The Oulipians would be delighted if they knew how easily they could be mistaken for Olympians. Controlled mistakes were one of the many elements that allowed them to experience creative freedom.
In literature, errors are usually associated with spelling mistakes or misprints. From my own experience as an editor, I will never forget a poem quoted in an article about sadness (smutek in Polish), which became a piece about a nipple (sutek) due to an unfortunate typo. However, the history of literature proves that a mistake can also become a tool of sophisticated literary expression. The masters of the precise use of constraints (creative restrictions aimed at producing a specific literary effect) were writers affiliated with the Workshop of Potential Literature, or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle in French, Oulipo in short. However, in order for an irregularity or lapse to come into being, one must first establish . . . norms and rules. And since the Oulipians did not suffer from lack of imagination, the rules they set were anything but ordinary.
The Potential of Order
If the Oulipo had not been founded in Paris in 1960, the group would have been invented later on. After all, its members implement many ideas that stem from the age-old question “what if . . .” and experiment with literary games that seem too bold to be carried out. Thanks to the Oulipo’s games, contemporary literature can develop in its own rhythm—Oulipians tested its boundaries, asked the most important questions, and experimented with the fabric of the text, undertaking new challenges when necessary. Experimenting clearly became a key activity for the group. The writer Raymond Queneau and the mathematician and chess player François Le Lionnais founded the Workshop of Potential Literature precisely to find out what would happen if the tools used in mathematics or physics were applied to literature.
The peculiar operating principles of the group are just as interesting as the Oulipians’ creative output. There can be no more than twelve active members—this number allows them to easily fit around a large dinner table. Joining the collective should not be solicited under any circumstances; as the writer Marcel Bénabou revealed, trying too hard results in being removed from the list of potential Oulipians for life. On the other hand, if one becomes a member of the Oulipo, it’s for good. Even death does not cancel an Oulipian membership; the only way to escape is through suicide, with a clear note that it was committed in order to leave the group. In addition, its members try to maintain an equal ratio of scientific and literary minds in their ranks, but this has been problematic since the very beginning: the mathematicians who were admitted to the group quickly became writers as well. The Oulipo is an international endeavor, but operates mainly in France, although sister initiatives have sprung up in many countries; in Poland, artists tied to the Lokator publishing house and café in Krakow once created an Oulipo-style zine entitled Ants in Chocolate.
The Oulipo does not refer to itself as a movement, and its members are not interested in preaching any specific worldview. What’s more, discussions on the subject have been forbidden. Oulipians are solely concerned with literature—especially, as the name of the group implies, with its potential: the stage of creation that starts before the words even flow onto paper. A work in this initial stage is an assumption, a set of rules, a vessel that defines the final shape of the text, yet to be filled with content. The group devoted itself to the analysis of this vessel (its structural potential, the very limits of extravagance). Discussing the horizons of literary potential and fulfilling that potential is only one of the two main pillars of Oulipo activity, the one leaning toward the future. The other is oriented toward the past, toward the search for Oulipian works in the history of literature. The notion of “plagiarism by anticipation” was created to describe works written before the group was formed. These ‘plagiarists’ turned out to be, for instance, Lewis Carroll and Alice from Alice in Wonderland, who moves through the plot like a knight in a chess game, or Jonathan Swift, who in Gulliver’s Travels, described a text-producing machine. The very idea of plagiarism that occurs before, rather than after, the plagiarized work has been written, clearly captured the imagination of the Oulipians. This is evident in the collaborative book entitled Winter Journeys, which will be discussed further on.
The Tight Corset of Rules
The Oulipians believed that, contrary to the tenets of surrealism, it is not inspiration or loose associations but fixed rules (called constraints) that drive the creative process. For this reason, their works are bound by the constraints mentioned above, sometimes defined by a mathematical equation, graph or diagram that explains how the text works. The Oulipians draw on games and word puns. “The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant,” argued Queneau. Constraints prevent the writer from expecting that inspiration will appear out of nowhere. Instead, artists remain inspired and creatively ready in all circumstances. Thus, the Oulipians claim that constraints fuel the literary machine and effectively liberate the writer from the torment of poring over a blank page. At the same time, observing such rules can simply be fun, and fun is something Oulipians take very seriously.
“It must be said that what truly matters in the OuLiPo method is the refinement of the chosen rules, their ingenuity and elegance,” explained another famous Oulipian, Italo Calvino. “If the results are of the same quality as the constraint, all the better. However, the work is merely an example of the potentialities that appear once these rigid rules are broken down.” An excellent example of a work that confirms Calvino’s claims is A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Queneau himself, the group’s founding father. The ten sonnets in the collection are based on perfect rhymes, so that the lines can be easily rearranged without disrupting the structure of the poem. Each of the fourteen lines is movable so the readers decide for themselves which lines become part of a given sonnet. With the help of this poetry machine one can construct 10¹⁴ “imaginative and elegant” sonnets, but, as Calvino argues, their stylistic quality is less important than the potential of the structure itself: the creation of a framework for a well-oiled literary machine.
And so Italo Calvino wrote The Castle of Crossed Destinies, a book whose plot is defined by two different styles of tarot deck. Jacques Jouet created one “metro poem” a day, writing an alexandrine stanza every time the subway stopped at a station. A typical example of Oulipian constraints is one that dates back to antiquity: the lipogram—a work created without the use of a chosen letter. Sometimes Oulipians went even further and created so-called “prisoner’s constraints” by eliminating many letters or words with specific features from a literary work. The “ventriloquist’s constraint,” on the other hand, involves reciting a poem with the exclusion of those vowels that require the reader to join lips. In most constraints, numbers play a primary role—the sum of letters in a sentence or verse, or a combinatorial pattern that determines on what basis a particular word is replaced by a few others.
