I alluded to this before, so to prove that for one sunlit second I wasn't actually talking out of my arse..
In the sunlit days of the turn of the millennium a young man was mulling over the idea of doing an MA in Creative Writing. That’s the sort of thing people did back then. Everyone told this young man what a talent he was, and how he was going places, he believed them, he had no reason not to.
As he mulled, and mulled some more (though fairly certain that it was a done deal, and that said MA was naturally the gateway to bigger and better things, a large advance for a novel before his second year was out seemed probable, might have to wait a few years before he landed one of the bigger prizes) he wandered down a library corridor and, entirely by chance pulled down a book, large letters down the spine named it “OULIPO COMPENDIEUM”.
Dear reader, that young man was me. And that tortuous opening, and my usage of the address “Dear reader” may have (correctly) informed the more astute amongst you that that advance never arrived, nor any prizes. This is due to a number of unfair things, but chiefly due to the fact that in the succeeding sixteen years I have signally failed to write a single one of the many, many books for which I’ve had ideas. Sometimes I’ve got as far as writing a bit of them, more often than not they remain a note on the back of an envelope, stuffed into a journal. Occasionally these are fully fledged ideas, with a beginning a middle and an end, or sometimes a beginning and a middle, or sometimes just a middle. More often they are half-baked notes along the lines of “something about middle-aged werewolves?”. What they all share though, is an utter lack of fulfilment. Ideas denied their apotheosis, skulking in yellowing notebooks. The shame is overwhelming.
But back to that library. I have no idea why I picked the book up. The word Oulipo had crossed my path before, but I’d not paid it much heed (I didn’t have to, I was a genius). But once I sat, and started reading, I couldn’t stop. Y the time I was done, I was burning with the idea. This, I thought, this was what I was going to do.
A brief digression for those unaware: the Oulipo (a contraction of “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle” which can be roughly translated as “Workshop for potential literature”) are a largely French group of writers, founded in the sixties, who seek to use formal constraints as inspiration for their work (such as lipogram, the deliberate omission of a letter, Georges Perec’s A Void is written entirely without the letter e).
This was a new world to me. I was going to do this, I was going to write an Oulipian novel. Sure, some had been done before, probably, but this time it was going to be me doing it.
I have since discovered, of course, that many have been done before. Perec’s A Void and Life, a User’s Manual are much read and cherished on my bookshelves. Books by Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau nuzzle up to them companionably. The British writer Richard Beard has, in the intervening years, comprehensively beaten me to the English Oulipian punch, as has Gilbert Adair. I’ll still keep their books, I bear them no ill-will, it’s my own fault for not writing the damn book.
But yes, the book I was going to write wouldn’t be so simple as to have a single constraint. Pshaw. I was, as I may have pointed out, really, really clever. So I wasn’t going to limit myself to just the one. I’d never done this before, but that, clearly, was for amateurs. So I conceived a plot based around a the constraint of x mistakes y for z. Utilised far more cleverly by Harry Mathews in The Journalist the idea is that one character assigns a role to another which they don’t recognise. In Mathews case a husband recognises his wife as his wife but expects her to behave as his mother. In my case, being in my early twenties and therefore only really thinking about what people in their early twenties think about, that is to say drinking and intercourse I had a set of characters in which the chain went thus, A cares for B, who in Turn cares for C, who in turn is in love with D, and so forth. Five characters in all.
I know, revolutionary huh? I really was very clever. But of course I wasn’t going to stop there, no, each chapter was to be a dialogue featuring only two of the characters, each of whom would converse only once with each other, and through these conversations, ten in all, each of precisely ten thousand words in length (I was laying on the constraints thick and fast by now, giddy with the precision of it all) the novel would play out. But no! Let’s not stop there! Why would we? Each individual chapter would have a single constraint applicable only to it. One would be a lipogram in e, in homage to Perec’s aforementioned A Void, one would be written entirely in dialogue, one in vastly differing style (a nod to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style). I toyed with the idea of including some of that wackier ones, for example n+7 (in which one counts on seven nouns in the dictionary from the ones one wished to use: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” becomes “Frankly my decapod, I don’t give a Dane”) but discarded that, after all, I was going to win prizes, impress with my command of style and tone, my facility with constraint, not freak people out. One would, um..
By this point, I was running out of steam. This stuff was hard.
Of course, that’s the point. Writing utilising Oulipian constraints is easy, I’ve used them many times since as ways to get the brain working, when the conscious mind is working on a puzzle (how am I going to write this using only the keys from the left hand side of the keyboard?) the subconscious loosens up, and ideas to flow; they can also be excellent tools for generating text, one of my favourites being antonymic translation, wherein one simply writes the opposite if what’s on the page. However, writing something good using constraints is hard. Anyone can use constraints to generate a few lines of text; coming up with a magnificent novel like Life: a User’s Manual takes incredible craft, skill and time. I was caught between two stools, those of wanting to be an experimental writer, and wanting to be a successful one. Only a few geniuses can be both. I duly became neither. The ideas, sketched out in outline only live on in my hard drive to this day, waiting patiently for me to get round to ithem.
Which, as you have doubtless gathered, I never did. And, in all likelihood, never will. But then, in a twist of fate to delight Perec himself they gained a new lease of life as the seed of this idea, to write about all the books I never actually got round to writing. I felt once more that rush of confidence, that surety of my own ability, for a fraction of a second I was twenty one again, and as much of an insufferable ass as ever.
Until, whilst researching this piece I came across a work by Oulipo member Marcel Benabou. Entitled “Why I have not written any of my books”, I’ll leave you to work out what it’s about. I cursed quietly, briefly, and went back to the day job.
