Perverbs and Snowballs

O to see man's stern poetic thought publicly expanding recklessly imaginative mathematical inventiveness, openmindedness unconditionally superfecundating nonantagonistical hypersophisticated interdenominational interpenetrabilities. This pyramid of words, each one a letter longer than the one above, is a snowball sentence. Read with care, from top to bottom, it actually makes sense. As difficult to compose as they are to pronounce, sentences like these are common coinages of OuLiPo--an abbreviation of Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature). OuLiPo's 17 members -- all Paris-based writers and scientists -- meet once a month at well-lubricated lunches to discuss the creation of new literary structures, most of them based on mathematical forms. Asks the group's formal manifesto: "Must we abide by the known recipes and obstinately refuse to imagine new formulas? What certain writers have introduced in their fashion, with talent (indeed genius), OuLiPo intends to do systematically and scientifically, and if need be, by resorting to the good offices of computers." "Structure is the work of OuLiPo," explains Mathemagician Francois LeLionnais, 75, a founder of the organization. "We are not interested in great literature, though we appreciate it." Adds Novelist Georges Perec: "We reject the noble image of literature as a divine inspiration. In our view, language is a kind of putty that we can shape." Among the stranger shapes issuing from the OuLiPo factory are palindromes--words or statements that read identically backward and forward. "Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts," is elementary to an OuLiPo member. Perec has produced Ou LiPo's longest palindrome: a 5,000-letter treatise--on palindromes. Other OuLiPoian inventions are equally astonishing. Poet Jean Lescure's N (or V) +7 formula takes the noun or verb of a given text and replaces it with the seventh of the following nouns (or verbs) in any given dictionary. In the February issue of Scientific American, Columnist Martin Gardner, an OuLiPo fan converts the opening two lines of Moby Dick into: "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago--never mind how long precisely--having little or no Mongol in my purulence, and nothing particular to interest me on shortbread, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery partiality of the worriment." Strip Flipper. OuLiPo's only American, Harry Mathews, has contributed "perverbs"--combined proverbs permuted until the mind is dizzied and the meaning transmogrified: "Every cloud is another man's poison"; "The road to Hell is paved with rolling stones." Poet Jacques Bens writes "irrational sonnets" based on the value of pi carried to the fourth decimal place: 3.1415. The 14 lines are divided into groups containing three, one, four, one and five lines--in that order. Perec's greatest verbalistic missile is a lipogram--a composition that completely omits one letter of the alphabet. There is not a single e in his highly praised novel, La Disparition--an omission that some critics failed to notice. "There were no problems of inspiration," recalls Perec. "After a while, the letters of the alphabet became the real characters of the novel." OuLiPoets have a host of illustrious predecessors: the Greek poet Pindar (circa 500 B.C.) wrote an ode without using the letter sigma. Lewis Carroll, an Oxford mathematician better known for the Alice books, liked to mix the logic of numbers with the freedom of dreams. In this century, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings and Vladimir Nabokov all enjoyed the pleasures of arithmetic while exploring the peripheries of language. But it was not until 1960 that the newly formed OuLiPo officiated at the shotgun wedding of science and literature. Its first and still most remarkable product was Cent Milie Milliards de Poems (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), written by the late Raymond Queneau, a novelist (Zazie dans le Metro) and co-founder of OuLiPo. The book consists of ten sonnets, ingeniously sliced into 14 strips. By flipping the strips left or right, the reader can construct 1014 intelligible poems. OuLiPo's lunatic fringework also included spoonerisms--deliberate slips of the tongue that gave different leanings to mexicons. Tales were written by the "decision tree" method used in programming computers, presenting the reader with choices. For example, Queneau's A Tale in Your Own Fashion begins, "Do you wish to hear the story of the three alert little beans? If yes, jump to 4. If not, jump to 2." Picking 4, the reader continues, "Once there were three little beans dressed in green ... if you like the description, jump to 5. If you prefer another description, jump to 9." In effect, the reader writes his own story. The story that no reader can write tells where OuLiPo's experiments will end. In addition to a trilogy of black- and blue-humored novels (Tlooth, The Conversions, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium), Mathews has recently composed poems to be printed on Mobius strips; works based on algorithms; and even a sentence that, spoken by a crow to a scarecrow, contains in sequence the sounds of all the letters in the alphabet: "Hay, be seedy! He-effigy, hate-shy jaky yellow man, oh peek, you are rusty, you've edible, you ex-wise he!" To fashion such creations, the OuLiPoians must be, as Martin Gardner characterizes them, "whimsical and slightly mad, as well as brilliant and too little known." But in art as in science, experiment leads to discovery and to higher forms of expression and invention. Poet Wallace Stevens once observed, "In the world of words, the imagination is one of the forces of nature." OuLiPo is a tour de force of nature--and yet another proof that the gap between science and art can still be bridged.

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