Homosyntaxism
Another procedure involving a source text. The source text (whatever you like) is broken down into its main syntactical elements, for instance:
“Two mountain chains traverse the republic roughly from north to south, forming between them a number of valleys and plateaus.” (sentence 1 of Lowry’s Under the Volcano)
translated into Nouns (N) Adjectives (A) Verbs (V) and Adverbs (Av) becomes:
AANVNAvNNVNNNN.
In this case ignoring articles, prepositions, and pronouns. All parts of speech could be utilized depending on the difficulty one wishes to impose.
From this formula one then creates a new text, inserting whatever words (of the correct part of speech) one wishes:
“Black and red flags flew over the buildings. Uncomfortably, Jake and Marco hid behind the barricades of brick, cobblestones, and tires.”
You may also note that punctuation is left out of any restriction.
This becomes more difficult the longer a chosen text is. Theoretically, whole novels could be written based on the syntax of other novels.
Harry Mathews offers a variant called the PPPP (Perfectible Parody & Pastiche Procedure) in which the syntactical translation is created with words from the same or a different work by the original author, thus creating a text with the rhythm and vocabulary of the author, but mixed to create a new work, ostentibly creating a parody or pastiche, depending on the words chosen.
References:
Mathews, Harry. “Homosyntaxism.” Oulipo Compendium (London: Atlas, 1998). 155-56.
—. “PPPP.” Oulipo Compendium (London: Atlas, 1998). 209-10.
La litterature potentielle (Gallimard, 1973. p. 172-76) offers short French examples of homosyntaxism written by 11 Oulipians, based on a passage from Queneau’s Les Enfants du Limon. Mathews’ English version of the same passage is found in the Oulipo Compendium article cited above.
Tags: Constraint, oulipo
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