Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, Harvard University Press, 2012.
"The youngest member of the Paris-based experimental collective Oulipo, Levin Becker tells the story of one of literature’s quirkiest movements—and the personal quest that led him to seek out like-minded writers, artists, and scientists who are obsessed with language and games, and who embrace formal constraints to achieve literature’s potential."
"What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements.
An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed.
In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic—and iconoclastic—group."
"Daniel Levin Becker's brilliant and entertaining book about the Oulipo combines meticulously researched history, a complete panoply of thumbnail portraits (he uses both thumbs), shrewd critical appraisal, and − bless him! − autobiography. If Oulipians are 'rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape,' he has explored the subtle channels of the labyrinth and caught all the rats; and he movingly describes why he is happy to have become a rat himself." - Harry Mathews
"Many Subtle Channels is both an account of a glorious chapter in the history of wordplay and an equally glorious example of wordplay at work. Its author is very, very smart, but because he's so witty and so playful, his intelligence feels friendly rather than formidable. Remember the name Daniel Levin Becker: you will be hearing it again. - Anne Fadiman
Essentially an account of the life and times of the Oulipo group, a Paris-based coalition of writers, mathematicians and artists that was set up in 1960 with the express intention of making life difficult for its members and readers. The clue to the real nature of the group is in "Oulipo"--which, when unpacked, stands for Ouvroir de la littérature potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature. This is meant to describe the practice of Oulipo members, who deliberately set themselves constraints on their writing. These can include palindromes, lipograms (excluding one or more letters), the snowball (a poem in which the first line is a single word, the second two words, and so on) and other myriad forms of self-imposed difficulty. The big idea is that if you set off to write, let's say, a short story by deliberately forcing yourself to replace every seventh noun in the text with the seventh noun after it in the dictionary then you are bound to end up somewhere unexpected. Hence the term "potential literature." From this point of view, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that this is no more than a particularly mirthless form of linguistic trickiness for its own sake; a kind of highbrow Gallic version of Scrabble or indeed the quiz show Countdown. This book admirably demonstrates that this is not the case...The book is a sheer delight. Levin Becker warns us that Oulipo is not for everybody, and he makes it clear that his book will be a largely uncritical and unashamed homage to the group. He admires them so much he ends up joining them (becoming only the second American member). But most importantly he is a sharp-witted guide to the most obscure details of Oulipo activity. Above all, he emphasizes that this is not merely an eccentric offshoot of Surrealism. Rather, he describes the Oulipians as scientists in a laboratory--they experiment endlessly, preferring no conclusion to false certainty, especially the false certainties of literature in a didactic or imperative mood. As Levin Becker puts it, this is the science of literature in a conditional mood...The activities of the Oulipo group, as Levin Becker emphasizes, are all about practice and opposed to theory... What all these Oulipians have in common is the notion that play is a serious business...Indeed, as the twenty-first century grows darker by the day, it may be that we will need the effortlessly ludic lucidity of Oulipo as an antidote more than ever.--Andrew Hussey
"In this intimate and informative book, Levin Becker explores the history of Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature), easily one of the most bizarre and charming literary movements of the 20th century. Claiming Italo Calvino, George Perec, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau among its members, Oulipo is best known for its exploration of new and seemingly impossible literary forms, such as Perec's A Void, an entire novel written (originally in French) without the letter "e," and a book of poems that would theoretically take a reader 190,258,751 years to complete. Originally tasked with organizing Oulipo's extensive archives, Levin Becker finds himself gradually inducted into the inner workings of the group before eventually being offered membership into the prestigious collective. From this unique position, Levin Becker excavates the movement's history from its creation in 1960 by an assemblage of French writers, mathematicians and eccentrics, to its present-day iteration. Levin Becker even offers insight into what the future of Oulipo may hold, noting the proliferation of "Ou-X-Po[s]," likeminded collectives that seek to discover new potential forms for other disciplines, such as music, cartooning, and even marionettes. As he delves further into the past and methodology of Oulipo, Levin Becker's palpable enthusiasm for potential literature becomes infectious. One finishes this book not only with an appreciation for Levin Becker's prose and Oulipian literature, but also with an urge to attempt it." - Publishers Weekly
"A playful illumination of the complexities, mysteries and absurdities of an obscure French organization devoted to “potential literature.”
