Creative Approaches

“When one made love to zero

spheres embraced their arches

and prime numbers caught their breath...”

― Raymond Queneau, Pounding The Pavements, Beating The Bushes, And Other Pataphysical Poems

In a collision of opposing approaches, Oulipo and Surrealism tackle creativity from two very different (pun unintentional) angles. Surrealists envisioned creativity as a product of the subconscious mind, a manifestation of dreams and cosmic inspiration, while the Oulipians countered that approach with constraints on literature based on disciplined forms and the structures of mathematics.  On the surface it would seem that the Surrealist tactic provided more freedoms in creative expressions, but in reality that’s not quite true. There was rigor imposed upon Surrealism that limited both the manifestations of the form and access to it. The pure aleatory freedom of Dada, with its “anti-real” determination to be without form in all of its expressions, was countered with the inward, humanist focus of Surrealism through renewed attention to artistic effort and human emotions in a myriad of disturbing manifestations. There were expectations of compliance to form within surrealism both aesthetically and politically, as manifestos were created that were both structured and exclusive. Andre Breton, for example, published lists of who was a true Surrealist and who was not. In a critical interview published in Action Poetique, Oulipian Jacques Roubard called Surrealism a “classical movement of modernism,” which was tainted by the hierarchal structure in its leadership, and noted “a certain Versailles-like splendor about its output; but also a tendency towards rigidity, intolerance, a constant emphasis on hegemony, on elimination of everything that resists it.”  Thus while the creative focus of surrealism, with its echoes of Romanticism in aesthetic appearance, seemed dreamlike and formless; it was nevertheless “played by the rules” of an exclusive few.

In contrast, Oulipo was, from its very beginnings, determined to “radically turn away from any group activity that might engender denunciations, excommunications, or any form of terror,” as stated by Raymond Queneau in Atlas la Litterature potentialle.  Queneau and co-visionary Francois LeLionnais envisioned a “potential literature” containing “new forms and structures which may be used by writers in any way they see fit.”  The Ouvroir de Liiterature Potentielle was thus more open, not less, to variations by those who practiced it, even though they were presented with mathematically based constraints. Those constraints were not all that different in philosophy than the structures of poetry that had existed for centuries before, from sonnets to cinquains, but they were more formally drawn and far more intricately detailed. As artists emerged who were willing to play with the forms, Oulipo became increasingly accessible and more diverse, despite the constraints.

Interestingly, there were comparable trends going on in music at about the same time, with neo-classicism echoing Dada (including aleatoric “roll of the dice” compositions by Marcel Duchamp and John Cage), and experiencing a “le movement flou” of its own en route through Surrealism to Serialism, a musical form devised primarily by Arnold Schoenberg and based on numerical constraints very similar conceptually to those in Oulipo. There, too, the varied approaches brought both affirmation and condemnation.

by Nathan, age 11, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.

"Escher's Garden. Based on Maurits Cornelius Escher's (one of my favorite artists) Relitivitat, I've constructed on digital designer a garden in three dimensions for three dimensions."

4x4x6 by Yuri

But back to the literacies at hand: Surrealism is drawn from the subconscious - dream-based and humanist, whereas Oulipo is rational, reasoned and patterned. A simplistic analogy could be drawn in creative approaches to a box full of Lego building blocks. The Surrealist creator builds a structure based on dreams and imaginings using a random assortment of blocks, but it can’t represent anything “real.” The Oulipian begins with a defined number of colors and/or blocks, and then is free to create whatever he can from them. Here’s what it looks like:

Surrealism http://legoquestkids.blogspot.com/2011/11/surrealism-photos.html

Oulipo http://www.mocpages.com/group.php/20789

 As I considered the creative possibilities of constraints beyond the Lego box, I thought about a challenge from my (beginners’ level) creative writing class last term. When it was assigned, the class groaned, but those of us who actually did it discovered it was creatively stimulating. It was called “100 Works” and was structured thus: First work, one word; second work, two words; and so on up to 100 words. The hardest part, I discovered, was communicating in fewer words. One hundred words was easy, eighteen was not. I liked it. It made me work hard with both form and word choice to communicate something meaningful in every work.

In terms of a revolution in literary movements, I don’t think that one or the other was more revolutionary. So much of all three of the movements built on elements of one another, and many artists flowed between. I think that all of them were revolutionary in contrast to Romanticism or Enlightenment, but not necessarily to one another. Oulipo is perhaps the easiest of all three to define, just because it has very clearly stated parameters, and thus it may seem more distinctly revolutionary. It is also the most accessible, and thus perhaps the most enduring.

“Rules cease to exist once they have outlived their value, but forms live on eternally. There are forms of the novel which impose on the suggested topic all the virtues of the Number. Born of the very expression and of the diverse aspects of the tale, connected by nature with the guiding idea, daughter and mother of all the elements that it polarizes, a structure develops, which transmits to the works the last reflections of Universal Light and the last echoes of the Harmony of Worlds.”

― Raymond Queneau




http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/15957.Raymond_Queneau. 

Roubard, Jacques. "Poesie, etecetera:menage-Entretion avec Jacques Rubard, par Liliane Giroudon et Michelle Grangaud." action poetique 141. le trimestre 1996. 21-25

LeLionnais, Francois. atlas la littérature potentielle Paris: Gallimard, 1981 "Raymond Queneau et l'amalgame des mathématiques et de la littérature" 34-41

Consenstein, Peter. Literary Memory, Consciousness and the Group Oulipo. Amsterdam. Rodopi. 2002