“Oulipans are rats who build the labyrinth
from which they will try to escape.”
–Raymond Queneau
It brings me no joy to report the rebirth (or the renewed undeadness) of the zombie literary movement known as OuLiPo.
Oulipo’s first birth came in 1960, from the vibrant and idle minds of Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. They dubbed it ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“workshop of potential literature”). A self-conscious experiment in applying strict mathematical constraints to art, its results (such as George Perec’s La Disparition, a novel that avoids the letter e) were spectacles of virtuosity, triumphs of ingenuity, and, at their very best, passable works of art. No coincidence, I say, that the name “potential literature” stands opposed to actual literature.
I believed this volcano had gone dormant. I was wrong. The last year witnessed four eruptions. I offer brief comments on each species of ash.
In Sarah Hart’s CENTIPEDES: 100-LEGGED FICTIONS (Flatiron Books, $24.95) the self-imposed constraints are punishingly tight. In each of the book’s 100 works of micro-fiction, you will find: (1) a single sentence, (2) precisely 100 words long, (3) with no words repeated.
The rules are so constrictive they threaten to cut off all blood flow. Fortunately, they do not. An example to illustrate the form:
After Amber’s dad left, her anger found tiny outlets everywhere: shoving in lunch lines, rude names flung at unsuspecting classmates, graffitied desks, smoldering glares when Miss Gillow pressed with “Are you feeling okay?” or “Is there anything wrong, Amber?” – but whenever his name came up, those hazel eyes suddenly pacified, the fighter’s stance softened, that mouth effected neutral smiles, and a demure young lady emerged, only vaguely curious about Father’s whereabouts; these reversals vexed counselors, threw them off-balance, like firefighters reaching an inferno’s site to find no smoke, nor heat, not even sparks, just houses collapsing amidst silent winter air.
Quibbles, of course, abound: I question whether “Amber” and “Amber’s” should count as distinct; I note the tonal awkwardness of “Father’s”; and I lament that the semicolon after “whereabouts” is writhing in existential pain, denied its rightful identity as a period.
But in such games, rule-bending is inevitable. And to Hart’s credit, these stories actually function as stories. (Never a guarantee in the labyrinths of Oulipo.)
Another of Hart’s centipedes:
First, Melissa left him, pledging love and reunion someday soon; second, she threw herself into the crucible of New York; third came two grueling years given over to worshipping deadlines, answering emails through lunch, hallucinating PowerPoint, day-dreaming Excel, squeezing selfish “errands” (like dental surgery) among more pressing corporate duties; fourth, there were occasional visits home, giddy weekends enjoyed mostly in bed, sleeping late together, pondering no future further than breakfast; fifth, finally, a permanent return, plagued by halting conversations, dodging topics that frightened them, such as whether their flame still smoldered, or if it had quietly spent its last fuel.
The constraints manage to serve the art, imbuing the story-sentences with nervous energy, as if they are navigating around some unutterable thought. The clauses search and twist, forbidden to return home, scrambling onward until an inevitable collapse.
One more illustration:
Aged eighteen, bored and restless, he took to sea: working odd jobs on ships, shunning routine, quitting when promotion beckoned; slipping between continents, self-medicating insomnia, pouring paychecks into liquor bottles; leaving no traces or friends among port cities, only half-concerned lovers, their faces scarcely more permanent in memory than Etch-a-Sketch portraits; until one day the trade-winds died, depositing his ship at a leeward harbor, whose piers were crowded with strange waterlogged fragments, forgotten decades earlier but improbably carried here, along fate’s currents, confronting him now as pale, bloated symbols of what neither sailor nor soul can ever really escape: oneself.
Great literature? Certainly not. But Hart’s work is never dull and only occasionally forced. Those merits alone place it in the higher ranks of Oulipo.
RANDOM INCIDENTS (MIT Press, $20), a collection of poems coauthored by Ben Orlin and Hendree Milward, takes up a different Oulipo tradition: randomness as the seed of creativity. Each cluster of poems is inspired by a random sample drawn from a different aspect of our digital world — for example, a randomly chosen pair of YouTube channels. The poets then seek to weave meaning from the fragments.
Note: I say that they seek to weave meaning. I do not say that they succeed.
