A Form of Words (an anthology of formalist prose)

Some of the above rules for poetical forms can easily be applied to prose, though ideas can come from elsewhere too. The OuLiPo (Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle) group of French authors often borrow formal patterns from such other domains as mathematics, logic or chess. Perec and Raymond Queneau experimented with many such forms.

Like poetry forms, prose forms vary in their mode and restrictiveness. They broadly fall into 3 categories

• Structural - The plot can loosely echo that of another text (in parody or Joyce's Ulysses) or, as in a recursive piece, echo itself. In James Lasdun's "ATE/MENOS or The Miracle" (New Fiction Magazine, V6, N7, 1987) a framed plot duplicates the outer plot. When the boundaries between layers are crossed by characters or other textual elements we have 'metalepsis ' - a term first used by Gérard Genette. In Coleman Dowell's novel "Island People" a low level becomes the top level, taking over the narrative, creating a kind of Mobius band. Self-similarity imposes the greater restriction.
• Linguistic - Some examples:
  • Palindromes - Perec wrote a 5000 word palindrome "ca ne va pas san dire"
  • Lipograms - Perec's lipogrammatic novel "La Disparition" lacked the letter 'E'.
  • Initial letters - Walter Abish's "Alphabetical Africa" consists of 52 chapters, each word in the first chapter beginning with 'A', each in the second chapter with either 'A' or 'B' and so on, until with chapter 26, where all letters are allowed, the process reverses, each word in the final chapter again beginning with 'A'.
  • Acrostics - London's Daily Express (Saturday, 6th January, 2001) had a leading article about organic farming. Taking the first letter of each sentence produced "F*** off Desmond" (presumably a message to the paper's new owner, Richard Desmond). The "Russian Doll" format is an extension of acrostics. Howard Bergerson dubbed self-replicating acrostic text an automynorcagram.
  • Less lexical is the ploy used in Brooke-Rose's "Between" which avoids all forms of the verb "to be".
  • Syllable counts can also be used.
• Typographical - Shaped novels exist, and Lewis Carroll amongst others wrote shorter shaped pieces.

Reader Response

• it's merely wordplay/exercise - the same is said of formal verse. It's hard to deny that the more restrictive forms (palindromes, for example) make traditional literary values difficult to achieve. The Oulipians say that they work actively with literary history and do not submit to its domination. By "working under constraint" they have raised their level of consciousness because - their dictum - if an author does not define his or her constraint, the constraint will in turn define their work for them. (from "Memory and Oulipian Constraints" by Peter Consenstein).

  There are some traditions where hidden patterns (verbal or numerical) are a factor in aesthetic judgement. Dante's work has quite a lot of patterns, and Hebrew theologians have a sharp eye for such details. Fowler in his preface to Silent Poetry even suggests that "it is probably no exaggeration to say that most good literary works - indeed, most craftsmanlike works - were organised at this stratum from antiquity until the 18th century at least" and that "numerology in prose fiction was still relatively intricate as late as FieldingÕs Joseph Andrews".

• it's poetry - repetition and the foregrounding of sound/spelling may produce a more poetic text.

• Writing Tutors use such works to train students to read more closely
• It encourages unusual mixes of ideas
• After having written such a piece it's such a relief to write normally again - suddenly everything's so easy!

References

• "Oxford Guide to Word Games", Tony Augarde, OUP, 1984
• "Chronoschisms", U.K. Heise, CUP, 1997
• "Pattern Poetry", Dick Higgins, SUNY Press, 1987
• "Silent Poetry", A. Fowler (ed), Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970.
• "Invisible Forms and other Literary Curosities", Kevin Jackson, Picador, 2000.
• "Oulipo, A Primer of Potential Literature", by Warren F. Motte Jr., University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
• "Oulipo Compendium", edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie, Atlas Press, London, 1998.
• revue des littératures à contraintes
• Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics
• "Lipograms and other constraints" by Ross Eckler in Word Ways, 1997.
• "Palindromes and Anagrams", Howard W. Bergerson, Dover Publications, 1973.