All PostsJan Baetens. “Comic Strips and Constrainted Writing.” Image & Narrative (October 2003).
This short essay feels more like the precis of a longer work. It offers a lot of ideas but fails to back them up with anything concrete. Baetens, who has written a lot on both comics and constraint separately, here brings the two together.
Baetens, referencing Thierry Groensteen (one of the members of the Oubapo, whose essay I need to track down), notes a division between generative (those that make new works) and transformational (those that modify existing works) constraints. Baetens questions the idea of a “generative” constraint:
Does the use of a constraint mean that one suddenly becomes able to “produce”, almost ex nihilio, a new work? Can the choice of a “grid-like” page structure suffice to pop a story? This conclusion sounds a little bizarre since it does not consider a crucial point: the almost metaphysical “leap” from the constraint to the work…
This is an important point that I have never addressed in this blog. Obviously, constraints cannot be considered a magical creative formula. Baetens goes on to address some theoretical views.
First of all, oulipian Jacques Roubaud’s first principle, “A text written under constraint often mentions this constraint.” Baetens takes this more seriously than I as an important way to identify “authentic” constrained works, and notes that this autorepresentation in some ways provides a bridge from constraint to work. My interpretation (he provides no examples) is that the constraint provides a form and then one uses that form to write about it. This seems on one hand facile and on the other perfectly logical. For what I would call “semantic constraints” this is most obvious. If one is constraining what one is writing about, then it will necessarily be autorepresentative and a bridge from constraint to work. To me, that is the whole point of a semantic constraint.
Baetens second theoretical view is from Jean Ricardou, who I am not yet familiar with, but will have to look up. I quote Baetens on Ricardou:
… whose “elaborational” theory seeks to establish a more precise framework for the “birth” of a work of fiction… the gradual transition from a set of predefined but still abstract constraints to a complete and independent work of art. One of the most interesting aspects of this theory–which describes meticulously the successive logical steps followed by the author of a constrained work–is that any elaboration inevitably modifies, sometimes even erases the initial constraint(s)… The “leap”… is never one single step but always a long and complicated process with many and continuous surprises.
I really don’t know enough about this theory (and it is only vaguely described) but I am curious to read more about it. The gradual process seems more fitting to a complicated prose constraint as opposed to the more traditional poem.
Baetens goes onto to look at works in the Oubapo volume Oupus 1 and the relation between the constraints and works themselves. He identifies two relationships, that of “dissociation” and “integration”. Basically this involves the way the constraint relates to the various aspects of the work. A “dissociated” constraint only works on one aspect of the production (for instance, just the text), while the integrated constraint works on the production as a whole. As Baetens notes, these relationships are often much easier to see in a comic than in literature, and probably has a good overlap with Roubaud’s first principle.
In the last section of the essay he has a brief analysis of the “obstacle”, which are material and institutional constraints such as censorship, page count standards, and time constraints (a few of which I previously brought up in this post). These types of constraints are certainly rather more prominent in the comic publishing world than in prose literature. If I understand correctly he terms these “obstacles” “negative constraints”, a rather odd terminology.
His conclusion is rather opaque to me. I’ll quote it and let the reader decide:
…an expanded vision of constrained writing not only establishes a less schematic definition of what a constraint really is and means, but also, and maybe even more so, changes the status of the non-constrained elements of a work which can now be analyzed as negative constraints in their own right. Constrained theory thus has no reason any longer to separate constrained and non-constrained elements, as is still done by most scholars, and instead should think of the non-constrained parts or aspects of the work as participating “negatively” in the overall action of the writing under constraint. Such a reorientation of the theory implies that reading under constraint no longer means trying to isolate what is constrained from what is not, but trying to see what is made possible by a rule or constraint, and what is not.
Anyone who wants explain that to me, please do.
Throughout, Baetens discusses the importance of comics to constrained theory, but he never discusses any actual comics except for two very brief examples on “dissociation” and “integration”.