BSHM Bulletin

Volume 25 (2010), 104–118

Mathematics, poetry, fiction: the adventure

of the Oulipo
David Bellos
Princeton, USA

T
he basic matter of language—sounds, letters, words—and the basic matter of
mathematics—numbers—have been in constant interaction since time
immemorial. In two ancient cultures that remain close to us, letters are
numbers. In Biblical Hebrew and Ancient Greek, the letters of the alphabet are used
to note numbers, and as a result many numerical expressions form words of the
language, and many words of the language have numerical value. The Kabbalists in
medieval Europe sought confirmation of the truth of biblical texts in their
conformity to arithmetical propriety—a pursuit called gematria. The shadow of
this irrational quest for doubled meanings re-appears insistently in some modern
engagements of literature and mathematics.
The marriage of words and numbers is much older than the oldest forms of script
we know. It can be heard in the oral poetry of preliterate societies—for the patterns
of recurrence that give rhythm to sounds are inseparable from counting, whether
syllables, stresses, or vowels are being counted. Rhyme and metre are the simplest
audible products of counting, and every one of the topics that arise in the marriage of
mathematics and literature can be thought of as a way of making things rhyme. The
Oulipo has been the most formidable inventor of devices that expand the field of
rhyming—that’s to say, the field of counting, stretching it over an ever wider range of
phonetic, literal and semantic material.
The Oulipo emerged in Paris in December 1960 as a convivial clutch of unlikely
companions who wanted to think hard about the possible effects of conjoining
mathematics and literature. There were a dozen of them at those earliest meetings.
The two co-founders and co-chairs of the group were Raymond Queneau and
François le Lionnais, the former a poet, novelist, and publishing executive, the latter
a mathematician, international civil servant, chess grandmaster and conjuror. The
other ten, in alphabetical order, were Noel Arnaud, Jacques Bens, Claude Berge,
André Blavier, Latis, Jean Lescure, Jean Queval, and Albert-Marie Schmidt, to
whom Paul Braffort, Stanley Chapman and Ross Chambers were quickly added.
Some of these were writers, some were scholars (Schmidt, Blavier, Chambers),
several worked in the media in one way or another; one among them, Claude Berge,
was a mathematical giant, and another, Paul Braffort, was a leading figure in the
emerging discipline of informatics.1 Their topic was mathematics and literature, but
1
Subsequent co-options have expanded the group to include Marcel Duchamp (1962), Jacques Roubaud
(1966), Georges Perec (1967), Marcel Benabou (1969), Luc Etienne (1970), Paul Fournel (1972), Harry
Mathews (1973), Italo Calvino, (1974), Michéle Métail (1975), François Caradec (1983), Jacques Jouet
(1983), Pierre Rosenstiehl (1992), Hervé Le Tellier (1992), Oskar Pastior (1992), Bernard Cerquiligni
(1995), Michéle Grangaud (1995), Ian Monk (1998), Olivier Salon (2000), Anne Garetta (2000), Valérie
Baudoin (2003), Frederic Forte (2005), Daniel Levin Becker (2009), keeping the balance between
mathematicians, writers and ‘others’ roughly constant. About twelve members are active at any one time.

BSHM Bulletin ISSN 1749–8430 print/ISSN 1749–8341 online ß 2010 British Society for the History of Mathematics
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/17498430903489237
Volume 25 (2010) 105

