Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 2, August 2006
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Consenstein, Peter, Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo, New York, Rodopi, 2002. 252 pages, 90-420-1438-5, $42 paperback
reviewed by
University of Arkansas
Take, for example, the cloister of a small apartment. The walls act as barriers closing off a set amount of space. But that space holds all of the resident’s possessions, all his favorite things—and by acting as his storage and living space, seems wholly adequate for his needs. Were he to draw those same dimensions with a stick in an open field, or with chalk on the street, the reality of its miniscule size would become apparent. “I live in a space,” he might say, “that isn’t even as wide as the street!” So the walls of the apartment function as constraints by disallowing motion outside of their boundaries, but in so doing, they figuratively enlarge the space in the resident’s mind—an enlargement that is both personal and mnemonic. The walls and the things contained within them serve to stamp time for the resident in a way that equivalent spaces in, say, the street do not.
The group Oulipo attempts to build similar linguistic walls in the creation of literature—the act of broadening through limitations. And, in the formulation of author Peter Consenstein, those attempts serve as conscious transformations of literary memory. His Literary Memory, Consciousness, and the Group Oulipo argues that writers of the Oulipo group place constraints on their writing as a method of recalling literary forms, marking time through experiment. This creation of freedom through constraint is not only functional for Consenstein, it is spiritual. In making his case, Consenstein reverses the prevailing analysis of Oulipian work as playful, formulaic, and therefore necessarily impersonal. He argues that the retransformation of literary forms and the emphasis on the consciousness of the endeavor make Oulipo’s project inherently personal, and it is that fundamental personal quality combined with the group’s production of these reinvented forms that creates a superior form of memory. “The result of what occurs when the logic of a literary constraint meets language’s own logic is the final product of the Oulipian laboratory; it is what is meant by ‘potential’ literature.” (22)
Oulipo—Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (the Workshop of Potential Literature)—was founded in 1960 by French authors Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais who sought to create artificial formulas and constraints, based mathematical algorithms and pattern theory, to force writing to grow in specific directions. One of Oulipo’s most well-known practitioners is Jacques Roubaud, and Consenstein notes his poetics as an example of establishing “a base for demonstrating how meter—a mathematical constraint par excellence—represents an historical and linguistic yardstick for measuring changes in an essential building block of meaning, that being rhythm.” (27) Language’s purpose is to represent things other than language, and, similarly, argues Roubaud—and through him, Consenstein—literature’s purpose is to represent things other than literature. “Literature, therefore, records how language speaks about something else.” (27)
Consenstein, however, does not rest with the group Oulipo. He marshals the work of a panoply of thinkers from classical Aristotle to contemporary David Ray Griffin, with the usual suspects of philosophy of memory and cognitive science interacting throughout with Oulipo writers such as Roubaud and Italo Calvino. Consenstein begins by describing various Oulipo writing constraints, demonstrating their relationship to “the tradition of mnemonics in literature.” (188) He then moves to the spirituality of the freedom-constraint paradox through an evaluation of the 1930s work of Raymond Queneau. He then analyzes the great literary dividing line between those who choose to abandon the literary past and those who view their project as building upon the inherited forms of their predecessors—“the famous Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.” (98)
The study is valuable and ambitious. But Consenstein’s ambition often leads him into vagueness, as he attempts to connect nearly all of recorded history’s theories of memory with the results of formal literary systems. And so there are holes, as there are bound to be in a work of such scope. For example, if the stimulation of memory comes through reading, are the products of Oulipian constraints readable? And whether they are or not, how does the aesthetic end of the project bear on this increasing perfection of memory? Do the ends, in other words, even create the possibility of justifying the means?
The endeavor, however, is a valuable beginning to the reformulation of Oulipo’s critical analysis of the benefits of the mathematical constraints. Through Queneau, Georges Perec, Henri Bergson, and others, Consenstein successfully ties Oulipian constraints to literary memory, and demonstrates that a mathematical and linguistic project can, in fact, be a personal, metaphysical endeavor. “Memory is nothing less than time, soul, and technique,” writes Consenstein. “The writers of the group Oulipo reveal by linking literary history to personal exploration: they are the test tubes of their own experiments.” (97) Would that Consenstein’s own exploration lead to “Ancient” evaluations that build from his study to continue to fill in the gaps of cognition and its relationship to literary time.