Editing Procrustes (section)

=={{anchor|date=December 2024}}Cultural references==
[[File:The Modern Bed of Procustes - Punch cartoon - Project Gutenberg eText 13961.png|thumb|alt=A man carrying an axe and wearing a sash labelled "The New Unionism" and a group of men in working clothes carrying their tools stand either side of a bed, viewed end on. The bed has a very short mattress. On the headstead is written "Legislative Eight-hours Day.!" A sign behind the bed reads "Trade Union Congress" followed by indistinct text.|"The Modern 'Bed of Procrustes.' 'It is impossible to establish universal uniformity of hours without inflicting very serious injury to workers.' — Motion at the recent Trades' Congress." Cartoon from ''[[Punch (magazine)|Punch]]'', 1891.<ref>{{cite magazine |url=https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13961 |title=The Modern 'Bed of Procrustes' |magazine=Punch |via=[[Project Gutenberg]] |volume=101 |date=19 September 1891 |first=John |last=Tenniel |author-link=John Tenniel |display-authors=etal |page=139}}</ref>]]

A '''Procrustean bed''' is an arbitrary standard to which exact conformity is forced.
* In [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s influential crime story "[[The Purloined Letter]]" (1844), the private detective Dupin uses the metaphor of a Procrustean bed to describe the Parisian police's overly rigid method of looking for clues.
* French philosopher [[Jacques Derrida]], in "The Purveyor of Truth", his response to [[Jacques Lacan]]'s seminar on "The Purloined Letter" (1956), applies the metaphor to the structural analysis of texts: "By framing in this violent way, by cutting the narrated figure itself from a fourth side in order to see only triangles, one evades perhaps a certain complication."<ref>{{cite book |last=Derrida |first=Jacques |author-link=Jacques Derrida |chapter=The Purveyor of Truth |title=The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading |editor1-first=John P. |editor1-last=Muller |editor2-first=William J. |editor2-last=Richardson}}</ref> This is one of [[deconstruction]]'s central critiques of [[Structuralism|structural]] (and [[Formalism (literature)|formal]]) literary analysis. [[Slavoj Žižek]] draws upon the metaphor to critique poetic form: "The most elementary form of torturing one's language is called poetry—think of what a complex form like a sonnet does to language: it forces the free flow of speech into a Procrustean bed of fixed forms of rhythm and rhyme."<ref>{{cite book |last=Žižek|first=Slavoj |author-link=Slavoj Žižek |title=Less Than Nothing: Hegel and Shadow of Dialectical Materialism |publisher=Verso |year=2012 |page=871}}</ref>{{ISBN?|date=March 2025}} Poet [[Hollis Robbins]] draws upon the metaphor to structure a sonnet about cutting lines to fit meter and rhyme.<ref>{{cite journal |url=http://www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.php?vol=2011&iss=1&cat=poetry&page=robbins |last=Robbins |first=Hollis |author-link=Hollis Robbins |title=Acrostic |journal=Mezzo Camin |volume=6 |issue=1 |date=Summer 2011}}</ref>
*Thomas Jefferson used the Procrustean bed as a metaphor in a paper on religious freedom. "Reason and experiment have been indulged, and error has fled before them. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitor? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subjected to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformativity desirable? Introduce the bed of Procrustus then, and as there is danger that the large men may beat the small, make us all of a size, by lopping the former and stretching the latter. Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Jefferson|first=Thomas|title=Notes on the State of Virginia, Writings|publisher=Literary Classics of the United States|year=1884|location=New York City|pages=286|lccn=83-19917}}</ref>
*The [[Talmud]] uses this concept to understand the sins of the people of Sodom. Sanhedrin 109b 5 says: "The Gemara continues to discuss the sins of the people of Sodom: They had beds on which they would lay their guests; when a guest was longer than the bed they would cut him, and when a guest was shorter than the bed they would stretch him."
