FINNEGANS WAKE FRACTAL
Since I first learned about fractals in the Seventies, I have maintained that Finnegans Wake is a fractal.
Now scientific research has validated it!
Now scientific research has validated it!
Researchers at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics found complex ‘fractal’ patterning of sentences in literature, particularly in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which resemble ‘ideal’ maths seen in nature.
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has been described as many things, from a masterpiece to unreadable nonsense. But it is also, according to scientists at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland, almost indistinguishable in its structure from a purely mathematical multifractal.
Fractals are used in science to model structures that contain re-occurring patterns, including snowflakes and galaxies.
Some works, however, were more mathematically complex than others, with stream-of-consciousness narratives the most complex, comparable to multifractals, or fractals of fractals. Finnegans Wake, the scientists found, was the most complex of all.
“The absolute record in terms of multifractality turned out to be Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The results of our analysis of this text are virtually indistinguishable from ideal, purely mathematical multifractals,” said Professor Stanisław Drożdż, another author of the paper, which has just been published in the computer science journal Information Sciences.
Joyce himself, reported to have said he wrote Finnegans Wake “to keep the critics busy for 300 years”, might have predicted this. In a letter about the novel, Work in Progess as he then knew it, he told Harriet Weaver: “I am really one of the greatest engineers, if not the greatest, in the world besides being a musicmaker, philosophist and heaps of other things.
Every part of Finnegans Wake is a fractal of the whole book, The whole book is a fractal of... Everything! Come listen to the whole thing with me as we enter this fractal.
- Candle
Come to Kauai for The Finnegans Wake Immersion.
WATCH THIS SPACE.
MORE TO COME.
MUCH MOR
I have always been amazed that reading Finnegans Wake, a section or a series of sections, to an audience has always gone very, very deep. People sob, others laugh at what their mind doesn't understand, and mostly, they feel very good.
Such a tiny percentage of the whole book. An hour. Less than 1/30th.
Now I have been given the language for what I've always known: that Finnegans Wake is a fractal, any part of it being the same as the whole.
That somehow listeners get the impact of the whole book by hearing any part of it!
This expands my work: I will continue to read the whole durn thing, while others can plug in listening to a chapter, more or less - or lesser!
A Chapter of Finnegans Wake is a fractal of the whole book. The whole book is a fractal of...Everything. HCE: Here Comes Everything.
Such a tiny percentage of the whole book. An hour. Less than 1/30th.
Now I have been given the language for what I've always known: that Finnegans Wake is a fractal, any part of it being the same as the whole.
That somehow listeners get the impact of the whole book by hearing any part of it!
This expands my work: I will continue to read the whole durn thing, while others can plug in listening to a chapter, more or less - or lesser!
A Chapter of Finnegans Wake is a fractal of the whole book. The whole book is a fractal of...Everything. HCE: Here Comes Everything.