Automatism, Arbitrariness, and the Oulipian Author

Abstract

Absent Subjects? Thanks to such writers as Georges Perec, Italo Calvino and Jacques Roubaud, scholars have begun to take the Ouvroir de litterature potentielle seriously. (1) However, this recent interest has not swept away all resistance. Most dismissive (or even disgusted) reactions to the Oulipo are based on instinctive distaste of the group's project rather than analysis of particular texts. Such reflexive rejections cannot, I believe, simply be attributed to a naive Romantic idea of poetic inspiration and a corresponding refusal to consider writing pratique, comme travail, comme jeu, as Perec suggests. (2) They reflect a deeper unease about the implications of such experiments for the very notion of the writing subject. If we briefly review a few such critical responses, the status of the author does seem to be the central concern. Much ink has already been spilled over Gerard Genette's account of the group in Palimpsestes, where he asserts that Oulipianism is a game of roulette that produces playful parodies in the Surrealist manner. Oulipian texts, according to Genette, involve no semantic intention; any meaning produced must therefore be accidental and the group's experiments merely ludic. (3) In response, the Oulipian Noel Arnaud has pointed out that the group defines itself in opposition to Surrealism and has described itself as anti-chance. (4) Yet this response does not fully address Genette's main point, which rests on the nature of certain Oulipian constraints. Henri Meschonnic pronounces a harsher judgment on the group: having defined poetry as une invention du sujet telle qu'elle invente indefiniment d'autres sujets, he claims that the subject is absent in Oulipian writing, and that the voluntarism of the constraint is a caricature of true poetic necessity. (5) Laurent Jenny, for his part, argues that the Oulipo furthers the twentieth-century tendency toward an automatisation de la parole that threatens the singularity of literary discourse. (6) This worry is not absent among critics who admire the group; the Perec scholar Bernard Magne, for example, is careful to underscore Perec's avoidance of overly mechanical constraints which would imply a loss of control on the part of the author. (7) Even a member of the Oulipo, Jean Queval, expressed concern during a 1962 meeting: Il ne faudrait pas substituer a l'automatisme psychique des surrealistes un automatisme mecanique ou le hasard aurait autant de part. (8) These comments all rest on the fear that the writer may be reduced to the role of machine, robbed of aesthetic choices and forced to bend to arbitrary rules. The simplest defense of the Oulipian enterprise consists in holding up masterpieces such as Perec's Vie mode d'emploi or Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler as shining examples of literary works written using constraints. However, I would like to tackle fears of automatization and arbitrariness more directly by addressing the two Oulipian writing methods that are the most easily dismissed as unserious or unaesthetic. The first is S+7, and the second is the lipogram. The method known as S+7, on -]n in itsmore general form, or N+7 in English, was first proposed by Jean Lescure during the Oulipo's fourth meeting (13 February 1961). (9) In dossier 17 of the Cahiers du College de 'Pataphysique and later in the collective volume Litterature potentielle, Lescure defines his rule in the following terms: La methode M[+ on -]n, que l'on propose d'abord sous la forme encore limitee dite [...] consiste a remplacer dans un texte existant (de qualite litteraire ou non) les mots (M) par d'autres mots de meme genre qui les suivent ou les precedent dans un dictionnaire. (10) In the S+7 form (the most popular among Oulipians), it is only the nouns (substantifs) that are replaced. The application of this method does not require the action of a writer, but rather an operator who is reduced to a purely mechanical function. …