Matthew Cormier

Writing by (Imaginary) Numbers

This text was presented by Matthew Cormier at the Contemporary Literary Practices: Communities and Convergences study day on March 20, 2024. The text was revised by the author on April 9, 2025 prior to its publication on Discours/e.

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The Virtual ’Pataphysics of Literary Constraints

I am now a literary scholar by trade, though when I first became interested in reading and even early on in my academic studies, I aspired—naively, perhaps—to be a creative writer, one that would connect with readers in exploring questions of culture and identity, especially. While I quickly realized that I would never become a successful writer, I remained fascinated with the notion of being creative, of what one could call the conditions of potentiality. If we could have creative writers, I wanted to explore what it meant to be a creative reader. I was thus drawn to innovative, interdisciplinary methodologies that might allow us to analyze texts on their own terms in ethical and productive ways—a practice that, I hoped, would be chiefly beneficial to those literatures that we might consider to be marginalized, and later on, specifically, Acadian writing. To this end, and with the technology available at present, I developed a two-pronged methodology that I call “sieve reading.” This paper conceptualizes and interrogates “sieve reading” as a two-pronged digital humanist reading methodology for Acadian texts that make original use of literary constraints.

Sieve reading combines distant reading practices supported by digital tools with conventional close reading approaches from diverse critical backgrounds. It adapts distant reading—which traditionally employs database and textual analysis tools, among others, to read many texts at once across historical periods—and adjusts it to consider individual or smaller corpora of literary works and their aesthetics as quantifiable and visualized data arrangements that reveal clusters, patterns, and tendencies, or so I hoped. Next, to counter distant reading’s known susceptibility to colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and heteronormativity, sieve reading considers this data alongside close readings of these texts to gain deeper, fairer understandings of them. In theory, then, sieve reading passes—sifts—objects through two critical “sieves” to offer original insights about them, merging deductive and inductive reasoning, the power of digital technologies, and our knowledge and expertise as humanists.

My position is that computational tools can be helpful to us as literary and cultural scholars because they allow us to, as Stephen Ramsay (2011) and others have called the process, “deform” the text in order to view it from different angles. We might categorize this approach as a “’pataphysical” one. French writer Alfred Jarry (1911) coins this term, ’pataphysics, at the turn of the twentieth century, though he has difficulty defining it, preferring to define ’pataphysics by what some might call non-definitions, or by what it is not. One of Jarry’s more compelling definitions, however, and the one to which most critics (Christian Bök 2001; Andrew Hugill 2012) have clung, is that ’pataphysics represents “the science of imaginary solutions” (21). To this chief principle, Andrew Hugill adds the following three: “’pataphysics is to metaphysics as metaphysics is to physics; ’pataphysics is the science of the particular and the laws governing exceptions; and ’pataphysics is a universe supplementary to this one” (4). In other words: ’pataphysics can represent a refracted version of a known universe—a simulation, one could argue—in which one can troubleshoot imaginary solutions to various problems. In this sense, writers who anchor their craft in quantifiable, measurable literary constraints—structured data—to create their literary universes can truly be considered to be ’pataphysical practitioners. This concept seems particularly appropriate when considering literary analysis alongside the value of digital, deformative tools. According to Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels, for instance, “Deformative moves reinvestigate the terms in which critical commentary will be undertaken. Not the least significant consequence […] is the dramatic exposure of subjectivity as a live and highly informative option of interpretive commentary, if not indeed one of its essential features…” (2001: 116). Outside of the slight dig at the subjectivity of human readers, the argument, here, is that, while human and computer readers share similarities, they have different strengths and weaknesses, ones that we can exploit in our research.

France Daigle’s Literary Rubik’s Cube

Much of my work has focused on Acadian writer France Daigle’s monumental postmodernist novel, Pour sûr. My goal was to better understand what I took to be melancholic affects in the text that pertained to Acadian francophone minor cultural memory, and I sought to do so by reading the text’s abundance of aesthetics, which made my case study quite robust in terms of data analysis: at over 750 pages in length, Pour sûr’s constrains comprise 1728 fragments split under/into 144 different headings or “categories” that most often relate directly or indirectly to Acadian culture, with each category containing twelve fragments. This form represents a “cubed” novel, since twelve multiplied by twelve is 144—the number of categories within the novel—and 144 multiplied by twelve again—the number of fragments within each of these categories—totals 1728.

