“Between two words in a sentence, there exists an infinity of others.”
—Raymond Queneau
In 1986 the Oulipo’s second president, Noël Arnaud, was worried about the future of the group. In his “Prolegomena to a Fourth Oulipo Manifesto—or not,” Arnaud calls the group’s embrace of potential literature both its survival and its downfall: the ouvroir will survive, he writes, as long as it has not exhausted its potential. Exhaustion being one of Georges Perec’s favorite Oulipian exercises, you can see the problem: for the Oulipo to survive, there must always be potentially more to do.
In 1986, when Arnaud confided these fears, the Oulipo was in need of direction. It had begun to lose the most dynamic, visionary members of its early period; Perec had died in 1982, co-founder François Le Lionnais in 1984, Luc Etienne in 1984, Italo Calvino in 1985. (The founding lions of the group were already long gone—Queneau in 1976, Marcel Duchamp in 1968, Albert-Marie Schmidt in 1966.) The original group had been somewhat clandestine, even cloistered, and the founders hadn’t wanted to court the spotlight by going public; having kept a low profile throughout the 1960s, the Oulipo didn’t publish anything as a group until 1973. As the Oulipo became known during the 1980s for its particular brand of ludic literary experimentation, the way forward seemed to be through wit, humor and public performance. But today, as the Oulipo enters its sixth decade of existence, the moment seems opportune to reevaluate if that’s the best way for the Oulipo to continue.
Arnaud was concerned that the Oulipo was becoming a victim of its own success, that its numbers were unequal to the demand placed upon them to lecture, lead workshops and make appearances, and that its “personality” was being “dissolved” by the pressure to turn the Oulipo into pedagogy. “It is becoming a ‘writers’ workshop,” he wrote, in an ominous tone. The comparison is apt; the writing produced in a writers’ workshop is often inspired by a prompt, just as Oulipian work is inspired by a constraint. Both kinds of writing are generated not by literary inspiration, or by an ineffable flash of genius, but by a concrete task to be fulfilled. As a result, it could easily be said that workshop writing is mechanical and formulaic, and that Oulipian writing is—well—kind of pointless. For better or for worse, formulas and mechanics are at the heart of the writing workshop as well as of Oulipian procedure. What then raises this work above mere mechanics to the level of art? Oulipo, like any good writing produced in a writers’ workshop, relies on that extra ineffable something that transcends the mechanism of its creation.
Arnaud was right to worry: today the Oulipo is vulnerable to exhaustion because performance—or rather, self-performance— has become a central part of the Oulipo’s activities. There are the weekly performances at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the frequent appearances at international literary festivals, the annual summer workshop where amateurs can pay to come and be taught Oulipian technique by actual Oulipians, who are becoming “seasoned performers,” working on their stage presence, cultivating a participation-loving audience. But some of the old Oulipian guard are dismayed by this. According to Daniel Levin Becker (the group’s youngest member, co-opted in 2009) in his new book Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature , the late François Caradec lamented that the group had gone from being a “société de littérature” to a “société de spectacle,” producing “Oulipo light,” as opposed to—as Jacques Roubaud puts it—“Oulipo ‘ard.” Oulipo light plays all the games of Oulipo ‘ard, with little of the substance. “A reliable indicator of Oulipo light,” Levin Becker writes, “is that a second ‘reader ’ is needed to make certain noises every now and then”— like the time when Marcel Bénabou read a poem which called for Frédéric Forte to ring a bell “at each instance of a word borrowed or adapted from Arabic.” Roubaud’s work, by contrast, blends poetry and mathematics with a high moral seriousness, though it is not without wit and levity, and is considered by the group both to have laid the solid foundations on which it stands today as well as to point a methodical and engaged way forward.
The crowds that gather at these performances, Levin Becker says, are generally familiar with the basic Oulipian games and would scowl resentfully if a member condescended to explain what a lipogram is (a text composed without the use of a particular letter: Georges Perec’s novel A Void is written entirely without the letter e and is therefore a “lipogram in e”). They play along at guessing games like the chicago (according to Levin Becker, a “guessing game where four sets of words or phrases with similar syntax act as clues for a fifth set that is also the homophonized name of a city”), or a variant of a game called a morale élémentaire in which Oulipians recite a phrase like “dim blaze” or “wan flame” and the audience has to guess which famous work of literature he is referring to (in this, Levin Becker ’s example, the answer is: “Pale Fire!”).
The problem may be that the group is weighed down by its own past; whereas the Oulipo was founded with the twin aims of researching (anoulipism) and producing (synthoulipism) potential literature, today research has won out, and creation takes place in the modes already laid out by earlier generations of Oulipians. The younger generation is hard put to come up with anything new—and they’re well aware of this problem. “What’s changed since those years is not so much the workshop’s relationship to the past as its relationship to its past,” Levin Becker observes; not one of their public readings goes by “without at least a few texts by someone no longer alive.”
The group’s most prolific producer of Oulipo light—or Oulipo lite—has to be Hervé Le Tellier. Although he has written an exhaustive scholarly study of the Oulipo, called Esthétique de l’Oulipo , Le Tellier ’s creative work is diverting but, on the whole, philosophically unserious. It lacks the drive to take the world apart in order to better rebuild it that characterizes the work of Perec, or the less well-known Oulipian Anne Garréta. Queneau defined Oulipians as “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.” But merely to build the maze and escape from it is not sufficient: the Oulipian Harry Mathews has said that the successful Oulipian work “has to be capable of producing valid literary results.” Le Tellier sets himself only medium-interesting and often juvenile constraints, and plays it safe in executing them. You get the feeling, reading Levin Becker ’s description of him, that this is one of the great open secrets of the Oulipo:
[Le Tellier ’s] books barely conceal a sentimentality both poignant and endearing; in person he has a magnetism that’s all brooding humor and sniperlike wit, and you get the sense that for him keeping the room in thrall is second nature, not because it’s fun but because it’s emotionally necessary. He is forever late, distracted, shabbily put together, despite all of which there is an ineffable seductive quality about him. (He also has this tic where every third blink or so is a veritable flutter of eyelashes, which probably helps a little).
In addition to being the most media-savvy of the Oulipians (he’s the one who sends out the most Facebook invites), Le Tellier is also the most frustratingly macho member of the group. In his work, misogyny and the marketplace collide, and the results are bad for the Oulipo. The group may not necessarily condone Le Tellier ’s sexism, but they overlook it. What are they going to do? They can’t throw him out. Once you’re in, you’re a member for life.
