From the Land of the Lost Classics: Georges Perec and Oulipo

There was a vogue for French writer Georges Perec back in the late 1980s. Well, maybe not a vogue exactly, but you could find most of his books in bookstores. Much of his name recognition was due to the experimental novel A Void which was written (all 300 pages) without once using the letter ‘e’.  That means a novel without the words the, he, she, or love. (It should be pointed out that the novel was written in French, but heroically translated by Gilbert Adair, who also expunged of every ‘e’ in sight.) But Perec’s real accomplishment was his strange, erudite, boring and sublime novel Life: A User’s Manuel. The novel’s numerous narratives center around a Paris tenement, chronicling the lives of the inhabitants, if not the life of the building itself. Perec dedicated a chapter to each and every room in the fictional apartment block, including the basement and attic. Some of the stories relate to the main character of the novel: Bartlebooth, a compulsive who is determined to paint watercolors of the ports of 500 sea-side locations, have the paintings cut as jigsaw puzzles, then ultimately destroyed. Written in intertwining narrative threads, historical asides, and literary allusions, all according to a chess permutation known as The Knight’s Graph, Perec achieves a result that is both grand and sweeping yet fine and intricate as lace.

The writing constraints Perec set for himself, like the chess grid-work and mathematics that went into Life: a User’s Manuel were the trademark of the small clique of (mostly French) writers known as Oulipo. In this group, which Perec was actively involved, we find a love of wordplay and narrative daring. Some of the constraints favored by the group are the use of:

Palindromes

Words that can be read backwards as well as forwards, like dad, or mom. Oulipo did not stop at just words, they wrote pallindromic sentences (Dennis and Edna sinned) and composed pallindromic poetry.

Snowball Poetry

These are poems in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer than the line that came before it.

I

Am

But

Nine

Lined

Poetry

Without

Suitable

Relevance

Lipogram

Writing that excludes one or more letters; Perec’s A Void is the ultimate example of this.

Univocalism

Here, only one vowel is used.  Perec, again, famously wrote a novella using the letter ‘e’ as the only vowel (using up all his spare ‘e’s from A Void, he would claim).

Though Oulipo’s endeavors may sound all too clever, Perec’s writing is so expressive that it redeems itself far beyond the execution of the puzzle he put before himself. His stories were not diminished by the Oulipo constraints but enlarged by their architectural structure. So don’t be intimidated by the size and scope of Life: a User’s Manual. It is the type of book where you can open it up at any point, read a chapter out of sequence, and put it down again; the book functions on a human level as well as a purely intellectual exercise, not unlike a great game of chess.