CONCRESCENCE AND COMPLICATION

...though Cioffi's book doesn't reference Aristotle, clearly his structural summation of how anomalous presences impact on "conventional social reality" is of a piece with Aristotle's concept of the "Complication" (literally "Desis"= "tying or binding"), while the way in which the viewpoint characters (my term) respond to the anomaly comprises the "Resolution" ("Lusis"= "untying.")--
ANOMALOUS ENCOUNTERS: RESOURCE.

 This focus on concrete modes of relatedness is essential because an actual occasion is itself a coming into being of the concrete. The nature of this “concrescence,” using Whitehead’s term, is a matter of the occasion’s creatively internalizing its relatedness to the rest of the world by feeling that world, and in turn uniquely expressing its concreteness through its extensive connectedness with that world. Thus an electron in a field of forces “feels” the electrical charges acting upon it, and translates this “experience” into its own electronic modes of concreteness. Only later do we schematize these relations with the abstract algebraic and geometrical forms of physical science. For the electron, the interaction is irreducibly concrete.-- INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY.

I've been using the imagery of wave formations whenever I've invoked the idea of amplitude, but here's another metaphor for connectedness: that of the knot-imagery put forth by Aristotle.

Since the beginnings of this blog, I've defined the significance of literary symbolic activity in terms of complexity. The idea of complexity as a value does not seem to appear as such in Aristotle's POETICS, in that the bulk of his argument focuses on art's ability to describe the good and the beautiful. The philosopher does use the categories of "simple" and "complex," but the categories reflect nothing save whether or not a given work contains what Aristotle called "the recognition scene." A simple narrative doesn't have a recognition scene; a complex narrative does.

Aristotle doesn't connect these categories to the "desis/lusis" dichotomy, which I assume was not original to him. However, I think that Aristotle found a moral value in the recognition scene, and that by the trope's presence, it gave a given narrative a greater moral potential. Thus a play like Euripides' MEDEA is simple because it possesses no turnabout scene, in which a protagonist realizes his "connectedness" to some other person or event, as Sophocles' OEDIPUS does.

For my purposes, the presence or absence of a recognition scene makes no difference. However, I find it interesting that the literary activity Aristotle calls "tying" is often rendered in English as "complication," while "untying" is often rendered with the French word "denouement," which originally had the same meaning of "unraveling."

Aristotle's logic is persuasive. Clearly he has examined, in his analytical manner, the way a given author creates interest in his protagonist's struggles by "tying" him up with one or more complications, and then "untying" him in such a way that the hero is either delivered up to good or bad fortune.

As a description of the authorial process, this is accurate, but I don't think it describes the finished literary narrative. I would certainly agree that the process by which Oedipus pieces together the clues regarding his true identity is a complex process. However, the metaphor of an unraveled knot doesn't adequately describe the conclusion of OEDIPUS REX, which is no less complex than all the knotty complications that lead up to the conclusion. The only way in which the play's denouement resembled an untied knot is in terms of a viewer's relief once he knows what has happened to the protagonist and all other significant characters. But the actual narrative process, by my lights, is either (1) simple all the way through, (2) simple in some places and complex in others, or (3) complex all the way through. Not surprisingly, these three levels of complication line up fairly well with my analysis of the levels of literary quality I called "poor," "fair," and "good." At the time I wrote that essay, I was using Aristotle's term "unity of action" to explain the presence of complexity in a given discourse; now, the concept of concrescence has largely usurped the place of said unity.

Thus, for me, every narrative is a knot, perhaps most visually approachable through this representation of different levels of complexity in molecular knots:

Now, since I've gone to great effort to expound upon the ways in which complexity can only be judged through examination of the four potentialities, I won't repeat that argument here, except to say that I've allowed for the possibility that symbolic complexity is not the only form of complexity. I've also allowed that "simplicity" has a role to play even in the most complex narratives. But focusing just on symbolic discourse, then a symbolically poor work would resemble the simple knot "A," a fair work would resemble B or C, which are more complex by virtue of having more crossings, and a good work would resemble D or E.