"From the reader's point of view, the existence in literature of potentiality in its Oulipian sense has the charm of introducing duplicity into all written texts, whether Oulipian or not. It isn't merely a sonnet in Queneau's 100,000 Billion Sonnets on which doubt is cast by the horde of alternatives waiting to take its place; the most practical work of prose, no matter how sturdy it may seem in its apparent uniqueness, will prove just as fragile as soon as one thinks of subjecting it to S+7 or Semo-Definitional Literature" (Motte, Oulipo [U. of Nebraska Press, 1986], 126).
(The two last named procedures replace words in a text either with other words found a certain number of spaces later in a dictionary or with their dictionary definition. 100,000 Billion Poems was the work around which Oulipo was founded: ten sonnets of fourteen lines each, composed so that any line of any sonnet can be replaced with the equivalent line from any other sonnets, yielding ten-to-the-fourteenth poems.)
Mathews' terms duplicity and doubt (which seem as if they might have come from a famous essay on Hamlet by Harry Levin), can best be understood as the contrary of inevitability. Texts, especially texts embalmed in a literary canon, are sometimes studied as if they could never have had any other form than the one they took. Even when we compare drafts with the result, we're usually looking to see how the text was improved by the process of rewriting it. Ezra Pound's overhaul of Eliot's The Waste Land is a familiar example.
In other words, we're assigning value to form seen as perfectible. Of course this is a platonic entelechy, never realizable in practice. But there is also that pleasure in seeing what a text might have been if it had not been changed, growing perhaps from a sense that the editor, even when this is the same person as the author, may make changes that bring the text more into conformability with some exterior sense of value — and then we're back to Normal Art (on which see an earlier posting). The strangeness of the earlier versions, the way in which they don't "compose" as neatly as the final one, is a value in itself, unless of course the process of revision has tended to "make it strange," as sometimes happens.
Of course writers will always be faced with forking paths at every level of composition, and of course they need to make up their minds, and to do so they need some sort of canon of value. But Mathews' point is about readers, a group that also includes authors (who are the first readers of what they have written). The image of the alternatives lurking behind the elements of linguistic composition at every level, like the alternative universes evoked by quantum mechanics (and also by 'Pataphysics), is deeply pleasing to me. And writers need to play, in order to find the value around which a text will form. Using a procedure that throws your expression away, a long way away, from what you'd thought you meant to say, is not guaranteed to produce usable results, but it will create fascinating, delightful language-structures that may after all be usable in some way you never would have come upon.
Next time we'll get to the semantic application of "Mathews' Algorithm," and to an interesting variation on it that The Writhing Society came up with and that yielded good results: the "100 Camels" constraint.
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