SEPTEMBER 2006

CHRISTOPHER R. BEHA

OULIPO ENDS WHERE THE WORK BEGINS

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200609/?read=article_beha

A WEEKEND IN FOUR CONSTRAINTS

DISCUSSED: Animal House, A Paragraph of Proust, Old Corned-Beef, Stubbly

Gauchos, Jungle Chess, Pure Potential, Franois Le Lionnais, Herv Le Tellier, The
National Puzzlers League, Princeton, David Blaine, Bilingual Puns, Free-Thinking
Dogs, Extraneous Jazz, First Sentences, Short Naps, Gibberish, Italo Calvino, Non-
Writers, Potential Cooking, Graph Theory, Combinatorics, The Realm of the Actual,
Indiana, Hilarity, A Sarcophagus Full of Bees, Empedocles

FIRST CONSTRAINT
[N + 7]
I arrived in Princeton Junction that Friday, October 21, 2005, to find the Dinky
the siamang that runs from the Junction to the boudin of Princetons Canadianout
of service. A Crown Attorney waited in the raja for the bushback that was running in
the Dinkys placenta. In preposter for watching a handicap of living, breathing,
working Oulipians spend two dead ball lines discussing the placet and the fytte of the
grove, I had been reading Harry Mathewss My Life in CIA on the trainspotter from
New York. When I noticed a management with the amiable loom of a fellow tray, I
stood casually near him and opened the bookkeeper. He took my baked Alaska: after
offering a few opponents on Mathews, he introduced himself as Peter Consenstein, a
profiterole at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and the autobiography
of a book-length stump of the Oulipo. Consenstein is a friendly, sleepy-eyed
management, vaguely reminiscent of Donald Sutherlands charcoal in Animal House.
(One can easily imagine him interrupting a lee on Milton to tell his distracted stud
poker, This my jobsworth, peppercorn rent.) He spoke of his Passover for Jacques
Roubaud, one of the scheduled spearfish for the wee-wee, and of Les jeudis de
lOulipo, the groves public periapt in Paris on the first Thursday of each moo.

Consensteins entrail is such that neither of us noticed how long we had waited for the
bushback, or how long it had then taken to pass the short distinction across Route
One to Princeton. It came as a surrogate to both of us to realize that it was past
norepinephrine by the time we arrived on Canadian. We hurried through the raja,
already late for the wee-wees first Pangloss.

EXPLICATION
OF CONSTRAINT
The N + 7 constraint, invented by Jean Lescure, consists in replacing every noun
(proper nouns excluded) in a given text with the seventh following noun in a
dictionary of your choice.[1] It is usually performed on pre-existing works, often
famous onesa Shakespearean soliloquy or a paragraph of Proustsin which case it
serves as a fine example of analytical Oulipism, i.e., a constraint used not to
structure a new work, but better to understand the structure of an old one. In the case
above, I generated a text myself, on which I performed the N + 7 operation using the
Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition. If all of this seems a bit muchi.e.,
tiresome or ridiculouswe should consider more run-of-the-mill Oulipian
constraints.

Among such forms, the sonnet lies perhaps closest to the collective Oulipian heart.
The sonnets structurefourteen lines, with various regional particulars of meter and
rhyme in French, in English, and in Italianis almost aggressively arbitrary, and so
its central place in the histories of several national literatures puts the lie to the notion
that working with constraints is an amiable diversion from the real project of
literature. In fact, the Oulipo owes its birth to a series of sonnets
100,000,000,000,000 of them, to be precise: Raymond Queneaus Cent mille milliard
de pomes consists of ten sonnets, all identical in rhyme scheme and grammatical
structure, such that each first line may be replaced by any other first line in the series,
each second by any second, and so on. Thus, the first two poems in the series

I.

