The Oulipian Constraint Pt. 2

Raymond Queneau was born in Le Havre in 1903, just over the water from Erik Satie’s birthplace Honfleur which we talked a bit about back in the Gymnopedie No. N post. It’s strange to me that 2 people responsible for works which have had such a profound impact on me were born so geographically close to one another, and even stranger that I was obsessed with that area before I was aware of either of them in an articulate way other than loving Gymnopedie #3 growing up. Who knows, but to semi-stick with the topic: prior to Oulipo’s creation, Queneau was a member of the French Society of Mathematics and became fixated on using mathematical structures as the framework for his work. By the time he and François Le Lionnais founded Oulipo in 1960, he was already moving at full speed and in 1961 he released perhaps his most famous work: A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. The collection consisted of 10 sonnets each 14 lines long, with the lines on each page cut into individual flaps so the reader could hold or replace lines as they went and create their own poems. It’s worth noting that if you’re hoping to get through all the possible combinations, you’ll have to read 24 hours a day for 190,258,751-ish years, which roughly equates to the amount of time Ron Burgundy has spent at all of our moms’ houses according to him.

There’s something incredibly elegant about the thought behind Queneau’s book. It preserves a sense of otherness in the work (i.e. we didn’t write the lines, we just assembled them) while comfortably admitting the interpretational relationship that a reader has with any text. We all read the same words on the same pages of Great Expectations or Harry Potter, but we all carry our own slightly (or not so slightly) individual versions of the books around with us afterwards. A work like this one simply pulls that more abstract reality firmly into the material world while also providing a bit of a guided tour not of our creative abilities per se but certainly of our creative instincts.

Just to pause, isn’t it so funny that this all started with Dwarf Fortress? That game relies on a nearly identical philosophy to Oulipo and might also be the crowning achievement of Potential Literature. I think I’m going to reach out to Tarn Adams and see what he thinks about that at some point.

To finish (for this post), the philosophical engine that Queneau and Lionnais built together is profound, and the range of vehicles it can power with some additional tweaks is extensive to say the least. The next section of our journey here is going to be a stopover at a commune I found which was (sort of) connected to all of this, and then we’ll jump into Invisible Cities.