Potential literatures
Sydney
The Oulipo and Literary Invention
Project Outline
In 1960, the French polymath François Le Lionnais (1901-1984) persuaded his friend the writer Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) to join him in founding a group that would investigate the literary potential of rules and structures derived from mathematics, often referred to as constraints. The group soon came to be known as the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature) or Oulipo for short.
More than fifty years have passed, movements have come and gone, and the Oulipo is flourishing still. The group’s notoriety and influence have grown steadily over its unusually long lifetime. Its name is now associated with literary works that have acquired canonical status, such as Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (La Vie mode d’emploi, 1978) and Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Se una notte d’inverno un viaggatore, 1979). In France the adjective oulipien denotes playful formalism in general; Oulipian exercises are widely used in schools; and the Oulipo’s monthly public readings have a faithful following. In the English-speaking world, the Oulipo has come to be recognized as an important feature in the landscape of experimental writing. What began discreetly with a group of friends meeting for monthly lunches and discussions has become an international literary phenomenon.
Part of the explanation for this impact is that several members of the group were or are major literary talents. But that is not the whole story. The Oulipo is a group agent whose shared purposes have found a wide echo, in spite of the fact that its approach to composition is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive: why should a writer burden herself with difficult formal problems and rigid structures? Why would she choose to put on a straightjacket? This project aims to produce an account for the Oulipo’s emergence as a force in world literature by asking three questions about the group’s practice:
Where does it come from?
The Oulipo’s approach is neither unprecedented nor as old as literature itself; it has a web of antecedents extending beyond the literary domain. The project will trace that web, notably by showing how certain Oulipians have adapted the methods of Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), Michel Leiris (1901-1990), and other “anticipatory plagiarists.”
How does it work?
Both sympathetic and unsympathetic critics have tended to assimilate the Oulipo’s constraints to other kinds of rules operative in literary composition. This may obscure the specificity of the group’s approach to writing. The constraint’s strength as a tool for literary composition lies principally in its precise and explicit formulation, which makes it simple to grasp if not to apply. The rule of the lipogram (avoiding the use of a particular letter) can be quickly understood, although writing a lipogram may prove difficult and time-consuming. Constraints focus the writer’s attention on a particular aspect of the text, transforming it into a game, while his or her implicit know-how, acquired gradually by reading and imitation, governs the rest of the compositional process.
What is it for?
Because Oulipian writing is game-like, some critics have assumed that it has no purposes. But games can have a point, as Wittgenstein remarked. Moreover, the most persuasive philosophical and anthropological studies of play criticize a clear-cut distinction between games and seriousness. The Oulipo itself claims certain purposes for its experiments: providing a range of new forms for other writers to try; guiding the construction of literary works; and raising questions for literary theory. The Oulipo’s inventions also serve tacit purposes, such as encoding meanings, redistributing the work of the writer’s rational and intuitive faculties, and fostering communities of practice.
Both in literary composition and in composing a new kind of artistic group, the Oulipo has shown that the alternative between adhering to traditional conventions and rejecting them in a revolutionary clean sweep does not exhaust the possibilities. We can also deliberately modify conventions and, above all, invent and institute new rules. Such rules may have limited domains of application, but they can take effect here and now. This is an emancipatory lesson.
