"literary bondage"

From: mE Studio

"You might think Raymond Queneau was guilty of a little overkill when he cured a bout of writer's block by writing One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, but this flipbook presentation of 10 sonnets did more than paper over a barren spell, it became the founding text of an experimental literary collective. The 14 lines on each page are printed on individual strips, so that every line can be replaced by the corresponding one in any of the other poems. By the author's reckoning, it would take someone 190,258,751 years to go through all possible combinations….

     Oulipians are into literary bondage. Their fetish is predicated on the notion that writing is always constrained by something, be it simply time or language itself. The solution, in their view, is not to try, quixotically, to abolish constraints, but to acknowledge their presence, and embrace them proactively. For Queneau, 'Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery.' Italo Calvino (who was co-opted in 1973) concurred: 'What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration or intuition is nothing other than finding the right road empirically.' Choosing the 'right road' from the outset, instead of stumbling upon it haphazardly, is the Oulipian way: once the Apollonian structure has been circumscribed, Dionysus can work his magic.
     'I set myself rules in order to be totally free,' as [Georges] Perec put it, echoing Queneau's earlier definition of Oulipians as 'rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.'"
— Andrew Gallix, The Guardian
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