The Stuff of Literature: May 2008 Archives

Harry Mathews is often introduced as "the only American member of the Oulipo." The introduction is obscure, as few Americans know anything about the Oulipo, and many of those who do came to it by way of Mathews. Short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or "Workshop for Potential Literature," the Oulipo is a group of mostly French writers and mathematicians who invent constricting forms as a means of creating literature. The famous example is George Perec's novel La Disparition, written (to the length of 300 pages) without use of the letter "e." It was subsequently translated into English, as A Void, by Gilbert Adair, also without recourse to that ever-useful letter. While the constraints gather all the attention, like an Olympic sprinter with prosthetic legs, a successful Oulipian text renders them almost beside the point. To his readers, Mathews is known first as a writer of strange and eminently pleasurable novels. None are overtly Oulipian, but each (I'm thinking of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, My Life in CIA, and The Journalist) is marked by sensations unfound elsewhere in literature. One suspects something is going on, that some exotic form is master of the content, before coming to the sure conclusion that Mathews is the prudent master of each.

Mathews and his wife Marie Chaix divide their time between France and Key West, where, from 2001-'04, he served as a member of our board of directors along with Irving Weinman. In 1998, Mathews, Chaix, and others celebrated the Key West marriage of Weinman to poet Judith Kazantzis. To honor their union, Mathews turned toward Perec's Oulipian re-imagining of the Epithalamium, a traditional poetic form which celebrates bride and groom. In Perec's version, the basic rule is that the letters used are restricted to those of the names of the betrothed. In Mathews' 5-part Epithalamium, a further refinement was added, limiting the letters of the first section to those of the bride's name, the second to those of the groom's, alternating until the final section, where the letters of both names are freely mixed. It sounds complicated, and is, especially when you consider the strict alphabet of this bride, j-u-d-i-t-h-k-a-z-a-n-s, and this groom, i-r-v-n-g-w-e-n-m-a. But what results is a gorgeous rendering of two distinct, isolate, fully-composed entities, finally coming together in a union richer than the sums of each. It is a marriage of language, in other words, to celebrate a marriage of friends.

Until now, Harry Mathews's Epithalamium for Judith Kazantzis and Irving Weinman, with collages by Marie Chaix, has been available only to those friends who attended the wedding of Judith and Irving on February 22, 1998, and received one of the ninety-three copies printed by the Grenfell Press. By special arrangement with Mathews and Chaix, we have created a digital version of the Epithalamium, following the design of the original. Click here to view the Epithalamium as a series of images in a pop-up window. Click here to download a .pdf of the Epithalamium, which will allow you to magnify text size as desired.

Photograph of Harry Mathews is ©Sigrid Estrada.

KWLS board member Bob Muens is a bookbinder and conservator who has worked in the Conservation Office of the Library of Congress, and lectured at venues including the Smithsonian Institution and El Archivo Nacional de Cuba in Havana. In 1996, he moved to Key West and opened Bookbinding and Conservation, his private studio. Rare documents and books from all over the world, some of them centuries old, are brought to Muens here, who works to restore and preserve them. His clients are universities, cultural institutions, and private collectors. Of Key West's many pockets of literary interest, Muens's quiet studio is perhaps the most active and vital. Unlike our seasonal literati, Muens is a year-round local presence, performing the meticulous and culturally important labor of preservation week in and week out. Every now and then I have a chance to drop in on Bob and see what he's up to.

This week, Bob is working on the 1693 second edition of Cotton Mather's account of the Salem Witch Trials, titled, with the charming verbosity of the age: The Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the TRYALS of Several Witches Lately Executed in NEW-ENGLAND And of several Remarkable Curiosities therein Occurring.
You can read a digital version of the 1862 edition through Google Books here .



On the table beside Mather's historic work, lay a Florida history text published in Madrid in 1722, covering the years after Juan Ponce de Leon's discovery of Florida in 1512. This beautifully printed, vellum-bound book, known as the Ensayo Cronologico, para la Historia General de la Florida, belongs to the University of Miami. After Muens's work is complete, the book will join the rare book collection of the university's library. You can see a digitized version of the book, produced by the Florida Collection of the Jacksonville Public Library here.

This post is the first of an occasional series about what I think of as "the other literature." It will concern not those stories and poems produced by the imaginative leaps and intellectual rigor of our great writers, but the hardworking professionals and simple instruments —books, paper, inks&mdash by which that literature has historically been disseminated, as well as the humbler literatures of posters, brochures, and printed ephemera of all kinds. For related selections from the Seminar's promotional literature, click on the blog category Among the Archives.