← New Books Network
New Books Network
Aubrey Gabel, "The Politics of Play: Oulipo and the Legacy of French Literary Ludics" (Northwestern UP, 2025)
00:47:04
Loading summary
Transcript39 lines
- [00:00]
A
Deck your home with blinds.com. Diy or let us install. Free design consultation plus free samples and free shipping. Free.
- [00:21]
B
Head to blinds.com now for up to 45% off sitewide, plus a free professional measure. Rules and restrictions may apply. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:37]
C
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network French Studies channel. I'm your host, Gina Stamm, associate Professor of French at the University of Alabama. My guest today is Aubrey Gable, here to talk to us about her new book, the Politics of Ulipo and the Legacy of French Literary, out this year from Northwestern University Press. Dr. Gable is assistant professor of French at Columbia University, as well as an affiliate with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. And current, currently a fellow with the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. She has also published a number of articles and chapters and chapters and edited volumes on literary play and constraints, but also on band dessine and other comic genres. Dr. Gable, thank you for being with us today.
- [02:21]
A
Thank you for having me.
- [02:23]
C
So, first of all, can you tell us about the path that led you to this project?
- [02:27]
A
Yeah, good question. When I started this project, I was really interested in the history of formalism. I was reading a lot of Georges and a lot of poetry and experimental feminist fiction, along with scholars that use Linguistics and sociology to understand the history of literary groups in avant gardes. And one thing that I noticed was that a lot of correct scholarship was really focused on the games that he played or how to translate those games. And of course not without reason, or the scholarship was focused on the kinds of psychological ramifications of play for the author. So constraints as a creative space for self construction or that oblige a certain kind of work of mourning. But there was a real emphasis on this particular kind of biographical reading. I ended up spending a year at the BNF reading anything that had JW Play or game in the title, along with pouring over various archives. I took an anthropology seminar at the with Thierry van Linck, who wrote an ethnography of Chess players. And what I noticed was that there's really a surprising array of fields, child psychology, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, that were invested in theorizing this opposition between play and game, in which play refers to certain kinds of unstructured free form creative activity. And game is the opposite sort of play, harnessed by structure, fixed by rules, made meaningful and competitive. And in fact this is even true in languages that only have one word, like French, where there's a tendency to think of Je either in terms of play or game. And I don't want to say this opposition never holds, but it's often used to create hierarchies between higher and lower forms of cultural or social activity. And literary scholars often or sometimes will apply these theories to literature without thinking about the larger ramifications. And Roger Cayois table from Les Jeux les Hommes, which is a good example of this because it provides a complex classification scheme that includes everything from chess and chance fade games to frenzy and roller coasters. But someone like Kaiwa is ultimately making a case for the superiority of one kind of game that is representative of Western culture. And while I was reading, I was also struck by another philosopher, Jacques Henriot, who said that we have a tendency to think of either everything or nothing as Je. So literature is play, poetry is play, any kind of creative play activity is play. And I wanted to avoid this. So all this to say, as a good humanist, I was thinking about the broad array of disciplines that might inform my thinking. And then I ended up returning to literary history and literary sociology, especially within a lineage of Bourdieu Gen scholars like Michael Lucy, Joseph Saperot or Camille Bloomfield. And in the end I kept the word Ludique ludic, literary ludic, because I didn't want to have to choose between play or game. And while this is a little bit of an erudite word in English. It is actually a fairly common word in French, and it can refer to things like ludo, activite, sort of playful pedagogy for elementary school students, et cetera.
- [05:51]
C
So you just expanded a little bit on what you mean by ludics. And going back to your title, you have on one side ludics, but on the other side, politics. So can you tell us a little bit about the expansive sense that you give to politics here as well?
