Oulipo Compendium

Atlas Arkhive #6

by Alastair Brotchie (Editor), Jean-Louis Bailly (Contributor), Jacques Barine (Contributor)

Anthology of prose, poetry and literary critcism. "OULIPO COMPENDIUM is a late 20th-century kabala, a labyrinth of literary secrets that will lure the uninitiated into rethinking everything they know about books and writing. The editors have done an astounding job putting together this nutty, one-of-a-kind book. It is the definitive encyclopedia of contemporary word-magic" -- Paul Auster. "Oulipo was--is--a seedbed, a grimace, a carnival. This is an indispensable book for everyone who cares about literature"--Susan Sontag. The OULIPO COMPENDIUM abounds in material for writers, teachers and scholars; it also offers a cornucopia of entertainment for curious readers. " rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape" -- Raymond Queneau.

Genres: Poetry, Writing, Nonfiction, Literature, France, Reference, Essays

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the seminal English text on the Oulipo in print and contains a comprehensive list of their constraints in practice. The Oulipo can make writing seem fresh and fun again when you have tired of turning out another mediocre paragraph, another attempt to scratch out a literary mainstream novel, another barrelful of shoddy sentences. On the other hand, plenty of these constraints are for professionals only, as the difficulty in putting them into practice (meaningfully), is truly reserved for those of Perecian minds. Lesser writers like me can snack on these suggestions for ways to improve their prose by introducing peculiar and outrageous quirks, and grope towards the sui generis with hopeful hands. This volume is worth reading from cover to cover—the alphabetical ordering allows readers learn about the history of the Oulipo while delighting in the examples and illustrations of the sorts of linguistic feats we all aspire to.

n + 7 Xmas

We wish you a Merry Chromatid;
We wish you a Merry Chromatid;
We wish you a Merry Chromatid and a Happy Nexus.
Good tie-dyes we bring to you and your kindling;
Good tie-dyes for Chromatid and a Happy Nexus.

Oh, bring us a figgy pueblo;
Oh, bring us a figgy pueblo;
Oh, bring us a figgy pueblo and a cuprammonium of good cheese plant
We won't go until we get sonata;
We won't go until we get sonata;
We won't go until we get sonata, so bring sonata out here

We wish you a Merry Chromatid;
We wish you a Merry Chromatid;
We wish you a Merry Chromatid and a Happy Nexus.

[Adam Floridia · Rating 5 out of 5]

1) a ruse since i scan, i view some versos. i no view sum.

Translation: I'm lying. I didn't "finish" this book. It's not one to be read cover to cover. This is one of those fine books that should always be no more than an arms length away. It is a collection of the mad creative genius writing constraints dreamed up by the mad creative geniuses of OuLiPo. For anyone unfamiliar with the OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle ("workshop of potential literature"), it was a group of, mainly, writers and mathematicians who devised all sorts of rules and formulas that they could apply to writing. They would then right some ridiculously difficult and often incredibly impressive works by following those certain rules. My favorite example is still Perec's A Void (here I implore you, if you no nothing of the book, do NOT find out anything else about it; just read it!). Anyway, what I continually find fascinating is the paradoxical idea that by enforcing very rigid guidelines on a writer, it is possible to open up world of originality and creativity.

I will enjoy opening this and reading some pages at random for some time to come. Even more enjoyment (and simultaneously frustration) comes with actually trying some of the constraints.

2) "Happy Holidays"
A scowl is crazy
Say, how is Allyn?
Crap! O it's sharp
And now I vanish

That's to give you a taste of what doing a pretty poor job of following some constraints might look like when written by an utter amateur.

1) The Prisoner's Restriction: Imagine a prisoner whose supply of paper is restricted. To put it to its fullest use, he will maximize his space by avoiding any letter extending above or below the line (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, y) and use only a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z. (And that woefully crappy first line took me 20 minutes. Imagine someone who could actually write a meaningful passage like that?!)

2) Homovocalism: The sequence of vowels in a source is kept while all of the consonants are changed to create a new phrase with the same number of letters. (Took me about 25 minutes with a thesaurus)

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will either drive you insane with hatred, or you'll love it to death. It will take no prisoners. For those who love literature as word-playing and if you have a strong love for Raymond Queneau or Georges Perec's writing - this volume published by the great Atlas press is just for you.

