Water and Sand: The Dialectic of Entropy and Negentropy in Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes

Marianne Marroum

《Concentric： Literary and Cultural Studies》 34卷1期 (2008/03) Pp. 135-156

https://doi.org/10.6240/concentric.lit.200803_34(1).0007

並列摘要

This study interprets Japanese novelist Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes in terms of the interplay of water and sand, taken now as a dialectic of disorder and order, entropy and negative entropy (negentropy). The protagonist Niki is entrapped not only by nature, symbolized by the encroaching sands, but by society: he is subjected to forced labor and to thirst by a community itself overtaken by moral and social entropy or dissolution. Thus he seems to embody an even greater dissipation of energy, a more encompassing disorder, homogeneity, stillness, disintegration and sense of death. Yet when Niki discovers water in the sands he unexpectedly acquires a vital negentropic energy, a life-energy. Water saves and sustains him and becomes the progenitor of his new self, the symbol of his rebirth. A new life now begins for him in the sand-entrapped community. However, while chaos theory describes the self-organizing of disorder and its deep structures of order, chaotic systems are also prone to unpredictable fluctuations and bifurcations. The same is true of Niki's new life, and the novel has an uncertain, radically open ending, one that befits all chaotic systems. It also befits water and sand and Abe's protean self, in all their fluidity.

並列關鍵字

Japanese literature ； Kobo Abe 1924-1993 ； Suna no onna 1962 ； The Woman in the Dunes 1964 ； water and sand ； thirst ； rebirth ； entropy ； negentropy ； chaos theory

參考文獻

Abe, Kobo.,E. Dale Saunders. (Trans.)(1991).The Woman in the Dunes.New York:Vintage.

Arnheim, Rudolph.(1971).Entropy and Art: An Essay on Disorder and Order.Berkley:U of California P.

Beckett, Samuel.(1954).Waiting for Godot.New York:Grove P.

Brady, Patrick.(1990).Chaos Theory, Control Theory or: A Story of Three Butterflies.Modern Language Studies.20(4),65-79.

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