Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim, editors. The noulipian Analects. Les Figues Press, 2007.

Review by Stan Apps

The noulipian Analects has a pink cover overlaid with rectangles the color of drying Dijon mustard. These rectangles act to create a disorienting optical illusion, as if the center of the cover were throbbing gently and slowing reaching towards the viewer. The contents are alphabetical by subject, beginning with “& and” and continuing with topics like “Cento: A Suicide Note”, “Materiality!” and “Pataphysical Linguistics.” It is an interesting book to flip around in, a place where fun alternates with confusion, and where it can be fun to be a little bit confused.

This new anthology of criticism and experimental prose and poetry, published by Los Angeles’ Les Figues Press, is a beautiful, useful, and very peculiar book. This peculiarity begins with the title, with its freshly coined adjective “noulipian.” For those relatively knowledgeable in the field of experimental/avant-garde literature, this word evokes a group of predominantly French writers, the Oulipo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (in English, the “Workshop for potential literature”), a group which has existed since 1960 and which has included several famous writers as members, notably Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino. The writers of this group rejected the emphasis on spontaneity and inspiration characteristic of previous avant-gardes, arguing that, as Christian Bök phrases it, “Random inspiration and chance composition do not in fact generate the extreme freedom desired. . . [and] can only imprison literati within the invisible labyrinth of a hackneyed discourse.” Instead of using inspiration and chance to derange language, the Oulipo created systematic, rational approaches to defamiliarization; classic Oulipo works follow bizarre, arbitrary rules created by the authors in order to produce writing that could never have come into existence without those rules (Perec’s novel A Void, in which the letter “e” does not appear, is the most notorious example).

Oulipo writing represents a clever turn in the development of avant-garde writing strategies—for the first time, Oulipo writers imagined that radical and liberating literary work could be produced by the application of rational strategies in an orderly fashion, with no need for what they saw as the mystifications of the Surrealists, no need for illogic, no dependence on dream imagery, no requirement to object to or destroy reason. In other words, the Oulipo continued experimental writing without the Revolutionary trappings (which they saw as a sham) and without the dependence on Freudian notions of the unconscious, and Oulipians argued that their works opened broader possibilities for writers than did earlier avant-garde strategies. As Oulipian Ian Monk puts it, “One definition of freedom might be the ability to choose your own rules;” unlike previous avant-garde groups which valued adherence to specific artistic dogmas or party-lines, the Oulipians value most of all choice. Rather than accepting dictation from some powerful inner prompting or writing in accordance with historical necessity as outlined in manifestoes or political tracts, Oulipians wrack their brains to devise rules and systems that have not been employed to make literature before (often these consist of slight variations on strategies used by other Oulipians) and do one of two things: 1) write new work following these new rules, and thereby instantiate a new literary possibility as a new literary work, or 2) leave the possibility as a possibility, an unmade literary work that nonetheless exists as a set of rules—more defined and systematic than the average daydream, but nonetheless containing a daydream’s unhewn charm.

This is about as much as a reader will learn about the Oulipo from The noulipian Analects, a book which, despite its title, is not primarily focused on the Oulipo group. Instead, this book is a collection of essays about contemporary poetic strategies in the United States, in which various writers, mostly American, discuss the usefulness of Oulipo ideas to contemporary practitioners of experimental writing. Often they are explicitly or implicitly discussing the relevance of the Oulipo to their own writing. (This is where the “n” in “noulipo” comes from—this neologism refers to a “new Oulipo” or “next Oulipo.”) Only two actual members of the Oulipo have contributed to the book: French novelist and critic Paul Fournel, and British poet Ian Monk, both of whom provide charming reminiscences of their experiences with the group. However, their work seems out of place in a volume focused not on honoring the Oulipo but rather on reacting to it.

