This page contains some reflections on literature by several oulipo writers. It is highly personal and subjective, and should not be construed as serious criticism.

The OuLiPo, or "sewing circle for potential literature" is a loosely knit group of European, American, Australian ekc. authors and mathematicians interested in exploring the use of formal constraint as an aid to creativity in literature. Loosely (and satirically) based on the Bourbaki group in mathematics, the OuLiPo differs from it in many essential ways, not the least of which is the lack of seriousness with which they take themselves. Famous OuLiPeans include Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews ekc.

Georges Perec

The quintessential Oulipean is Perec, and the quintessential Oulipean work is Perec's La disparition, translated into English by David Bellos as A void, a political satire about an abduction inspired and constrained technically and metaphorically by the fact that the work is a lipogram in the letter e - that is, this letter does not appear anywhere in the work.

In general, I find Perec hard to read, and somewhat unsatisfying. Perec is an "unreconstructed Oulipean", and there is a disturbing lack of irony in his enthusiasm for the tasks he sets himself. I think in general, my dissatisfaction comes from the fact that Perec's writing is generally both mediocre as narrative, and mediocre as mathematics; for me, no crossword can compare with Freudenthal's "magic square". My favorite work by Perec is Quel petit velo a guidon chrome au fond de la cour? which is charming (especially the index . .)

Raymond Queneau

Queneau is my favorite Oulipean writer, and perhaps my favorite writer of any kind. One of Queneau's best known works is Exercices de Style, a collection of about 100 renditions of a particular banal event in different styles and subject to different formal constraints (acronym, sonnet, neohellenism, ekc.) The contrast between these renditions of the same story is both amusing and enlightening.

To illustrate what I mean by banal, here is the "original" story, told in straightforward style:

Notation: In the S bus, in the rush hour. A chap of about 26, felt hat with a cord instead of a ribbon, neck too long, as if someone's been having a tug of war with it. People getting off. The chap in question gets annoyed with one of the men standing next to him. He accuses him of jostling him every time anyone goes past. A snivelling tone which is meant to be aggressive. When he sees a vacant seat he throws himself on to it.

Two hours later, I meet him in the Cour de Rome, in front of the gare Saint-Lazare. He's with a friend who's saying: "You ought to get an extra button put on your overcoat." He shows him where (at the lapels) and why.

The "same passage" is then rendered in various styles:

Noble: At the hour when the rosy fingers of the dawn start to crack I climbed, rapid as a tongue of flame, into a bus, mighty of stature and with cow-like eyes, of the S-line of sinuous course ekc.

Hellenisms: In a hyperomnibus full of petrolonauts in a chronia of metarush I was a martyr to this microrama; a more than icosimetric hypotype, with a petasus pericycled by a caloplegma and a eucylindrical macrotrachea, anathematized an ephemeral and anonymous outis who, he pseudologed, had been epitreading his bipods ekc.

Mathematical: In a rectangular parallelepiped moving along a line representing an integral solution of the second-order differential equation ekc.

ekc. (trans. Barbara Wright)

Another well-known Queneau work is Cent mille milliards de poemes which consists of 10 sonnets with the property that for each n, the nth line from any one of the sonnets can be substituted for the nth line of any other and still satisfy the technical requirements of the sonnet form. These sonnets are more interesting to think about than to read, although they have a playful quality, and some of the (unexpected?) juxtapositions that occur in randomly generated sonnets are hilarious.

My favorite books by Queneau are the semi-autobiographical Les derniers jours and Odile, which in some ways are quite typical examples of Bildungsroman. Vincent Tuquedenne struggles to escape the determinism of his provincial origins and the pseudo-intellectual millieu at the Sorbonne, and to open himself to the possibility of a fulfilling existence. Likewise, Roland Travy struggles to open himself to the possibility of happiness. Queneau's Paris is not filled with literary salons and avant-garde intellectualls; it's a burlesque, filled with marginal figures - posers, crooks and prostitutes. They represent a parody of the life of the mind, and contrast sharply with the "natural philosophy" which is embodied in characters such as Alfred the waiter and in the sympathetic but unflinching tone of the narrative. Consider the following passage:

One of the children began to cry. An old man came out of one of the houses and dragged himself over to a bench, smoking an old pipe. The patron of the cafe had finished both his reading and his cigarette and was yawning in the sunlight. Two housewives were shouting at each other from opposite sides of the square. An old-clothes man began to sing. A cat ran from one street to another, obliquely. The trees were becoming green, for it was that time of year. Against one of them a dog pissed, after having sniffed it, and then paid a visit to another. The woman was now singing "Le Temps des cerises." Tuquedenne felt he could weep, and was moved to pity over the inexistence of things.

How can they be saved? Yes, how can things be saved? How can things be rescued from nothingness, how can they be delivered from Being? How can the instant be given both becoming and eternity?

Both Les derniers jours and Odile contain sustained, thinly veiled satires of the Surrealist movement, with which Queneau was at one point aligned, though ultimately he broke from it decisively, although there is a difference of tone in the satire, which is gentle in Les derniers jours and ridiculing in Odile. In some essential ways, the methods and ideals of the Oulipo are diametrically opposed to those of the Surrealists - where the Surrealists favored automatic writing and eschewed premeditated form and rules, an Oulipean work is constructed by means of a rigid and intricate scaffolding of which the author is very consciously aware (though the reader might not be). However, there are many points of contact between the two movements (even if these are points of difference), and Queneau's satire is never entirely cool and ironic.

Many literary critics describe Queneau as (amongst other things) a mathematician. I suppose they do this in order to increase the legend of Queneau as a polymath or universalist. However, it seems that his contributions (mainly to minor subfields of combinatorics) are more what one might expect from a gifted amateur than from a professional. Elementary combinatorics is structurally important in Queneau's novels, but essentially no significant modern mathematics plays a role therein except possibly in the form of inspiration. There are, however, numerous references to (deep) mathematics - Cantor's continuum hypothesis is apparently settled in the affirmative in Le chiendent, and the insolubility of the general quintic by radicals is discussed in Odile.

(more to come)

Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews is the only American-born Oulipean, and one of few who writes (mostly) in English. His work centers on the themes of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and the problem of human communication. A poem from the collection Out of Bounds illustrates the subtlety of misdirection:

Writing can speak its subject in several ways, the plainest being that of loudly saying what it is.
Less obviously the job is done in modes of likening, of which the simile is reckoned the simplest.
More complicated symbolic forms need codes, to which many object (but who disfavors Dante or the cocked snooks of rebuses?)
Beyond these lie further encryptions, where subjects are revealed (if not known) by syntactic or semantic translation,
And of these, or perhaps beyond them, a purest alchemy, unseen but wholly present, engraves the subject by lack of that subject.
Thus in my not knavish but jibbing words can you, particularly you, find your sign writ minimally gross.

This poem is beautiful in its apparent clarity, and baffling in its Godelian self-contradictory quality.

Italo Calvino

Raymond Roussel

Jacques Roubaud

Marcel Benabou