What is Wrong with Oulipo's Understanding of Itself

James Elkins

This was originally posted on Goodreads and Librarything, August 2019. A newer version may be on
Goodreads, because I update it there. Please send comments, criticism, etc., to jelkins@saic.edu.

Once again it's time to take stock of Oulipo. This book has English translations of writings by all 41 members,
from the founding in 1963 to 2018. The last two assessments of the movement, "The End of Oulipo?: An
Attempt to Exhaust a Movement" by Lauren Elkin and Veronica Scott Esposito (2012) and Cécile De Bary’s
"Une nouvelle pratique littéraire en France: Histoire du groupe Oulipo de 1960 à nos jours" (2014), were both
reviewed by Mitchell Kerley in SubStance (2018, online). This anthology is more wide-ranging than the
materials covered in either book.

This is a reaction (not a review). It's an attempt to understand something that has puzzled me for a long time:
Oulipo writers speak about their constraints, but never about the expressive effect of the constraints on their
texts. The constraints in texts like Perec's "A Void" can be simple, but they produce intricate effects on the
writing: "A Void" can sound offhand, colloquial, awkward, inept, regional, foreign, and bureaucratic in the
space of a sentence, because of the word choices. Oulipo is a puzzle to me because unlike some
contemporary conceptual poets, its writers are not producing "objects" or "outcomes": they remain
interested in constructing examples of literature and poetry, and their texts are full of the conventional
elements of writing (narrative forms, common character types, common class and gender constructions,
traditional tropes and choices of words, unsurprising imagery)--and yet they talk only about the constraints,
as if constraints could block all convention and produce texts cleaned of any historical traces.

1. Literary value

Esposito's critique of Jouet as not sufficiently "literary" -- his Métro poems, one of which is in this anthology,
are criticized as "mealy mouthed," like a "first draft"--and his praise for Cesar Aira is a useful way to raise the
question of literary value. Technically, Oulipo's productions aren't supposed to have literary value: first
because they are only "potentially" literature ("littérature potentielle"), and then because the interest is
supposed to lodge in the constraint and the new forms it enables, not in conventional literary ideals such as
expression, insight, affect, or realism.

Nevertheless it isn't possible to avoid the impression that Oulipo has produced a possibly disproportionately
large number of forgettable texts. In this book there is Hervé Le Tellier's "Liquid Tales" (2012), a set of
harmless apercus that are occasionally whimsical or existential; Olivier Salon's "Shark Poem" (2013), a trite
parallel between poets and sharks; Pablo Martín Sánchez’s "Metric Poetry" (2012), which does not add much
to Jouet's idea of writing on the Métro... there are many forgettable entries in this anthology. (The anthology
has several excellent pieces. Harry Mathews's "Saint Catherina" (2000) is a hypertrohpied sestina in prose,
and the effect is a kind of hypnotic dementia; and Pierre Rosenstiehl's "Frieze of the Paris Métro" (1998) is an
excellent fusion of visual elements--mathematical diagrams--and prose, and it's followed by one of Jouet's
actual Paris Métro poems.)

So I am interested in Esposito's criticisms of Jouet and others, and in his praise of Aira and other non-
Oulipians such as Tom McCarthy, Édouard Levé, and Christian Bök (I've written on all these, except Levé), but
the assessment of literary value is not an Oulipian criterion.

Esposito's co-author, Lauren Elkin--no relation of mine--is concerned with gender representation, especially
in Hervé Le Tellier's work. As Kerley puts it, she notes that Le Tellier and many other Oulipeans fail to
"question or examine the existing structures of either power or language." This is also significant, but it is also
not an Oulipean criterion.

The problem of literary value, for me, has to be raised alongside the problem of the members' lack of
attention to the concept. I don't say lack of awareness, because literature and literary value are continuously
present in Oulipean writing. But it is seldom clear which qualities of literature are to be emulated, which are
to be avoided, and how constraints affect those qualities.

2. Constraints

The idea of constrained writing is itself curiously unconstrained. Some of Oulipo's constraints are very
challenging: monovocalisms, permutations on the sestina, lipograms, etc. But many others are so loose that
they effectively don't prevent any content. Michele Audin's "Caroline, October 21, 1935" (2015) is an
inventory of objects on a tabletop. Is this usefully understood as a constraint, or is it more like a theme, or
even an interest, or a focus? Paul Formel's "Novels" (2006) is described by the editors of this anthology as an
"extended descendent" of Queneau's "Exercises in Style," in which an anecdote is retold 99 times. Formel
retells a story from 7 perspectives. It's more like "Rashomon," but whatever its genealogy, there is no
appreciable effect of the constraint: "Novels" is just 7 pieces of average flash fiction.

