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État civil: Michelle Grangaud on Language Unrest

Abstract While Oulipian writing has generally been regarded as divorced from the militant causes espoused by twentieth-century avant-gardes, Michelle Grangaud’s work foments with politically conscious forms. One of the few women members of the group, she made anagrammatic composition the fulcrum of her procedural poetics, a close-up scrutiny of embodied and discursive phenomena. État Civil: Inventaires (1998) is exemplary for prying open the discourse of power (the registry of vital statistics), reclaiming its language, and releasing the potentiality of the inventory (an Oulipian topos amply explored by Georges Perec) as form. Taking hold of the categories used to index each resident (birth, marital status, and death), Grangaud’s text deploys a repertoire of tactics such as the anagram, serial disposition, and disfluency to unravel the matrix of life events and displace them alternatively onto social and linguistic relations. This essay focuses on understanding the use of Situationist détournement in Grangaud’s writing, not in the manner of memorial restitution—as Alison James has shown in her study of Perec’s infra-ordinary—but rather, as a means of contesting the power differentials that maintain the social order and its emphasis on private property, the patronym, and the law.