the ‘and’ in the expression is not bi-directional. The Oulipo did not gather over their
long lunch meetings to talk about what literature could do for mathematics. They
talked about what mathematics could do for literature.
Ou-Li-Po stands for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle. Ouvroir is an obsolete
word, cognate not to Modern French ouvrir, to open, but to Old French æuvrer,
ouvrer, to labour, and it means a gathering of workers, for example, an embroidery
workshop among high-born ladies of the French Renaissance. Potentielle was less
quaint but more exciting, and can be glossed in several complementary ways.
Potential means not yet existing, and the Oulipo most certainly was interested in
what had not yet been written. But the Oulipo also gave potential literature a more
restricted, almost technical sense: what they were looking towards were not just new
works, like any splinter group, but new ways of making works of literature, and
those new ways or devices had to have potential in a quite particular sense.
Specifically, they had to be formalizable, repeatable, and demonstrable; and also
generate textual outputs with semantic effects that could not be derived directly from
the constraint or its presuppositions.2
Oulipo has been going for almost fifty years and is the longest-lived of all known
‘schools’ in literary history (but its members would dispute for this reason and many
others that it constitutes a ‘school’). It has thrashed Classicism, Romanticism, Sturm
und Drang, Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Acmeism, Vorticisim, Dadaism,
Futurism, and even Surrealism into the position of chronometric also-rans. It is a
phenomenon that calls for some explanation.
Why did it arise when and where it did? In part, it sprang up to respond to a
topical debate about science and art known in the UK through C P Snow’s famous
but flabby essay on The two cultures. In larger part, Oulipo was Queneau’s way of
getting over his only half-admiring relation to Surrealism, which he found
intellectually vacuous, despite the literary and cultural prestige it held. Implicitly
also, it sprang up as a response to the alarming realization that the whole literary
field would soon be swept into irrelevance by the panzer-like progress of that
unkempt, unregulated non-form called fiction. ‘Anybody’, Queneau had famously
bleated, ‘can propel an indeterminate number of characters like a flock of sheep
across an indeterminate number of chapters through an indeterminate number of
insignificant obstacles, and the result will always be a novel’ (Queneau 1962, my
translation). From the start, the adventure of Oulipo sought to contradict the ‘two
cultures’, to beat Surrealism at its own game, and to bring new sharpness to the
writing of literature, and even to the formless muesli of the modern novel.
Oulipians were aware from the start that the marriage of mathematics and
literary creation was nothing new. Counting constitutes one of the wellsprings of
literary creativity—it is not for nothing that the words for ‘counting’ and ‘narrating’
are closely linked in many languages.3 One example of a sophisticated integration of
mathematics and poetic composition that has played a large role in Oulipian thought
is a form that first arose among Provençal poets in the High Middle Ages.
Troubadours were not just quaintly-clad minstrels serenading damsels in distress, but
2
Mathews and Brotchie 1998 gives a rich selection of Oulipian devices, in English; in French, the website
of the group, http://www.oulipo.net/, has an alphabetical index of constraints.
3
English recount is an obvious example, as is German erzählen (related to Zahl, number) and French
conter, raconter, which despite the variant spellings are derived from the same root as compter, compte (to
count, an account).
106 BSHM Bulletin

Figure 1. The spiral form of the sestina

composers of combinatorial ditties of great interest from a mathematical point of

view. Arnaut Daniel is generally credited as being the inventor of the sestina—a form
so magical that it was internalized and reused by uncountably many others. His
invention is a good example of what Oulipo means by potential literature.
The sestina regulates a repetition. The repeated element is usually a rhyme in
troubadour poetry, but it can also be a word or a phrase. The means of regulating
repetition in the sestina is easy to learn. It follows the pattern of the snail-shell (see
Figure 1): starting in stanza one with six lines numbered 1 through 6, stanza two
repeats the regulated elements in an order generated by a spiral transformation.
The spiral of the sestina is recursive, and each subsequent stanza is generated from
the previous one by the same snail-shaped algorithm. The satisfying beauty of this
particular form is that the reordering of stanza six, if it were done, produces the
initial order of stanza one, but it is sufficient not even to know this to find an
aesthetically pleasing rhythm in the exhaustive recombination of six rhymes, with
each rhyme-word falling in each of the six positions once and only once. The
repetition of the rhymes is rigorously ordered, yet not instinctively predictable. But
there is something more to it. Figure 2 shows the repeated elements in the sestina
form laid out as an array. Reading vertically and left to right, you have the order of
the rhymes in each stanza. But read horizontally, left to right, a cyclic pattern
appears. Like each column, each row consists of numbers 1 to 6, but what’s
surprising is that they are always in the same order, starting at different points in the
sequence. It seems likely that the long-lasting popularity of the sestina form in poetry
is somehow connected to the cyclical rhythm of its underlying mathematical form.
For centuries, the cyclic spiral of the sestina was only known to exist for order 6.
Raymond Queneau was puzzled by this, worked out that mathematically identical
permutations were possible in other orders, and wrote a mathematical paper showing
how the pattern could be generalized (Queneau 1965a). It can’t be done with all
Volume 25 (2010) 107

