Oulipian Novel?

[Dave Monroe]

On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 9:43 AM, James Kyllo <jkyllo at gmail.com> wrote:

> You'll be familiar with some of the writers and works, if not the term
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo

Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews was, after Marcel Duchamp, the second American chosen
for membership in the French literary society known as the Oulipo,
which is dedicated to exploring new possibilities in literature, in
particular through the use of various constraints and algorithms....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Mathews

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.oulipo.net/oulipiens/HM
http://www.lacan.com/frameVIII6.htm
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/interviews/show/48

Mathews, Harry.  The Conversions.
   New York: Random House, 1962.  Urbana, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1997.

At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a
gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the
next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the
bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three
mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history.

In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric
personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a
ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials
who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds
himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted
religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten
fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the coast
of an uncharted French island.

A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions
invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for
answers to an elusive game.

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/catalog/show/326
http://books.google.com/books?id=e1eWgRUvDG4C

>From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Recognition of Her Errand into the
Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

   In some ways, a French reader felt almost at home in The Crying of
Lot 49, as the novel clearly had some sort of kinship with the fancy
tricks the Raymond Queneau-George Perec-Harry Matthews-Italo Calvino
crowd (the OULIPO Workshop of Potential Literature founded in 1960)
was already up to on the Continent.  Harry Matthews [sic] was living
in Paris then, and The Conversions, published in 1962, had already
told a story that, four years later, Oedipa's seemed almost to
duplicate. In Matthews's [sic] novel, as well, there is a wealthy
eccentric who leaves behind a cryptic will which the would-be heir to
the estate has to decipher, puzzling out riddles, scrutinizing texts
and hunting for clues, eventually stumbling upon a secret society
which has survived persecution through several centuries by going
underground.  The hero of The Conversions is equally caught up in a
"conspiracy" and wonders whether the secret society might not be the
shadow- image of the estate itself, occasionally suspecting along the
way that the whole plot might have been devised by some wily
mastermind just to lure him into some sort of hermeneutic fool's
errand.  Furthermore, Matthews' [sic] novel strongly suggests, as does
Pynchon's, that the protagonist's fate inside the story is but a
mirror-image of the reader's predicament as he (or she) works his (or
her) way through the novel's labyrinths--that the novel inculcates a
self-reflexive game played through the process of reading itself. (pp.
128-9)

http://books.google.com/books?id=8AALiZY5XQoC&pg=PA128
http://books.google.com/books?id=8AALiZY5XQoC
http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521388333