Chinese Boxes and Matryoshkas

Jonathan Letham, in his 2005 New York Times essay, “Italo for Beginners,” calls Oulipo a motif that “spliced the DNA of literature with overt surrealist games.” The structures of this literary DNA are the constraints that govern George Perec’s A Void, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller, and von Trier’s The Five Obstructions, which, woven together, form the complex structure of an ornate Chinese puzzle box, with uniquely individual DNA-bound elements combined into a unified, mysterious whole. Oulipo founder Francois Le Lionnais would concur, as he stated in “Lipo: First Manifesto”

           "Every literary work begins with an inspiration (at least that’s what its author suggests)   
           which must accommodate itself as well as possible to a series of constraints and 
           procedures that fit inside each other like Chinese boxes. Constraints of vocabulary 
           and grammar, constraints of the novel (divisions into chapters, etc.) or of classical 
           tragedy (rule of the three unities), constraints of general versification, constraints of 
           fixed forms (as in the case of the rondeau or the sonnet), etc."

The Chinese box of all three pieces is a meta-awareness of the genre – the novel for A Void and If on a winter’s night a traveller and film for The Five Obstructions.  As the interiors of the boxes are slowly opened through chapters and scenes, the complexities of the subplots reveal themselves in ways not unlike the hidden designs of a puzzle box, interwoven and yet distinct, intricate and interrelated. Calvino analyzes, through the experiences of his Reader, all aspects of both the writing and production of a novel as his overriding narrative unwinds, while Perec’s character Amaury Conson, soon to be another victim, notes:

          “I can't stop thinking that I'm in a sort of roman a tiroirs, a thick, Gothic work of fiction 
          with lots of plot twists and a Russian doll construction, such as Mathurin's Monk, Jan 
          Potocki's Manuscript Found at Saragossa and just about any story by Hoffmann or 
          Balzac (Balzac, that is, prior to Vautrin, Goriot, Pons or Rastignac) – a work in which an    
          author’s imagination, functioning without limits and without strain…churning out 
          paragraph upon paragraph, writing his daily ration of incongruous scribblings till it’s 
          coming out his nostrils – a work…in which an author’s imagination runs so wild, in 
          which his writing is so stylistically outlandish, his plotting so absurd, of an inspiration 
          so inconsistent and inconstant, so gratuitous and instinctual, you’d think his brain was 
          going soft!” (Perec 198)

Just as Russian Metryoshkas are unstacked to reveal the myriad personalities within, the characters and plots of Perec and Calvino are pulled out to be examined, and then stacked neatly back into their meta-driven package.

Jorgen Leth is also forced, through Lars von Trier’s rather spiteful constraints, to experience his film “The Perfect Human” from a meta-perspective as he subjects himself to painful, personal explorations of his work. The meta-narrative is filmmaking, just as Calvino’s and Perec’s was novel making, all three through the lens of confused and often distraught characters trying to make sense of the plots. All three works resolve themselves with a meta look back at the work, Leth must read a self-deprecating letter, Perec kills off essentially all of his characters, and then summarizes through the voice of the murderer,

          “But an illusion was always lurking in such solutions, an allusion of wisdom, wisdom to 
          which not any of us could truly lay claim, not our protagonists, not our author, and not 
          I…and it was that lack of wisdom, that chronic inability of ours to grasp what was 
          actually going on, that had us talking away, constructing our story, building up its idiotic 
          plot…without at any instant attaining its cardinal point” (Perec 277).

And Calvino circles back on himself, placing his primary duo of characters side by side in a bed, reading, and ends with you, the reader, responding to your wife’s request to turn off the light, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino” (Calvino 260)

The constraints of all three works create intriguing structures, the DNA of Oulipian art, beneath their meta-genre analyses. Calvino’s mathematical structure, based on Greimas’ Semiotic Square (outlined by Calvino in “How I Wrote One of My Books”) http://www.english.txstate.edu/cohen_p/postmodern/Readings/Calvino/Essay.html, provides the interlocking Chinese box structure that weaves all the pieces together into one long title that becomes the box to open,

          “If on a winter’s night a traveller, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep 
          slope without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down into the gathering shadow in a 
          network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet of leaves 
          illuminated by the moon around an empty grave – what story down there awaits its 
          end?” (Calvino 258)

Perec playfully uses his lipogrammatic absence of “e” to rewrite Shakespeare, Milton, Hood and Poe, while weaving it sometimes painfully but for the most part skillfully throughout his text. Lars van Trier overtly designs his constraints to inflict psychological trauma on Jorgen Leth, ostensibly to free Leth from internal demons that constrain his art. Leth one-ups the constraints by making decent art in spite of them.

In the end the Chinese boxes are folded back up into elegant mysteries to explore, awaiting further analysis into all of their hidden nuances through subsequent readings of elaborate texts.

 Works Cited

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100169390&extrasfile=A1262012-B0D0-B086-B61CF122E7032B2A.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/books/review/20lethem.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0