This spring, I was asked to teach a survey of literature from 1800 to today at Brooklyn College, but I didn’t want to teach a survey class with a boring title (nothing with the words “vista,” “perspective,” “lens,” “examining,” “investigating,” “tradition,” &c.). I also wanted an arbitrary organizing mechanism, something simple and flexible.

So I settled on a title, the Fractal Rainbow—literature as fractal, recursive; literature as a continuous spectrum of voices, blending into new voices, organized by period and style but each individual, a thousand strokes of light on the back of an eyeball—and on color-in-the-text’s-title as guiding sine qua non.

I would teach, I thought, “The Black Cat” and White Jacket and Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West and The Bluest Eye and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Maybe The Green Child (but it proved too dang difficult to procure copies of this under-loved Surreal novel).

All this grand literary painting left me with a problem, however. At some point I would have to define in more detail what I meant by “the fractal rainbow.” Sure, it sounds like a Dream Theater concert DVD, or an anime I wouldn’t want to watch. But I like it, in part for its flatly fantastic(al) sonic quality (”frac” and the long vowels of rain, dream vowels), in part because it presents a puzzle.

Each person encountering the phrase has to test it against what they think it may mean, arriving somewhere unexpected. The phrase itself has a fractal quality of depth-plumbing leading not to an answer, but to more depths to be plumbed.

In a few posts, I’ll outline some of my ideas about the intersections of fractals, rainbows, and fiction.

To start off, what is a fractal?

These videos tell the story sans words.

For words, I paraphrase Wikipedia:

A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity. Roots of mathematical interest in fractals can be traced back to the late 19th Century; however, the term “fractal” was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured.” A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.

A fractal often has the following features:

• It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales: It can be analyzed at the macro, meso, and micro levels.
• It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
• It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
• It has a simple and recursive definition.

>> More fractal video, the “Classic Newton.”

>> Fractal math.

Deleuze-heads out there can already guess at what I mean when I say that literature is fractal. Elements at the lowest levels reverberate or straightforwardly recur at the levels of consciousness and even at whole-text levels—via paratext, the marketing of the fiction, the criticism and controversies and biographies and hagiographies surrounding it.

Look at the whiteness of the whale: It’s discussed openly, consciously; it recurs in imagery again and again; it pallors everything over, at the word-level, with the paleness of death, so all blanks and snowblind positivisms in Moby-Dick and even retroactively in White Jacket become the wall, the wall Ahab or any gnostic must somehow strike through… the whoosh of waves, white birds’ wails, winging harpoons whanging into whaleflesh, song of wind, wide openness, the hypnotizing whiteness of the sun, which is blindness. The term and chromatic qualia and death-signifier recur differently at each level, as whole chapters, as running motifs, and then as sentences, thoughts, and then as unconscious bits.

It’s not enough to teach the meso-level story; the text should be shown to be truly fractal.