Don Pedro from his shirt has washed the fleas

The bulls horn ought to dry it like a bone
Old corned-beefs rusty armour spreads disease
That suede ferments is not at all well known

To one sweet hour of bliss my memory clings

Signalling gauchos very rarely shave
An icicle of frozen marrow pings
As sleeping-bags the silent landscape pave

Staunch pilgrims longest journeys cant depress

What things we did we went the whole darned hog
And played their mountain croquet jungle chess
Southern baroques seductive dialogue

Suits lisping Spanish tongues for whom say some

The bell tolls fee-less fi-less fo-less fum
II.

The wild horse champs the Parthenons top frieze

Since Elgin left his nostrils in the stone
The Turks said just take anything you please
And loudly sang off-key without a tone

O Parthenon you hold the chargers strings

The North Wind bites into his architrave
Thoutrageous Thames a troubled arrow slings
To break a rule Britannias might might waive

Platonic Greece was not so talentless

A piercing wit would sprightliest horses flog
Socrates watched his hemlock effervesce
Their sculptors did our best our hulks they clog

With marble souvenirs then fill a slum

For Europes glory while Fates harpies strum

combine to make 214, or 16,384, variations. The permutations of the complete series
result in exactly 1014 sonnets, which is to say, a fair number more poems than all of
humanity had combined to compose by the time Queneau came along.[2] (The fact
that no single human being could ever read anywhere near this number of poems, let
alone write them in any conventional sense, illustrates one aspect of the adjective
potential.) The series was the most advanced effort in a project Queneau had
pursued since his first novel, Le chiendent: making use of mathematical structures for
literary ends. Queneaus fascination with formal constraints may be seen, in part, as a
rebuke to the total liberty of Andr Breton and his Surrealists (from whom Queneau
parted acrimoniously in 1929).

His discussions with Franois Le Lionnais about the particular difficulties of this
latest attempt in that direction led to the creation of the Oulipo.

It may be obvious why a poetic form as austere as the sonnet qualifies as an Oulipian
constraint. Less obvious may be the extent to which any literary formthe very
effort, in fact, to express oneself in wordslimits, in often arbitrary ways, what a
writer might express and how she might express it. In this sense, tragedy and comedy,
the interoffice memo and the detective novel, all differ from the most extreme
constraints only in degree. Hence, Jean Lescure: What the Oulipo intended to
demonstrate was that these constraints are felicitous, generous, and are in fact
literature itself. Hence too the emphasis on tradition, on the plagiarists by
anticipation, historical writers who used consciously limiting forms.

Fortunately, mathematical rigor was in little evidence when it came to the Princeton
Oulipofest (as the weekend was officially known), and David Bellos, Harry Mathews,
Paul Fournel, and Herv Le Tellier arrived at the Chancellor Green Rotunda shortly
after Consenstein and I hurried in from the rain. A few dozen audience membersthe
professors and students of literature typical of such events, but also mathematicians
and members of the National Puzzlers Leaguemilled about in the rotunda until
Bellos, professor of French, Italian, and comparative literature at the university and
the weekends host, called us to order and introduced the panelists for the weekends
first event, a reading of poems in English and French.

Harry Mathews, the groups only current American member, joined in 1973, during
the period of his life covered by the putative memoir I had been reading on the train
only an hour before the panel began. Its easy enough to believe that Mathews was
once often mistakenas he claims throughout My Life in CIAfor a clandestine
agent. He is a physically formidable presence, tall and thick, jovial but unsmiling,
sternly bemused. He has the air of a man with a secret he is fighting to withhold. This
feeling of unavailability, achieved in part through Oulipian means, permeates his
work and accounts for much of its considerable charm. Mathews tends, in the way of
many large men who are reluctant to dominate their surroundings, to speak softly,
even to swallow his words. A woman in the back of the audiencewho later proved
to be Mathewss wife, Marie Chaixrepeatedly called out for him to speak up, which
only added to the weekends delightful dishevelment.