Of the other contributors, only two go to the trouble of describing specific works by Oulipo writers in detailed and revealing ways. These are Tan Lin, who provides an insightful analysis of Raymond Queneau’s book 100 Million Million Poems, and Caroline Bergvall, who discusses Georges Perec’s unfinished project Lieux (Sites/Places), a work in which Perec wrote about various places in Paris while he was actually at those places, either writing while sitting and observing or (more challengingly) writing down what he saw on a certain street while actually walking down that street—an activity which, while not exactly athletic, is certainly inconvenient. Both Lin and Bergvall’s contributions are superb, and Lin’s is particularly creative, as he discusses Queneau’s book (published in 1961) as “among the first works of literature to implicate computer interface models into literature, transforming the book itself into what might be usefully regarded as a hardware and software interface to a database and to instantiate the code into a user-friendly book.”

Queneau’s book, rather than literally providing the reader with “100 million million poems” (which would be impractical, since it would require a book with millions of pages) instead provides the reader with enough lines of poetry to produce 100 million million sonnets, as well as instructions on how the reader can produce them. If these lines of poetry were to be put together in every arrangement allowed by the rules of the sonnet (which are, of course, that sonnets rhyme and that the rhyming lines must be arranged in particular orders), then the total number of possible permutations is 100 million million. The poems are unwritten, not-yet-instantiated, but are instead implied as outcomes of the instructions given in the book; Lin likens this unusual relationship between book and poems to the relationship between computer software as code and software as instantiated on a particular computer when a particular user runs it. Whereas code takes up little space and is easily transmitted and exchanged (like Queneau’s book) a program when it is running takes up much more space, and if it is running on millions of computers at once takes up exponentially more space than the kernel of code that generates it. As Lin puts it, “Queneau has successfully translated. . .the form of the book itself into a computational device that serves as a kind of linguistic adding machine or interface that. . .appears to function as software and as hardware, as storage bank and as transmission process.” Lin’s generosity, in taking an almost fifty-year-old book as an emblem of the possibilities inherent in new media poetries, is marvelous and awards us with this volume’s most lively and evocative insights.

Many of the other contributors, while they have valuable and worthwhile ideas about contemporary poetics, do not seem to have as much interest in the Oulipo as Tan Lin and Caroline Bergvall demonstrate. Instead some of the contributors make a straw man of the Oulipo, and the editors, Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim, do the same. On the first page, the editors seem to suggest that the Oulipo tactic of generating new works through the free choice of rules and restrictions is no more than a scholastic masculinist practice, writing that “As many writing teachers have noted, while men often bring constraint-based work into the classroom, when it comes to making art , women (who may feel more strongly the burden of constraint in their actual lives) often gravitate toward the expansiveness of the combinatorial, and other modes of accumulation, addition, and conjunction.” This sentence seems to suggest that that there is some sort of glut of Oulipo-inspired work coming into writing workshops. Personally, in my time as a student and a teacher in creative writing classrooms, I have not seen this; in fact I’ve never seen any student in any writing classroom I’ve been in bring for discussion a work based on any Oulipian constraint. While I’m sure Viegener and Wertheim’s anecdotal evidence has a real basis, the fact that it jars so entirely with my own experience suggests that it is far from representative. Furthermore, the suggestion that numerous young male writers do constraint-based work in order to discover a sense of constraint missing from their actual lives, is bizarre to me—again, totally different from the workshop scenarios I’ve experienced, where the only constraints that were practiced were the traditional ones of rhyme-and-meter.

Even if the Oulipians do call their collective an “Ouvroir,” this term does not only mean “workshop;” it also means “a gathering of ladies to do charitable works.” Ian Monk, for example, provides the alternative translation “Sewing Circle of Potential Literature.” Of the various things that “Ouvroir” signifies, a classroom is not one of them, and efforts to associate the Oulipians with a classroom environment are quite unfair, particularly when these efforts are being made by American writers who (as is typical of American writers) live by teaching at universities. It is as if the editors were to suggest that Allen Ginsberg’s work were scholastic because so many young writers brought pastiches of “Howl” into writing workshops.

Yet another concern that I have with this sentence is the suggestion that the Oulipians were not interested in “the expansiveness of the combinatorial, and other modes of accumulation, addition, and conjunction.” It seems to me that there are writers of all genders interested in these types of expansiveness, and that Oulipians such as Queneau (in 100 Million Million Poems and elsewhere), Harry Mathews (in his picaresque novel Cigarettes) and Jacques Roubaud (especially in his exploded genre masterpiece The Great Fire of London) demonstrate expansive combinatorial urges in terms of poetic production, narrative elaboration, and genre cross-overs. To suggest otherwise is to do the Oulipo a disservice.

