The Draw of the Potential
Reflecting on my relationship with the Oulipo
I just (just) finished Daniel Levin Becker’s Many Subtle Channels: after three months of on-again, off-again reading, sometimes skipping pages in a half-sleep state, I read the last word, which is “meaning”, opened a blank draft, and began to write, because to write remains always available as a further action. I thought the book itself was boring overall but even so important for me in particular to finish rather than abandon. My reason why is that I view my primary purpose in life (through writing and research and living) as the maximization of my potential given my constraints, which have been many and heavy but thankfully (finally) mine. As often overwhelmed by the too much of today as I have been, I find the constraints of my position in the world and of my compounded decisions comforting and enjoy the nevertheless limitlessness of operating within them as something of a captive rebellion; mine (as yours) is a privileged position.
My first brush with the Oulipo was from without the Oulipo, when I came across Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves in the Borders around which I would run with a friend of mine in high school. I had in my memory the locations of the spines of the various books in that store, which I loved like a refuge and which has since closed, rendering the remains of my memory fairly useless. House of Leaves was on a low shelf at the back of the first floor of the store, just past rows of shelves housing fictions from genres such as horror and history, which were vertical to the horizontal of the low shelf in question. There was only one or two copies of House of Leaves stocked, and so I had a sense of urgency about purchasing mine, which I didn’t do before a handful of visits spent thumbing through the text, which was unlike what I thought a book had to be by definition. There was color; words scattered across pages and formed shapes; meaning wasn’t purely linear.
I could recall with hindsight why I needed meaning beyond pure linearity, but I would be revising my history according to what I want to know today of life, which is that life is a story revised with each day. Truthfully, I think I thought the text was cool (it was different, novel, informational), and from there, I thought If on a winter’s night a traveler was cool too, and so I bought that as well, and then I bought Pale Fire, which has such a beautiful name that it alone might have turned me into a poet. These books are important to me in that they sit upon my shelves now, where I gaze upon their spines or pluck them for perusal, stimulating memory or pseudomemory or novel recombination (the endless possibilities of a spark).
The Oulipo is somewhere by the Surreal, but where the Surreal motivates toward, the Oulipo more is and could be if; the Oulipo is search without solution, solutions tending to disappoint; potential can be important by itself and yet frivolous still (bounding what could be and yet without any urgency to prescribe what must); there is lightness but never carelessness. As with the Surreal, the Oulipo is something of a response to the absurdity of structured life such as that of marching to war or being marked as one of such and killed for it. The Oulipo is not political insofar as a thing can be without politics, which of course not much can be, meaning being negotiated from what is found and all.
Every book I pick up still is potential, to read leaving to write as a further action, and with every book I pick up still, there is a message that is only mine to find, and I pride myself in the meaning I can make by being the person who found the message that only she could find on the day given. In the bookstores that remain, I am a clever rat, building myself from what is found a labyrinth of inexhaustible complexity, channel after subtle channel (~p. 313). I don’t know what I am looking for, but the search suits me fine as it must, as solutions tend to disappoint, as I who learned to love and need the rush and hopefulness of the potential that could be only mine for whichever reasons why rebel captive to the possibilities of a spark.
