Constraint and corporeality: reading Brooke-Rose and Garréta’s gendered experiments

ABSTRACT

This essay considers – and seeks to complicate – the critical tendency to gender constrained writing as ‘masculine’ and to read women’s experimental literature as a ‘feminine’ writing of the body. Via readings of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between and Anne Garréta’s Sphinx (1986), it elucidates how the constraint in each novel actually produces the focus on the body – without thereby simulating a writing of the body – and on questions of gender and desire. In both novels, I suggest, gender itself emerges as a form of ‘constraint’. In so doing, the essay seeks to move beyond any facile polarisation of constraint and excess, the conceptual and the embodied, and to unpick the gender-political possibilities of certain experimental literary strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Experimental literature
• gender
• Christine Brooke-Rose
• Anne Garréta
• Oulipo
• constrained writing

Introduction

This essay proceeds via three interlinked stages: first, I discuss what have been decried as the ‘masculinist tendencies of most constraint-based writing’, in order to identify a gendering of the critical language around experimental writing – critical language that tends to read cognitive and conceptual practices as ‘masculine’ and to associate the feminine with more ‘embodied’ experimental practices.¹ Second, I offer a reading of Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between (1968), a novel in which questions of gendered embodiment and identity are inextricable from that novel’s particular ‘constraint’ – the omission of the verb ‘to be’. Third, I consider how, in Anne Garréta’s 1986 novel, Sphinx, the constraint (the total omission of linguistic markers of gender) produces what Dennis Duncan describes as Sphinx’s ‘profound corporeality’,² rendering desire as ‘carnal’. The constraint in Sphinx stimulates also a linguistic and affective excess, while the multilingual punning of Between repeatedly takes us back to the sound and feel of words – and thus, by extension, back to the body.

In these texts, gender itself emerges, in different ways, as a ‘constraint’ – a fraught, rule-governed practice – while the figuring of desire and the body via the use of constraints complicates gendered notions of desire as unconstrained and of the female body as always overflowing its boundaries. Finally, both novels raise questions about translation as both an embodied practice and as itself ‘a form of writing under constraint’.³ What connects these readings is the claim that the (apparent) rigorous formalism of the linguistic or grammatical constraint does not preclude an attention to bodies. This is a simple (even banal) point, but a fundamental one in beginning to break down the problematically gendered dichotomies of reception and critical terminology that attend considerations of experimental writing, and in helping us to think beyond any facile polarisation of constraint and excess, the conceptual and the embodied.

The gender politics of literary constraint

‘Literary constraint’ is defined by Louis Bury as ‘literature that imposes rules and restrictions upon itself over and above the rules and restrictions (such as grammar and lexicon) inherent in language’; it is also, in his account of it, ‘literature that understands itself as part of an avant-garde tradition whose most prominent precursor is the work of Oulipo’.⁴ The Oulipo, the ‘OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle’,⁵ founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960, and counting (at various points) Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec as members, is known in particular for ‘the use of rules or “constraints” in writing’.⁶ Alison James notes ‘the sheer variety of possible constraints’ employed by Oulipo writers – ‘mathematical, syntactic, metrical, lexical, “lettric,” and semantic’,⁷ and explains that:

The “fundamental principle” of anti-chance invoked by many of the group’s members is at the heart of the group’s anti-romantic, anti-surrealist stance. Against the idea of spontaneous creation, the Oulipo insists on the importance of conscious control of the writing process.⁸

This language of ‘conscious control’ and non-spontaneity places Oulipian methods at some remove from the kinds of experimental writing lauded by Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs in their landmark book on women’s experimental writing, Breaking the Sequence (1989). Friedman and Fuchs’ narrative of women’s experimentalism, in the lengthy and detailed introduction to the book, privileges ‘nonlinearity’, ‘the tentative and impressionistic’, the ‘ephemeral welling up from the unconscious’ as uniquely feminine (and, by extension, feminist) uses of experiment:⁹ ‘[T]he radical forms – nonlinear, non-hierarchical and decentering – are, in themselves, a way of writing the feminine’, they claim.¹⁰ There are two false moves here, I suggest: the essentialist understanding of ‘the feminine’, and the assumption that experimentalism is necessarily radical. The language of Friedman and Fuchs has determined much of the subsequent discussion of women’s experimentalism and it is a language that reiterates the logic of the ‘feminine signature’, of writing as expression and of a writing of the body.

In a more recent chapter – a contribution to the 2012 Routledge Companion to Experimental Writing – Friedman continues to employ the notion of écriture féminine as a lens for reading experimental writing by women; for Friedman there is something distinctive – and distinctively feminine – about women’s experimental writing. Against this logic, one premise of this essay is that in taking up the category of women’s experimental writing it is not necessary to insist either on the necessarily feminine nature of these kinds of experiments (their rootedness in some kind of troublesome biological femaleness) or on the necessarily subversive nature of experiment. In fact these (counter)arguments were being made as long ago as 1989, by Rita Felski. For Felski, ‘[t]here exists no necessary relationship between feminism and experimental form’, though she does grant – and I agree – that ‘[a]n exploration of avant-garde form can constitute an important part of an oppositional women’s culture’.¹¹

In contrast to the language of spontaneity, emotion and the body that peppers the scholarship on women’s experimental writing, Oulipian experiments, writes James, are too often figured as ‘espousing cold rationality and an anti-expressive poetics at odds with literature’s vocation to harness or engage the emotions’, thereby consigning such works ‘to the realm of the cerebral and disengaged’.¹² James takes issue with this view, and with the ‘binary framing’ of such claims, which opposes ‘thinking’ to ‘feeling’, but she doesn’t comment on the gendering of these representations of constrained writing.¹³

Literary constraint is also often explicitly figured as the deliberate ‘foregoing of freedom’ – this is Richard Deming’s phrase,¹⁴ and Deming argues that constrained writing:

imposes formal conditions and strictures as an antidote to the angst, aesthetic as well as ethical, generated by the now maximally open field of contemporary writing, when there is no specific way […] that literary texts need to appear.¹⁵

