What has stalled me in this thinking though is where it could be useful besides theorizing other possible texts. I have since shifted the focus slightly and instead have been thinking of the idea of minimum covering sets (what is necessary to produce the text) rather than procedural chains (what the patterns of the text could also produce).  A basic covering set would simply be the list of words used in a text: “a”, “rose”, and “is” are sufficient to write Stein’s aphorism, but this is not a very useful description as it gives little other information to the structure of the text. The same list of words is also the minimum covering set of lines such as “A is rose”, “Is a rose a rose?” or “A rose rose”. Wordlists, normally combined with a word frequency index, are often used as a analytical measure of texts (see the downloadable word frequency list of Wallace Stevens’s collected poems at the Wallace Stevens Online Concordance, for example), and wordlists have also been known to be used by postmodern poets as replacements of texts.

But what happens if instead of using words we look at all word connections, at pairs of successive words, in the text?  For Gertrude Stein’s aphorism, we have the minimum set of:

{(#, a), (a, rose), (rose, is), (is, a), (rose, #)}, where # again signifies the end or beginning of a line.

The difference between this and Markov analysis is that the minimum covering set does not give the statistical chances of each connection being decided upon. The pairs lie flat in the set — they are purely a set of connections rather than decisions. If, like above, we expanded this to triplets, we’d end up with {(#, a, rose), (a, rose, is), (is, a, rose), (a, rose, #)}

The statistical figures for the aphorism would be as follows:

• 8  words long, 10 if the beginning and end of the line are included as textual markers.
• 3 distinct words, 2 textual markers, thus 5 members of a one-word minimum covering set (MCS)
• 5 members of a two-word MCS
• 4 members of a three-word MCS
• 5 members of a four-word MCS
• 5 members of a five-word MCS
• 5 members of a six-word MCS
• 4 members of a seven-word MCS
• 3 members of an eight-word MCS
• 2 members of a nine-word MCS
• 1 member of a ten-word MCS

The covering sets don’t start exhausting themselves (start becoming trivial) until the six-word set, and the three-word set is the most efficient of the non-trivial.

Whether this is a measure of nonsense rather than redundancy is what’s at stake, but I imagine that, whereas a wordlist can produce both sensical and nonsensical texts of the exact same size, there is most likely a very consistent (with a reasonable margin) relationship between the number of unique relations between words and the size of the text for what we’d call “normal” writing. I imagine that the number of unique relationships in nonsensical texts like those of Stein and Beckett wouldn’t start becoming trivial until the relationships were composed a much higher number of terms than for the same moment in normal texts. I also imagine that texts which started exhausting themselves in low-term covering sets would similarly be described as “meaningless” rather than “nonsensical.”

Let’s look at an 8 word “normal” sentence, using the same methods as above. I realize 8-word sentences aren’t long enough to prove much, but humor me. For the sentence “A rose is a popular kind of flower,” we have 8 distinct words, and so while the two-term covering set will tell us how to put the sentence together, it is otherwise no more efficient than the word list itself. To try and better mimic the structure of Stein’s sentence, we could try and make her sentence “meaningful” with minimum effort: “This rose is a rose and it is rose (colored).” We get 9 total words, 6 distinct words, and no assistance from covering sets. “This is a rose and that is a rose” — 9 total words, 7 distinct — gets results similar to the actual Stein sentence, having a greater efficiency at the 3-term MCS than anywhere else because, just as before, the most repeatable section (”is a rose”) is three words long. But even this sentence, though (possibly) informative and decidedly not “experimental”, has something fishy about it.

In a longer work, repeated phrases would not be the so consistently sized, and so the number of terms in the most efficient regularly sized covering set would be a compromise among all of them. If we posited a sort of smarter idea of the minimum covering set, where it deduced the most repeated phrases as arbitrarily sized from the text, we would see something else. For Stein the smarter minimum covering set (SMCS), might be something like:

{(#, a), (a, rose, is), (is, a, rose), (rose, #)}

which again has 4 members. For a non-repetitive sentence, however, there would only be one member: the entire sentence itself. In a different way, this is what Coetzee found odd in Beckett’s Lessness: that the SMCS for the text was not composed of large enough members. What differs in this picture from Coetzee’s analysis is that, like a list of words, a list of non-overlapping phrases leaves out crucial information of the text’s construction.

