Abstract

This dissertation discusses the concepts of symmetry in the text through the literary engagement with, or appropriation of, chaotics, using the images of the map and labyrinth. The texts under discussion are John Barth's Sabbatical: A Romance, The Tidewater Tales: A Novel, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, and Once Upon a Time. My choice of texts was guided by my initial interest in boundaries and repetition. While John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera might seem more overtly labyrinthine and symmetrical, my interest lies not only in the author's conscious creation of the labyrinth but also in the way the textual labyrinth creates its own conditions, hence my choice of Barth's longer, later works. Pynchon's texts, The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, give both repetition and variation, revealing different authorial techniques and textual indeterminacies. Each chapter of the dissertation looks at a concept associated with chaotics and explores how the text reveals, and revels in, that concept. My aim is not to provide a reading of the science behind the novels , but to look at how the use of chaotics as an approach to literature is especially fruitful in Barth and Pynchon. ;Chapter I provides an entrance into the maze by looking at the key terms used in the dissertation and at some other approaches to symmetry in texts. Chapter II examines the concepts of symmetry, repetition and bifurcation. In Barth's works, his, and his characters', attempts to create the conditions of repetition and symmetry are undermined by the impossibility of exactly replicating initial conditions. In Pynchon's works, the attempt to reproduce initial conditions in order to solve a mystery is similarly doomed to failure. Chapter III examines the typographical and topographical boundaries of the labyrinth, exploring more fully the image of fractal growth. Chapter IV discusses the temporal boundaries of the labyrinth, looking at how the authors, Barth in particular, play with the concepts of plot time, author time, and reader time. Pynchon's image of the rocket in Gravity's Rainbow, where effect precedes cause, reveals a reversal seen in both of the works under discussion. In Chapter V, I look at indeterminacy and infinite regress as they apply to the reading and writing of the works. Chapter VI may, or may not, provide a way out of the labyrinth, but I hope that by this point, the reader will agree that being lost in the textual labyrinth is the fun of reading postmodern texts and that finding one exit is not as enjoyable as finding an infinity of exits