The Cartoonist 2000

A common objection to OuLiPian methods of construction (see X 20 and DAMASCUS), is that the constraints used to generate text are essentially arbitrary, and therefore somehow irrelevant.

Searching for an elegant means to challenge this rather dim assumption, I became interested in social constraints which determine the nature of the world in which we live. In particular, for the purposes of The Cartoonist, the way that freedom of expression is increasingly constrained by copyright and libel law.

I decided to set the story of a novel in EuroDisney©™. Daniel Travers, a young, right-minded Englander, sets out to visit the park with his firebrand social activist of a teen-age cousin, Daphne. Daphne is full of inventive ideas for sabotage.

The first version of the novel, the original story which I wanted to tell, I set entirely in the real, true-to-life theme-park, the Disneyland Paris which at that time 70 million Europeans had already visited.

For publication, I then re-wrote the novel, adhering strictly to copyright and libel laws, genuine constraints. I discovered it’s not legally possible, in the sense of freedom of expression, to set a novel (a made-up and perhaps fanciful story) in EuroDisney, even though that gated space outside Paris with its outsized characters is a location very much relevant to the way we live now.

There are therefore two versions of The Cartoonist. There’s the original, unpublishable version. And then there’s the second, published novel, as generated by the legal limitations I was constrained to observe.

This begs the question, I think, of which of the two novels is the more legitimate.

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