[Zadignose]

I hesitated to say it but... this is junk. Not that I've read it from cover to cover. I probably never will.

I'm sympathetic to the central idea of Oulipo... I think. Anyway, yeah, devise constraints, make your own goofy rules, use math and secret schemes to guide your work. Fine.

But Oulipo brought together *some* very talented writers (Queneau and Calvino are among my favorite artists). Individually they did some great things, and the idea behind Oulipo may have served each of them in his/her own way. The works on display here argue more strongly against Oulipian method than in favor of it. If you're not going to produce great results, then the method is not justified. Even Queneau's 100 quadrillion (or whatever the number) poems, the seminal work, is kind of cute as a concept, and may have required great effort and imagination to produce... but actually there are no good poems among the 100 quadrillion (that's why it took me so long to review this... I read all of them!) They're not even particularly entertaining as humor. So... a decent but far from excellent effort here, yet it's the best of the batch.

Meanwhile, there's hardly any real point in cataloging and categorizing all this data, with fragmentary works for examples, except as a bit of historical trivia of potential interest to fanatics. But, in fact, any artist who is inspired by the concept behind Oulipo would do best to contrive his or her own application and rules, without need to refer to a catalogue such as this.

Nice to be ambitious, and all, but Queneau's first novel Witch Grass trumps this book and its entire contents, rendering it superfluous. One would be better off examining Raymond Rousseau's works and methods to find inspiration.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Oulipians: rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape".
Presumably on the basis that the more complicated the labyrinth, the harder the rat has to work, the better it feels IF it escapes.
This book elevates literary insanity to a glorious art form.

[Stuart Macalpine · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a must read for the intellectually curious! :) a bit odd but...

[Mark Hebwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic! Everything you ever needed to know about Oulipo.

What? No, the book has more than one paragraph! Unbelievable. Some people have a cheek... Ok let me rephrase then.

Fantastic! Everything you ever wanted to know about Oulipo.

You wouldn't even need a parapgraph for that? Ok that does it. I give up and do my review without an imagined reader interrupting me all the time.

Yes, some may regard Oulipo and its related groups as highly esoteric forms of experimental art, and I suppose they are, really. But anybody who is interested in this perennially avantgarde movement, will find a treasure trove of stuff here - the book mentions, and discusses in some depth, most of the constraints of the different "schools", gives an excellent overview of the lesser known offshoots of Oulipo, collectively known as "Ou-x-po", and arranges everything alphabetically, so it is easy to find.

The introductory essays are all informative, and sometimes a joy to read in their own right. I think Jacques Roubaud's introduction to "Oulipo" deserves special mention - it is brilliantly self-deprecating and in itself a reason to pick this book up.

But having spent a weekend reading the essays, and browsing extensively through the entries, I also have to admit that the book highlighted two issues I am having with Ou-x-po. And here they are:

First Issue

The key idea of Ouxpo is to analyse structure in a work of art, isolate its components, and then do one, or both, of two things (1) investigate what happens when you put the modules together again in different combinations and permutations (2) investigate whether you can formulate structural constraints and create a work of art that does not violate these constraints.

And both these pursuits, I am afraid, feel rather pedantic.

An example of a work product from the first category is the "eodermdrome", which involves placing letters or words at the corners of a pentagon and then combine them in accordance with a sequence you get by tracing out a complete path across the lines connecting the vertices, and the edges of the geometrical figure. The example given on p 145 yields several combinations of the words "desiring", "later", "love", "means", and "no". Two of the results yielded by the methods are "Desiring means love later no desiring later means no love desiring" and "No means desiring love later no love means later desiring no".

This (1) is complete gibberish (2) could have been generated by a computer program, without the input of the artist (3) follows a procedure that is arbitrary in the first place.

An example of a result from the second category is the game of "N+7", which the Oulipiens, for some reason, dearly love and revere as a method that yields deeply humorous results. It involves replacing each Noun in a sentence with the 7th successive noun in a dictionary.

Now, the quality of humour, by definition, depends on your taste. "The quanta of hum tone, by deformity, depends on your tatting?", I would ask, in conformity with the rule of N+7, "really?" It sounds like absolute tosh, if you ask me. Even if I knew the meaning of all the words without having just looked them up in my Collis English-English dictionary, the semantics do not save this phrase - I am unsure why it is amusing, or insightful, to note that "amounts of hum tone by deformity depend on my intricate type of lace".

