Daniel Costa has worked as a corporate online language educator for more than a decade, teaching mainly English but also Portuguese, Italian and Spanish to learners from several fields and countries. A regular MET contributor, he has written for publications such as the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, Encyclopaedia Britannica and academic journals. He has a CELTA, a BET, a COLT, an MA in History (Birmingham), an MA in ELT (Southampton) and a BA in Philosophy (London). He is currently doing his PhD in history at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, a multilingual project in the history of science. Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielcostaeducator/

 

Introduction

A lack of freedom in certain areas can prompt greater freedom in other ones, a seemingly paradoxical feature of existence which language is able to convey. This premise underscored a French 20^th-century literary movement whose attempts to foster creativity relied on the use of constraints in lieu of unfettered writing. Still active today, the underpinnings of Oulipo remind us of inspiration as a feature that goes beyond a blind obedience to impulse. What can reading ‘potential literature’ reveal about the use of constraints to foster creativity in education? This article considers key examples of such constraints and their sources as well as how they can be included in education.

 

 

Potential freedom

Oulipo is essentially an initialism which stands for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (‘workshop for potential literature’), a movement dating back to 1960. It was pioneered by French mathematician François le Lyonnais and poet Raymond Queneau, who referred to potential literature as the quest for forms and structures that can be used by writers as deemed fit (Motte, 1998). As such, as Lescure puts it, Oulipians are akin to rats building a labyrinth from which they plan to escape, thereby emphasising the link between self-imposed rules and freedom (Lescure, 1986).

Cerisy-la-salle hosted the emergence of Oulipo at the hands of ten founding members who worked as writers, university professors, mathematicians and pataphysicians. In this context, François le Lyonnais distinguished between Anoulipism, involving discovery, and Synthoulipism, entailing invention, while acknowledging the subtle channels which link the two (Motte, 1998). This approach appears to stand in contrast with modernism, which stemmed from a refusal to accept external constraints, as argued by Gabriel Josipovici, whose excessive freedom acted as a gateway to literary isolation, a conclusion espoused by Walter Benjamin.

Whether such constraints should be disclosed to the reader is a bone of contention. Harry Mathews believed that they shouldn’t as they prompt discovery, while Jacques Roubaud claimed that they should.  (Oulipo: freeing literature by tightening its rules | Books | The Guardian). Genres used by Oulipians include sonnets, travel narratives and novels while prominent writers include Italo Calvino, Harry Matthews and Georges Perec, who asserted in an interview that he set rules to his writing to set himself free. Paul Grimstad · Anticipatory Plagiarism: Oulipo What exactly, then, are these constraints?

 

The potential of replacement

Queneau’s book Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One hundred thousand billion poems) set the trend by having 10 sonnets with 14 lines on each page printed on individual slips (Queneau, 1961). This fostered the potential to replace every line with the corresponding one in other poems, prompting the author to suggest that it would take 190,258,751 years to reach all possible combinations. (Oulipo: freeing literature by tightening its rules | Books | The Guardian) Reminiscent of the travails of ergodic literature, the focus here is on restricting the writer on the path to literary freedom.

 

Replacing words

A key constraint is the S+7 method, used in 1961 by Jean Lescure. It essentially involves replacing every noun (substantif in French) in a given text with the seventh one which follows it alphabetically. This feature can be adapted to other numbers such as N-3 or N+8 or other parts of speech such as adjectives (e.g. A+3) or verbs (e.g. V-2), all of which would fall under the broader W±n. Online resources such as poetryfoundation.org and the online collaborative resource Spoonbill Generator can help learners who wish to see examples of how this works in practice before experimenting on their own (N+7).

 

 

Spelling constraints

Another feature put forward by Oulipo consists in omitting a given letter. This lipogram occurs in Georges Perec’s La Disparition (1969), a story about World War II where the letter ‘e’ (the most frequent letter in French) is omitted throughout, conveying the sense of loss which pervades the narrative itself. This feature pervades its English translation (Adair, 1994) and other ones as well, as the omission of the common vowel ‘a’ in the Spanish translation exemplifies (Regina Vega et al, 1997). As occurs with replacement, this lipogramatic feature can occur with other letters in classroom tasks designed to review lexis, thereby paving the way for greater creative potential.

 

Metro poems

Reading Jacques Jouet’s metro poems introduces one to the use of constraints beyond language itself, as lines are composed exclusively in the subway system (Jouet, 2000). In his own words:

“There are as many lines in a subway poem as there are stations in your journey, minus one. The first line is composed mentally between the first two stations of your journey (counting the station you got on at). It is then written down when the train stops at the second station” (Jouet & Monk, 2001: 64).

Several constraints follow, such as the inability to write when the train is moving or to compose when the train stops. Metro poetry exemplifies how a constraint can be conveyed by a sense of physical connections, enacted by asking a learner to write a text at a given place and under self-determined conditions. The choice of place as a constraint echoes texts such as Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi (‘Life: A User’s Manual’), whose plot takes place in a Parisian apartment block, conceived as a 10x10 grid reminiscent of a chessboard knight’s tour where each chapter is devoted to a room (Perec, 1978).

Other constraints involve the number of characters used, as the use of 111,111 by Jacques Roubaud in Arrangements exemplifies, and having the same story told from different perspectives, as occurs with Paul Fournel’s output (Monk and Becker, 2018).

 

Conclusion

Beyond merely witnessing acts of experimentalism, reading texts which make use of the features championed by Oulipo literature can help learners navigate the boundaries of linguistic creativity inherent in memorable language use. While certain constraints may come across as far-fetched given the constraints of several educational contexts, knowledge of them and their adaptation in tasks and games can prompt greater creativity while fostering an awareness of the scope of linguistic freedom.

 

References

Articles/ Books

Jouet, Jacques. Poèmes de métro. Paris: P.O.L, 2000.

Jouet, Jacques, and Ian Monk. “Subway Poems.” SubStance 30, no. 3 (2001): 64–70. https://doi.org/10.2307/3685761.

Lescure, Jean. “A Brief History of the Oulipo.” In Motte 1986, 32–39. From the French “Petite Histoire pour un tri-centenaire,” with four additional paragraphs. La Littérature potentielle, Paris: Gallimard, 1973.

Monk, Ian, and Daniel Levin Becker. All That Is Evident Is Suspect: Readings from the Oulipo 1963-2018. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2018.

Motte, Warren F. Oulipo: a primer of potential literature. Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.

Perec, Georges. La disparition. Paris: Gallimard, 1969.

Perec, Georges. La Vide Mode d’Emploi. Paris: Hachette, 1978.

Perec, Georges. A Void, trans. Gilbert Adair (London: The Harvill Press, 1994).

Perec, Georges. El secuestro, trans. Regina Vega, Hermes Salceda, Marc Parayre & Mercè Burrel (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1997).

Queneau, Raymond. Cent mille milliards de poèmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1961.

 

Websites

Grave Unseriousness: Experimenting with… | The Poetry Foundation

Oulipo: freeing literature by tightening its rules | Books | The Guardian

https://www.oulipo.net/

Paul Grimstad · Anticipatory Plagiarism: Oulipo

 

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