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Essay for Six Selections By The Oulipo: Getting Freedom from Contraints

The text "Six Selections by the Oulipo" is a combination of 6 texts about Oulipo, which are:

One Hudred Thousand Billion Poems, Yours for the Telling by Raymond Queneau, A Brief History of the Oulipo by Jean Lescure, For a Potenteial Analysis of Combinatory Literature by Claude Berge, Computer and Writer: The Centre Pompidou Experiment by Paul Fournel and Prose and Anticombinatorics by Italo Calvino. Those articles give us a brief introduction and a glimpse of what is Oulipo and how Oulipo writers work.

50 years ago, a group of French literatures lover established Oulipo (workshop of potential literature). Raymond Queneau (one of the original founders besides Francois Le Lionnais) noted that Oulipo is not a school of literature，a literature seminer or experiments, but a natural, artificial and amusing workshop where people are able to make up their own writing rules and restricts, in order to spark inspirations and find the vieling possibilities of literature.

For instance: "Airplane" ( Abbreviation of words.The word "Jet" is the abbreviation abbreviation ), "Beau(belle) Present(e)" ( a poem which compound names of a person you cherished or hated ) or "s+n" ( replace each noun of an existing text by the "N"th noun after it found in a dictionary) etc.. .
In this essay, I will give my analysis of Oulipo from the perspective of the relationship between contraint and freedom of literature.

The core of Oulipo rules is based on setting writing rules, which can be considered as "an add operation which is based on subtraction". That is why Oulipo is distinctly different from current schools of literature: hyperration, behind-closed-doors, chasing for language skills and new forms. In another words, the artificial contraints are a symbol of Oulipo, with which writers can write in gameplay.

Language is a complicated container or system combining with different functional parts. However, from Oulipo writers' point of view, it can also be an objected self-supported subject. Putting contraints into language makes the linguistic functions under-controlled.

For example, Lipogram, which is known as one of Oulipo writing methods, sets up the rule as writing excluding one or more letters. In Dissappear , Georges Perec did not use the letter "e" which is the most common letter in French. In a report, Marcel Bénabou noted that during the period of writing this novel, Georges Perec listed all the words that he could use without "e", the list was endless.

Another typical work is One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau. It "is a set of ten sonnets, printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book, a type of children's book with which Queneau was familiar. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, so that there are 100,000,000,000,000 different poems". This work can be treated as a computer programme, which can be randomly or artificially made by audience. However, The work is readable and followed by sonnet rules strictly.

However, the mainstream would never accept "linguistic games". Marcus Valerius Martialis once said that indulging in tricks is shameful and stupid. As a matter of fact, every school of literature has their own rules, more or less. These rules can also be seen as contraints (tricks), only because they had already been accepted by public, in general.

For instance, in traditional Chinese literature, there was a school called Jueju(绝句, broken off lines) which was popular in Tang Dynasty (from the period from 618 to 907). " Jueju poems are always quatrains; or, more specifically, a matched pair of couplets, with each line consisting of five or seven syllables" with the same rhymes. It requires author to fully use every character to create a successful poem. Thus, setting up rules is not a rare issue in literature field.

In every literature genre, the reason why we setup rules and contraints, is not only because we want to play with words or letters, but also we can find out some potential things which we have missed when writing "regular" text, as a result, from which, the literature's conventions spilt out.

Freedom

As the "alchemy" of language, Oulipo cooks the words with 100% sobriety and objectivity. In another words, the inspiration of writing is also been controlled. Their inspiration and creativity from the totally-controlled literature contraints they set by themselves.

Maths, Philosophy, Oulipo

Mathematics, as the footstone of science, plays a very important role in Oulipo rules. Raymond Queneau, known as one of the founders of Oulipo, also has the background of mathematics.

Back to Literature

Conclusion

There are two standards to critic Oulipo works: Firstly, settings of rules (technical perspective), the other is the works themselves (literature perspective). A successful Oulipo work should successfully reaches these two critical points. No matter how complicated or difficult the contraints and rules are in Oulipo grammar, after all, Oulipo is still in the circle of literature, which means readers are able to and should enjoy reading it like reading the other "normal" works.

Reference

Oulipo wiki