"No esta olvidada la ciencia": Science, Chaos Theory, and Tragedy in "El medico de su honra"

Abstract

The relationship between science and literature is too frequently presented as a dichotomy of mutually exclusive fields. Scholarship is now showing that the division of studies into arts and sciences--however convenient for academics-may be artificial and misleading. Interdisciplinary approaches that emphasize similarities in scientific and literary thought are increasing in both popularity and influence, as the recent literary critical interest in chaos theory demonstrates.' The emerging science of chaos, which addresses unpredictability and nonlinearity in complex systems, offers a useful framework for the analysis of literature in addition to its more technical, scientific applications. In the following pages, I will address some of the implications of chaos theory that are more pertinent to literary criticism and then discuss in particular Calder6n's El mddico de su honra, keeping in mind the important role of science in the play's thematic imagery and the ways in which chaos theory sheds light on the formulation of Calderonian tragedy. In the process, I will show how the study of chaotics in Calder6n's play can suggest interesting points of comparison between postmodern and premodern thinking. The science of chaos emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to present a challenge to classical Newtonian physics.2 Chaos theory takes issue with the reductionism inherent in the Newtonian model and criticizes by extension the deterministic insistence on order and predictability which has characterized Western science since the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The founders of Western science, products of Enlightenment logic and the age of the machine, conceived of the world mechanistically, breaking the whole into its constituent parts, describing how each component functions, and ultimately delineating a system that behaves in a predictable, stable, and orderly way according to certain universal laws.3 This new scientific perception of the world was fundamentally deterministic; given a set of initial conditions, one could predict the behavior of a system with relative accuracy and reliability. Newtonian