Serious wordplay abounds within the experiments of the Oulipo, a Paris-based collective devoted to systematic literary exploration, constraints that free the mind and imagination (such as writing a novel without using the letter e), and devising “real solutions to imaginary problems.” The organization’s pantheon includes Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, while fellow travelers could range from Vladimir Nabokov to Paul Auster. Much of the writing focuses on the processes of writing and reading while an emphasis on language as language trumps such conventional notions of “realism” in character and plot. Words on a page may not be more, but they are never less, than words on a page. American author Becker served an apprenticeship as an archivist before joining the organization in which “anyone who asks to be a member of the Oulipo thereupon becomes inadmissible for life.” The author is also the reviews editor for The Believer, and his self-deprecating reminiscences humanize the book well beyond literary theory, while his tone renders even extended examinations of the organization’s theories and history more palatable than expected. One work is praised for the “Zen-by-way-of-Kafka simplicity of its zero-sum goal,” while the masters rise above mere experimentation: “Like Perec, Calvino was great at bringing humanity into what could otherwise be a soulless structural shell game.” There is a strong mathematical, even scientific, component within the philosophies of these theorist-practitioners, whose field of inquiry (like so much else) has been transformed by computer technology. But there’s also a disarming element of whimsy: “Like any literary treatises worth their salt, the manifestos are unsatisfying; their saving grace is [their]…tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the notion of the manifesto in the first place.”
Destined to delight a small, select readership—the Oulipo wouldn’t have it any other way." - Kirkus Reviews
Many Subtle Channels is Levin Becker's personal history of this literature and his tribute to the people who helped create it, including [Georges] Perec, Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, and Marcel Duchamp...Levin Becker gets Oulipian obsessiveness on a gut level, and his delight in palindromes and lipograms (texts that, like the Perec novel [La Disparition], are entirely devoid of a particular letter) vividly comes to life in his writing. But the book's most revelatory moments come when Levin Becker suggests that this obsessiveness comes hand in hand with a deep need for guidance. Perec once said that "the intense difficulty posed by this sort of production.....palls in comparison to the terror I would feel in writing 'poetry' freely." The constraints the Oulipians place on themselves and on each other are by nature arbitrary. Sometimes, the texts end up tricking unwitting reviewers--one unsuspecting critic missed the conceit of La Disparition completely and panned the novel for being "stilted"--but mischief, writes Levin Becker, isn't really the point. Oulipian texts existed for decades before the collective was formed and will likely continue even if the collective disbands. Random as Oulipian practices may seem, they actually embody one of the most fundamental challenges that all writers face--to test and push the boundaries of language.--Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
"Many Subtle Channels is an insider-account of the OuLiPo - the 'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle' ('workshop of potential literature') whose members include Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau, and Harry Mathews. ('Include' - present tense - because even death apparently doesn't release you from the club: among the amusing titbits Levin Becker shares is that the only way to get out of the Oulipo once you're in is to commit suicide for the express purpose of leaving the organization; conversely, one way to assure you're never asked to be a member of the group is to ... ask to become a member, which gets you blackballed for life (and, presumably, death).) It's a surprisingly small group -- accumulating only thirty-eight members over the decades, Levin Becker says, of whom seventeen are deceased (disappointingly there's no appendix or table simply actually listing all the members ...); Levin Becker is one of the few foreign ones (though with Mathews and Ian Monk the English-speaking contingent is currently a strong one). He was 'co-opted' to their ranks in 2009, and Many Subtle Channels is both an account of his getting-to-know the Oulipo and his fellow Oulipians as well as a general sort of history of the organization.
Levin Becker does not proceed chronologically: the book is divided into three parts, 'Present', 'Past', and 'Future'. The present parts, which for example describe the Oulipo on tour and conducting workshops, make for a decent introduction of the current cast of characters and some of the games they play, but for the most part reads like a (too-)extended piece for a glossy up-market magazine.