1 4 2 3 5 6
2 3 5 6 1 4
3 5 6 1 4 2
4 2 3 5 6 1
5 6 1 4 2 3
6 1 4 2 3 5
Figure 2. The cyclic numbers of the sestina

numbers—a four-line stanza, for example, cannot be spirally permuted without

having line 3 recur in the same place twice. Queneau’s formula allows us to find those
many integers that permit sestina-like spirals, and a product of this formula is now
known as a quenina. Further mathematical work has been done on the problem by
Jacques Roubaud (1969, 2000), who has now invented the septina, and, more
recently, by Jean-Guillaume Dumas (2008). The sestina form—an exhaustive, non-
repeating spiral and cyclic permutation of a small set of elements—can be seen as the
very emblem of the Oulipo’s project to re-enact the marriage of mathematics and
literature. The only trouble is that it was done eight hundred years before Oulipo was
invented . . . and thus gave rise, in the only half-ironical terminology of the group, to
the doctrine of anticipatory plagiarism.
Is the poetic value of poems written in this or any other strict form related in any
way to the mathematical beauty of the underlying form? Can potential literature be
responsible . . . for the production of literature? With his tongue at least somewhere
near his cheek, Queneau produced an exercise in combinatorics that might be taken
to show just that. He used not the sestina, but another well-known form of regulated
repetition, the sonnet: fourteen lines divided into three quatrains and a final
couplet (abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee) or else into two quatrains and two tercets (abab, bcbc
ded, ede).
Queneau wrote ten sonnets, 140 lines of 12-syllable verse in all, making a mere
1680 syllables, approximately 700 words. It’s not a lot of text. It can be printed on
ten small pages with plenty of white space. But the sonnets can’t have been easy to
compose, because Queneau submitted his verse to two supplementary constraints
that are simple to express but much harder to execute:
(1) Make the rhyme sounds a, b, c, d, and e of each sonnet common to all ten
sonnets.
(2) Make each line of verse of each sonnet a grammatical unit (sentence, clause,
or phrase). This is also called ‘end-stopping’ the lines.
These supplementary rules were the precondition for Queneau’s simple and
revolutionary next step. He took a pair of scissors, and snipped the paper beneath
each line of verse in each of the ten sonnets almost, but not quite, to the fold. By this
means you can read, for example, lines 1 to 13 of sonnet 1 and turn over just line 14
to reveal line 14 of sonnet 2, making an eleventh well-formed sonnet in terms of
sound (because the rhyme scheme stays the same) and grammar (since the new line,
like the one it replaces, is a unit of the same broad kind). But it is a new sonnet, one
not actually written by Queneau. It takes just a moment’s reflection to realize that by
these four simple twists—the sonnet form, end-stopped lines, common rhymes, and a
pair of scissors—Queneau’s book, though not Queneau the poet, contains or
generates not ten times fourteen, not factorial fourteen, but ten to the power fourteen
well-formed poems. One hundred billion sonnets! That is enough reading material to
108 BSHM Bulletin

