By the time I arrive at the Montparnasse cemetery to pay my last respects to François Caradec, on a decorously still Thursday afternoon in late November, roughly two hundred people have gathered already. There is a fine mist in the air; collars are up but no umbrellas. Dress is casual. Most people are wearing black, but look like they would be anyway.

Caradec, who died at eighty-four a week prior from respiratory problems, was one of France’s first comics experts, a regular on various radio roundtables, and a biographer of the eccentrics of late nineteenth-century Paris. He wrote on writers...

The Oulipo didn’t start reading publicly until the early 1970s, before which its activities were steeped in a cautious, low-level clandestinity. Its first sorties were mostly tied to festivals and colloquia: a conference at Reid Hall, the Parisian branch of Columbia University; the Europalia festival in Brussels; a “Pompidoulipo” at the Centre Pompidou; the Festival de la Chartreuse in Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. The Paris jeudi readings began in 1996, at the 100-seat Halle Saint-Pierre in Montmartre; afterward, they migrated to a 250-place auditorium at Jussieu, a University of Paris campus near the Panthéon, then to the far more capacious Forum des Images...

As I write this in San Francisco, Jacques Jouet is at the Place Stalingrad in Paris, writing a serial novel in thirty-two parts. He has agreed to sit for eight hours a day inside a windowed tent at the southwestern tip of the Bassin de la Villette, typing away in 18-point Times while the text on his computer screen is projected onto a display nearby for anyone who cares to monitor his progress. The novel, Agatha de Paris, spins a new adventure for Agatha de Win’theuil, a libertine sexagenarian head of state in a post-republican Paris and a central character...

Ian Monk is at lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Bourges discussing the clinamen with some bearded men. Lucretius, one of the bearded men observes, defined the clinamen as the minute deviation in atomic motion at the source of our productively turbulent universe: that seemingly random swerve which explains why atoms collide with one another, causing nature to create things and keeping us all from being automata. The rest of the table murmurs in assent. It is indeed a good point of origin (even though Lucretius cribbed it from Epicurus) for a term that has, itself, swerved a great deal...

What follows is an account of how, over the past fifty years, the Oulipo grew from a hard-to-articulate idea to a hard-to-articulate global phenomenon. Bear in mind that for a good forty-two of those years I was altogether oblivious to the fact that the Oulipo existed, and that, while I’ve spent much more time than you’d probably ever want to talking shop with members of the group and poring over private archives and considering the ample contradictions in a rather dispersed paper trail, my perspective is nonetheless heavily indebted to books that you too could read, desire permitting.¹ In some...

The spirit that would possess one to make a poem from a phone book, or a play from a grammar manual, is not uniquely oulipian. It’s also a little bit Dada, a little bit Flarf,¹ and a little bit ’pataphysical. And to understand where the Oulipo comes from, it’s more than a little bit helpful to understand the Collège de ’Pataphysique—which is a shame, because anyone who claims he or she understands the Collège de ’Pataphysique is probably lying.

Some facts that could constitute a roundabout introduction to ’pataphysics: in Sweden, in 1991, a couple was fined for naming their...

The two Oulipo meetings I have attended so far, nos. 577 and 589—the former as a trial member and the latter as a geographically estranged one—were nothing like the madcap bull sessions I used to enjoy imagining: no contests to see who could go longest without uttering a masculine noun, no heated debates about the merits of the cedilla versus those of the umlaut, no weird occult rituals (at least none that I’m going to tell you about). No trace of decadence or bohemian angst either, just easy evenings among longtime friends, calm and convivial discussions of the newest available...

In 1973 Gallimard published La littérature potentielle, the Oulipo’s first real collective sortie. The book, which came out directly in pocket-sized paperback (unprecedented, this), bears the subtitle Creations, Re-Creations, Recreations, and presents the group’s work since its inception. It’s a strange little volume, enchanting and instructive and just about impossible to absorb in fewer than a dozen sittings: depending on the page you open to, you might find concrete poetry, scientific essays, intimidating graph theory, or what looks like perfectly normal prose. Its table of contents reads like that of a scientific journal, which is surely the point: the texts...

Thirty years to the day after the death of Raymond Queneau, I am in an ornate reading room at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal to commemorate the opening of the fonds Oulipo. Hulking on Paris’s near–Left Bank behind a twisted metal sculpture that allegedly represents Arthur Rimbaud, Arsenal has been around since Henri IV’s days: it held private manuscript and print collections for a few centuries, got requisitioned during the French Revolution, opened to the public in 1797—or, according to a plaque near the entrance, the 9th of Floréal in the year V—and was finally acquired by the the BNF in...

So, a little census-taking music. Who are the people, besides the thirty-seven ordained practitioners and one fictional functionary that constitute the workshop at present, who embody and have embodied potential literature? Who, anticipatorily or in conjunction with the normal laws of space and time, could justifiably be called—as one Portuguese literature professor whose letter appears in the correspondence file puts it—victims of the Oulipo?

“Without a time machine at its disposal,” Mathews writes in the Compendium entry for plagiary, anticipatory, “the Oulipo has been unable to rescue from the limbo of the past those writers who, lamentably unaware of the...

What else, then, and whom else, is all this really for? How can it be for you, whoever you are, regardless of your intent and orientation and inclination or disinclination, as the case may be, to associate yourself with the writerly act? How can you use all of these ideas for purposes other than producing the next roller-towel Finnegans Wake or epic poem about industrial plastic manufacture?

Let’s start with the almost insultingly obvious basics: reading oulipian texts makes you a better reader of oulipian texts. Getting to know the workshop’s collective output is an undertaking of great variety and...

In 1934, Marcel Duchamp gave his friend François Le Lionnais an inscribed copy of his boîte verte, a green felt-covered box filled with ninety-four elaborately printed pages of notes and studies toward the creepily iconic sculpture nicknamed Le Grand Verre, or The Large Glass. (The full title, Duchampian in its verbosity and a little bit Calvinian in its syntactic jaggedness, is The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.) When Le Lionnais was deported by the SS ten years later, the piece was confiscated along with most of the rest of his books and papers.¹ And then in 1966, strolling...