Mathematique by Jacques Roubaud

Mathematique Reviews

• 
  Geoff

  
  
  The third branch of Jacques Roubaud’s Great Fire of London series picks up somewhat chronologically from where The Loop leaves off. A few years have intervened, and we find Roubaud contemplating his intellectual future during his early years at the Institute Henri Poincaré and the Sorbonne, where he hears echoes of Villon in the ringing of the belltower yet still is intent on giving up Poetry as an academic study (Why? Poetry cannot be paraphrased, it says everything about itself there on the page, the only thing to know about it is what is already present, so what is there to be learned or taught?) In an act of youthful caprice, he one day decides, pretty much out of the blue, “I will be a Mathematician!” (Mathematics must necessarily be paraphrased, learned, reduced to ingestible quantities, complications simplified, steps to greater proofs lessened in rigor- mathematics is in a constant state of flux, so must always be being taught and developed, a never-ending internalization/externalization.) Roubaud enters Mathematics at a peculiar time, when Set Theory* is sweeping clean the old processes, and upstart revolutionaries are taking professorships at the École normale supérieure and the IHP, where Roubaud becomes aligned with a group known as the Bourbakists- the nom de plume of a multi-headed gorgon of mathematical theoreticians, publishing their treatises under this singular cognomen, a group uncannily similar to (and containing at least one future member of) another group of theoretical-minded intellectuals Roubaud was later to become a member of- the Oulipo. (There is an entire bifurcation in Mathematics: dedicated to François Le Lionnais)
  
  The retelling of Roubaud’s history with Mathematics is, of course, in service of the Project, which was to be a project of Poetry and a project of Mathematics, that is, if it hadn’t come to ruin, and if ”the great fire of London... .. ...” was not necessarily to become its simulacrum, built on those ruins. To repeat myself, Roubaud posits that Poetry is the language of memory and emotions, those things that make us human beings; Math is the language of the world, governing the universe in which we exist; therefore, Poetry is regulated, determined even, by Mathematics, by the very fact of its originating in our thought and speech. Mathematics: (the colon is a necessary part of the title) exists to elucidate for readers of The Great Fire of London how Math, and specifically Set Theory and its axiomatic techniques and its branches- Topology, Mechanics, higher level Algebra, etc.- came to determine a great part of the structure of the book we are reading. (The axiomatic principle also clearly is associated with another great influence on this series, Wittgenstein.)
  
  So we are given a glimpse of the realm of avant-garde mathematics in the 1950’s and 60’s in Paris, we are given the thought process by which Roubaud’s own understanding of sets and mathematics in general came to influence his treatise on memory (which we are in the process of reading), we are given a portrait of those closest to him in the Mathematics community as examples of the many paths the “new math” was opening at the time, and we are given fore-glimpses of the role math would come to play in that later, more famous group of experimentalists Roubaud was to be associated with, the Oulipo (and yes, Raymond Queneau stalks around the shadowy corners of this book, poking his head in every now and then discreetly, checking in on the action, waiting for his grand entrance onto the stage of The Great Fire of London); we are also given the Topology of the Library of the Sorbonne with its cities of books and classification numbers of inroads (to the “old quarters” of the ancient folios and the new “high rises” of recent publications), we are given Fermat’s last theorem and filters and ultrafilters and poems dedicated to obscure academics and points in space that cannot help but communicate and overlap with other points in space, floating indistinctly in the foam of time (memories). The final chapter of the book then describes a confluence of a powerful historical circumstance with the application of Mathematics, Roubaud’s life, and the history of France. But to reveal too much would be to give away a great pleasure of this book. The future, as well as the past, is always ahead of us.
  
  So, I have finished the last of what is currently translated into English of this phenomenal series. I’ll take this moment as the place to declare a plea, or some sort of petition, to Dalkey Archive Press, who have thus far been responsible for the gorgeous translations and pressings of this series: Dalkey, lend me your ears, please, please continue to translate The Great Fire of London in your gorgeous and affordable paperback editions. They may not be your most profitable project, but they are, at least to me, among your most loved and rewarding. Merci!
  
  *I won't even pretend to be able to explain Set Theory to you. I struggled through pre-Calc in college and then studied twentieth-century literature. You've got google. Use it.
• 
  Jonfaith

  To put it another way: a book is the autobiography of its title and, as such, the narrative of a singularity.
  
