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Strange Attractors: Literature, culture and chaos theory. By HARRIETT HAWKINS. New York and London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1995. Pp. xiv + 180. $22.00.
The cover of the late Harriett Hawkins's book on literature and chaos theory features a visually dramatic rendering of the Lorenz attractor. This is a striking and evocative image; strong highlights and other graphic enhancements make this important example of a strange attractor seem vividly real and alive. It looks like a carnival mask, a cat's face, a butterfly. Hawkins's caption points out these resemblances and then explains that "chaotic systems wander unpredictably over fractal attractors, except that one thing is predictable: the system stays on the attractor" (vii). The reader is then referred to page 127, where Hawkins explains that cats are "naturally strange attractors" because you can never know what they are going to do next. This is followed by a description of Shakespeare's Cleopatra as a "cat-like . . . strange attractor who cannot be included in the equations of a man-made . . . system." The intuitive leaps here are very daring-Hawkins was never afraid to take risks or to defend bold claims. But, alas, not much really happens in this work beyond a few facile generalizations about scientific theories of chaos, most of which are highly equivocal, misleading, and inaccurate.
Hawkins's handling of the Lorenz attractor is diagnostic of the problems with Strange Attractors. Her discussion never identifies an attractoras a pure mathematical abstraction, the representation in geometrical terms of a system of nonlinear equations. The Lorenz system, for example, consists of the following three differential equations:
The Lorenz attractor is useful for giving a mathematically unambiguous account of exactly how and in what way phenomena such as weather are chaotic and unpredictable. Attractors can also be used to describe such things as fluctuations in gypsy-moth populations or the behavior of a double pendulum. But what do these equations actually portend for the study of literary works? Pretty much nothing, as far as I am able to see. Strange attractors do not cause anything to happen, nor do they exercise any kind of physical attraction over objects. The suggestion that Cleopatra is "like" a strange attractor because she is both attractive and unpredictable is not only just...