A Workshop of Potential Literature
The Oulipo or "Workshop of Potential Literature" was a French literary movement inspired by Dadaism, absurdism, and the 'Pataphysics movement. The writers who comprised the Oulipo focused their work on exploring the role that constraintsFormal Constraint
Quick Definition
Mathematics
A formal constraint (what I consider to be analogous with Hofstadter'sGödel, Escher, Bach- An Eternal Golden Braid
Purchase a copy on IndieBound.
Read the Wikipedia article on GEB.
Background
I first encountered this book by Douglas Hofstadter in high school and became enraptured. The concepts from Gödel, Escher, Bach that have most influenced my thinking and artistic practice are summarized in the notes to "Creativity and Constraint: Queering the Formal System."
Gödel, Escher, Bach (also abbreviated as GEB) usually proves too difficult for me to adequately summarize in conversation; I'll try to be... "rule of production" or "rule of inference") is a method for transforming one result of a formal system into another result. In mathematics, we can use mathematical induction to derive a theorem from an axiom or from another theorem. Because we trust that our rules of induction will preserve the truth of our mathematical statements, following t... could play in creating new works.
Perec's A Void
The most prominent Oulipian figure, Georges PerecPerec, Georges
Georges Perec was a French author and thinker and a member of the [[Oulipo]] literary group. He is best known for his various books: W, or Memories of Childhood, [[A Void]], and [[Life a User’s Manual]].
Perec's works reflect his interest in constraint techniques, chance, fate, determinism, and memory. See more in the note on the [[Oulipo]].
Resources
James, Alison. Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009.
Last modified on ..., gives a numbers of excellent examples of these constraint techniques at play. His absurd thriller mystery novel, A Void, is celebrated for having been written without using the letter 'E.' The book's characters attempt to uncover the horrifying truth behind the sudden disappearance of Mr. Anton Vowl, and one by one succumb to his same fate.
The use of such a constraint to structure an entire novel, and the decision to celebrate and explicitly refer to such a constraint in the actual story that Perec tells is especially noteworthy.
Life a User's Manual
In a similar manner, Perec's magnum opus, Life a User's Manual, is an exemplar of constraint techniques. The sprawling text is comprised of a cascade of 99 vignettes, each occurring in a different room of the same apartment building in Paris. The author created a sort of "pre-compositional system" – a formal systemFormal System
What is a formal system?
Start with an [[Axiom]]
Continue with a rule or self-imposed [[Formal Constraint|constraint]]
Apply the rules and constraints to the axiom and see what happens!
This definition is loosely based on Hofstadter’s [[Gödel, Escher, Bach- An Eternal Golden Braid]] (GEB) and on my own experience making and breaking formal systems.
Start with an axiom (in mathematics) or idea/material (creative disciplines like the arts).
A rule or constraint develops ... – by which he created stipulations for how each chapter should be constructed: what room to write about, what characters would appear, what objects must be included either in the room or in the story being told, what topics or obscure literary references to weave into the narrative, etc.
The result is an incredible tapestry of figures and stories, each relating over the decades-long narrative and interacting with the mystery at the heart of the novel.
Once again, Perec makes his artistic goal quite explicit, Life a User's Manual revolves around the character of Bartlebooth, an independently wealthy English gentleman who has settled into a room at the Paris apartment building. His life's work is to tour 500 ports around the world, painting a watercolor of each and mailing the paintings back to Paris for a colleague to convert into a unique jigsaw puzzle. After years of such travel and painting, Bartlebooth returns to Paris to reconstruct each puzzle. As each jigsaw is finished, the painting is once again reconstituted by a specialist on a new canvas. The finished canvas is then mailed back to the port at which it originated; instructions are given and carried out for the canvas to be chemically erased and returned into the sea.
Some Parallels
Bartlebooth lives his entire life according to this (self-imposed) constraint, turning his leisure into a (rather wasteful and impractical) artistic and philosophical pursuit. There is more to Bartlebooth's complex story, but it strikes me that it might make a comparison with what it is that so many of us side B Christians are pursuing.
While the aim of Bartlebooth's constraint is depicted by Perec as a sort of doomed futility (Perec may have been contesting with the nihilism that settled over France after the end of the Second World War), seen from a different perspective it might begin to resemble something like the prodigality that God shows to his wayward children or the "irresponsible" and "wasteful" way that Mary pours such priceless perfume on the feet of Christ.
If we were to go to such extreme lengths as Bartlebooth – not for paintings and jigsaw puzzles but for relationships, the Gospel, and the pursuit of justice – we might find something even more unexpectedly beautiful.
Resources
- Motte, Warren F., Jr. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Last modified on 01-28-2022.