But why should we take Le Tellier seriously? He’s just one member of a group that, while generally acknowledged as an important part of French literary culture, still remains unknown even to well-read people. And yet in 2011 Le Tellier was the most widely-read (living) Oulipian in America, in addition to his ongoing visibility in France as a columnist for Le Monde and a member of the beloved France Culture radio show Les Papous dans la tête . He may be the Oulipo’s class clown, but surely what a group of people find amusing reveals something crucial about their values.
1. Le Tellier joined the Oulipo in December 1992, on the strength of his first novel, The Nostalgia Thief .
2. He’s got a knack for picking up on the procedures invented by other Oulipians.
3. He generated the exercise that would become the book Oulipo c’est un métier d’homme [“Oulipo is a man’s job”].
4. Here’s how that happened: Paul Fournel wrote a story about a professional skier. It began, “My job consists of going down the mountain from top to bottom. To go down it as quickly as possible. This is a man’s job.”
5. Then Le Tellier wrote his own variation, swapping out “skier ” for “seducer ”: “My art consists of seducing women over the course of an evening. Of seducing them as quickly as possible. This is a man’s art.”
6. There’s something kind of feckless about his will to seduction that makes you want to overlook it. He’s just a harmless tombeur, isn’t he?
7. Tombeur, n.m. French for a man, usually older, who won’t leave you alone if you’re young, pretty and female.
8. He is known within Oulipian circles for being a “notorious wit,” which is ironic if you’ve read his work.
9. 2011 saw four of his books published in English.
10. Other Press kicked things off in February with Enough About Love and The Intervention of a Good Man (published as an e-book).
11. Dalkey Archive responded in July with The Sextine Chapel and A Thousand Pearls (For a Thousand Pennies) .
12. Those four books were divided up between two very different publishers: Other Press is known for its dedication to (foreign) literary fiction, while Dalkey Archive is known for its dedication to (foreign) experimental fiction.
13. If you Venn Diagram Le Tellier across those two houses the only thing they’d have in common is his byline.
14. Enough About Love would be too conventional for Dalkey, and The Sextine Chapel too weird for Other.
15. The only one of the four to be a commercial success was Enough About Love , but it was successful enough that Other Press will bring out Le Tellier ’s most recent novel, Eléctrico W , next year.
16. Enough About Love is an urbane French book about love and adultery, told in a more or less straightforward chrono- logical narrative, while the Dalkey books are “experi- mental” works in a fragmented, explicitly Oulipian mode.
17. Enough About Love’s readers went on and on about its lovable qualities.
18. Lorin Stein called it “awfully cute” in Harper’s .
19. The Washington Post was moved to ask “What could be more romantic than falling in love in Paris?” and could not think of a better answer than reading Enough About Love .
20. BOMB called it “a French intellectual sex romp.”
21. The New York Times called it the key to unlocking one of life’s central questions: “At least as intriguing as how the French make their bread taste so good is how they manage all those extramarital love affairs they’re said to have.”
22. “We’ll be surprised if it leaves your hands,” chirped the style blog Daily Candy .
23. An enthusiastic blogger called The Book Lady attempted to count the ways in which she loved the book, concluding “I love it for amusing me, for making me think, for providing a window into other lives that helped me see my own more clearly and for being the perfect companion on a quiet afternoon.”
24. There is something weird about this kind of reception.
25. Something about Enough About Love was communicating at another level.
26. If it were a book written by an American, about Americans, I very much doubt Lorin Stein would have found it “cute.”
27. That kind of praise is reserved for books from France.
28. Americans love France, and Americans loathe France, and Americans love to loathe France.
29. How is it that French children don’t throw food and their women don’t get fat and they don’t die of heart attacks and they all have such robust and non-monogamous sex lives? And how did she tie her scarf that way?
30. American readers are prepared, when faced with a mediocre French book, to find some redeeming qualities because it is French, just as they’re prepared, when faced with a fluffy self-help book, to hate it more because it is French.
31. The Dalkey books didn’t get anywhere near as much press or praise.
32. Michael Orthofer reliably wrote about them in his Complete Review , calling them “entertaining,” though he wasn’t blown away by either.
33. Publisher’s Weekly wrote of The Sextine Chapel that it “seduces the reader with its wry wit” but that “the humor can be limp too.”
34. That’s a mean thing to say about a penis-driven narrative.
35. (Guess Le Tellier really isn’t writing Oulipo ‘ard.)
36. A Thousand Pearls received barely any reviews, except for a guy called Jeremy on Goodreads.com, who called it “a charming glimpse into the profundity and banality of one man’s random thoughts.”
37. All four of these books are steaming piles of sexism and masculine privilege.
38. Worse, they’re unfunny, clichéd and shot through with narcissism disguised as self-awareness.
39. There is a problem when this kind of writing can find a home on two distinguished publishers’ lists.
40. I can think of a few explanations why Dalkey would have published these books.
41. They’re taking advantage of the success of Enough About Love (the marketing explanation);
42. Any Oulipian text must be worth publishing by virtue of its being by an Oulipian (the co-opted avant-garde expla- nation);
43. Harry Mathews is on the board and is looking out for his fellow Oulipian (the nepotism explanation).
44. The percentage of books that are translated into English are “overwhelming male-authored,” noted Michael Orthofer: “around 80% in 2010.”
45. In 2011 that was down to 78%.
46. So being a non-Anglophone male makes you more likely to have your work published in translation in the US.
47. But whatever its language of composition, there’s a certain kind of work that gets published for reasons other than its own merit.
48. How else can I put this? Dude books rule.
49. Reading the best literary journals and book blogs, an alien visitor to our république des lettres would be forgiven for thinking that our leaders are called Pynchon, DeLillo and Wallace, and that they are subtended by a group of men named William (Gaddis, Gass & Vollmann).
50. I can’t think of a single female author who is as universally imposed on readers by editors and critics.
51. Can you?
52. “It takes the authority of a male voice to write from the center of culture,” I once heard the novelist Siri Hustvedt say. “As women, we’re just barking from the margins.”
53. This is what it sounds like at the center of culture: “After a series of multiplications including centimeters, frequency and various other intimate parameters, Laurent figures out that over the past twenty years his penis has traveled 12.5 kilometers inside a female body” (from The Sextine Chapel ).
54. This type of manthmatics (manth for short) really grosses me out.
55. I’m not sure Le Tellier would agree with my characterizing him as being at the center of anything; he presents himself as one of those nebbishly fragile-psyched beta-males who just want to be loved (on which, more below), and nebbish beta-males are in the habit of denying their masculine privilege.
56. Le Tellier ’s female characters are there to be desired and to reject the (male) protagonist. They are sexual objects and rejecting objects. They do not have interior lives and desires of their own.
