Assorted Afflatuses

While I have something of an affinity for the English language, I do not have an affinity for the "art" that is literary criticism. Nothing, save perhaps the handful of utterly idiotic errors I made on my second mathematics exam, in my one semester of tertiary education has caused me more grief than my French literature class. To be sure, I feel much more intelligent having read such big names as Baudelaire and Appolinaire in their original unfiltered French. Analyzing their poetry, however, has caused me a great deal of mental pain, albeit mental pain for the better.

Mathematics, on the other hand, is perhaps the most pragmatic subject around. It is, for the most part, utterly useless by itself, but, when coupled with a real world problem — particle physics or microeconomics — mathematics manages to solve big problems without messy ambiguity.

As such, when my French literature course turned its attention to Oulipo, I was intrigued. For Oulipo — whose name constitutes a shortened form of "ouvroir de littérature potentielle" or "the workshop of literary potential" — strives to bridge the divide between literature and mathematics.

Of all the avant-garde literary movements producing bizarre, conceptual writing, Oulipo is, without question, the least insane. The writing created using the various Oulipo constraints, while often entirely nonsensical, is at least founded in good mathematics. Moreover, much of the more nonsensical pieces are hilarious, and the more serious pieces are technically breathtaking.

Georges Perec — one of the more well-known "Oulipiens" — penned La Disparition without using a single "e." But, while one might imagine, out of sheer necessity, a 300 page novel without a single "e" would be a meaningless blob of jibber-jabber, French book critics failed to notice the lack of "e" on first glance. Frankly, I found skimming La Disparition a tad frightening. Had I not known Perec omitted the letter "e," I would never have noticed its absence.

One of the more amusing Oulipo works for the mathematically inclined is Cent mille milliards de poèmes or One hundred thousand billion poems. The printed book itself is no larger than a standard hardcover, which, when first I saw it, made me cast doubt on the whole Oulipo movement. I figured the title was nothing more than superfluous literary hyperbole.

Inside, however, the book contains a series of manipulable strips, each printed with a line of poetic verse. I liken it to magnetic poetry. Granted, unlike those absurd magnetic poetry kits, which manage to combine my hatred of refrigerator magnets and completely ambiguous poetry, any permutation of the lines in Cent mille milliards de poèmes actually makes sense. More importantly, it is actually possible to produce about one hundred thousand billion poems, given the number of interchangeable lines in the book.

Whether Oulipo manages to truly bridge the realms of literature and mathematics, I cannot be sure. Nevertheless, Oulipo is easily my favorite way to play with words in a way founded entirely in mathematics.

(For the French-speakers out there, a visit to the Oulipo website at oulipo.net cannot go amiss.)