Chaos Imagined

Literature, Art, Science

Martin Meisel

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231540469
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world—our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art—are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the act provokes.

Meisel builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos. He uses examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic art, science, linguistics, music, and film, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential. Discussions of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderon, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett, among others, are matched with incisive readings of art by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada, and the futurists. Meisel addresses the revolution in mapping energy and entropy and the manifold effect of thermodynamics. He then uses this chaotic frame to elaborate on purpose, mortality, meaning, and mind.

1

SHAPING CHAOS

Where thought is, there is indirection.

—Geoffrey Hartman

What chaos really is, in and of itself, and what sort of figure it truly cuts in the universe at large—an open question—is not something I know how to address. The notion of chaos is a different matter. The notion of chaos in its most general and traditional framing is a limiting case: the extreme of disorder, where all attributes assignable to order vanish. It is disorder made absolute. It follows from a desire to give shape or a name to our perceptions of discontinuity and dissonance, of confusion and incoherence, perhaps to quarantine them from what belongs to symmetry, shapeliness, and consequence. To attempt to represent chaos at the full, as surprisingly many have done, is a desperate business requiring a good deal of poetic imagination. To attempt to set out the shape of that lawless condition is on the face of it a paradoxical undertaking, like that of Descartes rationalizing the passions or Freud making us conscious of the unconscious, since it seems to entail the undoing of the essential character of the given.

Not what chaos really is, but the imagination of chaos, and some of the stratagems for its representation in the mindscape of our history, are what I have in mind to explore. Art and literature in this respect offer as rich a field of inquiry as philosophy and science. Indeed, the formal separation of these categories at some point in the Western tradition (the tradition to which I chiefly but not entirely confine myself) clearly will not work for such as Hesiod, Plato, Ovid, Lucretius. Moreover, even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it scarcely makes sense to consider the representations of chaos in the work of Goethe, Turner, Carlyle, Zola, Henry Adams, Beckett, Pynchon, and Cage, and in the work of Kelvin, Clausius, Gibbs, Boltzmann, Heisenberg, Gödel, and Feigenbaum, as if they could only be understood as science or imagination but not both. Indeed, if poetry and cosmogony were once happily married in ancient thought, they are at the very least freely cohabiting in modern physics and cosmology.

My special but far from exclusive interest is the representation of chaos in literature and art, with the thought that in the enterprise of imagining chaos it is the artist who has had to take most seriously the obligation of making chaos concrete. The mind moves readily to the abstract notion of absolute disorder, but it meets a stiff resistance, probably in its own constitution, when it comes to the concrete imagining of such a condition. I doubt that anyone could better convey the difficulty of really imagining chaos than St. Augustine in his Confessions:

I conceived of it as having innumerable forms and diverse, and therefore indeed did I not at all conceive of it in my mind…my mind tossed up and down certain ugly and hideous forms, all out of order, but yet forms they were notwithstanding; and this I called without form…true reason did persuade me, that I must utterly uncase it of all remnants of forms whatsoever, if so be I meant to conceive a matter absolute without form: and I could not. For sooner could I imagine that not to be at all, which should be deprived of all form, than once conceive there was likely to be anything betwixt form and nothing; a matter neither formed nor nothing; formless, almost nothing.¹

Augustine, as serious about eliminating form in his pursuit of chaos as any Dadaist looking to extirpate meaning, here names some of the common strategies, or to him evasions, for its representation: endless multiplication and diversification, creating a jumble of forms, creating monsters, and pursuing the via negativa until it runs aground in a shadowy approximation of nothing.

Conceiving chaos—Augustine’s concern—has a no less troublesome partner in the perceiving of it. For most of us the perception of chaos, of unmitigated disorder, appears to go much against the grain. Though in politics and morals and in aesthetics we are quick to cry chaos, it is only the word that comes easily. It is hard not to find some semblance of rhythm, some vestige of form and purpose, some seemingly selective regularity, in what experience offers. We are pattern-seeking, pattern-making animals who live and adapt by making sense of things and who break old patterns only to make new ones. We hear relations in aleatory music, we see rhythms in the action of paint, we feel conspiracy in the workings of chance.