57. And why would you want to be loved by a sexual/rejecting object?
58. Unless the sexual/rejecting object isn’t really the central issue.
59. What is the central issue, then?
60. Oh, that special something Lacan called “lack.”
61. By which he meant this: we are born into this world and we linger in a symbiotic harmony with our mothers until that cold hard day when we look in the mirror and understand that we are ourselves and not an extension of our mothers. We are separate beings.
62. Accepting our subjectivity means we’ll always want, and never retrieve, that symbiotic harmony.
63. We are on our own.
64. Refusal to acknowledge or inability to deal with this can lead to a panoply of pathologies, including excessive shopping, co-dependent relationships, and an abuse of social media.
65. Or it can lead to publishing pieces of writing that might be amusing to your friends but really don’t stand up on their own merits.
66. In cornering two sectors of the reading public (Francophilic novel-readers and too-cool-for-school experimental fiction- readers) Le Tellier has managed to get himself marketed as someone who can be read and adored by both women and men.
67. This is no mean feat, but perhaps easier for a work in trans- lation, with its whiff of exoticism and difference.
68. Can men get away with more if they are billed as “experi- mental” writers?
69. Yes.
One of the things Oulipians claim sets them apart from other avant-garde groups is that their movement isn’t meant to be political. And yet strong Oulipians, like Queneau, Harry Mathews and Perec, have wanted to interrogate the world we live in, largely through a disruptive use of language and a more conscious approach to the everyday world. Queneau’s Zazie in the Metro (1959) turns the map of Paris inside out; his heroine comes not to see the sights but to see the Metro, and the sights she does see are all scrambled up, one swapped out for another (“Look! The Panthéon!!!” “No, no, and no, isn’t the Panthéon.”).
Mathews has said that in titling his strange second novel Tlooth (1966) he aimed to disturb the very act of reading itself in order to “undermine any...hope of certainty that there may be in reading the text.” Perec, for his part, called for his readers to find what is significant in the quotidian: “Question your tea spoons,” he exhorted readers of “The Infra-Ordinary.” “What’s under- neath your wallpaper?”
Le Tellier doesn’t seem to want anyone to question anything. When he looks in his tea spoons all he sees in them is his own concave, upside-down reflection. Like the Surrealists he tends to see women as ciphers and archetypes—a sexism that’s latent in French culture (and avant-garde culture) in general. If Le Tellier were a writer on his own, this would be less important to point out; who has time to keep tabs on every single male chauvinist writer? But the Oulipo is menaced by the reactionary bourgeois element Le Tellier represents. This may be to some extent unavoidable; many avant-garde groups have seen their once- revolutionary ideas appropriated by the mainstream, where they lose their trenchant edge. The Oulipo’s loopy experiments have indeed come to seem like reasonable literary experiments. But if the Oulipo hopes to avoid exhausting its potential, it is up to its members to stay outside of the mainstream, writing from the margins rather than from the comfortable center of official culture. If an Oulipian leaves the workbench and settles into a comfortable armchair, his worldview narrows, and his work’s potential diminishes.
A vulnerability to sexism was coded into the Oulipo’s DNA from the outset.[1] Quick French lesson: an ouvroir , Arnaud tells us, “once denoted a shop...in which the master cobblers of Paris displayed their wares and pursued their trade.” This title indicates an emphasis on craft, on the made (and potentially anti-realist) quality of a work of literature. It also points up an element of trade associated with an ouvroir , where things made to be sold. Until around the eighteenth century ouvroir could refer to “that part of a textile factory where the looms are placed; or, in an arsenal, the place where a team of workers performs a given task.” In this way the Oulipo identifies itself as a much more grounded endeavor than other manifesto-driven avant-garde groups like the Futurists, the Surrealists, or the Situationists; in the ouvroir , we work with our hands, with tools. There is also, it must be pointed out, a distinctly masculine whiff to all of this—master cobblers creating and plying their wares, belonging to guilds, building a network of power founded on male camaraderie.
But ouvroir has some other, more feminine connotations. It can refer as well to a long room where the young women in a community work on projects appropriate to their sex; or a charitable institution for impoverished women and girls who found therein shelter, heat, light and thankless, ill-paid work, the result of which these institutions sold at a discount, thus depriving the isolated workers of their livelihood and leading them (as it was charged) into vice. Later, and for a short time only, ouvroir denoted a group of well-to-do women seeking to assuage their consciences in needlework for the poor and in the confection of sumptuous ecclesiastical ornaments.
Built into the term ouvroir , then, is a delightful condescension toward women: in the ouvroir women do what is “appropriate to their sex”; it is a place where women who have been stripped of any power over their own lives have been sent to be exploited, or a place where overprivileged women can help the poor through the creation of needlework and basically useless ornaments. The potential for women in the ouvroir is restricted.
The Oulipo was founded by a group of men in 1960, though women were eventually admitted: in 1975 Michèle Métail joined, though she has subsequently distanced herself from the group; the poet Michelle Grangaud 20 years later, in 1995; the novelist and scholar Anne Garréta in 2000; the systems analyst Valérie Beaudoin in 2003; and finally the mathematician Michèle Audin in 2009. (The group seems to have decided, when appointing female members, to employ the constraint that they must be named some variant of Michelle.)
The Oulipians borrow from the last definition of ouvroir to claim that they are doing benevolent work, casting themselves in the role of bourgeois women doing needlepoint. According to Queneau, the Oulipo “search[es] for new forms and structures which may be used by writers in any way they see fit,” tools which writers can use as handily as a needle, thread and openwork canvas. This is why they protest that they are neither a school, nor a movement. They are a “research group,” Jean Queval has explained, adding to our body of knowledge of potential things; they even see themselves as a “nursery school,” according to François Caradec.[2] The mixed metaphors would seem to be part of the point—the idea of pre-schoolers engaged in researching the intersection of literature and mathematics being the kind of delightfully surreal image the founding Oulipians loved.
But, like most research groups, the Oulipo is indeed a métier d’homme . All that math. All that game-playing. It’s hard, as a woman, to know what to make of the Oulipo, or where we might fit in to its project. It’s not that girls don’t like math: some do (just as some boys don’t). Girls also like games. And the idea of creating literature within certain constraints—why, women have been doing that for centuries. (Surely hiding the manuscript of your novel under your needlepoint and writing in jags when no one is looking constitutes an early Oulipian procedure.) Women writers are virtuosos at operating within constrained circum- stances. But the Oulipo—particularly Oulipo Lite—can seem slightly juvenile and pointless. Even women who love the Oulipo get impatient with it: “Lots of men sitting around doing crosswords,” said one of my experimentally inclined friends in an anti-Oulipo mood.