However, one would be wrong to think that the formal games undertaken by the Oulipo are nothing but art for art’s sake, or fun for fun’s sake. Georges Perec wrote a lipogram entitled A Void. It’s a detective story recounting the disappearance of a certain Anton Voyl (voyelle is French for “vowel”), written entirely without the use of the letter “e.” This constraint, which at first glance seems to be just another Oulipian experiment, takes on a whole new level of meaning when one knows more about Perec’s biography. His parents, Polish Jews, died during the war (his mother was most probably killed in Auschwitz) when he was just a few years old, and their absence influenced him deeply, as did being brutally torn from his roots. Removing the most popular vowel in the French language from the entire book, struggling with the impossibility of using it, and then examining the literary landscape of a work created without a crucial element becomes very telling in this biographical context. The development of a restrictive literary technique, a mathematical formula by which to create the perfect work, was for many Oulipians, a search for order in a war-ravaged world.
Nibbling Biscuits
Queneau affectionately described the Oulipians as “rats building a maze from which they are then to escape.” But even intricate paths with obstacles in the form of constraints are not enough for them. The ideal Oulipian labyrinth must also include secret passages, some kind of breach in the hedge that would make the whole adventure more exciting, but which would also prevent the artists from falling into excessive pedantry. In the literary worlds of the Oulipo, this breach was called clinamen. The term was used by Lucretius to describe atoms breaking away from an even trajectory, their unexpected collisions, and the subsequent appearance of new structures. In the Oulipian context, clinamen is a deliberate lapse in the governing rule of the text. Such lapses not only stimulate the reader’s attention, but also loosen the rigor of the compulsions and thus, make them more bearable. “The heavier the law, the more puzzling the exception, the more stable the model, and the more imposing the deviation,” Perec argues in the essay “The Thing,” and cites the painter Paul Klee who said that “genius is the error in the system.” In his most famous book, titled Life: A User’s Manual, Perec deliberately deletes one of the hundred chapters in order to distort the ideal system he created and thus erase the traces of the founding rules. He devotes as much time and attention to “programming chance,” that is, to cheating his own system, as he does to developing its operating rules. In a discussion with Claudette Oriol-Boyer and Harry Matthews, he said: “I decided that a square of ten by ten units resembles a biscuit, which is always nibbled at the corner. At the end of Chapter 65, a little girl appears and nibbles on the biscuit, causing the entire next chapter to drop out of the book, and further page numbers become false.”
Introducing controlled error into such intricately structured texts takes the reading experience to a completely different level. To use the beloved Oulipian allegory of the jigsaw puzzle, it can be said that the puzzle becomes interesting not because of what appears once we fit all the pieces together, but because of the one lost piece that must be discovered. Reconstructing the story of its disappearance and the reasons for its absence is the true “experience” of doing the puzzle. The situation becomes even stranger because of the impossibility of determining whether the error is a deliberate act on the part of the author or a simple misprint, which, after all, is always a possibility. An excellent example is one of the most complete Oulipian works created in collaboration, Winter Journeys.
The story of this collection begins in 1979 when Georges Perec published a short story entitled “The Winter Journey.” The protagonist, Vincent Degraël, accidentally finds a collection of poems by an unknown writer named Hugo Vernier, published in 1862. It turns out to be a groundbreaking discovery: Vernier, a brilliant poet, was imitated and plagiarized by all the great writers of the nineteenth century, but later became entirely forgotten. The research on Vernier was interrupted by the war, then thwarted by a cruel twist of fate: all existing copies of his book (also entitled The Winter Journey) disappeared without a trace. This mysterious story of a typical case of plagiarism by anticipation is full of literary references, intellectual games, and clues embedded in the names of the characters.
This tale about the true origins of a literary work, an Oulipian favorite, inspired Jacques Roubaud to create a short story based on Perec’s work, either by developing its plot or supplementing it. And thus, the machinery was set in motion: for thirty-four years, successive members of the Oulipo enriched or deconstructed the plot of “The Winter Journey” in their own fashion, adding further clues to Perec’s exceptionally solid investigation into the disappearance of a nonexistent collection of poems. What fuelled this unbridled imagination machine was a typo: after all, at some point in the narrative the title of the mysterious volume is spelled Le voyage d’hier (The Journey of Yesterday). This inspired other Oulipians to create their own versions of the story, basing them on the Oulipo’s beloved principle of homonymy: using words spelled in the same way, but differing in meaning. The following works were created: Le voyage d’Hitler (Hitler’s Voyage), Le voyage du ver (A Worm’s Voyage), Le voyage du vers (The Voyage of a Poem), Le voyage d’H… Ver… (The Voyage of H… Ver…). Whether the typo was actually a misprint or a clue intended to drive the narrative forward will remain a mystery. In fact, clinamen may be a simple oversight, but it could just as well become a letter in a bottle sent by the author to diligent readers, who, with this letter in hand, will embark on their own journey of conjecture and exploration.
Clinamen may also function as a warning about the false status of the literary work. A minor flaw, an imperfection in the fabric of a fictional work reminds the readers that they are not dealing with the truth, but only with its artistic imitation. Thus, as Marcel Bénabou writes, the error is identified by means of an error, “while the book regains its true status: that of an ordinary linguistic construction.” At this point, the paradoxical nature of this approach should not be surprising. And neither should the following conclusion: with the help of restrictive techniques and carefully observed constraints, the Oulipo has allowed literature to navigate much freer and livelier waters.
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