Oulipo stands for "Ouvroir de littérature potentielle", which translates roughly as "workshop of potential literature". It is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians, and seeks to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau

 and François Le Lionnais.

Other notable members include novelists like Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets like Oskar Pastior or Jacques Roubaud, also known as a mathematician.

The group defines the term 'littérature potentielle' as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy".

Constraints are used as a means of triggering ideas and inspiration, most notably Perec's "story-making machine" which he used in the construction of Life: A User's Manual. As well as established techniques, such as lipograms (Perec's novel A Void) and palindromes, the group devises new techniques, often based on mathematical problems such as the Knight's Tour of the chess-board and permutations

Oulipian works

Some examples of Oulipian writing:

Roubaud's La Belle Hortense, a whimsical detective story, in which six princes, all brothers, are suspects. All six appear in turn, in a different sequence each time. One of the six breaks the pattern: this is a clue that he is the culprit.

Queneau's Exercices de Style (Exercises in Style ), in which he tells the same simple story ninety-nine times, each in a different style.

Queneau's Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (Hundred Thousand Billion Poems) is inspired by children's picture books in which each page is cut into horizontal strips which can be turned independently, allowing different pictures (usually of people) to be combined in many ways. Queneau applies this technique to poetry: the book contains 10 sonnets, each on a page. Each page is split into 14 strips, one for each line. The author estimates in the introductory explanation that it would take approximately 200 million years to read all possible combinations.

Constraints

Some Oulipian constraints:

The "N+7" method: Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs.

Snowball: a poem in which each line is a single word, and each successive word is one letter longer.

Lipogram: Writing that excludes one or more letters. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, H, J, K, Q, V, Y, and Z (it doesn't contain any of those letters.)

The prisoner's constraint (a.k.a the "macao" constraint) is a type of lipogram that omits letters with ascenders and descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, and y).

Palindromes

In 1960 Del was at Second City when he discovered the writing revolution going on in France. The vast majority of French readers had never heard of it, let alone Americans, but in those days science fiction geeks could sense ripples world wide. In the stifling world of America in the late 1950's, they searched for creativity everywhere.

Imagine writing a story in which every sentence begins with the same first word. This is Oulipian. All the websites, books, articles I've ever seen on Del never mention how Del got the idea to go from ad lib, to improv, to oulipian constraints which would lead to the Harold. Perhaps I was the only person who ever asked him what his inspiration was.

All comedians already live with the law of threes- vaudeville comedians discovered a joke would work three times to the same audience and passed the info down for decades. But how to create a form of comedy that was a group activity, on stage, in which the individual would shine? Del, a fan of Ayn Rand, wanted to create a group activity that would allow the individual to shine. A contradiction? Not if he made it work.

And from Bill Murray to John Belushi to Chris Farley- he certainly would.

The idea that a group would be given the same constraints and create a wonderful, fragile environment in which individual creativity would shine became his goal.

But there are many, many constraints possible. Del always wanted the Harold form, the name he would years later give to his long form improv style, to grow and be used not only in comedy but drama, science fiction, horror, mystery ( oh yeah- don't even tell me that wouldn't be a great mystery), romance- every narrative form.

Sadly the people he worked with in the end lacked such vision, and now Harold ( also the slang term for heroin in the UK ) is strictly a improvisation exercise for middle class kids who want to be famous.

As opposed to wanting, needing to create.

And Del needed to create. Anyone who has done improvisation can now spot the constraints.  When I did improv comedy with THE WRECKING CREW** around 2000 instead of having the audience yell out subject matter- we would have them yell out constraints! 

Today almost all improv schools follow the same formula- put students through different levels while dangling a carrot that 1 or 2 people might be hired by SNL and became famous.

Because being famous today is seen as the goal.

It was not always so.

Del years later from 1960 at Crosscurrents, a bar that he would work from after being fired by Second City, would need to have a show up by the weekend to make his rent. Working with students he could teach novices long form in just 4 hours! So can I.

But there is no money in that. Levels of improv were introduced, and students wishing a lottery ticket like chance at fame would go through classes until they were "ready" for long form.

How long does it take to learn a fucking game?

The first chapter of this saga was written in the style of the Harold. This chapter has been the monolog.

I'll bet you can guess what style the next chapter will be written in!

END OF CHAPTER 2: THE MONOLOG

Cyber footnotes

Would you like to try your hand at a Oulipian constraints exercise? Go here:  http://home.earthlink.net/~eater/oulipo/index.html

Here is the French website for the movement.  http://www.oulipo.net/  To translate from the French go to the almighty Google (TM) search page

http://google.com  and you will notice to the right of the search box are the words LANGUAGE TOOLS. Click on that to enter the above website and translate it from French to English!

 **The Wrecking Crew never played comedy clubs. We did however do midnight shows at the Biograph, the Music Box movie theaters in front of audiences of anywhere from 80 to several hundred people. From Rogers Park coffee shops to near northside art galleries. The way improv schools work, audiences are usually composed of comedy teams who leave when they are done, parents and friends of the team There is rarely pay. Doing long form comedy in front of punk rockers, horror film fans (we even did a horror movie convention!), midnight stoners remains in my memory quite a peak.

However, there is such a glut of improv in Chicago- the press long ago decided to only cover a few schools. And Reader critics weren't going to stay awake to midnight to review us! It was difficult to get the press to understand what we were doing, and what made it different.