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WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch The Oulipo and Modernism: Literature, Craft and Mathematical Form Cartwright, D. This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © Dr Daniel Cartwright, 2019. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] The Oulipo and Modernism Literature, Craft and Mathematical Form Daniel Cartwright A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Westminster for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2019 Abstract The Oulipo is known primarily for the use of formal constraints in writing. The constraint is an arbitrary application of rigorously defined formal demands (often drawn from mathematics) in the process of literary or poetic composition. The group was founded in 1960, and their remit was limited to the formulation of constraints rather than literary texts. There is thus no literary theory proposed by the Oulipo, and little in the way of critical interpretation of their methods in terms of its wider sig- nificance to the condition of art in the period of their emergence. Their approach is often counterposed to the Surrealists: where the Surrealist response to the conditions of rationalised modernity attempted to explore the unconscious, the non-rational and chance, the Oulipo’s use of constraints is consciously determined and resists the pas- sivity of chance. The counter-model to the Surrealists for the Oulipo is the mathemati- cal collective Nicolas Bourbaki. Bourbaki’s rigorously abstract axiomatic mathematics provides the formal prototype of the most abstracted rationality for the Oulipo to use as compositional structures. The Oulipo also bear an ambivalent relation to structuralism, but where structuralism tends towards a descriptive identification of ‘deep structures’ of signification, the Oulipo instead deploy structures as historically-specific composi- tional material. This thesis proposes to read the practice of the Oulipo as a production of the ‘new’ through a form of construction as ‘craft’ that is itself receptive to critical interpreta- tion. It contends that the Oulipo can be seen to offer a distinctive trajectory among the various responses to what Adorno identifies as a crisis of art’s autonomy in the latter half of the twentieth century; in other words, that they pursue an alternative mod- ernism. I argue that the Oulipo’s use of arbitrary rigidified logical structures in literary composition is categorially alien to the latter’s concept, and thus that it forms a kind of resistant material which must be worked with. This model of skilled engagement recalls, in self-consciously paradoxical ways, the outmoded concept of craft which provides an alternative to, on the one hand, the post-romantic idea of artistic freedom, and on the other, full subsumption by technological procedure, maintaining a refracted instrumentality in the logic of method that yet resists pre-determination. Contents Introduction 1 1 Surrealism, Chance and Rationality 44 Chance,AutomatismandFreedom . 57 Revolution,UtopiaandtheUnknown . 74 OulipianPost-Surrealism . 77 TheCollegeof’Pataphysics . 80 2 Bourbaki and Mathematical Method 93 ModernMathematics . 102 MathematicsandArtisticProduction . 115 NicolasBourbaki ............................ 119 OulipianBourbakisation . 139 3 Structure and Genesis 151 Science,Structure,Form . 152 BeyondStructure? ........................... 172 Calvino’sStructures. 184 4 Craft, Construction and Constraint 207 OulipianCraft.............................. 207 ArtVersusCraft............................. 215 FromCrafttoConstruction . 232 TraditionandTechniqueinSchoenberg . 247 Material................................. 255 Epilogue 273 List of Figures 2.1 AnEodermdrome............................ 95 3.1 Perec’s‘Iputupi’............................. 155 3.2 Calvino’smodelsquare . 198 3.3 Greimas’smodelsquare. 199 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors, David Cunningham and Matthew Charles, my family and my friends for their vital support. I declare that all the material contained in this thesis is my own work. Introduction In 1962, Raymond Queneau took part in a series of interviews with Georges Char- bonnier. Among other things, he discusses in these sessions the work of the Oulipo, the group he had founded two years earlier with the scientist Franc¸ois Le Lionnais, dedicated to producing, as Queneau describes, ‘r`egles, lois, possibilit´es, formes, struc- tures, etc., tout un arsenal dans lequel le po`ete ira choisir `apartir du moment o`uil aura envie de sortir de ce qu’on appelle l’inspiration.’1 [‘Rules, laws, possibilities, forms, structures, etc., an arsenal from which the poet will choose, the moment he wants to get away from what is called inspiration.’] At the end of the final interview, Queneau is pushed by Charbonnier to elaborate on the meaning of such ‘constraints’. Queneau responds: R. Q.