Oulipian Melville

An engaging essay in Appendix Journal, ‘The Curse of Coherence: Cold War CIA Funding for Oulipo’s Confidence-Man’, puts forward the idea that Herman Melville‘s The Con-fidence Man was given the Oulipian N+7 treatment.

I chanced upon the intimation of American author Harry Mathews’s involvement in a CIA-funded Oulipian translation of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man in the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, where I was researching Mathews’s novel Cigarettes. Fragmentary data suggested a covert narrative: that CIA operatives, working with the expatriate American novelist, hired members of the French experimental writing coterie to translate Melville’s novel in the early 1970s as part of a larger project of cultural influence. If the history suggested here proves true, it will demand critical re-assessment of Mathews’s work, that of the Oulipo, and possibly even that of the so-called New York School poets, with whom Mathews has always been closely connected.

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Though the writer in good faith may label his work a masquerade, all too often the reader exercises their disposition to believe, and insists that the fable be real. “In this way of thinking,” Melville writes, “the people in a fiction, like the people in a play, must dress as nobody exactly dresses, talk as nobody exactly talks, act as nobody exactly acts. It is with fiction as with religion: it should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.” Melville presents a critique of naïve “realism” consonant with the Oulipo’s wider critique of language. It may well have been this consonance that caught the Oulipo’s interest in the first place.

[Via @tony_white_]