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
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: “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-everywhere-and-other-news/