I have not posted in a while because the things I have been thinking keep appearing other places, but said better. I am thinking now especially of fiction (text) as object thing I was going to work on until I saw that first essay in the Donald Barthelme’s book of assorted non-fiction and realized he’d thought the same thing, but more clearly and a good few decades ago. So the pieces you should have read here are now proliferating much more widely in diverse and more legitimate sources.
My other reason for writing less here is that I’ve been trying to work on my thesis. I will give you some excerpts so you can see the kinds of thoughts I’m having. The following are still in rough draft form and don’t include the quotations and citations that will buttress them.
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BEGINNINGS: Towards an Understanding of Potential, Literature, and Potential Literature
“Oulipo stops where the work begins”
1) I should like to begin my Beginnings with the beginning Beginning. I was walking to get coffee along the trash-strewn street in my South Philadelphia neighborhood and came upon thought that beginning Beginnings in this way was only appropriate, as it will highlight a few of the key concerns that will be begun and linked in the further Beginnings. These three keys will be:
1)- Language, repetition, and variation
2)- Concern with form
3)- Voluntariness and self-awareness
This is to say, the structure of the project itself plays with and into the fundamental topics under consideration. ‘Beginnings’ is a series of unfinished micro-essays that are thematically linked and the open up (in)to potentialities. Thus the project enacts (physically) the formal/materialist concerns of the Oulipo and (metaphorically) the nature of potentiality, thereby acting formally as instructive about the nature of both. This Beginning and those that follow are therefor not meant to be definitive remarks, but rather sites of interlinking explorations. As such, though the order of the Beginnings is significant and planned, it is not imperative that it is strictly followed. The reader is welcome to chart any course desired, to skip passages, to loop backwards. One of the most exciting things about Oulipian constraint is that it so often lends itself to a greater freedom for the reader.
2) The Etymologies of ‘Literature’ and ‘Potential’- A place where one might choose to begin this kind of investigation of words is in the words themselves. Our topic being potential literature, we thus has three natural etymological entry ways: Potential, Literature, and Potential Literature. Below we will attempt a preliminary etymology of each.
Literature:
Potential:
Potential Literature: Francois Le Lionais writes: “QUOTE from primer ”
3) The project of Beginnings needed a number that, like any given language unit, was both significant and arbitrary. To arrive at this number, I elected to use a variation of the practice of gematria, or Kabbalistic numerology. (Explain the process). Thus “Begin” translates “73” (2+5+7+9+50). And so 73 became my number, the number that would structure the entire project, holding within it a reference to both the highly potentializing practice of Kabbalist gematria and chosen arbitrary structuring of the classic Oulipian work.
Members of the Oulipo write frequently about their use of the axiomatic method. CITE from ‘Oulipo Primer’
24) Plagiarism by Anticipation/Plagiarism and Potential-
One of the more suggestive terms invented by the Oulipo is ‘Anticipatory Plagiarism’. The term is used to designate any instance in which an Oulipian constraint or structure turns out to predate it’s discovery or invention by an actual member of the group. This naturally leads to the cognate ‘Anticipatory Plagiarist’. Such plagiarists are held in high esteem.
Plagiarism after the fact, that is, plagiarism of the ordinary variety, is rarely looked upon with much favor. Oulipo’s playful co-opting of the term is not, at least primarily, a defense of plagiarism as such. Still, it operates within and nourishes a logic in which plagiarism can constitute a positive and creative act.
We should backtrack briefly to understand why this is so. For the certain general attitude towards language which this project has been obliquely tracing and describing, any instantiation of a grapheme is both unique and contingent. This is important if we take at face value the term ‘anticipatory plagiarism’. Of course this is a playful usage, but the Oulipians are a group that takes play quite seriously. So what does it mean to plagiarize Oulipo avant la lettre? It means that the idea becomes meaningful and unique to the Oulipo project when discovered or proposed within the Oulipo context, regardless of where it first originated. It also means that there is not simply a break between the meanings in the two contexts. Rather, each context carries the trace of the meaning of the other as a kind of supplement.
This same logic applies to ordinary or otherwise after the fact plagiarisms as well. To begin to explore this, let us look at three Don Quixote’s. The first, logically, is Cervantes’ original text. There is a kind of ghost-second here, which is introduced by translation, but we will leave this aside for the time being. The second Don Quixote is the plagiarized version written (assembled?re-mixed?) by Kathy Acker. Whole passages of Cervantes’ and several other pre-existing texts are lifted, fucked with, recontextualized. (Cont.) “What tiresome and laborious folly it is to write lengthy tomes, to expound in five hundred pages on an idea one could easily propound orally in a few minutes. Better is pretending that the books exist already and offereing a summary of commentary.” -Borges, as quoted in Benabou, why i have not written, p19.
The final Don Quiixote concerns not a direct plagiarism but the theoretical account of one. As Marcel Benabou reminds us in the epigraph to his ‘Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books’, Borges once wrote. “quote about the interest being in the description of a story rather than the telling.” In (one one register at least) keeping with this dictum, Borges provides us with the story ‘The Don Quixote of Pierre Menard’ in which the titular Menard seeks to “QUOTE on writing his own DQ”. (cont.)
56) Oulipo and Genius/Inspiration:
We can start from the platform of a platitude- Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Oulipo would tend to agree, but would instead say: What is inspiration even? What is success? Shouldn’t we just say, good work is as much an effect of craft as any kind of mystical ‘talent’ or ‘inspiration’?
This rejection of inspiration is then also a rejection of non-writing and of the very notion of ‘writer’s block’. Writing as craft takes on emphasis in projects like Harry Matthew’s ’20 Lines’, Georges Perec’s “XXXXXX’ project, and Raymond Queneau’s Excercises in Style’. In all of these, the act of writing is foregrounded.
Perhaps what is most interesting, in light of the inquiries we are making here, is what this rejection of inspiration says about the refusal to write. In removing ‘writer’s block’ and the failure of inspiration, Oulipo actually elevates non-writing. To not write becomes a positive act, a refusal. Or else it becomes inexcusable. Stripped of the concept of inspiration, non-writing takes on the same voluntary character as writing. Both agency and responsibility are thus highlighted in the act of writing. Here then the central paradoxes appear as they will continuously: the arbitrary becomes linked to the voluntary, both action and inaction to agency, unknowable potential to demystification…
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