Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo available in Hardcover
Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo
- ISBN-10:
- 0810125307
- ISBN-13:
- 9780810125308
- Pub. Date:
- 02/03/2009
- Publisher:
- Northwestern University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0810125307
- ISBN-13:
- 9780810125308
- Pub. Date:
- 02/03/2009
- Publisher:
- Northwestern University Press
Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo
Hardcover
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$89.95Overview
In Constraining Chance, James explores the ways in which Perec’s texts exploit the possibilities of chance, by both tapping into its creative potential and controlling its operation. These works, she demonstrates, strive to capture essential aspects of human life: its "considerable energy" (Perec’s phrase), its boundless possibilities, but also the constraints and limitations that bind it. A member of the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (known as Oulipo), Perec adopted the group’s dictum that the literary work should be "anti-chance"—a product of fully conscious creative processes. James shows how Perec gave this notion a twist, using Oulipian precepts both to explore the role of chance in human existence and to redefine the possibilities of literary form. Thus the investigation of chance links Perec’s writing methods, which harness chance for creative purposes, to the thematic exploration of causality, chance, and fate in his writings.
Constraining Chance has received early praise from scholars in the field. Warren F. Motte calls it "an erudite, engaging, intellectually intrepid reflection on the ways in which one of the most powerful authors of the twentieth century grappled with the notion of chance. [James] writes with both elegance and authority, inviting us to see Georges Perec's work through a new lens, one where chance may be viewed as a positive potential, fully enlisted in the service of ‘intentional’ literature."
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810125308 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/03/2009 |
| Series: | Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 350 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Constraining Chance
Georges Perec and the Oulipo
By ALISON JAMES
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2009
Northwestern University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2531-5
Chapter One No victor believes in chance. -Nietzsche
Mastering History
History, Politics, and "La Ligne Générale"
"History," states James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."? Much of modernist literature shares this opinion, which later events of the twentieth century only serve to strengthen. This catastrophic vision finds a powerful embodiment in Walter Benjamin's figure of the angel of history, irresistibly propelled by a storm "into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward." Georges Perec's pun, in W ou le souvenir d'enfance, on "l'Histoire avec sa grande hache" (History with its big ax/capital H) is no joke; it is the violence of history that cut Perec off from his origins, from his family, from any normal childhood memories (W, 17). However, this discourse of destruction and rupture is not necessarily the predominant one in post-World War II France. The political ideologies of the time continued to promise either possible or inevitable historical progress. Perec's works show the author's own transition from a somewhat forced optimism about the processes of history to a more pessimistic but also more nuanced view. This shift corresponds to his increasing acceptance of chance as an inescapable element in human lives.
In French intellectual circles, postwar debates on the philosophy of history generally set in opposition the proponents and critics of various forms of Marxist thought. In the years following the liberation of France, as the historian Tony Judt puts it, "a generation of French intellectuals, writers, and artists was swept into the vortex of communism." Liberal thinkers (such as Raymond Aron) who resisted this trend were left on the fringes of French intellectual life largely because of "the postwar obsession with History, with the need to align oneself with the forces of progress and action, the premium placed on success and on victory." Yet the Marxist doctrine of historical materialism also posed problems for those who wished to align themselves with "the forces of progress." In the case of Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, this aspect of Marxist doctrine came into conflict with an existentialist thought that emphasized individual choice. In his Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre criticizes the mechanical materialism of orthodox Marxism on the grounds that it denies the importance of individual freedom and creativity. Rejecting the view of history as necessity, Sartre seems to accept the existence of chance. Yet he asserts that individual projects (by which we freely orient our lives and contribute to history) depend on a conception of possibility that to some extent excludes chance from the future. Perec's early writings, as we shall see, express views that are fairly close to Sartre's.
