NOTES
- This article originally appeared, in a slightly
different version, in the James Joyce Quarterly (31.2
[Winter 1994]: 41-54. I would like to thank the James
Joyce Quarterly for permission to republish the essay here.
- Scientists, I should note, generally avoid the
popularized term "Chaos Theory," preferring to call their
emergent discipline "dynamical systems theory," "nonlinear
systems theory," or the like. This question of terminology
may become moot if the sciences of complexity eventually
subsume chaos science, as I suggest in this paper. For the
best general introductions to chaos theory see Gleick's
Chaos and Stewart's Does God Play Dice? Nina Hall's
essay collection, Exploring Chaos, provides a recent
overview of the applications of chaos theory among the
natural and social sciences. Two recent works of literary
criticism, Hayles's Chaos Bound, and her essay collection,
Chaos and Order, both pursue a quite different direction
than mine for reading chaos in fiction.
- For the concept of the "paradigm shift," see Kuhn's
Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
- For this concept of "simplicity" in the sciences,
see Barrow 259-60, and Morris 3-5, 210-11.
- See Kern's The Culture of Time and Space for an
extended study of the transformations in the arts at the
turn of the century, parallel to "developments inspired by
technology," suggesting "that a cultural revolution of the
broadest scope was taking place, one that involved essential
structures of human experience and basic forms of human
expression" (6).
- Lorenz presented his paper at the annual meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science (29
December 1979) (Gleick 322). Although his butterfly
metaphor is a relatively recent creation, Lorenz first
presented his basic model of unpredictability in the
weather, his strange attractor, in 1963, in his paper on
"Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" (Gleick 321). Gleick
provides an excellent overview of Lorenz's career (11-41 and
passim).
- For Poincar's influence on the mathematical
foundations of chaos theory, see Stewart, God 57-72.
- John Holland, responding to the central questions
facing the scientists of complexity, "How [can] you predict
anything? How [can] you have a science?" argues, using the
example of meteorology, "We can understand how [weather
features] interact to produce weather on a local and
regional scale. In short, we have a real science of
weather--without full prediction. And we can do it because
prediction isn't the essence of science. The essence is
comprehension and explanation. And that's precisely what
[the Santa Fe Institute for the Study of Complexity] could
hope to do with economics and other social sciences"
(Waldrop 255).
- Kauffman, a central figure in two recent accounts
of the developing sciences of complexity by Lewin and
Waldrop, develops the concept of the edge of chaos into a
new interpretation of evolution (see The Origins of
Order).
- Such is the "standard" explanation for the origin
of the term "quark" (e.g., see Morris 13); Gell-Mann,
however, recalls the story differently: "I liked the sound.
. . . Later I read Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, and
came upon the line, `Three quarks for Muster Mark!' There
were three of them, and there were three particles in the
proton. I knew the name was right" (qtd. Boslough 655).
Also see Gell-Mann 180-81.
- "Chaos is exciting," Ian Stewart writes, "because
it opens up the possibility of simplifying complicated
phenomena." "The great discovery of chaotic dynamics is
that apparently patternless behaviour may become simple and
comprehensible if you look at the right picture"
("Portraits" 44, 58). For a recent example of this new
model of scientific simplification, this search for what
could be called the algorithm of a particularly complex
phenomenon, see Henig's report on the "bizarre, totally
unpredictable changes" in the "genetic arrangement" of the
influenza virus that lead to flu pandemics (31).
Virologists have discovered that such mutations are neither
purely arbitrary, nor the predictable results of annual RNA
gene replication (which ordinarily makes immunization
effective), but the consequence of the genetic
"reassortment" that takes place in the intestines of birds--
especially ducks--and swine that live together and in close
proximity to, or cohabit with, humans (55). One region
where "integrated pig-duck farming" is indigenous and where
pandemic influenza "has historically originated," is the
Orient, particularly China (64).
- David A. White makes a similar point when he
distinguishes Ulysses, a novel "based on principles of
stability," from Finnegans Wake, a work "based on
principles of continual flux" (127). Joyce's determinism
appears in his use of a third-person narration that
"introduces an apparently irreducible stability into the
metaphysics of consciousness, implicitly but also
undeniably" (126).
- This impression that Ulysses in some sense takes
on a "life of its own"--Joyce has, after all, given the
novel an anatomy in his schemas--especially characterizes
the studies of the emergent, evolving styles of the book,
those features which Karen Lawrence, for example, describes
as "narrative behavior" (55; my emphasis); Michael Groden,
similarly, suggests that "Ulysses itself becomes one great
`character'" (55); also see French passim, Goldman 74-117,
and Riquelme 131-229.
- See Searle's Rediscovery of the Mind and
Pagels's discussion of cognition and consciousness (180-
240).
- Waldrop's study of complexity science centers on
the economist Brian Arthur's evolution of his heterodox
theory of "increasing returns"; one of Arthur's most
intriguing examples of this phenomenon is the emergence of
the QWERTY keyboard, a deliberately awkward alignment of
typewriter keys (meant to slow the typist and prevent
jamming in early machines), which nevertheless came to
dominate the industry, eliminating other and better formats,
and remaining the standard keyboard today (Waldrop 35).
Arthur also uses the VHS vs. Beta competition to illustrate
"increasing returns" (35-36).
- Both Heinz Pagels and Iris Murdoch argue that
Wittgenstein does not, in fact, rule out metaphysics and
theology in his Tractatus; he simply exposes the limits of
logic. Proposition 6.41 actually implies that a higher
design may exist (Pagels 23 and passim, Murdoch 29-31 and
passim).
- French, too, argues that "Joyce insists that man's
essence consists in his being a conscious reactor against
his uncertainty about having any significance" (239). For
the most extended reading of Ulysses in light of quantum
theory, see Booker 577-86; and for a convincing argument for
an aboriginal reality in the novel, beyond the influence or
control of the observer, see Perlis 191-97. Most of the
critics who have seen Ulysses reflecting the new physics
of the first quarter of this century, have suggested rather
loose correlations to an often misrepresented version of
Einstein's theories of relativity, following the early lead
of Wyndham Lewis (91-130 passim), and Edmund Wilson (191-
236); for example, see Eco 55-56 and passim, Fleishman 136-
48 and French 5, 12, and passim. French makes a confusing
move from casual references to Einsteinian relativity, to a
primary concentration on Heisenbergian "incertitude" in her
reading of Ulysses (17), illustrating what Perlis
describes as the chief danger in the overly facile
application of scientific terminology to Ulysses. For the
best recent discussions of Joyce's general relations to
modern science, see Perlis 191-97 and Friedman 198-206.
There are, moreover, several able studies of Joyce's use of
the theories of relativity and quantum physics in Finnegans
Wake; see, for example, Andrzej's Joyce of Science, Hart
65-66 and passim, Langdon 359-77, Mink 1-16, and Purdy 207-
18. Of course, a recent general study of the fiction,
Herring's Joyce's Uncertainty Principle, loosely
appropriates one of the central precepts of quantum theory,
Heisenberg's "uncertainty principle," to describe Joyce's
working methods.
- Purdy, while seeing Finnegans Wake as "our
century's greatest artistic expression of a changed world
science has given us," nonetheless dismisses "Einsteinian"
and "Heisenbergian" readings of the novel: "No twentieth-
century science provides more than a superficial source for
the book" (216).
Works Cited.