[Desktop]
Desktop		........[Peter Greenaway]
Peter Greenaway		...... [The Falls]
The Falls		...... Oulipo

John L***** offers these notes on Oulipo and 'The Falls'


Calvino is rightly mentioned as a writer analogous to Greenaway. Calvino belonged to a group called Oulipo (Ouvoir de Litterature Potentielle - Workshop of Potential Literature) founded in Paris in 1960, and I think it is precisely the 'Oulipian' side of Calvino's work that most directly relates to PG. I feel this group deserves mention as both its atmosphere and the work of some of its other members have affinities with PG.

The members of Oulipo were either writers or scientists and mathematicians (or in some cases both). Their project was to define a body of techniques for the generation of literary texts. As an offshoot of the central project, members would employ these techniques in various combinations to create works of literature.

In the first Oulipo manifesto, Francois Le Lionnais divides the research of the group into analytic and synthetic: the first investigates works from the past 'to find possibilities that often exceed those their authors had anticipated', whereas the second aimed to develop new possibilities outside the sphere of literature itself. For example, non-literary disciplines such as mathematics or symbolic logic might suggest new literary techniques. [In a particularly piquant aside in the present context, Le Lionnais suggests, 'other forays may be imagined, notably into the area of special vocabulary - crows, foxes, dolphins, Algol computer languages, etc. Le Lionnais once proposed to Oulipo that the group attempt to write poems using only words which could be understood by animals, writing poems for dogs, crows, foxes and so forth.]

The last sentence of the manifesto are also worth quoting: 'A word at the end for the benefit of those particularly grave people who condemn without consideration and without appeal all work wherein is manifested any propensity for pleasantry. When they are the works of poets, entertainments, pranks and hoaxes still fall within the domain of poetry.'

Some of the techniques discovered or used by Oulipo were

All of this may sound desperately dry and po-faced, and indeed many Oulipian works either exist only as an outline or are close to unreadable.

However, the idea of constraint which is common to Oulipian techniques is relevant to 'The Falls'. Whether or not Greenaway used any 'rules' to generate his material or structure, the result certainly looks as though he did. Oulipians paradoxically saw constraint as a means of inspiration: following a constraint stimulates the ingenuity necessary to fulfil it and disguise it from the reader. The best example of this is the work of Georges Perec (1936-1982) and the most striking parallel to 'The Falls' is Perec's novel 'Life: a user's manual' ('La Vie - mode d'emplois', first published by Hatchette in 1978). It consists of 99 chapters, each describing what is happening in one of 100 rooms in a Parisian apartment block. A plan of the block showing the side elevation is printed at the end of the novel and the movement from room to room, which at first seems random, can be seen to follow one possible solution to the 'Knight's Tour' puzzle on an imaginary 10 x 10 chess board.

The reader is also obscurely aware of some other ordering principle beneath the surface, as similar elements keep recurring in unpredictable patterns. In fact, for each room Perec drew up a list of 42 elements (from a list or pool of 420) which had to be introduced into each chapter in some form. These included quotations from particular authors (Borges, Calvino, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, etc.), allusions to particular paintings (including Breughel's 'Fall of Icarus'), references to colours, shapes, animals, styles of both furniture and music, activities, attitudes, etc. The choice of items for any chapter was determined from a pair of lists each containing 10 similar items by mapping 21 different 10 x 10 magic squares onto the plan of the apartment block - the first digit of whichever of the numbers from 01 to 99 coincided with the room determined the choice from the first list of the pair and the second digit the choice from the second list. (A 10 x 10 magic square includes the numbers from 01 to 99 once each in such a way that each column and each row adds up to the same number [495 for a 10 x 10 magic square]. 20 additional magic squares can be obtained from the 10 x 10 original by swapping around the columns and rows according to an algorithm invented by Raymond Queneau, another member of Oulipo.)

If this were not already complicated enough, one pair of lists determined which of the other choices for the same chapter should be deliberately omitted or falsified (and if applied to themselves or each other - 'falsely false', 'falsely omitted', and so on).