The Oulipo has already been criticized for being macho. At a conference in 2005, Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young delivered their Foulipo manifesto, in which they critiqued the “masculinist tendencies of most constraint-based writing” in a tract that adopted some of that constraint-based writing. They wondered if the Oulipo was not “pehaps toubled by an uninves- tigated sexism and thus not capable of being a pat of ou witing life in any way, a question we didn’t eally want to ask because we wee scaed of the answe and what it would deny us.”[3] But does it matter if the Oulipo is a boys’ club? What’s wrong with a bunch of men sitting around doing anagrams? Why does it matter how many women are members? To what extent does gender really matter for the Oulipo or its readers? What do we want from the Oulipo?
A little dissent, perhaps. A little acknowledgment of their masculine privilege. I don’t think women feel alienated by the Oulipo because women are inherently uninterested in games and constraints, but rather, through the work of Oulipians like Le Tellier, back through the long history ofthe avant-garde, women are made to feel as if, time and again, we have no place as subjects and agents of literature; we are only its objects.
Feminism and the Oulipo have more in common than one might think. Like Queneau and Perec, feminists have attempted to read life and literature against the grain. Critics like Rachel Blau Duplessis have argued that all existing poetic forms are fundamentally “male-gendered.” Feminist poets must address this formally: “Nothing changes by changing the content only.” The Oulipo, however, depends on pre-established (male- gendered) poetic forms like the sonnet and the sestina to provide a basic constraint. Other feminist critics from Barbara Guest to Adrienne Rich have proposed various degrees of rupture; they insist, as Kathleen Fraser writes, “on the primacy of reinventing language structures in order to catch one’s own at-oddsness with the presumed superiority of the central mainstream vision.”
This is what Spahr and Young were getting at in their manifesto: that the (masculinist) techniques of the Oulipo were considered still to have relevance while the (feminist) body- based arts evolving at approximately the same time are now considered heavy-handed and narcissistic. This was not intended as a critique of constraint itself but rather of what the privileging of Oulipian procedure and the dismissal of body- based arts implied, what was “slenderized”[4] out of the Oulipo and what perceptions were imposed on the naked female body:
We did not feel this wok that uses constaint was ielevant, not to men no to women. We did not want to dismiss it. When we liked this wok by men we saw the eteat into constaint as an attempt by men to avoid pepetuating bougeois pivilege, to make fun of the omantic nacissistic tadition, of all that tadition of fomalism. But at othe moments we ween’t so sue that this was eally a feminist, antiacist self-investigation. While this wok diectly avoided emotional and pesonal expes- siveness, it was mostly engaged with conceptual inven- tiveness, not an especially adical move post the tun of the centuy.[5]
Whatever one’s methods, avant-garde art must stage a continual intervention in the status quo if it is to resist being co-opted, and defused, by the mainstream.
The French title of Le Tellier ’s The Intervention of a Good Man (2007) was Je m’attache très facilement , a reference to Romain Gary, which in the English version is used as an epigraph (“I get attached very easily”). It’s not really clear why the title The Intervention of a Good Man was chosen; it doesn’t make a lot of sense once you’ve read the book, and it weighs the novel down with sentiment about the hero’s character. By contrast, the French title foregrounds the hero’s tendency to get over- invested. For who is more deserving of love than a “good man,” as the title urges us to consider our hero? (There is another alter- native—a kindly Scotsman—but his intervention is so minor that it cannot truly be the focus of the novel.) One wonders if it is under the heading of this unambitious goodness that he gets away with being a letch.
The Intervention of a Good Man is probably the least Oulipian of Le Tellier ’s works, but, as Le Tellier has said himself, any work produced by an Oulipian is to a certain extent Oulipian.[6]
It was originally published by Les Mille et une nuits, an imprint of Fayard, which specializes in publishing slim, small-format books, about 3 by 5 inches, generally of texts in the public domain. Sounding a little like it was written by the publisher, the Wikipedia entry for Les Mille et une nuits (an Oulipian resource if ever there was) notes that this format makes the books particularly convenient given the “constraints of urban life (commuting, waiting around)” and that the authors published by the imprint are very often “audacious (they have published several anarchists as well as numerous unknown ideologues).” In recent years, Mille et une nuits has expanded its operations to produce books of standard paperback size as well. It is then, like the Oulipo, a publishing house torn between anarchists and classics, between ideology and marketing, between the portability of the small format and the convention- ality of the larger one. Where does Le Tellier fit in?
The story is set in Scotland, where “our hero” (as he is referred to, chorally, by the narrator) has come to be with one of those very blond women, one who is 20 years younger than he, and who is “almost” married to someone else. She’s just not that into our poor hero, a vain yet somewhat self-aware, aging man, but this just keeps him on the line for her: he desperately needs her to validate him, somehow. Our hero’s romantic rival is also 20 years older than this very blond Scotswoman, but our hero does not believe he poses much of a threat.
The threat itself seems to emanate from this unpredictable, un-self-aware young woman, who seduces without “thinking of seducing,” and who “seems to think” that the three years she has been with the other man is a “huge” amount of time, though our vain, aging hero knows it is not. It may have been a mistake for our hero to come to Scotland, but he reassures himself with an Oscar Wilde quote that the things we regret are never our mistakes.
We learn less about the Scotswoman herself, although she is the object of the novel. Our hero tells us she is “intelligent and cultivated,” but he hasn’t been able to find out if she is funny, because he spends so much time attempting to impress her with his wit. The thing about this girl that keeps our hero interested is—have you guessed it?—she is “pretty, very pretty.” And “she knows it, of course.” (The hero’s musings are liberally peppered with “of courses,” to indicate how modestly, sadly, worldly wise he is.) We get a description of what kind of pretty she is: “tall, slender, with delightful little breasts, and her regular cycling keeps her small buttocks firm; her face is dusted with freckles.” The description of her bosom rings off-key; to whom is it delightful? To our hero, of course. As for his physique, he is more tanned and slightly more toned than the last time they met (but he has taken care not to look too much better, because he “would still not like to be too different from the man he was when he managed to seduce her ”). Hard to imagine the blond Scotswoman finding his body “delightful,” but this is the point—the vain, aging hero attempting to seduce the delight- fully breasted younger woman will always feel slightly inade- quate. Cue neuroses-driven non-plot.
Le Tellier ’s narrator keeps a tight watch not only on his characters but on the way his characters might be interpreted, anticipating the reader ’s judgments and conceding that, yes, the reader might be right. (He also congratulates himself for deciding to keep a diary of his misadventures—he dares not think in terms of “adventures,” which in French refers to love affairs.) The narrative is written in the present tense, to give (one imagines) immediacy to the proceedings and to the hero’s now- or-never, I-am-aging need. For this is the central subject of the book: I am aging, please want me love me need me . The self- awareness is so pronounced that one wonders if the need to be liked is restricted to the character of the vain aging hero, or if there is not some bleed over into the authorial persona as well.
