Cut ups and critical fictions

I'm working on a set of pieces where the compositional procedure is the cut-up. This is not Gysin and Burroughs' large-scale aleatory slicing and rearranging. I'm working more deliberately with sentences, phrases, and words. They are all cherry-picked from one source, Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne, a work at the wellspring of natural history writing. White was a clergyman in the second half of the eighteenth century who spent his life observing the weather, soils, geology, flora, and especially the fauna, and among the fauna especially the birds, of the parish where he was curate, Selborne in Southamptonshire. He wrote two series of letters about them to two different correspondents, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. Although he meant to publish them as a book, the epistolary form creates a fine play between the scientific exactness of his observations and deductions and the more fully flavored style of his personal address to men he knew.

So I went through the whole book marking passages I wanted to use. Then I found the text online, downloadable from Project Gutenberg. Using my marked copy as a guide I found and copied the passages I wanted and pasted them into an ordinary Word document. Then I printed that out and for the last two days have been taking scissors to it. I'm filing the snippets in several envelopes as themes and subjects emerge; one will certainly be a natural-historical look at writers entitled "Life and Conversation of Animals." That one I have already begun to assemble, by taping down the snippets to a large quad-ruled sheet; I tape lightly at one end to make it easy to lift and move them.

I began by cutting out longer units, whole sentences in many cases running three or four lines of type. Wendy Walker, who has done this before and was watching me snip, then gave me some advice.

Wendy practiced this method in a piece she wrote in 1993, "My Man," which was published in Conjunctions. It was made up of bits from Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo (which is Italian dialect for "our man"). She wrote "My Man" as a "critical fiction," that is, a non-discursive comment on or reading of a text by using the self-critique that every text contains in the fiber of its language. She did this as an alternative to writing an analytical essay for the NEH seminar she was attending.

The advice she gave me was to cut up the sentences into smaller bits, and to make the cuts in odd places: not to isolate phrases such as prepositional phrases, for instance, but to cut after the preposition, or between the adjective and the noun it modifies.

I have been thinking about these two methods. The first, assembling a piece out of long phrases or whole sentences placed in a different sequence, makes it harder to connect them. (I have not allowed myself to add words of my own, though at some point I might try cutting up two different texts and merging them, a sort of collaged chimera.) And the original author's voice is much more strongly present in the form-of-phrase. I'm very fond of White's style, and I like the way that reordering his statements brings out their shapeliness. But I took what was left over after cutting out those longer bits and cut that into shorter, one-to-five-word segments. My plan is to make one piece exclusively from the longer bits, one exclusively from the shorter ones, and a third that uses both. The last will give me most control but also involve my making many more decisions.

The Writhing Society tried this kind of cut-up with one letter from Selborne last Wednesday. I copied it from the online text and printed it out large on a tabloid-sized sheet. The participants got to work with scissors and glue sticks. I can now say that tape works much better than glue sticks. It took us the two full hours to get a product; I think I bit off more than we could chew. But it was very interesting to see what five different people made of the same text, Letter XVII to Pennant in case you're interested. It's an unusual letter, being about reptiles and amphibians, and contains gems such as "The copulation of frogs (or at least the appearance of it, for Swammerdam proves that the male has no penis intrans) is notorious to everybody." The results were very satisfactory. Half the pleasure of The Writhing Society meetings is hearing what directions other people have gone off in, starting from the same point. "Writhing" is all about alternativity.

The Thompson-Campbell constraint, the 100 Camels constraint

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."

Semantic Recombination

Semantic recombinations are also possible using Mathews' Algorithm. It is interesting about that algorithm that it can function at every level of linguistic difference, from individual sounds, to combinations of sound that do or don't express meaning but are not yet complete words (phonemes and morphemes) to syntactic elements, the parts of a sentence. As I mentioned in an earlier post, The Writhing Society finds that syntactic recombinations don't bring up much in the way of new, interesting sentences, unless there's quite a lot of preparatory work, and even then the results often turn out clever more than generative of further new ideas. Of course we haven't really gone very far into this experiment and would be very interested to hear from anyone who has used it to greater satisfaction. We haven't tried using the Algorithm on much smaller units, such as phones, but it would be interesting to do so with a view to creating new words, some of which might be like the utterances in the dadaist Kurt Schwitters' performances. (There are recordings of these on UBUweb.com.)

