Stumbling unto Grace: Invention and the Poetics of Imagination

Douglas Hofstadter shows in his hybrid of fiction and mathematical introduction Gödel, Escher, Bach—An Eternal Golden Braid (1979), how the paradoxes inherent in Gödel’s theorem (that “no fixed system, no matter how complicated, could represent the complexity of the whole numbers” (p. 19).), Escher’s complex drawings and Bach’s compositional techniques are isomorphic across disciplines. From Latin in venire, to come upon something, the word invention already suggests an element of accident: finding something that is already there. This paper shows how Hofstadter’s discussions and fictionalisations (via Lewis Carroll) of Bach’s two-part and three-part inventions, illuminate complex yet simple processes in aesthetic work: coming upon, stumbling over, and ultimately writing stories out of one’s ideas and imagination. Looking at the book’s fragmented patterns via Derrida’s inventions of the ‘other’ (such as in his discussion of Leibniz and de Man) the paper argues that the relation between imagination and inventiveness in Hofstadter is mediated by propositions on incompleteness and their paradoxical relation to ‘whole’ fragments.