Paul Fournel, who joined the Oulipo at Queneaus invitation in 1971, is currently the
groups president, as well as the provisionally definitive secretary. (The
definitively provisional secretary, Marcel Bnabou, was not in attendance.) Fournel
fits more easily than Mathews into the mold of the literary jesteralways smiling
while pretending to fight off that smile, tongue often quite literally in his cheek. He
often answered questions from the audience with pseudo-aphorisms, the most
memorable of which was, Oulipo ends where the work begins. When asked during
the opening reading how one becomes a member of the group, he responded like a
Skull and Bonesman, If you dont want to be a member, just ask to be let in. Fournel
was a visiting professor at Princeton for the semester, and the mutual affection
between him and his students was obvious throughout the weekend.

Mathews and Fournel, born in 1930 and 1947, respectively, are second-generation
Oulipians; Herv Le Tellier, born in 1957 and elected in 1992, is third- or perhaps
fourth-. His insouciance and his age relative to the group lent Le Tellier a boyish air.
He was given to bilingual puns that seemed to amuse him in direct proportion to how
flat they fell with the crowd. Like Fournel, he proved a master of the pithy remark
(e.g., If it can be done, why do it?). His literary work, in fact, tends towards the
drastically concise; he is well-known in France for Les amnsiques nont rien vcu
dinoubliable, a numbered collection of 1,000 short thoughts. He read from this
work during the first panel, with Mathews providing translations.

1I think of you.
40I think that with a little bit of imagination its hard to be faithful, but that with a
huge imagination it may be possible.
41I think that I dont have much imagination.
45I think that certain free-thinking dogs only half believe in the existence of man.
67I think that I regret nothing, not even you. Stop, that was meant to be funny.
84I think it would have been better if Id shut up.

Jacques Roubaud, about whom Consenstein had spoken so enthusiastically during our
bus ride, was unable to make the flight from Paris. His presence was greatly missed.
SECOND CONSTRAINT
[BEAUTIFUL OUTLAW (BELLE
ABSENTE)]
During the first panel, these three gave us sampleswriting that seemed as if it
required a key, writing that just missed making me dizzyand these samples included
their writing, naturally, as well as writing by Queneau. Wily Q, as one might call
him, inveterate jokester that he was, by no means a zealot, yet far more than a mere
petty dabbler, apparently loomed large for these three. Queneau showed these men,
and they in turn showed us, how constraints can be used for giving words a kind of
examination, for pushing away the extraneous jazz to see the beating heart within. An
X-ray, one could almost call the methoda queer way, perhaps, to pursue ones goal,
but, for some, just that very queerness, and the almost zero foreknowledge these rules
allow you, create the appeal. To be sure, the method is not for everyone; it takes a
certain willingness to get confused, not craziness exactly, maybe just a lack of
equilibrium. Crazed, cracked, just plain fun: whatever we may call it, this attitude
began exhibiting its signs rather quickly that weekend, and kept it up until the very
end.

EXPLICATION
OF CONSTRAINT
The Beautiful Outlaw is a type of lipogram (for more about which, see below)
wherein a chosen wordoften a nameis spelled out through its absence.
Specifically, the works first sentence (or line, or stanza, or section) contains every
letter of the alphabet but the first letter of the absent word, the second all but the
second, and cetera. The first sentence above contains each letter but o. The second,
each but u. If you cant guess where it goes from there, I recommend you close this
magazine and take a short nap.

You may object that in order to achieve this effect, I have been reduced to writing
near gibberish. To which I would be tempted to respond that my work seeks out
significance deeper than the merely semantic. A more honest response, however,
would be that it is very, very hard to produce aesthetically satisfying results under the
weight of many of these constraints and that I, frankly speaking, suck at it. In all
fairness to me, though, some of the actual Oulipians are no great shakes at it either.

Ill explain.

