“If I ask you to write a story,” says the novelist Richard Beard, “you might find it impossible. But if I ask you to empty your pockets on the table and write a story that includes every object on the table, it’s suddenly much easier.” That is the essence of Oulipo, an organisation founded in Paris in 1960 whose members and followers use artificial constraints on their writing: omitting one letter of the alphabet, say, or cutting words from an existing text to create a new one.
Oulipo is short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature, the name making clear that it is about seeking as much as finding, about limiting how you write as a method of discovering what it is possible to say. Oulipo co-founder Raymond Queneau called Oulipians “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”. It is both mathematical and literary, a movement built on experiment but which has entered the mainstream. It sounds niche, but the more you know, the more you see: Oulipo is everywhere.
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