For the love of literature: Oulipoxford mon amour

On 12 February, the modern French literature seminar convened by Prof. Michael Sheringham had changed its schedule to welcome three leading representatives of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (or Oulipo) founded 49 odd years ago by François Le Lyonnais and Raymond Queneau.

La Maison was delighted to welcome in its walls Paul Fournel, the President of the Oulipo, a cyclist extraordinaire and a surprising novelist and short-story writer, Marcel Bénabou, the Secretary Temporarily Provisional and Secretary Provisionally Temporary, a retired historian of Rome, a delightfully deceptive (but not disappointing) memorialist who wrote a whole book to explain why he had written none of his books, and the modest, brilliant, sparklingly just plain member of the Oulipo and grand master of living French poetry, the retired ever-active mathematician Jacques Roubaud.

Any reader who has never heard of Oulipo, who has not already stopped reading the present post, and reads some French should consider it his or her duty to visit the official site of that almost semi-centenary literary movement: http://www.oulipo.net. Whoever regards literature as a gift of (the?) god(s?) will be impatient to listen to our podcasting of the whole event on our site, and will envy the happy numerous who had the pleasure to attend this symposium-cum-performance-cum-workshop-cum-reading by three masters of humour and seriousness (and of literature too, by the way). A modest but representative photo gallery can be viewed elsewhere on our site.

Le Président Fournel imposed on the audience a session of Oulipian writing, demonstrating that once imposed a constraint, every person in the place had been able to produce a text, whereas if merely asked to compose a piece of poetry out of their “inspiration”, no one would have even undertaken to do so. Therefore, a literary constraint is a device to produce texts. What kind of texts? Sonnets? Blurbs? Jokes? Not only: whole novels were produced that way: La vie mode d’emploi, La disparition, The Sinking of Stadium Ordradek and scores of others, whose authors, including the three acolytes present last Thursday, are not always willing to reveal the algorithms or patterns that they followed.

Among the leading references in their discussions: Queneau of course, but also Italo Calvino, and most of all, Georges Pérec, or as Luc Étienne called him in a posthumous sonnet after the former's untimely death: "Ce repère, Pérec".

Given a lipogrammatic constraint in w (writing a text without the letter w) with an s-alliteration , I could proceed to explain that the MFO had seldom seen such a stupendous seminar that stunned the students and the septuagenarians subdued in seminal stupefaction. Such a success! Waow! Oooops! 2 w-s and no initial s: seppuku for the sinner.

Going back to an unfettered (and therefore uninteresting) form of writing, I heartily thank the staff of our Maison, who worked with enthusiasm to create the poster and the exhibition that brought so many participants to listen and write, and listen, and write, and wonder, and write, and think, and write. Subversion? Who knows…