As you can perhaps imagine, this structure, in and of itself somewhat of a ’pataphysical rendering of the Acadian hub city of Moncton, New Brunswick, laid an exceptional foundation for a relational database, which I built using Structured Query Language (SQL). For each fragment, from 1 to 1728, I input the correlating chapter and category to which it belongs, important characters and places featured within it, the text from the fragment, as well as whether it was a metanarrative (notes or explanations explicitly made by the author, who appears omnisciently in the text) or narrative (plot-related) fragment. In querying the database, I was able to cross-reference the distribution of categories throughout the novel, deforming “the cube” in the process, with the deployment of certain characters, the language used, and self-reflexive passages.

I was able to illustrate with the help of Python, for example, that, while some categories were clustered in certain areas of the novel, the most consistent in their distribution were self-reflexive and spoke to a melancholia when read closely.

I also blended distant and close reading to examine the roles of different characters and the spaces that they most occupied.

An important finding, too, related to the use of Chiac in the novel, the Acadian francophone dialect that implements English and that is a source of concern for the minor culture’s author and its characters throughout Pour sûr. One of the protagonists and by far the most used character, Terry, attempts to better his French throughout the novel, and the linguistic data reveals that the use of the dialect diminishes over the course of the narrative.

And so, in this particular case, sieve reading proved critically effective for me. It allowed me to produce some compelling analysis, to view the text differently because, in a sense, I let it breathe—speak for itself through its constraints and aesthetics. 

Herménégilde Chiasson’s Poetics of the Personal

Next, I want to turn to the sieve reading of poetry, and in particular that of Herménégilde Chiasson’s collection Conversations, published in 1998 at Éditions d’Acadie. Similarly to Pour sûr and in line with some of his preceding works of the period, Conversations is structured according to the constraint of fragmentation. The text comprises 1000 fragments, 999 of which either come from the perspective of an unknown “Lui” or an “Elle,” with the final fragment being mere silence. In this sense, the collection offers readers its namesake, conversations, which combined make up one long conversation in episodic narrative form which seeks to evoke orality in juxtaposition with what is left unsaid. One might argue that Chiasson then establishes a postmodernist or experimental poetics of the personal to simulate a ’pataphysical conversation or lack thereof, one in which virtual reflections occur in contrast to one another and, in this particular case, develop into a melancholic relationship.

Since the fragments in the collection are identified by speaker, we have the opportunity to map out the entire conversation and read it distantly. By doing so, we can not only analyze the distribution of the conversation in terms of speakers, but also identify certain points of interest along its trajectory to read more closely. For instance, the total count of fragments for each speaker shows a slight edge for “Elle” with 506 entries to those for “Lui” standing at 493.

We might expect such an even distribution from this type of constraint, but the advantage to “Elle” is noteworthy when considering the collection’s momentum. In the first 100 fragments of Conversation, for example, we can see that “Lui” dominates the narrative with 56 entries compared to 44 for “Elle”; however, in the final 100 entries, prior to the “silent” 1000^th fragment, “Elle” totals 54 fragments to 46 for “Lui,” including the last 7 in the collection.

What we might infer, then, is a gradual shift in the power dynamic of the broader Conversation (capital “C”) over the course of many conversations (lower-case “c”) from the male to the female voice. In the very first fragment from the perspective of “Lui” in the collection, readers are asked, “[p]ourquoi faut-il que le bonheur et le pouvoir soient à jamais irréconciliables ?” (9). This irreconcilable difference for “Lui,” this “distance between” the two, is, interestingly, taken up by “Elle” in those final passages and namely in the penultimate two fragments before she is met with silence, the first of which I cite:

Ce qui me blesse, c’est cette distance qui se prépare entre nous, qui va s’installer, qui va s’agrandir, au point ou il ne sera plus possible pour moi de vous parler, de vous toucher, de me faire croire que notre histoire ne passera pas, qu’elle n’est que figée, endormie momentanément, et que mes lèvres ont la force fulgurante de réveiller les pierres de leur sommeil, mais je sais que je rêve, je rêve au fond, et ça aussi, je m’en souviens…

And so, we can observe in this case a “problem” proposed at the outset of the collection from the male perspective: the irreconcilability between happiness and power. What follows are numerous ’pataphysical micro-conversations in that they are simulations mediated to the reader from each perspective—“dreams,” one might call them, as the female speaker does. Unfortunately, however, none of these almost-1000 imaginary solutions appear to work, and the reader finishes the collection with an uneasy feeling as to the future of the relation in its quelling of this “problem.”

