Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

Another new fractal discovery: many major writers—Woolf, Joyce, James, Bolaño—create fractals with their sentences. A word-count analysis of their texts shows self-replicating ratios between sentence lengths. The researcher Stanislaw Drozdz explains that fractals “point to the hierarchical organization of phenomena and structures found in nature. So we can expect natural language, which represents a major evolutionary leap of the natural world, to show such correlations as well. Their existence in literary works, however, had not yet been convincingly documented.” The most fractal works—meaning fractals of fractals—were stream-of-consciousness narratives, although it’s not clear whether that style reveals depths of consciousness or the writer’s imagination. But fractals forming the shape of a whole narrative are what interest me: texts that start with a “seed” or blueprint that spawns several more.