Chance and Constraint
Something I’ve been meaning to comment on for almost a month now. In one of Dan Green’s post on the Oulipo in relation to a Believer article on Walter Abish, he quotes the author of the article, Benjamin Lytal: “In order to minimize the element of chance in a literary text, and maximize intention, Oulipians intensify the constraints put on the act of composition.”
Dan questioned this assertion for its validity as a summary of the oulipian project and Matt Madden provided an excellent response in the comments, which I quote in part:
intent vs. chance. I find this a bit of a problematic aspect of the oulipo manifestos because I think the issue of chance is clouded by the group’s founders’ hostility to the Surrealists and that adds an unpleasantly polemic tone to their rejection of all things aleatory. I think this distracts from the more useful distinction between making deliberate decisions about every step in the process of creation by using arbitrary semantic, syntactic or other formal constraints on the one hand and relying on existing rules (genre, character motivation, plot, etc) —which are the “base” constraints which Le Lionnais describes in the quote above—on the other.
I completely agree that the anti-Surrealist attitudes of the founders, particularly Queneau who was briefly involved with the Surrealist group (fictionalized in his novel Odile), affected the early publications and thinking. Though Jacques Roubaud states that “l’Oulipo est un anti-hasard” (Oulipo is an anti-chance) and quotes Queneau, “il ne s’agit pas de litterature… aleatoire” (It is not a matter of aleatory literature.) (Atlas de litterature potentielle, 56) before going on to discuss the mistaken equation of “hasard et liberte” (chance and freedom). It’s hard to look at these statements too closely and not question them.
I meet an impasse when I try to think too much about the idea of “aleatory literature” or “chance”. According to the OED, aleatory is “depending on the throw of a die or on chance” or in a musical sense “involving elements of random choice during their composition or performance”. The problem here is in that “throw of the die”. While one would like to think the throw of a die is “chance”, it is really a limited permutation of a small system. You could create an artwork based on the throw of a die, but it wouldn’t be random and it wouldn’t be chance. While there is a small loss of control, it is all within a pre-formulated system. As Madden notes: “John Cage’s use of the I-Ching [...] used chance [...] as a part of a very deliberate process.”
If Queneau means the Surrealist automatic writing, when he refers to aleatory literature (and I think we can assume this is his target), then aleatory literature is simply a less obvious constraint. The Surrealists broke away from literal, logical sense by constraining themselves to the automatic writing process. Writing without conscious attempts to direct the work may break out of certain conventions, but it still has its own pre-formulated rules. Aleatory literature is its own form of constraint, a flipside to the mathematical oulipian constraints.
The Surrealists had a concept of “objective chance”, which, briefly, attempted to draw certain acausal connections between what we might call “coincidental” occurrences (Breton’s writing is filled with this). In their way, like the oulipian constraint and the issue of maximizing intention (control), the Surrealists were also trying to control the “random” nature of their experiences. It makes me think of the very basic introduction to chaos theory I read, where the seemingly random was, at a very deep level, discovered to be a pattern.
The more I think about this, the more it becomes about control. The oulipo are using constraint to have a hand in the control of their creations, not a all-encompassing control, but an obvious, conscious, and personal control over process. Instead of letting conventional constraints (genre, “normal” use of language, conventional structures, or the, for them, conventionalized unconscious) control them, the oulipians make their own personal fields to work within. The Surrealists also wanted to escape the conventional through unconscious and personal constraints disguised as unmitigated freedom (belied by the rather authoritarian organization of the group). Sadly, the Surrealists experiments have shown that either a) they were too much following each other and thus quickly falling into a new convention or b) the unconscious is all too similar across those writers (if you read a few automatic texts you start to see the similarity in them).
This is far less than I think I should say about this, but one of the joys of blogging for me is the lack of necessity for being formal about my ideas.
(Edit: I’ve glued together a few posts here to save space.)
AKA offers a brief reply to my Chance post in the comments, which I copy here:
I think the opposition between Oulipo and the Surrealists should not be made too rigid, and Oulipo’s reject of aleatory methods is not strict. I think Oulipo objected less to chance as such than to the irrationnal undercurrent of surrealism: you can have chance, but chance cannot be left to a dream. S+7 is a oulipian method based on chance and is acceptable. Hypnotism is a surrealist method not based on chance and unacceptable. Automatic writing is something in between: it’s a method, it’s not irrationnal, it might be acceptable, even though it’s not perhaps really interesting.
I’m not completely in agreement that Surrealism has an “irrational undercurrent”. I think the the Surrealist project was imbued with a great deal of reason and rationalit but with it applied to areas considered less rational by the majority (dreams, coincidence, the unconscious).
Looking further into the article by Roubaud that I quoted, he elaborates on Queneau’s feelings vis a vis the Surrealists and notes that it was the concept that the Surrealists worked in ignorance: “The refusal of automatism is thus for him in no way the refection of mechanical procedures, but only of those that are mechanical largely through ignorance.” (Trans. Warren Motte, Oulipo: A Primer…, 88)
I am rather curious to come up with other aleatory methods. What can we consider aleatory as far as literary creation goes?
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p>AKA provides some more comments in re chance and constraint. he links to a lecture on Perec by Alison James [in French] and does some paraphrasing/commentary of it:
“She says that even though Oulipo was opposed to “chance”, it didn’t object to:
“* the intervention of the reader’s choice (see Queneau’s Cent mille milliards de poèmes, which is a sonnet with each verse on a separate slip of paper which the reader can combine at will to “generate” new sonnets), or
“* l’« aléatoire mécanique » (mechanical aleatory) that a system (even a deterministic one) can generate when it is substituted for the author’s will. And she quotes La Vie Mode d’Emploi here. It’s “programmation du hasard” (a programming of chance).
“I think we misunderstand Oulipo if by “aleatory” we mean merely “chance”. Constrained chance would be better. And I think that as far as literary creation goes chance should not be left to chance alone.” (AKA)
I like this concept of “constrained chance”, which gets back to what I mentioned earlier regarding something based on the “chance” roll of a die really being a “permutation of a small system”, or what Matt Madden references in regards to John Cage’s use of the I Ching.
Also, Dan responds again to one of my posts:
“While I understand that the oulipians wanted to create a method that was as much as possible in contrast to that of the surrealists, I still wonder whether the “control” imposed by constraint isn’t at least to some degree an illusion. Constraint can’t escape contigency any more than “automatic writing”; it is at some point going to produce results the author could never have predicted beforehand, and is to that extent outside of his/her control. Desirably so.” (Dan Green, full post)
I would agree with Dan that constraint as a total control is illusionary. One can’t control an artistic creation completely, but one can take control of some parts of the creation by taking the control away from the conventional, the generic, the hidden rules that we follow without thinking. Certainly unpredicted results are always a pleasure of creative work. For me, the constraint is a control of process, but not a control of the work as a whole, which in my mind is an important difference.
Tags: chance, Constraint
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