Sartre's Critique appeared in 1960. After the dogmatism of the postwar decade, the late 1950s and early '60s marked something of a turning point in French leftist thought: writers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Henri Lefebvre began to disengage themselves from their earlier opinions, and the gradual acknowledgment of Stalin's crimes led to various efforts to decontaminate Marxism. The Algerian War and the end of the Fourth Republic also presented the French left with new challenges. It is in this context that we should understand the political commitments of the young Georges Perec, who was close to the intellectual Marxism of his time and milieu without belonging to any particular party. In 1959, at the age of twenty-three and six years before the publication of his first novel, Les Choses, Perec attended two meetings of the group Arguments, whose goal was to reconstruct a Marxist politics capable of dealing with contemporary problems such as the situation in Algeria. In the same year, Perec and some of his friends (Roger Kléman, Claude Burgelin, Marcel Béabou, Jean Crubellier, and Pierre Getzler, among others) decided to create a new review, "La Ligne générale" ("The General Line"). The group's name, taken from the title of a film by Sergei Eisenstein, indicates its ambitions: the project of forming a coherent theory that would unite politics and art. In 1960 the French Communist Party (PCF) refused to endorse the project, and the participants consequently abandoned their plans for publication. The group nevertheless continued to meet until 1964 and to publish articles, mostly in François Maspero's journal Partisans, with a few in the PCF-controlled Nouvelle Critique (the journal of communist intellectuals) and in Clarté (the journal of the Union des éudiants communistes).
The group's desire to define a new direction in political thought and to win the approval of the PCF is typical of the political climate of the time, and not surprising for a group of young students and writers; such ambivalence was to be found even among heavyweight writers and intellectuals. In some respects, the group attempted to remain close to orthodox Communism. It also borrowed elements from Sartre's existentialism and his doctrine of literary "engagement," or commitment. A further crucial influence, as Marcel Bénabou emphasizes, is the work of the Hungarian Marxist theorist Georg Lukás (first published in French translation in the 1950s and '60s). "La Ligne générale" came into being at a time when the question of individual agency in history seemed particularly urgent, and when debates about the moral and political function of literature were heated. The articles that Perec wrote for the group tackle these issues head-on.
Perec's "Ligne générale" articles do not constitute a theoretical key to the author's literary works. Polemical and often simplistic, they provide us with a statement of the author's positions only at a particular point in time-the early 1960s, before the publication of his major works. That said, they should not be ignored. David Bellos rightly notes that these texts constitute "an essential exposition of Georges Perec's theoretical and ethical attitudes at the dawn of his career as a writer." Since the role of chance in both history and literature is an explicit and central theme in these writings, the "Ligne générale" texts provide a useful starting point for examining what is at stake in these notions, before I turn to the much more nuanced and complex thematics of the literary texts. The most significant of Perec's "Ligne générale" texts, for the purposes of my argument, are four articles published in Partisans in 1962 and 1963: "Le Nouveau Roman et le refus du réel" ("The New Novel and the Refusal of the Real"), February 1962; "Pour une littérature réliste" ("For a Realist Literature"), April/May 1962; "Engagement ou crise du langage" ("Commitment or Crisis in Language"), November/December 1962; and "Robert Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature" ("Robert Antelme, or the Truth of Literature"), January/February 1963. At the heart of these essays is the effort to define literary realism in terms of the writer's engagement with history.
Commitment or Chance
In "Le Nouveau Roman et le refus du réel," Perec and coauthor Claude Burgelin acknowledge the twentieth- century crisis in realist representation, dismissing the popular literature that simply follows traditional models (L.G., 30). However, they then attack the apparent solution proposed by the contemporary New Novel, arguing that a reactionary ideology underlies the aesthetic theories of such writers as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, and Nathalie Sarraute. Ironically, the future member of the Oulipo does not hesitate to accuse these writers of "formalism" (L.G., 40), even as he acknowledges that existing literary forms may no longer be adequate. While the article's insistence on political commitment reveals the influence of Sartre (who had formulated his argument for "littérature engagée" in "Qu'est-ce que la littérature?" ["What Is Literature?"] a decade earlier, in 1948), Perec and Burgelin's argument also draws heavily on Lukás's criticism of literary modernism. A case in point is the claim that the New Novel expresses the inherent contradictions of Western capitalist societies but fails to explain and overcome these contradictions (L.G., 39); this essentially repeats Lukács judgment of such writers as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Samuel Beckett.