But semantic units are units of meaning; that is, one or more words that don't require a context to make a statement. In practice these units are parts-of-story or parts-of-discourse. They are analytical units. Sometimes they articulate a plot or an argument. Stories will begin with a problem, essays with an issue. The structure of what follows will be fairly predictable, even though the content may not be. That is, a story may contain a peripety in which the action changes direction drastically; we may not know which way it will turn, but we still will expect a peripety or more than one.

Because these are analytical units, various scholars have tried to complete the analysis by creating an encyclopedic schema. "Freytag's Pyramid" divides tragic structure into a rising action (inciting moment, exposition, complication) leading up to climax/crisis, and then descending through reversal (that's peripety), catastrophe, to "moment of last suspense," which I imagine is when we're wondering exactly how everyone will die. More recently, Joseph Campbell found a structure to all myth, his "monomyth," and laid it out first (in 1949) in The Hero With a Thousand Faces (3rd. ed., Princeton: Bollingen, 2008). Comparing the story of the hero's quest from every culture where such myths had been recorded, he found a pattern that was independent of the processes of cultural diffusion (i.e. stories invented in one place being retold in another by merchants, conquerors, slaves, etc.). He ascribed this uniformity to the omnipresence in all cultures of Jungian archetypes. The book is worth reading if only for the wealth of stories it brings together.

Another semantic unit, also found in myths and legends though not always occurring predictably at a given point in the story's unfolding, is the "folklore motif." Vladimir Propp published his Morphology of the Folk-Tale in Russia in 1928. The American scholar Stith Thompson followed with his Motif-index of folk-literature: a classification of narrative elements in folktales, ballads, myths, fables, mediaeval romances, exempla, fabliaux, jest-books, and local legends (6 vols. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1932-7). Here is a part of his classification:

J0--J199. Acquisition and possession of wisdom (knowledge)

†J10. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from experience

†J30. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from inference

†J50. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from observation

†J80. Wisdom (knowledge) taught by parable

†J100. Wisdom (knowledge) taught by necessity

†J120. Wisdom learned from children

†J130. Wisdom (knowledge) acquired from animals

†J140. Wisdom (knowledge) through education

†J150. Other means of acquiring wisdom (knowledge)

J180. Possession of wisdom

One of the interesting aspects of this sort of codification is the assumption of naiveté in the choice of materials, even though the composition of those elements may be highly sophisticated. Campbell sees mythic elements even in the modern novel, especially in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. But this post has gotten too long! To be continued!

"Duplicity"

Harry Mathews begins his essay "Mathews' Algorithm" with a comment on the literary importance of combinatorics:

"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.

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.

What I'd like to do here

This blog is all about writing with constraints. It's a topic I want to approach dialogically and not ideologically. I like conversation. My taste for arbitrary invented rules does not extend to prescriptions from aesthetic dictators. I want to explore constrained writing practices, about which I still don't know as much as I'd like, and I want to know what interesting procedures people use in their writing — or their compositions in other media — the ones they've discovered and the ones they've invented. I want to share some of what I know about the procedures invented or collected by Oulipo, and some of what I know about yet other procedures that I have learned about. I may post some of the constrained writing that I do or that the people who attend the Writhing Society meeting do (with their permission, of course). I'll certainly be spreading the words about interesting books, websites, events, and whatever else might interest people who can see the point of this sort of experimentation.

For me the point of it is to escape from the invisible rules and prescriptions of Normal Art, the art produced under the currently dominant paradigm. I want my work to move readers and writers towards a new paradigm. (For more on Normal Art, see the home page of my website, www.tomlafarge.com.) Constrained writing is a means of escaping from old, ingrained, unexamined habits and assumptions. It's a way of escaping the prison of One's Voice, that very voice that writing programs spend so much effort in helping us to find. Raymond Queneau, the co-founder of Oulipo, described the members of that group as "rats who must build the maze from which they intend to escape," and that seems a good place to leave my mission statement for now.

Homomorphic Converters will come out in September

This is the first posting on my first blog. Welcome to The Writhing Society! The Society is an actual class/salon that meets every Wednesday at 6:30 at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY. We practice and discuss composition with constraints — arbitrary, invented rules for writing and sometimes for visual-verbal composition. We drink wine, free at $2 a glass, and eat popcorn for the salt.

This month Proteotypes will publish the second pamphlet in my series 13 Writhing Machines. The series will serve as a manual for constrained composition, especially in writing. This pamphlet, Homomorphic Converters, considers the use of previously used forms for new and unexpected contents. It should be out late in September!