Picking up where I left off (literature-as-fractal), more on my survey of literature after the Enlightenment, the Fractal Rainbow:

What is a rainbow? To paraphrase Wikipedia:

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth’s atmosphere. They take the form of a multicolored arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch.

A rainbow spans a continuous spectrum of colours; the discrete bands are an artifact of human colour vision. The most commonly cited and remembered sequence, in English, is Newton’s sevenfold: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, popularly memorized the mnemonic ROY G BIV.

Rainbows inspire metaphor. Wordsworth’s 1802 poem “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold” begins:

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!

The Newtonian deconstruction of the rainbow is said to have provoked John Keats to lament in his 1820 poem “Lamia:”

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine—
Unweave a rainbow

In contrast to this, here’s Richard Dawkins talking about his book Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder:

My title is from Keats, who believed that Newton had destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours. Keats could hardly have been more wrong, and my aim is to guide all who are tempted by a similar view, towards the opposite conclusion. Science is, or ought to be, the inspiration for great poetry.

For my part, literature is a rainbow in composition, in content. Literature is a continuous spectrum of texts (non-arbitrary groups of signs). The discrete genres and movements within the spectrum are artifacts of human vision. Genre distinctions exist for us when we look for them. They are information we put into texts. Without us, the texts are simply texts.

The point here is: We read the texts. Reading is a verb. We compose texts by reading. Reading is not about taking information out. The information never leaves the text. You put your reading into the text, classifying it, applauding or despising it. You are in control.

But regardless of how you or I read at this moment, literature is out there, a continuous, ongoing emergence of complexity from the arbitrary world of signs—things we say, things we mean, pictures we draw, ideas we have, sounds, feelings.

These signs emerge, writer by writer, into texts that emerge, year by year and day by day, into broader bands whose total complexity is history, literature, science, language, our ability to think these thoughts, in English.

The point is: Literature is something big that we make, all the time, by reading and by writing.

Lamia, by Draper.