Many Subtle Channels : In Praise of Potential Literature (9780674069626) by Daniel Levin Becker

Author:Daniel Levin Becker [Levin Becker, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780674065277
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr
Published: 2012-07-30T21:00:00+00:00

In the same spirit, Roubaud has proposed a collective memoir of the group to be assembled by fragments called moments oulipiens (oulipian moments). “I picture such a portrait as a large puzzle in which different moments oulipiens are placed, bit by bit, bringing to light the increasingly sharp face of the model, Oulipo,” he writes in La Biblio-thèque de Warburg, volume six of the Projet. “The ensemble of them, endlessly expanded, year in and year out, if possible with contributions from all of the Oulipians, organized according to appropriate constraints, will eventually, in the not-too-distant future, constitute a collection of texts capable of illustrating the hypothesis expressed by the title of the first part of this chapter.”10

For now, there are no explicit constraints; there is only the stipulation that a moment oulipien involve or have been witnessed by at least one member of the group, and that it be as precise as possible on names and dates (“for the edification of future generations,” specifies the back cover of the first and so far the only collection of the form, published in 2004). It can be monumental, like the meeting where Perec read out some early excerpts from La Dispari-tion and nobody noticed there were no E’s in it, or mundane, like the nth time Paul Braffort misplaced his wallet. Most examples are funny, some bittersweet even if they’re not meant to be—Fournel’s story about Perec’s IBM typewriter, which rendered the last word of Life A User’s Manual and then never worked again, chokes me up every time I read it—but sure enough, each one does fill in a piece of the puzzle.

If the moment oulipien sounds like a slightly self-indulgent, anecdotal project from a handful of slightly beloved public figures, that’s because it is. (The book has not sold particularly well.) But it also has a more interesting figurative function: it’s how Roubaud has chosen to set about actually writing the unwritten, collective, and necessarily unfinishable novel that he believes the Oulipo to be. The plot is a little bit staid, maybe, but each recurring character comes across with a set of echoes and contradictions consistent with that unnerving overlap between real life and realist fiction. There’s also something wonderfully im-mersive about getting all your information in a novel from its characters: there is only the world that surrounds and unites them, none of the off-the-page interference that Barthes and Foucault theorized. By blurring the lines separating author and person and character, each moment oulipien builds a piecemeal portrait of the group that’s exactly as faithful and trustworthy as the reader needs it to be, the story of the left leg as told by the right shoulder.

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