last many lifetimes, even if reading poetry filled every waking hour of every day of
every week. It follows automatically that the poetry of all but an insignificant
fragment of this vast work (the ten sonnets written by Queneau) were not written by
anybody, and stand as the automatic products of a poetry-generating machine.
Stanley Chapman translated the sonnets obeying the same rules into English
(a stunning achievement in itself) to show that Queneau’s machine is replicable, and
thus the potential cause of a production of poetry that could easily fill the entire
universe.
Queneau’s alarming poetic device can be seen as a vicious rejoinder to the
Surrealists’ notion of automatic writing. ‘You want automatic writing?’, it seems to
be saying. Well, put away your puny psyches and your shallow subconscious minds,
and try arithmetic! Combination turns out to be a more powerful automator of
poetry than inspiration—by fourteen orders of magnitude.
Another way of making sense of One hundred billion poems is as a rejoinder to the
impending onslaught on the idea of authorship and literary ownership that would
come from Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and their Left Bank parrots in the
1950s. The author is dead? Sure thing! Here are poems that nobody wrote.
Like the sestina, Queneau’s permutation exercise on the sonnet predates the
foundation of the Oulipo, but in this case by not very many months. It was published
in 1959, and served both as an announcement of the Oulipian project and also as an
exhaustion of the very idea of potential literature—since nobody will ever read more
than a tiny fragment of it. One of its more curious side effects is that any kind of
established critical approach to a poem generated by the combination game becomes
a parody not of the poem, but of the method—whether you are using Jakobsonian
poetic analysis, French explication de texte, or a close reading in the manner of the
New Criticism.
The sestina and the snipped-sonnet device, despite their huge importance, do not
seem likely to be productive outside of relatively short, visibly regulated forms of
writing. What kinds of structure could possibly give order to the sprawling, messy
thing called the novel? The question is far from trivial, since the novel is the major
form of literary activity in the modern period. Among the devices first tried out by
Raymond Queneau, but then applied more widely, is the tree structure. A tale as you
like it offers at the end of each short paragraph two choices: if you would like this
outcome, go to paragraph such and such; if not, go to a different paragraph
(Queneau 1965b). In this way a restricted number of paragraphs produces a very
large number of stories.4 Paul Fournel used the same idea in some of his theatrical
works and in a full-length novel, Chamboula, which offers infinitely many looping
tracks around the subject of European contact with Africa, producing sometimes
banal and sometimes stupendous alternative histories of colonialism. But the most
stringent and at the same time most inventive exploitation of a tree-structure text can
be found in Georges Perec’s exercises on incrementation.
The project began with a parody of an algorithm cooked up by Jacques Perriault,
a mathematician working for IBM, as part of a government-sponsored idea to
promote computing in the humanities. Perriault’s flow-chart was intended to
demonstrate what an algorithm actually was, but also (for the purposes of
entertainment) to mock the lengthy procedures necessary to obtain a pay-rise in a
4
Readers can play with the different paths through Queneau’s tale on the web at http://www.gefilde.de/
ashome/denkzettel/0013/queneau.htm
Volume 25 (2010) 109

labyrinthine bureaucracy. The original flowchart (see Figure 3) possesses a binary

