OuLiPo (the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or the Workshop of Potential Litera-ture) is the name of a literary group whose works have defined and elaborated the practice of writing under constraint. Founded in 1960 by two friends, both trained as mathematicians, François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau, and now consisting of thirty-six writers and mathematicians, this Paris-based yet very international collec-tive has played an essential role in the rediscovery of constrained writing as well as in the dramatic redefinition of its stakes.
All traditional poetics make room for what is called the “constraints of meter and rhyme,” just as all traditional forms of writing know the practice of “fixed forms,”
i.e. poetic genres obeying strictly defined and often very sophisticated rules such as, for instance, the sestina. Nevertheless, without having invented the word itself, it is indeed the OuLiPo that has defined the modern expanded use of constraint as self-chosen supplementary and systematic rule. This reinvention has taken from the begin-ning two different forms. First, the OuLiPo has tried to invent new constraints, for instance the “S + 7” constraint, where each noun (or substantive) in a chosen text is replaced with the seventh noun following it in a chosen dictionary (on this constraint – in English “N + 7,” for “noun” – see Mathews and Brotchie 2005: 202–3). Second, the collective has completed their idiosyncratic inventions (which were called Ouli-pianisms) with the rereading, unearthing, or reappraisal of constraints that had fallen into oblivion but that were appropriated by the group as involuntarily pre-Oulipian (a phenomenon they ironically called plagiarism by anticipation). The best known example of such a rediscovery is of course the lipogram or letter omission, a very ancient figure which previous generations saw as, at best, a kind of rhetorical gadget. The OuLiPians explored the lipogram with great enthusiasm and it is now a major tool in all types of creative writing in France. The results of both exercises were gathered in the working papers of the “Bibliothèque de l’OuLiPo,” with a very modest print-run of 150 copies.
It was only afterwards, once the group had achieved some notoriety (mainly since the 1980s), that these documents were circulated more widely.
The history of the group can roughly be divided in three periods. In the first years of its existence, the OuLiPo was mainly a group of friends united in their shared dis-taste for mainstream literature (characterized or rather plagued, in their eyes, by form-lessness) as well as by a shared love of experiment for experiment’s sake. The aim of OuLiPo in these years was to invent new forms of writing, i.e. in the first place new forms of constraint, and to provide one or more illustrations of these constraints.
Almost immediately, however, it became clear that invention could also mean rein-vention, and the OuLiPians started working with forgotten or minor constraints. In this first period, the essential mark of the group’s work is their strictly experimental, almost conceptual approach to literature (one should not forget that one of the his-torical members of the OuLiPo was Marcel Duchamp). The constraint was compared to a kind of mathematical theorem, and the textual production that could accompany it was seen as one of its possible demonstrations. During this period, various OuLiPians
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continued to pursue a double practice: although deeply involved in the activities of the group, their work in print was not necessarily OuLiPo-oriented, and since the pres-ence of the group in the literary public sphere was still insignificant, few presented themselves as members of the OuLiPo or as being under its influence. The diffidence of Raymond Queneau, who already “did” procedural writing in the 1930s but often remained silent about that part of his writing that he put to one side as instrumental or preparatory, was typical of these first years. His most popular books were either non-OuLiPian (Zazie in the Metro, Queneau 2001) or pre-Oulipian (Exercises in Style dates from as early as 1947 [Queneau 1979]), so that it was perfectly possible for him as well as for the public to discard OuLiPian proceduralism as play, a form of entertainment, if not simply an intellectual joke, that did not affect the heart of these authors’ “real work.” In the same years, various French New Novelists such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and later Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon had however already been experimenting with constrained-based storytelling, using punning as a device to replace linear narra-tive by new forms of narranarra-tive that could shift from one layer to another to mere word-play (see Marx-Scouras, this volume). A good synthesis of New Novel techniques can be found in a novel by Jean Ricardou, La prise/prose de Constantinople (1965), in which the author has tried to invent the story with the help of mere word-play and manipula-tion, the starting point of the whole book being moreover the word “rien” (“nothing”;
for a detailed self-analysis of the genesis of this work, see Ricardou 1978).
