Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature

by Warren Motte (Translator), Noël Arnaud (Foreword)

English, French (translation)

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Poetry, Writing, Criticism, France, Essays

209 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief review based on Mathews’s Algorithm:

Initial formula:

A1 B1 C1 D1
A2 B2 C2 D2
A3 B3 C3 D3
A4 B4 C4 D4

A: This marvellous collection, plump with erudition, sparkling with innovation, makes me spasm in delight.

B: This overview of Oulipian techniques, rife with creativity, shiny with brilliance, makes me come.

C: The work of Queneau, especially the formulations, leaves me tongue-tied, makes me weep salt shakers.

D: Perec is present, in a glorious shiny suit, twinkly with wondrousness; makes me want to love someone.

Results upward:

A1 B4 C3 D2
A2 B1 C4 D3
A3 B2 C1 D4
A4 B3 C2 D1

This marvellous collection makes me come: leaves me tongue-tied in a glorious shiny suit.

Plump with erudition, this overview of Oulipian techniques makes me weep salt shakers—twinkly with wondrousness.

Sparkling with innovation, rife with creativity, the work of Queneau makes want to love someone.

Makes me spasm in delight: shiny with brilliance, especially the formulations: Perec is present.

*

OK, this is a crude (well—bad) example, but illustrates the Oulipo’s success at creating combinatorial forms in literature. Technology has made many of their algorithms possible. Especially Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems.

This volume contains the following:

Harry Mathews: “Liminal Poem” / “Mathews’s Algorithm”
Francois Le Lionnais: “Lipo: First Manifesto” / “Second Manifesto” / “Raymond Queneau and the Amalgam of Mathematics and Literature”
Jean Lescure: “Brief History of the Oulipo”
Marcel Benabou: “Rule and Constraint.”
Collective: “The Collége de Pataphysique and the Oulipo” / “Recurrent Literature”
Raymond Queneau: “Potential Literature” / The Relation X Takes Y For Z” / “A Story As You Like It”
Jacques Bens: “Queneau Oulipian”
Jacques Roubaud: “Mathematics in the Method of Raymond Queneau”
Georges Perec: “History of the Lipogram”
Claude Berge: “For a Potential Analysis of Combinatory Literature”
Paul Fournel: “Computer and Writer: The Centre Pompidou Experiment” / “The Theatre Tree: A Combinatory Play”
Italo Calvino: “Prose and Anticombinatorics”

The material ranges from informative, historical, to brain-busting mathematical complexity. You get from this collection a sense of quite how remarkably gifted these French writers and mathematicians were, and as a “primer” it certainly leaves you wanting to read full-length works. Harry Mathews has always been the most lucid explainer of Oulipo techniques for me, perhaps due to faults in translation, and his piece gives the best examples of combinatorics in action.

Warren Motte translated most of these pieces and at times his decision to leave quotations in the original French is a nuisance. These quibbles aside, this is a prim primer and a must for the logic-bound tinkerer.

Recommended reading:

Marcel Benabou: Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books = Pourquoi je n'ai ecrit aucun de mes livres
Italo Calvino: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Paul Fournel: Little Girls Breathe the Same Air as We Do
Harry Mathews: Tlooth (American Literature
Oskar Pastior: Many Glove Compartments: Selected Poems
Georges Perec: Life: A User's Manual
Raymond Queneau: Exercises in Style
Jacques Roubaud: The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

190119: this is the only book on shelves i have found at u, so far, on oulipo. but it alone has inspired me to read an entire sort i knew only through reputation and some Calvino. i never thought i would be again so excited by demonstrations of literary theory. it has been long years (decades...) since i maybe read much critical work at u, but if i look at the literature read a lot has been what may be avant-garde or ‘difficult’. being now on GR i look at many other bookshelves and realize my taste in literature has mostly been modern/postmodern and translation/genre and philosophy/art... this is a great start for this movement that may be declined or forgotten but then how would i know and who cares...

[Simon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly dry, redundant essays with a few really fun bits spread through. Liked Perec and Queneau's bits the best of the more straight-played stuff, and Calvino's one was easily the most fun. Just falls sort of flat reading now since so much of the generative stuff is just like how all those twitter bots and every dialogue tree work now (points for that ig) and feels more like a party trick than anything really interesting...also sort of unclear why they pursue that stuff so much when they insist that they resist chance, "the only literature is voluntary literature" etc. Didn't come away convinced that the mega-constraint is as good as they think--I love having a theorem/mathematical structure underneath a piece, but far enough underneath that the ropes aren't leaving any marks. Fan of calling your predecessors "plagiarists by anticipation" though. Merry Christmas love for all <3

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

here, a "zeugma," "The room was not light, but his fingers were."

a mathematical probability is not a good sight, but here, where?

simply put: key notes on the mathematics, the procedures, the calculations, the constraints of writing. it is a thing sure, wry.