Subsequently, he suggests that ‘the employment of constraint’ is ‘a way of surviving a pluralistic aesthetic reality’.¹⁶ This is a fairly common view: that the use of constraints is a response to a situation of too much choice or too much freedom. Bury, for example, wonders whether ‘the recent efflorescence of American constraint-based writing’ might be a response ‘to prevailing anxieties about freedom and choice’ in late capitalism, and whether constraint might then become ‘a helpful mechanism for navigating quantitative overload’.¹⁷ I question, however, whether women writers necessarily or straightforwardly inhabit such a situation of too much freedom, in relation to their aesthetic choices or to the wider world. Is there an assumption – particularly white, western, masculine, affluent – that all writers feel this ‘freedom’, and experience it as a burden? Might there not be other reasons why women writers might want to reject the supposed ‘choices’ on offer to them, or even reject the false promise of a neoliberal ‘choice feminism’? What is at stake in those, including women, who already feel overly disciplined/rule-governed from without, imposing additional rules and constraints on their own writing? These are some of the questions guiding my enquiry into women writers’ use of constraint-based techniques.

Constraint is not merely a formal matter. Marjorie Perloff notes that ‘the Oulipo constraint is a generative device: it creates a formal structure whose rules of composition are internalized so that the constraint in question is not only a rule but a thematic property of the [text].’¹⁸ Deming goes a little further in asking whether ‘such a text not only describes its particular constraint but the very condition of constraint as well?’, expressing ‘an experience that is everywhere a condition of language and that exists below daily conscious thought.’¹⁹ This universalising narrative – ‘everywhere a condition of language’ – fails to take into account specific experiences of and relationships to ‘constraint’ on the part of the author. It is the alertness to the specificities of gendered embodiment as an ‘experience of constraint’ that I find in Between and Sphinx.

My readings of Brooke-Rose and Garréta respond, in part, to arguments concerning the allegedly ‘masculinist’ character of ‘constraint-based writing’.²⁰ At the ‘noulipo’ conference at CalArts in Los Angeles in 2005 – a conference contemplating the possibility of a North American Oulipo – Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young collaborated in a performance presentation which critiqued the gender politics of the Oulipo, contrasting it to the feminist body art of artists such as Marina Abramovich and Carolee Schneeman, and suggesting that in the experimental use of constraint, what gets left out is the (female) body: ‘when it came to the body, we felt we needed mo[r]e addition and less const[r]aint.’²¹ As Jennifer Scappettone concurs more recently, there is ‘an unsettling inconsistency in the reception of the seventies avant-garde: Oulipo is still upheld as a model of vital experimental production, while body performance art has long fallen into critical disregard.’²² In both cases, the opposition being set up is between a feminist art of the body and a masculine art of the logical, conceptual and cognitive. Here is part of the statement delivered by Spahr and Young (which, as you can see, employs its own constraint):

We stated talking about 70’s body at by women afte fist talking about how men so often use estictive, numbe-based pocesses and constaints in the wok they bing into the many poety wokshops we have attended and/o taught. And then we said, isn’t it inteesting how we can think of no instance when a woman has bought in wok using a constictive composition device to any of these wokshops and yet we can think of men who did it week afte week and called themselves adicals fo it. And while we wee talking about the false envionment of poety wokshops, we wee also thinking at the same time about the lage amount of wok by men that did this and the not so lage amount of wok by women that did this in the contempoay poety scene.²³

Spahr and Young are not in principle opposed to the use of constraints in literature, stating that, ‘We did not feel this wok that uses constaint was ielevant, not to men no to women. We did not want to dismiss it’. However, they assert that this work that ‘diectly avoided emotional and pesonal expessiveness’ and ‘was mostly engaged with conceptual inventiveness, [was] not an especially adical move post the tun of the centuy.’²⁴

The critical view of the Oulipo proffered by Spahr and Young is one recently contested by Michael Leong, who argues that the Oulipo ‘has consolidated, since 1995, a talented cadre of four women writers: Michelle Grangaud, Anne Garréta, Valérie Beaudouin, and Michèle Audin,’²⁵ and insists that ‘women’s restrictive writing’ is not ‘a minoritarian genre within an already marginalized discourse’, but rather should be brought ‘into the very center of a twenty-first century poetry of constraint’.²⁶ Recognition of this fact is borne out by the inclusion of these four Oulipiennes – as well as North American women writers such as Harryette Mullen, M. NourbeSe Philip, Bernadette Mayer and Juliana Spahr herself – in the recent Philip Terry edited anthology, The Penguin Book of Oulipo (2019).

Moreover, as Bury comments on Spahr and Young’s performance protest: ‘What this dichotomy [between constrained writing and body art] perhaps overlooks, focused as it is on cultural capital, is how, with the notion of the writing exercise, a tantalizing analogy between language and the body underlies Oulipian practice’.²⁷ Bury calls his own chapters ‘exercises’ (in a book entitled Exercises in Criticism because each one employs a particular constraint – in this he is imitating Raymond Queneau’s seminal Exercises in Style (1947), a text that relates the same brief story 99 times, in different (generic, linguistic, or grammatical) styles. Calling them ‘exercises’ is also, Bury claims, ‘intended to evoke the term’s corporeal dimension, a notion – that literary constraint has bodily implications, even if only by analogy – that has become important in post-Oulipian conceptions of constraint.’²⁸

My aim here, however, is not to recuperate the Oulipo, but rather to show that ‘conceptual inventiveness’ need not preclude either a gender-political angle or a focus on the body; ‘conceptual inventiveness’ and ‘emotional expressiveness’ need not be mutually exclusive, as Spahr and Young imply. As the work of Brooke-Rose and Garréta demonstrates, it can be the constraint that generates the focus on the body, thereby exceeding the analogical relationship between constraint and the body suggested by Bury. My own approach then aims to challenge the narrow view of constraint as a ‘masculine’ strategy, and to complicate the corollary narrative of unconstraint – flux, fluidity, spontaneity, the unbordered bodily – in women’s experimental writing. I will start by reinserting the question of gendered embodiment into the discussion of Between, which has tended to be read more generally as mimicking the ‘modern condition’ of ‘anomie and rootlessness’,²⁹ or as emblematising ‘our ambiguous present, […] our postmodernity’ (which is not to say that it doesn’t also do these things).³⁰