The second period of the group coincides with the arrival of Georges Perec in 1967. Perec and others with him proclaimed their membership publicly, pledging alle-giance to the experimental spirit of the group and progressively eliminating their non-OuLiPian production. Perec had not started his career in the non-OuLiPian manner, but after his reception by the collective, he rapidly moved into proceduralism. This increased self-awareness and confidence appear also in the publication of manifestoes and other theoretical and historical texts by various members of the group. The success of some of Perec’s books – above all La Disparition (1969; English translation A Void [1994]), a 300-page lipogrammatic novel written without the letter e, the most frequent letter in French – helped make OuLiPo visible for the very first time to the broader public.
Yet the basic transformation of OuLiPo in this period had to do with something more profound: the redefinition of the relationship between the constraint as theorem and the constrained text as demonstration of this theorem. By contrast with the first period, with its clear emphasis on the invention of new theorems, OuLiPo in its second period started insisting on the importance of the resulting text. This new factor seems to have encouraged the production of OuLiPian texts and, even more importantly, their public presentation as OuLiPian works. Besides Perec, the major new names in that period are Jacques Roubaud (first in poetry, later also in prose) and the non-French writers Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, and Oskar Pastior. Rooted though it was in French culture, the group had managed to be highly international from the very start.
The third period, probably launched by the colossal success of Georges Perec’s Life A User’s Manual (2009 [1978]), can be described as that of its canonization. OuLiPian works and authors, the leading figure now being Jacques Roubaud, who was seen after
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Perec’s early death in 1992 as the spokesman of the collective, became more and more productive and also more and more recognized by the literary establishment. Today the group is accepted as one of the chief literary movements of the second half of the twentieth century. The international breakthrough of the movement, partly due to the sustained attention given to OuLiPo by academics outside France (see the pio-neering study by Warren Motte 1986) and to important popularizations such as Math-ews’s Oulipo Compendium (2005), has of course not gone unnoticed in France, where the success of the OuLiPo offers a consolation for the collapse of other forms of French experimental writing and, more generally, the disappearance of mainstream French literature from the international scene. Last but not least, the dynamism of OuLiPo is demonstrated by its active cross-fertilization. The notion of constrained writing has not remained a strictly literary phenomenon, but has been successfully exported to other fields such as painting (with the OuPeinPo or Ouvroir de Peinture Potentielle) or comics (with the OuBaPo or Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle). Here as well, the dialectics of old and new has proven extremely rewarding: artistic domains outside literature benefit from the importation of literary constraints, even as they come to the realization that they were already OuLiPians without knowing it (the case of the British film director Peter Greenaway, whose first movies were strongly marked by mathematical constraints, is a clear example of such retrospective proceduralism).
The most exciting effects of canonization are however indirect. The success of the OuLiPo has given renewed visibility to other, non-French examples of procedural writing, such as for instance Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa (1974), an astonish-ing novel that transforms the figure of alliteration into a real (and lipogrammatic) constraint. The book has 52 chapters, each them containing only words that start with particular letters: the first chapter contains only words starting with a, the second chapter only words starting with a or b, the third only words starting with a, b or c, etc. until in chapter 26 the whole alphabet is available; the second part of the novel repeats the structure but in reverse order, dropping one initial letter per chapter, until it reaches once again a chapter having only words starting with a. Another example, written by a Paris-based British novelist strongly influenced by French experimental writing and poststructuralist theory, is Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Between (1968), which applies a similar lipogrammatic rule, although no longer restricted to the domain of letters but transferred to the domain of lexical items. The protagonist of this novel is a professional translator belonging to a team that travels throughout the world attend-ing various international conferences on translation. Between presents two intersect-ing narratives, one in the present tense in several different languages and describintersect-ing the breakdown of the protagonist’s marriage, and one containing a series of love letters written in medieval French. In neither of these two narratives does the author use the verb “to be,” which for Christine Brooke-Rose is a way of expressing the narrator’s disoriented sense of personal identity. A later novel by the same author, Amalgamem-non (1984), offers a variation on this constraint. In this novel, Brooke-Rose avoids all use of present-tense verbs in order to stress the temporally and culturally multi-layered stream of consciousness of the female narrator who sits in bed reading Herodotus while
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her lover is snoring beside her. The narrator’s thoughts and sense of word-play explore the tensions between fact and imagination against the background of reflection on the changing status of women in relation to traditional hierarchies.
In addition, OuLiPo has generated new literary vocations all over the world. The most promising case is undoubtedly that of Christian Bök (2003, 2009), to whom we will return later on.