Oulipo (sometimes OuLiPo). Contraction of Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, a group of writers formed principally by Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais, Jacques Bens, Jean Lescure, and Jean Queval and subsequently including Jacques Roubaud, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino. Beginning as an offshoot of the Collège de 'Pataphysique, this group of writers concerned themselves above all with the principle of ‘potential’, seeing the creation of literature as arising most felicitously from the imposition of constraints of a rigid and sometimes mathematical nature. One of their number offered the early definition of the group and its endeavours as: ‘rats qui ont à construire le labyrinthe dont ils se proposent de sortir’—and indeed most of their works, whether original compositions or transformations of existing texts, have a labyrinthine quality as well as a strongly ludic dimension [see
From initial meetings begun in November 1960, the group expanded its numbers—including corresponding members, sometimes writing in other languages—and its activities throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Two manifestos were published (La Lipo and Le Second Manifeste) by the mathematician François Le Lionnais, and a number of collective projects and publications were undertaken. The main body of the group's work—aside from the principal achievements of individuals—can be found in two publications: La Littérature potentielle (1973) and Atlas de littérature potentielle (1981), and perhaps the most inventive conjunction of the mathematical and the literary is to be found in Roubaud's ɛ (1967).
Citing the invention of the sonnet as an early example of ‘littérature potentielle’, since it combines great rigour with great freedom of invention, the group set out to propose as many new ways of creating literary works as possible. These ‘lipos’ (= littératures potentielles) were to operate in two fundamentally different ways: either as a set of constraints to be imposed on material of the author's own invention, whether in prose or in verse, or as a set of transformational rules applied to existing literary works. Thus Queneau, as an example of the latter, reduces Mallarmé's celebrated sonnet: ‘Coup d'aile ivre, | sous le givre, | aujourd'hui | pas fui’ to a haiku-like form, while another celebrated method consists of replacing every word by that found seven places on in a nominated dictionary. Of the former type, perhaps Perec's adoption of the lipogram—a form requiring the omission of one or more letters—has produced the best and best-known example in La Disparition—a novel written without the use of the letter e—and Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes is evidence of the fruitfulness of the Oulipian approach to verse.
[Ian Revie]
