About this site

This site was founded in 2001 by Tom Hart, Jason Little and Matt Madden in order to create an English-language forum for the discussion and fomentation of constraint-based comics. Tom Motley was enlisted in 2002. The goal of the site is to offer information for those interested in Oubapo and Oulipo and to create a venue for showcasing new works created using constraints (see our "challenge" and "projects" sections). This site is not an official Oubapo site; however, in 2002 Matt Madden was elected as a "foreign correspondent" of the French Oubapo.

 

About OUBAPO

OULIPO: Qu'est-ce que c'est?

1. It's not a literary movement.
2. It's not a scientific seminar.
3. It's not chance-based literature

Oulipo: rats who build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape

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Both quotes:Oulipo: la littérature potentielle (Gallimard, 1973)

Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature) was founded in 1960 by author and poet Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lyonnais. The founding of the group arose through discussions of Queneau's work, in particular several works that had used predetermined rules in their creation, most notably his One Hundred Billion Poems-a book of ten sonnets in which each line can be read with any of the other sonnets, creating a number of possible variations which Queneau calculated as ten to the fourteenth power-and Exercises in Style, where the same short text was permutated 99 times. Membership (by unanimous invitation) has grown over the years, the two most famous members being Georges Perec and Italo Calvino.

Oulipo was founded in order to further explore the possibilities of creating literature using what came to be known as constraints: rules, often mathematically determined, that dictate a certain formal principle a work has to follow, and which challenge writers to use the full extent of their creativity in following them. As Queneau himself put it: "What we have named Potential Literature refers to the study of new structures and forms which can be used by writers in whatever manner they please." Oulipo member Michel Bernabou states the goal this way:
"To force the system which is language to go beyond its routine uses; by the same token, to force it to reveal its hidden resources. All of these prohibitions to which we submit ourselves, all of these obstacles we create for ourselves while playing, for example, with nature, with order, or the number of letters, syllables, or words, show their true purpose in this light…Thus arises the paradox…of linguistic contstraint: far from blocking imagination, its arbitrary demands awaken it, stimulate it, and permit it to ignore all those other constraints that, being unrelated to language, are harder to control."

Although mathematics are a guiding principle, Oulipo sees itself as first and foremost a literary group, and while they take look at literature through a mathematician's lens, they also view mathematics and science through the eyes of poets. Their goal is to find new ways to generate literature without resorting to arbitrariness and chance. In fact, Queneau was at one point associated with the Surrealists before having a violent falling out with leader André Breton for esthetic, personal, and political reasons, and the mathematical cool of Oulipo is in some sense an answer to the surrealist mode of automatic writing. Another important opposition to the surrealists is that Oulipo has no leader, rather it is run collectively and with an air of conviviality (they've been meeting once a month for lunch or dinner for over 40 years).

Oulipo is not concerned with tearing down works of the past in order to construct a new paradigm. Quite on the contrary, part of the project involves studying prose and poetry from the past and looking for kindred souls, who are lovingly dubbed "anticipatory plagiarists." For what are sonnets and other rigorous poetic structures if not constraints which challenge a writer to master them?

OUBAPO: Qu'est-ce que c'est?

Since early in the history of Oulipo, numerous new groups have been founded under the principle of constraints. Collectively, these are known as Ou-x-po, and some examples are Oupeinpo (Workshop for Potential Painting), Oumupo (Workshop for Potential Music), and Oucuipo (Workshop for Potential Cooking).

The Ninth Lively Art is the most recent medium to join the ranks of Ou-x-po, with the parent group's blessing. Oubapo (Ouvroir de la Bande Dessinée Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Comics) was founded in France in 1992 by critic Thierry Groensteen and members of the Parisian publishing collective, L'Association, notably J.-C. Menu, Killoffer, and Lewis Trondheim. In 1997, L'Association published Oupus 1, which sought to introduce the group's first works as well as establish a preliminary list of constraints that can be applied to comics. Some of these were adapted from the oulipian canon (N+7, Tireur à la ligne), others were formulated with the particular grammar of comics in mind (repetition of a single image, or substituting text in word balloons like the Situationists, Subgenius, and hundreds of pranksters with Family Circus paperbacks).

Other publications from Oubapo include Oupus 3: Les vacances de l'Oubapo, Trondheim and Sergio Garcia's Les Trois Chemins (Delcourt), and Oupus 2, a collection of various constraint based comics including a number of collaborative works done at comics conventions.

-Matt Madden, August 2001

Sources:

You can order the Oubapo books from Mars Import --