篇名 | So Many Numbers and So Much about Measurement: Quantity in Wu Ming-Yi’s So Much Water So Close to Home |
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卷期 | 47 |
作者 | Julian Chih-Wei Yang |
頁次 | 035-058 |
關鍵字 | Wu Ming-Yi 、 So Much Water So Close to Home 、 quantity 、 Gaia hypothesis 、 hyperobjects 、 fractal |
出刊日期 | 202206 |
DOI | 10.6153/EXP.202206_(47).0003 |
In this article, I will address the roles played by quantity in Wu Ming-Yi’s consideration of nature in Jia li shuibian name jin (So Much Water So Close to Home). I will first examine how he brings the qualitative properties of nature to life by reference to nature’s quantitative properties while equally accentuating the importance of the latter. Then, I will investigate a special quantitative term—“one,” which can be understood as “one-system”—and discuss how it structures Wu’s depiction of nature both according to and beyond James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and Bruce Clarke’s revision of Lovelock. Finally, I will explore how So Much Water anticipates Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects, namely objects with very large but finite magnitude in time and/or space, and how the book treats Benoit B. Mandelbrot’s concept of fractal as a different, if not better, way of dealing with these hyper-sized objects. In the conclusion, I will touch briefly upon the ambiguous quantity “x,” which summarizes the above-mentioned senses of quantity.