OULIPO

[Andrew Clarke Walser]

	In an interview, John Barth speaks a bit about the experiments of
Queneau, Perec, and the rest:

	  Consider the nonsense of an OULIPO text such as the
	opening two sentences of MOBY-DICK changed by the algorithm
	"substantif plus sept":  "Call me islander.  Some yeggs 
	ago, 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."  Even this renders reality, since whatever
	meaning its nonsense has comes from its participation in two
	orders of reality -- the world and the literary text it is
	derived from.  It is a spooky simulacrum of sense.  The
	spookiness comes from its being just far enough removed
	to be strange, but not so far removed as to be utterly
	unintelligible -- which is a lot like the way metaphors
	work.

	The interview, incidentally, comes from ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN,
edited by Tom LeClair and Larry McCaffery, which also contains talks with
William Gass, Joseph McElroy, Toni Morrison, and others. 

					Andrew Walser
					University of Illinois-Chicago