fork at each node (IF X then A, if NOTX then B) together with a rich set of crazy
loops in one corner and an escape hatch towards the bottom left, to which nearly all
possible paths around the labyrinth lead.
This is a kind of mathematics—recreational mathematics, perhaps—and it seems
at first glance to be a much more likely procedure for organizing fiction than either
the spiral permutation of the sestina or the exponential combinatorics of the snipped
sonnet. Indeed, genre fiction such as romance and teenage adventure stories seem to
be generated by unformulated but thoroughly internalized algorithms of a similar
kind. What Perec did with this flow-chart, however, was something probably never
attempted before or since: he wrote out not ONE possible path around the floor-
plan, but a text that lays out ALL the possible paths, and to underscore the repetitive
and recursive nature of the undertaking he wrote it out as a single sentence—80
pages long (Perec 1968). It is completely unreadable, in one sense, but also quite
hilarious. A little while later, Perec took the exercise and turned it into something
else—a radio play, with each of the formal functions of the algorithm endowed with
a distinct speaking voice (Perec 1981). The quasi-mathematical constraint of
recursive movement gives the play its irritating, exhausting, hilarious tone, but
actually, it’s what Perec does to the regularity of the loop that gives the play its
meaning. In fact, not one of the repeated formulae is repeated exactly: variation—
seemingly insignificant at first, growing more recognizable and outlandish as the play
goes on—gives to the frustration of a human and social labyrinth a narrative of time
passing, and speaks to us of entropy, despair, resignation, and mortality.
A different kind of ‘disordered order’ has been generated through a quasi-
topological conundrum called the EODERMDROME. The basic idea is simple
enough: find a sequence of five letters which, when positioned at the apices of a
pentagon, produce a meaningful 11-letter expression when the path between them
passes along each of the outer and inner lines joining the five points without going
back on its tracks, as in Figure 4. The word EODERMDROME which names the
device is meaningless, it is just the letters EODMR plotted along one of the many
possible routes of the pentagon-pathway problem. The letters TEASR are more
interesting: they give you ‘tears at rest’.5 But each of these two samples is produced
by a different path. How many paths are there? According to John Conway,6 there
are 264 different ways to track round the pentagon without repeating any segment.
That must be one of the reasons why the eodermdrome, a topological mapping of
letters (or words, or even themes or topics) produces a strong sense of recurrence and
even of completeness, without creating any sense of repetitiveness at all.
The Oulipian marriage of mathematical form and literary expression constantly
tips over into a struggle between the regularity of some generating device and the
irregularity of any human-shaped narrative. To allow themselves a free pass out of
the corner they had constructed, Oulipians had recourse to a somewhat jocular
version of Heraclitus’s account of the origin of living things in a ‘bending’ of atoms
as they fall through space. They used the Lucretian term clinamen for their own
unacknowledged ‘bendings’ of the regularity of the devices that they invented.
Perec’s radio play, with its variations intended to ‘bend’ the course of the algorithm
5
Other examples, taken like this one from Roubaud 2008, arrange letters (e´toile, ortie [star, nettle]) or
words (figs, lizards, snakes, heat, light, figs, snakes, light, lizards, heat, figs) as ‘keys’ to each chapter.
6
Private communication, May 2009.
110 BSHM Bulletin

Figure 3. The flowchart of Perec’s Algorithmic Exercise, reproduced from Perec 2008
Volume 25 (2010) 111

Figure 4. The schema of the eodermdrome

towards a ‘human’ meaning, is a clear example of the play of the clinamen, but the
most interesting and spectacular example by far is of course his vast novel, Life a
user’s manual. It is impossible to do justice to this revolutionary masterwork in a
short (or long) paper; what follows is only the briefest of outlines of its mathematical
underpinning.
Life a user’s manual purports to be a description of a block of flats in a middle-
class quarter of Paris (see Figure 5). Each chapter describes one room, and digresses
a propos of this or that object in the room to tell the stories of the people who had
lived there, or been connected to the object or objects in the room, thus weaving an
infinitely complex web of anecdotes about a cast of several hundred people, among
whom half a dozen stand out as the main narrative figures of the fiction as a whole.
Perec made a vertical cross-section of the block of flats (effectively, removing its
facade) and mapped it on to a 10  10 grid: each grid square corresponds to a single
room (see Figure 6). The stairwell and lift machinery occupy most of two columns, 6
and 7 (slightly off-centre, by design); row 0 maps the cellars attached to the larger
apartments on the left, which have five rooms each, the smaller right-hand side
apartments having three.
But in what order should he describe each of the rooms? Perec used a one-off
solution to the Knight’s Tour problem in chess—getting the knight to travel around
the board alighting on each square once and only once. Starting at grid square 6,6,
on the staircase, Perec’s chapter-order is a knight’s tour solution transposed to a
10  10 grid (see Figure 7). More comprehensibly, chapter and move numbers are
added as well as the names of the apartments’ inhabitants (see Figure 8). Perec
obviously should have written 10  10 ¼ 100 chapters. But there are only 99. Why?
Because one chapter is missing: this is the clinamen as it affects the structural level of
the novel. The missing chapter is an intentional ‘bending’ of an otherwise regular
procedure. The chapter omitted is the one that would have described the bottom left
112 BSHM Bulletin

