CHAOS and ORDER in Literature—a few examples
Virginia Woolf, from “Modern Fiction”
“Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being “like this”. Examine for a moment an
ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions—trivial,
fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an
incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life
of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance
came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write
what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not
upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or
catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street
tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a
luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this
unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with
as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage
and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom
would have us believe it.”
Jorge Luis Borges,
from “The Garden of Forking Paths”
“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I
am your enemy.”
Once again I felt the swarming sensation of which I have spoken. It
seemed to me that the humid garden that surrounded the house was
infinitely saturated with invisible persons. Those persons were Albert
and I, secret, busy and multiform in other dimensions of time.” (28)
Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities
…the shortest distance between two points in Esmeralda is not a straight line but a zigzag
that ramifies in tortuous optional routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two,
but many, and they increase further those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry
land…And that is not all: the network of routes is not arranged on one level, but follows
instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets…A
map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid
and liquid, evident and hidden. (88-9)
Virginia Woolf, from To The Lighthouse
What was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with
James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents
which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there,
with a dash on the beach. (47)
Italo Calvino, from Mr. Palomar
But counting the blades of grass is futile: you would never learn their number. A lawn does not
have precise boundaries; there is a border where the grass stops growing, but still a few scattered
blades sprout farther on, then a thick green clod, then a sparser stretch: are they still part of the
lawn or not?...Then there are the fractions of blades of grass, cut in half, or shorn to the ground,
or split along the nervation, the little leaves that have lost one lobe…The decimals, added up,
do not make an integer…Mr. Palomar’s mind has wandered, he has stopped pulling up weeds.
He no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. He is trying to apply to the universe
everything he has thought about the lawn. The universe as regular and ordered cosmos or as
chaotic proliferation. The universe perhaps finite but countless, unstable within its borders,
which discloses other universes within itself. (33)
Virginia Woolf, from To The Lighthouse
It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she had already felt about something
different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change,
and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral,
like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she
thought, the thing is made that endures. (105)
Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Library of Babel”
I venture to suggest this solution to the ancient problem: The library is unlimited and
cyclical. If an eternal traveler were to cross it in any direction, after centuries he would see
that the same volumes were repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated, would be
an order: the Order). My solitude is gladdened by this elegant hope. (58)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea
seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to
the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made. (157)