In Moby-Dick, Melville’s grand epic of the consuming need to find a meaning—however terrible—in the universe of experience, the author posts an exemplum of that human imperative near the head of the text. In chapter 2, Ishmael describes entering the Spouter Inn, where he encounters “a very large oil-painting, so thoroughly be-smoked, and every way defaced, that in the unequal cross-lights by which you viewed it, it was only by diligent study and a series of systematic visits to it, and careful inquiry of the neighbors, that you could any way arrive at an understanding of its purpose.” A first near-thought in the presence of “such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows” is that “some ambitious young artist, in the time of the New England hags, had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched. But by dint of much and earnest contemplation, and oft repeated ponderings, and especially by throwing open the little window towards the back of the entry, you at last came to the conclusion that such an idea, however wild, might not be altogether unwarranted.” Ishmael’s last sentence does not culminate in the expected conclusion, though surely a deep reluctance to see unmeaning chaos lies in its hedged and qualified final clause, after the valiant many-sided effort inscribed in its opening.

Even with chaos so begrudgingly allowed as the possible subject of the image, the viewer cannot permit himself to rest. Puzzled and confounded, Ishmael continues:

A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet there was a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.—It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale.—It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.—It’s a blasted heath.—It’s a Hyperborean winter scene.—It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time. But at last all these fancies yielded to that one portentous something in the picture’s midst. That once found out, and all the rest were plain. But stop; does it not bear a faint resemblance to a gigantic fish? even the great Leviathan himself?²

The catalogue is exhausting if not exhaustive, and it represents, albeit as comedy, the mind’s restless inventiveness in the face of the persistently, suggestively, inchoate. From black on black to white on white, it reels from one imagined chaos—as found in Ovid, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Genesis, Revelation—to another. And eventually, something emerges, as it does from Turner’s whaling paintings, whose reception Ishmael unwittingly suggests. Ishmael’s final theory is that the picture represents a ship in a great hurricane, half foundered and weltering so that only the remains of its three masts are visible, “and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling itself upon the three mastheads.” Under extreme provocation, the baffled mind resorts to violence: an apocalyptic religious vision of universal crucifixion, but the excruciation has been in fact that of the would-be interpreter, seeking to stabilize a pattern, a meaning, in the infinitely suggestive meaninglessness.

If perfect, unmitigated disorder absent all meaning is intolerable and perhaps inconceivable, as Ishmael’s struggle suggests, what about perfect order? Does one require a devious strategy to give it concrete representation as well? Does it bear contemplation, and for how long? Is there a comparable resistance in perception or conception? At first blush it would seem not—given the apparently universal appetite for symmetries and regularities, the invention of equations and utopias, of the Golden Age and the diapason. But then one has to think of the difficulty in sustaining the perception of a perfect order, of sustaining attention once the principle has been grasped and the problematic intricacies, the epicycles, have all been exhausted. In those Last Judgment scenes where the saved souls in their ordered rows all look alike, having attained the perfection of human form, one turns quickly to the devils and the damned. Utopias, fancied or decreed, reliably generate dystopia and dissidence. In classic experiments in sensory deprivation, where silence, darkness, and climate control come as close to providing perfect peace as organic life allows, the mind invents its own interruptions in the form of hallucinations.³ And as for the need for indirection in giving dazzling perfection concrete and apprehensible representation, God, in consideration of man’s limited capacity, reveals himself to Moses, in passing, by showing his back parts. There is surely a message in that.