Figure 5. 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, reproduced from Perec 1979

1,1 1,2 1,3 1,4 1,5 1,6 1,7 1,8 1,9 1,0

2,1 2,2 2,3 2,4 2,5 2,6 2,7 2,8 2,9 2,0

3,1 3,2 3,3 3,4 3,5 3,6 3,7 3,8 3,9 3,0

4,1 4,2 4,3

5,1 5,2

6,1

7,1

8,1

Figure 6. The grid to be overlaid on the apartment house

Volume 25 (2010) 113

Figure 7. The Knight’s Tour solution on a 10  10 board

hand corner location, grid square 1,0, and it corresponds to the 66th move of the
knight.
But there is much more to Perec’s irregularity within regularity. In 1960 or
thereabouts, Claude Berge reported to Oulipo that a trio of mathematicians, Bose,
Parker, and Shrikhande, had used a computer to confound the hypothesis of Euler
that an orthogonal bi-square of order 10 could not exist (Bose and Shrikhande 1959).
An orthogonal bi-square, also known as a Latin square, or Graeco-Latin square,
distributes pairs of elements around a grid in such a way that no pairing occurs twice,
and no element is used more than once along each row or down each column.
Figure 9 shows a bi-square of order 3. Claude Berge’s suggestion to a meeting of
Oulipo was that if you took the letters as characters—say, the Reverend, the Colonel,
and the maid—and the numerals as objects—candlestick, gun, and paper-knife—you
could write a kind of Cluedo novel, using an exhaustive combination of characters
and objects in a rotating, aesthetically pleasing narrative. It would be rather obvious
and narrow if a square of order 3 were used, but if it were of order 10, as had now
been proved possible, then the bi-square would have potential, and would moreover
fit the Oulipian idea of potential literature. Perec picked up the idea, and, after
obtaining the actual bi-square of 10 from Bose himself, he designed not ten, but
twenty-one sets of ten elements each, and used the bi-square to distribute them
around his now-established chapter-plan of Life a user’s manual.
Figure 10 is one of the bi-square distributions Perec actually used (it is in his own
handwriting). Each of the grid-squares corresponds to a chapter in a 99-chapter
book, and thus to a physical location in the block of flats at the fictional address of
114 BSHM Bulletin

Figure 8. The Knights Tour implemented as the chapter plan for the description of 11 rue Simon-
Crubellier, reproduced from Perec 1995

A, 1 B, 2 C, 3

B, 3 C, 1 A, 2

C, 2 A, 3 B, 1

Figure 9. A bi-square of order 3

11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, in the seventeenth arrondissement of Paris. The numbers

at each location refer to a ranked item in a pre-determined pair of lists of things.
What kinds of things did Perec distribute in this way? Perec’s list-topics are a
strange and heteroclite bunch, and are not directly related to his story, characters or
Volume 25 (2010) 115

Figure 10. The bi-square used for the distribution of the two lists of ‘quotations’ in Life a user’s manual,
reproduced from Perec 1995

