Oulipo (Group of authors)
Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), is a literary movement that originated in France in 1960, founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The group is known for its unconventional approach to creativity, advocating that restrictions can enhance artistic expression rather than stifle it. This philosophy diverged from the prevalent postmodern trends that emphasized free expression and the subconscious. Oulipo writers often employed mathematical and puzzle-like constraints in their work, leading to innovative techniques such as N+7, where nouns in a text are replaced with those seven entries ahead in the dictionary, and the snowball method, where lines of poetry expand in length.
Notable figures in the Oulipo movement include George Perec, whose novel "A Void" famously omits the letter 'e', showcasing the potential for meaningful narratives within strict constraints. Despite its decline in influence, Oulipo's legacy continues as contemporary writers explore similar creative experiments, demonstrating that boundaries can indeed open up new avenues for artistic exploration and expression.
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Oulipo (Group of authors)
Oulipo, sometimes rendered as OuLiPo or OULIPO, refers to a small but impactful literary movement that began in France in 1960. Oulipo rejected many of the prevailing ideas of postmodern art and literature, which celebrated free and limitless expression of thoughts, feelings, and subconscious impulses. Followers of Oulipo believed that this lack of restriction hurt artists’ creativity and artistic quality. To avoid this, they created works based around self-imposed restrictions, often set out mathematically or in a puzzle-like manner. Although this form of writing waned in influence, it did not disappear. Many Oulipo-type writing experiments continue to take place in the twenty-first century, often aided by new technologies.
Brief History
Much of the art and literature of the twentieth century was based on challenging the traditions of past centuries and seeking new methods of expression. One of the most creative and surprising literary schools to arise in post-World War II Europe came to be known as the Oulipo movement. Oulipo derived from the French term Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature.
Two very different yet like-minded men, Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, founded the Oulipo movement in Paris in 1960. Queneau was an experienced writer known for his experiments with the surrealist style, which emphasized the power of the unconscious mind and often produced strange and unearthly works. Le Lionnais had little literary background but was instead primarily an engineer and mathematician. The differences between these founders helped to define the unique identity of the Oulipo movement they began, which, in essence, combined literature with mathematics and engineering concepts, along with input from other disciplines.
Overview
The main idea behind the Oulipo movement was that freedom, particularly artistic freedom, may be enhanced through the application of restrictions. At the time, most artists and writers would likely have disagreed with this seemingly paradoxical statement, since the mid-twentieth century saw the growing popularity of surrealism and many other styles that encouraged people to express themselves without limits in often wild and abstract ways.
Oulipo’s founders believed that restrictions could enhance true creativity since they challenge artists to seek new ways to overcome these restrictions. Queneau explained the Oulipo mindset with an example of rats in a maze, saying that Oulipo artists are “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.” Proponents believed that confining styles and thinking could lead to endless potential for new ideas and artworks. Oulipo restrictions could also bring new life to past writings by altering them in surprising ways. Often, the liberal application of humor made light of how nonsensical some of the new writing sounded.
One of the works that helped to inspire and popularize the Oulipo movement was One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Queneau. Queneau had been experiencing writer’s block, an inability to continue with one’s writing. He decided to take a break from traditional writing forms and attempt to free his mind with an entirely new approach. The result was a flipbook, a volume in which each page featured fourteen lines of a poem, presented as strips that the reader could even cut out if desired. The reader could match any strip on one page with any strip on the following page, and so on, until the reader had constructed an entire sonnet. Queneau calculated that a reader could create an astronomical number of unique poems using this technique and could spend 190,258,751 years negotiating the ideas in the book. Although such a feat would be absurd, the message of creativity and new methods of making artwork inspired many readers who encountered Queneau’s book.
Writers in the Oulipo movement found a wide range of new ways to challenge themselves and open new opportunities for art and expression. One popular technique came to be known as N+7. In this technique, a writer begins with a previously written work, often by a famous writer of the past. The Oulipo writer then rewrites the work by replacing every noun with the noun that appears seven nouns ahead of it in the dictionary. This shuffling of words will inevitably create a new work with a surprising new meaning; many proponents of N+7 even check each new substitute word to ensure it is sufficiently unlike the original word in sound and meaning. For example, the well-known nursery rhyme lines “Mary had a little lamb; / Its fleece was white as snow” might be converted into “Mary had a little lamp; / Its flint was white as soap” using N+7.
Some Oulipo writers used a creative restriction known as the snowball method. A snowball poem is required to start small and become bigger, like a snowball rolling down a hill, collecting more snow and growing. In one variation, each line grows one word longer; for example, the first line has only one word, the second line has two words, and so on. In another variation, each word in a line must be longer by one letter; for instance, the first word has one letter, the second word has two letters, and so on. A sentence constructed in the latter variation might read: “I am the only happy author feeling peaceful presently.”
Aside from the founders of the Oulipo movement, some of its most notable practitioners include the poet Oskar Pastior, poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud, and novelist Italo Calvino. Novelist George Perec, another celebrated Oulipo writer, created perhaps the most famous work in that style. Originally called La Disparition (The Disappearance) but renamed A Void upon its English release, this three-hundred-page novel is written entirely without using the letter e. E is extremely common in English but is the most used letter in the French language, in which the book was originally written.
Many people thought that omitting the typically ubiquitous letter e would have made it impossible to write an entire novel or that the completed novel would be incomprehensible. However, many readers enjoyed the novel not only for its uniqueness but also for its story and artistry. Perec noted that some readers finished the book without even realizing it was missing the letter. He chose this unique constraint symbolically to honor the people, including his own parents, who had disappeared during World War II (1939–1945).
Bibliography
“A Brief Guide to OULIPO.” Poets.org, poets.org/text/brief-guide-oulipo. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
Andrews, Chris. How to Do Things with Forms: The Oulipo and Its Inventions.McGill-Queen’s U P, 2022.
Consenstein, Peter. Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo. Brill, 2021.
Gallix, Andrew. “Oulipo: Freeing Literature by Tightening Its Rules.” The Guardian, 12 July 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/jul/12/oulipo-freeing-literature-tightening-rules. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
Leong, Michael. “Rats Build Their Labyrinth: Oulipo in the 21st Century.” Hyperallergic, 17 May 2015, hyperallergic.com/206802/rats-build-their-labyrinth-oulipo-in-the-21st-century/. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.
Pêcheux, Mina. “‘L’OuLiPo’: Mixing Maths and Literature.” Medium, 26 Nov. 2021, medium.com/geekculture/loulipo-mixing-maths-and-literature-50ab410caab3. Accessed 14 Nov. 2023.