| This study explores the relationship between the trickster, who has over the past three decades crossed over from traditional oral story to become the most widely recognized convention of contemporary Native American Indian literature, and chaos theory, more properly dynamical systems theory, which has, since 1960, evolved on the margin between mathematics and physics. Both, indeed, construct ironic and paradoxical relationships between order and disorder. Chaotic systems are completely unpredictable yet fully determined. Inherently nonlinear, chaos, which parodies randomness in time sequence, in fact, evolves in an orderly manner characterized by progressive bifurcations that occur at precisely the point where the ratio between two subsequent values reaches the Feigenbaum constant 4.6692. Plotted graphically, the evolution reveals a fractal structure based upon this scaling factor.; Trickster is central to explorations of postindian identity in the novels of Gerald Vizenor, Gordon Henry, Jr., and Louis Owens, but not because any single character can be identified with trickster. Traits typically associated with the trickster—lust, violence, tricks, victimry, and shapeshifting—are here spread across the character collective. Chaos theory underscores the fact that the three novels considered in my study—Vizenor's Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, Henry's The Light People , and Owens's Dark River—depend upon a dynamical system of characters rather than an individual Protagonist. Each of these novels exhibits both the pattern of bifurcation and the fractal self similarity that characterizes the classic bifurcation diagram. In this case, the universal scaling factor is textuality. Bearheart reveals its fractal structure through six recursive tropes at five textual scales: the umbrella text, orality, textuality, institutions grounded in Western textuality, and a world beyond textuality. The Light People incorporates 22 recursive tropes at six textual scales: orality, textuality, dream, institution, im/materiality, and the new or whole world. Owens's five-novel oeuvre constitutes a fractal at yet a larger scale with 29 recursive tropes that recur at the oral, textual, institutional, popular culture/text, and popular culture/film scales. |