themes (see Figure 11). Some of these determine formal features of chapters (list 15:
length), others determine physical features of the room to be described in that
chapter (list 9: walls; list 10: floors; list 35: surfaces; list 36: volumes), others apply
mostly but not always to the characters in the rooms at the time of the description
(list 1: position; list 2: activity; list 17: age/sex) or to their clothing, and several of
them control the inclusion of textual material (lists 3 and 4: quotations 1 and 2; list 7:
‘third sector’, meaning printed material other than books) or of allusions to paintings
(list 27) and books (list 28).
Lists 41 and 42, ‘couples’, distribute around the chapters of the novel the separate
parts of conventional doublets: Laurel and Hardy, Racine and Shakespeare, Ashes
and Diamonds, and so on. The use of a bi-square to scatter them around the novel
means that they occur only once in their canonical form, and nine times each in
combination with some other element, producing ‘Ashes and Shakespeare’, ‘Laurel
and Diamonds’ and so on. It is perhaps needless to say that Perec uses all the
resources of his devious mind to hide (to ‘naturalize’) the occurrences of such
unlikely combinations.
With these twenty-one pairs of lists, Perec’s jumble-machine provides the writer
with forty-two independent and recurring elements to include in each chapter. In the
book as a whole, readers would notice strange echoes from here to there, as each of
these forty-two things must recur ten times, but always in combination with things
with which it is nowhere else combined in exactly the same way. A sense of ordered
disorder would be created, a sense of de´jà-lu that would plunge the reader into a
dream-like state of simultaneous familiarity and strangeness that for many is bound
up with the idea of aesthetic experience.
116 BSHM Bulletin

1. Position 2. Activity 21. Fabrics (substance) 22. Colour

3. Quotations 1 4. Quotations 2 23. Accessories 24. Jewels

5. Number 6. Role 25. Reading 26. Music

7. Third Sector 8. Motive? 27. Pictures 28. Books

9. Walls 10.Floors 29. Food 30. Drink

11. Period 12. Place 31. Small furniture 32. Toys

13. Style 14. Furniture 33. Feelings 34. Paint

15. Length 16. Miscellaneous 35. Surfaces 36. Volumes

17. Age/sex 18. Animals 37. Flowers 38. Trinkets

19. Clothes 20. Fabric (nature) 39. Faux 40. Manque

41. Couples 1 42. Couples 2

Figure 11. The ‘list of lists’ distributed around the chapters of Life a user’s manual by the operations of
the bi-square and the pseudo-quenina

That would have been too simple. Life a user’s manual was intended from the
start to be a demonstration text, to prove that Oulipo’s marriage of mathematics and
literature was more than a parlour game. Perec wanted to make life itself enter his
universe and book, and that meant (at least, according to Heraclitus, as adopted by
the Oulipo) making the ‘atoms’ bend and depart from their regularly plotted
trajectories.
Perec introduced a clinamen at the basic level in the floor-plan of the chapters
with the unwritten chapter corresponding to the 66th move of the knight. Clinamen
number two was rather more cunning. Of the forty-two lists, two special ones form a
pair. Called manque and faux, these recursive lists determine which of the ten groups
of four of the remaining forty lists will be missed out in the chapter specified by the
grid-location (the manque list), and which of them will be got wrong (the faux list).
For example, the bi-square determines that in chapter X, something from group Y
will be missed and something from group Z will be implemented with an error. Perec
believed that the recursive use of these two gremlins meant that in the finished text
there would be insufficient evidence to reconstruct the formula used to distribute the
material. But the occurrences of the clinamens themselves would not have been left
to chance. The effect would square the ultimate circle, the tension between chance
and necessity—creating the impression of randomness by means that are not random
at all.
However, there is another reason why the mathematical construction of the novel
is not recoverable from its implementation. Perec did not use the same bi-square for
each of his list-pairs. It turned out that the mathematical procedure discovered by
Raymond Queneau for generalizing the sestina could also be tweaked to generalize
the bi-square, that is to say, to redistribute the numbers produced by Bose, Parker,
and Shrikhande in an almost infinite variety of ways. This procedure, called a
Volume 25 (2010) 117