Perec and Burgelin claim to reject the Sartrean model of "littérature engagée" (committed literature), arguing that it simply involves the insertion of the correct political intentions into conventional narrative structures. However, their essay is essentially a plea for commitment in literature: "L'engagement, aujourd'hui, c'est le respect total de la complexité du monde, la volonté acharnée d'être lucide, de comprendre et d'expliquer" (L.G., 44-45) (Commitment, today, is the total respect for the world's complexity, the fierce determination to be lucid, to understand and to explain). Perec returns to many of the same arguments in "Pour une littérature réaliste," where he refers to the project of "littérature engagée" and the New Novel as the two great failures of the contemporary novel (L.G., 47). Echoing Lukás once again, Perec affirms that literature's function is to be realist, and that realism aims at nothing less than the total explanation of history-and thus the demonstration of the necessity of social change. Conceived of in these terms, a realist literature would necessarily be revolutionary in nature. According to Perec, a socialist perspective is necessary for realism because it guarantees the correct understanding and portrayal of reality (L.G., 61).
Even at his most dogmatic, Perec is clearly uncomfortable with the traditional terms of a debate that opposes committed, realist representation to formalist, nonrealist, noncommitted art-a distinction that is founded on the customary distinction between form and content. However, the "Ligne générale" articles do not articulate a clear alternative to this dichotomy. While Perec struggles to articulate his position on the question of form, his primary concern at this point is with the content of the realist text, with its status as a complete explanation of experience: "Le rélisme n'est pas un mot magique: il est un aboutissement; toute situation décrite d'un bout à l'autre nous y mène; il suffit de refuser les mythes, les explications trop faciles, les hasards, l'inexplicable" (L.G., 65) (Realism is not a magic word: it is an end point; a complete description of any situation leads us to it; it is enough to reject myths, facile explanations, accidents, the inexplicable). Realism, according to this view, is a total description of a situation, and it is a refusal of chance. It is grounded in an underlying necessity that characterizes both the course of history and the actions undertaken by human beings: realism is possible because the future is predictable and controllable (L.G., 66). The notion of chance has no place here; placed on the same level as myth, it is treated as a fiction, a symptom of our failure to understand causes. The goal of the realist writer is therefore to trace the necessary path from cause to effect, all the while rejecting both easy explanations and the refusal to explain.
Perec's argument in the "Ligne générale" texts rests on an understanding of the world, and of human history, as essentially coherent and comprehensible. On the one hand, this is a view that seems to presuppose an overarching order, even recalling the Hegelian view of history as the necessary course of the World Spirit. On the other hand, Perec accords an important place to human choices and actions in determining the movement of history. The influence of Sartre's existentialism is evident here, although it is unclear precisely how Perec reconciles historical determinism with his insistence on human choice. A similar ambiguity can be found in Lukács's Meaning of Contemporary Realism. However, what is clear is that chance is excluded from Perec's account, as a notion that escapes both the idea of necessary causal chains and that of free choice. The young Perec's rejection of the idea of chance is closely linked to his insistence on the complete description of situations, to the emphasis on "totality" that Tony Judt identifies as a special characteristic of modern French Marxism, and which results from "an energetic desire to exorcize from the thing-to-be-explained all random, or contingent, or causally under-determined phenomena." In this respect, the "Ligne générale" project presupposes the refusal of chance.