Christine Brooke-Rose, Between (1968)

Christine Brooke-Rose’s work frequently uses grammatical constraints – omitting a particular verb or tense, for example, or using ‘no personal pronouns or relative pronouns or possessive adjectives’.³¹ As she explains in the essay ‘Invisible Author’:

The difficult thing I’ve been doing, on and off, for thirty-six years, has a technical name: a lipogram, though I prefer the word constraint. I didn’t learn the technical name until well after I’d developed it. A lipogram (from Greek leipein, remove, + gramma, letter) is a self-imposed omission, and presumably the term can be extended to cover more than a letter, since gramma also means “writing”.³²

Between is written without the verb ‘to be’, and the constraint facilitates an exploration of the displacement – even the evacuation – of feminine identity, following the experiences of an always in-transit, simultaneous interpreter who becomes a vehicle for the languages that pass through her. In Stories, Theories and Things (1991), Brooke-Rose offers a retrospective ‘metastory’ of the writing of Between:

The I / central consciousness / non-narrating narrative voice / is a simultaneous interpreter who travels constantly from congress to conference and whose mind is a whirl of topics and jargons and foreign languages / whose mind is a whirl of worldviews, interpretations, stories, models, paradigms, theories, languages. Note that in this metastory the simultaneous interpreter has no sex.³³

Yet she explains that, ‘during the writing of the first draft in 1964 the author became totally blocked until, some three years and another novel later, this simultaneous interpreter became a woman,’³⁴ and this in part due to an intuition ‘that simultaneous interpretation is a passive activity, that of translating the ideas of others but giving voice to none of one’s own, and therefore a feminine experience.’³⁵ The choice of the constraint is motivated both by a desire to produce ‘a specific style’ via ‘the self-imposition of constraints’ and by what Brooke-Rose calls ‘mimetic “realism”’, that is to show ‘perpetual motion in my central consciousness, and loss of identity due to her activity’.³⁶

‘Between doing and not doing the body floats’, we are told, on the opening page of Between;³⁷ and thereafter, ‘Between sleeping and not sleeping the body floats’,³⁸ ‘Between loving and not loving the body floats’³⁹ – and numerous other variations thereof, until the closing line, ‘Between the enormous wings the body floats’.⁴⁰ These repeated lines present a body oscillating between activity and inactivity/passivity – defined, in the absence of the verb ‘to be’, by doing rather than being. In the dance of language(s) (the novel employs at least a dozen), we are never allowed to forget the experience of being a body. The critical tendency has been to read the novel in terms of linguistic and semiotic theory, while ignoring these questions of embodiment; my suggestion is that the two are interlinked.⁴¹

For Susan Rubin Suleiman the protagonist of Between is ‘a crossroad where more than four languages meet’ with ‘her consciousness, floating between sleep and waking, irony and nostalgia, anticipation and memory, […] a jumble of natural languages […], professional jargons’ and ‘advertising slogans’, among other things.⁴² Certainly she is this, yet the protagonist is also more than a consciousness and the text insistently returns to images of her as ‘The body strapped under a tightly swaddling sheet and heavy blanket’ on the plane,⁴³ or a body in a hotel bedroom menaced by the ‘decorative metal locks’ on the cupboard door which ‘have Napoleonic hats and look like Civil Guards’;⁴⁴ she is a wired up body, trapped in a glass interpreting booth, the prostheses of earphones and microphone holding her in place; she is also, as I will show, an observed, objectified body.

While the repeated textual references to ‘the body’ may seem to indicate and imitate the impersonality of the nouveau roman (the body as an object among other objects, stripped of its semantic and affective symbolism), Brooke-Rose’s bodies are subject to the disciplinary organisation of gender from the outset: in ‘the body of the plane’, with its ‘distant brain’ (the cockpit) and its rows of seats ‘like ribs’, ‘In some countries’, we are told, ‘the women would segregate still to the left of the aisle, the men less numerous to the right’, even if here ‘the chromosomes sit quietly mixed’.⁴⁵ Repeated references to ‘the breasts of the air-hostess that point up her white blouse’ and ‘the medal of St. Christopher between the breasts’ of the protagonist sexualise these female bodies-in-transit, and remind us of our own objectifying gaze – an awareness that is absent from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s voyeuristic treatment of the female body in Jealousy, for example.⁴⁶ Meanwhile, the repeated invocation to declare to customs officials ‘any plants’ becomes the more leading question which ‘everywhere goes unanswered’:

[H]ave you anything to declare any plants or parts of plants growing inside you stifling your strength with their octopus legs undetachable for the vacuum they form over each cell, clamping each neurone of your processes in a death-kiss.⁴⁷

As Karen Lawrence notes, ‘The “vessel of conception,” the narrative vehicle of transplant and translation, is here figured as a female body’, and thus the protagonist becomes ‘a conduit or vessel of reception’.⁴⁸ Elsewhere, the ‘fear of something else not ordered’ hints also at the peril of unwanted pregnancy.⁴⁹

As one of the novel’s repeated refrains has it, ‘In der Luft gibts keine Grenzen’⁵⁰ – in the air there are no borders – but nevertheless Brooke-Rose’s bodies are marked by gender differences that make a difference (to social status, to reputation, to authority), particularly once ‘the slow descent into matter’ (another refrain) occurs.⁵¹ And thus the ‘conventions’ to which the interpreter travels have (at least) a double reference, as the interpreters ‘help to abolish the frontiers of misunderstanding with frequent changes of partners loyalties convictions, free and easily stepping over the old boundaries of conventions, congresses, commissions, conferences’.⁵² Yet for the protagonist these are not such easy boundaries to step over: ‘Bright girl, she translates beautifully, don’t you think? Says the boss’, the compliment a loaded one.⁵³