—L’intention de l’Oulipo, c’est de proposer des structures nouvelles. C’est tout. Maintenant, vous pouvez penser, vous, que cela am`enera autre chose. Le sens mˆeme de l’Oulipo, c’est de donner des structures vides, de proposer des structures vides. G. C.—Alors, je pose le question: est-ce possible? 1Raymond Queneau, Entretiens avec Georges Charbonnier (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp.154. 1 INTRODUCTION 2 R. Q.—Probablement.2 [R. Q.—The intention of the Oulipo is to propose new structures. That’s all. Now, you may think that will bring about something else. The very meaning of the Oulipo is to give empty structures, to propose empty struc- tures. G. C.—So, I ask the question, is that possible? R. Q.—Probably.] Several important things can be drawn from this exchange regarding the nature of the Oulipo: first, that they aim to break with the post-romantic commonplace of ‘inspi- ration’; second, that they mean to innovate, to propose new structures; third, that their methodology implies a kind of formality that bears no a priori immanent relation to literary sources or consequences (these are empty structures, deeply redolent of mathe- matical formalism, and of the scientific structuralism of the era); and, fourth, that such empty structures may not necessarily be possible. The last point is a typically Quenel- lian equivocation,3 one that indicates a circumspection towards doctrine that is very characteristic of the Oulipo (most obviously in their relationship to structuralist the- ory, but also in their opposition to the stridency of Bretonian Surrealism). The group’s theoretical circumspection is often cited as the main reason for their longevity, but it is also the reason why they have remained resistant to incorporation in the standard nar- ratives of twentieth-century modernism, despite their responsiveness to the conditions of the time, and their distinctly modernist aspiration to pursue the new. The refusal 2Ibid., pp.154–5. 3See also, for example, Queneau’s claim in the first interview that ‘quand j’´enonce une assertion, je m’aperc¸ois tout de suite que l’assertion contraire esta ` peu pr`es aussi int´eressante, `aun point o`ucela devient presque superstitieux chez moi.’ Ibid., p.12. [‘When I make an assertion, I immediately see that the contrary assertion is roughly as interesting, to a point where that becomes nearly superstitious for me.’] INTRODUCTION 3 to set out a doctrine is perhaps also what allows them to combine apparently opposed concepts in the practice of writing: constraint versus potential (or freedom); litera- ture versus science (most specifically mathematics); tradition versus the new; and the end-work versus its process. The Oulipo was founded in 1960, the idea of Queneau, an established writer and general secretary at Gallimard, and Franc¸ois Le Lionnais, a chemical engineer and mathematician. The other original members were No¨el Arnaud, Jacques Bens, Claude Berge, Jacques Duchateau, Latis, Jean Lescure, Jean Queval and Albert-Marie Schmidt. Later famous members include Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud. Marcel Duchamp was also inducted as a ‘foreign correspondent’ but was never a fully active member. The group still exists, and has met monthly since its founding.4 In the first decade or so, their individual members produced and published a number of Oulipian works, but the group itself remained, voluntarily, in relative obscurity until the publication of their first group book, La Litterature´ poten- tielle,5 in 1973, a collection of short exercises, descriptions of constraints and some theoretical pieces. Since 1974, they have published regular editions of their own Bib- liotheque` Oulipienne series, dedicated to exemplifying new constraints, and in more recent years they have held monthly ‘jeudis’, at which they present their work publicly. The use of constraints in writing is probably the most commonly given character- isation of the Oulipo’s work, along with the paradigmatic example, Georges Perec’s 4The comptes rendus for the meetings from 1960–63 are published as Jacques Bens, ed., Genese` de L’Oulipo 1960–1963 (Bordeaux: Le Castor Astral, 2005).

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