More on Oulipo

I may put up in the very near future a further counter-response to Derik Badman's postanswering my questions about the limits of the concept of "constraint" in literature. In the interim, I thought I'd quote from an essay by Benjamin Lytal in the current issue of The Believer. The essay is ostensibly about Walter Abish's How German Is It, but Lytal also discusses what he sees as a connection between Abish and Oulipo:

The Oulipians defined themselves as "rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape." They resist whatever in literature is aleatory: they seek to constrain everything from the whims of inspiration to the multiplicities of interpretation. Founder Francois Le Lionnais explains, "Every literary work begins with an inspiration which must accomodate itself as well as possible to a series of constraints and procedures that fit inside each other like Chinese boxes. Constraints of vocabulary and grammar, constraints of the novel or of classical tragedy, constraints of general versification, etc." These constraints are what transform a writer's intention into a literary text. But any modern author will recognize that the meanings found in any text extend far beyond her intentions. In order to minimize the element of chance in a literary text, and maximize intention, Oulipians intensify the constraints put on the act of composition. In fact, some Oulipians would say that the constraints themselves are the literary text. Raymond Queneau once remarked, "We may consider the day when the Carolingians began to count on their fingers 6, 8, and 12 to make verse, they accomplished an Oulipian task. Potential literature is that which doesn't exist."

The Oulipian project is carefully balanced on the contradictory crux of "potential literature." On one side is their ardor for pre-detemined literature, with maximal intent and minimal happenstance. But on the other side is a liberation, an exchange of conventional constraints for unconventional ones, after which anything can happen. "I anticipated everything, absolutely everything," claims Abish in the "i" chapter of Alphabetical Africa. But this cannot be true! He may have adopted certain rules that limited possible outcomes, but within those rules he was completely free to write his story--which must have led to certain unanticipated results. If anything, his eccentric alphabetical rules release him from more common obligations: to plot, to character development, to narrative, etc.

Abish's affinity for Oulipian methods derive, perhaps, from the interplay between what has potential and what is expected. The stiff salute at the conclusion of How German Is It has a certain potential--in its varying interpretations--in the same way that Oulipian rules and formulas beg to be implemented. Furthermore, the rules of Alphabetical Africa's composition, apparent to any reader, fold the reader's expectations into Abish's own act of writing. A rhyming couplet invites us to consider which end-word had first priority, and which was selected to rhyme with its mate; so each word in Abish's sentences invites us to wonder, quite automatically in the strictest chapters, "What other word, given the letters allowed, might Abish have considered?"

Despite Lytal's voluminous quotation of Oulipians, is this really an accurate characterization of the Oulipo project? To "minimize the element of chance in a literary text, and maximize intention"? Isn't it at least equally true that imposing certain pre-determined constraints gives freer rein to chance and makes "intention" less relevant? Surely the Oulipians were not seeking to constrain the possible interpretations of a work of literature, were they?

Also, when I mentioned in my previous post my reservations about the "breadth of application" the idea of constraint sometimes invites, I think I had less in mind Derik Badman's exploration of the possibilities of constraint and more something like this passage from Lytal's essay. Try as I might, I can't quite see Walter Abish as a full-fledged Oulipian. Alphabetical Africa seems to me to manifest "constraint" only in the vague kind of way I suggested might be true of most works of literature. It's otherwise a formal experiment--he's given his novel about Africa a new fictional form. Admittedly it's an experiment in language--the gradual introduction of all letters of the alphabet into the "story," only then to remove them--but it still seems like an "experiment" more than than the use of a constraint-like technique: the latter is part of the former.

"Furthermore, the rules of Alphabetical Africa's composition, apparent to any reader, fold the reader's expectations into Abish's own act of writing. A rhyming couplet invites us to consider which end-word had first priority, and which was selected to rhyme with its mate; so each word in Abish's sentences invites us to wonder, quite automatically in the strictest chapters, "What other word, given the letters allowed, might Abish have considered?"

This sounds like gibberish to me.

Comments

[derik]

You ask: "Despite Lytal's voluminous quotation of Oulipians, is this really an accurate characterization of the Oulipo project? To "minimize the element of chance in a literary text, and maximize intention"?"

I'd say that perhaps that characterized the group at one point, or at least Le Lionnais' conception of it (he being a mathematician more than a writer) in the early 60's, but that would assume that the group is unchanging, which is clearly untrue. Unlike the Surrealist project which pretty much survived unchanged due to Breton's leadership/will, the Oulipo adds members and older members have died with no single person holding sway.

Many of the early Oulipo manifestos evoke the quoted sort of theory that doesn't seem to hold for the majority of what has come from the group.

And outside of that, while the Oulipo certainly brought the idea of "constraint" to a fore, they are not necessarily the arbiters.

And I agree about that last bit of gibberish.

[Matt Madden]

I've been following the discussion of constraint between you and Derik with interest, although I haven't figured out any kind of global response to what you have been discussing.

Two comments on this post: first, intent vs. chance. I find this a bit of a problematic aspect of the oulipo manifestos because I think the issue of chance is clouded by the group's founders' hostility to the Surrealists and that adds an unpleasantly polemic tone to their rejection of all things aleatory. I think this distrats from the more useful distinction between making deliberate decisions about every step in the process of creation by using arbitrary semantic, syntactic or other formal constraints on the one hand and relying on existing rules (genre, character motivation, plot, etc) —which are the "base" constraints which Le Lyonnais describes in the quote above—on the other. The idea of eliminating chance sounds reductive and like the idea is to remove all spontaneity and surprise from the creative act, but to my understanding (and in my experience), for oulipians that delight and surprise comes out of the act of choosing and wrestling with arbitrary constraints. In that sense, chance could play a part as yet another type of constraint: for me that is the difference between automatic writing, on the one hand (which I think is a bit bogus), and John Cage's use of the I-Ching on the other. Although Cage used chance, he used it as a part of a very deliberate process which has many parallels to ou-x-ian works, including his use of various kinds of acrostics. Furthermore, chance insinuates itself into every situation anyway, for example, even an Oulipian war horse like N+7 is going to yield different results depending on which dictionary you happen to use (or if you use a dictionary like the French one I have which has the occasional page from the "g" section bound in the middle of the "c" section!).
I realize none of this addresses the question of whether the final work is any good or not, I'm just addressing this from the creator's point of view.

Second, I'm not sure I see why you both object to that last quote from the Believer article. If I understand it right, it seems to me like the author is commenting on the reader's engagement with the choices an artist has made in a work: it can be fun to try and "second guess" a writer to an extent when he or she is working under constraint, whether a sonnet or an alphabetically determined novel, especially in an extreme case like the "a" chapters in Alphabetic Africa: if you had 20 writers write a five-page story where every word began with "a", would they all be significantly different? Would the authors' voices still come through? To what extent does such a limited vocabulary determine the content of the work? I found Perec's A Void interesting for similar reasons (among many others), while repetitive poetic forms like the sestina virtually challenge the reader to anticipate how the poet can use the same six words in different contexts seven times.

[Dan Green]

Matt: You make Lytal's point more clearly than he did.