Riverrun: a Joycean tract to keep the professors busy for centuries

[charlesreid1]

Hi folks,

This issue is to declare my intent to participate in NaNoGenMo 2016, with a dense, incomprehensible Joycean tract called Riverrun. This uses a Queneau generator to chop up James Joyce's book Ulysses and arrange the pieces into a new novel. More specifically, it uses leonardr's wonderful Olipy library to make most of the magic happen.

Link to Riverrun text

Link to Riverrun code

Sample:

"And he showed them glistering coins of the tribute and goldsmith notes the worth of two pound nineteen shilling that he had, he said, for a song which he writ. Omnis caro ad te veniet. Do you remember her, Vincent? I wish you could have seen my queen today, Vincent said. Lawksamercy, doctor, cried the young blood in the primrose vest, feigning a womanish simper and with immodest squirmings of his body, how you do tease a body! Drat the man! Bless me, I’m all of a wibbly wobbly. And how I am punished! The inferno has no terrors for me. And as no man knows the ubicity of his tumulus nor to what processes we shall thereby be ushered nor whether to Tophet or to Edenville in the like way is all hidden when we would backward see from what region of remoteness the whatness of our whoness hath fetched his whenceness.

Joyce on Ulysses: "I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality." (As quoted in Ellmann, James Joyce (1982)).

What makes this challenging is that the novel has such wildly different styles in each chapter, requiring each chapter to be constructed separately, and different strategies to be implemented for each chapter. For example, most of the chapters can be chopped up into sentences, split at periods ".", and rearranged to create the Ulysses remix. However, the last chapter of Ulysses, "Penelope," Chapter 18, consists of about 5 extremely long, multi-page run-on sentences, meaning the approach of chopping at periods must be abandoned. New approaches must be adopted. Decisions must be made. Blood must be shed.

The same is true of Chapter 7, "Aeolus," which is sprinkled with newspaper headlines, and Chapter 15, "Circe," which uses a literary style that's halfway between a play and narration (a style Joyce called "hallucination"). Chapter 16, "Eumaeus," also presents some challenges, since it is filled with tables, numbers, dates, and lists.

Future (2016) improvements:

• less redundancy in opening chapters
• improved structure and typesetting for Chapters 7, 15, and 16
• add a stylesheet
• add a page with "how it works" information

Future (2017) improvements:

• For next year's NaNoGenMo I plan to modify this novel to generate academic footnotes and sprinkle them throughout the text, to fill the entire novel with bizarre and obscure references to literature, music, pop psychology, and Irish politicians