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This article is about the structuralist literary movement. See also constrained writing and Oulipo.

Combinatory Literature is a term used to embody a particular type of fiction writing in which the author relies and draws on concepts outside of general writing practices and applies them to the creative process. This method of writing challenges conventional structuralist processes. To do this,the author investigates alternate disciplines outside the common channels of creative writing and literature, notably mathematics, science and other humanities. The author then applies constraints or influences from the new concepts to their writing process. This inspires creativity in literature regarding form, structure, language and narrative plot, among other things. The emergence of combinatory literature is largely the result of philosophers and intellectuals who have been concerned with the interrelated nature of disciplines and the way these combine to affect brain function. Notable proponents of combinatory literature are T.S. Eliot, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, whilst modern writers like George Saunders have credited having a multiple disciplinary background as influential on their work.

History

Philosopher Gottfried Leibniz drew on mathematics principles to answer philosophical questions

The origins of Combinatory Literature first emerged with the work of 13th century writer and philosopher Ramon Llull, who attempted to combine philosophical and religious reasoning with a mechanical device known as a zairja. Eighteen core questions of morality were considered with both religious and philosophical responses. Then, the user was guided by visual aids and charts leading from each of these questions to a response, with the aim of definitively answering any question or doubt encountered. Llull combined logical argumentation with an algorithmic process to create a tool for converting Muslims to Christianity. He believed the user would arrive at true knowledge. The approach of combining different fields of thought, whilst unsuccessful for Llull, would resurface in the 17th century and encourage philosophers toward a similarly cross-discipline approach to addressing problems.

In the 17th century, philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote De Corpore, which covers his work on logic and reasoning. He concluded that the process of reasoning was natural computing, which involved the sum of one's experience, followed by the systematic elimination of irrelevant information until a conclusion was derived. This provided important framework, arguing that knowledge is simply a combination of thought processes. This concept of battling internal processes would later become widely accepted as the philosophical basis for combinatory play in general. At the same time, philosophers Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Philipp von Zesen and Justus Georg Schottelius of the Baroque Period were the first to identify the inherent lack of creativity within the structure of words, and how limiting that came to be for the writer. They suggested that because words had to be learnt, the first naturally occurring constraint to producing literature of any kind was the type, structure and formation of words themselves. Thus the creativity and imagination of the writer was limited by the words they could use. In particular, Harsdörffer suggested that there was nothing that the writer could devise “the likes of which had not been already”. To combat this, Harsdörffer rolled dice, with syllables on each face instead of numbers and then, combining the syllables, invented new words that did not conventionally apply to the lexicon. Harsdörffer specifically borrowed the mathematical constructs of chance and probability to create new words.

In 1666, philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz published his Dissertation on the Art of Combinations, which acted as the foundation on which he developed the “art of combinations”. This was based on Llull's earlier attempt to combine disciplines. In it Leibniz borrows basic permutation theory from mathematics and applies it to other disciplines, similarly to Llull, such as theology, law and philosophy. The logical construction borrowed from a mathematical solution is applied to a philosophical dilemma. Leibniz demonstrates the existence of God with a series on numbered postulations and corollary hypotheses that cancel one another and interact in order to reach a conclusion.

In the 19th century, the notion of combinatory play became widely accepted through the advocacy of intellects and academics, such as Albert Einstein and T.S. Eliot. Einstein claimed that "combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought". Einstein famously came up with important scientific theories while taking violin breaks, as he believed the secondary discipline of music helped connect the different processes in his brain, allowing him to think more broadly about a subject. Similarly, T.S. Eliot believed that one's thought process drew on and applied the individual's unique life experience, the end product being a culmination of ideas specific to that individual. Eliot believed that the breadth of potential avenues of thought contributed to the most complete realisation of the idea. This proved to be a modern interpretation of Hobbes' previously mentioned theory of reasoning.

However, it was not until the 1960’s that the Combinatory Literature movement rose to popularity through the French literary group the Oulipo. The Oulipo took the ideas presented by predecessors Leibniz and Harsdörffer to recognize that writing is always naturally constrained, be it by language as Harsdörffer suggested or some other constraint. Instead of being restricted by these constraints, the Oulipian's developed an approach that not only identified but embraced the constraints, purposefully placing themselves under both small and immense constraints in their approach to writing. These constraints are intentionally taken from other disciplines. They believe that the new constraints they apply to literature focus not on what literature is, but "attempt to uncover what it could be, either in theory or practice".

Theory

Combinatory literature is grounded in a similar theory to combinatory play, being an extension of the theory, however it has one main distinction. The process of combinatory literature does not involve the strong component of distraction that combinatory play is based on.The purpose of distraction is to distance the individual from the work so that they may gain insight from a change in perspective. Combinatory literature similarly seeks new perspectives, however there is no element of distraction that accompanies it.

To find new perspectives, combinatory literature addresses the fact that what initially appears as creative writing is actually the result of internal computation and processing of one’s experience, exposure and personal subjectivity.The author’s experience and perception of the world then subtly, often unconsciously, emerges through their writing. Combinatory literature actively accepts these limitations and, like combinatory play, combines and adopts the rhetoric of an unrelated discipline or idea with the writing of the work. Relying on unusual practices and ideas from other disciplines adjusts the natural limitations the writer faces, often removing current constraints and actively creating new ones. This provides a fresh, original perspective. By imposing these on oneself, the author is forced to proactively engage with the constraints to create a work of literature that defies conventional, traditional narrative structure, form or voice, (among other features) as the work takes on elements it would not previously or naturally have been subject to.

This process has allowed writers like Lewis Carroll and David Foster Wallace, both with extensive mathematics backgrounds, to garner reputations for their unique sentence structure, word play and writing style as a result. For example, upon writing his novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace admits to imitating the structure of a Sierpinski Gasket in modelling the structure of the novels chapters. Lewis Carroll, a cleric and mathematician, wrote Jabberwocky, his famous poem that invents a lexicon whilst adhering to the conventional ABAB rhyme scheme.