76 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
76 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
# OuLiPo
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*Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle*, founded 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Members: Perec, Calvino, Roubaud, Mathews, Garréta. "Rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape" (Queneau). Constraint as generative engine.
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## When to use
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- Writing — fiction, poetry, copy, lyrics, anything text
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- Writing feels samey; constraint suppresses your default sentence shape
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- Generating titles, names, taglines (short forms benefit most)
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- Software constraint by analogy (code golf, no-dependency, single-file)
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## Don't use when
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- You want the prose invisible (constraints are usually visible in the result)
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- Blocked because you don't know what to say (constraint gives you *how*, not *what*)
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- The constraint will compensate for not having a subject (Perec's *La Disparition* works because the missing E is the subject)
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## The constraints
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### Lipogram
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Exclude one or more letters. Perec's *La Disparition* (1969): 300 pages without E. The previous sentence is a lipogram in B, F, J, K, Q, V, Y, Z.
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### Univocalism
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Only one vowel letter. (Letter, not phoneme — "born" and "cot" both qualify in English.)
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### Snowball / Rhopalism
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Each line one word; each word one letter longer than the previous.
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### S+7 (or N+7)
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Replace every noun with the 7th noun after it in a dictionary. "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." → "Call me Ishmael. Some yes-men ago..."
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Generalizes: V+7, Adj+7, N+k for any k.
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### Stile
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Each new sentence stems from the last word/phrase of the previous: "I descend the long ladder brings me to the ground floor is spacious..."
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### Palindrome
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Sonnets, paragraphs, or longer constructed palindromically. Perec wrote a 5,566-letter palindrome.
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### Prisoner's constraint (Macao)
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Lipogram excluding letters with ascenders or descenders (b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, p, q, t, y).
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### Pilish
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Word lengths follow the digits of π: "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics."
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### Sonnet machine (Queneau)
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Fixed structure with interchangeable line-strips. Queneau's *Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes* (1961): 10 sonnets cut into 14 strips each → 10^14 combinations.
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### Antonymy
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Replace each word with its antonym. Reveals what the text is *about* by what it would mean if reversed.
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## Procedure
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### For openings
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1. Pick a constraint that fits your domain.
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2. Write 200 words under it.
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3. Note what the constraint forced you to say.
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4. Decide: keep the constraint for the whole piece, or use the opening then unconstrain.
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### For unblocking
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Apply S+7 to the stuck paragraph. The dislocation surfaces what the original was about.
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### Software analogues
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- Lipogram → no `e` in identifiers
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- N+7 → replace each function with the 7th in a library; describe what the result does
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- Snowball → each commit one line longer
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- Univocalism → variable names use one vowel
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- Pilish → comment word counts follow π
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## Anti-slop notes
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- Constrained-without-subject = exercise, not work. *La Disparition* works because the missing E *is* the subject.
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- Apply strictly. Half-constrained is worse than unconstrained.
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- Don't fake "Calvino-style" surface qualities. Use the actual constraints.
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- Acrostics are not OuLiPo (centuries older). Use a real constraint or call an acrostic an acrostic.
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