Hound of Golden Imbeciles

John Sturrock

• Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie
  Atlas, 336 pp, £16.99, March 1999, ISBN 0 947757 96 1

Cape Y2K once safely rounded, and we shall be faced in short order by 2002, a date that stands suggestively out to the numerological eye as a palindrome. We’re allowed only one of these amphisbaenic years per century, though we lived through the last of them a bare eight-some ago, in 1991. Lived through it and failed for sure to spare it a glance. In France, it was not so. There, the members of the Oulipo took due notice of a calendrical windfall and laid plans for some suitably reversible celebrations, such as inviting President Menem of Argentina to come and address audiences in the towns of Noyon and Laval, and ‘consecrating’ Léon/Noel, Eve, Anna, Otto, Bob and Ava as ‘given names of the year’. It was in keeping with the principles of the Oulipo that these should have remained as theoretical events, conceived of without any taking of steps for their realisation, for this ever-amiable groupuscule’s founding articles lay down that it should explore potentiality irrespective of whether reality can be managed so as to give it house-room: or as the Compendium has it, ‘it has been concerned not with literary works but with procedures and structures capable of producing them.’ Indeed, one of its two founders and chief manifesto-writer, François Le Lionnais, was an extremist who thought that the potential procedures and structures which members invented were diminished rather than validated by being put into practice.