Oulipo: Writing Under Constraint

Imagine being handed a pen and told to write a novel. The possibilities are endless, and for many writers, that infinite freedom is paradoxically paralyzing. Now, imagine being told to write that same novel, but you are forbidden from using the letter “e.” Suddenly, the infinite void narrows into a puzzle. The paralysis turns into problem-solving. You are no longer waiting for a muse; you are hunting for words.

Welcome to the workshop of Oulipo.

Short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), Oulipo is a collective of French writers and mathematicians founded in 1960. Their philosophy flips the traditional concept of creativity on its head. While the Romantics believed in raw, unbridled emotion and divine inspiration, the Oulipians believed that true freedom creates randomness, while strict constraint creates art. For linguists and language learners, Oulipo offers a fascinating playground to deconstruct how language works.

The Rats Who Build the Labyrinth

Oulipo was born from the minds of Raymond Queneau, a writer, and François Le Lionnais, a mathematician. They sought to explore how mathematical structures could be applied to language. They viewed themselves not as tortured artists, but effectively as mechanics or carpenters of language.

Queneau famously described the Oulipians as “rats who imply to build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”

This “labyrinth” is the constraint. By imposing arbitrary, difficult, and often mathematical rules on the writing process, the writer is forced to bypass their habitual neural pathways. When you cannot use the words you normally reach for, you must dive deeper into your linguistic reserves, exploring grammar, syntax, and vocabulary in ways standard writing rarely requires.

The Lipogram: A Void in the Alphabet

Perhaps the most famous—and arguably most difficult—Oulipian constraint is the lipogram. This is a text written while excluding a specific letter of the alphabet. It sounds like a parlor game until you attempt to remove a vowel as common as “e.”

In English and French, “e” is the most frequently used letter. It appears in “the”, “he”, “she”, “written”, “context”, and “letter.” To write without it is to lose specific pronouns, past tense markers (-ed), and thousands of essential nouns.

Yet, in 1969, Georges Perec published La Disparition, a 300-page detective novel written entirely without the letter “e.” The plot remarkably revolves around a missing person, mirroring the missing vowel. Even more astoundingly, Gilbert Adair translated the book into English as A Void, adhering to the exact same constraint.

From a linguistic perspective, reading a lipogram is an uncanny experience. The language feels “off” but grammatically correct. The writer is forced to use archaic words, complex periphrasis (talking around a subject), and unusual sentence structures. It highlights how much of our daily communication relies on a tiny subset of available phonemes and graphemes.

The S+7 Method: Algorithmic Surrealism

If the lipogram is a test of vocabulary endurance, the S+7 (or N+7 in English, standing for Noun+7) method is a test of syntax and serendipity. It is one of the most accessible Oulipian exercises for language learners.

The rules are simple:

1. Take a pre-existing text (a poem, a constitution, a recipe).
2. Identify every noun (Substantive in French).
3. Replace each noun with the seventh noun following it in a chosen dictionary.

The result is a text that retains the grammatical skeleton of the original but possesses an entirely new, often surreal, semantic skin. Because the syntax remains perfect, the sentence “sounds” logical, even if the meaning creates cognitive dissonance.

For example, taking the line “The cat sat on the mat“ might transform into “The cathedral sat on the matchstick.”

For students of linguistics, S+7 demonstrates the independence of syntax (structure) from semantics (meaning). It is a practical application of Noam Chomsky’s famous meaningless-yet-grammatical sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” It reveals the structural bones of language.

Combinatorics: A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

Oulipo’s structural nature reaches its peak in Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems). This book consists of ten sonnets. Each page is cut into horizontal strips, allowing the reader to turn just one line at a time.

Because every line maintains the same rhyme scheme and strict metrical structure (the alexandrine), any line from one sonnet can be mixed with lines from the others. Mathematically, this creates $10^{14}$ potential combinations.

It would take nearly 200 million years of non-stop reading to go through every variation. This perfectly encapsulates “potential literature”—the book is a machine that generates text, rather than a static object to be consumed. It challenges the concept of an author’s singular intent, handing the role of composition over to the reader (and probability).

Why Constraints Liberate the Writer

Why would anyone subject themselves to this literary torture? The answer lies in the Oulipian belief that total freedom is an illusion. When we think we are writing “freely”, we are actually adhering to the unconscious constraints of:

• Habitual vocabulary (using the same words repeatedly).
• Clichés and idioms.
• Standardized sentence structures.
• Literary conventions of the era.

By imposing a conscious, difficult constraint, you disable the autopilot. You cannot use a cliché if the constraint forbids the letters required to spell it. Constraints force lateral thinking.

A Tool for Language Learners

For those learning a second language, Oulipian techniques are more than just artistic experiments; they are powerful drills. Writing a snowball poem (where the first line has one word, the second has two, and so on) forces a learner to plan syntax carefully. Writing a lipogram forces a learner to abandon the first translation that comes to mind and search a thesaurus for alternatives, drastically expanding their active vocabulary.

Conclusion: The Game of Language

Oulipo treats language not as a sacred vessel of divine truth, but as a material—pliable, breakable, and reconstructable. It reminds us that language is a system of signs governed by rules, and that by tweaking those rules, we can create new worlds.

In an era where AI can generate standard text in milliseconds, the human ability to play with language—to set absurd rules and dance within them—becomes even more precious. Whether you are a poet, a linguist, or a student, try imposing a constraint on your next piece of writing. You may find that by closing the door on “total freedom”, you open a window to genuine creativity.