Among the many literary movements from the last century, the Oulipo is probably one of the most fascinating. Translated to mean “workshop of potential literature” (OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle), the Oulipo was founded in November of 1960 with the intent to generate works whose complexity came not only from their content or prose, but most importantly from their writing process.
The authors, in fact, - for the majority French-speakers and mathematicians - cuffed themselves with imposed challenges they referred to as “constrained writing”. Those constraints were rigid rules which while being surely impressive among the group itself, held little appeal to the general public.
Or at least did until George Perec’ s “Life A User’s Manual”, the book that brought the movement and its author to unprecedented popularity. Perec successfully stuck to the Oulipo core philosophy, yet delivered an accessible and insightful reading experience, becoming the epitome of his movement.
After establishing his own intricate set of rules, the author bent them to a certain and logical extent, and created a complex narrative with hundreds of meticulously detailed stories involving residents of a certain Parisian apartment block, past and present ones: the ultimate result was a piece of literary jigsaw built upon another even more sophisticated one.
This layered structure, logic and complexity, inspired us to investigate Perec’s writing process and ultimately translate it into an ontology.
To cover the whole book and inner levels, however, would have been massive, therefore our main objectives/focus for this project are:
1.
the primary and best-known story of Bartlebooth, the closest to a protagonist among the book’s characters;
2.
the mechanism used by the author to attribute narrative constraints to the chapters, their sequence and content.
The Story-Making Machine:
From our perspective, it was impressive to discover how close to an ontology Perec’s tools were. Making use of the means available at his time (mainly a lot of manual works, sketches and handwritten tables), the author established parameters and corresponding values, attributing them to the chapters according to some rather complicated combinatorial rules.
Fascinated by the mechanism, which Perec himself defined as a "story-making machine," and by the possibility of formalizing it, we decided to deepen this topic.
2022, Diego Chillo & Laura Travaglini