Fringe Magazine - Issue 12

Issue 12: October 2007.
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Home > Issue 12: October 2007 > Criticism

Ou-Li-What? What American Writers Might Learn from the French
by Heather MacNeill

Bowker.com, the U.S.’s leading provider of bibliographic information, tells me—as someone who wants to “stay on the pulse of the publishing industry”—to “click on the links below” in order to find out what “highly-esteemed national and international television and newspaper outlets” have to say about what’s hot, and what’s not.[1] I click on the CBS News link and am immediately hit with the cover of the next great book to buy: Chocolates on the Pillow Aren’t Enough: Reinventing the Customer Experience. The blurb beside it tells me that I should also direct my attention to Fashionably Buff: Essential Workouts for Looking Great in Anything You Wear, and one I find particularly amusing, Actually, It Is Your Parents' Fault: Why Your Romantic Relationship Isn't Working, and How to Fix It. The recommended reading list is long; prescriptive titles littered with colons instruct readers on how they can change what they didn’t know was wrong in their life. This, followed by a quick perusal of the Best-Seller’s list for the week of March 1st leaves me broken-hearted—another Danielle Steele lover’s tryst, James Patterson’s latest legal thriller, and Mitch Albom’s more recent revelation on life without Morrie are among the top ten. It seems that the publishing industry is suffering from a bad case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder—they just can’t help but repeatedly churn out variations on the same old derivative, tired themes.

If this is the case—if this is what the masses are consuming—what hope is there for experimental literature’s survival? In a Harper’s Magazine article, Ben Marcus rages against the judges of 2004’s National Book Award in fiction, saying their quick dismissal of low-selling works was “a clear announcement that the value system for literature [is] tweaked to favor not people who actually read a lot of books but a borderline reader…who might read only one or two books in a year.”[2] Marcus’ argument is based on a premise that American readers are not interested in being mentally challenged and that the publishing elite cater to this by marginalizing economically any writer “interested in the possibilities of language…[who] appreciate artistic achievements of others but still dream for [them]selves …[and believe] that new arrangements are possible…new connections of language that might set off a series of delicious mental explosions.”[3] Though the publishing house numbers would support this assertion, what Marcus fails to account for is the fact that experimental writing, from avant-garde to postmodern, has never held the dominant interest. In fact, this is specifically a condition of its existence. As long as mass-produced and formulaic literature exists, there will be marginal groups addressing the crises and conflicts internal to literature itself. And that is okay.

I recognize that the term “experimental” is problematic, and has been found frustrating by many writers. Among the more vocal was Kathy Acker, who openly complained that it invalidates the finished work and creates an illegitimacy that more traditional forms do not have to deal with.[4] She saw the label as “another way of sticking people in the corner,” focussing solely on texts that would be more aptly named transgressive. In contemporary society, it is easy to blur boundaries and get confused. While the experimental and transgressive can overlap, just as the experimental and postmodern can, they are not necessarily the same animal. Experimental writing, for the purposes of this discussion, includes the transgressive, postmodern, and avant-garde. It acts as an umbrella term; a foil to traditional, formulaic, formalist writing.

Experimental writing provides a means of expression that is different from traditional narrative by shifting focus from empathy to sympathy—from “I feel what you feel” to “I feel a supporting emotion about your feelings”—a distancing that creates objectivity.[5] It not only allows the writer to access areas that may have been blocked off by traditional, formalist approaches, but creates an opportunity for the reader to shift consciousness and become aware of the present. And while experimental writing, like other forms, will always exist, it can never become dominant due to its nature to demand shifts in cognition: “Whenever the present achieves expression, those living in it will find it annoying, irritating, unnatural, ugly. Consequently, art can’t be made present by accommodating it to popular styles or dominant ideas” because it will lose its present-ness as a result.[6] Experimental writing will need to reconcile itself to the fringe of publishing society and accept that what it is creating now will most likely not be appreciated for many years to come, when its innovative approaches have become integrated into popular culture and are no longer threatening.

Since the 1960s, an experimental fire has been brewing in France. At first only a slow smolder, the kindling has in the last fifteen years begun to take and spread its embers about the globe. This fire, to end the metaphor here, is the literary form of Oulipo. Now, I must be careful because maybe form is not quite the right word. Genre? No, even that’s debatable. For now, I’ll leave the categorization up to you.

Oulipo—otherwise known as Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle, OU.LI.PO, and OuLiPo—is experimental, provocative, and transgressive. Oulipo is political and subversive, superficial and multifaceted, weighted and impartial. Oulipo is poetry, prose, fiction, nonfiction, mystery, romance, comedy, and tragedy. In short, Oulipo is everything.