Most indicative, and most abysmal, are the Wikipedia-inspired poems. The authors used Wikipedia’s “random article” button three times per poem, and then stitched the three disparate topics together. At best, the stitches are horrifyingly obvious. At worst, there are no stitches at all, just a loose Frankenstein of juxtaposed limbs, held together by inertia alone.
(One senses that Milward is the more capable poet, and that Orlin is responsible for the more severe embarrassments, but that is cold comfort. If you mix chicken soup with house paint, the result belongs neither on spoons nor on walls.)
I suppose I must inflict an example upon you. Here is one of their more valiant efforts, titled “Name-Giving.” (If only the whole book met this modest standard of quality.)
Wikipedia #6:
Name-Giving1.
In the place we call Romania,
by the river they call Buhai,
there is a persistent little trickle
of water along the ground,
and since we cannot help
but give names to things
the trickle is called Pârâul Întors:
the inner creek.Without the name, it’d still be inner.
Without the name, it’d still be a creek.
And the name will not keep it
from drying up.2.
There are certain sunflowers
called “chamomile,”
and certain of these
called “mayweed.”
But this was not good enough
for scientists, who decided
the specimens were better suited
by the name Tripleurospermum.Flowers must look different to them.
3.
In Washington DC,
on the 8th of December, 2008,
film critics gathered to assign names.
Slumdog Millionaire they called “Best Film.”
Danny Boyle they called “Best Director.”
Mickey Rourke they called “Best Actor.”Maybe such names really work,
like magic.
Maybe, for the next year,
Mickey Rourke really was
the Best Actor on Earth,
until they gave the name
to someone else.
Beyond Wikipedia, Orlin and Milward sample other digital universes: posts on Reddit, photos on Instagram, videos on TikTok. While these poems are no better, I admire the ingenuity of the sampling methods: in the absence of a “random post” button, the authors cleverly simulated random walks across the platform, tapping into the “dark matter” of unseen posts, those disfavored and concealed by the algorithms.
As sociology, the results are illuminating; as mathematics, effective; and as poetry, dire beyond redemption.
In short: a characteristic work of Oulipo.
Gizem Karaali’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE FORM OF INTEGER SEQUENCES (Milkweed, $17.99) is a poetic riff on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. It probes the individual personalities (and the shared impersonality) of numbers, the extent to which they can (and cannot) be imbued with life.
Titles of some entries:
- “Apartment numbers at which I have lived, in chronological order”
- “Hours I spent on my phone each day for the last year”
- “Ages at which I felt a phase of my life had ended”
- “Ages at which, looking back now, I feel a phase of my life ended”
- “Page numbers of the poems that have changed me” (Karaali provides no information on the books or the poets, only the pages)
- “Number of my parents still alive on my birthday each year” (The sequence begins with a long string of 2’s, but reader and writer both know that the sequence cannot rise, only descend, sooner or later, in two terrible steps)
Some numbers are freighted with heavy-handed significance (“funerals attended each year of my adulthood”). Others are obscure and trivial (“number of times my friend Ruby said the word ‘anarchic’ in successive conversations last month”). Others seem to be saturated with hidden meanings, accessible only to the poet, while others must be inscrutable even to her, the inhuman data forming a kind of anti-autobiography (or, more properly, auto-anti-biography).
The collection works because Karaali herself does not seem settled on the basic questions. What can numbers do? What can they not do? Karaali offers tentative answers but no single thesis. This is, I suspect, the formula for successful Oulipo: careful calculation plus unyielding skepticism of the enterprise itself.
Fourth and finally, Rob Sleezer’s ON CONCISION (Princeton University Press, $14.95) is not necessarily a work of Oulipo proper, but rather, the kind of literary prank that Queneau et al might appreciate.
The book is structured as a sort of tedious page-a-day calendar, with each leaf imparting a famous person’s thoughts on concision. Invariably, our heroes are in favor (ardently in favor!) of expressing oneself concisely.
What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.
Mark Twain
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had time to make it shorter.
Blaise Pascal
Just as a good editor of prose ruthlessly prunes out unnecessary words, so a designer of statistical graphics should prune out ink.