This post has already gone on too long, so I will save the rest for a later one, but I think a clear definition of covering sets could help give an abstracted view of the important role nonsense, as opposed to “common sense”, plays in culture as well as show the adaptability of this concept to computer text-generation where the idea of culture is perhaps less applicable.

The simple premise for my game then would be to wander, your character slowly drifting into the coma of beggardom, and the only action you could take would be to talk with other characters, trying to keep them engaged in conversation by whatever means possible. The conversations would be driven statistically, using some simple Markov Chain algorithm, using the source text as well as inputted text, so that the conversational maneuvers could grow organically within each instance of the game. The point would not be for the other characters to understand your sentences, merely that they are able to react to them. Like the novel, it is not about communication, but merely staying in the game.

That said, there is nothing there yet. There are no conversations yet to be had, you can merely walk your little Pilate, using the arrow keys, past the same sketched house, and mutter little words by typing and pressing enter. I have done little testing outside of Firefox, so browsers beware. I am not sure if what is there now will be what eventually evolves into a game, it was done merely as a rough sketch of a possible visual aesthetic.

“Things once they are named the name does not go on doing anything to them and so why write in nouns. . . And therefore and I say it again more and more one does not use nouns. . . Nouns as I say even by definitions are completely not interesting.”

“Nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something.”

“A noun is the name of anything, why after a thing is named write about it. A name is adequate or it is not. If it is adequate then why go on calling it, if it is not then calling it by its name does no good.”

“As I say a noun is a name of a thing and therefore slowly if you feel what it is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known.”

“When I said. \ A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. \ And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.”

The last statement is a bit inconsistent if we are to take her previous statements on face value, but she never admits to actually using a noun to “name” anything, she is “addressing” it. Stein’s problem with nouns seems to be that they refer to things, and it seems much more consistent to call her work nonreferential than to say it is nonsensical. The common reading of her chain of roses follows as if the statement ends with an unspoken “any way you slice it,” a reminder of trivial fact that shares nothing with Stein’s “address.” I have to read more of her lectures before coming even close to a definitive claim here, and I really don’t mean to give this little aphorism such high priority, but the noun to me is emptied by the phrasing and not solidified. When Stein reacts to the cultural appropriation of the line: “Now listen! I’m no fool. I know that in daily life we don’t go around saying ‘is a … is a … is a …’ Yes, I’m no fool; but I think that in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years,” I have a hard time believing that, according to her own rules, she has really said anything about “the rose,” but rather has maybe said something about the color red without having to name it.

In 1969, the Irish-born writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) published the piece of short prose Sans in French. One year later, in 1970, it was followed by a translation (by Beckett himself) into English titled Lessness.

An interesting characteristic of this work is its combination of dense aural and structural patterning and apparent randomness. Both versions consist of 24 paragraphs containing a total of 120 sentences. Each sentence occurs twice: once in the first half of the work and once in the last. Beckett later indicated to critics that the order in which the sentences in Lessness appear had been determined randomly by drawing little slips of paper out of a container.

There are several reasons why I find Beckett’s pulling-words-out-of-a-hat stunt interesting. The technique is not novel, per se, but Lessness is one of the rare instances where a lasting text has been created – the similar methods employed at times by the Dadaists, for instance, were meant to create purely dissoluble texts. The dissolubility of dada-esque experiments relies explicitly on the sense of disorder, and chaos, but also implicitly on the idea of boundlessness. Beckett’s text is, on the other hand, grimly finite, and this effect owes itself in a large part to the fact that Beckett performed the stunt twice as if to prove how limited the possibilities were – a fact which any single instance necessarily masks. But even this assumes that the intricacy and importance of repetition in Lessness lays solely in relation to its randomization. I assume, however, that the “structural patterning” mentioned above refers not to the arbitrary ordering of the sentences but to their internal composition of phrases. J.M. Coetzee, pre-Nobel Prize, armed with some basic FORTRAN code and an adept handle on simple combinatorial mathematics, hacked his way through the text to reveal its complex sub- and inter-sentential patterns. He published his findings as “Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition” in Computers and the Humanities, Vol. 7, No. 4, March 1973 deducing the following rules and patterns:

