UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones 5-1-2014 The Dakini Project Kimberley Harris Idol University of Nevada, Las Vegas Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/thesesdissertations Part of the American Literature Commons, and the Comparative Literature Commons Repository Citation Idol, Kimberley Harris, "The Dakini Project" (2014). UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones. 2094. http://dx.doi.org/10.34917/5836113 This Dissertation is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by Digital Scholarship@UNLV with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Dissertation in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. 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THE DAKINI PROJECT: TRACKING THE “BUTTERFLY EFFECT” IN DETECTIVE FICTION By Kimberley Harris Idol Bachelor of Arts in Literature Mount Saint Mary’s College 1989 Master of Science in Education Mount Saint Mary’s College 1994 Master of Arts in Literature California State University, Northridge 2005 Master of Fine Arts University of Las Vegas, Nevada 2009 A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy - English Department of English College of Liberal Arts The Graduate College University of Las Vegas, Nevada May 2014 Copyright by Kimberley Idol, 2014 All Rights Reserved THE GRADUATE COLLEGE We recommend the dissertation prepared under our supervision by Kimberly Harris Idol entitled The Dakini Project: Tracking the “Butterfly Effect” in Detective Fiction is approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy - English Department of English Felicia Campbell, Ph.D., Committee Chair Donald Revell, Ph.D., Committee Member Joseph McCullough, Ph.D., Committee Member Michael Pravica, Ph.D., Graduate College Representative Kathryn Hausbeck Korgan, Ph.D., Interim Dean of the Graduate College May 2014 ii Abstract This dissertation merges creative writing with scholarship using the novel, The Dakini Project, to provide the subject matter to which the criticism applies. It will focus on the source of mystery format as that codified by Edgar Allan Poe that is later taken in hand by his fellows Arthur Conan Doyle, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (as novelists), authors of the hard-boiled American style, and it will use Chaos theory to assess to idea of catastrophe in terms of emergence rather than disintegration. Though the format comes from American beginnings, the scope of the stories discussed here are tangled around a kind of urban angst that takes place in any number of settings and countries. Crime in these stories is born on the ragged edge of modernity where societies in difficult transitions seem to be struggling with the notion of decency on many levels. The detective in these cases is a rule breaker and a systems expert who is tracking what is known as the “butterfly” effect, the small and undefined movements that grow and create the huge horrible storms. He is an individual who resolves, brings and rescues others from disorder which is a symptom, cause, and the result of crises, but he is also the disaster maker who will send his fellows whirling away into another kind of lost space. An individual who is himself a creature in disarray, this character is a citizen of the system brought to its knees by crime therefore he is as much a part of the confusion he has been tasked with resolving as any other character in these stories. He will solve the mystery, but his resolution will not be a return to a familiar stability as much as an emergence into the foreign territory of a brand new system which in itself will be recognizable as a platform that will not hold for very long because flux, not stability is the order of existence in these stories. iii Table of Contents Approval ........................................................................................................................... ii Abstract ............................................................................................................................. iii Chapter 1 Literature Review ............................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2 Chaos Theory and The Dakini Project ............................................................. 4 Chapter 3 Tracking Chaos Theory in Detective Fiction ................................................... 8 Chapter 4 The Dakini Project ........................................................................................... 40 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................292 CV ....................................................................................................................................297 iv Chapter 1 Literature Review Chaos theory and complexity is already commonly used to reinterpret many traditional literary works for the purpose of building connections between fictive and real world studies and therefore deepening the connections between writing about what we know and what we imagine in an attempt to deal with the connections, differences and crossovers indicative in that kind of labeling of knowledge. Katherine Hayles has written groundbreaking essays in which she traces what she defines as the shifting meaning of chaos within the Western literary tradition. Her book of essays (editor and contributor) Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science is a collection that describes how complexity and emergence can be used to reexamine literary and non- literary texts, plot organization, narrative strategies (Kenneth J. Knoespel), metaphors (William Paulson), metafiction (Peter Stoicheff), audience response, and the process of interpretation. With this collection, Hayles also broadens the definition of an interdisciplinary field of chaotic systems that crosses over many fields of study not previously considered as bedfellows. The works of surrealists, stream of consciousness authors and authors who use nonlinear timelines to advance their stories are regularly analyzed with the focus on the way perception in these texts is aligned with emergence, fractal imagery and the butterfly effect. Peter Mackey redefines the attention paid to randomness in James Joyce’s Ulysses in terms of the butterfly effect. Thomas Rice uses the theory and James Joyce to build a bridge between scientific, literary and historical works. Determining that William Faulkner, Laurence Sterne, and Virginia Woolf are masters of what she redefines as turbulent narrative systems, Jo Alyson Parker makes connections between these kinds of 1 narratives and a real world understanding of chaotic systems. In her essay “Chaos Theory, Hypertext, and Reading Borges and Moulthrop” Perla Sassón-Henry analyzes Jorge Luis Borges's and Stuart Moulthrop's text in terms of bifurcation. Thomas Weissert, looking through the chaotic lens, finds chaos to be the center piece and not the central problem in Borge’s labyrinthine garden. In his book, Beautiful Chaos: Chaos Theory and Metachaotics in Recent American Fiction, Gordon Slethaug applies complexity in a review of John Barth, Michael Crichton, Don DeLillo, Michael Dorris, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Thomas Pynchon, Carol Shields, and Robert Stone and uses the theory to analyze these authors’ use of chaotic tropes and nonlinear narrative forms. Harriet Hawkins applies the theory of strange attractors in an assessment of literature that runs from Shakespeare to Tom Stoppard. She also includes a short discussion of detective fictions in Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture and Chaos Theory that focuses on chaos to order via the butterfly effect). There are also studies applying Chaos theory to Science Fiction, specifically Asimov’s Foundation series and Frank Herbert’s Dune series (Donald Palumbo) with a focus on dynamic systems in process. The range of literature now being reexamined in via the lens of complexity and emergence is growing in fact with international authors also being examined. This list includes but is not limited to Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie, Jean-Paul Sartre, Al Hakim's and D.H. Lawrence. There are many studies of detective fiction but they are still driven by social theory, racism, gender studies, classicism, Freudian psychology, urban angst and crime, rationalism, realism, and colonialism. As the genre starts to develop strong followings in different countries the stories are compared on a cultural basis. There are also papers 2 written on the problem of modernity but with the idea that the detective story works from disorder to order in an organized fashion. There are no studies that I could find that applied systems theory as it is applied here to the classic form of this genre as defined in this paper. There are a few authors of detective fiction who have written stories ruled by the notion of Chaos theory, but with a few exceptions most authors in this genre have not worked primarily with complexity or emergence