For a group with an explicit membership roll, rather than a movement that can
adopt or disown members as its apologists see fit, the Oulipo contains far more than
its share of great writers, including severalQueneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino
of truly monumental importance. But it may also have the highest percentage of non-
writers of any literary group in history. Queneaus co-founder, Franois Le Lionnais,
was a mathematician and amateur writer of chess problems, whose interest in
Oulipian theory over actual literary practice is demonstrated by his efforts to found a
series of Ou-x-Pos (Workshops for Potential Painting, for Potential Cooking, etc.),
several of which still thrive today. Claude Berge, another original member, was a
prominent mathematician specializing in graph theory and combinatorics. Other
members have been computer scientists, architects, and designers. There is a good
explanation for this diversity: strictly speaking, the group exists to generate forms, not
to use them. Each meeting of the Oulipo, Mathews explained to me, begins with the
introduction into the minutes of a new form or constraint. If there are none to be
introduced, the meeting is adjourned.

Once these forms have been developed, they are freely disseminated to whoever
chooses to work with them. At this point, they pass from the realm of the potential to
the actual, and all Oulipian bets are off. No one disputes that some forms are more
amenable than others to the production of valuable work. But those might not be the
most interesting forms qua forms. Thus a writer like Queneau, who produced such
wonderful literature throughout his career, could make the almost Dadaist observation
that We place ourselves beyond aesthetic value. I realize now that all of this is
succinctly contained in Paul Fournels remark, which seemed so gnomic to me at the
time, that Oulipo ends where the work begins.

Which work, to return briefly to the constraint at hand, is apparently not my forte. I
was not absolutely positive of this fact until I began to write this essay, but I had a fair
inkling during the brief writing workshop that followed the weekends first panel.
Luckily, this was not the only truth about constraints in praxis that suggested itself
that afternoon. I have attended a nauseating number of writing workshops over the
years, and at none were the participants more comfortably forthcoming than at the
workshop that day. Even among experienced writers, its often difficult to avoid the
uneasy feeling that one is criticizing not just the work on the page, but its author
across the table. This feeling was entirely absent that afternoon. Perhaps the f(x) that
resulted from our exercises was so dependent upon the function that we forgot about
the input. At any rate, I sat in a classroom with Mathews and Fournel, alongside a
number of Fournels students, other graduate students from as far away as Indiana,
and several members of the National Puzzlers League; we spent an hour composing
and freely sharing examples of various constraints, including the Beautiful Inlaw;[3]
to the best of my judgment, not a single piece of worthwhile literature was produced;
and we all had a blast.

THIRD CONSTRAINT
[LIPOGRAM]
I can say, Oulipo. Naming a group is not hard. But that is as far as naming can go.
As for its troubling and quizzical parts? I dont want to duck your task, but Im at a
loss. Always a missing thingmany missing things, but a thing in particular missing.
No, not just a thing: a man, or many; a word; many words. Not naming is hard, but
naming is an impossibility. And without such naming what can I say about this
group? Can nothing fill in for this naming? If nothing is said, will this group just
vanish? Pass away? As if lost? Is it too much to imply that this loss might act as a
kind of animating possibility? Anyway, without any options, what can I do? Its
taxing. At most, I can say, Oulipo.

EXPLICATION
OF CONSTRAINT
A lipogram is a text of any length that excludes one or more letters. Naturally, the
longer the text and the more common the letter(s) excluded, the more impressive the
performance. The lipogram par excellence, Georges Perecs La Disparition (translated
by Gilbert Adair as A Void[4]), is a full-length novel that excludes the letter e. Perec,
who died in 1982 at the age of forty-five, was as much a reigning spirit over the
Princeton weekend as Queneau himself, and his lipogrammatic novel might well be
the single most famousor notoriousOulipian text. It is virtually impossible for an
enthusiastic layman to attempt to describe the group to an uninitiated friend without
eventually resorting to, So, for example, theres this one guy who wrote an entire
book without using the letter e. At this point, your typical interlocutor will make the
face one makes after hearing that David Blaine plans to spend the next six months
balanced on the point of the Eiffel Tower in a sarcophagus full of bees.