  This was by far my favorite Roubaud, which is surprising given the themes. The twinning of the author joining the Math department after previously working towards a degree in English is matched with another account fifteen years later as Roubaud was being sent in the military to an atoll for the testing of a nuclear weapon. It is the alien aspects of each decision which gave me traction. After a quarter century at my job I recently took a promotion which has cast me in a different dimension. There is a sudden surges of bureaucracy to navigate and endless documentation. My grace is to remain a Candide: it may not be better but it will be different.
  
  But the remembrance of my incomprehension is far greater than the deductible knowledge of the fact that before understanding, I must not have understood.
  
  There has been much to cram and familiarize. None of which will be broached on this site. I have leaned a great deal on friends lately, I should also note that Roubaud's sobriety has been a true asset as well.
• 
  Heronimo Gieronymus

  When I set out last month to read in sequence, back to back, the three branches thus far translated into English of the mathematician, poet, and novelist Jacques Roubaud’s series of experimental Oulipo autofictions, commencing with THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, first published in French in 1989, it was initially my erroneous assumption that these three works comprised the entirety of the series, with 1997’s MATHEMATICS: (A NOVEL) the final, culminating “branch.” I was set (rather exhaustively) right by translator Jeff Fort’s Afterword to the second and longest “branch,” THE LOOP (1993). (You will note that Jeff Fort only translates THE LOOP, each of these three novels, at least insofar as concerns the Dalkey Archive editions, having been tackled by a separate bold buccaneer.) In 2009, when Fort’s English translation of THE LOOP arrives to us, it is in fact the second of five branches, with the sixth and final supposedly immediately forthcoming. We still only have THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, THE LOOP, and MATHEMATICS available to us in English. The version of MATHEMATICS we in fact have, is, strictly speaking, only half a branch, Roubaud having found himself, for reasons that are not especially clear (or pointedly meant not to be clarified), unable to realize the work as he had originally imagined it (however open-endedly). The second half of branch three (MATHEMATICS) eventually was completed in French, published in 2008 as IMPÉRATIF CATÉGORIQUE, at least according to a footnote in the aforementioned Jeff Fort Afterword. Again, the Dalkey edition of MATHEMATICS consists solely of a translation of the first half of the branch as it originally appeared in ’97. If we are reading a book that is running aground, unable to see a way forward for itself and thus forced to eschew entry into territories it had intended to breach, this becomes perceptible within the text itself only fitfully, most especially in the final chapter, which is in itself something of an outlier within the overall coherence-to-schematic of the first three branches of this fastidiously organized series. Early on in this outlier chapter, in its first fragment or “numbered moment,” a hint, a suggestion of trouble in paradise, preempted by complaints from our London-loving Anglophile author respective of the unendurable heat in Paris and the altogether disagreeable nature of that city more generally: “But this time, I have decided to adopt a different strategy, so as to force a decision. I am writing this, I am writing down what is happening, my extreme difficulty to speak, and the form this takes; and I am not allowing it to disappear.” The fourth and final chapter of MATHEMATICS—a chapter that commences in fine Oulipo fashion with numbered moment 99—does indeed set out to “adopt a different strategy,” but this is in itself not all that surprising…or at least it shouldn’t be to serviceably close readers of the “great fire of London” novels which are above all else branches with branches (and with branches clustered within those branches) of THE PROJECT, which is fiercely axiomatic but is, in addition to a great many other matters, axiomatic concerning the necessity of its own flexibility. I know that comes off a little discursively dense. But just wait. The first novel in this series is called THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, but we should not confused it with a novel of the same name that itself had proved to be unwritable, nor to the “great fire of London” that is all the novels in this series, just as we will need to distinguish between the ongoing PROJECT and the PROJECT that failed, not that these are categorically separate fields of sense. (Jeff Fort also has fun teasing out some of these convolutions.) Let me attempt to comfort you: these are extremely pleasurable books to read, every bit as much as they are robustly cerebral and theoretically daunting. MATHEMATICS is probably the most effortlessly pleasurable novel of the series, a matter which rests largely in what Roubaud himself believes distinguishes it from THE LOOP, its immediate predecessor, this time the “memory game” being a good deal more “deliberate,” such that the more compact book it ultimately occasions—product of a methodical, thematized “entwining”—is more elegantly virtuosic, less a matter of distention and sprawl. For those