Simultaneous interpretation is here a bodily matter, ‘his words flowing into the ear through earphones in French and down at once out of the mouth into the attached mouthpiece in simultaneous German.’⁵⁴ But it is also figured as: ‘the divine principle descending into matter through the earphones and out into the mouthpiece at the Congress of Gnostics in Brussels, Bonn, Beirut, wherever angels and ministers of grace and meaning come down to land upon a pinpoint’.⁵⁵ And once this ‘descent into’ the ‘matter’ of language has occurred (via the body of the interpreter, the ‘divine’ inspiration not her own), the tricky question of gender again raises its head. The protagonist observes how:

some languages for example divide their genders into animate and inanimate while others less primitive into andraic with a flat shoe or male figurine on the door and metandraic which covers objects animals of both sexes and women.⁵⁶

And even the phrasebook becomes a bible which instructs in more than language acquisition:

For the phrase-book says listen to this under Marriage Proposal: As I really love you I want to make you my wife. Do you agree? Have you an opinion for the marriage? Did you want to test by means of engagement? Do you want to create our own home? Do you like children? Saith the book, the phrase-book saith.⁵⁷

Here and elsewhere, the novel is alert to the social constraints – of respectability or morality, for example – to which the protagonist is subjected. Brooke-Rose’s conceptual inventiveness is inextricable from the social and political realities out of which she is writing.

Meanwhile, Between’s use of a linguistic constraint – this omission of the verb to be – produces an apparent unconstraint in the form of what Lawrence calls the ‘hectic mobility’ of the novel’s style:⁵⁸ the ‘transgressive travel’ of the syntax, a relative absence of punctuation, an eschewing of ‘narrative continuity’ in favour of ‘replays and repetitions’,⁵⁹ refrains that mix and mingle and morph promiscuously, and – most distinctively – an energetic switching between languages, sometimes mid-sentence. Between’s use of multiple languages serves both to orient us (telling us where the protagonist is at that moment) and to disorient us (both because we may not understand all the languages being employed, and because an abrupt shift of language also implies a shift of location and – sometimes – of voice). In addition, the associative movement between different languages in Between often uses sound rather than sense as the link, echoing Oulipian homophonic translation techniques,⁶⁰ and again tacitly returning us to the body, via the vibrations of voice and the peculiarities of accent. Consider this example, a conversation in a hotel room between the protagonist and her lover, Siegfried:

Und since man spricht sehr little Deutsch unlike my clever sweet half born and bred on Pumpernickel, man denkt in eine kind of erronish Deutsch das springt zu life feel besser than echt Deutsch. Und even wenn man thinks AUF Deutsch wann man in Deutschland lives, then acquires it a broken up quality, die hat der charm of my clever sweet, meine deutsche mädchen-goddess, the gestures and the actions all postponed while first die Dinge und die Personen kommen. As if languages loved each other behind their own façades, despite alles was man denkt darüber davon dazu. As if words fraternised silently beneath the syntax, finding each other funny and delicious in a Misch-Masch of tender fornication, inside the bombed out hallowed structures and the rigid steel glass modern edifices of the brain. Du, do you love me?⁶¹

In this passage, Brooke-Rose mixes German and English in multiple ways and on multiple levels – semantic, grammatical, phonic, syntactic, visual, associative. Thus German and English words form part of the same phrase (‘sehr little’); German grammatical rules are applied (e.g. the verb moves to the end of the sentence or clause, or subject and verb are inverted following a sub-clause), even when the sentence or clause is not fully in German (‘wann man in Deutschland lives’, ‘then acquires it’); English phrases describe German grammatical structures (‘the gestures and the actions’ – that is, the verbs – ‘all postponed’); the similar sound of words in the two different language (e.g. ‘feel besser’ to echo ‘viel besser’; ‘Du, do’) facilitates some interlingual punning; words that feature in both languages (‘man’) suggestively carry both meanings; and neologisms (‘erronish’, ‘Misch-Masch’) effectively combine the two languages, producing a version of ‘Denglisch’. Between’s fraternising – even fornicating – languages, then, constitute the text’s inventiveness, its peculiar unconstraint.⁶² Michela Canepari-Labib describes Between as a ‘text of pleasure’ (in the style of Roland Barthes),⁶³ though that word ‘fraternised’ might give us pause: this is a ‘brotherly’ relation of languages and ‘was man denkt’ still holds sway in the world that Brooke-Rose describes.

For Kate Briggs, translation is itself ‘a form of writing under constraint’,⁶⁴ ‘a regulated operation, a form of writing enabled by the observation of a certain number of rules’; it is, furthermore, often understood as a ‘mechanical’ (even ‘automatic’) rather than a ‘creative’ process.⁶⁵ And certainly, Brooke-Rose’s novel reiterates at intervals how ‘no communication ever occurs’ in the conventions and congresses at which the protagonist does her interpreting work, and how she lives ‘between’ the ideas of others, channelling those ideas rather than expressing her own: ‘We merely translate other people’s ideas’, she tells Siegfried; ‘No one requires us to have any of our own’.⁶⁶ And yet, as Briggs explains:

What is fascinating about the lipogram, and suggestive of how translation might be fruitfully defined as an analogous form of writing under constraint, is the way the systematic application of a rule, and the loss which predictably ensues, conspire to initiate a peculiarly inventive kind of writing.⁶⁷

‘What translation shares with the lipogram’, Briggs suggests, ‘is its curious mode of affirmation: both processes are testament to how much can still be written in the face of the deficiency and loss that are the condition of their writing anything at all’.⁶⁸ Rachel Galvin claims that ‘the Oulipo has always had a special relationship to translation’, as it seeks ‘to translate elements from the sphere of mathematics into potential literary structures’;⁶⁹ and she ventures that ‘translation is fundamentally more Oulipian than has been recognized’, being more ‘literary production’ than ‘reproduction’.⁷⁰ While Brooke-Rose presents simultaneous interpreting as something apparently restrictive – hence the ‘passivity’ of the protagonist – translation is the method as well as the subject matter in Between, in the way it dances between different languages, reinstalling agency in this unconstrained movement. Ultimately the novel presents translation as both constraint (the constrained, restricted body of the interpreter, belted into airplane seats, swaddled in hotel beds, shut in her glass interpreting booth) and unconstraint (the licence to move, lasciviously, between languages in a single sentence). The ‘encounter between languages’ that is central to translation is an eroticised encounter, whose effects are unpredictable, not circumscribed.⁷¹