- [06:05]
A
Sure. So the quandary that really animated this book was why is it that certain playful works are automatically understood to be political? Political, according to authors, readers and critics of different audiences? And why can this happen sometimes, without needing any kind of outside justification or supporting on the ground activity, while other texts are denied political content? So is what is politicized or depoliticized coming from the authors, from themselves, or coming from their readership or the systems, the publishing houses, the prizes, the market in which they're functioning? So, for instance, how is it that Surrealists, with their elaborate party games, exquisite corpses and so on, were able to align themselves with the French Communist Party? And a few decades later, Lippians would not just be reluctant to think of their work as political, but would, in fact, self identify as a political group and as an apolitical group. And as an apolitical group in 1960, you know, at a time when situations, situationists were developing ludic spatial practices and using found film and aligning themselves with French Maoism. So why would you be apolitical at this moment? And this problem could also, you know, could be applied to the history of literary groups or within an author's own work and reception. So why was it, for instance, that some of Parak's texts were received as overtly political, like his kind of bitter attack on consumer culture and petit bourgeois politics? And others were at least initially received as elaborate experiments without any real kind of political, any real content, political or otherwise. And this was the case for La Dispavation, which is a lipogram or a novel written entirely without the letter E, the most common vowel in the French language. And early readers were really fixated on the constraint and often replicated it in reviews. And there are sort of hundreds of reviews like this. But Brecht, for his part, lamented that it was a book that was exhausted by its structure, that it was explained as soon as someone explained the constraint. So in my book, I really wanted to be thinking about Ludic and politics according to a kind of Flexible definition that would take a couple of things into account. One, the spectrum of forms and practices that could be encompassed by literary and play and games, from highly complicated textual constraints like the lipogram or feminization, to looser rules or procedures that dictate time, space or other conditions of writing, what Michael Sheringham and Johnny Gratton have called projects. Two, I wanted to call attention to various ludicrous themes, the grotesque, the body or scatological language, kind of replacean heritage that often accompanies formerly playful texts. And three, and perhaps most importantly, how different modes, forms or modes of self presentation can be understood as a social strategy or a posture within the literary field. So ludics as a means of playing the author or the group, or even a means of kind of gaming the system. And I tend to think of politics in a couple of ways, One, most narrowly as overt allegiances or references to contemporary political groups so party membership, allusion to a particular party. Second, in terms of an author's status as a spokesperson or a public or political figure within the literary scene. Jean Paul Sartre, who spoke for the French Communist Party, Raymond Couleau, who spoke for Ulipo, et cetera. And finally, in terms of literary politics or the conflicts between authors and groups, so Ulipo's relationship with surrealists and pataphysicians, or its admiration of Bugl Dyke, a secret mathematics collective of the 1930s.
- [10:12]
C
And given these definitions as you've developed them, how did you develop the, or winnow down the corpus that you're presenting to us in this book? And how did you decide to organize it?
- [10:22]
A
Sure. So there are early parts of the book where I kind of go backwards in time and try to construct a kind of ludic lineage with this definition in mind. But one guiding principle that I had when developing the corpus was that in every chapter I would try to approach ludics as both a writerly practice and an authorial strategy or a means of intervening in this field. So every chapter tries to highlight a kind of formalist choice or a series of formalist choices, and to think through the repercussions of this as a strategy. So in general, the monograph centers on hug or the potential, which began in 1960 with the CO founders Raymond Conneau et Francois Le Lyonnais. And it was a group composed, initially composed of mostly older Parisian men and the odd American of mathematicians, writers and intellectuals. And they were interested in the creation of new literary forms like constraints or other rules that condition the creation of a text and the revival of Old forms like the medieval Sistina. And so Olivo is arguably the most well known post war French literary group invested in formalism, or perhaps even these days, the best. Well, you know, the most well known French formalist group, TU core. So it really is a touchstone for any ludic or experimental text that came afterwards. And the group is also active in French literature today, although it's, you know, its members and its position within the literary field have shifted significantly and it's become better known and more consecrated over time. So Conno's works are on the Baccalaureate, Lipins have held regular events at the BNF, and so on. But when I use the word legacy in the title, which was actually a suggestion from my editor, it's to capture not just the importance but the dominance or primacy of Ulipo in discussions of French formalism and the way in which their reception has conditioned future discussions of formalism, as well as the way in which the word legacy can capture how the group has shifted over time. And so, with this in mind, I chose to intentionally write about several generations of the group, with chapters on Raymond Kuno, Georges Pere Jacquesuet, and a coda on Michel Houdin and generation by generation here I mean the moment at which they were added to the group, in the group's history. But I didn't want to focus only on Ulipo, as I was finding other parallel practices of play and game among writers of the same generation. And here I'm thinking of generation in the conventional sense. I was looking at writers like SAS novelist Monique Wittig or third worldest editor Francois Masperoux. And I want to really emphasize that this is not just incidental. You know, even if these authors weren't members of Ulipo, they did come into contact with Perek or other Ulypians. So it wasn't just that they were experimenting with similar practices, but they were sort of circulating in the same circle. Wittig contributed a passage to La Disparation. She stayed at the same artist colony, the Boulon Dande, where Peret wrote the text. Masquerault was a friend of Perek's and wrote later texts and homage to him. Que Noeau's Azidans le Matreau won a prize and they held an event at Maspero's bookstore, and so on. So there's this kind of historical attachments among members of the group. And in the end, the core of the book focuses on these writers of the same loose generational cohort and Maspero, all writers who came of age politically and artistically in the 1950s and 60s, in the aftermath of World War II, during the Algerian War and culminating in May. 68. Anjou is the youngest, as he was born just after the end of World War II. But he, like the others, was. Was nevertheless marked by its aftermath and felt it as part of his political education, via his family and friends.
