Letters

The Complexity Theory of Narrative

At last I've gone one better than my year 12 English teacher's dictum "every story must have a beginning, middle and end."

Essentially, it is the emergence of complex behaviour from simple interactive rules in an environment. Organic patterns on the small scale (snowflakes for example) and more abstract phenomena (population explosions and declines) could all reflect the simple interaction of rules and forces.

Historically, scientific and mathematical systems have excelled at explaining the Newtonian view of the universe— all fixed forces and measurable proofs, but they couldn't explain the way complex or highly organised (pattern-heavy) behaviour could emerge without direct or anticipated cause, seemingly spontaneous.

And then, spontaneously, about 20 years ago, the concept of chaos (or completely random affective states of behaviour) entered mathematics, offset by increased computer processor powers. Difficult stuff like fluid dynamics could be calculated, which requires huge numbers of calculations per second amid shifting inputs. This caused a change in the thinking behind computers as model generators for complex environments. The increased modeling power meant everything from ant colonies to neural nets and astrophysics could effectively be researched in this way, because all the unpredictable variables in an environment could be plotted. This kind of deflates the motivated or 'designed' explanation of organic behaviour (and the universe)— simple, program-like rules lie at the heart of it all. Even the most basic computer programs (like cellular automata) could produce patterns of visible complexity. Round about this time people also started to get excited about Mandelbröt postcards.

In short: higher level orders can arise from very basic formulae and sets of behaviour. A great day for number crunchers everywhere.

With this kind of idea in mind, how could we approach literature, the most disparate field of technique, personality and critical approach? How would one advance the old-science style of structuralist method and write a complex novel? We'd have to understand the basic formulae of narrative.

Now everyone's had their pennies' worth arguing the most narrative novelistic qualities: formal plot, reader-based theories, discourse resonance, Freudian extensions, pluralities and jouissance, sign-sex-politics etc. The poor novel barely escapes.

I'd like to focus on narrative duration as the reader's prime interaction with literature. There is something about the act of reading and engaging in duration that embiggens the mere ordering of words in the reader's mind. The high point of reading durational content, its final achievement, is a sense of immersion with its world — the success of which in turn cultivates a sense of greater relation not only with other texts but with the world outside. We consider, by willful interaction, a series of well-presented perspectives and let them move us. Or rather, a novel is affective because it is also a representation of time. The immersion wouldn't occur otherwise.

The manipulation of duration in music has the same effect— a melody seeks to draw us in before or because it disappears, because it wants to stay in our brains— and to me this was the clue that'd allow for an understanding of narrative rules.

Specifically, it's an extension of Brian Eno's rule-set for generating automatic music (see A year with swollen appendices ). For Eno, a small vocal ensemble or a looping (sequencing) program can all generate uniquely different pieces of music based on simple rules or starting points. Just like cellular automata, the results differ every time (or fail in interesting ways), saying something about harmonic effect or rhythmic coincidence on the listener level; that is, the traditional 'feel' of music's affect can be produced artificially. Generative music is a 'seed' program which builds on a listener's preferences and instructions and creates continual variations, as though it 'grows' variety*.

For narrative, I propose three simple rules:

• Narrative has a generative force. It is initiated in particular settings with attendant forces and resistances at work. It introduces, opens, sets tones & environments.
• Narrative has a sustaining force. It maintains attention with the movement and progression of event and time. Its elements are paced for continuity and balance. Or it will facilitate new events (plot).
• Narrative has a force of closure. It moves to a resolution, and it also deploys limiting or resistant elements — whether these are particular morals or meaning-conclusions, or the finality of its own (implied or postponed) decay. The end.

'Story' is the gestalt or complex effect of simple narrative units, tones and points working individually, contiguously and wholistically. Open, sustain and close.

I suppose there's a bland parallel with life in it— birth, subsistence, dying. But maybe along this line there's a narrative perceptivity hardwired into our brains, some innate response to the myriad incarnations of narrative (myths, tales, anecdotes, movies, soapies, reviews, biographies, telephones etc)— something greater than the foundations of communication alone. Something deeper than our parents telling stories from day one.

Narrative seeks to mimic life and the experience of living, and so we identify with narrative elements as we identify them in real life. To paraphrase Spinoza, why shouldn't narrative too desire to persist in its being? (see rule 2). This is the root of the great immersive quality of literature— its empathy and cerebral satisfaction, the feeling we've gained something or widened our perceptions and perspectives— even if only ironically. And it explains the universality of metaphors like 'life = journey'.

Mind you, these three narrative forces or instructions are primarily of interest to the writing of writing — the complex gestalt of their effect lie purely with the reader and cannot substitute for the sensibility of choice governing word selection and order. In other words a computer could only reproduce legitimate content so far, unless it too could be programmed to 'want' to plant memorable sayings and melodies in the reader (a rhetorical computer). My concern is with process and generation, with the thousand qualities that compose the writerly art.

These three basic rules function primarily at the coal-face of the work, in its punctuation as it were; they function as the fine detail of style. From the higher point of view, where the reader's mind comes to search and grapple with the author (and usually his biographic correlation with the work) there are the higher authorial orders that deal with the necessity of creation— that is, where the whole psychology and romantic babble of 'authors' as the transparent playthings of critics comes in. Which are the qualities that other writers sense and digest in turn again:

• The impetus to find the best mode of address with which to narrate— ie the peculiar method and tone of a writer, his voice.
• The impetus to create strong or deliberate characters, or greatness by portraiture, strong passions/beliefs and moral embodiments. The characterisation of a problem or an idea in society.
• The impetus to make or achieve the self. To create (after) one's own image: the true godliness of creation.

In skillful execution, these orders weave together to create a work born of author, world and time. They are also slightly more arbitrary, and can vary with the critic's directive or politics.

In sum then: the basic working orders of narrative involve the punctuations of style & order, and the establishment of conditions where reader involvement takes over. On the higher, more pattern-observant level there are issues of authorship, modes of address and the reader— all the critical roads of entry into a work.

What I think the pragmatism of this principle is — not its rigidity and idea championing of a particular narrative element, but its creativity of criticism, its dedication to diverse and continuing criticism; to an extra dimension of appreciation which is ultimately a regard for writerly method and process.

It's a basic process of action. If I was to drop it into the Post-Structuralist world of unstable language and signification, then the generative element of a work would trade on the assumed or inherent stabilities of introductions, character descriptions and voices. The sustaining element would seek to prolong the conclusion of fitting meanings by developing ambivalence, contradiction and unexplainable turns of character development through productive multivalence and association. And the closing element would sternly curtail these rich readings, often in the service of orthodox plot— the tangential possibilities and allusions left to the reader to consider elsewhere, but whose interaction deepen the work— because ultimately, say the Post-Structuralists, all this work is done in the shadow of meaning's direct impossibility (or absence).

* And personally, I'm hoping that consumer interest and technological facilitation will reach critical mass soon and make this happen, thereby ending the idea of music as 'finished product'.

An application of this theory will follow soon.

Links
http://www.emergence.org/Emergence/Whyemergence.html