Sphinx

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An anecdote that may be instructive to the reader of novels written under Oulipian constraint: in 1969, after Georges Perec published La Disparition—if not the most illustrative example of an Oulipian novel then certainly the easiest to explain1—a critic named René-Marill Albérès reviewed it, lukewarmly, in the journal Les Nouvelles littéraires. Other critics reviewed La Disparition too, of course; what stood out about Albérès was that he plainly missed the central conceit of the book, namely that it had been written without any words containing the letter E.

I bring this up because, whatever grim conclusions we may reach specific to Albérès’s deftness as a reader (and La Disparition takes place in a world from which the letter E has gone mysteriously missing, so it’s not like there weren’t clues), his gaffe points out a pitfall with the potential to trip up even the most meticulous littérateur: reading an Oulipian novel without knowing the precise way in which it is Oulipian.

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