Oulipo Literary Chess Deathmatch

[eredien]

This article in Cabinet is about playing chess as a text, with texts. It's called "Novel Chess." (Yes.)

An appetite for such forms of poetic justice is not, however, consistently sated by our software, as one certainly does not expect Huckleberry Finn (1884, playing white) to be picked apart in passive resignation by Kafka’s Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915), and it is difficult to look on with suitably clinical detachment. In particular, a too-little, too-late counterpunch of (promoted) Queen b8-e5 must be said to painfully darken the miasma of futility that hangs over this confrontation from the first move (Huck’s defensive “Anderssen” opening, the paralytic a2-a3).


The best part is that you can actually set up a game and watch it play through. I pitted "The Scarlet Letter" (white) against "Madame Bovary" and ended in a draw, but when the positions were reversed, Madame Bovary got checkmate.

Comments

[zdenka]

Whoa.

Wuthering Heights vs. Frankenstein also ended in a draw.

[krinndnz.livejournal.com]

That was entirely worth my time to read, and I think I may need to pit Stephenson against Gibson now in a Cyberpunk Novel Chess Serial. Or, if I feel like even more work, Ellis vs. Moore for the Crazy Uncle Championship.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

But Gibson and Stephenson have already met in combat, not once, but three times: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/001430.html

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

I love the fact that this has both lit-crit and chess analysis, and the fact that they pitted a novel described as solipsistic against itself.