La Bibliotheque Impossible

Thirty years to the day after the death of Raymond Queneau, I am in an ornate reading room at the ­Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, a massive eighteenth-century edifice hulking on Paris’s near–Left Bank behind a twisted metal sculpture that allegedly represents Arthur Rimbaud. Along with bookbinding curiosities, medieval manuscripts, and prison records from the Bastille, Arsenal’s holdings have recently grown to include the archives of a literary collective called the Oulipo—Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or “Workshop for Potential Literature.” Tonight’s mini-gala is intended to commemorate not the opening of those archives to the public—they are still not consultable today, except by ­special permission and prolonged maneuvering through the Kafkaesque labyrinth of French library bureaucracy—but the idea of their at least being kept someplace august and official, rather than at the ninth-arrondissement apartment of Marcel Bénabou, the Oulipo’s definitively provisional and provisionally definitive secretary.

Besides the two dedicated champagne-pourers in the corner, everyone in the room is swirling around in varying states of hobnobbery: library undersecretaries, branch curators, and nearly all the living members of the Oulipo, about half of whom I am meeting for the first time. There is Bénabou, a former history professor with owly eyes; Paul Fournel, a diplomat and cyclist and the workshop’s current president; Jacques Roubaud, an endlessly venerated poet who still states his ­profession on paper as “mathematician (retired).” There is Anne Garréta, an unrepentant postmodernist who wears a leather bomber jacket; Hervé Le Tellier, a newspaper wit who is never on time for anything; Olivier Salon, a high-school math teacher who looks like a good-natured ­pirate or a twenty-second-century librarian, depending on whether he is wearing his glasses. There is ­François Caradec, a literary biographer whose eyebrows and mustache make him look like a well-dressed shih tzu; Paul Braffort, a computer scientist from ­before personal computers existed; ­Michelle Grangaud, who once published a book consisting entirely of anagrams made from the names of Parisian metro stations; and Jacques Jouet, who once spent fifteen and a half hours composing a poem by visiting every station in the Parisian metro system at least once, writing one line per stop. (He then did it again a few months later, with the route reversed.)

There is Paulette Perec, the widow of Georges Perec, author of La Disparition (A Void), a 311-page whodunit that recounts the disappearance of the letter e from the world—without ever using the letter e. Hearing about La Disparition in a French-lit survey course during my freshman year in college was my first exposure to the Oulipo, and its impact on me was immediate and visceral, not least because a year...