The motifs and structures of folklore and mythology — of all narrative, if you believe Joseph Campbell — are the elements that Mathews' Algorithm could be used to combine. Imagine a table where the rows represent different story structures i.e. sequences of events (but again Campbell would say they're all the same). You could use the plots of Shakespeare's plays, for instance, or of Conrad's stories. The structural elements need to be analogous to one another; so for instance you could do by the order of events, starting with what gets the story going ("dead father visits son," "unemployed sailor takes job as captain of African river steamboat"). Or you could use more abstract categories: "the hero reaches the first threshold and faces an ordeal" or even "complication of the rising action."
That's the rows. The columns would be filled in by motifs from the stories whose structures you used. Or, alternately, you could use folk-lore motifs borrowed or adapted from Stith Thompson or any other indexer of such "naive" literature, or motifs in modern urban fiction, especially in such highly controlled genres as ChickLit or Romance or Fantasy. (For a fine satirical catalog of Fantasy motifs, see Diana Wynne-Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (Rev. ed., Firebird: 2006.) If your first row used Shakespeare's King Lear, your second Conrad's The Secret Agent, your third some work of ChickLit, your fourth a Romance novel, and your fifth a Fantasy novel, you could then fill in the columns with appropriate motifs. Then using Mathews' Algorithm you could recombine them to get the opening of Lear forcing his daughters to express their love in words, a setting in a pornography shop in London, in whose back room anarchists meet, a disastrous altercation between two girls dating the same man, a moonlit reconciliation scene, and the intervention of a wizard riding a dragon to wrap things up.
But even here the Algorithm can be cumbersome. Its best use is really for experimentation, to get yourself thinking in recombinant terms. Mathews' himself (in "Mathews' Algorithm" [see citation in an earlier post]) proposes the use of the Lullian combinator, a set of concentric, independently moveable wheels. The "rows" would then occur along the visible rim of these wheels and the "columns" would be bounded by radii from the center. The different wheels could be turned independently from one another, and then read down from the periphery to the center. (Ramon Llull, the great Catalan kabbalist, is too large a topic for this post.)
What we did in The Writhing Society was looser yet. We practiced a constraint invented by Paul Bowles in his collection of stories "A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard" (2nd ed.; SF: City Lights, 1986). Here is his description:
"In 1960 I began to experiment with the idea of constructing stories whose subject matter would consist of disparate elements and unrelated characters taken directly from life and fitted together as a mosaic. The problem was to create a story line which would make each arbitrarily chosen episode compatable [sic] with the others, to make each one lead to the next with a semblance of naturalness."
We remember that Bowles was a friend of William S. Burroughs, co-inventor of the "cut-up" with Brion Gysin. The material Bowles used from drawn from "a group of incidents and situations I had either witnessed or heard about that year." They all took place among Moroccans in Tangier, where Bowles lived. Here's an example: "J. ate so many cactus fruit that the peelings covered his gun and he was unable to find it." Most of the anecdotes used involve only one character, none more than two, but the resulting stories use as many as four and meld their situations.
On our first try we used a set of fables ("The Ant and the Grasshopper," "Who Killed Cock-Robin?"), from which we extracted situations and characters. The next time we come back to combinatorics I'd like to try using raw anecdotal material, which is so much more particular in its detail (e.g., cactus fruit) than what gets mined from "story."
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