Variations on Lessness is a website set up by Elizabeth Drew and Mads Haahr which generates all the possible versions of Samuel Beckett’s source text according to the rules the author himself used:
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 Si and P2 and P3 co-occur in some sentence Sj.
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.
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