Oulipian Novel?

[Paul Mackin]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: "James Kyllo" <jkyllo at gmail.com>
Cc: "David Morris" <fqmorris at gmail.com>; "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2009 12:42 PM
Subject: Re: Oulipian Novel?


> 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


Now is remember.. The oulipian novel I read was My Life in the CIA. 
(Mathews's most recent)

I t  was about a guy who everyone always thought and accused him of being a 
CIA agent so he started pretending to be one.


>
> 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