not in the know, the three “great fire of London” novels each consist of a main body (“the story”) and two sections of “insertions,” these the “interpolations” and “bifurcations” to which the reader is regularly directed by typographic prompts in the main body, and the numbering of the “numbered moments” corresponds to the physical placement of each such moment within the text, such that moment/fragment 25 from the third chapter of the story of THE LOOP, for example, may send us hopping to moment 97, deeper in the book, collected along with the other interpolations corresponding to the third chapter of the story. The bifurcations will tend to be much lengthier / more exhaustive than the interpolations, and when this is not the case, they universally stand apart or outside, less like parenthetical extrapolations than potential alternative lines of development. (A nifty analogue for this somewhat complicated arborescent model appears in MATHEMATICS in the form of the “alpha point alpha point alpha alpha point point point,” a tree with no trunk, merely branches, “nodes of branches,” and the “possible branches” that serve as something like leaves.) The fourth chapter of MATHEMATICS is called “Zero Point” and that is in a sense largely what it is, which also sort of makes it read like a dangling bifurcation more than a culmination to the story. It 'adopts a different strategy' in that sense to be sure, but it does so at the end of a novel that distributes the interpolations and bifurcations differently than THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON and THE LOOP, placing them at the end of the chapters to which they refer (or largely refer) instead of after the entirety of the story. In practice, this ends up once again testifying to a new focus on elegant “entwining,” but it also has something to do with the failure to execute the entirety of the third branch…plus it results in “Zero Point” arriving not only posterior to the rest of the story but also the totality of the insertions (both the interpolations and bifurcations). Again, “Zero Point,” ultimately dealing with Roubaud’s military service in Africa and detonation there (in a world of unassuageable sand, something like a metastasis of cosmic forgetting) of the first French atomic bomb, bears striking similarities to the two earlier bifurcations included in MATHEMATICS, the first of which relates primarily to Oulipo president and (along with Rayomd Queneau) co-founder François Le Lionnais, and the second to the epochal saga of international efforts to solve Fermant’s Last Theorem. Oulipo was in and of itself something like a workshop for anarchist mathematical literature, famously dedicated as it was to the exploration of the possibilities of generative constraints and formulae insofar as they might be put to service in literary experiment, and, at least as he comes to be represented in Roubaud’s novel, François Le Lionnais seems very much like a living precursor for the thinking behind “the great fire of London” and the PROJECT. “François Le Lionnais’s head, weighed down like a stag by its horns, by the peripheral organs that were the shelves of his library, was also a ‘dark boutique,’ where, at the end of his life, he was the only person able to recognize himself; before recognizing himself not quite so well, then failing to recognize himself ever again.” Throughout the “great fire of London” novels, Roubaud has routinely insisted that THE PROJECT is poetry first and mathematics second, and in the first branch, THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, the field of memory excites a dream which inaugurates a procedural fire seeking to extinguish itself by consuming the field of memory. THE LOOP turns back further, attempting to arrange memory around a Fore-Project and as such the phenomenology of an anterior or even a metaphysical poetical dimension. Still, ever and always, THE PROJECT is a living reconciliation with the failure of THE PROJECT in an earlier iteration, and any number of zero points or false starts, interstices at which paths to which the author believes he has committed himself are suddenly closed off, require adaptability and the inauguration of new trajectories, such that the original failure to complete MATHEMATICS becomes itself positively (in the full sense) emblematic. THE PROJECT, like the author’s professional life in academic mathematics, is largely “preparations, and the material of my imaginings.” The governing mathematics never attains a proper realization. This is largely a direct exigency of the immensity of the ever-shifting field of mathematics: “the abrupt realization of this state of affairs, which led to a real crisis in my relationship with mathematics, remains, at this stage of my narrative, in the unforeseeable future. What’s more, it concerns only tangentially what I mean to begin (and only begin) to talk about here, which is not strictly mathematics itself, nor the details of my biography as a mathematician, but the contribution of a certain vision of mathematics to a PROJECT, a project for poetry and a novel.” The “crisis” of a “relationship with mathematics” leads to a PROJECT that must accommodate complimentary crises. If all of this might sound mighty heady, and if the “great fire of London” is after all an active construction which seeks to destroy its building materials—essentially the raw content of the writer’s life (!)