Jacques Jouet was thirteen at the time of Oulipo’s founding and thus ineligible for entry. By 1983 things had changed and Jouet found himself invited into the amicable circle that Oulipo still forms. But what did this mean? What does Oulipo do? Oulipo was formed not to compose literary works—this was something that its members believed writers could do well enough on their own. It was formed to compose literary constraints—constraints through which literary works might be written. Whether they were written or not was another question — and not the essential one. These constraints vary from the very simple to the very complex. The most famous case of the former is that of Georges Perec and his La disparition (The Disappearance5) — a book of more than three hundred pages in which no word containing the letter e appears. To remain with that author, Perec’s final novel, La vie mode d’emploi (Life A User’s Manual), is a fine example of the latter, composed as it was through the constraints formed by the use of a complex algorithm governing the recurrence of a whole network of objects, situations, themes, citations — and more.
As one expects from the member of such a group, Jouet has proven intensely interested in constraint. A work’s “form,” as he has often remarked, modifying a phrase from Francis Ponge, is “meaning’s tautest string” (la corde la plus tendue du sens).6 For Jouet, this elegant formula expresses the relation of constraint to the work that it produces. Although a constraint might begin as something arbitrary and external to the work, it soon begins to inform and form its content. To say in this context then that form is “meaning’s tautest string” is to say that the use of constraint is no sterile exercise in the manipulation of words, but is, instead, the setting of energizing obstacles, the composing of dynamic riddles for the writer to solve.
Such riddles are not, of course, foreign to Jouet’s republic. In a work not yet translated, Fins (Ends), two Parisian couples pull meaning’s string in a variety of ways. The first way is in a formal constraint that governs the book’s division into paragraphs. It is based on one of the most time-honored and difficult constraints in Western poetry — the sestina (a form that involves the regular permutations of six rhymes). In Fins, the recurrent elements are not rhymes but sentences. The novel contains 216 paragraphs, each of which is composed of between one and six sentences. The first paragraph contains one sentence, the second two, the third three, and so forth, through the sixth paragraph. In the seventh paragraph, another permutation begins, in which the order is shifted. The pattern is followed until the exhaustion of all of the combinatorial possibilities (6 x 6 x 6 = 216). And it is here that meaning’s taut string begins to resonate. This formal constraint engenders a semantic one. Jouet’s fellow Oulipian Calvino famously wrote a work consisting of only the beginnings of a series of stories.7 Each of the 216 paragraphs in Fins, while fitting into the larger story of which they are a part, is composed as an ending to the brief narrative which that paragraph traces.
What, then, of Upstaged? Was it written in response to a constraint? If so, what is it? Or, if so, do we need to know it? Oulipians have been of two minds on this matter, disagreeing as to whether it was better to share the constraint with the reader, as Perec and Calvino believed, or, as Queneau argued, to remove the scaffolding once you’re done with the building. For some cases, like that of Fins, Jouet has chosen to tell his reader how he reached his ends. In a brief afterword to that work entitled, “To the Formalist Reader (Without the Author Formalizing Himself),” Jouet notes, “I made his book with many obscure things and two formal axioms.”8 Upstaged is graced with no similar afterword and leaves its reader in the dark as to the role constraint played in its composition.
Whereas Fins and Annette et l’Etna are then clearly Oulipian works pulled tight with the strings of constraint, Mountain R and Upstaged are of more uncertain character. This, however, does not mean that constraint plays no role in Upstaged. Whether or not formal axioms were employed in its writing, it is clear that it has much to say about constraint — and that it even offers something like an allegory of constraint. As the reader soon sees, it is a story about the strange fruits of the unexpected. A stranger arrives and his first act is, well, constraint (tying an actor to a chair). His next one is to oblige the troupe to follow his unexpected leads onstage. The ultimate effect of his imposition is liberatory. A walking, talking — and dashing—clinamen, the man they call the Usurper displaces the orderly fall of dramaturgical atoms. He functions as a spur to innovation, an opponent of settled thinking and acting. Constrained to improvise, the actors are removed from a rut they didn’t realize they were in. Deprived of their routines, they discover new possibilities. Each reacts in his or her fashion. One faints, another falls in love. Roles are exchanged and the game of musical chairs they play sends the author onstage where he must come to terms with his actors’ demands (one of which being that he commit suicide).
But, on another level, the Usurper lifts an important constraint: the play itself. For the actor, the play is pure constraint. Instead of speaking their mind, giving free rein to their feelings, following the unexpected turns of heart and mind — that they were born and will die, that they loved a girl with freckles and red hair, that they dream nightly of panda bears with frightening grins — they recite their lines. One way of looking at the stage is: constraints as far as the eye can see, and the French term for rehearsal—repetition—reinforces this idea. And yet, there is at the same time immeasurable room for diversity in the unity formed by a play. This is indeed the glory of the stage — the fine lines of individual interpretation traced by those who give it life. The actor must walk four paces to the settee and say, “But my dear, that simply will not do!” But how one takes those paces and says those lines can make a world of difference. In other words, the stage is the place where freedom and constraint meet and merge, and the reason that life in the theater shuttles back and forth between repetition and novelty. In Upstaged, the pendulum swings wildly in the direction of novelty. And then it swings back.
In the light cast by novelty and constraint, the play’s final line—“Never again!”—appears particularly rich. Spoken by “the President of the Republican Council,” it closes the proceedings and serves as a menacing promise: never again will he allow such an assault on his presidential dignity. Spoken by the actor, it means: never again will he be bound and gagged, knocked unconscious, robbed of his role. Spoken as a member of the troupe, it means: never again will he be cowed by their “debonair dictator,” the author-director Flavy. And, finally, spoken as a privileged witness to the night’s drama, it means that what the audience saw was utterly unique, one of a kind, never again to be repeated.
Returning to republican matters, the upstaged actors at the end of this novel wonder whether they have witnessed a political statement — and Jouet’s readers might find themselves in the same position in Upstaged, in Mountain R, and the rest of La République roman. In his Raymond Queneau, Jouet says of the young writer — in 1927, then a member of the Surrealists—“Queneau shows a clear apolitical bent even at a time when he is, to all appearances, quite politicized.”9 While this is an excellent description of Queneau’s works and days, it might with equal justice be applied to Jouet’s own development. It would be wrong to conclude that Jouet’s works are primarily political ones. Upon closer inspection, one sees that he is far less interested in denouncing the Irrépublique, as he at one point calls it, or bringing about une nouvelle République réembastillée, as he remarks elsewhere, than in exploring the literary freedoms and constraints that a fictional republic offers.