h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I wonder whether Raymond Queneau studied the work of Lewis Carroll, another author mathematician.

Lewis Carroll's famous, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' is 26,650 words in length, and he would not allow his publisher to remove even one word from his manuscript.

And Queneau once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.

OK, where the number 91 is the product of the first 13 numbers, and 153 is that of the first 17 numbers, and 17 x 9 is 153. And 17 is the number ID for the serpent, the cobra, the goddess of the ancient Egyptian Delta region and the protector of the Pharaoh.

And the number for the sea is 71 (because 71% of the Blue Planet is sea) and so the sea serpent is 71 x 17.

Now 26,650 x 2/10 is 5,330 or 17 x 17 + 71 x 71, the ID for the Sea Serpent or the leviathan of deep, deep, down below the ground.

And Raymond Queneau numbers for 'The Bark Tree' of 130 x 130 and /2 + 9,100 + 9,100 = 26,650 the number for 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.'

Actually, I do feel there is something rather mystical about numbers but they are best left out of the text where possible because it makes tedious reading, and so when I read of say, the masked god Anubis, the Funeral Director, I see the ID63, for 63 days is the gestation period for the jackal and for most breeds of dogs.

OK, and now to the ID42, probably outside of one other number, the most famous number in the western world thanks to the late Mr Adams, and the gestation period for the vulture goddess of Upper Egypt, the other symbol on the Pharoah's headdress, is 42 days. And 17 + 42 = 59 is... and the height of the four iron legs of the Eiffel Tower where they coalesce is 590 feet. So the cobra and vulture 'support' the Mark over Paris. And the numbers game goes on like this, take 'The Bark Tree' number 91, as 910 /2 and less 59 = 396 feet the height of the shaft of the Eiffel Tower + 590 feet for the legs = 986 feet.

Hmmm... You make Queneau sound like a bit of a mystic, as though he invested magical powers in numbers or believed, like some student of the Kabbalah, that they could be made to uncover the secrets of the universe. And I don't think that's what the Oulipo was really about. What came through when I was researching this article, was how thoroughly pragmatic and, well, *rational*, was the attitude towards mathematics of Queneau and his fellow travellers. They were primarily concerned with what they could *do* with numbers - in particular, how they could use maths to inform the structural aspects of their writing. That was their basic remit - to discover new forms - new constraints - that writers could use instead of being confined to a choice between either old-fashioned literary forms, on the one hand, or so-called 'free verse', on the other. I don't think they found great semantic significance - hidden meanings - in the numbers themselves.

Having said all that, I must admit I'm impressed by the Lewis Carroll connection that you mention. I hadn't heard about that before. It's certainly likely that Queneau would have had more than a fleeting acquaintance with Carroll's work, given the fact that Carroll was also interested in numbers and given Queneau's youthful interest in surrealist / nonsense writing. And Carroll seems to have attracted a fair bit of scholarly interest in France, so he's been kind of drifting about in the ether over there for a number of years. More than mere coincidence, then? Peut-etre... it would be interesting to find out...

Lear