La potentialité en acte

The concept of potentiality plays a central role in the practice of the Oulipo. But what exactly is literary potentiality? “The potential is that which does not yet exist”, says Queneau, but for the Oulipo it is also a property of existing texts that have a privileged relationship with the literature of the future. Jacques Roubaud distinguishes between two kinds of potentiality: “predisposed” and“ in actuality”, the first residing in a constraint, the second in a text that may initiate a series of variations or mutations of the constraint according to which it was written. The Oulipians regard “fecundity” or generative capacity as a measure of the potentiality (whether “predisposed” or “in actuality”) of a constraint or text. Certain purely formal proposals have turned out to be very productive (N+7, quenines and nonines), but in the most spectacular cases of potentiality in actuality, the process began with a text: Exercises in Style and Elementary Morality I by Raymond Queneau, I Remember and The Winter Journey by Georges Perec. These four texts have some common characteristics: they are adaptations more than radical innovations; they invite other writers to continue them or provoke responses (sometimes via a paratextual appendage),and they are not governed by tight formal constraints. It may be the case that the most productive Oulipian forms and constraints are not the most complex or the most interesting from a mathematical point of view.