—Roubaud is for the most part a congenial, unpretentious guide. Consider this almost folksy passage from the opening “numbered moment” of the book under consideration: “Mathematicians, as portrayed in the typical, spontaneous reactions of the populace when someone first meets you and learns that you’re someone who does ‘math’ (always coming just after the ritualistic statement: ‘I was hopeless at math at school’), are individuals who express themselves in a language that is incomprehensible to almost everyone else, and are thus prestigious, defining truths that are at once essential and obscure.” Roubaud wants to assure us that he is a kind of hapless, eager student—anything but a rarified vessel of specialized gnosis. Readers of MATHEMATICS should not expect to find “a paper monument worthy of” the subject in question. “But then, it hardly needs one.” The novel properly commences with a decisive moment that just so happens to be, characteristically, a grounding experience of perplexity and confoundment. Professor Choquet, the Calculus lecture hall, 1954. The alarm of the gathered students. It is the introduction of “set theory,” as conceived and elucidated by Nicolas Bourbaki, in reality a somewhat shadowy collective rather than an individual, that perplexes Roubaud and his peers, even provoking their spontaneous ire, only to quite quickly excite obsessive pursuit. By way of consideration of three close friends, three archetypal personality-formation-type reactions to the Bourbaki revolution in mathematics in the mid-'50s are established, though Roubaud is quick to insist that he is performing instrumental reductions in order to make his point(s): a) “the line of pure obedience” is represented by Marcelle Espiand, a young woman of colour, therefore facing a double adversity, who is eager to perform at her studies in such a way as to get a foot in the door (and who, while she certainly had gotten her foot in the door, is to meet an unspecified tragic end); b) “the line of pure belief” is represented by ardent monomaniacal Bourbaki convert Philippe Courrège; and c) “the line of pure anticipation” is represented by Pierre Lusson, characterized as it is by an encyclopedic curiosity and reluctance to commit to any single orthodoxy, very much like the mentality Roubaud attributes to François Le Lionnais (who he does not yet know in the mid-‘50s). Roubaud relates most especially to Pierre Lusson, though he is himself so much a figure of “anticipation,” perhaps, that he cannot admit to anything so exact as even that. “Pierre Lusson could have been characterized in intellectual terms by the the extreme rapidity of his reasoning, associated with a no less extreme difficulty in stopping at the strict conclusion of a deduction, because such conclusions were necessarily limited, had been reached far too quickly, and were by consequence immediately dull, as is any completed reality, given that it has been united with the present, thus becoming immediately out of date.” Lusson’s mind, then, is another kind of great fire of London. Early in 1955, Roubaud writes of commencing a proper extended engagement with Bourbaki by way of the volume on General Topology. This is in some sense ‘au hasard,' but readers of Roubaud's prognostications concerning the Fore-Project might sense a certain implicit attribution of a poet’s premonitive impetus. At any rate, we come quite markedly to comprehend the true mathematical basis of THE PROJECT, especially as represented in THE LOOP, when we are made aware of the grounding encounter with mathematical topology. (And the imagination's London is likewise its own topological landscape.) THE PROJECT very much is a topology of interiority, or memory, and of the poetic imagination. Or, in other words, “a topological fantasia.” Or is that strictly true? Is this less what the project “is” than what it “was”? If THE LOOP is an exhaustive topology of its own interiority, is MATHEMATICS not in large part more centrally about false starts and suspended lines of development? Such as the one that it itself is? And what does destruction by means of memory have to do with this? “The great fire of London” is unambiguously a series of novels; works of literary fiction (even if it is autofiction). Roubaud consistently reminds us that he cannot trust the veracity of his writing and neither should we. Memory turns its contents into distortions and it performs its inductions by means of procedural invention. The author began his decades-long PROJECT, in the form it now takes, seeking to dispel grief by razing the territory of an experiential past in preparation for his own ultimate (perhaps desirable) dissolution. The living man is processes moving in any number of directions, temporally, spatially, mathematically, imaginatively. The man and his mind are never not disappearing, never assured to be any fixed thing (independent of a moment's mental construction). But what of the “great fire of London” and the books that give it its provisionally fixed form? Roubaud: “a book is the autobiography of its title and, as such, the narrative of a singularity.”
• 
  Sarbajit Ghosh

  Oulipo and Maths have completely changed my life, and reading this book was an ode to that change
• 
  Victoria

  wonderfully analytical and human at the same time
• 
  Gary Homewood

  Rambling and digressive, but thought provoking meditation on mathematics and literature.
• 
  in8

  talked about it here:
  http://www.5cense.com/13/reject.htm