I will say in Le Tellier ’s defense that he does not present himself as a writer who has figured it all out; rather he moves over the emotional topographies of his characters as if he were reading Braille. And yet—this is what makes him just so skeevy. He runs his fingers over all of his female characters, trying to figure out what they mean, what they want, who they are. He doesn’t mean any harm; he’s just trying to love and be loved. What more basic human desire is there? Yet the “love” our hero feels for the young blond Scotswoman is so intermingled with desire that he wonders whether he actually loves her or if he only (“only”) desires her.
He reflects on the addiction built into the term “heroine”: he is “genuinely dependent” on her. Like a drug, she is there for him to enjoy; she does not possess her own interiority. This is no longer a crime in fiction—E.M. Forster ’s comparison of round versus flat characters rings old-fashioned. But the love story is simply so hackneyed, so absent of any stakes, except insofar as we may feel somewhat bad for this vain aging hero. The novel announces its own futility at every corner, as if the very novel itself—The Novel, not only this one—could only lust after young women and mope about its own ineffectiveness. But this does not reflect some postmodern crisis of The Novel where love and sex are concerned: it reflects only the limits of Le Tellier ’s imagination. He wants to write about love, but he also doesn’t want to write about it. He wants to write about sex, but can only write about its banality.
Our vain aging hero attempts to put a name to his feelings for the young blond Scotswoman. His need for her is addictive, but is it love? Let’s see. “What does he think of when he thinks of her? Her eyes, her mouth, the back of her neck, other parts of her body that no listing could ever exhaust. This is a physical desire, one he could never fight. But what drives him toward her first and foremost is a sense of suffering, which at some points he lucidly analyzes as a fear of losing her.... He does love her—we should not be afraid to use the words—and is aware that he should not.” But why should he not love her? Nothing we are explicitly told would seem to endorse this kind of judgment; on the contrary, we seem intended to sympathize with him.
Does she desire him back? (Can a drug want you back?) Signs point to no; much like an inanimate object, “She is quite capable of going for days on end without giving any sign of life.” The only sign of anything she gives is in the sack, when he can tell “from the taut feel of her young body beneath his hands that he has been synonymous with pleasure for her, every time they have met.” Note the phrasing: he can tell from the feel of her body beneath his hands that she is enjoying herself, but she does not communicate, except inaudibly, tactilely. He “wants her skin to long for his, and to prove it to him every moment.”
Perhaps Le Tellier gets stuck in the banality of love and sex because he is trapped at the level of the epidermis. In his books a woman is there for his enjoyment, or she is a terrifying, myste- rious creature capable of devouring a man with one snap of her perfectly whitened teeth. This is not a worldview; this is not a philosophy. This is a constraint which the Oulipo should give up.
I will, however, give Le Tellier credit for bringing love into the Oulipo. Exploring the bonds that link people together in love or lust isn’t often a theme in Oulipian novels, or of experimental novels in general; perhaps it should be. Love itself is a kind of constraint. Love imposes form.
But what can the Oulipo bring to a love story?
Le Tellier ’s 2009 novel Enough About Love tries to take an honest look at people in love, and mostly succeeds, hitting a few false notes mainly where the women and their self-images are concerned (but we’ll get to that). A set of crisscrossing characters meet, fall in love, uncouple, and recouple: Anna falls for Yves (though she is married to Stan and he is with Ariane) and Louise falls for Thomas (though she is married to Romain). Thomas is Anna’s therapist, the kind of well-connected Left Bank Paris shrink who has photographs of himself with Lacan and with Barthes on his shelves. Each chapter shuffles this cast of characters, bringing each one momentarily into contact with another.
Its Oulipian predecessor is without a doubt Harry Mathews’ Cigarettes , but where Le Tellier ’s vision of love is exclusively concerned with sleazy older men lusting after younger women, Cigarettes looks at all different kinds of love in addition to heterosexual relationships—different kinds of sexual relation- ships (lesbians, gays, S&M) as well as non-sexual relationships (fathers and daughters, artists and subjects, critics and artists).
As in The Intervention of a Good Man , middle-aged masculine insecurities infuse the text. Yves Janvier, a middle-aged writer, worries about what he has achieved in his career to date, taking some solace in the fact that he makes his living from words, though he worries he does not make a comfortable enough living. “You have readers, but you haven’t yet found your true readership,” his editors assure him. Wooing the married Anna Stein, Yves gives her a copy of his latest book “with the unusual title The Two-Leaf Clover .” The description of the novel sounds perfectly matches The Intervention of a Good Man:
The book, which is very short, relates with ferocious intensity an emotional disaster, a restrained and clinical dissection of a lover ’s fantasy: a story as old as time itself about an older man who, having become infatuated with a young women and having seduced her a bit, but not enough, decides to go an join her in Ireland—which explains the title—where he collides head-on with her withering indifference in the most magnificent fiasco. The irony with which it is told made her laugh, and she thought: this man’s an expert.
With Yves as the author of a book which strongly resembles one Le Tellier himself has written, Yves would seem to be a double for Le Tellier.
Also like Le Tellier, Yves writes novels with constraints. His latest project is a book provisionally titled “Abkhazian Dominos,” a variation on the classic game of dominoes played in Abkhazia, a “small former Soviet republic on the Black Sea.” Le Tellier first goes into a long-winded discussion of how to play said dominos game before explaining how the novel based on the game will work: there will be six main characters, and each will get his or her own domino, with “the novel will reproduc[ing] the trajectory of a game of Abkhazian dominoes.” But—wait! That sounds more or less exactly like the novel we’ve been reading, with its configurations and re-configurations of characters. In fact, the characters are domino tiles!
Yves wants to call the novel “Abkhazian Dominoes,” but doesn’t plan to explain its structure to the reader. Le Tellier, of course, has just explained it to the reader. But Yves doesn’t stick to his own rules—and neither, one might infer, will Le Tellier. (Yves also doesn’t end up keeping the title; Anna quite sensibly tells him to pick something more universally attractive: “Put ‘love’ in the title,” she says.)
The text’s awareness of its own status as a text is calculated; Le Tellier can never stop commenting on his own limitations as a writer, but this doesn’t come across as a postmodern refusal to boonswaggle the reader with the constructed world of the novel so much as a self-flattering nod at Le Tellier ’s own self- awareness. “How to describe the beginnings of love?” Yves wonders. “That eternal question. Of course, ‘eternal question’ is a cliché.” This superficial self-awareness, and the strategic use of self-deprecation, is a cover for self-concern.
