Playing ergodic literature

“A rather well-known example is Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes (A hundred thousand billion poems; see Queneau 1961), which is a sonnet machine book of 10 [lozenge] 14 lines, capable of producing 1014 sonnets. Several novels have been identified as ergodic over the years: B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), Milorad Pavic’s Landscape Painted With Tea (1990), and many others. The variety and ingenuity of devices used in these texts demonstrate that paper can hold its own against the computer as a technology of ergodic texts.”

(Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature by Espen J. Aarseth (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)

“Ergodic” is being used here to mean literature where “nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text”. In other words, literature where the reader is either encouraged or forced to actively participate in the progress of the text. In The Unfortunates, famously, the ‘novel’ is a sheaf of 32 sections in a box. The reader is instructed to shuffle them into any order desired before reading. I’ve never seen Landscape Painted with Tea, but Pavic’s prior novel,The Dictionary of the Khazars, is presented as a set of encyclopaediae, with readers encouraged to follow the cross-references as fancy takes them.

Aarseth also mentions Nabokov’s extraordinary Pale Fire, surely one of most cunningly constructed novels in the English language. ‘Pale Fire’ is a 999-line poem, presented with an introduction, extensive footnotes and other editorial apparatus. It is only when you read all of them in combination that the novel starts to reveal its secrets. Oh, and it’s got one of the only two narratively interesting indexes in literature (to my knowledge: the other being a Ballard short story).

More recently, the Toby Litt collection, Exhibitionism, has a short story where the reader is instructed to read the sections, labelled A-Z, “in any order except the order in which they are presented” (I paraphrase).

There is more, but not that much more out there. Some of Calvino may be classed as ergodic, and certainly some of the OuLiPo group, such as Georges Perec and Harry Mathews.

It turns out that Aarseth is concerned with how to read Multi-User Dungeons and other computer adventures as fiction, but I won’t hold that against him, because he’s rightly suspicious of Umberto Eco’s rather shady discussion of the various types of labyrinths.