Totally Tantalising, This Tome

The Oulipo is a writing movement that uses constraints to produce ‘potential literature’. (Oulipo is an acronym in French: Workshop of Potential Literature.) It was co-founded by Raymond Queneau, who created 100,000 billion sonnets. It’s been estimated that if you were to read one a minute for 24 hours a day it would take you around 200 million years to get through them all. 

Consider the following:

• Queneau created his massive sonnet collection by writing 10, but cutting up the pages in such a way that line 2 of the first poem, say, could be replaced by line 2 of the eighth poem. Some people have reproduced this using computer programming. See the picture below to see what I mean. It is taken from the Penguin Book of Oulipo.

• On the subject of programming, there is a group of programming languages known as ‘esoteric languages’, or ‘esolangs’. These are languages that have been developed for experimentation, not to do anything useful. That experimental focus seems very Oulipian to me.

• Going back to to the poems, I haven’t tried to re-create that idea. However, I did have some fun creating a spreadsheet to mash up proverbs. This is another Oulipian approach, the results of which are called ‘preverbs’. I wrote about preverbs here: Using preverbs to break writer's block.

• And, of course, generally speaking constraints can be very useful in computing.

Having established my love of Oulipo, I should turn my attention to this book or, to be more accurate, monograph. Many of the early Oulipians, such as Queneau, were amateur mathematicians, so this book is not as unlikely as its title may suggest. Indeed, the more I read about the connections, or possible connections, between the Oulipo and literature, the less inclined I am to accept completely Snow's description of the "two cultures".

Berkman has written an interesting and very academic examination of the links between maths and literature. As I have yet to finish reading the book, I am loth to comment any further for the time being. But, as the saying goes, watch this space.

Incidentally, or actually not that incidentally, the heading for this piece is an example of a tautogram. This is an Oulipian technique whereby every word begins with the same letter. Easy enough for a short heading, but try writing an intelligent-sounding paragraph!

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