The group that I study (the OuLiPo or Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) is a collection of French writers/mathematicians/computer scientists/etc. who chose to write sous contrainte. Basically, they choose a constraint and write a book using it, for the very simple reason that all literature is constrained whether or not the author is aware of it. Choosing ones own constraint, according to them, makes an author freer, since he is not a slave to rules of which he is ignorant. Their most famous constraint is a lipogram, which comes from the Greek λειπογράμματος for leaving out one letter. While it is not a new constraint (indeed, the Ancient Greeks did it, and so have many since—consciously and unconsciously), the OuLiPo's theorization is what makes its particular use of the constraint unique. They understand what they do in a mathematical way, a conceptualization that comes in part from axiomatic theory in mathematics. While I won't get into this now (since I'm sure I'll get to it when doing research on this), what is important is this: a constraint for the OuLiPo is rigorous, easily defined, and demonstrable. By rigorous, I mean that there is some level of difficulty (obviously, a lipogram's difficulty varies depending on the letter one chooses to leave out); a lipogram is easily defined, clearly, as I just did; by demonstrable, I wish to say that were one to write a novel without a letter, that author will have demonstrated the feasibility of the constraint, or that it is indeed possible. Reading a lipogram is different than reading any old text. I mean, not only is reading it a verification that the constraint was strictly followed, but there is the constant question of why.
The OuLiPo text that follows this constraint is Georges Perec's La disparition. The author not only wrote the entire book without the most commonly used vowel in the French language (E, which can be found in about 80% of French words), but he also wrote the book about the loss of the letter E. That is to say, not only are there 26 chapters of which the 5th is missing, but the main character, Anton Voyl, also disappears, just like the E's in his name (Voyl is the French word for vowel without the E's). Beyond that, the entire novel speaks of the constraint—not only at key moments, but always. In this case, the constraint is not only the compositional principle of the text, but also the content.
This brings me back to the book I just read, Ella Minnow Pea, the progressively lipogrammatic novel. I learned about this book from the Princeton translation luncheon series, run by my advisor, David Bellos. The novel tells the story of an island of word-loving people who owe their existence to the inventor of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," Nollop. You might be wondering, what is a pangram? It is a sentence that uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. You'll note that this is a particularly short one, commonly used for typists to check that every key on their typewriter worked. But one day, when the Z on the sentence falls off of the commemoratory statue, the island's government interprets this as a message from Nollop himself, forbidding the use of the letter Z. But soon, other letters begin to fall, and communication on the island becomes more and more complicated. In the end, the only way the inhabitants can find to circumvent the government's ridiculous interpretation is to come up with a new pangram that is only 32 letters long.
Now, I won't give away the end, but I will say that it was a delightful read. Luckily for me, I will get to read it again, in French! So, I mentioned that I learned of this book from a translation luncheon, where Marie-Claude Plourde had been invited to speak about her experience translating the novel into French. You may ask: why would someone be invited to talk about the experience of translating a single book? Well, because with a progressively lipogrammatic novel, translation poses very interesting problems about the nature of language itself. In the original, Ella Minnow Pea, the first letter lost was Z, which is not a particularly important loss for the language. Bees were unable to speak, but getting around that issue isn't impossible. The second letter to go, however, was Q. In French, Q is indispensable for asking questions: qui, quoi, qu'est-ce que, que, ce que, ce qui, all of these extremely common pronouns and question words disappear. The Q is much more common in French than in English. This complicates a removal that perhaps was not as difficult in English. Plourde's talk focused on this differences, how she circumvented them (sometimes by changing the letter that fell, sometimes by thematically changing bits of the book, etc.). The greatest difficulty, according to her, was finding equivalents for the pangrams that were the appropriate number of letters. I have her book back in Princeton and when I return tomorrow, I will happily start reading her translation! Should I also mention that mine is a signed copy? Yeah...I have a few autographed books, and I'll be sure to write about them!
To conclude, I'd just like to quote the end of Ella Minnow Pea, a quote that I think sums up something inherent to constrained writing: "...any one of us could have come up with such a sentence [that is, the new 32-word pangram that they come across totally by accident at the end of the book]. We are, when it comes right down to it, all of us: mere monkeys at typewriters." (199) The fact that the discovery of the shorter pangram at the end is mere happenstance highlights something about the OuLiPo and their methods—while all writing is constrained (whether the author is aware of it or not), understanding the constraints and how they function helps us understand something about the way we think, the way we write, and the nature of language itself. And this is all without even beginning to talk about the mathematics!
PS: For those who find these ideas interesting and would like to read the book, here is the link to it on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Ella-Minnow-Pea-Novel-Letters/dp/0385722435
Enjoy!
The French translation is difficult to get in the United States (I bought it directly from the translator). But here is the link to her personal website: http://www.binome.ca/
And here is the link to the French Amazon page for her translation: http://www.amazon.fr/LIsle-Lettr%C3%A9e-Un-roman-lettres/dp/B00CHIJHQQ
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