In theory

Oulipo: freeing literature by tightening

its rules
You might think Raymond Queneau was guilty of a little overkill when he cured a
bout of writer's block by writing One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, but this
flipbook presentation of 10 sonnets did more than paper over a barren spell, it became
the founding text of an experimental literary collective.
The 14 lines on each page are printed on individual strips, so that every line can be
replaced by the corresponding one in any of the other poems. By the author's
reckoning, it would take someone 190,258,751 years to go through all possible
combinations. Cent Mille Milliards de Pomes is at once complete, always in the
process of becoming (with a little help from the reader) and necessary (on its own
combinatorial terms) the signatures of the Ouvroir de Littrature Potentielle, or
Potential Literature Workshop (OuLiPo) launched by Queneau and Franois Le
Lionnais in 1960.

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The Oulipo replayed literary modernity in ludic mode. It was, inter alia, an attempt to
reconcile CP Snow's two cultures, an undertaking which was embodied by the
workshop's co-founders: Queneau was a writer fascinated by science; Le Lionnais, a
scientist fascinated by writing. In their own way, they were reprising the early
Romantic ambition that "all art should become science, and all science art" (Friedrich
Schlegel). Despite such lofty claims, the collective adopted a very pragmatic approach
to fiction, which is rather unusual in France, where literature has preserved much of
its mystique and creative writing programmes are almost unheard of. According to
Daniel Levin Becker, Oulipians consider "literature in the conditional mood; not the
imperative". They do not profess to know what literature should be, but attempt to
uncover what it could be, either in theory or practice. In the early days, the emphasis
was firmly on the former (i.e. "anoulipism" in Oulipospeak). When they were not
scouring the great works of the past in search of proto-Oulipian procedures, the group
members were busy establishing a lineage of "pre-emptive plagiarists" (Lewis Carroll,
Raymond Roussel et al.). The invention and possible deployment of new writing
constraints ("synthoulipism") soon became the main focal point, however, and under

the aegis of Georges Perec (who joined in 1967) the production of ambitious new
works took centre stage.
Oulipians are into literary bondage. Their fetish is predicated on the notion that
writing is always constrained by something, be it simply time or language itself. The
solution, in their view, is not to try, quixotically, to abolish constraints, but to
acknowledge their presence, and embrace them proactively. For Queneau, "Inspiration
which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery". Italo
Calvino (who was co-opted in 1973) concurred: "What Romantic terminology called
genius or talent or inspiration or intuition is nothing other than finding the right road
empirically". Choosing the "right road" from the outset, instead of stumbling upon it
haphazardly, is the Oulipian way: once the Apollonian structure has been
circumscribed, Dionysus can work his magic. "I set myself rules in order to be totally
free," as Perec put it, echoing Queneau's earlier definition of Oulipians as "rats who
build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape".
As Gabriel Josipovici argues in What Ever Happened to Modernism?, modern
literature was forged out of a refusal to submit to external constraints, with the novel a
"new form in which the individual could express himself precisely by throwing off the
shackles that bound him to his fathers and to tradition". The flipside of this
emancipation of the writer (or privatisation of writing) was, as Walter Benjamin
pointed out, isolation. No longer the mouthpiece of the Muses or society, novelists
could only derive legitimacy from themselves. "Going back to the world of genres is
not an option, any more than is a return to the world of the ancien rgime," writes
Josipovici. The Oulipo escapes the Romantic cul-de-sac of unfettered imagination (or
its Surrealist avatar, chance) by reintroducing external constraints, which are selfimposed.
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Whether or not constraints should be disclosed to the reader is a moot point. Harry
Mathews refuses to do so, while Jacques Roubaud (another mathematician) argues
that the constraint(s) should be the very subject matter of any truly Oulipian work.
Some constraints are a trifle gimmicky, like Jacques Jouet's metro poems, or even
Jean Lescure's N+7 procedure. Others are far more convincing, for example,
Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style in which the same anecdote is retold in 99
different ways. "The problem, when you see the constraint," Perec observed, is that
you no longer see anything else. It is a testament to his prodigious talent that one of
the first reviewers of A Void (1969) should have failed to notice that the novel does
not contain the most common letter (e) in the French language. This lipogrammatic
tour de force is particularly poignant because the missing e (pronounced "eux"
"them" in French) refers to all those (including the author's parents) who went
missing during the second world war.
For Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, the Romantic fragment "stands
for itself and for that from which it has been detached," making it both finite and
(theoretically) infinite. According to Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito, the Oulipian
constraint serves a similar purpose: "The work which results may be 'complete' in
itself, but it will also gesture at all the other work that could potentially be generated
using that constraint". Exhaustion is the "necessary corollary" of potentiality, they

continue. This is particularly true in the case of Perec, who, like an agoraphobic
miniaturist, focuses on manageable, bite-sized chunks of reality, which he then tries to
shoehorn into his books. He claimed that his ambition in Life: A User's Manual (1978)
was "to exhaust not the world" but "a constituted fragment of the world". An Attempt
at Exhausting a Place in Paris (1975) his famous exploration of the "infra-ordinary"
involved spending three days on the Place Saint-Sulpice observing what happened
when nothing happened.
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One could argue that the failure of the Oulipian project is Perec's major theme. In one
of the dreams in La Boutique obscure recently translated for the first time Perec
discovers an edition of A Void in which the banned letter e keeps recurring. In Life: A
User's Manual, Bartlebooth dies clutching the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, which
turns out to be the wrong shape. The plot based on an algorithm enabling the knight
in a game of chess to touch every single square on the board once enacts the novel's
failure (there is a missing chapter corresponding to an unvisited basement). "The
Winter Journey" (which Atlas Press is bringing out in a new edition) revolves around
the discovery and subsequent loss of a book (the eponymous Winter Journey)
proving that all the great modern poets were in fact plagiarists. Also, 53 Days about
an unfinished book left by a writer who disappears was left unfinished by Perec,
when he disappeared in 1982. The most famous Oulipian himself a crossword
constructor knew that literature was an unsolvable puzzle.
Some say that the Oulipo increasingly resembles a gathering of ageing cruciverbalists:
it started off looking for "pre-emptive plagiarists" and is now largely concerned with
archiving its glory days. In an age of N+7 Machines and ebooks, many of the Oulipo's
algorithm-based experiments have lost their cutting edge. The recent revival of
interest, in the English-speaking world, is due to translations of works by historic
Oulipians, as well as Daniel Levin Becker's youthful transatlantic enthusiasm (he is
the group's latest recruit). Perhaps it is a measure of the movement's success that these
days some of the most interesting debates and experiments are taking place outside
the narrow confines of the group. Take Multiples, for instance, which originated as a
special issue of McSweeney's, edited by Adam Thirlwell, which Portobello is
bringing out here next month. It is a typically Oulipian exercise in which 12 short
stories are translated by 61 novelists into 18 different languages. Each story is
translated into or out of English several times, until something new is found in
translation.