Of course, impulses to critique the past are an important element of writing, and even when critiques are not entirely accurate they can lead in valuable directions. Irritation or resentment towards a past writer or group of writers can become a source of generative energy, the spark of new work. The noulipian Analects lets the reader see this process in action, as leading experimental writers take stabs at the Oulipo. For example, Christian Bök criticizes the Oulipians for their failure to “question the ideology of [their] own grammatical, referential bias” and for producing a “restricted literature [that] often seems skewed toward normality;” Bök suggests that he and other writers associated with the website UbuWeb have “gone on to showcase the political potential of [Oulipian] devices” by “requiring that every constraint acknowledge its political potential.”

Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, in their collaborative piece “‘& and’ and foulipo” (a text from which most instances of the letter r have been removed), argue that American body art of the 1970s is now given insufficient attention and that Oulipo should be thought of in conversation with this work in order to produce “a numbe of geneative and estictive, numbe based pocesses and constaints that help us undestand the messy body.” Young and Spahr call for the synthesis of two artistic approaches that have rarely been discussed together, but which have certain profound commonalities, most notably that body art often emphasizes the imposition of rules and constraints onto the artists’ body, whereas Oulipians often emphasize the use of rules and constraints to produce texts. Of course, one movement was primarily situated in New York, the other in Paris, one emphasized performance, the other emphasized text—so it is easy to see why they have not been discussed in tandem often.

Unfortunately, Spahr and Young stint on discussing the analogies between these two art strategies and spend less than a page discussing what an art synthesizing these approaches might be like; instead, much of the essay is spent on criticisms of the Oulipo and valorizations of body art that add little to the essay’s overall point (though the descriptions of various body art performances are often appealingly lyrical.) In particular, Spahr and Young profess to be upset that many people believe body art to be “so ove, so done, so sot of epulsive” and they seem to view it as unfair that the legacy of Oulipo is being cared for while the legacy of body art is not; they write, “We did not think it made any sense to cay only oulipo fowad and not cay the body at fowad.” This seems unrealistic, when in fact body artist Marina Abramovic continues to be a very successful performance and installation artist in New York, who, since the year 2000, has published at least 5 books, has performed in numerous countries, and has been written of regularly and admiringly by leading art journals. By contrast, most books by Oulipians released in the U.S. have been published by the small press and have limited distribution. Not only is body art not over and done, numerous performance artists in the U.S. continue its traditions (as compared to a much smaller group of American writers who are aware of the Oulipo). Rather than endeavoring to create a false impression that body art is more marginalized than Oulipo writing in the United States, Spahr and Young should have spent more time elaborating on their valuable notions about how these artistic modes can be synthesized.

Complementing the critical writing, The noulipian Analects also includes selections of poetry or experimental fiction by almost every contributor. A particularly notable piece is “Via: 48 Dante Variations” by Caroline Bergvall, which presents the first tercet of Dante’s Divine Comedy in 48 different translations, creating an elliptical narrative of the history of the text’s reception by English-language translators. This work demonstrates how much can be revealed by a work which is 100% quotation, as does Doug Nufer’s “Since You Said You Were Mine,” a short narrative composed of phrases from American jazz standards which reveals the tragic subtext behind the buoyancy of those tunes. Excellent poems by Christine Wertheim and Stephanie Young, and fiction by Tan Lin and Vanessa Place are also highlights.

In closing, The noulipian Analects is an excellent book to get if you wish to learn more about contemporary American experimental writing. As well as those writers already mentioned, the book also includes fine work by Rodrigo Toscano, Harryette Mullen, Johanna Drucker, Bernadette Meyer and others. However, those wishing a general introduction to the Oulipo should look elsewhere first, such as to the excellent Oulipo Compendium from Make Now Press, which collects classic writings by Oulipians. Those who are already familiar with the Oulipo can look to The noulpian Analects to provide elaboration on and criticism of their legacy.