*The concept of the Procrustean bed has been invoked by [[Eurosceptic]]s to describe the relationship between the [[Eurozone]] and its member states.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/28/opinion/marine-le-pen-after-brexit-the-peoples-spring-is-inevitable.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-0&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article |first=Marine |last=Le Pen |author-link=Marine Le Pen |title=After Brexit the people's spring is inevitable |newspaper=The New York Times |date=28 June 2016}}</ref>
* [[Theodosius Dobzhansky]], a founding figure in [[evolutionary biology]] and [[genetics]], wrote "Progress of scientific understanding is often obstructed and side-tracked when a working hypothesis which proves serviceable in a certain field is used as a Procrustean bed to mutilate the evidence derived from other fields."<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Dobzhansky |first1=T. |title=A review of some fundamental concepts and problems of population genetics|journal=Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology |date=1955 |volume=20 |pages=1–15 |doi=10.1101/SQB.1955.020.01.003|pmid=13433550 }}</ref> Dobzhansky made this chiding statement in response to claims that certain biological phenomena could only arise via one mechanism.
* The Austrian-American writer [[Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn]]'s 1943 book ''The Menace of the Herd, or Procrustes at Large'' is a critique of what the author describes as the negative effects of [[egalitarianism]] as a political philosophy, where state power is used to force individuals to fit the standards designed by politicians and intellectuals.
* In his poem {{lang|pl|Damastes z przydomkiem Prokustes mówi}} (''Damastes (Also Known as Procrustes) Speaks''), Polish poet [[Zbigniew Herbert]] shows an analogy between 'fitting' people to the bed of Procrustes and totalitarian regimes of 20th century trying to create a 'new man' that will be subordinate to their authority.
* ''[[The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms]]'' is a 2010 book by philosopher and probability theorist [[Nassim Nicholas Taleb]], author of ''[[The Black Swan (Taleb book)|The Black Swan]]'' and ''[[Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder|Antifragile]]''. Giving continuation to this idea, in [[Antifragile (book)|Antifragile]], the author uses the image of the Procrustean bed as an allegory to modernity, linking it to present-day man's fear of randomness.
* '''[[Procrustes analysis]]''' is the process of performing a shape-preserving [[Euclidean transformation]] to a set of shapes. This removes variations in translation, rotation and scaling across the dataset in order to move them into a common frame of reference. This is generally the precursor to further statistical analysis. A related problem in [[linear algebra]] is the '''[[orthogonal Procrustes problem]]''' of finding the closest [[orthogonal matrix]] to any given [[matrix (mathematics)|matrix]].
* A '''Procrustean solution''' is the undesirable practice of tailoring data to fit its container or some other preconceived structure. In a Procrustean solution in statistics, instead of finding the best fit line to a scatter plot of data, one first chooses the line one wants, then selects only the data that fits it, disregarding data that does not, so to "prove" some idea. It is a form of rhetorical deception made to forward one set of interests at the expense of others. The unique goal of the Procrustean solution is not win-win, but rather that Procrustes wins and the other loses. In this case, the defeat of the opponent justifies the deceptive means.
* The term "procrusticism" appears in the novel ''Eden'' by Polish science fiction writer [[Stanisław Lem]], where it denotes the forced adaptation of the entire society of the planet to doctrinal, quasi-religious (including biological) models.