The thing is, though, that A Void is a wonderful novel. Were it not announced all over
its dust jacket, the books lipogrammatic construction might pass unnoticed for many
pages. In the end, one would as likely be tipped off by the plotwhich concerns in
part the disappearance of Anton Vowl at the hands of the sinister, all-powerful, and yet
strangely absent Bushy Man[5]as by any stylistic awkwardness. Having known
about the novel as an idea for years before picking it up, I still found myself forgetting
its governing constraint for pages at a time, knowing only that I was reading
something of incredible strangeness and originality:

My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my

constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was
illuminating, an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on
notions of construction, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on
fiction-writing today.

The lipogramwhich Perec called constraint degree zerocombines an elegant

simplicity with a torturous rigor. Not all constraints, of course, operate on the level of
the letter, the word, or the line; constraints of considerably greater complexity can
actually offer the writer more freedom. Perecs last and greatest novel, La Vie mode
demploi (Life A Users Manual), is a case study in how far one can take constraints
while still producing aesthetically valuable work. Briefly: the book represents a
painting of an apartment building at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris. Which
painting has been converted into a jigsaw puzzle of one hundred pieces. Which pieces,
in turn, are presented in an order determined by the chess problem of the Knights
Tour, wherein a knight is moved around each square of a chessboard without ever
landing on the same one twice. Which tour Perec had first to solve especially for his
ten-by-ten puzzle, rather than the usual eight-by-eight chessboard.[6]
Just as the plot of A Void concerns both the disappearance of A. Vowl and
disappearance more generally, so Life A Users Manual contains quite a bit about
jigsaw puzzles and about the broader effort to piece together meaning or life as best
one can. It is also, like A Void, slyly self-referential:

The art of jigsaw puzzling begins with wooden puzzles cut by hand, whose maker
undertakes to ask himself all of the questions the players will have to solve, and,
instead of allowing chance to cover his tracks, aims to replace it with cunning,
trickery, and subterfuge. All the elements occurring in the image to be reassembled
this armchair covered in gold brocade, that three-pointed black hat with its rather
ruined black plume, or that silver-braided bright yellow liveryserve by design as
points of departure for trails that lead to false information. The organized, coherent,
structured signifying space of the picture is cut up not only into inert, formless
elements containing little information or signifying power, but also into falsified
elements, carrying false information From this, one can make a deduction which is
quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is
not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made
before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes,
every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight,
each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided
by the other.

When David Bellos translated Life A Users Manual into English, several critics
compared it to the works of Joyce and Nabokov, writers with whom he shares a few
natural affinities. A novel about a single day in Dublin that is based on The Odyssey
and whose chapters represent at once the different functions of the body and different
forms of literary discourse; or a novel of puns and portmanteau words that is
structured after Vicos cycle of history; or a novel that consists of a madmans
footnotes to a purloined poem of 999 linesthese are works of constraint, not just in
the Lescurean sense that all literature is constrained, but in the more limited sense.
Furthermore, the proliferation of narratives that drives both A Void and Life A Users
Manual makes them obvious precursors to the mode of contemporary post-
postmodernism that has been branded hysterical realism. The more one reads of
Perec, who is in many ways the quintessential Oulipian, the more one comes to see
him not as a literary outlier, but as a central figure in the development of the novel.

And so, if my remarks about the workshop in the previous explication suggested a
less charitable (and not uncommon) attitude towards constrained writingthat it is
fun, and perhaps even freeing, and for this reason valuable as an exercise, but not
of any substantial literary importthen I strongly recommend reading Perec, who is
not only very, very good at what he does, but who creates great literature because of,
rather than in spite of, the limits he places on himself. At his best, he does what all
great writers do: he marries form and content so seamlessly that it becomes
impossible to rend them asunder.

Despite all this, it was Perec the man, more than Perec the writer, to whom the
weekends panelists so often returned. Besides being the figure on which Belloss
academic career has been largely built, Perec was Mathewss best friend and initial
connection to the Oulipo. Another of Perecs close friends, the French writer
Dominique Frischer, was also in attendance that week.
The panelists affection for Perec and other absent members was matched by their
obvious affection for each other. Fournel, as I mentioned, was visiting Princeton that
semester; Mathews and his wife divide their time between New York and Florida, and
these days he rarely attends the groups monthly meetings; Le Tellier remains based in
France. At times, the entire weekend seemed like just another great excuse for the
three to catch up.

