Combinatorics

Combination and recombination of text, images, or other media to create varied storylines or poetic structures from a defined set of elements, enabling intricate patterns of interaction and interpretation
Nat Moore 2025-03-14

Explication

Combinatory text generation pre-dates electronic literature. From the Latin poet Porphyrius Optatianus in the 4th century, to the medieval theologian Ramon Llull, to Oulipian experiments in constraint (such as Georges Perec’s 1969 lipogrammatic novel La Disparition, which does not use the letter “e”), literature has a long history of formalized procedures that blur the boundary between algorithm and author. Or indeed the boundary between machine and author; John Clark’s 19th century Latin Verse Machine, for example, generated lines of Latin hexameter via an ingenious mechanical system of pulleys, levers, and cogs.

Computational combinatory text generation is broadly similar to its pre-digital predecessors, with the main difference being that it is a computer, as opposed to a person or a mechanism, that arranges or permutes the chosen constitutive elements. Although it is important not to conflate electronic literature with combinatorial procedures, pioneering literary experiments with computers, such as Christopher Strachey’s 1952 love letter generator, or Theo Lutz’s 1959 Stochastiche Texte, are explicitly combinatorial in their procedural transformations of source texts. The former, for example, generates love letters by inserting a randomly selected element from a list of romantic words into an empty slot within a syntactic template (such as “You are my [adjective] [noun]”). The latter enacts a similar alliance of semantic randomness and syntactic determinism, though the very different textual output (Lutz’s source text is Franz Kafka’s novel The Castle) demonstrates the major effect that a human programmer can have on computational combination simply by curating the elements to be combined. These early examples of literary computation set the tone for many subsequent works of electronic literature; as Philippe Bootz and Christopher Funkhouser write, “until the 1980s most works of digital poetry were combinatorial generators” (83).

Following advances in personal computing and the sea change of the internet, electronic combinatorial literature receded into the background as poets explored the kinetic, multimedial, and networked possibilities afforded by new technologies. These same technologies, however, also significantly increase the number of combinations that an algorithm can instantiate, and some writers have continued to produce combinatorial work. For example, Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s 2010 electronic poem Sea and Spar Between algorithmically combines and recombines a small set of words drawn from works by Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson to produce an ocean of text populated by some 225 trillion stanzas. In doing so, they exemplify the potential of computation to radically accentuate and dramatize a set of questions that are naturally raised by combinatorial literature: can an algorithm be an author? What kind of affectual or aesthetic impact, if any, can a mere procedure have on a reader? How can we interpret a system of combinatorial production when the number of possible combinations exceeds the cognitive capacities of a human reader? Is language itself just a database? 

See Also

• Aleatory - Elements of a work that are left to chance, often relying on randomization algorithms to affect the narrative or poetic outcome
• Cybertext - Print or digital texts that require active participation from the reader not just to interpret the meaning of the text but also to navigate through it, for example by choosing alternative paths or entering data that alters the output
• Generative Poetry - Poetry created through the use of algorithms or computational processes, often resulting in works that can change or evolve with each iteration
• Remix - Recombination of existing media elements to create new works, highlighting issues of authorship, originality, and copyright in the digital age

Works Referenced

Bootz, Philip, and Christopher Funkhouser. “Combinatory and Automatic Text Generation.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, edited by Marie Laure Ryan, Lori Emerson, and Benjamin J. Robertson, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014, pp. 83–84.

Further Reading

Funkhouser, C. T. Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms, 1959–1995. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007.

James, Alison. “Randomizing Form: Stochastics and Combinatorics in Postwar Literature.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics, edited by Robert Tubbs, Alice Jenkins, and Nina Engelhardt, Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 207–226.

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