The New 3 Rs: Repetition, Recollection, and Recognition

Abstract

The New 3 Rs:Repetition, Recollection, and Recognition Lissa Paul (bio) This is not really a critical essay—more like an item from a gossip column. But as I am writing and circulating it myself, it also has the quality of a leaked document. Or in dull academic terms it might be simply a description of a work-in-progress—though I like to think about what I'm doing as more interesting, perhaps even slightly scandalous or amoral. I'm working on a poetics of children's literature, one that moves out of the realm of criticism as interpretation. These new poetics are shaped by the nonlinear patterns of the "chaos" theory of physics, and by revisionist approaches to the Aristotelian concepts of mythos (plot), mimesis (imitation), and anagnorisis (recognition): the first major shifts in Western perception since Euclidian geometry and Platonic philosophy first shaped it. That may seem a rather extravagant claim, but please don't stop reading yet. My work-in-progress is more interesting—and easier—than it sounds though some background is necessary before I get to the gossipy bits. My obsessions with chaos theory and revisionist Aristotelian poetics developed out of a paper I did for the Narrative Theory in Children's Literature Section of the MLA in New Orleans in December 1988. In "Intimations of Imitations: Mimesis, Fractal Geometry and Children's Literature" (an expanded version is published in the May 1989 volume of Signal), I spoke about correspondences between two radically different models of perceiving the world: mimesis and fractal geometry. Mimesis is ancient (over twenty-five hundred years old), while fractal geometry is recent (the term coined only in 1975); mimesis originates in Aristotelian poetics, while fractal geometry originates in mathematics and is a description of irregular shapes. What struck me was that both theories articulate much the same vision: repetitions of self-similar structures produce unexpectedly varied ways of seeing the world. Mimesis, traditionally a static form that presumes to describe exact correspondences between the world and words, turns out, in the new poetics, to be notoriously diverse (in my paper, I talked about mimesis in the context of the cow poems in What is the Truth? by Ted Hughes—very different cow poems in the book are all recognizable representations of cows). Fractal geometry, by comparing relationships between scales, is a mathematical description of the shapes of irregular, natural forms likes snowflakes, tree bark, lightning, and clouds: shapes that are almost but never quite exactly alike (computer graphics make it possible to design and produce these images). Chaos theory (a misnomer really) is the name given to the study of the kind of order we've previously dismissed as disorderly or chaotic. In the end, mimesis, fractal geometry and chaos theory argue not for a world that is explainable, but for one that is infinitely varied. Rather than insisting on ultimate truths, they offer a language for the discussion of relationships that make variation visible. Because I was discussing the complex connections between mimesis, fractal geometry and poetry in my ten-minute oral paper at the MLA, I used a mnemonic—repetition, recollection and recognition—as a catch phrase to describe the pattern I had understood. I knew (from my readings on orality and literacy and from my knowledge of oral formulaic poetry) that it was the sort of line people could remember on one hearing. It was also convenient short-hand for the ways that both mimesis and fractal geometry represent the world as repetitions of self-similar patterns. My guilty secret (this is the scandalous bit) is that when I was working on the paper, I didn't fully understand the appropriateness of my triple catch phrase, repetition-recollection-recognition, as co-ordinates for a new poetics. Critics are supposed to know exactly what they mean. I didn't. But I did know that in "Intimations of Imitations," I was bringing together several critical lines that had formed my knowledge of the poetics of oral literature. I understood—more or less—that the works of Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Peter Brooks and [End Page 55] Christopher Prendergast spoke to repetition and recollection, but I had not yet...