Again, the result of this rule (1) is rubbish (2) could have been generated by a robot (3) follows an arbitrary procedure.

So my first issue is that much of the Ouxpiens' work seems to be the product of plodding administrators, of people who dream up meaningless procedures which they then execute unimaginatively, and the results of which they record with little, if any, artistic intervention.

But hold on - don't hit me over the head with the Compendium just yet! I said "much" of the work, not all. There are some absolute gems coming out of the Oulipiens' kitchen! Some are included in Raymond Queneau's Exercises de Style, (my review here) and certainly Georges Perec's Disparition is a work of genius! Also brilliant is the work of John Donne and other metaphysical poets, of Laurence Stern, Schoenberg, Magritte, Escher, Virgil and Shakespeare. So there are some among the Ouxpiens whose work is genius. But the majority of stuff I have seen is basically derivative, and lacks an original artistic soul.

Second Issue

Hang on a minute. Donne? Virgil? These guys are ancient! Nothing to do with Oulipo. Escher and Magritte? They predate Oupeinpo. Schoenberg? Still some 40 years earlier than Oumupo. Have I lost it?

Well I might have, but if so, then for different reasons. These guys have all employed methods which the Ouxpiens claim to have originated. Some only sparingly so, like Virgil's use of synchysis, or Shakespeare's novel sonnet structure, some as the foundation of their work, like Schoenberg's Zwoelftonmusik (twelve tone technique), or Escher's mathematically inspired graphic art.

So my second issue is a big one: The Ouxpiens are not even original! The very concept that lies at the heart of their work, to blow up conventional structures in art and put them together again, has been done 200 years earlier by Laurence Sterne in Tristam Shandy, and 300 years earlier by John Donne in his poetry. Many forms of classical rhetorical devices invented by Greek and Roman writers do exactly the same. Magritte played brilliantly with the concepts of philosophy and represented them in self-referencing paintings, in a similar way as MC Escher did by using concepts of mathematics.

But form and content embrace in many of these artists' work, each is instrumental in heightening the quality of the other, and the result is deeply satisfying, and often fundamental. This is sometimes, but I am afraid not often, the case with the Ouxpiens. On balance I think much of their work will remain an interesting curiosity. Where appropriate, it may be admired for its often ingenious craftsmanship. But only very few Ouxpiens will be able to transcend form as a gimmick, and produce works of art that can speak to us on a deeper level.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oulipo doesn't take any prisoners - you are either into it or you're not. And that's perfectly ok. Small club into word or narrative games. Writing as a science with a side of surrealist playfulness. A must for those who are curious and open to have their literature take them to other places. Even silly places!

[Tabitha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Peter Auster describes this book as, 'a late 20th century kabala'. It is! It's my book of secrets and mystical word games. My bible of literary fun. It inspires me to do so much more than merely write stories. I have not read it from cover to cover, but I have devoured it, bit by bit, many times over.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth it for Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 poems alone!

[Silvia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crazy, intriguing, amazing. There's the point of an exercise being just that, an exercise, yes. But it makes sense to prove something, to challenge yourself in a way that opens your boundaries.

[Terry Freedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Oulipo Compendium, compiled by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie, is in effect a dictionary/encyclopaedia of Oulipo. As such it is both comprehensive and easy to navigate. Oulipo is the use of restrictions (constraints) in writing. For example, writing a text in which every word starts with the same letter (a technique known as “autogram”). The point is to see what potential such constraints might have for creating literature. Contrary to what you might expect, applying such constraints tends to lead to more creativity rather than less.

The Compendium opens with Raymond Queneau’s 100 billion poems. This is a collection of ten sonnets. Originally, they were printed in such a way that you could mix up the lines from all the poems in order to create new ones -- a 100 billion sonnets to be more precise. According to the Compendium,

“Queneau calculated that someone reading the book 24 hours a day would need 190,258,751 years to complete it.”

This is a great way of starting the book because it gives you a flavour of what’s to come. However, apart from the additional sections (more of which in a moment), the book is probably more useful to those who already know a bit about Oulipo and want a reference book. If you are new to the subject, it’s not an easy read, because there is no obvious starting point. A better book from this point of view is the Penguin Book of Oulipo. In my opinion that provides a better introduction, but is not as detailed as the Compendium. I would say that the two books together complement each other.