In the sunlit days of the turn of the millennium a young man was mulling over the idea of doing an MA in Creative Writing. That’s the sort of thing people did back then. Everyone told this young man what a talent he was, and how he was going places, he believed them, he had no reason not to.
As he mulled, and mulled some more (though fairly certain that it was a done deal, and that said MA was naturally the gateway to bigger and better things, a large advance for a novel before his second year was out seemed probable, might have to wait a few years before he landed one of the bigger prizes) he wandered down a library corridor and, entirely by chance pulled down a book, large letters down the spine named it “OULIPO COMPENDIEUM”.
Dear reader, that young man was me. And that tortuous opening, and my usage of the address “Dear reader” may have (correctly) informed the more astute amongst you that that advance never arrived, nor any prizes. This is due to a number of unfair things, but chiefly due to the fact that in the succeeding sixteen years I have signally failed to write a single one of the many, many books for which I’ve had ideas. Sometimes I’ve got as far as writing a bit of them, more often than not they remain a note on the back of an envelope, stuffed into a journal. Occasionally these are fully fledged ideas, with a beginning a middle and an end, or sometimes a beginning and a middle, or sometimes just a middle. More often they are half-baked notes along the lines of “something about middle-aged werewolves?”. What they all share though, is an utter lack of fulfilment. Ideas denied their apotheosis, skulking in yellowing notebooks. The shame is overwhelming.
But back to that library. I have no idea why I picked the book up. The word Oulipo had crossed my path before, but I’d not paid it much heed (I didn’t have to, I was a genius). But once I sat, and started reading, I couldn’t stop. Y the time I was done, I was burning with the idea. This, I thought, this was what I was going to do.
A brief digression for those unaware: the Oulipo (a contraction of “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle” which can be roughly translated as “Workshop for potential literature”) are a largely French group of writers, founded in the sixties, who seek to use formal constraints as inspiration for their work (such as lipogram, the deliberate omission of a letter, Georges Perec’s A Void is written entirely without the letter e).
This was a new world to me. I was going to do this, I was going to write an Oulipian novel. Sure, some had been done before, probably, but this time it was going to be me doing it.
I have since discovered, of course, that many have been done before. Perec’s A Void and Life, a User’s Manual are much read and cherished on my bookshelves. Books by Harry Mathews, Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau nuzzle up to them companionably. The British writer Richard Beard has, in the intervening years, comprehensively beaten me to the English Oulipian punch, as has Gilbert Adair. I’ll still keep their books, I bear them no ill-will, it’s my own fault for not writing the damn book.
But yes, the book I was going to write wouldn’t be so simple as to have a single constraint. Pshaw. I was, as I may have pointed out, really, really clever. So I wasn’t going to limit myself to just the one. I’d never done this before, but that, clearly, was for amateurs. So I conceived a plot based around a the constraint of x mistakes y for z. Utilised far more cleverly by Harry Mathews in The Journalist the idea is that one character assigns a role to another which they don’t recognise. In Mathews case a husband recognises his wife as his wife but expects her to behave as his mother. In my case, being in my early twenties and therefore only really thinking about what people in their early twenties think about, that is to say drinking and intercourse I had a set of characters in which the chain went thus, A cares for B, who in Turn cares for C, who in turn is in love with D, and so forth. Five characters in all.
I know, revolutionary huh? I really was very clever. But of course I wasn’t going to stop there, no, each chapter was to be a dialogue featuring only two of the characters, each of whom would converse only once with each other, and through these conversations, ten in all, each of precisely ten thousand words in length (I was laying on the constraints thick and fast by now, giddy with the precision of it all) the novel would play out. But no! Let’s not stop there! Why would we? Each individual chapter would have a single constraint applicable only to it. One would be a lipogram in e, in homage to Perec’s aforementioned A Void, one would be written entirely in dialogue, one in vastly differing style (a nod to Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style). I toyed with the idea of including some of that wackier ones, for example n+7 (in which one counts on seven nouns in the dictionary from the ones one wished to use: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” becomes “Frankly my decapod, I don’t give a Dane”) but discarded that, after all, I was going to win prizes, impress with my command of style and tone, my facility with constraint, not freak people out. One would, um..
By this point, I was running out of steam. This stuff was hard.
Of course, that’s the point. Writing utilising Oulipian constraints is easy, I’ve used them many times since as ways to get the brain working, when the conscious mind is working on a puzzle (how am I going to write this using only the keys from the left hand side of the keyboard?) the subconscious loosens up, and ideas to flow; they can also be excellent tools for generating text, one of my favourites being antonymic translation, wherein one simply writes the opposite if what’s on the page. However, writing something good using constraints is hard. Anyone can use constraints to generate a few lines of text; coming up with a magnificent novel like Life: a User’s Manual takes incredible craft, skill and time. I was caught between two stools, those of wanting to be an experimental writer, and wanting to be a successful one. Only a few geniuses can be both. I duly became neither. The ideas, sketched out in outline only live on in my hard drive to this day, waiting patiently for me to get round to ithem.
Which, as you have doubtless gathered, I never did. And, in all likelihood, never will. But then, in a twist of fate to delight Perec himself they gained a new lease of life as the seed of this idea, to write about all the books I never actually got round to writing. I felt once more that rush of confidence, that surety of my own ability, for a fraction of a second I was twenty one again, and as much of an insufferable ass as ever.
Until, whilst researching this piece I came across a work by Oulipo member Marcel Benabou. Entitled “Why I have not written any of my books”, I’ll leave you to work out what it’s about. I cursed quietly, briefly, and went back to the day job.
Great ideas, man! If you ever write them, I'd love to read them :)
ReplyDeleteOne of these days...
ReplyDelete