Narrative instabilities

Abstract Taking Nabokov’s Pale Fire as its tutor text, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that narrative functions as a complex or dynamic system. Due to the novel’s nonlinear and multiply configured format, a series of dissipative structures is provoked whereby states near equilibrium, on reaching states far from equilibrium under the weight of multiple causality, putting the system “beyond the threshold of stability” and “at the edge of chaos,” perpetually self-organize. Taking a cue from nonequilibrium thermodynamics, instabilities, it is argued, are inherent to narrative discourse. This calls into question the pertinence of the logic of linearity (“event A causes event B”) as well as the scope of such postulates as the isomorphic relation between sequence and narrative as a whole, a postulate that frames narrative as a closed system following the principle of conservation of energy in classical mechanics. As the poem “Pale Fire” in Nabokov’s novel advances linearly, it is constantly disrupted by the “Commentary” which is related to the poem only tangentially, each text fragmenting the other and self-organizing into new meanings. The effect is to render salient in narrative discourse the complexity science principles (in addition to those mentioned above) of irreversibility (the “arrow of time”) vs. reversibility, sensitivity to initial conditions, negative vs. positive feedback and the symmetry-breaking effects of bifurcation. The manifestation of these principles in Nabokov’s novel raises fundamental questions about the structuring of narrative, but also about the conceptual framework through which narrative at large might be approached.