Thus, with perfect order as with unrelieved chaos, there is a resistance that makes itself felt not only in the realm of experience but in the workshop of the imagination. Part of the sport in looking closely at some of the most effective representations of unlimited chaos in what follows is in unearthing the elements of order that, like it or not, insinuate themselves within the strategic indirections. Often these inhere in the medium itself, the language of representation, but often they seem gratuitous, indicative of an impulse to resist disorder or even to encode a secret order. An example of the first is Haydn’s marvelous “Representation of Chaos,” the movement that opens his Creation, speaking in the musical language of the late eighteenth century (discussed in chapter 6, “Energy: Matter in Motion (Inertia, Friction, Noise)”). A vivid example of the second is an illustration offered as an image of the primal chaos by the Flemish artist Abraham Diepenbeek, designed originally in about 1655, for an elaborate book of engravings inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses (fig. 1.1). In his poem, Ovid describes the primal chaos as a formless, unstable mass, the inchoate elements heaped together and at war with each other, cold with hot, moist with dry, a confusion of land, sea, and air. In his visual representation, Diepenbeek adds to the traditional four elements—Earth, Air, Water, and Fire—the signs of the zodiac; some other animal figures, alchemical or astronomical or both; sun, moon, stars, rock shapes and cloud shapes scarcely distinguishable; and beyond all (in the words of the accompanying text) “an immense Abyss of Darkness.” Not only the elements but the constellations of the zodiac are at war with each other, while additionally Canis challenges Serpens and Ursa the sun. Water and fire stream in all possible directions, rocks pile up with no heed to gravity, “the Stars are scattered up and down, some fixt to Rocks, others wrapt in Fire, and others plunged in Water; and to complete that artful Confusion which runs thro the whole Piece, the very Name of the Painter is jumbled into the Mass, and writ in the Heavens.”⁴ Yet the image (originally without borders) takes the form of a wide-bottomed ellipsoid, appropriately egg shaped, though essentially two-dimensional, within the conventional rectangular plate. It has a rough bilateral symmetry. One of the four elements, Air, is represented by the winds, which are also four. These are distributed in an inverted Y, mirroring and embracing the thrusting Y of rock and cloud slanting toward the viewer in the lower left foreground. And most insidiously, the zodiac, though all out of normal order, is at war not randomly but logically, each sign with its calendar opposite, six months apart: Aquarius with Leo, Sagittarius with Gemini, Capricorn with Cancer, etc. The fighting zodiac pairs fall into two arcs on either side of the diagonal marked by the sun and moon, one arc of the odd months and one of the evens, in the order (starting with January) 1/7, 3/9, 5/11 and 2/8, 4/10, 6/12. It would appear by this “artful Confusion” that if primal chaos was for the universe primal innocence, number is the true serpent in the garden and symmetry and pattern the tempting fruit, the insidious agents of the fall.

The trouble with “absolute” chaos and “perfect” order may lie not in the nouns but in their uncompromising modifiers. In any event, neither extreme seems to suit our “genius,” the native bent of our minds and feelings. It is nevertheless undeniable that perfect order has had a better press. It may be that our situation as a species has made the obligation of finding and making regularities more pressing, disruptions of the safely familiar more alarming. Accordingly, the foreground concerns of most history of ideas, as of much cultural anthropology, have been ideas of order, with chaos admitted and represented chiefly as the radical threat in the background to be contained, or as the defect of order. Similarly, the traditional account of art has identified it with a schematics of order and has seen art as eliciting order from the chaos, real or apparent, to achieve a claritas that for the scholastically inclined is the ultimate ground of beauty. It is true that serious attention to the role of disorder or irregularity in art has not been lacking, at least since Longinus. It is true that the nineteenth-century artist might be disposed to insist, with Novalis, that “in every work of art, Chaos has to shine through the veil of order” and that the twentieth-century artist has often done his brazen best to strip the bride bare.⁵ But traditionally and conventionally, disorder in art belongs to the recalcitrance of the materials, language included, or to the ineptitude or ambivalence of the maker, so that a book like Morse Peckham’s Man’s Rage for Chaos, reversing the classical perspective and arguing that the disruption of forms, conventions, and regularities is the biological function of art, its very reason for being, remains a challenge to an ingrained orthodoxy.

