Surrealism’s Subject

Viewing the group through the lens of their relationship with Surrealism, this chapter looks historically at the way that the Oulipo’s own conception of their activities changed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It begins by describing Queneau’s role in the Surrealist movement in the 1920s, and his subsequent long-lasting dissatisfaction with the Surrealist approach to authorial inspiration. In a radio interview of 1962, he mocks Surrealism’s adherence to the cliché of the tortured artist, contrasting it with the brisk simplicity of Oulipian procedures for preparing texts where the very notion of an author comes close to being wiped out. A few years later, however—after the group began to extend its membership in the late 1960s—the Oulipo’s second wave began to speak in terms in which the author-subject is rehabilitated. These members view constrained writing exercises as a way of ‘radically outwitting’ their own repressive mechanisms to produce works of self-expression which would not have been possible without the constraint: a formula that has more in common with Surrealist automatic writing than many in the group would admit.

Literature Machines

In the group’s Second Manifesto, François Le Lionnais writes that ‘structurAlist’ (his own capitalization) is ‘a term that many of us consider with circumspection’. Therefore, as a way of describing the Oulipo’s interest in structures without getting it mixed up with the method of thinkers like Roman Jakobson or Claude Lévi-Strauss, he proposes the neologism structurElist. And yet, in their analyses of the literary canon and their fascination with cybernetics and authorless texts, much of the Oulipo’s early work does exhibit unignorable affinities with the structuralists. Using material from the BnF archives, this chapter shows how the apparent distaste for structuralism is bound up with the Oulipo’s own moves into narratological—as opposed to linguistic—constraints, and moreover is not felt uniformly by all members. Some, like Le Lionnais, had a role in structuralism’s early development, while others like Queneau are acutely aware of the contested space that the two groups occupy.

Conclusion

The conclusion points forwards from the debates of the 1960s and early 70s, suggesting that if the group is to continue to engage with the intellectual concerns of its milieu, then these will be concerns of the politics of identity. In one, sense, in co-opting Anne Garréta the group now has a member who has used constrained writing to extraordinary effect to demonstrate the inescapability of declarative binary gendering for the speaking subject in French. At the same time, as Garréta herself has pointed out, the Oulipo remains very much an old boys’ club. The chapter also looks at the critique of the Oulipo delivered by Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young at the CalArts Oulipo conference of 2005.

Perec and Mathews

This chapter looks at a pair of related short stories, one by Perec, one by Mathews. Both concern South Seas ethnographers who stumble upon languages with highly limited vocabularies. These stories draw on the analytic philosopher W. V. O. Quine’s example of the gavagai language, by which he illustrates the indeterminacy of translation, and Perec and Mathews use their stories to similar ends. Perec’s story, from his novel Life A User’s Manual, encodes allusions to Wittgenstein’s ‘slab’ language from Philosophical Investigations, as well as to Borges’s famous Chinese encyclopaedia, in order to reflect on how the categories by which we understand the world, and which are so important to translation, are culturally specific. Mathews’s story meanwhile ends with a riposte to Quine: pure translation may not be possible, but we do as well as we can do.

Introduction

The Introduction outlines the argument of the book, giving some examples of the Oulipo’s close ties with philosophy such as voting to invite Michel Foucault to one of their meetings, and a surprising anecdote about Jacques Lacan as a dinner guest. It also gives a flavour of what the group’s meetings are like – lively, clever, slightly chaotic – by quoting a passage from some early minutes. It then goes on to provide an account of the Oulipo’s formation and subsequent expansion in the 1960s and 1970s, and to introduce the group’s members. It considers their backgrounds, noting that the group was formed not merely of writers, but of mathematicians, academics, Pataphysicians, and philosophers. Several had been associated with the Surrealists; a number, too, had been involved in the underground publishing movement during the war. These biographies, I argue, are important: they demonstrate that the Oulipo was, from the start, connected to wider intellectual networks – not insular, but rather a workshop in which a multiplicity of voices with varying interests and experiences were brought to bear.

Calvino at a Crossroads

The movement described in Chapter 3—from anti-authorial procedures to a new accommodation with the author-subject—should not be seen purely as a division between one generation of writers and another. During the late 1960s, the structuralist climate was thawing in Paris, and it was natural that individual writers and thinkers should modulate their positions. This chapter charts a shift in the thinking of Italo Calvino, around the time that he first meets and then joins the group. It finds him first of all thrilling to the idea of writing machines, where humans are no longer required in the act of literary creation. Within a couple of years, however, he is softening, insisting that the clinamen—the swerve, the deviation from the rules: a concept he takes from Lucretius—is a necessary feature in great literature, and one that can only be provided by a conscious writer.

The Punning Muse

One method much-practised by the Oulipo is ‘homophonic translation’: taking the sounds of one language and trying to recreate them in another. Thus Keats’s ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever’ becomes in French ‘Ah, singe débotté, hisse un jouet fort et vert’ [‘Oh, unshod monkey, raise a stout green toy’]. But this type of extended punning has also always had a crucial role in psychoanalytic interpretation, and in this chapter we find members of the Oulipo framing their exercises in homophonic translation as spoof scholarship, thereby sending up reductive or overzealous reading in both psychoanalysis and literary criticism. The chapter also introduces two of the Oulipo’s acknowledged precursors: the poet Raymond Roussel, and the quack etymologist J.-P. Brisset, who believed that phonetic similarity was never merely coincidental (thus, if grammar sounds like grandma, then this tells us something about grammars, grandmas, and the world at large).