There was no reference to Vladimir Nabokov’s patterning in the news about
the multifractal structure of novels in the “Guardian” and “The Paris
Review”

I couldn’t discover the names of the 113 writers whose works were
researched.



In “The Eye” VN makes explicit the importance of patterns, although I found
it difficult to identify them!

Quote from the foreword: “ I do not know if the keen pleasure I derived
thirty-five years ago from adjusting in a certain mysterious pattern the
various phases of the narrator’s quest will be shared by modern readers, but
in any case the stress is not on the mystery but on the pattern.”

(he was writing about a hell of mirrors and a merging of twin images;
actually this is one of his favorite pursuits)



Scientists find evidence of mathematical structures in classic books

Researchers at Poland’s Institute of Nuclear Physics found complex ‘fractal’
patterning of sentences in literature, particularly in James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake, which resemble ‘ideal’ maths seen in nature... James Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake has been described as many things, from a masterpiece to
unreadable nonsense. But it is also, according to scientists at the
Institute of Nuclear Physics in Poland, almost indistinguishable in its
structure from a purely mathematical multifractal.


<http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/scientists-reveal-multifractal
-structure-of-finnegans-wake-james-joyce?CMP=share_btn_fb>
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/27/scientists-reveal-multifractal-
structure-of-finnegans-wake-james-joyce?CMP=share_btn_fb

Today in fractals: they’re everywhere, dude. In Joyce—fractals. In
Proust—fractals. In Cortázar, Woolf, Dos Passos, Bolaño—fractals, fractals,
all fractals, sometimes even multifractals. This per science: “
<http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/thni-twg012116.php> Some of
the world’s greatest writers appear to be, in some respects, constructing
fractals. Statistical analysis carried out at the Institute of Nuclear
Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, however, revealed something even
more intriguing. The composition of works from within a particular genre was
characterized by the exceptional dynamics of a cascading (avalanche)
narrative structure. This type of narrative turns out to be multifractal …
The study involved 113 literary works written in English, French, German,
Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish … To convert the texts to numerical
sequences, sentence length was measured by the number of words … The
dependences were then searched for in the data … This is the posited
question: If a sentence of a given length is x times longer than the
sentences of different lengths, is the same aspect ratio preserved when
looking at sentences respectively longer or
shorter?”http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/01/27/fractals-man-theyre-e
verywhere-and-other-news/




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