In this fictional self-portrait, Le Tellier includes a sketch of the writer as fighter, heroically battling clichés (“Yves is a writer because he would not write ‘infinite tenderness,’ ‘life’s journey,’ or ‘hopelessly in love’ without feeling ashamed”) and “pummel[ing]” easy wording. But what Yves/Le Tellier is really after—that most elusive of literary pursuits—is to represent reality on the page: “His words try to depict real things, like flagstones covering beaten earth: but, in places, rebellious weeds poke through.”
It’s not clear what these rebellious weeds are meant to represent—are weeds less real than flagstones?—but the lopsided binary provides a nice metaphor for the way Le Tellier ’s own work attempts to use the synthetic constraints of the Oulipo to get at the real of fiction, while the weeds of sexism keep growing up to disturb (one infers) his work’s aesthetics.
Clearly Le Tellier is trying to make the reader question the relationship between the real and the fictional through his description of the constraints at work; however “real” these characters may seem, however beaten and polished the language, it is the work of an Oulipian mastermind. But the weeds—those pesky weeds. No matter how attuned Yves/Le Tellier may try to be to language, mannerisms, pleonasm and rhythm, no matter how dedicated he may be to stomping them out, the weed-clichés about women come poking out of the ground, overwhelming the text to the point of near unread- ability.
Le Tellier ’s sexism is truly overt in the case of Anna Stein, one of the four protagonists of Enough About Love . Though each protag- onist is vain in his or her own way, Anna is the only one whose preoccupation with her appearance is a defining element of who she is. Le Tellier writes her from the outside, never quite able to penetrate what her interest in clothing might mean. We first see her through the eyes of her shrink, Thomas (who is also, in a way, a double for Le Tellier): “Anna Stein’s outfit is distinctive, as usual. Wide white pants that fit tightly over her buttocks to define them clearly, a fleetingly transparent, midnight blue blouse, and a shiny, black trench coat.” But in the very next phrase, we are meant to leap into Anna’s own perspective on her body: “She chooses her clothes carefully, her long tall figure allowing her to wear things that would be fatal on others. She sees herself as slim, lives being slim as synonymous with being rigorous. Gaining weight, she is convinced, is always a lapse.”
Something about this description rings false. Maybe it’s because it comes not long after a description of Anna as a teenager, her emotional maturation focalized through her body: “At 15, Anna ties her black hair up to reveal the nape of her neck. She triumphantly inhabits her brand-new woman’s body: she wears leopard-skin leggings and high heels, aggressive bras.” I’m reminded here of Angela Carter ’s discussion of male writers in drag as female characters, “Lorenzo the Closet Queen,” in which she takes D.H. Lawrence to task for his fetishistic attention to women’s clothing in Women in Love . Calling it “Lawrence’s most exuberantly clothed novel,” she criticizes Lawrence for using Gudrun and Ursula’s clothing to define them as characters. “Details about clothes are just the sort of thing a man would put into a book if he wanted the book to read as though it had been written by a woman,” Carter writes. “Lawrence clearly enjoys being a girl.” Carter ’s quoting Oscar Hammerstein II’s lyric for “Flower Drum Song,” but I’m also reminded of “How Lovely to Be a Woman” from the cultural milestone that is Strouse & Adams’s “Bye Bye Birdie”:
How lovely to be a woman
the wait was well worthwhile
How lovely to wear mascara
And smile a woman’s smile
How lovely to have a figure
That’s round instead of flat!
Whenever you hear boys whistle
You’re what they’re whistling at!
Is this what men think of female puberty? That we suddenly wake up one day, look in the mirror, clasp our newly sprouted breasts and dance around? (Later, Anna describes her breasts as having been “arrogant.” I have a hard time picturing a woman describing her breasts in those terms, but I supposed it could happen. There are a lot of different kinds of women around.)
Fast forward to the present moment: “Anna Stein is about to turn 40...Because she thinks there is a before and an after, as commercials for hair products, she is already living in mourning for what has been and in terror of what is yet to come.” Of course women worry about aging (as do the men in this book), but in the reference to hair product commercials Le Tellier gets in a real dig at Anna. (Is she perhaps based on a cruel ex- girlfriend?) Certainly unintelligent women can be a subject for fiction—why not? But there is something troubling about the way these analyst-writer-lovers see women.
In Enough About Love , Anna’s body has a will of its own. Yves writes to her, “I like looking at you naked, you like me looking at you...your buttocks turn and rise up toward me, their every curve wanting to arouse me, their soft, soft skin intended just for me. You smile, and this gesture gets the better of me, I’m gripped by desire, you are mine and I take you.” Anna—her volition, her desire—is reduced to her buttocks; they have agency but she can only be “taken.”
Louise is Anna’s less superficial, more down to earth foil: she has a great sense of humor, references the Oulipo, makes bad puns and can command a room full of lawyers. She teaches her husband how to address a crowd. And yet she is a “little blond slip of a woman.” We’re meant to think—oh she’s so little and yet so powerful! And yet—were she physically threatening it would be too much; the book would sink under the terrifying fixating power of Louise Blum. It is at her most astounding debut perfor- mance—giving a speech to win entry to the Paris Bar—that she meets her husband. Just as she moves out of bounds, she is folded back in, defused of her threat by the conformity of marriage.
Louise also exists through her clothes, but they give her a confidence Anna lacks, and this works to solidify her relation- ships rather than splinter them. When she goes out, she “put[s] on her makeup and this black dress which—she knows for sure—really suits her,” and when she goes out “She knows that there are men on cafe terraces looking at her, right now, as she walks up the Boulevard Saint-Germain.” She jokes to Thomas that when she goes out, “it’s to show off my ass.” Thomas smiles with confidence: “In spite of everything, he doesn’t actually mind if she shows it off, that ass of hers.”
The novel turns marriage into an Oulipian constraint, cleverly following Jacques Roubaud’s principle that the constraint must be the theme of the novel. Oulipianly, Le Tellier probes these love affairs, tunneling toward their exhaustion. Le Tellier has the conventions of the love story to get out from under, and the adultery plot is as limited in its outcome as a toss of the dice (or a game of dominos?). What are the possible outcomes? They stay together. They stay together and the partner finds out. They stay together and the partner doesn’t find out. They break up and (or because) the partner finds out.
They break up and (even though) the partner doesn’t find out. They break up and the partner finds out and the lover becomes the new partner. They break up and the partner doesn’t find out and the lover becomes the new partner...Etc, etc, etc. There are more outcomes but it’s boring to list them. The point is: two millennia of the love plot have exhausted it. What is the Oulipian writer to do, then, except treat marriage and infidelity like a game?