pseudo-quenina by Perec and his commentators until recently, is now known as a

perequine. As a generating device for Life a user’s manual it is redundant, partly
because the recursive operation of ‘miss’ and ‘wrong’ breaks the regularity of
distribution, but mostly because Perec did not actually fulfill all the constraints that
his machine laid down for him! This is clearly evident from the working document
that Perec established, chapter by chapter, to track his own completion of the
‘specification’ laid down by his bi-squares. Constraints fulfilled are checked off in
highlighter—but in no chapter did Perec check all of his specifications, and in many
of them barely half are acknowledged (see Perec 1995—one of the most beautiful and
strange ‘genetic documents’ ever published).
The implicit claim of the ground-plan of Life a user’s manual is therefore both
perfectly clear and completely two-faced. This great novel seems to say (a)
mathematics is the literal ground on which literature stands; (b) to become a work
of literature, the mathematics must be broken, disrupted, and treated as a joke.
Such a Janus-like attitude towards the marriage of mathematics and literature is,
on the one hand, characteristic of Georges Perec, who described himself in his
autobiographical novel W or the memory of childhood as ‘like a child playing hide
and seek who does not know what he fears or desires the most—to stay hidden, or to
be found’ (Perec 1988, 7). On the other hand, it is also characteristic of the Oulipo in
general, divided since its inception between the wish to display and demonstrate the
methods that it invented, and its wish to keep them well-hidden so as to allow its
works to be read as literature, and not just as technical exploits. The tension is best
understood not just as a reformulation of the old opposition between ‘form’ and
‘content’. Having restored strict form to its fundamental place in the composition of
verbal works of art, the Oulipo has re-enacted the ancient marriage of mathematics
and creativity, but in its espousal of the clinamen, it has given a quite new form to the
relationship between life and art.7 In that important sense, Perec’s title is absolutely
right. The overlaid levels of mathematical determination and random approximation
in the construction of Life a user’s manual offer an intriguing argument about what
life is really like.

Bibliography

Bose, R C, and Shrikhande, S S, ‘On the Falsity of Euler’s Conjecture’, Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science, 45 (1959), 734–737.
Dumas, Jean-Guillaume, ‘Caractérisation des quenines et leur représentation spirale’,
Mathematics and Human Sciences, 46 (2008), 89–123.
Fournel, Paul, Chamboula, Seuil, 2007.
James, Alison, Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo, Northwestern University
Press, 2009.
Lapprand, Marc, Poe´tique de l’Oulipo, Rodopi, 2004.
Le Tellier, Hervé, Esthe´tique de l’Oulipo, Le Castor astral, 2006.
Mathews, Harry, and Brotchie, Alistair, The Oulipo compendium, Atlas Press, 1998.
Motte, Warren, Oulipo: a primer of potential literature, Dalkey Archive Press, 2008 (originally
published 1985).

7
Lapprand 2004, Le Tellier 2006 and James 2009 all have important insights that illuminate this difficult
topic.
118 BSHM Bulletin

Perec, Georges, ‘L’Art et la manière d’aborder son chef de service pour lui demander une
augmentation’, L’Enseignement programme´, Vol. 4 (December 1968); in book form,
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(original work published 1975).
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Perec, Georges, Life a user’s manual (trans David Bellos), Collins Harvill, 1987, (original work
published 1978).
Perec, Georges, ‘Quatre figures pour La vie mode d’emploi ’, L’Arc, 76 (1979), 88–90.
Perec, Georges, Cahier des charges de La vie mode d’emploi, H Hartje, B Magné, J Neefs
(eds), Zulma, 1993.
Queneau, Raymond, Cent Mille Milliards de Poe´mes, Gallimard, 1959.
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Queneau, Raymond, ‘Note complémentaire sur la sextine’, Subsidia pataphysica 1 (1965a).
Queneau, Raymond, ‘Un Conte à votre façon’ (1965b) (trans W Motte), in Motte 2008.
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Mathematics and Human Sciences, 27 (1969), 5–12.
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quenine’, La Bibliothe´que oulipienne, 5 (2000), 99–124.
Roubaud, Jacques, Parc sauvage, Seuil, 2008.
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