무질서 속의 질서 -존 혹스의 『희화화』와 리처드 파워즈의 『황금 벌레 변주곡』 = Disorderly Order: John Hawkes`s Travesty and Richard Powers`s The Gold Bug Variations

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Various literary criticisms, theories and cultural theories emerge in the second half of the 20th century. These become (new) paradigms and critical tools of, or approaches to the interpretations of literature, arts, and even to the aspects or phenomena of culture. One of them is Chaos Theory, and it is one of the ways to interpret literary texts as a feedback cycle. This theory together with Poststructuralism, Russian Formalism, and theories of Hermeneutics see literary texts not as a well wrought urn, but as a reservoir of chaos. Based on this view, Chaos Theory shows that chaos is inherent at the bottom of a system or an organ, indicating that simple systems move to the complexity and vice versa. Followers and critics of Chaos Theory say that chaos has such basic constructs as strange attractors, fractals, self-similarity, bifurcation, and unpredictability. Strange attractors do not explicate or emphasize the organized structures out of chaos but ordered descent into chaos. Also it reveals or captures the actuality-consistencies and vagaries-of human behavior patterns better than do homeostatic points. Fractal boundaries or dimensions convey two important concepts. First, seeing depends largely on observer`s perspective. Second, accuracy of measurement relies on the definition of the process. Thus, it embraces fuzzy boundaries or dimensions, that is, the gray (ambiguous) area of behavior patterns. From this perspective, the more different the boundaries seem, the more they resemble each other when viewed from the appropriate levels. This points out that in situations, points of nonsimilarity can be found as those of similarity. Bifurcation means splitting into two, adding complexity to a system or an organ. To closely look into this phenomenon, after a period of time, natural processes tend to bifurcate, and then, after another period of stability, another bifurcation takes place. In such processes, the system or the organ goes out of control, that is, it becomes chaotic. These confused states can serve as opportunities for creative change. Unpredictability has two definitions. One is the relation to the function of strange attractors, and the other is the operation of the butterfly effect. The above-mentioned basic constructs are core characteristics of Chaos Theory. Just as such basic constructs occurred together or sequentially in natural phenomena, so in literature such constructs are alluded or metaphorized. In Travesty, Hawkes witnesses the opposite phenomena-disorderly order-occurred from the collision of cars in France and then he creates Travesty through his imagination, so Powers considerably takes emergent phenomena like as unpredictability as a basic construct of Chaos Theory in The Gold Bug Variations. For them, imagination and emergent phenomena are key factors for the creation of their novels. The two factors here are like as the fact that abundant order comes from or exists at the edge of chaos. In Travesty Hawkes believes that nothing disturbs the essential integrity of the tableau of chaos. That is, he certainly shows that if design inevitably surrenders to debris, debris inevitably reveals its innate design(58-9). The ontological scheme of debris/design that Hawkes proposes is like the concept of strange attractor in Chaos Theory-like the mediated point between the right movement of pendulum and the left one of it, and like the in-between dimension(level) between water and ice. Such a phenomenon can be called a paradox. So, like the driver in the novel, Hawkes prefers the flickering shadow of imagination to the explosive and flaming manifestations of nature, that is, the order of imagination in progress in his head(57). In The Gold Bug Variations, Powers indicates that the complex social phenomena are the sources of the emergent phenomena. So the novel posits the special age of history together with the emergent phenomena. In such a relation, the narrative structure of The Gold Bug Variations