Yet Le Tellier saps Oulipian procedure of any urgency it might be thought to contain. It’s fine to set up the novel like a game; this is part of the novel-writing craft. And this kind of constraint brings the novel closer to poetry, in the sense that its various components (chapters instead of verses) are more strictly formalized. But somehow it robs the characters of their free will, and forces them to do the bidding of an authorial God. If Barthes’s now-canonical essay declared the death of the author, Le Tellier ’s novel reassures us that he’s alive and well and living in Paris.
Banality is the other side of love, its inevitable sequel, and Le Tellier makes it his principle theme. Modernism taught us how to cope with, and even appreciate, literary banality; Proust turns boredom into a narrative device to great effect in In Search of Lost Time . In fact, you could argue Proust’s use of the banal brings his novels closer to some concrete idea of “the real” precisely because it observes the progression of thought in an average mind. But with Le Tellier, rather than exploring banality from an aesthetic or philosophical perspective you get the distinct impression that he’s trying to validate his own banality by attributing it to his characters, by making it the very essence of humanity. In the early sections of Enough About Love , when we are learning about Yves’ struggles with weeds, we are treated to some of the “incomprehensible notes” contained in Yves’s diary:
“Jupiter ’s moons. Twelve. Some can be seen with the naked eye.” and “Being on the crest. Climbing up from the valley to be on the crest. No interest in the mountain per se.”
A few pages earlier, Yves Janvier also noted: “What is it about the rain that I like so much?”
“Why have I always hated having my picture taken?”
“We talk about overwhelmed and underwhelmed, but is anyone ever whelmed?”
“The left cerebral hemisphere controls speech (Paul Broca).”
“Abkhazian dominoes, the only game of dominoes where, if you can’t play, you are allowed to pick up a domino that’s already on the board.”
Placing the banal in a work of literature is a great and noble tradition in French literature going back at least to Flaubert and Balzac. But whereas, in Species of Spaces or W. , Perec uses the banal in order to get at something larger than himself (war, displacement, abandonment, organic and inorganic change, capitalism) Le Tellier ’s use of it shows he has a difficult time thinking of anything other than himself and things that directly concern him—like love, sex, rejection, and how bloody boring it all can be. Perec aims to overturn ordinary everyday banality to question its underlying assumptions and values; Le Tellier just wants to quip and get laid.
Le Tellier confronts banality head-on in his epigraph to The Sextine Chapel (2005), which comes from Roland Barthes: “Sexual practices are banal, impoverished, doomed to repetition, and this impoverishment is disproportionate to the wonder of pleasure they afford.” As Le Tellier narrates one interlude: “Cunnilingus, then fellatio, then penetration, then orgasm (or not)....Terence thinks how right Foucault was: sexuality is quite monotonous.” Le Tellier takes up this idea and builds on it, exploring chains of sexual partners in a series of vignettes depicting the coupling (ok, the fucking) of Anna and Ben, Ben and Chloe, Chloe and Dennis, all the way through the alphabet to Yolande and Zach, where it starts again: Zach and Anna, Anna and Harry, Harry and Oriane, etc. Each person appears in six vignettes with six different partners. A table of contents lists all the pages on which you can see each of the characters in action, so to speak.
Think of all the people you’ve been with, then the people they’ve been with, and the people they’ve been with—nothing makes you want to settle down with one sexual partner like a book that shows you all the potential wackos in your sexual group. And because this is a book by an Oulipian, some of those people have been the same people. (The Oulipian allergy to chance and randomness would seem to demand this; Le Tellier is trying to build an erection with a specific set of blueprints; the Oulipianness of the blueprints would seem to call for some limits to be imposed, but, à la Hundred Thousand Billion Poems , wouldn’t it be far more interesting for Le Tellier to have found a way for his core group of people to be linked up to Hundred Thousand Billion Lovers ?).
As with Enough About Love , Le Tellier owes a debt to Harry Mathews, but here he makes that debt explicit: The Sextine Chapel is dedicated to Mathews and proves to be an homage to his Singular Pleasures (1983), a collection of 61 short scenes of people around the world wanking off. But The Sextine Chapel has none of Mathews’ ingenious perversion. Mathews’ text spins ever wilder scenarios of people masturbating—alone, together, homosexually, heterosexually, without even touching themselves directly, with tree-trunks, in Gaza, and on the edges of glaciers: “Somewhere north of the Bening Straits, sitting on the edge of an ice floe, his face impassive, all movement concealed beneath thickness of pelt and fur, an Eskimo male of 31 is bringing himself to an orgasm of devastating intensity in a slickness of dissolving blubber.” Toward the end of Singular Pleasures Mathews suddenly invents a group called MAID, or Masturbation and Its Discontents, whose members invent obstacles to be overcome while they masturbate.
The Oulipian constraints used to build The Sextine Chapel are as monotonous as a boring sexual encounter; here’s how Le Tellier described The Sextine Chapel to Bookforum :
I first decided to use three constraints that all relate to the number 78.
First the ceiling: the 26 characters correspond to the letters of the alphabet and each character makes love to six other characters, each scenario unfolding according to a particular circular rotation.
For the floor of the chapel: the number 78 is the sum of the numbers of one to 12, and from this I was able to construct a series of triangles within a larger triangle, with 12 triangles as its base.
Are you still reading? Here’s the rest, feel free to skip over it:
Every chapter (a small triangle) contained a[n] element of reference (often well-hidden) to the chapter that surrounds it, another small triangle in the larger triangle.
For the “stairs” that go from floor to ceiling...I used the sextine, a formal poetry of the troubadours, consisting of six stanzas of six verses, and ending with the “envoi,” composed of three verses. Or 39 verses in all. In the sextine, the words at the end of the verses of the first strophe (1 2 3 4 5 6) turn like this, for the second strophe (6 1 5 2 4 3), and so on, five times. Two successive sextines equal 78 lines in total.
There are images in the back of the book: the floor of the Sextine Chapel and the ceiling of the Sextine Chapel. One is a set of triangles showing each page number in a triangular relationship to the others, together forming one big triangle that looks like a checkered floor, except the checks are triangles. And the ceiling is a circle of criss-crossing lines connecting each person to his or her partners, their names listed around the edge of the circle like an astrological chart. If you’re not into math you won’t care about the illustrations.
In The Sextine Chapel , the vignettes are 100% heterosexual, which seems really weird, and some of them are downright orientalizing, as someone called Rémy “finger[s] the delicate hairs of [Qiu’s] jade-colored, oriental pubis.” Mathews indulges in this kind of exoticization as well, but to such an absurd extent that it’s impossible to take seriously. Le Tellier on the other hand casts his couples in bourgeois locations like the Museum of Natural History or behind a formica countertop. He tries to be funny, but it falls flat: “Pierre thinks how much kisses are like pickles in a jar. One you manage to extract the first one, the others come of their own accord.”
