Oulipo and Surrealism

It almost pains me to say this. For years I was a strident follower of the works of Dali, being enthralled in his dreamlike paintings and eccentric personality. I was drawn to the idea of Surrealism as something that allows for uninhibited expression of one's innermost thoughts through wildly subjective representations. Surrealism was more than an art form; it was, in my mind, paradigm-altering and represented a clear schism between traditional art and modernist art. There was little that could convince me there was something remotely as interesting as Surrealism.

Then I learned of Oulipo. Initially I couldn't quite understand why I was so drawn to Oulipo, which seemed to be a group of writers resorting to semantic gimmickry and entirely whimsical boundaries as influences to their work. Selecting a specific restriction and then observing it as law. I wasn't impressed with the movement until I learned of Queneau's book Cent mille milliards de poèmes that I finally understood the impact of this movement; fourteen individual sonnets bound together was nothing particularly special, but the true ingenuity of slicing the pages so that every line of every poem could be matched with lines from other sonnets within the same book floored me. Queneau had written the longest book in the history of literature, and it was thinner than most television operation manuals.

This was how I came to understand that Oulipo is a movement that pushes for originality and inventiveness. It applauds writers that can operate within constraints and make something truly original from these constraints that reads as literary. Unlike the Surrealists, who believed creativity to be entirely ethereal, spawned in hypnagogic states of altered consciousness, Oulipo writers (Oulipans?) felt creativity had to be pulled from one's self through repetition and constant exploration of the edges of creative thought. This is not to say Surrealism is without merit, of course. To do that would be folly. But while Surrealism seemed to encourage (consciously or otherwise) acting as a vessel through which creativity could manifest itself and in essence having an external locus of control with regards to creative output, Oulipo placed the creative weight squarely on the shoulders of the writers. Their purpose was to experiment, and to show others whether their experiments worked. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't, but that's the beauty of experimental writing.

It is difficult to imagine where literature as a creative art would be without the incredibly prolific efforts of the Oulipo writers, who in their pursuit of bringing experimentation on par with that of any physical science helped to define what does and does not work in unleashing the creative genius within themselves altered the course of creative writing and critical analysis for decades to follow.