Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
of literature, partly as a reaction to the open-ended freedom of
Surrealist literary methodologies. Queneau was particularly inter-
ested in the work of the mathematical research collective Bourbaki.
Most the methods developed involved different kinds of word play,
such as anagrams, lipograms (in which one or more letters of the
alphabet are excluded from a text), transpositions, and palindromes.
One of the most famous Oulipian works was Raymond Queneau's
Cent mille milliards de poèmes
(
Poems),
15
a
topic physically designed so that different lines can be combined to
make up the eponymous number.
Members of OuLiPo included Marcel Duchamp, Harry Mathews,
Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. The last two in particular gained
international recognition for their literary work, much of which
employed Oulipian methodologies. Calvino employed the combina-
torial narrative possibilities suggested by tarot cards in his topic
The
Castle of Crossed Destinies
,
16
while Perec produced an extraordinary
topic,
La disparition
, which in true lipogrammatic style, did not use
the letter E (and which, perhaps even more extraordinarily, has been
translated, without Es, into English by Gilbert Adair, as
A Void
).
17
The underlying strategies and theories of OuLiPo can be seen as a
response to the combinatorial and algorithmic possibilities sug-
gested by the computer, and to the more general information culture
emerging in the '
100, 000, 000, 000, 000
s. Before becoming famous, and thus
able to write full time, Perec worked in a laboratory run by the
CNRS, the French scientific research funding council, as an assistant
dedicated to organizing the information in the research library. To
this end he worked on a series of extraordinary paper databases,
the complexity and subtlety of which anticipated future digital
developments.
18
The digital nature of Oulipian ideas was made
explicit when, in the early '
60
s and '
70
s, some members initiated a new group,
'Workshop for literature assisted by mathematics and computers',
'
Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et les Ordinateurs
'
or ALAMO for short, devoted specifically to research into computer-
80
