Franktienne's spirals: chaos theory, minor literature and generic limits

This article elucidates the distinct relationship between Franktienne's spiral writing and Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers' contemporary chaos theory demonstrating that chaos theory is an important paradigm to consider in literary analysis of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The open-ended nature of Franktienne's spiral interprets the Arrow of Time as proposed by Prigogine and Stengers; that is, that time is not reversible and the future and the past do not have a direct, linear relationship. In essence, Prigogine and Stengers proposed that order evolves out of chaos. Furthermore, the fractalized, noisy, chaotic schizophony illustrated in his works imitates the bifurcation process in chaos theory when a system, far from equilibrium, undergoes self-organizing iterations from chaos to either order or more chaos. As a result, this analysis will examine how two of Franktienne's works, Ultravocal and H'ros-Chimres, challenge the limits of traditional genre theory, and will show that his schizophonic writing exists in a state far from equilibrium allowing a deleuzian minor language and literature to be exposed.