Tea at Trianon: French Mathematicians Birthed a Strange Form of Literature

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, May 5, 2023

French Mathematicians Birthed a Strange Form of Literature

From Big Think:

On November 24, 1960, at a café in Paris, two Frenchmen, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, met with a group of fellow mathematically-minded writers and literature-minded mathematicians and formed the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or Oulipo (from the first letters of the words). This translates roughly as “workshop of potential literature.” The aim of the group was to explore new possibilities for structures that could be used in literature, whether that be poetry, novels, or plays.
Since mathematics is the lodestone of structure, the group was particularly interested in how mathematical ideas could be starting points for new literary forms and structural constraints. Queneau and Le Lionnais are not well known outside literary circles, but you have probably encountered Oulipians like Italo Calvino and Marcel Duchamp. (Read more.)