In highlighting, as I have here, both the novel’s insistence on bodies and the apparent unconstraint of its style (a style that is, of course, carefully crafted and contrived), I do not, however, mean to read Between as a kind of écriture féminine or writing the body – or as self-expression: Brooke-Rose is very clear in her ‘metastory’ of Between that ‘none of this had been the author’s personal experience either as woman or as author’.⁷² Instead, I suggest merely that Brooke-Rose consciously experiments with supposedly ‘masculine’ techniques of constraint (the lipogram, translation), as a means of reflecting upon gender and feminine embodiment in particular as themselves forms of constraint: the gendering of language, the objectification of the female body, the over-determination of that body as symbol, as vessel, the social and moral constraints imposed upon the body. The apparent impersonality of the gaze produced by the grammatical constraint allows for a reflection on bodies that cannot be read as a writing of the body.⁷³

Anne Garréta, Sphinx (1986)

Sphinx, Anne Garréta’s debut novel, was published in 1986; she joined the Oulipo group in 2000. Nevertheless, the novel is generally identified as an ‘Oulipian’ text, and often deployed to challenge the view of the Oulipo as masculine mathematicians (“Lots of men sitting around doing crosswords”),⁷⁴ and of Oulipian experiments as ‘insufficiently radical’ due to their ‘grammatical, referential bias’.⁷⁵ Garréta herself has described her works as ‘formalist novels, constrained fictions (semantic or pragmatic) in the Oulipian sense’ and, above all, ‘critical novels’, while not quite ascribing to them a political agenda: they are not ‘thesis novels’, she says, in the same interview.⁷⁶ The Oulipo group, as Garréta describes it “est et n’est pas (de la) politique”, an ‘enigmatic’ claim, with its ‘hesitation between the adjectival and substantival meanings of the French politique’, which nevertheless (on Alison James’ reading) ‘points in two directions: to the political potential of constraint, and to the group’s mode of existence as a (potentially) political entity.’⁷⁷

Sphinx’s central constraint is that neither the unnamed narrator-protagonist, a student of theology-turned-DJ, nor their lover, A***, a dancer, is gendered. This is especially hard to do in French for, as Zoë Roth explains: ‘In English, gender is only used to describe people or living beings (semantic gender)’, but French ‘works through grammatical gender, meaning that all nouns are classed according to either masculine or feminine categories’ and ‘[ad]jectives, subject and direct object pronouns like il [he] and elle [she], compound past tense verbs, and pronominal or “reflexive” verbs must all agree with the gender case.’⁷⁸ The result of this is that ‘a subject’s gender is revealed with almost any verb in the past tense or adjective’; Roth concludes then, that ‘Given the importance of gender to the structural cohesion of French, […] Garréta cannot simply avoid or omit gender – she must re-form the French language.’⁷⁹

Let me give you an example of how the constraint works, in both the French original and in Emma Ramadan’s English translation. This passage occurs at a point in the novel when the narrator has become suddenly, shockingly aware of the strength of their desire for A*** and is trying to navigate not just the power, but the very carnality of this desire. In French, this reads:

Le souvenir de son parfum, l’empreinte résiduelle, à peine sensible, de son épaule appuyée ce matin contre la mienne tandis que nous parlions me torturaient. Je sentais comme le fantôme de sa présence contre moi; sa main, un instant posée sur mon visage, sa cuisse que le peu de place dont nous disposions pour nous asseoir avait amenée contre la mienne.⁸⁰

In English, this is rendered as:

I was tortured by the memory of A***’s scent, by the residual imprint, barely there, of a shoulder resting against my own this morning as we spoke. The ghost of A***’s presence against mine; a hand poised for a moment on my face, our thighs pressed together in a cramped space.⁸¹

In French you can have possessive pronouns (‘son parfum’, ‘son épaule’, ‘sa main’) because the pronoun agrees with the gender of the object (perfume, shoulder, hand), not the gender of the person whose perfume or shoulder it is; in English, to avoid using the gendered pronouns ‘his’ or ‘her’, Ramadan repeats A***’s name: ‘A***’s scent’, ‘A***’s presence’, and then, to avoid too much repetition of the name, switches to the impersonal ‘a shoulder’, ‘a hand’, and changes ‘sa cuisse … contre la mienne’ (which in English would have to be ‘his/her thigh against mine’) to ‘our thighs pressed together’.⁸² In both French and English, however, the phrasing throws the focus onto the body – we are continually reminded of this insistent presence of the loved body, the remembered body, the gazed-at body, the desired body. And this body that might otherwise seem – in an essentialist vein – to fix sex (and, by extension, by cultural convention, to fix gender) does the opposite: it allows for the side-stepping of gender. The narrator and A*** can each oscillate between varieties of conventionally gendered behaviour, without ever being caught by a category.

