The Oulipo: making poetry a game

Oulipo is the "ouvroir de la littérature potentielle." Created in 1960, this group of poets continues to exist and create. Some members have known its early hours, and new artists join the team, some of whom were not born when the movement was created. They are often poets, but sometimes mathematicians or scientists.

Choose your constraints

Their common ground: building their work from constraints. In their own words, the oulipian would be a rat who creates his own maze and tries to get out of it... Is this really new? The alexandrines, the sonnets are also built on constraints. But the oulipians multiply them and complicate them as much as they want. Inventing constraints is part of the creative process. The oulipiens website presents more than a hundred, which could well inspire teachers of French or expression techniques.

Among the pioneers, Raymond Roussel is the first culprit of what the oulipians call "anticipatory plagiarism." A plagiarist by anticipation is simply an author who applied the rules of the Oulipo... before the Oulipo. And indeed, in How I wrote some of my books, Raymond Roussel explains that he chose a first sentence and then the last one by changing only one letter. But this very slight change causes a change in the meaning of the whole sentence...

"I would choose two almost similar words (...). For example, billiard and looter. Then I would add words that were the same but taken in two different meanings, and I would get two almost identical sentences. In the case of billiard and loot the two sentences I got were these:

1° The letters of the white on the stripes of the old billiard table...
2° The letters of the white on the stripes of the old looter.

In the first, "letters" was taken to mean "typographical signs," "white" to mean "chalk cube," and "strips" to mean "borders."
In the second, "letters" was taken in the sense of "missives", "white" in the sense of "white man" and "bands" in the sense of "warlike hordes".
The two sentences found, it was a question of writing a tale that could begin with the first and end with the second. Now it was in solving this problem that I drew all my materials."

Then all he had to do was write the book between those two sentences.

Some games

Oulipians create constraints that are games. In an editorial he devotes to them in the literary magazine, Laurent Nunez makes a connection between the game and literary creation that expresses their approach very clearly. He quotes Roger Caillois, the author of Les jeux et les hommes.

Games that involve the unexpected

S + 7 involves taking a poem by a classic author, and replacing each noun (a noun) with the one seven places further down in a dictionary. The result is confusing. But the Oulipians, unlike the surrealists, do not seek to awaken hidden or unconscious meanings. Psychoanalysts are not among their favorite readings. The interest of the Oulipians is mainly in formal games.

These random changes highlight the structure of the verses they transform.

Raymond Queneau proposes a variant of this in M+1, provided the metric is respected.

I am the tensor, the old, the unconsummated
Arabian spring with abonished peat
My simple stole is soft and my dismayed lynx
Puts down the knotted solen of melanism. [...]

To bring out a sense of the absurd over impeccable syntax, oulipians merge proverbs, making them "perverbs."

On ne fait d'omelette que mal accompagné
Petite à petit, les borgnes sont rois
L'espoir ne fait pas le moine

In the same way, and even more radically, oulipians sometimes merge two poems. In a classical sonnet, the last six feet of each alexandrine are replaced by those of another sonnet.

The last six feet of each alexandrine are replaced by those of another sonnet.

Some language games lead to results that make you smile:the line puller consists of taking a simple text, and gradually increasing it, as a journalist paid by the number of signs would do. The definitional literature replaces the terms of a poem with their definition, then the terms of the new text in turn with their definition. The result is amusing, it brings out a technocratic and pompous language where everything was very simple!

The intervention of chance, and its limits

The stated constraints are heavy. If I take the seventh noun in the dictionary to replace the one in a poem, I may run into a weak word, one that will not evoke anything in the context of the poem. Should the rule take precedence over the aesthetic? No answer the Oulipians, who have reinvented the clinamen of the Epicureans. Recall that for Lucretius, the clinamen is that very slight and unpredictable deviation of atoms, which allows them to clash, and which offers an escape from absolute determinism.

