Chekhov's Mistress

Mark Ford on Harry Mathews and The Oulipo Compendium

by Bud Parr


I like it when major review outlets talk about books that came out a while ago instead of the latest hot item. In this week’s New York Review of Books Mark Ford does a good job of talking about Harry Mathews’ My Life in CIA and an even better job of talking about the Mathews edited Oulipo Compendium (Ford’s article is unfortunately for subscribers or available for $3). Both of the books were published in 2005 and the Compendium is merely a revised edition originally published in 1998.


I wrote about My Life in CIA (see my post) late last year and although Ford touches on some of the same issues, his article adds more background. I’d like to have seen more of his take on the Oulipo Compendium because the article was weighted toward Mathews’ novel, even though his segue between the two puts the novel in an interesting context of paranoia literature and fantasy/reality that I didn’t really think about when reading it. Still, Ford really whets your appetite for the Compendium.


For instance, he discusses Raymond Queneau’s work that was the founding piece of the movement, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, from 1960:


“It consists of ten sonnets each, in the original edition, cut into fourteen strips. The reader is invited not just to read the sequence through, but to devise his or her own set of sonnets by starting with, say, line one of sonnet four, followed by line two of sonnet eight, followed by line three of sonnet one, and so on. Since each sonnet obeys the same rhyme scheme, and all are grammatically devised so any given line is interchangeable with the corresponding line in the other nine sonnets, these poems can be used to generate 1014, i.e., 100,000,000,000,000, poems which, Queneau once calculated, would take someone reading this short book twenty-four hours a day 190,258,751 years to read from start to finish.”


If this is the kind of work they started with, it’s interesting to think of where they’ve gone since, with grammatical games, or a piece whose structure is based upon the constrained movement of a knight on a chessboard. Even this somewhat mathematic phobic writer is fascinated by the games this group has managed to play with words. Still, to write an entire book excluding the letter “e” seems more interesting in the writing than in the reading (I’ve not read the book, A Void, in its English incarnation). But as Ford points out “their experiments are conducted in the spirit of disinterested curiosity, rather than with any specific literary work or goal in mind,” which as a disclaimer of sorts says to me to just jump in and enjoy the ride.


For more information on Oulipo and constraint based literature, see Derik Badman’s MadInkBeard.



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posted September 19, 2006

comments

The most surprising thing about A Void is not that it’s written without any Es, but that it’s actually an enjoyable read.

    – James (09/20  at  11:28 AM)


A Void is an enjoyable read. What astounds me is that these works can actually be translated effectively.

    – Isabella (09/20  at  04:20 PM)


It is amazing, but I guess like poetry, it is an interpretation.

Ford says that “Life: A User’s Manual” is one of the greatest novels of the 20th Century.

    – Bud Parr (09/20  at  04:51 PM)


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