The best -- and most useful -- part of the book is the historical overview, of the five-decade span when "the Oulipo grew from a hard-to-articulate idea to a hard-to-articulate global phenomenon": how the Oulipo came about and how it developed, and how it was shaped by leading figures such as co-founder Queneau and then early recruit Georges Perec.
The final part considers the present again, as well as the potential -- both literary as well as what other ou-X-ian possibilities there are (since such 'constrained' activity is hardly limited to literature).
Levin Becker's status -- a relatively new member, he shifts a bit uneasily between student, acolyte, and insider -- both helps and hinders in the shaping of the book. What he presents is not a simple, neat history of the Oulipo (a work that is long overdue and sorely needed), but it's also not quite simply an insider's take on all matters oulipian. Meandering all about, it's also far too chatty. Some of this is good fun -- Levin Becker certainly offers enough entertaining anecdotes and insights ("The oulipian reader would notice that "The Raven" is a lipogram in Z"), can turn phrase nicely, and has a knack for footnotes (at least for those of us who enjoy amusing digressions of this sort) -- but it makes for a very lumpy book.
Trying to give a sense of the large cast of characters, Levin Becker generally remains too warily respectful; the dead (Queneau, Perec) often come to life better than those he actually deals with in person. The descriptions of readings, workshops, and meetings offer more atmosphere than substance, and leave at least this Oulipo-fascinated reader itching for more detail. While some projects are quite well-described -- Jacques Roubaud's grand one, for example -- too often the narrative meanders about without sufficient focus. While giving a reasonable general sense (and occasional precise explanation) of what constrained and potential writing is, Many Subtle Channels offers less new insights than one would have hoped from an actual Oulipo-member.
Certainly of interest to anyone interested in the Oulipo, Many Subtle Channels is a nice if small addition to the literature about the organization and its activities. The essential go-to text, however, remains the Oulipo Compendium, which is still both the best overview and introduction to all things Oulipo. And, yes, there is still room -- a lot of room -- for a proper history of the Oulipo; perhaps Levin Becker will be able to write it after having spent a couple of decades in the oulipian ranks." - M.A.Orthofer
"If "American Idol" dumped the music and concentrated instead on the glorious quirks and diverting wonders of words, the show might resemble — in some tiny, fleeting, hopelessly inadequate but endearingly earnest way — the legendary performances of the ragtag band of intellectual adventurers profiled by Daniel Levin Becker in his fetching new book, "Many Subtle Channels in Praise of Potential Literature".
Levin Becker, who grew up in the Hyde Park and Lakeview neighborhoods, made it his mission to get to know this group, based in Paris and cloaked in myth and mystery. Known as Oulipo — which, as Levin Becker explains, is "an acronym for Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature" — the society is "a sort of literary supper club" whose public performances can be "joyous occasions of sublimely mischievous wit."
Those adjectives work as well for Levin Becker's glorious book. His account of acquainting himself with the men and women who are determined to discover "the potentially surprising ways to behold the literary possibilities of language" is all of that: joyous, sublime, mischievous, surprising and filled with possibility.
The Oulipo was established in 1960, the author reports, as an "outlet for restless creative energy" for its members. Public readings — the "American Idol" component — began a decade later.
There are 38 names on the roster, including Levin Becker's; after investigation of the Oulipo during a Fulbright Fellowship year in Paris, he was offered membership in 2009 — only the second American to be so honored. Of the 38, 17 are dead. That is one of the more original aspects of the Oulipo: Death is largely irrelevant. It only means, Levin Becker notes, that the late member is "definitively excused" from club activities, "owing to the handicap of being deceased."
Imagine playing Sudoku with letters of the alphabet instead of numbers and you'll have a fair idea of the kinds of games favored by Oulipoians. They write entire books with one letter missing — not an extraneous letter like "x" or "y," but a crucial one, like "e." They scribble — and then read aloud — love stories with no genders revealed. Levin Becker dreamed of writing "a set of vignettes linking a randomly coupled first and last sentence poached from other works" and "a cycle of stories whose themes were determined by their word count."
