Combinations

In February 2000 I met Ester Xargay; Carles Hac Mor I met not long after that. I think it was when we realised we could work together that we started to talk about Raymond Queneau. Particularly we talked about his text Cent mille miliards de poèmes ("A hundred billion poems"), that in 1960 became one of the basis for the group known as OULIPO (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle). I had been experimenting with the combinatorial possibilities of the text on computer I had found, during a trip to London, a book called OULIPO Compendium. In it there was an English version for Queneau's text. The text consists on ten sonnets of 14 lines. In all the sonnets one finds the same rhymes, so each verse can be replaced by the correspondent verse of a different sonnet. For instance, verse 1 from sonnet 1 can be replaced by verse 1 from any other sonnets from 2 to 10. The total amount of potential existent sonnets -they might be never read out but their existence is predictable according to this combinatorial system- is 10 raised to the power of 14 = "Cent mille miliards" = 100,000,000,000,000. (Carles made an estimate and he found that one could only read all the sonnets after several million of years; and no eat or sleep breaks, that's for sure.
Carles and Ester undertook the scary work of translating Queneau's text into Catalan... a short time later they gave me a brilliant version which I put in the computer. Thus the text could be projected on screen; through a special mechanism -a device called pitch to MIDI that transforms the voice tone into a digital signal -a number- Carles and Ester could read the sonnets and create new combinations with their own voice. It's an never-ending reading, since when they reached the last verse of a sonnet, the first sentence would be different to the one they had started with.
The way one can surf throughout Queneau's ocean of sonnets, at least the one that allows new reading routes each time, is based on applying random algorithm. Every time the computer presents a new sonnet on the screen, it does it by generating 14 random numbers, each of them between 1 and 10. The first number shows the sonnet number where the first verse is going to be taken from; the second number shows the sonnet where the second verse will be taken from and so on until the 14 lines of the sonnet are completed. At the end a "new" sonnet with 14 lines chosen randomly is formed.
Queneau always objected fortuity as a writing method. To him, the idea of equivalence between inspiration, subconscious exploration, liberation, and fortuity and automatism was false; the type of freedom consisting of obeying blindly any impulses is in fact a form of slavery. According to him, the classic author who writes a tragedy following a certain number of known rules has much more freedom than the poet who writes anything randomly, since he is a slave of rules he doesn't even know about.
I'm afraid fortuity as a reading method, especially as a reading method for Cent mille miliards de poèmes, would not please Queneau either. To our defence, we can say fortuity is the method which allows us better to dive into the massive profundity of his text. We use fortuity simply as an exploratory method.
As a precedent to the work carried out by Ester, Carles and myself, Paul Braffort has to be mentioned. In 1975 he adapted Queneau's piece to computer. His reading method was not random; the reader's name and the time that took them to type it was used to determine the sonnet instead. This work was first shown that very same year in the Europalia festival, in Brussels. Soon after that it was sponsored by ARTA (Atelier de Recherches Techniques Avancées), from the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris.
In Cent mille miliards de poèmes, Queneau's merit was to create a sonnet machine: when he named the combinatorial rules he built the gears; when he wrote the 10 original sonnets he gave us the raw material to make billions of them. Each one of them, although different from the others, has a trade name and comes from the same machine: an unbelievably productive one.
In his book Opera Aperta ("Open piece"), Umberto Eco defines certain types of pieces as "open pieces"; these pieces have no definite closed message; they don't have one univocal organised form either; instead, they have in them a net of relations which make several final organisations possible in the piece. These so-called "final results" of the piece depend directly on the reader's initiative; through this process the reader becomes interpreter.
The open piece is a device anyone can use as they like.
In order to make a piece open, then, one needs to base it, at least part of it, on fields of events; a collection of elements or orientations which have to perform in the piece only potentially; They can't be predefined.
One could say then, that the Cent mille miliards de poèmes sonnets are fields of events; sown fertile fields with phrases sprouting here and there; when they combine they create mutant poems, still similar to themselves. It's exactly this similarity what gives cohesion to the piece, what allows one to guess the author's intention.

Eugenio Tisselli Vélez
Barcelona, August 2002
Translation rom spanish: Roger Garcia Coll

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Bibliography:
Oulipo Compendium. Mathews, Harry y Brotchie, Alastair (Atlas Press, London 1998)
Opera Aperta - Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee. Eco, Umberto (Bompiani, Milano 2000)

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