All Posts[The original post on Dan Green's blog The Reading Experience to which I am replying.]
I’ve been pondering the limits of this idea of “constraint” for quite awhile now (at least as long as I’ve had this blog), and I can’t say that I have come to any clear conclusions. What at first seems clear cut and obvious becomes, upon closer examination, rather blurred. Like all real categorical divisions at some level a certain arbitrariness is put into place. That said, Dan poses some questions that force me to look closer upon the subject, whether I pass the point of finding the circle that limns “constraint” remains to be seen. To remain on track, I will attempt to address Dan’s remarks sequentially, quoting the relevant parts as necessary. Unless otherwise cited, quoted sections are by Dan Green.
“I do have something of a problem with the breadth of application it [constraint] sometimes seems to inspire.”
While, I don’t believe Dan goes on to address this problem, it is something I do think about: the application of constraint to a broader spectrum of pursuit. Perhaps Dan only means the literary, but I have considered (though not as of yet in writing) the idea of constraint in non-artistic contexts. Depending on what you are considering “art” the Oulipo off-shoot groups (collectively referred to as the Ou-X-po) bring up wider applications such as the OuCuipo (Workshop for Potential Cooking).
“How does “constraint” in literature fundamentally differ from what I have just generically called in several of my own posts “experiment”?”
In this context Dan cites a number of authors and works including: Joyce’s Ulysses, Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Coover’s Universal Baseball Association (thankfully all novels I have read). Of the three, Ulysses is the novel that could most be considered a work written (as it is said) “under constraint.”
The schema that Joyce passed on to Stuart Gilbert (found in his James Joyce’s Ulysses) shows a systematic organization for the contents of chapters in the novel. How much Joyce created this previous to the writing of the book and how much he made as he went along is most likely debatable (though Kevin Dettmar’s The Illicit Joyce of Postmodernism (U Wisconsin, 1996) indicates that the schema came after a number of chapters were completed). I make this distinction because one important element of constraint is its use before the fact of creation. Constraint is about process.
Another main characteristic of constraint is the system (OED: an organized scheme or method). A constraint is a systematic application of rules. While Nabokov “constrains himself to the kind of story that can be “told” through a fictional poem and the annotations attached to it” this is no more or less systematic than “constraining” oneself to write a book about a ship of men chasing a white whale. The conventional use of the word “constraint” (OED: a limitation or restriction) and the use to which I (and others) would put it in this literary case are not exactly identical.
As for the relations of the constrained and the experimental work, I’d have to say that they are connected but not necessarily coterminous. Experimental works may be constrained or not. Constrained works may be experimental (the majority of the works I discuss) or not (sonnets, haiku, other conventional constrained forms), and additionally may be experimental in process but not necessarily in product. It would certainly be possible to create a work under constraint that goes unnoticed and appears as a very conventional work (though part of the interest in constraint is the virtuosity of execution that would be unknow in such instances).
“Is the technique of using constraint thus just another word for experiment or innovation in literature, is it a special subset of such experiments, or is it separate from this more “mainstream” experimentation altogether?”
I would say that in most cases, constraint is a subset of experiment, which I hope is clear from the above.
“Is constraint to be understood in essentially negative terms, as something that is held back or taken away? Does this assume conventions or conditions for literature that are more “normal” (or at least expected), from which the use of constraint is a departure? Or can constraints be considered as an affirmative act, an adding to, by which the writer demonstrates that fiction can be whatever we want it to be? Is such a writer actually illuminating the ways in which constraints can be taken simply as contributions to the open-ended repertoire by means of which literature can be “made”?”
Yes, to all (with the qualification of removing that “essentially” in the first question). The use of constraint is both negative and affirmative. Certainly a restriction/rule/etc. is holding back something, or taking something away, and I think that constraint implies a “normal” or “expected” or, I would say conventional path. Additionally, constraint demonstrates new vistas of investigation in creation, process, form, style, etc. There are psychological studies that show how limitations can allow the mind to go in new and different places.
