OULIPO

   A term standing for L'Ouvroir de Litterature Potentialle, which might be crudely translated as "workshop of possible fictions". Oulipo is an extremely selfconscious international literary movement founded in 1960 by the French authors Raymond Queneau (FRANCE) and François Le Lionnais; its official membership was originally limited to 10 but eventually expanded to the present 25. Over the years Oulipo's members and proponents have included many internationally known fabulists and magic realists such as Harry Mathews (1930-), Georges Perec (1936-1982) and ItaloCALVINO.Oulipo's tenets are radically high-Modernist. Inspired by the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussurre (1857-1913), its members consider "literature" a game of language rather than a means of representing the world, a perspective foreign to most but not all sf writers. By designing artificial "constraints" and "structures", Oulipoeans try to make prose-writing difficult in the same way thatmetrical schemes make sonnets and sestinas difficult. But, in order to manufacture complicated products, it is necessary first to manufacture complicated machines. It is the friction generated by the author's imagination working against such formal constraints, Oulipo contends, that produces great art.Members of the group have tended to be mathematicians as well as writers. While many of their formal structures are extremely complicated, it is often their simplest formulae that produce the most spectacular results. Perhaps consciously following the example of Ernest Vincent Wright, whose novel Gadsby (1939) has no letter "e", Georges Perec(1936-1982) wrote the novel La Disparition ("The Disappearance") (1969) without once using that letter. (When a work is produced by deleting a letter or set of letters, the resulting narrative is referred to as a "lipogram"; The Wonderful O (1957) by James Thurber (1894-1961) is about a lipogram world.) Italo Calvino generated the plot for his Il Castello dei Destini incrociati (coll of linked stories 1973; trans as The Castle ofCrossed Destinies 1977 US) by randomly turning over the cards of a Tarot deck. Similar procedures were used by various contributors to Rachel POLLACK's Tarot Tales (anth 1989 UK).Thomas M. DISCH's novel 334 (fixup1972 UK) is probably the most successful Oulipo-related experiment in the sf field. The title (which should be pronounced "three three four") does not refer primarily to a place or a time but rather describes the three-dimensional narrative diagram according to which the book is constructed. John T. SLADEK is another sf author who often builds his novels and stories according to arbitrary designs or games; in Tik-Tok (1983), for example, each of the 26 chapters begins with a successiveletter of the alphabet. Other sf or sf-related authors who exhibit a similar "gamesmanship" in their work - whether having heard of Oulipo or not - include Don DELILLO, Vladimir NABOKOV, Rudy RUCKER and Pamela ZOLINE.

   SB

   See also: FABULATION; MAGIC REALISM; POSTMODERNISM AND SF; PSEUDO-SCIENCE.