Oulipians allow themselves a few "clinamen." They stray from the rule, when it leads to meaningless propositions. If I make an S+7 poem, and the dictionary tells me a noun that sounds bad...I can take the next one. Between the rule, and a beautiful verse, the oulipian chooses of course the beautiful verse!

Very heavy constraints

While oulipians bring in the unexpected and the surprise, they also invent constraining rules that require an excellent command of the language.

Among the most advanced is the one that consists in using only a reduced number of letters, or excluding one, the lipogram. The most famous of these is due to Georges Perec, who chose the difficulty by removing the most used letter in the French language, the "e" in his novel, La disparition.

For Jacques Roubaud's eightieth birthday, Michèle Audin writes a "beau présent." The beautiful present is a tribute that uses only the letters that make up his name. She doubles it with an "A supposer que...", a constraint that consists in writing a text of one sentence, initiated by the expression "A supposer que...". One could fear that the excess of rules would prevent any sensitivity. This is not the case, and to see for yourself, just read this beautiful present.

Oulipians are fans of acrostics, those poems where the first letters of each line form a word. They invent or use variants, such as the Brivadois acrostic, a constraint invented by a class of ten- and eleven-year-old students and adopted by oulipians.

Rules to shake up one's style

Oulipian constraints sometimes force the author to experiment with other styles. For example, Raymond Queneau's exercises in style tell the same story in 99 different ways.

The hyper-romances are novels that give rise to variants. Perec's Winter's Journey continues with Roubaud's Yesterday's Journey and about 20 other texts, which together constitute a hyper-novel.

The hyper-novel is a novel that is not only a novel, but also a story.

Italo Calvino, in If on a winter's night a traveler, writes ten novel beginnings, appropriating a different style each time. The aim is more ambitious than a simple writing exercise. In an interview with Le Monde in 1979, he explains:

My book contains ten different novels or, more exactly, ten beginnings of novels: each of them corresponds to a type of novel that I could have written and that I did not write. This list of possible novels is a catalog of paths that I have discarded, but these paths do not only express types of literature, they are also human attitudes, forms of relationship with the world: my book thus ends up reviewing all the closed roads that surround us, it is an allegory of our difficulty in saying the world.

Create writing activities around Oulipian works.

Many teachers have relied on their literary games to educate students about writing. Caroline Duret, from the International Institute of Lancy in Geneva, proposed a "Poetic Fablab through the city." She has designed three activities. TRAMes poétiques consists of writing in the streetcar, a verse between each station, a stanza for the outward journey and one for the return. "L'oeil écoute les mots de la ville" (The eye listens to the words of the city) invites to produce a literary text from the words of Geneva. "L'écho des voies" (The echo of the tracks) makes a track of the city speak... Caroline Duret bases her work on the use of tablets, which make it possible to write in the city and even in transportation.

Olivier Salon, Oulipien has worked with classes of students aged 11, 14 and 15 on discovery and creation workshops at the French Lycée of Ireland in Dublin. These activities, coordinated by Dorothée Potter-Daniau reached 70 students.

The Oulipo, a workhouse of potential literature, thus also reveals itself as a workhouse of potential pedagogy. Constraints are so many avenues for pedagogical activities, and digital tools open up even more possibilities for creating labyrinths, and for trying to get out of them...

Resources

C. Delacampagne, "Interview with I. Calvino," Le Monde, December 16, 1979

Oulipo, "Constraints," accessed July 10, 2016,
http://oulipo.net/fr/contraintes

Raymond Roussel, How I wrote some of my books, Paris, Gallimard, coll. "L'Imaginaire," 1995

FJ Jarraud, Le café pédagogique, Caroline Duret: a poetic Fablab at the high school published October 5, 2015, accessed July 10, 2016.
http://www.cafepedagogique.net/lexpresso/Pages/2015/10/05102015Article635796208131699224.aspx

Dra Haydé Silva Ochoa, Surrealism vs. Oulipism: Two Incompatible Poetics of Play, accessed July 10, 2016,
http://lewebpedagogique.com/jeulangue/files/2011/01/SurrOulipo.pdf