Even if the ever-fluid, defiantly whimsical and borderline wacky nature of the group's goals leaves you unmoved, however, you will still be enchanted by Levin Becker's book. He is obviously very smart, but he doesn't need to show you that; instead, he leads with his curiosity and his humility. One of the most entertaining chapters deals with his participation in an event to organize the Oulipo archives. These are people, he says, who adore language and who "allow themselves to be seduced by its pitfalls and pratfalls and pliable protocols."
Levin Becker, whose father and stepmother still call Chicago home, has lived in San Francisco since his return from Paris. In an email exchange, he dived into the question of whether the Oulipo movement could have originated anywhere but in Paris:
"The optimist in me likes to believe that every language has built-in potential for structural playfulness — but it's true that French culture is particularly heavy-handed in the way it both teaches and fetishizes structure, so I think a mischievous relationship to linguistic rules is already developed in anyone who comes up through the French education system, then nurtured by the apparent national pastime of naming businesses after terrible puns — which, for the sake of comparison, is limited in the U.S. to hair salons and dog-grooming boutiques." - Julia Keller
"There are literary movements and then there are literary niches. The Oulipo is the latter of these. The group’s work can be both challenging and charming, fascinating and frustrating, and Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature provides an immersive and enjoyable account of what is either a literary paradise (if you like that sort of thing) or a complicated hell (if you don’t).
The Oulipo, whose name is an acronym for the French ouvroir de littérature potentielle, was founded in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and engineer François Le Lionnais, who together perfectly embodied the aims of the group. The earliest scenes from Levin Becker’s history pull from Queneau and Le Lionnais’s pre-Oulipian days. Le Lionnais survived Nazi prison camps by recalling his favorite paintings. “Stone by stone,” Le Lionnais says, “we built the most marvelous museum in the world. In so doing we managed to extract from each work one detail, occasionally two, infinitely more sonorous, more profound, and more righteous—more real—than the wretched reality that mired our bodies.” The combinatorial spirit that helped Le Lionnais survive the Nazis lent itself to his belief in the capacities of literature. Marry this to Queneau’s early attempt to capture a poem, “Here poem poem poem […] Aw nuts / It got away,” and you have some idea of what the Oulipo is about.
The essential conceit merges literature with other constraints (primarily mathematical) in order to unlock literature’s potential (the group’s name translates into English as “Workshop for Potential Literature”). The result can be inviting, comedic, baffling, or solemn. Opening with the funeral of one of its current members (death does not end one’s membership in the Oulipo, though it is an understandable excuse for missing a meeting), Levin Becker grounds the book in a humanity that tempers the science of melding math and literature.
A crash course in over 50 years of literary history, Many Subtle Channels carries its reader through discussions of Oulipo light and Oulipo ’ard; through the idiosyncrasy of Oulipo meetings; through the jeudi, the Oulipo’s seasonal performance gatherings; and through the list of offshoots and spinoffs collectively known as the Ouxpos. The group’s 38 members are each given their due, Levin Becker being one and the fictional QB another, and while some names are recognized, i.e. Calvino, Duchamp, Perec, and Queneau, there are quite a few discoveries. There is also plenty of the literary gamesmanship for which the Oulipo is best known. Yet, simply because the group is having its own long-running inside joke with literature doesn’t mean it isn’t serious. The purpose of the Oulipo and its constraints is to set the writer free, to set literature free even, and Levin Becker does an excellent job demonstrating how demolishing the line between the serious and the enjoyable happens to be only one benefit of that freedom.