Sphinx’s preoccupation with bodies (with A***’s body in particular), is evident from the outset. While watching a cabaret performance in a nightclub, ‘during a melancholic, disinterested contemplation of a succession of bodies I wasn’t trying hard to distinguish’,⁸³ the narrator first sees A***: ‘A body, just one, that I hadn’t identified, surreptitiously had filled the place with a seduction that permeated so deeply I couldn’t discover the cause, I couldn’t uncover the root of it.’⁸⁴ So A*** is, from the outset, ‘a body’ in a spotlight, a performing body in a theatrical and markedly debased setting: ‘the road to hell was lit with pale lanterns; the bottom of the abyss drew closer indefinitely’, the narrator tells us, on the first page;⁸⁵ the clubs have names like ‘Ambigu’, ‘Eden’, ‘The Apocryphe’ (which is ‘somewhere between brothel and butcher shop’);⁸⁶ one club is described as ‘a sweaty inferno’;⁸⁷ as a DJ, the narrator becomes ‘the priest of a harrowing cult’.⁸⁸ The language of sin and deviance imbricates the corporeal and the carnal, the sensual and the sinful, such that the narrator’s entry into this night time world is a ‘fall’ into fleshly existence (‘I was slipping and could only keep falling’).⁸⁹ Moreover, this ‘contemplation of bodies’, is, the narrator tells us, ‘a major passion’ of mine – the very word ‘passion’ invoking here both an intense sexual love and the suffering and death of Jesus, both the carnal and the spiritual; this is a passion that is ‘arbitrary, blind, and indifferent’, such that ‘its object is of no consequence’ – a brutish physical reaction.⁹⁰

As the narrator concedes, this is not in any way a cerebral or even an emotional attraction: ‘This strange intimacy didn’t stem from any common social or intellectual interests; it wasn’t the sign or effect of a close friendship or romantic relationship.’⁹¹ The development of the relationship in a sexual direction is, then, inevitable: ‘What I was feeling for A*** needed its own embodiment [réclamait son incarnation]’.⁹² This is, precisely, the desire – not just for A***’s body, but for A*** as a body, and it is channelled through the gaze:

I was tantalized by the idea of contact with A***’s skin [le contact de sa peau m’attirait]. […] With an unknowingly crazed look, I was always watching this irresistible body [ce corps adorable]. But my gaze was narrowing and stiffening [se crispait et se raidissait] under the tension of carnal desire [la tension du désir charnel].⁹³

The French word here, ‘charnel’, reminds us of the mortality of the body (the charnel house) and the proximity of death (there are several dramatic and gruesome deaths in this novel); through metaphor, the gaze is given physical form – the reflexive verbs ‘se crisper’ and ‘se raidir’ mean, respectively, to tense and to stiffen – and notably phallic overtones.

As in Between, the constraint produces a linguistic excess and a hyperbolic emotionality – a queer melodrama which colours every page of the novel.⁹⁴ While Between uses phrasal repetition, dizzying multilingualism and interlingual punning, Sphinx’s need to avoid fixing/revealing gender produces an ‘excess’ at various levels (formal and thematic). The use of the imperfect (rather than the passé composé, which often requires gender agreement), ‘implies an action that was repeated many times in the past or done regularly’, explains Ramadan, so the narrator ‘is always taking up habits: the habit of wandering, of skipping classes and studying for exams at home, of going to nightclubs with a priest […].’⁹⁵ These ‘habits’ imply addiction, a physical compulsion, a cycle, spiral or fall, and produce a moral and corporeal enervation which can only tend towards destruction – of the relationship, and of the two people involved. Garréta also uses the more literary ‘passé simple’, in place of the ‘passé composé’,⁹⁶ which feeds the presentation of the narrator’s identity as ‘a rather pretentious, bourgeois(e) scholar’,⁹⁷ rendering their prose especially mannered, flamboyant, and elevated. In this way, the linguistic constraint shapes the protagonist’s character and contributes to the impression of tonal idiosyncrasy and to the text’s breathless histrionics.

Finally, as Ramadan elucidates, because ‘the narrator can never describe A*** directly, as almost all adjectives in French have to agree with the gender of the person being described’, we are instead given indirect descriptions – of ‘A***’s skin, arms, shoulder, scent, residual imprint, thighs, mass of hair, curved neck, so that the adjectives agree with the gender of the particular body part in French and not with A***’s gender’, as in the examples I cited earlier.⁹⁸ Again, I read this as producing an ‘excess’ – an excessive-obsessive attention to the parts of A***’s body (to A*** as a collection of body parts, never quite cohering beneath the power of the narrator’s gaze) and a piling-up of the substitutes for that vetoed direct description. As Ramadan notes, ‘A*** is […] also referred to as various nouns’, including ‘a cadaver, a living cadaver, a life, a body, a beloved body, an inanimate body, an ephemeral body, a parasitic body, so that the adjectives agree with these nouns and, again, not with A***’s gender.’⁹⁹

One effect of this (constraint-generated) reduction of A*** to an objectified body is a fetishising focus on their blackness, leading to what Roth has described as ‘the overdetermination of race in the novel’: in Sphinx, claims Roth, ‘the illegibility of gender is offset by the seemingly crude treatment of race’, and ‘[p]aradoxically, race appears more pre-determined than gender.’¹⁰⁰ My reading, though, is that this is a novel preoccupied with extremes, binaries and excess and that it continually sets up these oppositions and contrasts in order to reveal their artificiality and to ask us to think about desire as rooted in otherness; this play of otherness/sameness runs throughout and it is what makes possible the various readings of Sphinx – as a heterosexual, gay or lesbian love story. Gender is also ever-present, precisely because of our inability to determine it. In a novel so preoccupied with theatricality, surface, materiality, performance, and looking it is little surprise that skin (A***’s skin, in particular), the surface of the body, its outward performance, should receive so much attention. This is not to absolve Garréta of the accusation that blackness is problematically fetishised here – it certainly is; rather, it is to situate this fetishisation, these repeated descriptions and metaphors of the (racialised) carnal surface, within the novel’s wider economy of the voyeuristic, titillated gaze and of the bodies that are its object. Roth contrasts the ‘excessive evocation of racial alterity’ with ‘the subtle and sophisticated elision of gender from the discursive workings of French’;¹⁰¹ my claim is that the elision/excess are inextricable – that both are a product of the constraint.

