Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 2, August 2004
Special Issue: Jacques Derrida’s Indian Philosophical Subtext
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Gillespie, Michael Patrick. The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. pp 140.
ISBN 0-8130-2641-5. £39.95 (HB).
Reviewed by
University of Durham
This is a strange book. By turn insightful, perplexing and infuriating, Gillespie’s thesis seeks to contend the narrowness of traditional linear explorations and formulations of literary criticism by elucidating a more nonlinear approach that takes its cue from scientific metaphors. He wants “an alternative to cause-and-effect thinking” as exemplified by Eliot’s “accretive approach to creativity.” This is an admirable and ostensibly original desire, but it is not until page 30 that we encounter exactly what Gillespie intends by ‘linear’ and nonlinear’ thinking:
In my sense of the phrase, linear thinking works according to
exclusionary, cause-and-effect logic: one for one. It sees the whole as
equal to the sum of its parts. It moves toward closure by seeking a single
resolution to a particular problem. Nonlinear thinking eschews this sort of
closure and seeks to sustain multiplicity: one for many. The whole exceeds
the sum of its parts. It maintains a range of perspectives, and endeavors to
promote multiple responses by refusing to privilege any one point of view
over the others.
Non-specialist readers of this book might (rightly, I think) complain that this definition should appear considerably earlier in the book than in its third chapter.
Gillespie claims to be “endeavoring to articulate a strategy that enables a genuine acceptance of pluralism, one that reflects the way reading encounters literature”: that is, he wants to privilege the subjectivity of interpretation over traditional objective approaches. It is a basic truism that general readers and professional critics read differently, and Gillespie regards the interpretive strategy of ordinary readers as more fruitful since they experience texts in greater depth and with greater capacity for multiple readings. While initially seeming somewhat controversial, it is understandable why he should argue this case. Generally speaking, the ordinary reader tends not to impose vested interests, interpretive agendas, or predetermined theoretical co-ordinates onto their readings. Professional criticism is often guilty of searching for reductive or closed meanings, but the ordinary reader has at their disposal a multitude of possibilities. Gillespie therefore endorses a system of criticism based on a pluralistic approach which permits many interpretations “without giving primacy to any.” He claims that multiplicity is a reversion of past methods that has more in common with quantum physics and chaos theory, systems which have reasserted interest in extracting plural readings from any given text. Nonlinearity, with its refusal of strict deductive reasoning and cause-and-effect associations, can open up literature in new ways, much as it made way for the New Physics. The literary work, asserts Gillespie, is fundamentally a chaotic system and its interpretation requires the application of scientific methods that includes all possible variables. Aesthetic richness is derived not from conclusiveness but from “the spectrum of alternatives through which [the reader’s] judgement passes.”
Having explained his basic premises through an examination of the inadequacies inherent in the essential linearity of reader-response, post-structualist, and deconstructive theories, Gillespie goes on to apply them to five very different texts: Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (the American title), Beowulf, the Book of Job, and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. An eclectic selection, certainly, but one which adequately illustrates both the strengths and weaknesses of Gillespie’s methodology. In the case of Finnegans Wake, the statement that linear cause-and-effect thinking cannot produce a wholly satisfactory reading would probably be met with assent from many critics. The ambiguous, inconclusive nature of that novel’s opaque language requires any reader to make imaginative associations which invariably result in interpretive multiplicity and misprision. However, while the notion of applying chaos theory to such a chaotic text initially sounds fertile, Gillespie does not apply his theory sufficiently, and this brief chapter (it is only fifteen pages long) fails to do justice to the initial premise. Ideas are often left hanging unresolved (an ironic consequence of the theory itself, perhaps?). Indeed, the chapter reads as though it might be intended more as an introductory study that could be expanded on or taken up by another critic at a later date. Moreover, familiarity with the text is presumed (despite the acknowledgement that few have actually read it), and some remarks are infuriatingly vague. For example, “The word lipoleum...suggests by its commonness the sort of multiplicity that allows the narrative of Finnegans Wake to function so effectively.” Does ‘lipoleum’ really suggest commonality or even an obvious pun?
Gillespie goes into greater detail over the Harry Potter book – perhaps too much detail. He spends several pages providing an exposition of the plot before describing how it fits in with traditional fairy tale narratives. Invoking both the open-endedness of Lévi-Strauss and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, he then outlines some intriguing possibilities open to the reader. He writes that goodness is the over-riding factor which unites fairy tale narratives, and if other aspects were privileged (e.g. intelligence, single-mindedness, magical abilities, heroism) then different characters in Rowling’s novel would become more prominent than its titular hero. The danger with this idea is that any factor can become a governing principle, and things like tallness, wearing spectacles, or having a beard can realign conceptions of character-privileging, depending on the reader’s own value system. Another problem emerging from the theory arises when Gillespie writes, “If I attempt...to define the nature of goodness in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, I encounter the same difficulty that crops up in many other fairy tales...The specific qualities that distinguish good from evil become difficult to discern.” But surely this is the point of fairy tales. Because they are fables of human behaviour, in all its chaotic manifestations, they are intrinsically rife with moral ambiguities and already contain multiple readings of the kind described by Gillespie. He even states that Harry’s rebelliousness allies him more closely with Voldemort than with Dumbledore. But this is actually written into the text: the only reason the sorting hat puts Harry into Gryffindor rather than into Slytherin is because Harry wills it. All too often this chapter stakes claims for interpretations based on complexity and chaos theory when in fact those interpretations are already present and can be discerned without recourse to such notions.
In the Beowulf chapter, more interesting questions are raised regarding whether we should see the hero “as a unique individual or as the normal representation of the male figure of that society.” But, again, Gillespie plays safe by appealing to the blindingly obvious. He writes, “In a traditional epic reading, the central character is an ideal hero. In more sophisticated [i.e. nonlinear] readings, critics would qualify or find exceptions to that ideal.” But is this not true of most contemporary readings of The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and Paradise Lost? We no longer think of Aeneas or Odysseus as paragons of virtue, just as Milton’s Satan is not generally considered wholly evil. Again, it seems to me that in cases such as these, complexity theories have been applied to literary texts for some considerable time now, only without being named as such.
I realise that many of these remarks sound negative or even condemnatory, but Gillespie’s book is not without its merits. The chapter on Beowulf, for instance, renders some intriguing conclusions, while the chapter on Wilde expresses a significant problem; namely, how do we define the characteristics of national identity? Gillespie has written widely on Joyce and Wilde (which makes the misspelling of Anna Livia Plurabelle as Anna Livid Plurabelle all the more galling), and his reading of The Importance of Being Earnest is genuinely impressive. However, while he makes an admirable attempt to retrieve subjective interpretive strategies from the cold clutches of objectivity, I still fail to understand why this could not have simply been called a study of plural readings as this is where Gillespie’s strengths lie. The scientific metaphors and appeals to Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrődinger’s cat, and chaos theory actually add very little to the theoretical notions proposed here, since they are explored in insufficient depth to be either effective or convincing.