novel by factors

In the spring of 1983, a chain-smoking grad student at the University of Montana named Donovan Zorelli attempted a literary project, the pointlessness and depth of which have never been fully grasped. His thesis, entitled Constructing a Novel by Factors, outlined his ambition in its early stages, and only later was the complexity of his undertaking to deteriorate his mental health to the point where he couldn’t even form meaningful sentences.

Donovan’s idea seemed simple enough at first: to write a novel where the factors of the total number of pages determined different possible ways in which the story could be read. For instance, a story with six pages could be read straight through, from pages one to six, or, using the factors of six, one could read every other (second) page, every third page, or just the sixth page, and each would be its own encapsulated story.

For a novel, this becomes slightly more complicated. Donovan wanted to have 144 pages in his book, leading to fifteen different storylines. In the fall of 1982, what’s now known as the ‘gestation period,’ Mr. Zorelli read compendiums of Borges and Nabokov’s short stories and became intrigued by the idea of ‘hypertexts,’ stories with multiple levels and continuums of meaning embedded inside. To quote from his thesis:

"I first got the idea after reading Borges’ The Garden of Forking Paths, and later thinking heavily about Tsui Pen’s labyrinthine novel. The reason people had trouble with it was because characters would die and reappear, and because the temporally-scattered stories were laid out sequentially. Dr. Stephen Albert tells the narrator about how certain events can be the product of different pasts, and so their interpretation relies on the viewpoint of the observer."

With my novel, I hope to create a perfect version of said labyrinthine novel by having key events with different precedents and results, but instead of laying them out in a straightforward manner, I want them to be encrypted into the work itself through a simple means allowing the depth to achieve a modicum of complexity."

Donovan set about this task by listing and considering the various considerations required by such a project. The first step was, of course, to pick a number to factor. He chose 144 for two reasons, it is a relatively workable amount of pages for a novel, and it has a lot of factors. To greatly simplify his project, he could simply write a book with 139 pages, since it has only one and itself for factors, but there would have been no glory in that, no fame, no women, no Demeter bowls full of cocaine.

After settling on 144, he had to get a piece of paper and a pencil and factor it out, its factors being 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 16, 18, 24, 36, 48, 72, and, of course, 144. To bring this math lesson back into relevance, each factor listed doubles as the number of pages and the starting page for different storylines. Using the factor pair 6 and 24, you realize that starting on page 24 you get a story 6 pages long, reading only pages 24, 48, 72, 96, 120, and 144.

With the math worked out, there were formatting problems to take into consideration, like what to do with page breaks, i.e. where can they go without ruining the structure of the project. It would be easy to make each page self-contained and without split paragraphs and sentences, but this looks forced and weird to anybody who has spent any amount of time reading novels. The charm of the entire project relies on the idea of a normal novel with hidden layers, not a long chunk of random text sliced to fit the needs of the project. No, there would have to be page breaks.

To settle this problem, he divided the pages into three categories: starter pages, links, and prime pages. Starter pages, pages which start a storyline and are also the factors listed above, would have to be contained at both ends, with no dangling paragraphs at either end of the page. The reasoning for this is pretty straightforward: stories don’t begin in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, and because almost all of the starter pages are proceeded by each other in one or another storyline, they would have to be sealed off at the bottom of the page with a conclusive paragraph as well.

Pages he classified as links were active pages in two or more storylines and were not the first pages of any storylines (the last page is always 144, so that’s not an issue here, since that page is also its own story and therefore counts as a closed-off starter page by the logic in the preceding paragraph) and so they always had a page before and after, which could be made flush with all storylines if clever page breaks were used.

However, not all pages were part of multiple storylines, and these pages, categorized by Donovan as ‘prime pages,’ would only appear in the actual 144-page novel. With these pages, he could use whatever breaks he wanted as long as they matched up with the pages before and after. After making a chart with the numbers 1-144 in rows of 12, he made lines through all the numbers that were multiples of factors, pages that were not ‘prime pages,’ and ended up with four pretty columns of virgin pages (the columns were the numbers below 1, 5, 7, and 11 in the first row.)

With most of the logistics out of the way, this audacious Zorelli had to figure out how to attack this beast with a pen. Write it straight through? Write every other page first and fill in the blanks? He eventually decided he would have to start backwards, working from the shortest storyline to the longest, since it would be easier to fill in blanks than conceive the entire novel at once, something akin to the way Vonnegut says Tralfamadorians see the world in Slaughterhouse Five.

He started with pages 72 and 144, since they would have to function in the greatest number of storylines, (twelve and fifteen, respectively) and had to make the tricky decision of deciding what would actually happen on these pages. The keys to the project, concepts that came to him in an epiphany moment, were ambiguity and context. He knew that with the right contexts, ambiguity would go unnoticed.

To give an example of what I mean when waving around these vague descriptors, let’s say that page 72 is a sex scene. On the page itself, the act of sex between two persons is described, using photographic details. But we all know that sex is never just sex. If we just see a picture of two people having sex, we don’t know if it’s consensual, if the parties are related, how old the girl is, or even whether she’s alive. Since this page, our theoretically sexy page 72, takes place in multiple storylines, the author doesn’t have to work within the confines of pages 71 and 73 to tell us what’s going on. There are 23 pages in the novel by factors that border this page in the total permutations of this story, and using pages 60 and 84 (in the every-twelve-pages storyline) or pages 66 and 78 (the every-six-pages storyline) Donovan now had options for placing the ambiguous sexual ‘photograph’ of page 72 into different contexts, different means of interpretation where it could be read as necrophilia, incest, or rape, or whatever he was into by the time he was that far into whatever mental degradation the project was slowly, irreversibly forcing him into.

Assuming that by some thunderbolt of fortune he’d actually succeed at finishing a draft of his novel, there were more considerations to consider. The most obvious was formatting. The way a novel appears on a computer screen or a typewriter is usually not the way it’s going to appear in novel form. The pages he wrote would have to be the actual pages of the book. With most books this would not matter, but with his the entire work depended on its page layout, and this leads us into the second question his theoretically finished and ready-for-publication book would need answered: how important is the premise of factors for initial publication?

To rephrase this, there are really two ways to make the idea interesting to the literary community, the first being to market this book initially as a novel by factors, and the second being to write a seemingly innocuous book and have it be ‘discovered’ later by the world that this unpopular novel written off as crap by the critics had this secret layer of encrypted brilliance all along.

The second method was, by far, the one preferred by Zorelli when working on his thesis, but to get the work through publication with its layout unsodomised would require the cooperation of the publishers, who probably wouldn’t accommodate him unless tipped off to the veritable mathematical devil’s machine hidden underneath the words. However, if he could successfully pull off this second method, the value of second, third, and fourth editions would sky rocket, maybe even resulting in the publication of ‘study guide’ editions with seven hundred pages, each storyline being printed in its entirety, sequentially, in one book, complete with introductions and analyses by renowned writers and professors of literature from colleges replete with brick buildings and huge government subsidies to develop top secret weapons in sub-basements using ridiculous advances in theoretical physics.

In the end, the project proved to be too much for Donovan Zorelli. His girlfriend stole his car and drove to New Jersey, and his cat died after weeks of neglect. He was later found by authorities in a puddle of his own juices and solids among stacks and scatters of hundreds of index cards, babbling about the ‘ultimate labyrinthine novel’ and how ‘maybe it should have 496 pages because, after all, 496 is a perfect number and that would lead to the perfect novel.’

 

(c) j baugher 2006