Literary Formulae

Last night I was discussing literature and thermodynamics with the Palindrome. She'd asserted that juxtaposition of time (as in the flashback/flashforward with simultaneous foreshadowing bit) was the literary technique driving a particular play. Her argument contained bits of the infamous Second Law of Thermodynamics and a mention of the heat death of the universe.

It strikes me that post-Newtonian literature has that painful hard margin to walk next to. After Newton, there was a conscious sense that the universe was subject to description, if not outright circumscription. As the implications of Newton's Law's of Thermodynamics were worked out, a sense of what I can only call 'enlightened defeatism' seemed to set in: after all, if everything runs down (and downhill) to an inevitable end, there is never going to be a 'happily ever after'.

I don't think that literature was ever uniformly seen that way, although some commentators have attributed this zeitgeist to 'postmodern literature'. What I think is that there are literary formulae which turn on two things: 1) the fact that humans in general have a commonality of behaviours (or if you like, a commonwealth of stereotypes), and 2) the laws that frame the universe are deliberately to be balked.

For example, if time is a one-way arrow, then literary media (in any form — graphic novels, radio shows, poems) gain power by showing the author's power to bend time in the narrative; he can have all things at once, or out of sequence, or in multiple possible branches. Similarly, the author can play God, can play a fly on the wall, can read minds. Literature is the triumph of creativity over the constraints of the science we have made.

When we start with, "Once upon a time," and end with "... happily ever after," we are likewise asserting that time has no value to us; it does not really matter, and shouldn't. We overcome the heat death of the universe by preserving the information of the story without corruptibility and loss, or by laughing at it when it happens. The entropy becomes controllable, the fall is no longer inevitable.

The art of the author overcomes all, and because his counter-formula is uniquely tinted by his personal lens and artistic temperament, it is not perfectly reproducible. Even his formula is not subject to science; we will never know if he really intended to do what he did to us by his act of creation, even if he says that is how it was. Attempts to analyse by the standards of the scientific method are doomed to fail. Literature has its own vocabulary, and it is sacred in its catholicism.

I've mentioned what my grandfather said about the stages of life before: innocent idealism, innocent cynicism, informed cynicism and informed idealism. Literature is not like life; it is always artifice and never innocence. It is designed to disturb the comfortable, and seldom to comfort the disturbed. At the very core, literature is rebellion against the ills that flesh is heir to; it is the desire to not go gently into that good night, no matter how innocently it is clad.

This is why I view Jane Austen with such admiring suspicion and fear. She perfectly preserved, in a closed system, the dynamic interactions of a limited cast of particles, each with acutely measured momentum and ability to react against others. She broke all the laws of science, and kept alive that which all the refrigerating systems of the world could not: a cleverly-wrought vision of a specific way of life. That way of life will no longer go into the night, even though its historical mould has fallen away.

Humanity can never alone be perfectly measured, interrogated and quantified by humans. People simply do not fall easily into many categories (which is why we categorise them to reduce our cognitive load), observations are never perfect. Literature accepts all this, science denies it in principle. But there has never been a consensus on 'happily ever after', and as Moorcock used to point out implicitly and explicitly, there will be dancers even at the end of time.