What Le Tellier was trying to do in The Sextine Chapel — which, I assume, is write engagingly and interestingly about uninteresting sexual encounters—has been done more success- fully elsewhere, not only by Mathews but by Nicholson Baker, whose recent porno-novel House of Holes is louche, border-trans- gressing, and original. (On this point I disagree with my colleague Barrett Hathcock, who in Lady Chatterley’s Brother takes Nicholson Baker to task for having in House of Holes completely omitted any semblance of character or plot devel- opment. Surely modernism has disabused us of a need for either.)
The confluence of sex and mathematics would seem to indicate that The Sextine Chapel wants to legitimize sex as a casual recreational activity akin to driving or skiing, and writing as a sequence of not very interesting observations. It takes the particular talent of an Oulipian to blend mathematical principle with the romance-killing mathematics behind our love affairs. But on the other hand, it may be the too-perfect interior archi- tecture of Le Tellier ’s texts that turns them into works frozen in their own forms, much like the nineteenth-century novel rejected by the modernists, laden with accumulated detail.
Although Le Tellier told Bookforum that the themes are not the same in Enough About Love and The Sextine Chapel (“ The Sextine Chapel talks about sex, the sexual act, without love (incidentally, the book does not contain the word tenderness ), while Enough About Love addresses the issue of love and desire”), I think he means to do more than just be funny, and the book’s delightfully heretical take on the Sistine Chapel seems to support this. The book is a massive orgy of people groping each other—the title of the book, one imagines, referring to the animating touch from God’s finger to Adam’s in Michelangelo’s ceiling. Through touch, we are given life. Following this logic, Le Tellier ’s characters grunt and strain and rut in a frantic group attempt to fuck themselves into life. And yet, life eludes them: they are characters stuck in a book by an author who has already decided that their pursuits are banal and their women destined to disap- point them. The Sextine Chapel represents a philosophical unseri- ousness toward a serious philosophical problem. Faced with the pointlessness of it all, Le Tellier seizes on the female body as a source of validation, but it provides only disappointment at every turn.
Le Tellier has written an impressive treatise on the subject of the Oulipian aesthetic; this aesthetic, if it can be said to exist, has to do with the pleasure that the reader takes in deciphering the text— le plaisir du texte .[7] This may consist of recognizing the constraints, “but not necessarily.” Defining the aesthetic in this way, Le Tellier suggests, “eliminates any illusion that we can analyze the quality of a work, allows subjectivity to enter the aesthetic judgment and imposes the term ‘complicity.’”
Oulipian reading calls for a different kind of engagement with a text—it has to do with a heightened awareness with what else the language may be saying apart from what it seems to be saying. In some cases, as in The Intervention of a Good Man , the Oulipian reader may look for constraints in vain. (Even if the author has said there aren’t any constraints, the reader may ask, how do we know for sure?) It “differs from regular reading only in the reader ’s degree of complicity with the author,” writes Daniel Levin Becker. “There’s a different kind of attention that the Oulipian texts calls for, inherited from modernism, which calls on the reader to move from passive receiver of the text to active collaborator/decipherer of its meaning.” So whether or not the Oulipian writer has advertised his (or her) constraints, it is still a question “of making you, the reader, aware of your own effort and engagement, of putting you in control, of diminishing the distance between finding and making.”
The difference between Oulipo Lite and Oulipo ‘ard may have to do with this complicity between reader and writer. Is the reader just hanging out listening to funny poems punctuated by ringing bells? Or is the reader working with the text, figuring out its constraints, its meaning. But this dichotomy would seem to separate Oulipian culture into “high” and “low,” and there’s room for all variants of Oulipo at the table. Being entertained with word games is as valid a way of spending an evening with an Oulipian as pondering the absence of e in Perec’s A Void . But Le Tellier ’s Oulipo Lite violates the complicity between reader and writer through a reactionary approach to sex and gender. I wince when a literary double for a writer writes of a younger female’s “pretty young body beneath his...the nape of her neck docile to his kisses.” I mean, gross. It’s no wonder his “good man” keeps striking out with women—he traps them in exteriority.
Oulipo is about what’s inside. It explores the silent spaces between letters and words, investigating language to reveal latent meanings. There is nothing inherently sexist or macho in this pursuit. The Oulipo will be fine if it can shed this chauvinist inheritance, and if it can learn instead to promote members like Anne Garréta, who in her novel Sphinx (1986) eliminates all references to her two main characters’ genders. (This was one of the reasons she was invited to join the group, according to Jacques Roubaud in an interview with BOMB Magazine .) Garréta’s prose is elegant and even mannered, without being prim. Sphinx is a very intense book; it is déchirant , it rips itself to shreds. Composing a love story without revealing if the narrator and the central love interest are men or women is a neat device, particularly difficult to achieve in French because so much of the language reflects the gender of the speaker and the addressee; but Garréta manages, in line with Roubaud’s principle, to make the constraint the subject of the novel. Bodies are repeatedly hidden throughout the course of events, just as, through grammatical evasion, Garréta hides the sex of her lovers from the reader. She gives us images of looking without deciphering—the stare of the deceased, who see without seeing; the throng of bodies in a dance club, monstrous in their undefin- ability but somehow prolonging their lives through their togeth- erness; the image of the narrator ’s body as s/he stares at him/herself in the mirror, stepping out of the shower. We are shown only his/her wrinkles, his/her fatigue, the outfit s/he decides to wear; we see nothing specific, for the novel tells us that specificity not only doesn’t matter but is somehow impos- sible. The very nature of love and being is at odds with a deciphering gaze. Understanding carries with it a finality that Garréta attempts to keep at bay.
This translates as well into a superstition of linear narrative. The narrator can’t render her love “discursive” when s/he wants to declare it to his/her lover, who is called A*** in the text:
I alternated (and received no response) between snatches of stories and accounts of my interior monologues, between syllogisms and images, moving without transition from slang to an elevated style and from the trivial to the abstract without ever finding the right ton or appropriate genre in which to make my speech.
A postmodern narrative that is very much of its time, Sphinx points a way for literature to escape the confines of fictional narrative. Garréta’s constraint answers the challenge of feminist critics to “reinvent language structures”—or at least avoid certain structures—“in order to catch one’s own at-oddsness with the presumed superiority of the central mainstream vision.” The elimination of gender in a love story might prove an interesting Oulipian exercise for Le Tellier to undertake.
Garréta’s work is wide-ranging and provocative; Dalkey or Other would do well to publish her in English. McSweeney’s published her wonderful piece “On Bookshelves” in 2007; why not a translation of her novels from their publishing arm? Why should the Oulipo continue to be a métier d’homme —why not allow for it to become a métier de femme ?
Why not indeed?