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Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (review)

This enlightening book takes our understanding of Georges Perec to a new level of sophistication without departing at any point from common sense, and I cannot recommend it too highly. The initial problematic that gives the book its title and its main thread can be summarized as follows: what is the literary relationship between the Oulipians’ oft-proclaimed intention of ‘taming chance’, and the gloriously random outputs of the machinery of regulation — such as the notorious Nþ7 device — that they impishly impose on their writing? To begin with James seems engaged on a conventional dissertation limited to a narrow topic (thus a long introduction on the linked histories of various words for ‘chance’), but as she has chosen a really important key to the underlying concerns of a great writer, her inquiry develops into a deep and wide reading of the whole span of the work of the Oulipo’s most productive member, Georges Perec. The result is to show, in ways that have long been imagined but never clearly demonstrated before, the intellectual coherence and unity of Perec’s literary career, from Les Choses to ‘53 jours’, and to show also that the imponderability of causation in human life — the ultimate reversibility of chance and non-chance, of the necessary and the arbitrary — is Perec’s abiding and central concern. James is not a reductive reader, nor is she in thrall to any of the factions in the great house of Perec scholarship — with sound judgment and occasionally sharp wit, she makes use of the results of metatextual, biographical, ideological and other kinds of criticism without ever abandoning her own sure-footed path through the literary labyrinth of Oulipian prose. (It is good to see English-language critics such as Leak, Molteni and Adair given their due.) Like Perec himself, however, James resolutely avoids psychological speculation and treats the author’s hesitations and apparent inconsistencies as the expression of a fully conscious mind seeking to achieve in challenging and difficult ways the objectives that he set for himself at the start of his career and announced in the title of his masterwork — to represent life as it is. Although the chapters are organized thematically, as answers to specific questions about order and chaos, they also concentrate in turn on specific aspects of Perec’s varied work. There are fine and sensitive readings of all the major texts: Les Choses (principally but not exclusively in Chapter 1), Un Homme qui dort (Chapters 1, 2, and 7), W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Chapter 2); La Disparition (Chapters 3, 4 and 6), ‘53 Jours’ (Chapter 4), Alphabets (Chapter 6), and La Vie mode d’emploi, passim, but especially Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 8 is a welcome and persuasive attempt to integrate Perec’s exercises in ‘flat description’ into his overall project, which emerges here and in the book’s conclusion as a modest, self-aware and intellectually responsible representation of the undecidability of order in the world. Such restraint and honesty is the hallmark of great literature — and of a first-rate reader.