In order to make sense as a constraint, a constraint should exert a perceptible effect on the writing--perhaps
by excluding words or ideas, or by forcing their inclusion; or else by distorting the language itself, for example
by redirecting the narrative, or rearranging morphemes, words, or elements of narrative. In addition (and this
is a second, separate theme) if the constraint is apparent, if the author publishes it, or if it can be deduced
from the text, then it becomes part of the work. It exerts its own pull on the reader, and has its own "literary
value." I will consider these points separately.

(a) When constraints are known, or can be deduced

This anthology provides a wonderful contribution to this topic, in the form of Calvino's "How I Wrote One of
My Books" (1982), describing "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" (1979). The text, which occupies 15 pages in
this anthology, can be used as a guide to all 12 chapters of Calvino's book, and at the end Calvino gives page
references in Greimas's "Du sens" that provided the structuralist semiotic combinatorics.

This text, "How I Wrote One of My Books," now becomes part of the book for English-language readers. The
reading experience of the book now changes. It will always be possible to read "If on a Winter's Night a
Traveler" by itself, just as it is possible to read Perec's "Life: A User's Manual" without the astonishing
documents of its constraints (they are all online: see escarbille.free.fr/vme.php). But these documents are
not of the same kind as Flaubert's letters, or Sartre's, or discarded drafts of manuscripts: they are finished
documents, the exact equivalents of simpler statements of constraints given throughout this anthology.
When constraints are known, or can be deduced, it seems to me they produce a more interesting hybrid text,
comprised of the constraints and the texts they have been permitted to produce. The problem for literary
criticism and reception multiplies, because Calvino's "How I Wrote One of My Books" is actually readable.

(b) Motives

Given the variety and sometimes the intricacy of Oulipean constraints, it is surprising that there is so little on
the subject of motivation. What has prompted members and followers of Oulipo to impose constraints?

There is an interesting passage in Jacques Roubaud's piece called "⊂" that bears on this problem. (The ⊂ is
explained by the editors of this book as "the mathematical symbol for complementarity," which is wrong;
they also have a very poor explanation of Queneau numbers [p. 220], which makes me think that they have
little affinity for the often strong mathematical content of Oulipo.) Roubaud remarks:

"I sensed... that I was not going to be able to stop myself from having mathematics play a part in [my]
process... it was initially just a desire for amazement, a hoax, [a desire for] singularity, originality, an aesthetic
meaning which was of course not entirely inexistent (Max, calligrams, cummings). But now I want to take this
hoax thorugh to its end." (p. 277)
To me, this is a remarkable passage, because he declines to think about what mathematics is actually doing
for his writing. Naturally enough, when he first started, it would have been a pleasure to produce
"amazement" in his readers, and there would have been times when his mathematical constraints were
taken as a "hoax," and other times when they were recognized as "original." But now that those motives
have passed, he still remains committed, and it is not clear why--and more puzzling, it is not at all clear why
he does not perceive the need to explain that commitment. There are similar passages by other Oulipo
writers, in which the hardest thing seems to be thinking about what literary effects constraint actually
produces.

Among the implicit and explicit answers to that question, there is the possibility that constraints produce
originality by dismantling or blocking literary conventions that are unknowingly brought into the text. That is
often true, but it is never entirely true: certain conventions will be made difficult or prevented by certain
constraints, but many other will not be, including the underlying conventional desire to produce "good" or
"strong" literature.

(c) The effects of constraints on writing

The idea of multiplying constraints as a blockade against conventions has been explored much more
thoroughly in music. Stockhausen's Klavierstueck 10 is an example: for that, he invented 12 "dimensions" of
music (like pitch, pedalling, etc.), divided each one into 7 "levels," and then made permutations of each one.
Almost nothing of older music could survive in the final composition. The result is still not impossible to listen
to as a virtuoso composition in the romantic mode, and that is an aspect of its reception in performance.
Boulez did the same kind of thing in the Second Piano Sonata, and it is full of fragmentary equations from
Berlioz, Wagner, and any number of predecessors. Constraints do not necessarily produce originality or the
freedom from convention, and when they do, they work in ways that are entirely unpredictable.

