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SubStance 30.3 (2001) 3



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Introduction

Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Jacques Jouet
(But Were Afraid To Ask)


Once again, with this special section on Jacques Jouet, SubStance returns to a format it practiced in its early years, introducing the work of a writer whom it feels deserving of broader recognition among readers of contemporary literature. As Sydney Lévy put it in a recent issue, there are only two rules to be observed here: first, that the author work with the journal in order to shape the dossier; second, that the author figure among the contributors.

Born in 1947, Jouet joined the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo) in 1983. He is the author of more than forty books, works that boldly traverse the spectrum of genres available to writers today, and which beggar any attempts at normative critical description--just the sort of gesture, alas, that the present circumstance demands. Suffice it to say that each of those books, regardless of genre, puts literature itself to the question in fresh, intriguing ways, as Jouet deploys wit, erudition, playfulness, and a poetic imagination in which tradition and innovation find such felicitous articulation that they become virtually indistinguishable.

His own piece on formal constraint here will give the reader some idea of the importance of rigorous structure, both in his own work and in the broader literary aesthetic of the Oulipo. Michelle Grangaud's essay on Jouet's recent three-volume collection of poetry, Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux, offers a reading of Jouet's ethos of poetry as vital practice, from the perspective of a fellow-poet. Jean-Didier Wagneur has explored Jouet's "Republic Novel" cycle, in a consideration of the fiction of power and the power of fiction. Marc Lapprand examines a fixed poetic form of Jouet's own invention, the "metro poem"; and Ian Monk has provided some examples of those poems in English translation. For my part, I have focused on the way Jouet puts the principle of exhaustion into play in his writing. Finally, I should mention that we expected a contribution from Jean-Charles Baduli, who promised to eviscerate Jouet's work and persuade us that his books should be burned; but I must report that Baduli's project has been abandoned. One can only conclude that some critical tasks are more difficult than others.

Warren Motte

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