On Memorial Stones

Page 26 American Book Review Kelsey continued from previous page As the title word “noulipian” suggests, the Oulipian tradition is a vital influence on the book’s project and writers. The book project itself might seem to be the epitome of the two-fold task of the Oulipian: analysis via essay and synthesis via practice . In addition, many of the book’s essays, which include an address by Paul Fournel, the current president of Oulipo, directly address the history and legacy of the tradition. However, this is not simply a history book or an homage, for the “n” in the title signals an important difference between noulipo and Oulipo, indicating the ways in which the writers featured in The noulipian Analects have re-visioned the tradition.The editors explain that the “n” in “noulipo” is not only in play off of the famous “N+7” constraint, but also “echoes the English new, the French nous, which means us, and the Yiddish nu, which means so? or well?” designating “a range of practices that draw on Oulipian techniques without necessarily conforming to the highly specified strictures mandating proper Oulipian work.” For example, Rob Wittig’s “Three Searchpoems,” created by first using a search engine to search texts using three keywords or phrases and then remixing the phrases, isn’t strictly Oulipian but, in an Oulipian spirit, offers readers new ideas for creating texts. Such ranging beyond conformity necessarily implies a challenge to the Oulipian tradition, and this is where the differences between noulipo and Oulipo become, for me, most significant. One of the biggest challenges noulipians return to throughout the book is a questioning of the politics of Oulipo. These questions are both historical and future-looking, zeroing in on the fact that the founding group was not only all male, but also showed no interest in engaging Oulipo in the political during a time when most other avant-garde groups centered around politics. The writers of the Analects take these elements of Oulipian history in many intriguing directions, asking us to wonder if there is something gendered about the very notion of “constraint,” to wonder at the connections between “constraint” and “restraint,” to wonder about the politics embedded in process and in form. Such wondering expands the scope of the book from an intense, fresh look at Oulipian tradition to topics of interest to any writer or reader intrigued by the significance and consequences of process and form. Karla Kelsey is assistant professor at Susquehanna University. She is the author of Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary (2006) and Iteration Nets (forthcoming), books of poetry published by Ahsahta Press. on memorial SToneS Marilyne Bertoncini sTèles Victor Segalen Translated and Annotated by Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush Foreword by Haun Saussy Wesleyan University Press http://www.wesleyan.edu/wespress 456 pages; cloth, $80.00; paper, $34.95 VictorSegalen—thecontemporaryofGuillaume Apollinaire, cubism, orphism…but more seemingly attached to the French fin de siècle, as the introduction points out—could well be, like these steles he chose as a subject and form of the collection here presented, a landmark for modernism, through his heterogeneous style and writings (poetry, novels, essays), as well as in his life as a traveler, medical surgeon, translator, archeologist. Precisely this multifaceted activity and marginality kept him unclassifiable and nearly unknown in France, until the mid80s , when the reference edition of Stèles by Henri Bouillier, the symposium of Pau, and the thesis of Christian Doumet encouraged the rediscovery of his work, revealing a conscious, even if ambiguous, exocentric attitude, a care for the form, akin to the works of contemporary pre-surrealist Raymond Roussel on language—a “deconstruction” before Jacques Derrida explored the concept—of the materiality of the text and the traditional links between words and cultures. The prose poems of Stèles, Segalen’s most renowned work, here in a new and brilliant translation , with notes and an important essay by Haun Saussy, are exemplary of this decentering of the subject, the attention to the diverse which explains that the reception of this writer inAsia and the world has anticipated its recognition in France (where most of his publications are posthumous). Timothy Billings and Christopher Bush...