* In [[computer science]], a '''Procrustean string''' is a fixed length [[string (computer science)|string]] into which strings of varying lengths are placed. If the string inserted is too short, then it is padded out, usually with [[space character|space]]s or [[null character]]s. If the string inserted is too long, it is [[truncation|truncated]]. The concept is mentioned in the [[ZX81]] and [[ZX Spectrum]] user manuals, where a portion of a string is replaced by another string using '''Procrustean assignment'''—the replacement string is truncated or padded in order to have length equal to the portion being replaced.<ref>{{cite book
  | last = Vickers
  | first = Steven
  | title = Sinclair ZX81 BASIC Programming
  | publisher = Sinclair Research Ltd
  | year = 1981
  | pages = Chapter 21
  | no-pp = true  }}</ref> Such an assignment is also sometimes referred to as '''Procrustean formatting'''. Although the term did not catch on in wider usage, it appears in some references, notably ''[[FOLDOC]]''.<ref>{{cite web
  | last = Howe
  | first = Denis
  | author-link = Denis Howe (editor)
  | title = Procrustean string
  | work = [[Free On-line Dictionary of Computing]]
  | date = 12 September 1997
  | url = http://foldoc.org/Procrustean+string
  | access-date = 8 July 2020 }}</ref>
* The film editor [[Walter Murch]] refers, not entirely negatively, to a certain style of [[film editing]] as "procrustean". If the first assembly of a film is too long by a certain amount, that amount is removed quickly, sometimes brutally. Then the film is viewed at this new length, and progress afterwards is aimed at smoothing out the amputations without adding length.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://folkmanbrothers.com/2010/04/30/nothing-ever-changes-or-does-it/ |title=Nothing Ever Changes, or Does It? |publisher=Folkman Brothers |access-date=14 July 2014 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://archive.today/20130123092408/http://folkmanbrothers.com/2010/04/30/nothing-ever-changes-or-does-it/ |archive-date=23 January 2013  }}</ref> Similarly, [[Vince Gilligan]] alludes to the Procrustean bed when stating that each episode of ''[[Breaking Bad]]'' had to be edited to a length of exactly 47 minutes, 7 seconds, and 4 [[Film frame|frames]].<ref>{{cite episode |url=http://www.stitcher.com/podcast/breaking-bad-insider-podcast/e/38708282|title=Episode 502: 'Madrigal'|last1=Dixon|first1=Kelley|first2=Vince|last2=Gilligan|author-link2=Vince Gilligan|date=24 July 2012|series=Breaking Bad Insider Podcast|publisher=[[Stitcher Radio]]|access-date=1 February 2017 |at=1:00:10}}</ref>
* Procrustes appears in the ''[[Percy Jackson & the Olympians]]'' book ''[[The Lightning Thief]]''. This version is depicted as a [[half-giant]] who is a [[water bed]] salesman. He also appeared in the [[Disney+]] fantasy show ''[[Percy Jackson and the Olympians (TV series)|Percy Jackson and the Olympians]]'', played by [[Julian Richings]] (who also played [[Charon]] in ''[[Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief|Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lighting Thief]]''). The main difference is that the heroes decided to spare him, unlike the book.
* The legend of Procrustes figures prominently in [[Malayalam literature]], beginning with the highly acclaimed poem titled eponymously "Procrustes" by [[Vayalar Ramavarma]].
* {{lang|ro|Patul lui Procust}} (''The Bed of Procrustes'') is a novel by Romanian author [[Camil Petrescu]].
* ''Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed'' is a collection of essays by [[Harlan Ellison]].
*In [[A. F. Th. van der Heijden]]'s novel {{lang|nl|Het Schervengericht}} (''Jugement by shards''), Procrustes' bed is used as a symbol for the strict standards of the society.
*In [[Cormac McCarthy]]'s ''[[Blood Meridian]]'', [[John Joel Glanton]], a [[filibuster (military)|filibuster]] and [[Scalping|scalp collector]] who has taken control of the Yuma Ferry by means of violence, is described as imposing a "procrustean" toll on his clients wherein "the fares were tailored to accommodate the purses of the travelers".<ref>{{Cite book |last=McCarthy |first=Cormac |title=Blood Meridian |publisher=Vintage International |year=1985 |isbn=978-0-307-76252-8 |edition=1st |location=New York |pages=262 |language=en}}</ref> The meaning here denotes how Glanton and his men would not ferry any customer until they had surrendered all of their money and goods, leaving them entirely destitute.
*The Mexican stop-motion animated series ''[[Frankelda's Book of Spooks]]'' features a spidery villain named Procustes, being the nightmare kingdom's royal writer who refuses to accept the shortcomings of his work in a changing world and imprisons the soul of Frankelda, a female horror writer defying the standards and expectations placed on her in 1870s Mexico, within his slumbering mind.