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in green who were fast asleep in their pod {...}. If you prefer another description, go to 9.
If this description suits you, go to 5". If readers do not want to hear about peas they are
then offered the choice of"three big skinny beanpoles" in fragment 2 (if yes, go to 16, if
no, go to 3), or, ifthat is not good enough, "three middling mediocre bushes" (if yes, go
to 17, if no, go to 21) in fragment 3. Readers who do not fancy any of these tempting
options are very quickly punished for their lack of patience and interest and end up at
fragment 21, which simply says: "In this case, the story is likewise finished".
Bifurcating graph representing the structure ofRaymond Queneau's "A
Story as You Like It,' Lettres Nouvelles, July-September /967. (Wt' owe
this sagittal representation to Queneau>
4
Even though the structure of the story offers only two choices at the end of each
fragment, there soon comes a point where the sheer quantity of paragraphs to describe
all the possible results becomes unmanageable, the text faces an exponential problem".
One decision point requires 2 following fragments, those then need 4, then 8, then 16,
then 32 , then 64 erc., and very soon the pure volume oftext would be impossible to deal
with. (An electronic version would make the storage and the handling of the text much
easier, but would still not solve the problem ofwho is going to write all these texts in a
154 Garreth Rees, "Tree fiction", no page numbers.
Chapter 2 - page 47