Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature by Daniel Levin Becker (review)

In an undergraduate French course at Yale, Levin Becker was introduced to the writings of Oulipo—the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature—which had been founded in Paris in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais and is still going strong today. Among its early members were Italo Calvino and Georges Perec: when Levin Becker learned that Perec had written La Disparition (The Disappearance), “a mystery novel of some 300-plus pages completely devoid of the letter E,” he was hooked. “That is, I thought to myself without hyperbole, one of the five coolest things I have ever heard.” Shortly after graduation, Fulbright in hand, he set off for Paris to investigate the group and, before long, was himself granted membership in the exclusive club that is Oulipo.

Many Subtle Channels is the happy fruit of this initiation: part history, part theory, part critical evaluation and juicy gossip about individual Oulipians, this delightful and witty book is on a subject usually treated with high seriousness and patient explication. Consider the following account in the opening chapter:

Since its creation in 1960, the Oulipo has served as the laboratory in which some of modernity’s most inventive, challenging, and flat-out baffling textual experiments have been undertaken. . . . Oulipian inquiry has yielded novels without certain vowels, love stories without gender, poems without words, books that never end, books that do nothing but end, books that would technically take longer to read than most geological eras have lasted . . . books that may not actually exist at all. These works, all of them governed in some way by strict technical constraints or elaborate architectural designs, are attempts to prove the hypothesis that the most arbitrary structural mandates can be the most creatively liberating.

It is especially important to understand what Oulipo is not: “It is not a movement, or an -ism, or a school. It does not have an agenda, aesthetic or political or otherwise. It is not a scientific seminar; it is not invested in wrangling randomness or automatism or chance. . . . It is concerned with literature in the conditional mood.” Conditional, in that, “when you don’t know what you’re looking for, as they say, your chances of finding it are excellent.”

Today the Oulipo has “thirty-eight members, of whom five are women and seven are non-French (no overlap).” Problematic as this ratio is, we should remember that, of the thirty-eight, seventeen are dead: among them, Marcel Duchamp (“the most famous Oulipian nobody knows was an Oulipian”), Calvino, Queneau, and of course Perec himself, who died in 1982 at the age of forty-six. Levin Becker gives shrewd and pithy assessments of some of the most important works of the living, especially the poems and fictions of its greatest living member, the mathematician-novelist-poet-critic Jacques Roubaud. But the real center of this book is the wonderfully various work of Perec, whose La Vie Mode d’Emploi (Life a User’s Manual) has become a classic even for readers unaware of the elaborate constraints used in its creation. Everything Perec wrote, Levin Becker posits, can be traced back to a particular foundational experience: the Nazi deportation of the poet’s parents when he was a very young child: “Perec wrote to make sense of the world, and his insistent exploration of form and subject depended heavily on the idea that there was something obscure but crucially important to be found.” Indeed, most of the founding members of Oulipo, Levin Becker notes, took an active part in the Resistance.

In tracing the source of Oulipo to the spirit of postwar Pataphysics, “with its defensive glibness in the face of the world’s cruelty,” Many Subtle Channels nicely puts to rest the assessment, still so common, at least in the United States, that Oulipo was and is merely “playful”—clever gamesmanship rather than “real” art. “Duchamp’s genius,” Levin Becker quips, vis-à-vis Adorno’s...