As for the “contributions to the open-ended repertoire by means of which literature can be “made”", this is actually one of the early tenets of the Oulipo. They endeavored to create new forms for the use of writers everywhere. Part of the workshop idea in the name was the experimentation, creation, and testing of these new forms for the use of others. A meaning missing in the translation of the “Ouvroir” in the name of the group as “workshop” is that of “sewing circle,” wherein quilts were made by a circle of women and put to charitable uses.
“Finally, to what extent is it true that all works of literature involve constraint in their very terms of existence?”
True, but with the qualifier above on the use of constraint in a conventional dictionary way and in a literary/artistic context (this is where we need Derrida to step in and add an accent mark somewhere or alter a letter to get us a new but almost indentical word for the concept). I’d say that there is not a real thing as open-ended, no restrictions, no rules freedom. Even the Surrealist automatic writing, so touted as the escaping of previous boundaries, is still constrained by writing as a medium, the mind of the individual doing the writing, or even the speed with which the writer can put down words on paper. That is why the literary/artistic constraint is qualified by systematic, voluntary, etc.
“For myself, I would say that perhaps the most ideal situation for writers and readers of literature would be when constraint, or any other device, is simply accepted as an example of the myriad kinds of devices a writer might put to use to compose a work of fiction or poetry.”
I can’t argue with that. I don’t there is anyone who works exclusively under constraint. It is a device or rather the categorical heading of potential devices that can be used for the creation of fiction, poetry, films, comics, etc.
I welcome any further replies, questions, comments, etc. on the subject, and I have thank Dan for bringing it up as I much enjoyed thinking about this and writing it all down.
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Dan posted a quick response in the comments to the above, I repeat them here and then my response (this question/answer thing sure is a great way to generate content):
“Thanks for responding. I may have a (friendly) counter-response in a few days. For now: When you say “constraint is about process” before the fact and that it’s a “systematic application of rules,” does this take us back to the original Oulipo emphasis on “mathematical structures”? Are we talking about constraint as a kind of artistic/writing software? I don’t mean to sound deprecating about it. That sounds like an intriguing idea.”
I don’t think constraint has to be mathematical. But there has to be some kind of system. It’s not just: “I’m going to write a book using tarot cards”, but “I’m going to write a book wherein each chapter corresponds to one of the cards and the image in the card is featured within the chapter.”
Or… compare an epistolary novel, say Clarissa to Barth’s LETTERS or even Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea. The former is a novel in letters, but the latter two are novels in letters with some systematic rule on, in Barth’s case, the sequence, date, and author of the letters, or, in Dunn’s case, the alphabetical letters allowed in the epistles.
I’m not sure I am explaining this well, or if (as I stated in the first paragraph of my last post) there is any clearly definable boundary here. Perhaps it is just one element of many in a definition of which some other piece is lacking.
As far as “constraint is about process”: the constraint is used for the process of writing (or whatever endeavor one is constraining), and while the constraint is usually obvious or at least detectable in the final work, that is not the point.
In this regard, Harry Mathews is a good example. While many authors explicitly state their constraints, he does not believe this is necessary and has in fact stated that while a number of his novels have been written under constraint, he
has not divulged the constraint used. His Cigarettes is the most prominent example I can think of. As I wrote in my review:
The constraint at work is a ‘permutation of situations’ though he does not ever state exactly what that is. (In his essay “Translation and the Oulipo” he writes: “I had concocted an elaborate formal scheme in which abstract situations were permutated according to a set pattern.”)
You could probably consider constaint as a sort of software, not as in, “the software does the writing for me”, but as “the software is a tool I use to create the writing.” This isn’t computers writing books (thought that recent NYT article seems to indicate that is happening).
Related is the human/computer interaction of Gnoetry (which I am still wishing I could run on my Mac, so I could try it out).