Here's an extract from my Berfrois essay on Georges Perec's newly-translated dream diary, published by Melille House.
“Along with a poorly identified person (maybe my aunt), I am visiting a sort of colonial trading post. At the very back of one room we come upon a gigantic puzzle… it’s of a Renaissance painting… close up, though, you realise the whole thing is a puzzle: the puzzle itself (the painting) is but a fragment of a larger puzzle, unfinished because it can’t be finished… there are, if not an infinite number, at least an extremely large number of possible combinations.” Dream #114 - La Boutique Obscure
What are dreams for? Elliptical, intimate, (seemingly) significant; from predicting the future to returning the repressed, these least fathomable experiences have always had an interpretive function laid on them.
A similar question lies at the heart of the Oulipo, the Euro-French literary club founded in 1960, which Georges Perec joined in 1967. The movement replaced its Surrealist antecedents' espousal of 'chance’ - “Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought.” - with the application of mathematical ‘constraints’ in order to create 'potential literatures’, not all of which are, or are capable of being, realised. The Oulipo’s ideological aims - perhaps uniquely for a twentieth century art movement - are less clearly stated and vary from practitioner to practitioner. Its problem might be, as Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito have recently suggested, that it is a literally ‘end-less’ literature. Does it matter if Oulipian texts 'mean' anything, have a purpose, or even sound good?
If you're just dying to know the answer, read the rest here.
I'll also be talking about the Oulipo with Lauren Elkin on 11th March here. Please come if you can!
