Literature games: the OULIPO and how teachers can benefit

 

The authorial intention: OULIPO and the transformation of literature

The OULIPO is a group of writers, scientists and poets that was founded in 1960 in France by two men, one of whom remains very famous to this day: Raymond Queneau – the other was François Le Lionnais. You probably know Queneau for one of two things (or both, of course): Zazie dans le métro, and Exercices de style (or perhaps, too, for his Cent mille milliards de poèmes - A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems). The first is a slim, quirky novel that mixes registers and tries to transcribe spoken vernacular language, and the second is a magnificent exercise in writing technique: one simple, banal scene told in 99 different ways according to grammar, tone, style and more. Incidentally, teachers and learners of literature should all have a copy of Exercices de style: it has been translated in more than twenty-five languages so you should be able to find a copy you can read.

Queneau had studied philosophy but he was also very attracted to mathematics, and when he met Le Lionnais, himself a trained mathematician, the OULIPO could begin: OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle. This is difficult to translate exactly, so let’s say it’s something like ‘Workshop of Potential literature’, where ‘Workshop’ really borders on ‘Opener’ (ouvrir) in the sense of creating the conditions for, opening a space for. The idea really was to impose constraints on literature, and those constraints would often be mathematical in nature. Then of course, the field opened up to other constraints, less mathematical but just as stringent. As Queneau is reported to have defined it, an OULIPO author is ‘A rat who builds his own labyrinth, which he proposes to escape’ (‘un rat qui construit lui-même le labyrinthe dont il se propose de sortir’).

The most famous of all OULIPO productions is probably George Perec’s La Disparition, called A Void in English. This English title seems to me really excellent as a pun that also carries the constraint itself: there is not a single vowel E to be found in that novel. Not one. And in French as in English, that vowel is the most frequent of all letters: it’s easy to imagine what an incredibly, fantastically difficult task it is to write a 300-page novel without once using a letter that is found in more than 14% of all French words (for comparison, the second most frequent letter is A, in about half of that: 7.6%; all other letters are below that level). La Disparition (which means The Disappearance) is a novel about someone who has disappeared, but also of course a reference to the disappearance of the letter E.

Now, it may be that your first thought is: how useless an exercise. How utterly irrelevant to literature: it’s a joke and nothing more, haha, it’s impressive perhaps, meaningless probably, an empty display of technique certainly. But in fact it is none of those things, and I can only urge you to give it a go because reading that novel is a different experience – somehow, the text is denser, heavier, it tastes different. And the story holds, too: it’s a sort of detective novel with real intrigue and mystery. Perec, an immense writer, also wrote a novel without the letter A (Les Revenentes), a wonderful and totally original memoir (Je me souviens), a novel constrained by three mathematics theorems (La vie mode d’emploi), and many small texts of fiction and non-fiction, among which the wonderful W ou les souvenirs d’enfance (where you find the famous phrase: ‘l’Histoire avec sa grande hache’, a pun that doesn’t work in English unfortunately).

Not all the constraints imposed were of that nature of course: a well-known one is the so-called N+7 formula, where you take a poem and replace all the nouns you find in it by a noun which is seven places further in a dictionary; let’s try with one of the most famous poems in the English language these days: Robert Frost’s The road not taken, which originally runs like this:

 Original:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Original N+7:

Two rocks diverged in a yellow woodpecker,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one treacle, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the underskirt.

Where it can get interesting – and reminiscent of the problems I discussed here  – is when you do the same with, say, T.S. Eliot: these are the opening lines of The Waste Land (1922), probably the most important poem in the English language in the twentieth century. This is how it begins:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

And this is The Waste Land N+7:

Aquarium is the cruellest moonrise, breeding
Lime out of the dead landmark, mixing
Meniscus and despot, stirring
Dull rosewood with spring rajah.
A wiseacre kept us warm, covering
An easel in forgetful snuff, feeding
A little ligature with dried Tuesday.

Honestly: which one means the most to you?!

So what was the point of Queneau, Perec and the others within the OULIPO? What was the point of imposing constraints on writing, or following mathematical rules? We have heard of similar approaches in music (dodecaphonic, Xenakis and the Golden ratio), but what does it do in literature?

First off, many of those constraints have to be seen as Language Games: not the Wittgenstein kind perhaps but then again not that far off. Reading those two examples above, one is struck by the arbitrariness of language (why that word for that thing?) but also by its depth of anchoring in us. Words (and here, nouns) mean something we can never quite get away from – the word becomes the thing itself. Another French author, Jean Tardieu, wrote a play called ‘Un mot pour un autre’ – ‘a word for another’, where characters systematically use one word in place of another. And while it’s complete gibberish in the beginning, slowly things start to make sense, and we can guess at the meaning of sentences while they’re made of arbitrarily chosen words, and we can guess at the overall meaning while no dialogue makes sense on the surface. And that is where we realise that language is arbitrary, there is no natural connection between a word and what it denotes, and what that play does is what we all do. It is reminiscent of the famous surrealists’ Cadavre Exquis game, but while they were interested in the unconscious, the OULIPO’s interest is in meaning, and language as a tool.

A second aspect of the OULIPO’s work is literature itself, and artistic creation in general: games as N+7 reveal the problem with literature as meaning-making vehicle – change one word and it loses something. Yet change all words and something else comes through: how can that be? Further, literature is itself a system of rules, with a history and a tradition, which all taken together create meaning, and a certain beauty: what if the constraints, the rules, were different? What kind of beauty can we create then? And more generally: is creation freedom from all constraints? Must it be without constraints? Consider Indian classical music: there are many constraints (which notes, which rhythms, structure of the tune etc.) yet within those musicians are completely free. Why wouldn’t it be the same with mathematical constraints?

Experimentation in literature, since Sterne probably, or Rabelais, has always asked questions of literature itself, how far it can be stretched and what its role is (or should be). From free association to free rhymes, from realism to modernism, various constraints of various sorts have been imposed on creating, and the OULIPO did just that too. Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Queneau) reminds us that poetry is endless novelty within endless repetition, and semantic games remind us that words are not the full reality.

And that’s not something AI would come up with :)