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 is Reviews Editor for the Believer and has been a member of the Oulipo since 2009.
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Chapter 3: Reading Out Loud
The Oulipo didn’t start doing its reading publicly until the early seventies, before which its activities were steeped in a cautious, low-level clandestinity. Its first sorties were mostly tied to festivals and colloquia: a conference at Reid Hall, the Parisian branch of Columbia University; the Europalia festival in Brussels; a “Pompidoulipo” at the Centre Pompidou; the Festival de la Chartreuse in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. The Paris jeudi readings began in 1996, at the 100-seat Halle Saint-Pierre in Montmartre; since then they have migrated to a 250-place auditorium at Jussieu, a University of Paris campus near the Panthéon, then to the far more capacious Forum des Images in the massive underground shopping complex at Les Halles, and finally, in 2005, to the slightly smaller but more suitably prestigious grand auditorium at the BNF.
Readings are a natural and sustaining part of the Oulipo’s public life for a number of reasons. For one, it gives the audience a reason to care, to buy a book after the reading, to put a face to the name on the spine, to rub elbows with other elegantly disheveled mordus. Conversely, while it allows the Oulipians to be approached by their admirers, it has also become a significant means of evolution for the group’s collective corpus. The BNF, which is fairly intimate despite its seating capacity, is a place where new material can be tested before a sympathetic audience and where old material can be repurposed and given new valence—a place, for the most part, where oulipian texts attain the life they were meant to lead.
The jeudis for the last several years have been organized by theme. Each reading in the 2006-2007 season, for instance, was devoted to a color, beginning with Infrarouge and ending with Ultraviolet. For the occasional writer like Salon, someone whose daily life is not centered on literature, a monthly reading is a great impetus to compose, with a sufficiently pliable prompt to yield quality results. (Salon’s offerings, pun-besotted shaggy-dog stories that are at once savant and howlingly corny, are invariably among the most crowd-pleasing texts of the evening.) For younger members who have not yet published much, the theme of an upcoming jeudi can provide the concrete hook for a new idea: Forte, for instance, found that the reading on le bleu du ciel, or blue of the sky, lent itself well to a form he had recently created, a series of 99 pseudo-randomly ordered observations that collectively depict a single topic. (Likewise, after my induction, I used a reading on the theme of les premiers outrages—first indignities—as an excuse to develop my half-baked theory that the tower of Babel episode in the book of Genesis was the first oulipian event in history.) Meanwhile, more seasoned and prolific authors like Jouet can reach into their own back catalogs and find something relevant to the evening’s theme; others—such as Bénabou, whose bibliography is concentrated mostly on metaliterary issues—can just as easily trot out a beloved (or obscure) text by a deceased Oulipian, or a particularly apropos one from someone outside the clan: French poet Tristan Corbière, British screenwriter Richard Curtis, Roman rhetorician Quintilian, and so on.
All this gives an effect not unlike that of the spiral of Oulipian heads projected behind the stage: it suggests that there is no end to the connections that are possible between disparate minds focusing on one thing, the sheer volume of stuff that can be brought together under the aegis of even a couple of humdrum ideas. Like the galaxie, the themes seem to signify this both in practice—what’s been written already—and in theory—what could be written, given a theme and some time and a handful of techniques. Each reading is, in this respect, a small and casual affirmation of potential literature’s potential applicability to the real world.