Rule I. If P₁ and P₂ are any two phrases, there exists a phrase P₃ such that P₁ and P₃ co-occur in some sentences S_i and P₂ and P₃ co-occur in some sentence S_j.

Rule II. Given any sentence S₁, there exist at most three other sentences S₂, S₃, and S₄, such that S₁ is contained in the union of S₂, S₃, and S₄. (This rule does not hold for sentences with unique phrases or for sentences 52 and its twin.

…

The following results, in summary, hold for the paragraph:

1. A chi-square test shows that there is no statistical reason for rejecting the hypothesis that phrases are distributed randomly over paragraphs.

2. Cases are very rare of a given paragraph not having at least one phrase in common with every other paragrah in the same half of the work (6 out of 132).

3. If we follow clusters of 2, 3, 4 … phrases across the 24 paragraphs, we find that they do not fall into any of such elementary patterns as, for example, 1010 … (occurrence in every second paragraph), 1001001 … (occurrence in every third paragraph), 11001100…, etc. This is partly a consequence of Rule I, which says that no phrase clusters form closed subsets, partly a reflection of (1) above.

These results show that the paragraph is not a different kind of structural element from the sentence, for example a hierarchically higher element: at the level of combinatorial rules (though not necessarily at the level of the semantic structure of the text as discourse) it is nothing but a sequence of sentences.

Coetzee shows no knowledge in his essay of the technique Beckett had used in creating the text, which I find interesting because his pursuit in a way seems to be one of reverse-engineering the very process of creation/composition, and yet his results only reveal a hard-bounded complexity, whereas the bottom-up explanation revealed later seems utterly facile.

In terms of stylistic analysis, the published version of Lessness offers some interesting problems/challenges. Firstly, the doubledness of the text is an anomaly not well accounted for in standard measures. Secondly, I would like to think that there would be some way, following in the footsteps of the “Variations on Lessness” project, to disbelieve the primacy of the published version – i.e., using comparative analysis with other of Beckett’s works, could a single version of Lessness be identified as the “most” Beckettian and so undo the mask of randomness given in the published version. If so, what could be done with the second half of the text if one version was given primacy? I think any endeavors in this vein would further elucidate to what pains the author has gone in order to make his own role a mathematical, and therefore certain, impossibility. Coetzee’s interpretation posits a second-order of imagination at play: “This endless enterprise of splitting and recombining is language, and it offers no promise of the charm, the ever-awaited magical combination that will bring wealth or salvation, but the solace of the game, the killing of time.” But the enterprise is not endless, as we have seen above and as Variations on Lessness proves, it only sufficiently seems so and only on account of its limitedness, its endlessnesslessness.

Said the chemist: I’ll take some dimethyloxiomidomesoralamide
And I’ll add just a dash of dimethylamidozabensaldehyde;
But if these won’t mix,
I’ll just have to fix
Up a big dose of trisodiumpholoroglucintricarboxycide.

II.

There was a young man of Japan
Whose limericks never would scan.
When someone asked why
He replied with a sigh
“It’s because I always try to get as many words into the last line as I possibly can.”

III.

Another young poet in China
Had a feeling for rhythm much fina.
His limericks tend
To come to an end
Quite suddenly.

IV.

There was a young lady at Crewe
Whose limericks stopped at line two.

Collected from Wim Tigges’s An Anatomy of Literary Nonsense

From “Appendix II: Memoirs of Dadaism” by Tristan Tzara in Edmund Wilson’s Axel’s Castle