Yet, for all of what Levin Becker successfully captures in Many Subtle Channels, there is something that gets away. The live experiences of the jeudi and the Oulipo’s public workshops are more informative than enjoyable, and the excitement that was surely present in the moment is now padlocked by the page. Perhaps such excitement is untranslatable—certainly reading a review is never as satisfying as attending a performance—and it may be unfair to fault Levin Becker for a shortcoming that is inherent to the material. Seemingly aware of these moments, Levin Becker provides short and sometimes breathtakingly funny quips in the footnotes, and these help keep the mood light when the pace of this generally sweeping narrative falters. Many Subtle Channels also appears to be free of the very constraints the work spends so much time detailing. It is entirely possible that I, like the critic Albéres, who read the entirety of La Disparition without realizing it lacked the letter “e,” have missed something.
Levin Becker has borrowed his title from Le Lionnais’s words concerning the synthesis and analysis of Oulipian invention. Moreover, it is indicative of the work’s raison d’être. Levin Becker’s investigation is as much love letter as biography; it is a seduction to read more, to explore a subject, which is what the best books do. Readers’ eyes will yearn for One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, Life A User’s Manual, Î, If on a winter’s night a traveler, and the complete and at times ridiculous series of permutations that follow Le Voyage d’hier, whether or not they’ve read them before. Michelle Grangaud, one of the few female members of the Oulipo, said about language, “I was seized by the beauty […] that all our thoughts are made with just 26 letters and the game of their permutations.” These words rest in the heart of both the Oulipo and the Praise written about it, making Many Subtle Channels a robust reminder of the true potential literature still contains." - Jon Dozier-Ezell
"In reading this charming book, I tried to recall how I first fell in love with the Oulipo. It must’ve been through Dalkey Archive, and probably had to do with one of the wild-eyed booksellers at Schuler Books & Music, but I just couldn’t remember . . . At first I assumed it was through Harry Mathews, whose books were being reissued by Dalkey at the time; it jus as easily could’ve been through Perec’s A Void, since that’s the most patently Oulipian work available in English and I remember pushing it on customers all the time. (And now do the same with my students.)
Then it suddenly came to me: When I was living in Grand Rapids, I went to a used bookstore just to look around, and found a mass market, old-school version of Raymond Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro. For those who don’t know, this part of Michigan is loaded with Calvinists and their moral baggage, so it isn’t all that surprising that someone had scrawled across the title page of this book, condemning it as “erotic trash.”1 SOLD!
But even then, I didn’t really know what the Oulipo was. I mean, I got the concept—use constraints to write “potential” literature—and read almost everything I could get my hands on, but without the Wikipedia of today or knowledge of the French language, figuring out what this group of strange writers was all about was like solving a puzzle without any sort of picture to work off of.
Eventually, the Oulipo Compendium came out as did Oulipo: A Primer, and all the pieces/techniques—lipograms, S+7, complicated algorithms, x mistakes y for z—started to come together. That said, until reading “Many Subtle Channels,” I don’t think I had a sense of how the Oulipo as a group has functioned for the past 50-plus years.
As a member of the Oulipo, and the “slave” who organized its archives, Daniel Levin Becker is in the unique position that he can create a context for this group of writers who, as diverse as their are personality-wise, are connected by their love of puzzles, of new ways to generate texts, of learning, of seeking out puzzles, of creating the linguistic labyrinth from which they try to escape.
For anyone who isn’t already steeped in Oulipian lore, I highly suggest you read this book, then pick up Queneau’s Exercises in Style, Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and Mathews’s Cigarettes. After you read all of those—and possibly some of the info you can find online—you’re likely to be hooked on this way of writing and reading for life.
What’s interesting about this book to readers already familiar with the Oulipo and its crazy fun literary stylings is the way in which Levin Becker builds a context around the development of the Workshop while bringing up some really interesting questions about the nature of Oulipian writing: Is it better to reveal the constraints or make the reader figure them out? If the reader knows the constraint, is that the end of their interpretation/enjoyment of the book? How has the group’s dynamics and goals shifted from the post-WWII years to 2012? What’s the point of all this madness?
