Systems, Shakespeare, and Intertextuality: Premise 8

Complex systems may change in cycles, from organization, through disorganization, to reorganization.

Narrative texts often move from organization, through disorganization, to reorganization (one way in which they "hold a mirror up to nature"). Campbell’s "monomyth" is one description of this movement. "Problem and solution" is another.

Narrative texts can, in one sense, exhibit the whole movement and, in another sense, exhibit just the movement from organization to disorganization or just the movement from disorganization to organization. Northrop Frye's theory of mythoi might be paraphrased as saying that tragedies exhibit the movement from organization to disorganization; comedies exhibit the movement from disorganization to organization.