[Lua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Si hay algo que agradezco que haya existido en la Literatura es el Oulipo.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about Oulipo, a group of writers, mathematicians, and linguists in the 1960s on, who experimented with language and writing. That's a wretched explanation of the group, but the entire idea of what they do blows my mind so much that I can't even explain what they do. Oulipians experiment with--among other mind-blowing challenges--lipograms, leaving out a specific letter, as in the case of Georges Perec's A Void, which NEVER uses the letter e in the entire book; combinatorics, as in the case of Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, which allows the reader to combine the 14 lines of 10 different sonnets to create her/his own new sonnets, or Italo Calvino's explanation of his "The fire in the cursed house" novel, or Raymond Queneau’s "A Story As You Like It" (which is basically a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story); and shifting words and phrases, such as in Jean Lescure's S+7 method, where a signifier in a story is replaced with the signifier that is 7 places away from it in the dictionary, or Harry Mathews's algorithm where he places the major parts of a sentence into a matrix, does the same with x number of other sentences, does some weird shifty-shifty movements within the matrix, and voila, composes a new work.

As the title says, this is a primer, so there are very few actual works of Oulipo in it, but many essays that describe what Oulipo did and what various authors accomplished (i.e. what experiments they performed) in their writings.

In reading some of the works described, I've found that the works can be interesting, or sometimes not so much (like A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems); but when you read the descriptions of *what* was done to create the work, and you think about the sweat and brainpower that must have gone into creating a work like that.... mind blown.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this three stars not because there is anything wrong with the book, but because the ideas are complicated and require a re-read, a re-think, and possibly some courses in remedial algebra and set theory. If you have an interest in their ideas, you will find this to be a four or five star book.

The Oulipo have an interesting perspective on formal issues in literature and its relationship to mathematics. Their ideas about the function and value of constraint are things I agree with and have pursued in the visual arts, but of course, using different techniques to match the medium.

Their ideas about potential literature are exciting if you can get past the popular idea of the lone artist creating beauty in his solitary lair of inspiration and see that they are suggesting that planning, theories, and intention have their place in art.

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just one of those books I wanted to read out of curiosity about the movement. Fascinating stuff but I can't say their techniques interest me much as a writer, although I have spent some time playing around with the Calvino chapter. Think you almost have to truly believe that literature is exhausted and severe measure are needed to inject life into it before the Oulipo program makes sense. On the other hand, Queneau's Exercises in Style is an especially brilliant example of the power of constraints.

[Darren Cormier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting read: a series of essays on different literary techniques by the French avant-garde literary theorist group Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). Some of the essays are quick and interesting, outlining different theories of constraint within literature, or how to apply mathematical constructs to writing. Some of the essays are very opaque and read more as mathematical theses, which is expected as some of the members of the Oulipo were mathematicians.
on the whole, most of the structures and theories/exercises are just that: exercises. Some of the exercises resulted in fascinating and lasting literary output, primarily the work of Perec, some of Harry Mathews, and some of Queneau. Others of the attempts seem shoehorned to fit a preconceived notion, experimental for the sake of being experimental, gimmicky for the sake of being gimmicky and not contributing mush beyond the exercise itself.

Recommend for those who love experimental literature, and for completionists of the Oulipo in particular. But even then, I wouldn't say it's required reading for those who love experimental literature.

[Mina-Louise]

This confirmed that I don't want to read translated oulipo works.
(Though I very much respect the difficulty of translating oulipo works)

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like the idea behind constraints in writing. Some of the mathematical constraints in this book seem beyond my grasp at this point. But I'm interested in games and in making the reader work to find underlying meaning and even as a way for a reader to bring their own experience to someone else's work.

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

collection of texts from a group of "rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape." of particular interest are perec's "history of the lipogram", calvino's "prose and anticombinatorics" and queneau's proto-choose-your-own-adventure "a story as you like it".

[Gregory Sogorka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the Oulipo's contributions and experiments into algorithmic literature.