Edward Tufte
The quotations themselves are unfailingly concise. Sleezer is interested in form, and how it mirrors (or undercuts) meaning. The book’s epigraph (yet another quote, the only one not concision-themed) is from Jim Propp: “Form without meaning is incomplete, but even before meaning attaches itself to form, form can point the way towards meaning.”
Alas, I cannot stop yet. You must experience the full soporific effect of the repetition:
You know that I write slowly. This is chiefly because I am never satisfied until I have said as much as possible in a few words, and writing briefly takes far more time than writing at length.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.
Henry David Thoreau
Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.
Victor Hugo
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
Strunk & White
I began as a naturalistic painter. Very quickly I felt the urgent need for a more concise form of expression.
Piet Mondrian
French parents teach their kids to be concise and amusing, to keep everyone listening.
Pamela Druckerman
Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.
William Zinsser
The catalogue goes on. And on. And on. All this concision adds up to something quite bloated. I’m offering here only a sample of Sleezer’s onerous compendium—but it must be sizable sample, or else the punchline will fail to land.
In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to conciseness.
Samuel Johnson
Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.
Hans Hofmann
The most valuable of all talents is never using two words when one will do.
Thomas Jefferson
The concise man makes one think; the verbose bores.
Edouard Manet
There is no truth which cannot be given in fifty words; the truth is always concise.
Barry Malzberg
Most directors subscribe the principle that less is more, and the best direction is the most concise direction.
Joshua Marston
A story should, to please, at least seem true,
Be apropos, well told, concise, and new:
And whenso’er it deviates from these rules,
The wise will sleep, and leave applause to fools.Benjamin Stillingfleet
It will be my earnest aim that The New York Times give the news, all the news, in concise and attractive form.
Adolph Ochs
The more alien and strange a world or situation is, the more concise you have to be if you want the reader to follow you.
Karin Tidbeck
By the book’s halfway point, the effect becomes almost unbearable. All these paeans to concision—none original, none deeper than the skin of an apple, none saying anything the others do not already encompass. A stack of paper squandered on the monotonous recitation of the same platitude.
Then, finally, you reach the last and longest quotation.
Concision means you have to be able to say things between two commercials. Now that’s a structural property of our media—a very important structural property which imposes conformism in a very deep way, because if you have to meet the condition of concision, you can only either repeat conventional platitudes or else sound like you are from Neptune. That is, if you say anything that’s not conventional, it’s going to sound very strange. For example, if I get up on television and say, “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is a horror,” that meets the condition of concision. I don’t have to back it up with any evidence; everyone believes it already so therefore it’s straightforward and now comes the commercial. Suppose I get up in the same two minutes and say, “The U.S. invasion of South Vietnam is a horror.” Well, people are very surprised. They never knew there was a U.S. invasion of South Vietnam, so how could it be a horror? They heard of something called the U.S. “defense” of South Vietnam, and maybe that it was wrong, but they never heard anybody talk about the U.S. “invasion” of South Vietnam. So, therefore, they have a right to ask what I’m talking about. Copy editors will ask me when I try to sneak something like this into an article what I mean. They’ll say, “I don t remember any such event.” They have a right to ask what I mean. This structural requirement of concision that’s imposed by our media disallows the possibility of explanation; in fact, that’s its propaganda function. It means that you can repeat conventional platitudes, but you can’t say anything out of the ordinary without sounding as if you’re from Neptune, a wacko, because to explain what you meant—and people have a right to ask if it’s an unconventional thought—would take a little bit of time…. Here, our media are constructed so you don’t have time; you have to meet the condition of concision. And whether anybody in the public relations industry thought this up or not, the fact is that it’s highly functional to impose thought control.
Noam Chomsky
Sleezer’s book, amusing as it is, suffers a limitation common to satiric works. It punctures the myth of concision, pops the overinflated balloon—but in the silence that ensues, it has nothing else to say. The straitjacket of concision is thrown off; but one wishes Sleezer (or Chomsky, or Twain, or anyone!) would chime in with the wisdom that concision had withheld from us.
Ah well. I suppose it’s fun to see balloons (and constraints) pop.
On Amazon, Sleezer’s book is listed (among other categories) as a work of “Inspirational Quotations.” Perhaps just a marketing blunder, or perhaps another layer to the satire, but I choose to read it in earnest. What better form of inspiration than to declare that all your prior inspiration was truisms and lies?
