In Case You Have Nothing Better to Do

Are wedding-chests having fusion yet?
(Raymond Queneau, Oulipo co-founder)

While watching Vi Hart’s short film “Twelve Tones” (I recommend it if you have 30 minutes to spare), I was introduced to the word “Oulipo.” It denotes a group of French-speaking writers and mathematicians who thought it would be fun to create works using “constrained writing.” (All of my writing seems constrained. I’ve convinced myself, as they did apparently, that it is enjoyable in spite of this.) Although Oulipo sounds like something started by artistic types high on green fairy juice in the 1800s, it was actually founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and Francois Le Lionnais.

Constrained writing simply means there are certain arbitrary rules you must follow. If you want to “snowball,” for example, you have to write a poem where each line is one word and each successive word is one letter longer than the previous word. If you take the N+7 route, you replace every noun in your text with the seventh noun that comes after it in the dictionary (see caption above). Here are two examples of Oulipian creations:

Queneau’s Exercices de Style is the recounting ninety-nine times of the same inconsequential episode, in which a man witnesses a minor altercation on a bus trip; each account is unique in terms of tone and style.

Perec’s novel La disparition, translated into English by Gilbert Adair and published under the title A Void, is a 300-page novel written without the letter “e,” an example of a lipogram. The English translation, A Void, is also a lipogram. The novel is remarkable not only for the absence of “e,” but it is a mystery in which the absence of that letter is a central theme.

I have to admit the second one sounds kind of interesting. No, wait. Let’s see if I can do this. I must grant that said book just up from this sounds intriguing.

Wow. It took me ten minutes to rephrase that sentence without using the letter “e.” Let’s see if each page contains, say, fifty sentences (just a wild guess), then if Perec wrote A Void at the same speed and spent four hours a day writing, it took him ((10 x 50 x 300/1440) x 6) 624 days to finish the novel. That’s not so bad. I think I will start with something simpler, though, until I get the hang of it. I will write my 300-page novel without using the letter “q.” Should be done next Tuesday at 11:54 a.m., give or take.