Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network – French Studies Channel
Host: Gina Stamm
Guest: Aubrey Gabel, Assistant Professor of French, Columbia University
Book: The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics (Northwestern University Press, 2025)
Date: December 15, 2025

In this episode, Gina Stamm interviews Aubrey Gabel about her new book, which explores the intertwining of play (the "ludic") and politics in French literature, focusing on the Oulipo group and its legacy from the 1960s to today. Gabel discusses how playful literary experimentation serves as both an artistic and sociopolitical intervention, how Oulipo navigated its political positioning, and the gendered dynamics in contemporary experimental writing.

Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of the Project and "Ludics" (02:23–05:51)

• Interdisciplinary Approach to Play
  • Gabel traces her interest to the history of formalism and experimental literary groups.
  • She notes, "There's really a surprising array of fields—child psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology—that were invested in theorizing this opposition between play and game..." (03:35).
• Defining 'Ludics'
  • She retains the term “ludic” as it uniquely bridges play and game, with rich connotations in French.

2. Expanding 'Politics' in Literature (05:51–10:12)

• Why Are Some Texts Seen as Political?
  • Gabel examines how certain playful literary works are immediately politicized while others are not.
  • She explores the role of reception, institutions, and self-presentation:
    • “Is what is politicized...coming from the authors...or coming from their readership or...the systems, the publishing houses, the prizes, the market in which they're functioning?” (06:18)
• Flexible Definition of Politics
  • She considers overt references, public stances, and intra-literary field conflicts in her analysis of political acts.

3. Shaping the Corpus & Oulipo’s Centrality (10:12–14:48)

• Multiple Generations and Connections
  • The monograph’s chapters each approach “ludics” as both a craft and a literary posture.
  • Focus is on Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais.
  • Gabel contextualizes Oulipo alongside contemporaries like Monique Wittig and François Maspero, noting their social and personal connections.

“[Oulipo] really is a touchstone for any ludic or experimental text that came afterwards.” (12:08)

4. Oulipo and Political Deflection (14:48–19:33)

• Secrecy and Apoliticism as Strategy
  • Gabel posits that Oulipo’s claims to apoliticism and secrecy are discursive stances—ways to circumvent the era’s pressure on public literary commitment.
  • She points out that these stances distinguished Oulipo from structures like Surrealism and the “committed author” à la Sartre:
    • “...secrecy and apoliticism are not historical realities, but discursive positions...” (15:29)
  • Oulipo’s differentiation from postwar literary models is both a self-positioning within and reaction to a hyper-politicized field.

5. Reading La Disparition as Political (19:33–24:51)

• Coded Interventions in Puzzles
  • Gabel challenges the reductive view that Perec’s La Disparition is “exhausted by its structure”.
  • She interprets the lipogrammatic novel (written without the letter “e”) as containing hidden, timely political references (the Algerian War, May 68 students, the disappearance of Ben Barka):
    • “...this really difficult language actually hides in plain sight references to ongoing events...” (21:21)
• Collaborative Authorship
  • Manuscript evidence of multiple contributors at the Moulin d’Andé artist community.
  • Gabel highlights the way group-contributed clues are woven in as “clients, clues or red herrings” (24:33).

6. Monique Wittig, Formal Innovation, and Reception (24:51–27:43)

• Activism and Literary Form
  • Wittig, though politically active, resisted being pigeonholed as a “political” or “minority” writer:
    • “...once you become what she calls a minority writer...your work is no longer read as literature, but it's read as propaganda.” (25:54)
  • Gabel foregrounds Wittig’s “invasive procedures” in language, seeing them as materialist, transformative acts—beyond mere content-driven activism.

7. After Communism: Jacques Jouet and the Persistence of Politics (27:43–33:24)

• The "Political Oulipian"
  • Jouet, a later Oulipian, is ambivalent about Communism’s legacy, but his “work site poetics” are marked by continual reinvention and collective action.
• Literary Republicanism
  • Inspired by the collapse of French Communism, Jouet’s “literary republicanism” is an inclusive, aesthetic principle:
    • “...a kind of literary universe that would be welcoming to all, not unironically because he uses a word like cuckoo or commie, because he's interested in these kind of bumbling communist types...” (32:29)

8. François Maspero: Ludics in Militant Publishing, Travelogue, and History (33:24–40:59)

• Militant Publisher-Turned-Author
  • Best known for Éditions Maspero, a crucial node in postwar leftist publishing.
  • Maspero’s later works blend journalism, auto-fiction, and constrained writing, especially in Les Passagers du Roissy-Express and Balkans-Transit.
    • Gabel calls these “unscripted encounters” and “ludicro processes” (36:35).
• Role of Images
  • Collaboration with photographers becomes integral, with visual documentation offering counterpoints and filling archival silences.

