In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Explicating Oulipo
  • Jason Conger (bio)
Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature. Daniel Levin Becker. Harvard University Press. http://www.hup.harvard.edu. 352 pages; paper, $27.95.

Potential literature is both the things that literature could be and the things that could be literature. Potential literature is language; potential literature is life.

In 1960, Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais founded the Oulipo, a group of French writers, mathematicians, and scientists devoted to exploring the use of formal procedures and technical constraints to produce texts. “Oulipo” is an acronym for “Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle,” which translates to “Workshop for Potential Literature.” For Queneau—a renowned poet, novelist, and one-time member of André Breton’s surrealist ensemble in the 1920s—the Workshop was a forum for applying mathematical principles to the writing process in “the search for new forms and structures that may be used by writers in any way they see fit.” As the group’s project has expanded in the last fifty-two years, so too have the limits of what constitutes potential literature.

The Oulipo is perhaps best recognized for its membership, which has included Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud, and Marcel Duchamp. Though the group has mined countless scientific, technological, and mathematical disciplines for formal innovation, its oeuvre is often reduced to the most herculean and noggin-boggling examples of constraint, like Queneau’s own Cent mille milliards de Poèmes (1961) (One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems)—a combinatorial sonnet that contains as many permutations as its name would suggest and which would take over a million centuries to read in full—and Perec’s La disparition (1969) (The Disappearance), a 300-page novel that altogether omits the letter “E.”

Few comprehensive resources on the Oulipo have been widely available in English. Devotees are familiar with Warren F. Motte Jr.’s Oulipo: a Primer of Potential Literature (2008) and Alastair Brotchie and Harry Mathews’s Oulipo Compendium (2005). Both are indispensable guides to the Oulipian corpus, but they function foremost as reference volumes for the firmly converted.

Enter Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels, which not only fills a number of gaps in available information but also skillfully introduces readers into the domain of constraint-based writing.

Levin Becker, an American writer, received a Fulbright scholarship, moved to Paris, and interned with the Oulipo (in a position jokingly referred to as “esclave,” or “slave”), organizing the group’s archives at the French National Library. He observed monthly meetings, frequent readings, and semi-regular workshops, and interviewed each of the group’s active members about their engagements with potential literature. Through his efforts, he was inducted in 2009 as only the second American member—the first, Harry Mathews, had remained alone for over thirty-five years.

Part personal narrative, part historical survey, and part expository essay, Channels begins with its author’s own curiosity about the Oulipo and proceeds into an exhaustive interrogation of its principal methods and aims.

The book is organized into three sections: “Present,” “Past,” and “Future.”

“Present” begins with Levin Becker’s arrival in Paris. He escorts us into the territory of potential literature and explicates a broad-stroked but dependable context for understanding its generative designs.

“Past” provides an in-depth survey of the Oulipo’s development, including its emergence from the conditions of World War II. This section shows that the group’s formation represented a uniquely interdisciplinary, collective collaboration, and Levin Becker takes great care to demonstrate how rigorously the early members approached their research.

Finally, “Future” zooms out to consider the unrealized applications of potential literature. With continual changes in personnel and technological resources, and the poetry workshop’s academic prominence, the paths for investigation have only multiplied. This is demonstrated by the throng of spin-off groups, known collectively as the Ou-XPos (workshops for potential something) that have emerged to apply formal constraints to a variety of disciplines. “Future” introduces us to the most serious and deliberate of these, such as the OuPeinPo (painting) and OuMuPo (music), as well as the lowbrow and largely theoretical, like the OuPornPo (I’ll let you guess).

The three sections of the book are stitched together...

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