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Abstract.
Chaos theory, better known as hidden-order or dynamical systems theory, is a new way to think about order that can illuminate fragmentation and nonlinearity in literature and other fields. Nonnus' Dionysiaca is held together by the deeply encoded structures of the spiral, dance, serpent and web, and by the impulse for self-organisation and self-generation, as it explores the relationship between order and disorder.
(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)
Many of the insights of nonlinear dynamics go back to the Nineteenth Century or earlier.1
Readers of Normus' Dionysiaca will be aware of the sense of chaos, noise and disorder that pervades the work. A sprawling, 21 000 hexameter line epic on the career of Dionysus, it is a work of theme rather than plot or character, a loosely structured, digressive assembly of tales, episodes and epyllia that celebrates explosive energy, revelry, banging drums and the licence of Dionysus, and highlights the nonlinearity, incoherence, writhing limbs, hysteria even, of the Dionysian worldview. A major theme is confusion itself. The poem has been seen as lacking proper form and restraint, the product of a 'sickly and unwholesome fancy', only likely to interest the student of 'the degenerescence of literature', composed by a poet who has 'lost sight of his own framework', and who self-indulgently and grotesquely elaborates details and individual scenes at the expense of order and good taste.2 'Certainly the narrative structure of Nonnos' poem is a shambles, its causal connections obscure, its suspense and climaxes almost all dissipated or thrown away, its details often selfcontradictory'.3 'It is, in short, a piece of barbarian literature and clearly shows the workings of the Oriental mind', reflecting a culture 'in which the free will played no part'.4 Yet the work can be seen as having a firm sense of structure. In these post-structuralist, post-modern times we may be more sympathetic to a poet not overconcerned with linearity and who uses a stream-of-consciousness style to explore the theme of order versus disorder.5 For the poem celebrates order too, not just thematically but formally and technically, where Nonnus' singular achievement is 'the creation of an extraordinarily restrictive metrical, and hence, linguistic mould within which to display infinite energy, ingenuity and verve in variation and innovation'.6 It is the...