FIGURE 1.1. Abraham van Diepenbeek, The Chaos, after Ovid (1655), engraved by Bernard Picart, illustrating The Temple of the Muses (Amsterdam, 1733).

Source: Collection, Library of Congress.

In investigating the representation of chaos in and out of art, I do not intend to pursue Peckham’s argument, though I do intend to reverse the usual perspective and treat order as background, the latent presence whose regular outbreak in those same representations can be too insistent to ignore. I hasten to add that there is nothing in the subject of the imagination of chaos that requires chaotic expression. But the subject is surely complex, and it dictates no inevitable shape. Consequently, I find myself divided between the appeal of a conceptual approach and one more strictly historical and chronological. What emerges—in the interests of giving prominence to what is most pertinent—is a compromise that leans to the conceptual or thematic but attempts to have it both ways, a compromise facilitated by the fact that to some extent the conceptual and the chronological coincide. That is, there were eras when certain biases in the conception of chaos were especially prevalent or especially revealing, so that one may order the succession of categories to take account of a broadly historical succession as well. Because there is a historical side to the imagination of chaos, it is even possible to claim that its shifts and changes can serve as an index to some historically significant turns in the course of Western civilization, from Hesiod and Genesis to Blake and Heisenberg. Nevertheless, chronological focus on a given era will sometimes appear to be distinctly overwhelmed in the course of exploring further developments. That will be evident in the first section to follow, “Nothing and Something,” where the exemplary texts and images range from about 1400 B.C. to the mid-twentieth century.

Additionally, there are four broad avenues that run through the long encounter of the world of thought and that of experience here making their appearance: cosmogony, psychology, aesthetics, politics. Cosmogony provides the earliest instances of the representation of chaos, chaos with reference to the physical world, and its succession includes the assertions and extrapolations of nineteenth-century thermodynamics and twentieth-century quantum mechanics. Psychology embraces not only projections of the aberrant mind’s disorder but epistemological and moral concerns, issues of the relation between internal and external realities. Politics projects apocalyptic dissolutions and disabling incoherencies within states and societies and between them. Aesthetics incorporates preoccupations with dissonance, kinesis, and accident. The aesthetics of chaos is an oxymoron that nevertheless has found expressive elaboration in the theory and practice of generations of working artists.

Cosmogony, psychology, politics (and society), aesthetics—these are also the contexts within which the wholly abstract idea of disorder made absolute can seek concrete expression. You cannot imagine disorder in a vacuum, as Augustine shows, though disorder as vacuum, as absence, material and otherwise, may be one paradoxical form of the attempt to give it substance. In general, the strategies for representing chaos begin with its contextualization, so that the endeavor to imagine and represent chaos as such is only half the story. The other half originates in and with the context and reflects the human disposition to characterize as “chaos” disordered or unfamiliar states in every corner of experience. The term is as easily attached, and as easily abused, as “tragedy,” but beyond its convenience as shorthand hyperbole, there is a serious cognitive and a serious conceptual side to its invocation. The cognitive side enters where the complexity of a set of phenomena passes beyond the mind’s ability to contain and control the experience (I discuss this later, in chapter 3). The conceptual side enters where an artist or thinker wishes to release experience from the mundane or, more radically, to transform how it is perceived and understood. In such a case he or she can draw on the power of an evoked chaos to disconcert and revolutionize how we see and feel about reality.

Formal strategies in the representation of chaos are constrained first of all by the nature of representation itself. This has to be finite and contained, whereas chaos typically carries with it the sense (or the threat) of something unbounded and uncontained. Contextualization is also limitation, and that requirement makes incumbent further indirections in the strategies of representation. When chaos appears as the background to cosmos, as in many creation myths, much can be forgiven—left in the dar...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Frontispiece
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Ω. Uncertainty and Complexity: An Untethered Epilogue
• 1. Shaping Chaos
• 2. Nothing and Something
• 3. Number: The One and the Many
• 4. Carnival
• 5. War
• 6. Energy
• 7. Entropy
• 8. Coda, or da Capo al Fine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index