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Serious Play: Formal Innovation and Politics in French Literature from the 1950s to the Present by Aubrey Ann Gabel A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Michael Lucey, Chair Professor Debarati Sanyal Professor C.D. Blanton Professor Mairi McLaughlin Summer 2017 Abstract Serious Play: Formal Innovation and Politics in French Literature from the 1950s to the Present By Aubrey Ann Gabel Doctor of Philosophy in French University of California, Berkeley Professor Michael Lucey, Chair Serious Play: Formal Innovation and Politics in French literature from the 1950s to the present investigates how 20th- and 21st-century French authors play with literary form as a means of engaging with contemporary history and politics. Authors like Georges Perec, Monique Wittig, and Jacques Jouet often treat the practice of writing like a game with fixed rules, imposing constraints on when, where, or how they write. They play with literary form by eliminating letters and pronouns; by using only certain genders, or by writing in specific times and spaces. While such alterations of the French language may appear strange or even trivial, by experimenting with new language systems, these authors probe into how political subjects—both individual and collective—are formed in language. The meticulous way in which they approach form challenges unspoken assumptions about which cultural practices are granted political authority and by whom. This investigation is grounded in specific historical circumstances: the student worker- strike of May ’68 and the Algerian War, the rise of and competition between early feminist collectives, and the failure of communism and the rise of the right-wing extremism in 21st-century France. Analysis of pronominal subjects in Perec and Wittig shows how they interrogate power struggles during May ’68; both authors imagine shared textual production as the bedrock of new political communities. Moving into the 21st century, Jouet stages various “bad” communists, in order to pay tribute to dying communist communities and to unpack the ongoing legacy of communism’s collapse. In the end, formal play offers an antidote to 20th- and 21st-century crises of community by creating virtual communities through the text itself. 1 For Ingrid and Tom i Table of Contents: Introduction, “Serious Play: Formal Innovation and Politics in pp. 1-16 French Literature from the 1950s to the Present” Chapter 1, “Not So Secret: Queneau’s dégagement and Oulipo pp. 17-52 as an open secret” Chapter 2, “Marxistes, Tendance Groucho: Perec’s La pp. 53-79 Disparition as Collective History” Chapter 3, “Stumbling Sheep: Political Education and History in pp. 80-111 Les Guérillères and Paris-la-Politique” Chapter 4, “Jacques Jouet’s “Bad” Communists: Worksite pp. 112-147 Poetics in Le Cocommuniste” Epilogue, Virtual Playgrounds: Form, Space, and Community pp. 148-152 ii Acknowledgements Thank you to my dissertation director, Michael Lucey, for the thorough and thoughtful feedback and for gently guiding me through my own thinking. Many thanks to my committee members—Debarati Sanyal, Mairi McLaughlin, and Dan Blanton—for reading many drafts of my chapters as they were unfolding. Your input was invaluable to my research and helped shape the final form of this project. Finally, my warmest congratulations to my fellow future PhDs, Vanessa Brutsche and Margot Szarke. You not only welcomed me into our “adopted” cohort, but you led me through the ups and downs of the dissertation writing process, with grace, intellect, and clarity. iii Introduction: Serious Play: Formal Innovation and Politics in French Literature from the 1950s to the Present In a 1980 interview in Jeux et stratégie, Georges Perec describes literature quite simply, as the practice of reorganizing the words in the dictionary: Ecrire, pour moi, c'est une certaine façon de réorganiser les mots du dictionnaire. Ou les livres que l'on a déjà lus. Vous voyez que c'est assez banal! […] Au départ, cela met donc en jeu une certaine disponibilité à l'égard d'un ensemble. D'un catalogue, d'un corpus. On dispose d'un certain nombre d'éléments et l'on doit, avec eux, construire quelque chose. Le premier travail que cela implique, c'est une redistribution, une réorganisation, donc une disponibilité. (Perec, Entretiens 115) Indeed, it is harder to imagine a more banal definition of literature: one begins with a set (“ensemble”) of words or texts, one reorganizes this corpus, and voilà, literature. The act of writing is no colossal feat of the spirit or the intellect. It does not involve long hours of arduous work, or sleepless forays into the midnight hours in wait of inspiration. It is simply a game of scrabble. (Just don’t forget the tiles!) This definition of literary work is almost comically boring and modest, especially for an author known for his artistic tours de force. Could we really describe an entire novel written without the letter “e,” texts assembled