Perec's "A Void" is an excellent example of this unpredictability. I am not aware of any reviews or
assessments that remark on the strange kinds of English that result from the lack of the letter "e," but the
effect is intense and kaleidoscopic. (I assume it's the same in French, but I can't assess that.) The beginning of
a sentence might sound like patois, and then it might evoke a vernacular usage or even an obscenity, then
veer into a surprising ventriloquism of some dialect (like Southern American English, or Midlands UK English).
None of this would be intentional. The simple constraint does indeed produce a complex originality, but that
originality is not itself analyzed, because Oulipo constrains itself to speak only of its constraints. (I've written
on "A Void," for example on Goodreads, and also on Bök's "Xenotext," which has passages that sounds like
weird Loeb Classical Library translations. An example in this anthology is Olivier Salon's "Invisible Cities: Lille"
(2007), which is a variant of a lipogram in that it contains only the vowels in "Lille." It veers senselessly
between various implied styles: offhand, literal-minded, formal, oddly abbreviated, jocular, Joycean,
beginner's prose... and I am only reading the first three lines:

"Lille's glimmering. It seems impressive. Lille stretches then Lille rises. Night's ending, it's high time! Lille's
sheer steeples rise, then it flicks its index finger right there..." (p. 213)

I can't imagine a way of approaching texts like this, or Perec's lipogrammatic texts, without acknowledging
this ruleless, uncontrolled collage of pastiche styles.

(d) The difference between literary texts and lists

I would also like to explore the possibility that there are two flavors to Oulipo: readable texts, like Perec's,
and lists, like Bernard Cerquiglini's "A Very Busy Year" (2013), which gathers all the emails he received at
work regarding the closures of departments and facilities related to his job:

"The Digital Francophone Campus of Tbilisi will be closed from January 1 through January 7.
"The West Africa Office and the Digital Francophone Campus of Saint-Louis will be closed on Thursday,
January 12, in observance of Magal de Touba" (p. 253)

And so on for many pages. Without a narrative, the expressive value comes from the unusual placenames.
Carquiglini ends with an optimistic note:

"The entire staff of the Middle East region wishes all of you excellent holidays and a new year filled with joy,
good health, and peace."

This balances whatever sense of dissipation and uselessness might have accumulated over the long read of
the list.

In the aesthetics of lists and what has been called "cruft" (see David Letzler's excellent book, "The Cruft of
Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention"), the question of attention looms. How should
such texts be read? Kenny Goldsmith chooses to read his own unoriginal texts quite expressively, as if they
were conventional mid-century poetry. Others read in a carefully affectless voice. Tan Lin has said that his
texts ask for different kinds of attention and inattention--skimming, glancing, selecting. All of these questions
of reader's attention are raised by texts like this one that avoid narrative. It's such a fundamental choice that
it seems to me it should count as a fork in the Oulipo road. It leads to flarf, conceptual poetry, and aleatorics,
and away from problems of literature.

3. The visual element in Oulipo

Visual elements in fiction are one of my principal interests (writingwithimages.com). The are perhaps four
kinds of visual elements in this anthology: comics, mathematical diagrams, mathematical and structuralist
symbols (in Roubaud and Calvino), and lists and tables. The overtly visual contributions are comics, and they
are weak. Étienne Lécroart’s "Counting on You" (2012) is disappointing because it is the only entry that
makes an attempt to apply constraints to visual material (he limits the number of lines in each drawing), but
does so in an entirely unvoncincing manner. I am more interested in the other three kinds of visuality. Rhett
McNeil, reading an earlier draft of this text online, noted that even lipograms are visual, and that's true. In
that sense a high percentage of Oulipo is is oriented toward the visual. Very provisionally, the kinds would be:
(1) graphic novels, comics, pictures
(2) diagrams
(3) symbols, mathematical and other
(4) lists, charts, and other formats
(5) visual appearances of pages of ordinary text (as in lipograms).
The last is especially intriguing, and I may write more on it. But the moral, in terms of this anthology, is that
Oulipo authors might consider the visual more inclusively and more reflectively, to avoid exercises like
Lécroart’s, and to fully include diagrams like Rosenstiehl's.
Concluding thoughts

I'm hoping this will be the last time I feel the need to write about Oulipo. I agree with Esposito's concern with
literary value even if I'd make different choices, and with Elkin's concern with the fact that constraints
haven't produced effective politics or gender representations. (And to that I'd add that constraints also
haven't prevented whimsy from being Oulipo's principal mood.)

But in addition it is difficult for me to understand descriptions of Oulipean texts that do not address the
question of whether the constraints themselves are, or aren't, to be read as parts of the text itself.

And it is difficult to understand or believe in the critical reception of Oulipean texts as long as the literary
values and meanings that are produced by the constraints go unanalyzed and even unremarked. In some
contemporary conceptual poetry and writing descended from Oulipo, it makes sense to say the product of
the process isn't a poem or a piece of writing in the usual sense, even if that is more a rhetorical position than
a claim that squares with readers' responses. But the Oulipo authors consistently write about literature, and
produce texts that are versions of very recognizable forms, expressed in entirely recognizable conventions.

I am interested in writing texts that ask to be read differently, including texts that seem to be produced by
constraints, and texts that seem to be non-narrative, like lists. But I am uninterested in abrogating the
writer's duty to analyze and understand their own methods and strategies by applying constraints in the
hope that they will produce innovative effects. Writing is so much more interesting than that.