There’s a lot of great stuff in here worth quoting, both in terms of examples and explanations, but I’ll just end this here with one short paragraph that reminded me of why Lost was so damn good, and why only some people were cool with the eventual ending (I think this proves that I can pull Lost into just about every book discussion):
A good solid search, especially for something you’ll probably never find, drives the plot forward both on and off the page. The less you know, the more you want to know. Hitchcock knew it as well as Homer did: get the audience invested in the pursuit of a puzzle piece, be it the key or the antidote or the identity of the dead man, and they’ll follow you for as long as it remains missing. That’s why it’s so hard to write a satisfying ending: “solutions,” Mathews says, “are nearly always disappointing.” - Matt Rowe
For over fifty years now, the (mostly) French phenomenon known as the Oulipo (short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’) has been baffling and enthralling readers everywhere with its array of opaque literary techniques. Founded in 1960 as a subcommittee of the even more enigmatic Collège de ‘Pataphysique, the group has included such luminaries as Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau. The latter coined a phrase that has caught on as a précis of what oulipian writers do: they are, Queneau claimed, ‘rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape.’ In other words, such writers work within self-imposed ‘constraints,’ submission to which encourages their creativity.
The Oulipo is partly about puzzles. From palindromes to lipograms and other linguistic devices, oulipian texts are crafted with what one member calls ‘the finest sort of needlework.’ A well-known example would be Perec’s novel La disparition, written without the letter ‘e’. Here I’ll come clean: I don’t always see the appeal of these games. From what I’ve read of the Oulipo’s output, I’m a bit ambivalent. A case in point would be Perec’s masterpiece, Life: A User’s Manual. I first read this book completely naively, unaware that its plot was modelled on a sequence of chess moves mapped by a mathematician. I enjoyed it immensely. But as soon as I knew how it had come about, it lost its allure. I couldn’t read it without being reminded of what seemed like an annoying authorial trick, a self-congratulatory gimmick. Of course, the fault was entirely mine; my reading of Perec was weighed down by my own presuppositions about how literary works should behave. But it’s worth being clear, when it comes to the Oulipo, that I’m neither an expert nor necessarily a believer.
Fortunately, Daniel Levin Becker is both. This young American writer has been a member of the Oulipo since 2009. Moving to Paris on a scholarship after college, he was enlisted by the group as an esclave (literally ‘slave’), and commenced an apprenticeship organising its official archive, the fonds Oulipo. Before long he was invited to join. His book clearly benefits from his scholarly work with the group’s ‘paper trail’ – its meeting minutes, correspondence, and other obscure apocrypha. More than this, it benefits from his insider’s perspective, meaning not merely his membership, but his vivid way of conveying his lived experience of the group. Many Subtle Channels is a book about the Oulipo, but it’s also about what the Oulipo means to its author. It’s a personal appraisal.
In trying to understand the Oulipo, the first problem one faces (if trying to understand it isn’t already a problem) is how to grasp the group as a collective entity. Levin Becker’s descriptions are by turns deflationary and elevated: in his hands the Oulipo is first ‘a sort of literary supper club’ and then ‘a hallowed echo chamber for investigations of poetic form and narrative constraint and the mathematics of wordplay.’ What he’s getting at is that it’s somehow both. Indeed, he subtly captures his subject’s capacity to be silly and inconsequential and, at the same time, scientifically serious. Put simply, the Oulipo is serious without being self-serious. Levin Becker traces this tendency back to the group’s early years, when ‘pataphysical pranksterism got mixed up with the mathematical methods of the ‘Bourbaki’ collective. The result was a characteristic cocktail of rigour and irreverence.
Daniel Levin Becker
Of course, this is something it shares with many avant-garde movements (like Tom McCarthy’s ‘International Necronautical Society’, to take one of today’s examples). It also shares an ethos of imitativeness: as Levin Becker notes, ‘a reliable indicator’ of a technique’s oulipian merit ‘is whether or not it inspires riffing from other members.’ Crucially though, unlike most modernist movements (especially its key precursor, Surrealism) the Oulipo is avowedly unprogrammatic. Levin Becker again: ‘it is concerned with literature in the conditional mood, not the imperative… it does not purport to tell anyone what literature should or must be.’ In this respect, maybe it’s less like a movement and more like what some members believe it to be: ‘an unwritten, collective, and necessarily unfinishable novel’ starring its authors as characters.
