...In 1961 Raymond Queneau, from the circle around the group OULIPO (Ouvroir
de littérature potentielle), finally introduced an improved
book-hardware to be used as a poetry machine: ten sonnets are printed on ten
reinforced pages in such a way that the reader can turn the pages line by line
- thus being able to combine each of the lines from each of the pages with one
another using this combinatory Poetry Machine.[9]
archivX007: The novel as a card game (1962)
Döblin's pronouncement - that one could easily cut the creations of epic
poetry into pieces and they would still remain viable - led Marc Saporta to
transform a novel into a card game in 1962. A reader opening the box will find
a stack of one hundred and fifty unnumbered cards along with an instruction
leaflet.[10] Open compositional forms of serial
music, Mallarmé's aleatorics, and William Burrough's cut-up
methods enter into the functionality of this literary "Card Shuffling Machine",
as well as the nested narration experiments of the Noveau Roman.
In reference to artistic book projects, not only typography is disintegrated in
this experiment, but even the material body of the book is torn apart.
The visions of a universally networked archive of texts with the
possibility of associative links using external technical storage systems
became revitalized directly after World War II, when American research was
reorganized along the lines of civil scientific networks based on Vannevar
Bush's design of a scientific workplace:
[9] In the instructions it says:
"This little work (...) enables anyone to create a hundred trillion sonnets as
desired (...), so that it is, on the whole, a kind of machine for producing
poems. (...) Each verse (there are ten) may be combined with ten different
verses; thus there are a hundred different combinations of the two verses; if a
third verse is added there are then a thousand, and with the ten complete
sonnets with fourteen verses each, the result is the number named above. (...)
As Lautréamont said so well, poetry should be made by all, not just by
one."
Raymond Queneau: Cent Mille Milliard de Poèmes, originally published in
Paris 1961 (no page number, for obvious reasons!)
[10] "The reader is requested to shuffle these
cards as for a card game. He may take a card, if he so desires, with the left
hand, as with a fortune teller. The order in which the cards lay, determines
the fate of the man X. (...) It depends on the chain of circumstances as to
whether all ends happily or unhappily. A life is composed of many different
segments. But the number of possible compositions is infinite." Reinhold Grimm:
Marc Saporta oder der Roman als Kartenspiel, in: Sprache im technischen
Zeitalter 14/ 1965, pp. 1172-1184, here p. 1173