using Latin bi-squares and rook’s moves, or enormous palindromes as mere “redistributions” of words? We should be careful not to take Perec entirely at his word; his definition of literature is deceptively simple and purposefully downplays the implications of literary production. Nevertheless, Perec does express a fundamentally different relationship to literary production. Literature is not the work of genius, nor does it serve a higher purpose. It does not seek to radically change the world, politically or metaphysically. Its purpose, on the outset, is neutral and undefined; its destiny is only determined by the number of “h’s” and “a’s” left in the pile.1 It is hard to underscore just how fundamentally different Perec’s notion of literature and literary practice is from that of many French authors of his time. Perec is writing in 20th- century France, the heyday of avant-gardisme, with its critique of aesthetic production, its active involvement in the political sphere, and its drama, fueled by so many public squabbles and debates. More particularly, Perec came of age at a moment when the literary field had become particularly fractured. As May ’68 and the Algerian War would later reveal, the decade after the war was riven by competing political agendas and literature followed suit. From the immediate postwar period well into the Trente glorieuses, French literature was also dominated 1 Jeux et stratégie was a magazine edited by Excelsior Publications that ran from 1980 to 1990; it was dedicated to gaming of all sorts (including board-gaming, video games, strategy games, etc.). It is unusual for an author to write about literature in a gamers’ magazine, given that emerging media (like video games) often have less cultural status than literature. This choice of publishing venue already challenges certain assumptions about what qualifies as art and highlights the extent to which playing and gaming were essential to Perec’s work. 1 by the politico-literary construct of littérature engagée. In the engagement paradigm, literary work and political practice are inextricably linked. The engaged author is not only subject to the media spotlight, but beholden to it. His intellectual authority comes with external obligations to both the political and literary fields. In this “hyperpoliticized” environment, every literary gesture is infused with meaning.2 Every act of the author is calculated or criticized. Being an author requires not only a public face, but a political identity—a commitment to a larger cause, political party, or agenda. Even in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as literature seemed to withdraw from politics, the author continues to be an important figure in French society. With the growth of far-right extremism and the collapse of communism and industrialism, French literature—and France at large—is undergoing a political crisis. While many wonder if and how literature can continue to influence politics, it nevertheless continues to be a means of reflecting on the relationship between individuals, groups, and communities. Regardless of whether one speaks of literature before or after this political crisis, one thing is clear: literature in 20th- and 21st- century France is a serious enterprise. In the life of the author, there is simply no room for play. Play and game nevertheless remain important conceptual frameworks through which Perec understands literary practice.3 Unlike engagement or avant-gardisme, however, literary play is hardly a cohesive force in 20th- and 21st-century French literature. Playful literature does not constitute a singular group, movement, or trend. At best, it is a loose amalgam of like- minded thinkers, who privilege form as a locus of literary innovation. My corpus tracks the work of three generations of the literary group Oulipo (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Jacques Jouet) from the 1950s to the present, but it also includes the work of a non-Oulipian, Monique Wittig. While Wittig had limited ties to Oulipo, she engaged in similar play with literary form.4 Literary play was most notably theorized by Oulipo, but it was hardly limited to the group, and I will demonstrate that echoes of Oulipian formal play can be seen elsewhere in France, even today. While the authors I study are diverse, and circulated in (sometimes wildly) different political venues, they nevertheless share certain interests in form and pose similar questions about the relationship between form and collective practice. These authors often treat the practice of writing like a game with fixed rules, imposing constraints on when, where, or how they write. They play with literary form by eliminating letters and pronouns; by using only certain genders; by writing in specific times; and so on. 2 In La guerre des écrivains, Sapiro explains that this “surpolitisation” of literature originates in the progressive politicization of literature.

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