Jacques Roubaud on Math and the Art of Literary Invention
Adventurous heroines, abstract algebra, a poetics of grief, OULIPO, and the ongoing memoir of a grand project
If you’ve never heard the name “Jacques Roubaud,” just use any of these substitutions:
- “Emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X-Nanterre”
- “Composer of the innovative, recombinatory poetry collection ∈”
- “Author of a fantasy about talking animals and abstract algebra”
And that’s only a start. Since publishing his first volume of poetry in 1967, Roubaud has produced a stream of innovative literary works in almost every form — including a trilogy of comic novels about the postmodern heroine Hortense, and a series of intricately interwoven memoirs that explore not only his personal experience but the mysteries of memory and the structures that organize our individual realities. His work in every form is suffused with mathematics, whether explicitly or subtly.
Roubaud has been a leading member of the experimental writing collective known as Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature“). Oulipo writers often employ “constraints” like leaving one letter of the alphabet out of a…