The question, of course, begs to be asked: if Oulipo is everything, how can it be something? In order to answer that, some backtracking is in order. In the early 1930s, a group of French mathematicians gathered together secretly to begin writing a series of books under the collective name of Nicolas Bourbaki. The group’s mission was to rewrite all of mathematics using Set Theory and rigor to create a unifying foundation. Operating as an underground group, Bourbaki managed to publish extensively, subverting conventional mathematics worldwide, particularly at the advanced level. The originators of Oulipo (François Lionnais, Raymond Queneau, et al.) considered their group an homage, parody, and extension of Bourbaki—their intention being to invent and reinvent restrictions by which literature is composed. Oulipo translates the rewriting of mathematics as a whole into the realm of language arts.Unlike formalist approaches, Oulipien literature begins by setting up rules for itself; rules that do not coincide with the conventions of tradition or with which readers have understood to constitute a proper work of art. These rules can be as simple as Christine Brooke-Rose’s decision not to use the verb “to be” in her novel Between, or as complex as Georges Perec’s choice to follow complicated mathematical equations and chess moves in Life A User’s Manual. The rule, once set, then becomes the only initial constant—it is the sole framework within which the author will create.

Many of the constraints that have already seeped their way into popular literature include the anagram, acrostic, and lipogram. The anagram, for those unfamiliar, rearranges the letters of one word to create another (angel into glean, for example); acrostic poems use the vertical succession of a word to form the first letters of each line of the poem (John Cage did this quite a bit); and lipograms exclude one or more letters from the text (Perec’s A Void manages to exclude the letter “e” from the entire novel). Other less familiar constraints conform strictly to mathematical formulas, like W ± n. This relation was originally devised by Jean Lescure and is also known as S +7 and N + 7. Here W stands in for a word, and n stands in for a variable number. The formula is simply to replace each noun in a passage with the seventh that follows in the dictionary. The original texts can be taken from traditional sources or created originally for the project. If we take the quote "Honest plain words best pierce the ear of grief" (Act v, Sc.2) from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost and try the formula, we get: “Honest plain workshops best pierce the Earhart of grieschoch.”The amendment, in and of itself, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. So what’s the point? Simply, this is one of the easiest ways of breaking down the pre-programmed language structures that condition our experience and expression and subsequently one of the easiest ways of creating something new. By their very nature, these strategies require a lack of intention on the part of the author—the method becomes the focus, rather than the result. This lack of intention within the constraint, though, is only the initial approach to creating a text. It is a compositional approach, just like freewriting or Madlibs. The author does the work of accumulation under constraint and arrives at a point where all of the elements are ready to put into a composition. Oulipien writing, unlike trangressive or avant-garde, is not about rebellion or political agendas. It is about finding new combinations of things, new ways of expressing and seeing, and nothing more.

Where formalist approaches make structure invisible so as to allow for full immersion in the subject-plot, Oulipien approaches draw attention to form and make structure part of the reading experience. Formalism’s structure “conceals certain assumptions about that pre-existing order and its role in creating the possibility for human action and critical theory” and can easily reinforce the framework of society so that readers do not consider re-evaluation.[7] Oulipien, and other experimental forms, subvert this framework.

So what can American writers learn from the French? That we can be more proactive in thinking outside the box with regards to our compositional structures. If mathematics and literature can be combined, why not try other non-literary areas? Why not physics, or ecology, or plumbing (yes, you read that right). It’s an exciting world, this realm of the experimental. Aristotle burst many a bubble with his everything already exists idea—why not find out what connections are lying hidden? Who knows what can happen as a result.

Some notable Oulipien texts worth reading:

Life A User’s Manual and A Void (La Disparation) by Georges Perec

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Cosmicomics, and The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino

My Life in the CIA by Harry Mathews

Zazie in the Metro (Zazie dans le Metro) by Raymond Queneau

Oulipo Compendium edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie

Notes

[1] BookWire. 9 March 2006. Bowker, Inc. http://www.bookwire.com/BookIndustryNews.asp

[2] Ben Marcus, “Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It,” Harper’s Magazine (October 2005): 41

[3] Ibid 40

[4] Kathy Acker interview. http://www.centerforbookculture.org/interviews/interview_acker.html The Review of Contemporary Fiction," Fall 1989, Volume 9.3

[5] Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” NARRATIVE 14.3 (October 2006): 207-236

[6] See R.M. Berry, “Avante-garde and the Question of Literature,” Electronic Book Review, ed. Joseph Tabbi 27 Apr 2003 http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/AVAnt

[7] See Jim Hansen, “Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the Function of Allegory,” New Literary History 35.4 (Autumn 2004): 663-684