Gabriel Robichaud and Reference Mapping

Finally, I want to discuss another example from the genre of Acadian poetry, a more recent work published in 2018 by artist Gabriel Robichaud titled Acadie Road, a clear allusion to Guy Arsenault’s 1973 classic Acadie Rock. On the digital publication, Le Mouton Noir, critic Clara Lagacé categorizes Acadie Road as “une classique déambulation à l’américaine : un road trip identitaire, mais cette fois, en Acadie” (n.p.), and goes on to offer her assessment of the collection as a success, albeit one that repeats the work of others:

Si la démarche de Robichaud n’a rien de nouveau, en effet plusieurs auteurs acadiens avant lui ont cherché à nommer le territoire pour affirmer leur existence et leur survivance, il se l’approprie pleinement. Grâce aux nombreux vers à l’humour cinglant qui agissent à titre de contrepoids aux textes plus dithyrambiques, comme l’admirable “Manifeste diasporeux,” coécrit avec Jean-Philippe Raîche, le recueil du poète originaire de Moncton réussit à tenir l’équilibre précaire entre banalité et émerveillement. (n.p.)

But it is precisely this renewal in the form of repetition or homage which is interesting to read in terms of ’pataphysics, but perhaps one that in this case imagines a solution in the realm of nostalgia.

What I mean here is Robichaud’s abundant reliance on references to Acadian authors and artists throughout his collection; therefore, while a worthy and perhaps more obvious study might include mapping out the speaker’s road trip and close reading poems in juxtaposition with it, I instead wanted to trace the references in the text. As we can see here, the number of references throughout the text as a whole steadily rises, and thus we can see how Acadian cultural nostalgia becomes the work of a clear and progressive project for the author.

In terms of points of emphasis, the sharp climb we see after page 25 represents the poem “Halte n°1” (29). Interestingly, and perhaps logically, as this is a road trip, this burst early on in the collection is defined by Acadian musicians: Robichaud sets the tone as the speaker makes his was across Nova Scotia towards the Cabot Trail with references to Lisa Leblanc, the Hay Babies, Les Paїens, Caroline Savoie, and even Cayouche (30). Next, we find the slower rise roughly between pages 50 and 125, or the core of the book. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the references in this section of consistency are to Moncton artists and cultural hotspots. As the so-called hub of Acadian literary and artistic production, and where Robichaud writes from, Moncton’s stable presence at the heart of the text makes sense. Lastly, outside of the aforementioned poem, “Manifeste diasporeux,” another surge can be seen between pages 125 and 150. This penultimate cluster of references pays homage to the Bouctouche region, namely Antonine Maillet, the Pays de la Sagouine, and Gérald Leblanc, who was born there. While certainly not a definitive nor in-depth study, it is interesting to see the internalized logic of an Acadian cultural nostalgia as simulated by Robichaud’s ’pataphysical constraints.

Conclusion

I want to end my paper by reiterating that none of this work represents a finished product by any means, and you could say that my ongoing work is more so experimental methodology building than hard literary or cultural criticism. That being said, I do think there’s much potential in working between the data and capta that can attest to literary text, and especially when we begin at quantifiable aesthetics that we can localize. Moreover, even the simple visualization of such elements can helpfully deform the text, allowing us to read differently, and, hopefully, gain new insights into both creative and critical practices.

Works cited

• Bök, Christian. ’Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science. Northwestern UP, 2001.
• Chiasson, Herménégilde. Conversations. Éditions d’Acadie, 1998.
• Daigle, France. Pour sûr. Éditions du Boréal, 2011.
• Hugill, Andrew. ’Pataphysics: A Useless Guide. MIT Press, 2012.
• Jarry, Alfred. Gestes et Opinions du Docteur Faustroll, Pataphysicien: Roman néo-scientifique suivi de Spéculations. Fasquelle, 1911.
• McGann, Jerome J., and Lisa Samuels. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. Palgrave, 2001.
• Ramsay, Stephen. Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism. University of Illinois P, 2011.
• Robichaud, Gabriel. Acadie Road. Éditions Perce-Neige, 2018.