Poétiques oulipiennes: la contrainte, le style, l’histoire by Christelle Reggiani (review)

Reggiani, Christelle. Poétiques oulipiennes: la contrainte, le style, l’histoire. Genève: Droz, 2014. ISBN 978-2-600-01769-5. Pp. 172. 35 CHF. The plural “poétiques” in this book’s title indicates a difficulty that confronts all scholars of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle: the Oulipo’s evolution over more than fifty years, the multiple perspectives of its members, and its anti-dogmatic ethos, all stand in the way of a definitive account of Oulipian poetics. Works such as Marc Lapprand’s Poétique de l’Oulipo (FR 76.1) and Hervé Le Tellier’s Esthétique de l’Oulipo (Castor Astral, 2006) have nevertheless identified tendencies and principles that guide the Oulipo’s project of writing using constraints. Reggiani’s key contribution is to inscribe the Oulipo in a larger “formal history” of literature, taking up the program proposed by Roland Barthes in Le degré zéro de l’écriture (12–13). This perspective brings unity to an otherwise heterogeneous collection of essays. Reggiani’s erudite and incisive book does not outline a plurality of individual poetics as much as it adopts a multidirectional approach that, without attempting to be exhaustive, explores the stakes and the ambiguities of various aspects of the Oulipian project. The nine chapters fall into two sections (“Modèles et imaginaires textuels”and“La contrainte a-t-elle du style?”), which address not only the concrete stylistic effects of Oulipian constraints (for instance the specific characteristics of the Perecquian lipogram, analyzed in ch. 6), but also the more abstract discursive models that constitute the group’s literary imaginary: these range from the fiction of a mathematical literature (ch. 2) to the mobilization of biological metaphors for formal constraints (ch. 4). Some chapters develop arguments presented in Reggiani’s earlier Rhétoriques de la contrainte (1999): borrowing terms from the literary theorist Michel Charles, Reggiani argues that the Oulipo adopts an ambivalent position between a scholastic regime—in which the unity and closure of the work, as literary monument, is founded on the authority of the author—and a rhetorical regime that conceives of a mobile and open set of textual manipulations requiring the intervention of a reader (ch. 5). This theoretical frame allows Reggiani to develop a critical account that neither simply defends the achievements of the Oulipo nor repeats precepts articulated by the members of the group, but rather uncovers the deeper paradoxes and even the“bad faith”(56, 79) that determine the Oulipo’s self-definition.While Reggiani’s analysis cannot do justice to the diversity of Oulipian practices (as she acknowledges),the book offers an important investigation of the historical situation of the Oulipo. Originating in a postwar context that renders lyrical expression problematic, the Oulipo develops its own brand of impersonal lyricism, and it seeks new strategies in the contemporary moment as the expansion of digital technologies raises questions about the future of literature. Ultimately, Poétiques oulipiennes suggests that the Oulipo, in all its contradictions, at once exemplifies the uncertainties of a particular moment in history, reveals the gaps and discontinuities 266 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 267 that characterize the history of literary forms, and makes history into the object of its investigations, searching for forms that give shape to time. University of Chicago Alison James Sanyal, Debarati. Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Testimony. New York: Fordham UP, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8232-6548-0. Pp. 352. $37. This study issues a cogent and passionate plea for the power of literature to stage the complexity of overlapping historical memories. It builds on recent interventions in Holocaust and memory studies that have emphasized the interconnections and “multidirectionality”of different histories, memories, and legacies (Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory), as well as the epistemological pitfalls of critical theory and trauma studies in their tendency to singularize and sacralize the Holocaust (Thomas Trezise, Witnessing Witnessing). Sanyal proposes“complicity”as an overarching frame for examining the ethical, political, and poetic stakes of intersecting memories— memories that circulate across historical periods or between subject positions, and that find their expression in diverse works of cultural production. The first chapter elaborates a critique of philosophical paradigms that dehistoricize the Holocaust, and...