5 - Chaotic bodies

Summary

In fact, the path of [evolution], so frequently compared to some steadily-rising mountain slope, is far more like a footway worn by leisurely wanderers in an undulating country. Excelsior biology is a popular and poetic creation – the real form of a phylum, or line of descent, is far more like the course of a busy man moving about a great city. Sometimes it goes underground, sometimes it doubles and twists in tortuous streets, now it rises far overhead along some viaduct … Upward and downward these threads of pedigree interweave, slowly working out a pattern of accomplished things that is difficult to interpret, but in which scientific observers certainly fail to discover that inevitable tendency to higher and better things with which the word “evolution” is popularly associated. Wells, “Zoological Retrogression”

Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (p. 159)

Entropic narratives are in their own way highly directive: they accomplish a straightforward reversal of narratives of “progress.” That is, while entropic plotting is productive, capable of generating an intriguing variety of abhuman possibilities, gothic entropy can be seen as a traditional narrative structure: it moves steadily, without detour or interruption, towards a telos, albeit the negative telos of loss of specificity. What Wells describes by contrast in the quote above is a narrative model more consistent with Darwin's own: a model of random movement, non-directive, non-telic, aimless and errant. Eric White identifies such a narrative movement as “picaresque” (as opposed to the “comic romance” of progressivist history): “The temporal unfolding of reality is … open-ended and unpredictable, a suite of contingent circumstances rather than an inexorable march toward some predestined goal.”