9. Gender, Memory, and the Contemporary Oulipo: Michèle Audin (40:59–45:09)

• Feminist, Communist, and Historian
  • Audin’s legacy—both literary and political—stems from her advocacy around her father’s disappearance during the Algerian War.
  • Gabel considers Audin’s archival methods and critical fabulation as ludic practices, reconstructing microhistories from minimal traces:
    • “...she developed certain practices...culling the archives...as a kind of ludic practice…” (44:03)
• Ongoing Gender Dynamics
  • The role and representation of women in Oulipo remain fraught, with Audin a singular example of recent feminist and political engagement.

10. Closing and Upcoming Work (45:09–46:39)

• Future Research
  • Gabel is now working on comics journalism and graphic reportage, viewing them as forms of “slow journalism.”
    • “Very recently...I have been thinking about graphic journalism as emblematic of...a compromise between in depth embedded investigative reporting and op eds...” (45:44)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the politics of reception:
  “Why is it that certain playful works are automatically understood to be political...and why can this happen sometimes, without needing any kind of outside justification?” (06:05, Aubrey Gabel)
• On Oulipo’s positioning:
  “[Oulipo's] secrecy and apoliticism are not historical realities, but discursive positions, predominantly ways of speaking and intervening in the literary sphere.” (15:29, Aubrey Gabel)
• On reading Perec’s La Disparition:
  “The difficult, slangy polyglot language...actually hides in plain sight references to ongoing events...like the students occupying the Sorbonne...” (21:21, Aubrey Gabel)
• On literary inclusion:
  “It’s this idea of a kind of literary universe that would be welcoming to all, not unironically...ultimately defined by bourgeois values...” (32:29, Aubrey Gabel)
• On Wittig's frustration:
  “Once you become what she calls a minority writer...your work is no longer read as literature, but it’s read as propaganda.” (25:54, Aubrey Gabel)
• On Audin’s legacy and gender:
  “A lot of Michèle Audin’s works use various ludic methods to engage in what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation...to reconstitute the life of her own father...” (44:03, Aubrey Gabel)

Key Timestamps

• 02:27 – How Gabel came to the project & definition of 'ludic'
• 06:04 – The meaning of 'politics'; why certain texts are seen as political
• 10:22 – Corpus selection, Oulipo as legacy, and generation-based analysis
• 15:12 – Oulipo's “apolitical" self-presentation as a political strategy
• 19:48 – Perec’s La Disparition as coded political intervention
• 23:20 – Collective authorship and the artist residency at Moulin d’Andé
• 25:15 – Monique Wittig’s literary activism and relationship to formal innovation
• 27:59 – Jacques Jouet and the shifting field after the fall of Communism
• 31:51 – Jouet’s “literary republicanism” defined
• 33:38 – François Maspero’s ludic travelogues and publishing history
• 37:48 – The role of photography and images in Maspero’s travelogues
• 41:15 – Michèle Audin, gender, and the intersection of mathematics, politics, and ludics in Oulipo
• 44:03 – Audin’s use of ludic archival research to reconstruct lives
• 45:19 – Gabel’s future work on comics journalism

Conclusion

This episode provides a deep dive into the entanglements of play, form, and politics in postwar and contemporary French literature. Aubrey Gabel’s analysis illuminates how literary ludics is more than mere formal play: it is a mode of intervention, social strategy, and often a way of coding or negotiating political reality, whether that means avoiding commitment, encoding dissent, or reconstructing lost histories. The book foregrounds Oulipo while connecting it richly to other vital figures and movements, and the conversation opens new avenues for thinking about authorship, collectivity, gender, and the ongoing evolution of politically charged experimentation in literature.