Earlier, I published this post, and then took it down quickly after a third and fourth reading, revealed that I hadn't said what I meant to say and that what I did say wasn't well said. So I'm editing this, which I should have done to begin with.
What I meant to say is that I have come to think of narratives as complex systems, and complexity has allowed me to think about narratives in new ways here late in my career as a retired language and literature instructor and technology director. This assumption is the starting point for what I'm calling RhizoNarratology.
To understand what a complex system is, I find it helpful to compare and contrast a complex system to a complicated system. Both systems are a collection of interdependent entities that work together to form a larger coherent and more involved entity, and as such, the terms are often used interchangeably. However, they are distinct concepts. Understanding the distinction helps clarify both – especially complex systems.
A jumbo jet, a CD player, or a mechanical watch are complicated systems. They consist of many intricate parts, but their organization is stable and their behavior is predictable. Given the individual parts, the whole thing typically has one optimum arrangement, and any deviation from this arrangement can impair or even break the system. Moreover, a complicated system can be disassembled and reasonably analyzed to determine how it works. If you take a mechanical watch apart, you can understand exactly how it works by examining its individual gears, and if you put it back together, it will run exactly as it did before. In a complicated system, the whole thing is exactly equal to the sum of its parts. If it stops working as expected, then usually we can disassemble it, analyze it, and restore it with one or just a handful of optimum strategies.
On the other hand, human families, economies, rainforests, dogs, and poems are complex systems. They, too, consist of many parts that interact with one another, but their interactions are not necessarily predictable or stable. In a complex system, you cannot adequately understand the whole by simply taking it apart and looking at the pieces in isolation. Because the parts are richly interconnected, their interactions give rise to novel, unpredictable behaviors that take on a life of their own. In complexity science, the defining motto is that the whole thing is different from the sum of its parts. Unlike a mechanically complicated watch, you can't take apart an organically complex dog to examine its individual parts and then put it back together, expecting it to operate as before. It won't. Even though the dissected dog will now be exactly equal to the sum of its parts, something will be missing. The dog will be dead, and some important features will be lost.
I am in no way suggesting that we cannot gain useful insight into the nature of dogs by disassembling, or dissecting, them. We do. But in the process, we kill the dog, and lose those very qualities that made the dog interesting to begin with. In the long run, the qualities that we lose when we disassemble any complex system turn out to be highly important qualities. Complexity theory tries to reclaim those qualities and, by the way, keep the dogs alive. I think that complexity theory can help me understand why stories live and how.
I think we have often used this same reductionism to understand stories: cutting them up into their various parts to see how the blood circulates, and in the process, losing the very qualities that made the stories interesting in the first place. We do learn some things, but in the end, we kill the story. This, I think, was a strong tendency and problem with the close readings of the New Criticism of the mid-Twentieth Century when I was learning to read stories. The New Critics assumed that a poem or novel was like a watch: exactly equal to the sum of its parts. And like a skillful jeweler, they would break a poem into its parts to see how they were connected and worked together.
Fortunately, reader-response, feminist, post-colonial, and other theories saved us from the reductionism of New Criticism. To my mind, these theories worked in large part because they reopened the text to its context: its writer, its reader, its wider historical and social environments. This points to another major insight about complex systems: they are radically open to their environments. They must constantly intake and process energy, information, and "noise" from the outside world to adapt, learn, and survive.
We can see this openness certainly in science. An ecosystem or a living biological cell is an open system, constantly exchanging energy, matter, information, and organization with its surroundings. If an ecosystem becomes completely closed off from the outside world, it reaches a state of total equilibrium, exactly equal to the sum of its parts. In biological terms, complete equilibrium means death. A cell, dog, rainforest, city, or solar system requires the dynamic tension of and interplay with the environment to continually self-organize and evolve.
To my mind, the same is true of literary works – well, of all artistic works, but I'm focusing on stories here. A novel like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885) acts as a living, open complex system. Huckleberry Finn is not a static object, even though we too often treat the book between its two covers as an unchanging thing; rather, it is an "on-going linguistic formulation" (Richardson and Cilliers, "What Is Complexity Science", 2001) that is created in the moment of telling and reading, retelling and rereading. When you read Huckleberry Finn, your mind interacts with the text's diverse tesserae—its historical context, its moral paradoxes, its dialects, its syntax, and with your own literary, aesthetic, and social ecosystems. The story's meaning adapts and evolves as it encounters new generations of readers. If a narrative becomes a closed, mechanical system, then it loses its complexity and effectively dies as a cultural force. If it is rigidly interpreted in only one way, losing its openness and its connection to the shifting human experience, then it is entombed in the sepulchre of a university library, covered in dust, its ghost becoming evermore faint. I suspect that few today have read Dimplethorpe (1880) by Eliza Tabor Stephenson, quite popular at the same time as Huckleberry Finn, but now a mostly dead narrative.
Ultimately, understanding complexity means shifting our worldview. Instead of seeing the world as a giant, predictable clockwork mechanism that can be mastered by breaking it into pieces, complexity science asks us to view the world as a dense, living web of relationships. Whether we are looking at the neurons in our heads, the global economy, or the stories we use to make sense of our lives, the magic lies not merely in the parts themselves, but in how those parts connect and interact with each other and with their environments. I find these complex systems worth exploring.
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