Conquering the World
The desire for moral and political certainty emerges strongly in Perec's "Ligne générale" writings. Language and reason, Perec affirms, are capable of connecting the individual to the course of history, thereby making freedom possible (L.G., 114). One of the most striking aspects of these articles, viewed as a whole, is their optimism: confidence in the contribution of literature to future social change, faith in language and its ability to represent reality, and above all, belief in the individual's ability to master his or her destiny, and thereby the world itself. Throughout the articles, the words conquête (conquest) and maîtrise (command, mastery) recur. In their article on the New Novel, for example, Perec and Burgelin criticize Nathalie Sarraute's treatment of psychology because it allegedly implies that self-mastery is unthinkable (L.G., 37), and the essay concludes that true literature is a sign of humankind's "conquest of the world" (L.G., 45). The essay "Pour une littérature réliste" repeats this notion that realism is defined by mastery of the real (L.G., 53), and is even more emphatic in its claims for the power of reason: there are no phenomena that rationality and language cannot "conquer" (L.G., 64-65). The article "Engagement ou crise du langage" reaffirms the belief that a correct perception of reality entails a conquest of that reality (L.G., 85).
As we have seen, there seems to be little room for chance in this account of the three-way relationship between the individual, history, and representation. As becomes clear in the article "Robert Antelme ou la vérité de la littérature," the notion of chance stands in opposition to the principle of human freedom and mastery. Antelme's account in L'Espèce humaine (The Human Race) of his experience in a Nazi concentration camp is, according to Perec, exemplary both of literature's power to represent the real and of humanity's ability to triumph over even the most terrible circumstances:
La survie est, bien sûr, une question de chance. Mais la chance n'explique finalement rien. Il y eut, dans la détention de Robert Antelme, des moments qu'il ne put contrôler. C'est à la veine, ou à un automatisme, pur et simple, ou au geste inespéré d'un autre, qu'il dut alors de ne pas mourir. Il en eut d'autres dont il resta maître. Alors il triompha de la mort. (L.G., 103)
Survival is, of course, a matter of luck. But luck ultimately explains nothing. There were, during Robert Antelme's detention, moments that he could not control. Then he owed his escape from death to a fluke or to a pure and simple reflex, or to the unhoped-for gesture of another. There were other moments of which he remained in command. Then he triumphed over death.
Here, Perec seems to acknowledge the existence of chance-understood not as an absence of causality, but as an aspect of experience that escapes our conscious control. However, he then attempts to diminish its consequences, claiming that the essential human moments are those in which luck plays no role. It is almost as if Antelme's symbolic triumph over death had more importance than the accidental fact of his actual survival. Perec's insistence on Antelme's control of his own destiny recalls some of the more extreme formulations of existential freedom put forward by Sartre-for instance, the latter's assertion that the French had never been freer than under German occupation, since the constant threat of torture and death led to deeper self-knowledge and the discovery of the essence of liberty. If Perec does not go quite this far, his attitude toward individual freedom seems similar.
Les Choses: Tensions and Tenses
Perec's Partisans essays do not amount to a sustained reflection on Marxist theory, but they do help us to situate the beginnings of Perec's literary career in relation to the literary and political debates of the period. If we turn from Perec's political essays to his literary texts, Les Choses (1965; Things) is closest in both chronological and ideological terms to the concerns of the "Ligne générale" project. It even concludes with a quotation attributed to Marx (ITLITL, 157). Subtitled "Une histoire des années soixante" ("A Story of the Sixties"), Les Choses is the tale of a young couple who struggle to find happiness in the France of that era. It has been read as a "sociological" novel and as an attack on the consumer society of the post-World War II years known as the Trente Glorieuses (Glorious Thirty). However, the novel does not present us with a clear political message.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsNote on the TextList of AbbreviationsIntroduction1 Mastering Hitsory2 Questioning Destiny3 Cause and Effect4 Traps and Machinsations5 A Challenge to Chance: The Poetics of the Oulipo6 Perec's Constraints: Combination, Coincidence, Clinamen7 Labyrinths and Puzzles8 Ordering the InfraordinaryConclusionNotesWorks CitedIndex