Is some system like this used to allocate symptoms, age, nationality, average temperature and type of sexual quadromorphism to VUE victims in 'The Falls'? Or is there any pattern to the omission of certain biographies in 'The Falls'? (Perec deliberately omitted chapter 66 of his novel, which corresponds to the room at the lower left corner of the apartment plan.)

Incidentally - and with a nod towards Alan Andres - Perec acknowledged Saul Steinberg as one of the influences on 'Life', and in particular his drawing in 'The Art of Living' of a rooming house with its facade removed so that the inhabitants and contents of the room can be seen. Given the similarity between Steinberg's drawings and those of Greenaway, is this a particularly involved example of the useful Oulipian concept of 'anticipatory plagiarism?

Other similarities to Greenaway:

* deliberate confusion of the audience, mixing obscure but nevertheless real personages with entirely invented ones, with no immediate means of determining which is which, as well as deliberate misstatement of facts as a means of disguising allusions (in 'Life', for example, a poem attributed to Ibn Zayadun is really a quotation from Proust).

* use of pastiche, multiplicity of narrative and linguistic styles, introduction of 'found objects' into the text (in 'Life' this takes the form of reproductions of notices, adverts, invitations, recipe cards and even a half-finished crossword puzzle - needless to say these are distributed according to the magic square!)

* internal allusions, private jokes and self-promotion. Self reference in 'Life' is already guaranteed by the fact that the list of ten books to be alluded to throughout included both Perec's own novel 'La disparition' and 'The conversions' by Harry Matthews in Perec's own French translation. However, an additional pair of constraints were employed which seem very much in the spirit of 'The Falls'. Firstly, each chapter includes an allusion to one of Perec's other works as well as yet-to-be-completed projects. Secondly, each chapter had to mention something that happened to the author during the period it was written. (Harry Matthews is the only American member of Oulipo, and his quirky fictions are certain to delight Greenaway fans. Perhaps another note may be in order at some future date?!)

* implicit parallel between the narrative itself and some other elaborate trick being played out on one or more of its characters. The overarching narrative of 'Life' concerns a project devised by the dilettante Percival Bartlebooth in collaboration with the jigsaw puzzle maker Winckler. Bartlebooth will learn watercolour colour painting for 10 years, then over the next twenty will paint 500 watercolours of seascapes, which will be made into jigsaw puzzles by Winckler. for the next twenty years, Bartlebooth will re-assemble the puzzles, remove the reconstituted paintings from the backing board, return them to the place they were painted and dissolve the paint so that no trace of the project will remain after fifty years entirely devoted to its completion. Winckler revenges himself on Bartlebooth by cutting the jigsaw pieces in such a way that there is more than one solution to the puzzles, and Bartlebooth dies while assembling the 439th, holding the last piece in his hand - his death coinciding with his realisation that it does not fit. Similarly, there are suggestions in 'The Falls' that the VUE may be a cruel hoax perpetrated by one of its apparent victims on the others (and hence on the audience). Many of the other stories in 'Life' and the individual biographies in 'The Falls' describe pointlessly complex projects which seem doomed to failure or incompletion.

* the idea that truth may be attained through comprehensive listing, cataloguing and indexing - and the recognition that such work develops its own momentum and comes to be undertaken for its own sake. In Greenaway's case, this may have been influenced by his work for the COI. Perec worked from 1961-78 as archivist for a unit at the CNRS (the French scientific research funding institute) and devised an indexing system for the technical periodicals taken by the unit. some of Perec's other works involve exhaustive or arbitrary listings: for example, 'Lieux ou j'ai dormi' ('Places I have slept') or 'L'Augmentation' ('The Increment') in which Perec planned to describe two of twelve places in Paris each month (one in situ, one from memory), and repeat the exercise over 12 years. This is, of course, reminiscent of the photographic project '20 sites, n years' begun in 1973 by the English artist Tom Phillips - Greenaway's collaborator on 'TV Dante'.

[Secretary's note: I'll end here as John L***** goes on to list Perec's other works and suggests reading on Perec and Oulipo. However, if there is a demand for these end-notes I'm happy to pass them on.]