Conclusion

In Many Subtle Channels, his book about the Oulipo, Daniel Levin Becker describes Garréta’s mode of experimentation as

perpendicular to the [Oulipo] workshop’s standard values. Although her novels are heavily preoccupied with the dimensions and effects of language and literature, the approach they take to those issues is neither winking nor mischievous, but rather engaged, politicized, at times almost militant; their composition is intense and tightly controlled, but the language that comes out often reads as fluid, florid, furtively romantic. In a sense, the challenges she sets herself are authorial and not compositional: even the technically daunting suppression of sex markers in Sphinx feels motivated by the desire to say something political about gender, not something grammatical.¹⁰²

There are various things to unpack here – not least the description of Garréta as both ‘militant’ and ‘furtively romantic’ – but what I find especially interesting is Becker’s polarising distinction between saying ‘something political about gender’ and saying ‘something grammatical’ – which implies, first, that grammar is not political, second, that gender is not built into grammar, and third, that it is impossible to do both at the same time, as Garréta and Brooke-Rose do. As this essay has sought to show, the use of linguistic and grammatical constraints in Between and Sphinx is more than a dry, conceptual exercise; in fact it is crucial in generating an intensity of focus on questions of embodiment, gender and desire. More than this, it allows Garréta and Brooke-Rose to steer a course away from an essentialising writing of the body, a view of writing-as-expression that has dogged women experimentalists in particular, and it reveals the inadequacies of any dichotomous presentation of constraint and corporeality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito, The End of Oulipo? (London: Zero Books, 2013), p. 79.

2 Dennis Duncan, The Oulipo and Modern Thought (Oxford: OUP, 2019), p. 154.

3 Kate Briggs, ‘Translation and the Lipogram’, Paragraph, 29.3 (2006), pp. 43–54 (p. 43).

4 Louis Bury, Exercises in Criticism: The Theory and Practice of Literary Constraint (Chicago, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2014), p. 13.

5 Duncan, p. 1.

6 Alison James, Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), p. 14.

7 James, Constraining Chance, p. 14. Quoting the Oulipo’s Atlas de littérature potentielle [1981] (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

8 James, Constraining Chance, p. 15.

9 Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs, ‘Contexts and Continuities: An Introduction to Women’s Experimental Fiction in English’, in Friedman and Fuchs (eds.), Breaking the Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 3–51 (pp. 12, 14).

10 Ibid., p. 3.

11 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 31

12 Alison James, ‘Oulipian Feelings: On the Emotional Effects of Constraints’, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 25.5 (2021): 557–65 (pp. 557, 558).

13 Ibid., p. 559.

14 Richard Deming, ‘Constraints as Opposed to What?: A Philosophical Approach to the Values of Constrained Writing’, Poetics Today, 30.4 (Winter 2009), pp. 653–68 (p. 658).

15 Ibid., p. 654.

16 Ibid., p. 666.

17 Bury, Exercises in Criticism, p. 18.

18 Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Oulipo factor: the procedural poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall’, Textual Practice, 18.1 (2004), pp. 23–45 (p. 25).

19 Deming, ‘Constraints as Opposed to What?’, p. 659.

20 Elkin and Esposito, The End of Oulipo? p. 79. Discussions of gender and the Oulipo have also occurred in the French context – see for example Christelle Reggiani’s ‘Être Oulipienne’, which opens with the question: ‘L’écriture oulipienne peut-elle être (vraiment) de genre féminin?’ [‘Oulipian writing, can it really be female?’]. Études littéraires, 47.2 (2016), 103–17 (103).

21 Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young, ‘“& and” and foulipo’, in Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener (eds.), The Noulipian Analects (Les Figues Press, 2007), pp. 5–13 (p. 9). Text of ‘foulipo’ also available at: https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith/foulipo.html

22 Jennifer Scappettone, ‘Response to Jennifer Ashton: Bachelorettes, Even: Strategic Embodiment in Contemporary Experimentalism by Women’, Modern Philology, 105.1 (2007): 178–84 (181-82). This statement arguably no longer holds (if it ever did) – Oulipo’s reputation/reception is mixed; feminist body art has seen major retrospective exhibitions in recent years (Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann) and Hannah Wilke’s work is a key reference point in Chris Kraus’s cult hit, I Love Dick [1996] (Semiotext(e), 2006).

23 Spahr and Young, ‘foulipo’, p. 7

24 Spahr and Young, ‘foulipo’, p. 8

25 Michael Leong, ‘Oulipo, Foulipo, Noulipo: The Gendered Politics of Literary Constraints’, in edited by G.N. Forester and M.J. Nicholls (eds), Verbivoracious Press Festschrift Volume Six, ‘The Oulipo’ (2017), pp. 100–30, p. 102.

26 Ibid., p. 104.

27 Bury, Exercises in Criticism, pp. 65-66. My emphasis.

28 Bury, Exercises in Criticism, p. 15.

29 Karen R. Lawrence, ‘“Floating on a Pinpoint”: Travel and Place in Brooke-Rose’s Between’, in Ellen J. Friedman and Richard Martin (eds.), Utterly Other Discourse: The Texts of Christine Brooke-Rose (Chicago, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), pp. 76–96 (p. 78).

30 Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Living Between, or, The Lon/veliness of the Alleinstehende Frau’, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 9.3 (1989): 124–27 (127)

31 Christine Brooke-Rose, Letter to Michael Schmidt dated 3/09/93, Carcanet Archive, John Rylands Library, Manchester. Brooke-Rose comments in this letter on how the use of these constraints helped her to overcome her unwillingness to deal with ‘real’ material in her pseudo-autobiography, Remake.

32 Brooke-Rose, Invisible Author, p. 2

33 Christine Brooke-Rose, Stories, Theories and Things (Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p. 6.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., p. 7.

36 Ibid.

37 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 395.

38 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 398.

39 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 420.

40 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 575.

41 Karen Lawrence acknowledges that ‘For Brooke-Rose experimental grammar is never merely a question of the relationship among parts of the sentence but a technique for exploring fixings and releases of positionality’, and she gives the example that, ‘In exploring prepositions and changes in position, Brooke-Rose focuses on the mark of gender in the circulation of meaning in language.’ However, she is more concerned with the ‘mark of gender’ in language than with the specific question of the body (as I am). ‘“Floating on a Pinpoint”’, p. 86.

42 Suleiman, ‘Living Between’, p. 125.

43 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 410.

44 Brooke-Rose, Between, pp. 398, 399.

45 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 395.