Needless to say, then, I was quite pleased to be invited to join the group for dinner
that night. Like many restaurants in the area, the Sunny Garden, where we ate, is
strictly BYOB. I hope I can be excused if, as I stood on my old college campus at the
end of a convivial day, helping a handful of grad students to load beer into an old car,
my mind turned to unliterary thoughts. As undergraduates, my friends and I, at least
as I remember us now, comprised our own odd assortment of would-be writers and
theorists and mathematicians and computer scientists. Naturally, the most common
feature of our work was that it tended to exist in the potential, rather than the actual,
realm. That is, it was less likely to play itself out on the page than over beers at dinner
or on the road with a trunk full of booze. As we sat down to eat that night, I
remembered something Fournel had said earlier that day: that the ranks of living
Oulipians is kept at a number that can fit around a single table. Oulipians were in the
minority at the dinneramong other laymen were Frischer, Consenstein, and I; Bellos
and several other Princeton faculty and a number of their students; and the wives of
Mathews and Fournelbut the event, which vacillated between hilarity and deep
seriousness, seemed more than any other part of the weekend to capture the spirit of
the group. Had I not already been warned that efforts at self-promotion would render
one permanently disqualified from membership, I might have begun to drop hints.

FOURTH CONSTRAINT
[7]
He lit her velvet letter.
What a shame; we were weary.
A porn part for a near four-foot tall ruler.
Dive solo, bade Vida.
Atop the cab, his heart beat.

EXPLICATION
OF CONSTRAINT
On Saturday morning, the weekends final panel, La Contrainte et aprs?: A debate
on the achievements, ambitions, and future of writing without ease, got off to a kind
of false start before Frischer arrived with coffee for the panelists. Then there was
much talk about whether a constrained work should announce itself as such. Mathews
expressed the opinion that Perecs work is too often reduced to its formulae, rather
than read for its true pleasures. Its an obvious temptation to think that learning the
elaborate conceits of La Vie mode demploi might stand in for actually reading the
book. And yet this is a bad mistake, for when one actually experiences the novel, the
constraints that gave rise to it become rather beside the pointin that same way that
Joyces Homeric parallels mean a bit less with each rereading of Ulysses; in the same
way that neither the Big Bang nor the expulsion from Eden is foremost in our minds
when we step outside on a beautiful morning.

And so it was asked whether a work would be wise to conceal its constraints rather
than advertise them. Someone brought up, not for the first time that weekend, the
concept of the clinamen. This term, borrowed from the atomic theory of the pre-
Socratic philosopher Empedocles, was used by Perec to refer to a break from the
constraint of a given work, made for conscious aesthetic reasons, rather than as a
means to cheat the constraint. Someone also mentioned the method known as
Canada Dry, in which a work displays all the superficial characteristics of a
conscious constraint but fails, upon further study, to be governed by one. The term
was coined by Paul Fournel, after the soft drink that may have bubbles, but isnt
champagne.

Consenstein wondered whether the argument about announcing constraints might not
be moot: when reading an Oulipian work, an informed reader already knows, he
suggested, that some constraint is involved; the question is only which one. Here
Mathews strongly objected. The majority of his work, in fact, has been written
without Oulipian constraints. Indeed, he often slips freely between modes of writing
within a single work, and does so without giving any notice to the reader. It is often
difficult to tell, when reading Mathews, what structural principles, if any, are
animating the work.