The Oulipo’s main contribution to literary history is its central concept of ‘constraint,’ which lets writing arise out of paradoxically productive rules and restrictions. One consequence of constraints is that they free writers from a romantic ideal of spontaneous creativity. Levin Becker quotes Gilbert Sorrentino on this: ‘constraints destroy the much-cherished myth of “inspiration,” and its idiot brother, “writer’s block.”’ Indeed, Levin Becker argues, the Oulipo was ‘designed to discredit’ writers’ and readers’ fondness for a false impression of literature as a matter of ‘ecstatic intuition.’ The latter sounds suspiciously like what I was disappointed to see disappear in Perec, once I knew what his rules were. Maybe I wasn’t ready to have my romanticism demystified.
But this discrediting of aesthetic dogma does seem full of fertile possibilities. One of Levin Becker’s many striking character sketches deals with Jacques Jouet, of whom the Oulipo scholar Warren Motte once said, ‘he writes to pass the time.’ Levin Becker’s Jouet appears engaged in a near-revolutionary conflation of art and everyday life. Sat on a train composing his ‘metro poems’ (one line per stop, and transcribed only when in a station) he breaks the barrier between inspiration and what has to be one of modernity’s most uninspiring routines. In this way, Levin Becker says, he ‘extends the range of potentially potential activities,’ making life itself as anti-utilitarian as the best art. Again, this is very much an avant-garde staple: life as art, as unprincipled play. In this sense there’s something almost Situationist about Jouet, and perhaps about aspects of the Oulipo.
Yet Jouet’s poetic method is only suggestive of a Situationist politics. The Oulipo has signally failed to follow such political tendencies to the end of the line. On this score, Levin Becker cites the Canadian experimental poet Christian Bök, who claims that oulipian constraints are themselves constrained to producing ‘solutions to aesthetic, rather than political problems.’ The potential which oulipians exercise is essentially apolitical. One critic Levin Becker doesn’t mention is the Cambridge academic Alex Houen. For Houen, the whole idea of literary ‘potential’ is freighted with revolutionary resonances. He regards potency as utopian, a force aimed at making things possible. For this reason his rich study of the subject, Powers of Possibility, totally excludes the Oulipo, and rightly so. Yet Levin Becker reminds us that, after all, Perec and co never attempted to gild their work with political pretensions: ‘these were never the terms that the Oulipo set for itself.’ To be sure, it’s admirable that the group has avoided ‘the pitfalls of the party line.’ But perhaps oulipian practice is problematic insofar as it’s only interested in writerly, readerly, purely procedural revolutions.
There’s a tension, too, between this autotelic aspect of the Oulipo and the accessibility that Levin Becker asks of it. He would like, he asserts near the end of the book, ‘to make these ideas belong to everyone, not just littérateurs.’ For him an oulipian approach is as applicable to life as it is to letters. Removed from the hermetic realms of reading and writing, an oulipian mindset might ‘give us the tools’ to unpick the aesthetic patterns embedded in everyday existence, renewing the cognitive novelty of ‘newspaper clippings and restaurant menus and radio traffic news.’
Psychologically, such acts of pattern recognition also speak to a search for security. Levin Becker suggests as much, when he concludes that under all its conundrums the Oulipo’s essence is the ‘less sturdy but more human’ archetype of the ‘Quest.’ On this model, to live your life like an oulipian is to ‘move through it with the purpose and security that come from knowing you hold the tools to give it shape and meaning.’ This is an uplifting thought, although it risks being read as narcissistic: an annexation of the Oulipo’s energy to a kind of West Coast existentialism, where ‘potential’ would be reduced to self-affirmation and self-fashioning. If we’re to learn life lessons from literary practices, why not make them less individualistic, more politically committed? But in any case, Levin Becker’s heart is in the right place. His personal perspective is compelling, and his book is beautifully written. So wonderfully written, in fact, that it’s entirely worth reading even if, like me, you remain unconvinced by the Oulipo, an outsider looking in. - David Winters
Daniel Levin Becker's web page
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