential and bracketed sentences, casually announcing the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew. The randomness of nature’s work upon the summer home appears to mirror the ostensible randomness of the familial deaths, their causes, and their structural positioning within the text. In this manner, the author paints a picture of a world in which chaos rules over nature and time, enabling decay, and giving way to death. Entropic phenomena are also evident in the portrayal of the familial deaths, each occurring after a crescendo of lines depicting chaos’s hand in nature, after images like “wind and destruction,” “leaves fly[ing] helter skelter,” “the sea toss[ing] itself,” “pools of uneasy water,” “passing shadows,” “ominous sounds,” and “shriek[s]” (Lighthouse 128, 132, 133). These descriptions reflect the impact of time and nature on the summer home as well, as the image of the decaying house symbolizes the process of entropy in the natural world and in human death:
The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long night seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. The saucepan had rusted and the mat decayed (Lighthouse 137).
Just as the home becomes a shell, given to the decay of chaos over time, so do human bodies after life has left them. This imagery is also notably similar to Faulkner’s description of the Compson home, which he portrays with phrases like “crumbling household,” and “falling ruins” (“An Introduction” 231). The decaying homes and decaying bodies present in both texts are symbols of chaos’s power in nature, and they particularly emphasize the authors’ observations of chaotic processes permeating their own worlds—for Woolf, the blasts, shrieks, and recovery of war, and for Faulkner the collapse and tumbling decline of the old southern worldview. Yet, while the authors portray grim observations of chaos within their texts, they ultimately work to reconcile any nihilistic implications of chaotic decay by inserting moments of ordered perspectives and hopeful insinuations, as seen in Dilsey’s final and external observations of the Compson family, and Lily’s final touches to her painting.
In the third section of Lighthouse, after ten years have passed in entropic decay, Lily reflects on Mrs. Ramsay’s ability to unify the fragmented pieces of life that surrounded her—her ability to make ordered masterpieces out of seemingly disjointed and fleeting moments in time:
Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)–this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability (Lighthouse 161).
Lily’s statement that Mrs. Ramsay’s attempts to make moments permanent is “the nature of a revelation” underscores the importance of this message throughout the book. The revelation that emerges from the dust and ashes of crumbling homes and broken bodies is that “[i]n the midst of chaos there [is] shape.” This is what both Woolf and Faulkner prove with the construction of their novels. Observing chaos, they portray chaos, and in doing so make it something concrete, whole, and approachable—Parrando’s paradox.8 They piece together fragments of disorderly life and create a holistic, beautiful image of humanity, capable of evoking powerful sentiments within the hearts of the readers, and drawing their audiences toward an all-encompassing vision of a hopeful existence. Dilsey and her family endure, standing intact above the smoking ruins of the old south all around them, pressing on with the insinuation that they among others will lead the south into its recovery. ‘In the midst of chaos there is shape.’ Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe capture moments, making them “stand still,” defying the power of chaos long enough to breathe in the calm air of the present and appreciate the ordered beauty therein. ‘In the midst of chaos there is shape.’
July 7, 2020
Notes:
- Henry Adams was a nineteenth-century, American historian and political voice during the American Civil War and its aftermath. He is a direct descendent of the familial American presidents, John and J. Quincy Adams, and served in a variety of occupations throughout his life, including secretary to his father as Lincoln’s UK ambassador, journalist for political papers, writer, editor, and professor of history at Harvard University. He is known for his theory of history in terms of the second law of thermodynamics and chaos—an idea that in history, as in physics, all things tend toward disorder. The Education was posthumously published in 1918, and was received immediately as a booming success, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1919 (See “The Education” under ‘References’).
- Newtonian Physics is also known as classical physics which interprets the systems of nature as pattered and calculable, leading to an idea that everything is deterministic, life and the events therein are all predetermined by natural, ordered laws. Chaos theory undermines this classical notion, and observes that there are certain systems in nature that are unpredictable, variable, and indeterminable (See Jo Alyson Parker’s book chapter “Chaos Theory” under ‘References’).
- The term, ‘lost generation,’ was coined by Gertrude Stein to define a group of artists, musicians, and authors in post-WWI era. It has been adopted as a generational term for all those emerging in the aftermath of WWI (see “Lost Generation” under ‘References’).
- Discovered in the study of Game Theory by Juan Parrondo in 1996, under the observance that ‘a losing strategy + a losing strategy = a winning strategy,’ the paradox was applied by Almeida et al. (see ‘References’) to “one-dimensional quadratic maps,” essentially mathematical models of physical reality, in which they discovered that the same principle is true in the realm of science and mathematics as “chaos + chaos = order.”
- A “cultural matrix,” according to N. Katherine Hayles, is the mutually shared time and space of contemporary individuals within a given era. It is how “connections between literature and science…are mediated;” how, for example the United States, although less impacted by WWI, could share in the modernist ideas that emerged from its aftermath (Hayles 4, see ‘References’).
- Another name for chaos theory is “nonlinear dynamics” or “dynamical systems theory,” which is a more accurate description according to Hayles. The study of chaotic systems is the study of dynamic, variable, and seemingly unpredictable systems (Hayles 8, see ‘References’).
- This phrase has been published in various forms by various people over the years, two of whom are authors Jane Teller and Amelia Mysko. Respectively, their renditions appear, “From the moment we are born, we begin to die,” and “The second we are born, we start dying” (See goodreads.com under ‘Jane Teller’ and ‘Amelia Mysko’). It is also a central theme in Walt Whitman’s famous poem, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
- “Chaos + chaos = order” (See footnote 4).
Works Cited:
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. 1907. Reprint. Project Gutenberg EBook, 2011.
Donne, John. “XVII Meditation.” The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne. Edited by Charles M. Coffin, The Modern Library, New York, 2001.
Farkas, Aliz. “Organized Chaos: Cohesive Devices in Benjy’s Sections of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.” Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica, Vol. 8, Iss. 2 (2016), pp. 167–176, De Gruyter Open.
Faulkner, William. “An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury.” The Sound and the Fury., pp. 228-232, (1933). W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2nd Ed., Edited by David Minter, New York, 1994.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. (1929). W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2nd Ed., Edited by David Minter, New York,1994.
Fulai, Wang. “Improvement and empirical research on chaos control by theory of ‘chaos + chaos = order.’” Chaos 22, 043145 (December 2012), American Institute of Physics.
Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Necessary Gap: Chaos as Self in The Education of Henry Adams.” Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science, Cornell University Press, ITHACA; LONDON, 1990, pp. 61–90.
Kern, Stephen. “Virginia Woolf: Creating Shape Out of Chaos.” Modernism After the Death of God Christianity, Fragmentation, and Unification, 1st Ed, pp. 149-171, Routledge, New York, 2017.
Lukács, Georg. “The Ideology of Modernism.” Modernism., pp. 102-113, Edited by Michael H. Whitworth, et al., Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., Oxford, 2007.
Matthews, John T. “Seeing Through the South: Faulkner and the Life of Writing.” William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South., pp. 1-18, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2009.
Parker, Jo Alyson. “Chapter 1: Chaos Theory and the Dynamics of Narrative.” Narrative Form and Chaos Theory in Sterne, Proust, Woolf, and Faulkner, pp. 1-29. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
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