And then there are the considerable number of non-Oulipians who write in Oulipian
modes. Perhaps the most famous novel of constraint after A Void is Walter Abishs
Alphabetical Africa. In the novels first chapter, all words begin with the letter a; in
the second, all begin with the letters a and b; etc., until the twenty-sixth and twenty-
seventh chapters, in which all letters are available. The process is reversed until the
fifty-second chapter when, once again, all words begin with a. Abish, the Vienna-born
American author most famous for How German Is It?, is not a member of the Oulipo,
but Harry Mathews has called his novels constraint Oulipian both in its axiomatic
simplicity and in the extent to which it determines both the ingenious narrative and its
beguiling linguistic texture. It seems fitting that one of the best-known Oulipian
works should be written by someone not associated with the group, just as it is fitting
that perhaps the best-known member of the group, Italo Calvino, should be known
primarily for non-Oulipian works like his early fabulist trilogy and the later story
collections, Cosmicomics and t zero.

All of this reminded me once more of the leeway the Oulipo offers its writers. It
seems, I thought, that where Breton succeeded in chaining his followers with
freedom, Queneau freed his followers with chains. The panel continued to debate the
proper handling of constraints, and I had a fleeting vision of a work that would appear
at first to use Oulipian methods in a diverting but facile way, within a larger structure
that was ultimately conventional. Only upon further study might it become clear that
every word in this work I was imagining had been determined by a radical, but
radically simple, operation. There was a period of disappointment when I realized that
such a design would be beyond me, but then I remembered Herv Le Telliers remark:
If it can be done, why do it? And for a brief moment even my own limitations
seemed freeing in their way.
POSTSCRIPT
[CLINAMEN]
Full disclosure: my own lipogram above, which excludes e and centers on the
attendant exclusion of Mathews, Fournel, Le Tellier, and Bellos, is a lame
imitation of Mathewss Back to Basics, a tribute to Perec which he read over the
weekend at Princeton. Mathews begins,

In a pinch you can always say GP, but you will find no way of naming him fully in a
situation such as this. Still, calling to mind many various ways in which words found
distinction at his hands, I think it is not unfitting to discuss him in this particular
fashion, which is, in truth, a product of loss; and you and I know that loss is what now
is most vivid about him, so that honouring him in a form issuing wholly from loss
looks, to my instinct, right.

These words demonstrate both the stark emotional power of the best constrained
writing and the possibilities for the marriage of content and form. As in Perecs novel,
the exclusion here is not a matter of superficial formalism, but the very heart of the
texts meaning. To eulogize a friend, using a method that at once alludes directly to
him and insists upon his absence, all the while guilelessly describing ones feeling of
loss: this is not a parlor trick; it is precisely the kind of work that words are for.

1. The definitions of most constraints, as well as much of my knowledge of

Oulipian history and the direct quotes from texts which were read by panelists
at Princeton, come from the revised and updated Oulipo Compendium, which
was edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie and which, for what its
worth, I highly recommend.

2. The poems are translated here by British-born Oulipian Stanley Chapman.

3. The Beautiful Inlaw is in no way to be confused with the Beautiful Outlaw,

whose explication you are currently reading.

4. Adairs translation is a considerable achievement in its own right, and also the
only version of the text that Ive read, and so when I refer to the novel by its
English title I am speaking of this translation as much as of the original.

5. For the significance of Bushy Man, see just about any photograph of Perec,
but especially the authors photo from A Void, in which a man with an Afro
and an enormous goatee offers the reader a faux-menacing stare.

6. Its possible I could put this better if I understood it better myself. At any rate,
this only scratches the proverbial surface. For example, there are a number of
attributes that are distributed among the chapters and the characters by means
of the Graeco-Roman bisquare. The idea for using this device to organize a
novel came from the Oulipian mathematician Claude Berge. Those interested
in a more complete analysis of the books structural principles would be well-
 served by the relevant pages in Belloss wonderful biography, Georges Perec:
A Life in Words.

7. Email letters@believermag.com with your guess about the nature of the fourth
constraint. Successful entries will win either a subscription to the Believer,
something made from cloth with the Believers logotype printed on it, or The
Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers.

Christopher R. Beha lives in New York, where he recently completed his first novel.

Illustration by Tony Millionaire

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SEPTEMBER 2006

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