Mathews' Algorithm

The Writhing Society has been trying out some of the combinatoric methods invented by Oulipo. I still have not got my head around all the various ways in which mathematics can apply to composition in language and would like in particular to understand topology better. (Is there a "Topology for Dummies"?) Combinatorics, which Jacques Roubaud places at the heart of the early oulipian program ("Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau" in Warren Motte, Jr., Oulipo. A Primer of Potential Literature), is quite complicated enough. Perec used the greco-latin bi-square in the composition of La vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual), and one of these days I hope to try that procedure.

Lately The Writhing Society has been experimenting with Mathew's Algorithm. Harry Mathews describes it in both the Oulipo Compendium and in an article in Motte. He arranges several sets made up of equivalent members in a table like a multiplication table, which is primarily a method of visualization. As a simple example, here is a table in which each row forms a sentence and each column lines up subjects, adverbs, verbs, and complements.

Nixon reluctantly accepted the need for resignation.

Willy immediately rejected a profitable career as a safe-cracker.

Aisha hardly enjoyed eating raw fish wrapped in dried seaweed.

Carla testily refuted the implication that Sarkozy was too short.

Mathews now proposes two ways of recombining the elements, by moving the second line one space to the left (or to the right), the second line two spaces, the third line three spaces. The words that leave the square come back at the other end, so that moving the second line left produces:

immediately rejected a profitable career as a safe-cracker Willy

If one has shifted the line to the left one reads the column down, starting with the original first word. That would produce this sentence:

Nixon immediately enjoyed the implication that Sarkozy was too short.

If to the right one reads the column up, starting with the first word. That would produce:

Nixon testily enjoyed a profitable career as a safe-cracker.

We found that it helps to have a pair of scissors to hand and to cut the table up into 16 squares. But besides being hard to visualize, this procedure, at the syntactic level, really requires quite a lot of work before you can start. I had to change the last of my sentences from "the implication that her husband was too short for her" because of the feminine pronoun that would have introduced. A female Nixon is of course an intriguing, if not a disturbing thought, but in the end we agreed that the results are not worth the work -- except at the semantic level. More about that in my next.