On the subject of the detail, it is impressive. There are long examples of Oulipian work, and plenty of cross-referencing. As an example, I am currently interested in the application of computing to Oulipo, and I found a great deal of useful information in this book in under three minutes.

Following the main part of the book are additional sections introducing a few variations of Oulipo. One of these, for example, is Oupeinpo, inn which the principles of Oulipo are applied to art. Looking back on my school life, I wonder if my art teacher was aware of this movement when he set us work in which we could use only one colour, such as blue or yellow. Painting a landscape or, if you are a masochist, a crowd scene, using only different shades of blue is quite a challenge!

Another section is dedicated to the Oulipopo, or detective fiction, while another focuses on the Oulibapo, or comic strips.

Highly recommended.

From the back cover:

The Oulipo Compendium abounds in material for writers, teachers and scholars; it also offers a cornucopia of entertainment for curious readers.

[Paul H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

It pains me that this needs to be pointed out, but the point is to take clever wordplay and actually do something with it. Oulipo (and half the Dalkey Archive) remind me of bad science fiction, except sci-fi writers at least bother with a half-assed fig leaf of narrative/characters and don't just publish their ideas in bullet-list form. These "experimental!" Oulipo authors are just the bullet-list, where the execution (or lack thereof) of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 or whatever poems is just as disappointing as the idea. Also there's a general smug, obnoxious, self-satisfied tone to the entire Compendium (as if this is the world's greatest collection of artists) that is incredibly irritating.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 3 out of 5]

An uneven and interesting compilation. There are astounding works in innovative forms, non-fiction letters and essays that are probably only of value if you're interested in Oulipo, and texts that are quite mediocre or boring. One chapter is simply a list of organizational closure announcements for an entire year. Since each author only gets one chapter, it's heavy on more modern and obscure members of the movement. Queneau, mentioned repeatedly throughout, contributes a mere single-page poem (but it's great). Overall, I wouldn't recommend this unless you're a writer looking for inspiration or already interested in Oulipo as a movement.

[Taissia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved learning more about the origins of this group of surrealist in France. Their ridiculous constraints and rules in language are hilarious and intriguing.
-a constraint is just a mold for language to develop
- limitations are not a boundary but a base for creativity.

Also, surrealism is just so fantastically weird. Thinking about this surrealist group having meetings and creating and changing all the letters 'e' to '.' in their chapter of their collective book makes me happy.

[Sara Clark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had a lot of fun playing with this book as a young 'un.

[austra]

An endless well of creativity!

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've browsed enough of this to consider it "read" for a reference work, though I have yet to get through all of Queneau's 100,000,000,000,000 poems--all of which are included! Nice party trick for the nerds...

[annakatrina · Rating 4 out of 5]

oulipo=ouvroir de litterature potentielle (workshop for potential literature). one of the founders, raymond queneau, describes oulipians as "rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape." ha! a delightful collection of their exercises and works.

[Tiffany · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive, yet not complete, look at Oulipo (Workshop for Potential Literature), its members, some of their works, and its writing strategies/theories/experiments. Also includes sections on some of the other Ou-x-po groups, like Oulipopo and Oupeinpo.

[Al Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

Currently I've lent this to Jasen...

[Linda · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok, I like the idea of Ou-x-po, but the products really stink. And this book is so ponderously obnoxious I had to fling it away.

[ylin002 · Rating 4 out of 5]

less inspirational than i'd've imagined. but then again, i didn't have much time sitting with it.

[AJ Dehany · Rating 5 out of 5]

The definitive introduction and reference and resource for all things Oulipian.

[Caulen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent anthology of one of my favorite literary "groups".

[Ivan A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

amazing that this group still gathers! crazy, fascinating and readable .. literature completely different!

[Ulrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

En uvurderlig leksikon over OuLiPos mange finurlige projekter og forfattere. Anbefales til alle med bare lidt interesse i eksperimental litteratur. En skattekiste!

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Obviously the excerpts from the works are grand, additionally though the whole thing's done in a manner that's at once accessible and light, without losing any of the intellectual poise.

[Steve Gutin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book about these great writers; a great book about writing. Also lots of fun.

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent texts, these seem the best. Here we see the better sense, the best sense, the excellence, yet excess when needed.