In Defence of the Chaotic Method
I had questioned myself about the ways in which a book can be infinite. […] A book whose last page was identical with the first […] Almost instantly, I understood [this] was the chaotic novel.
- Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Labyrinths.
I have a riddling tendency to not pay nearly enough attention as some might to the technicalities of an exposition, middle, and conclusion of a book. Much to some of yours horror, I must admit that some books I have read backwards (from the end to the beginning), others I’ve started on the last page and then have flipped back to the first, and others yet I’ve started in the middle, worked my way to the end, only to start up again from the beginning and finish in the middle.
This, as some might call it, is the chaotic approach. It derives from my aversion to linearly successive outlines, plots, and thoughts. In this way, the text becomes infinite - infinite in the labyrinthine routes I could take in reading it, and infinite in my reluctance to have the “end” be the end. I therefore find the books to resonate most with me to be those that lend themselves to chaos.
If you too are a kindred spirit and lend yourself well to chaos, I would suggest you read the book I am currently working my way through, Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. It’s all in the name. It not only implies but requires that you jump back and forth through stories and has an array of footnotes lead to new footnotes that lead you to new stories that may or may not relate to what seems to be the infinitely drawn out plot. I have been promised, however, that order does derive from this chaos, and that it does so at the very end, where you are seemingly brought back to the first page of the book and everything suddenly falls into place.
This is my sort of the book, a surplus of the infinite and the chaotic with an underlying and creeping order. As Borges has written, the ‘infinite’ book is ‘nothing other than a cyclical volume. A book whose last page was identical with the first, a book which had the possibility of continuing indefinitely.’ (“The Garden of Forking Paths”, Labyrinths). The so-called infinite or ‘chaotic’ novel produces a ‘forking in time, not in space’, in which all possible outcomes occur, yet you, the reader, may choose which of those paths to take.
Stay inspired