46 Brooke-Rose, Between, pp. 406, 410.

47 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 413

48 Lawrence, ‘“Floating on a Pinpoint”’, pp. 84, 90.

49 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 401.

50 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 408.

51 Brooke-Rose, Between, pp. 408-9.

52 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 437.

53 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 414.

54 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 398.

55 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 424.

56 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 433.

57 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 431.

58 Lawrence, ‘“Floating on a Pinpoint”’, p. 81.

59 Lawrence, ‘“Floating on a Pinpoint”’, p. 77.

60 On the Oulipian practice of ‘traduction phonologique’, Duncan notes that ‘translating for sound rather than sense – better known as “homophonic translation” – has a venerable history in the Oulipo going back to the group’s first publication, the Pataphysical Dossier 17.’ (p. 22)

61 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 447.

62 As we are told, of a later encounter, despite numerous miscommunications, ‘And yet languages flew straight across and words met loins.’ Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 554.

63 See Michela Canepari-Labib, Word-Worlds: Language, Identity and Reality in the Work of Christine Brooke-Rose (Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 212-15.

64 Brigg, ‘Translation and the Lipogram’, p. 43

65 Briggs, ‘Translation and the Lipogram’, p. 45

66 Brooke-Rose, Between, p. 413

67 Briggs, ‘Translation and the Lipogram’, p. 43

68 Briggs, ‘Translation and the Lipogram’, p. 47. As Carole Sweeney also notes, simultaneous translation of the kind practised by the protagonist of Between is ‘relatively new technology after the Second World War’ and ‘In the “bombed out hallowed structures” of post-1945 Europe, accurate communication and a consensual version of “truth” acquire an acute sense of urgency.’ ‘“Groping inside language”: translation, humour and experiment in Christine Brooke-Rose’s Between and Brigid Brophy’s In Transit’, Textual Practice, 32.2 (2018): 301–16 (308).

69 Rachel Galvin, ‘Form Has Its Reasons: Translation and Copia’, MLN, 131.4 (2016): 846–63 (846).

70 Galvin, ‘Form Has Its Reasons’, p. 847

71 Briggs, ‘Translation and the Lipogram’, p. 44.

72 Brooke-Rose, Stories, Theories and Things, p. 7

73 Brooke-Rose notes her objections to this kind of essentialism in ‘A Womb of One’s Own’, in Stories, Theories and Things.

74 Elkin and Esposito, The End of Oulipo? p. 78. Elkin is here quoting a friend of hers (probably Joanna Walsh).

75 Alison James, ‘Perec and the Politics of Constraint’, in Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens (eds.), The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh UP, 2017), pp. 157–70 (p. 160). Many contemporary experimental poets, Christian Bök explains, ‘find Oulipo impressive in its formal technique, but inadequate in its social rationale’. Christian Bök, ‘UbuWeb and Intentional Freedom’, in Christine Wertheim and Matias Viegener (eds.), The Noulipian Analects (Les Figues Press, 2007), pp. 221–23 (p. 222). Kenneth Goldsmith has also, in interview, criticised the Oulipo for ‘[embracing] a blandly conservative narrative fiction which seems to bury the very interesting procedures that went into creating the works.’ Erik Belgum interview with Kenneth Goldsmith, originally published in Read Me 4; now available here https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/goldsmith/readme.html

76 Interview with Garréta by Eva Domeneghini, in Cosmogonie (2000): http://cosmogonie.free.fr/index2.html My translation of: ‘des romans formalistes au départ, des fictions à contrainte (sémantiques ou pragmatiques) au sens oulipien’, and ‘des romans critiques’.

77 Alison James, ‘Perec and the Politics of Constraint’, pp. 163-64. James argues that the Oulipo’s ‘project’ is positioned ‘not against, but outside the conflictual history of the literary avant-garde in favour of a transhistorical – but not ahistorical – understanding of the “potentiality” of forms.’ (p. 161) She reads this as a kind of ‘universalism’. (p. 162)

78 Zoë Roth, Formal Matters: Embodied Experience in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: EUP, 2022), p. 75

79 Ibid.

80 Anne Garréta, Sphinx (Paris: Grasset, 1986), p. 59

81 Anne Garréta, Sphinx, translated by Emma Ramadan (Dallas: Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015), p. 40

82 It is worth noting here Hervé Le Tellier’s point that ‘toute traduction d’une oeuvre oulipienne est un exploit et une oeuvre oulipienne en soi’ [all translation of an Oulipian work is an Oulipian feat and work in itself], which suggests, claims Galvin, that ‘constrained translation’ – that is, translation of constrained texts such as Sphinx – ‘should be honored as an act of origination’. Galvin, ‘Form Has Its Reasons’, p. 847, quoting Hervé Le Tellier, Esthétique de l’Oulipo (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 2006), p. 247.

83 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 2. Translation of: ‘d’un ballet de corps que je ne m’efforçai pas de distinguer’, p. 12.

84 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 12. Trans of: ‘Un corps, un seul’. p. 13.

85 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 1.

86 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, pp. 5, 6, 9. From the Greek apokruphos, ‘hide away’, referring to the Old Testament ‘Apocrypha’ – writings dating from 300BC to AD100 which are not included in the Hebrew Bible.

87 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 6

88 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 10

89 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 1.

90 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 4.

91 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 35.

92 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 39.

93 Garréta/Ramadan, Sphinx, p. 39

94 This, combined with the Baroque vision of a hedonistic Parisian underworld, the resolute focus on the material surface, the deliberate verbosity and the tenor of bitter melancholia, put me strongly in mind of Djuna Barnes’ 1936 novel, Nightwood.

95 Ramadan, ‘Afterword’, in Sphinx (Deep Vellum Publishing, 2015), p. 125.

96 Ramadan, ‘Afterword’, p. 125.

97 Ramadan, ‘Afterword’, p. 126.

98 Ramadan, ‘Afterword’, p. 127.

99 Ramadan, p. ‘Afterword’, 127.

100 Roth, Formal Matters, p. 79

101 Roth, Formal Matters, p. 82

102 Daniel Levin Becker, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 228–29