- [14:48]
C
So you've evoked the centrality of Ulipo throughout the multiple generations that you're talking about. And in your book you talk about how it has a fairly tense or uneven relationship with politics. Could you talk about the position of degagement that they and some of the other authors adopt, and maybe how you see deflection of attention to politics as a political strategy in itself?
- [15:12]
A
Sure, yeah. So again, what brought me to Ulipo was again, this quandary. Why did they self identify not just as apolitical, but as secret? And why would they do this in 1960, at the height of the Algerian war? And so, in general, I argue that secrecy and apoliticism are not historical realities, but discursive positions, predominantly sort of ways of speaking and intervening in the literary sphere. And what do I mean by this? I say that it's a kind of deflection strategy that allowed them to avoid, but also offer an alternative to the committed author and committed literature. So I could say that within, you know, within Ulipo's studies, there's a certain tendency to talk about Ulipo's, to take Ulipo's own discourse for granted, so to talk about its secret secrecy, even though they weren't secret for very long. They radio, you know, Kano was already talking about them on the radio a little over the year into the group's existence. They had invitees. They were. They originated as part of the. Part of the College of Cataphysics. So they published their early texts and goings on there. All this to say that they maybe weren't public in a certain kind of way, but they were not invisible to certain publics. And when we say that they were apolitical, you know, it's good to remember the moment at which they're writing is the height of Sarturian or committed literature, which understood the author as a public figure whose deeply involved in on the ground political activity. And in fact, you know, following. There was even sort of an assumption that prose over poetry was a preferable mode for engaging in politics. And then at the other end of the spectrum were the new novelists, who are the kind of hodgepodge of writers associated with the Edition des Minue, who dedicated themselves to reinventing the model, the novel, but did not want to tie literature to any singular political message. And Alain Roubrier, who often spoke for the group, often said that they were committed above all else to language. And the literary field at this time in post war France was also what Giselle Sapio calls hyper politicized, meaning that every act or gesture could be infused with political content. So there are obviously a number of paradoxes in terms of how this played out. There were new novelists who did have political agendas. Jerome Landon, Minaby's editor, was a former resistant and sort of fell back on that in order to make a case for publishing apolitical literature. Many of Sartre's old novels are quite formalistic, but nevertheless this is the kind of discursive field in which Ulipo was operating. And while several founding Libyans were former Resistance, Le Dyonnet was active in the Marco Polo network, Noel Arnaud founded the anti fascist journal La Marin, La Plume, Jean l' Escuro was involved in a clandestine poetry journal, and so on. I argue that they, you know, they weren't just differentiating themselves from their predecessors. So they had. There were a certain number of Olympians that had begun their careers with certain surrealism and wanted to postulate, you know, postulate a model of group behavior that would be different than the way that surrealism functioned, but that they're also. They were also trying to avoid a certain kind of public political identity that was associated with. And so when I look at, towards the end of my first chapter, this notion of what I'm doing is responding to a kind of counter discourse that was prevalent but was never homogenous and brought together a number of different thinkers. The Maoist essayist Etienne Le Roule, H. Jerome Landon, who I mentioned a moment ago, were all sort of anxious about guitar and gaget becoming the yardstick by which all their forms of political practice were measured.
- [19:33]
C
And one of these members of Lippo, who becomes then the focus of your second chapter. So, Georges, La Disparation, how do you read this lipigrammatic text? As an intervention in or a comment on the politics of the late 1960s in particular?
- [19:49]
A
Sure, I read Parette's La Disparation as A History of Two presents so the present of the Algerian War in May 68 and the present of the Moulin Dande, the artist community in which he was living. So at the moment at which Parek started writing the book in late 68, early 1969. He was really disillusioned with his public role as a Marxist author and felt a little bit trapped within the framework of the committed author. And he moved to the Moulin Dante in Normandy largely to escape the public eye. And he effectively missed the height of 1968. And we could remember that the disparation was initially received as a linguistic feat. You know, it's a whodunit novel in which nearly every character disappears and dies. Beginning with. And the allegory of the missing letter. The missing O has over time been read as an allegory for the Holocaust since Burek lost his mother to Auschwitz. So the is the erasure of the feminine to a certain extent, and also an erasure of an sort of absent for them eux. And without negating this reading, I also see Parakh as engaging him in what I call a kind of coded speech, or what I describe as a linguistic trompe l'.
- [21:11]
C
Oeil.
- [21:12]
A
So in which the difficult, slangy polyglot language. And I've had colleagues reference it as a kind of unreadable text. And I'm not sure I would go quite that far, but that this really difficult language actually hides in plain sight references to ongoing events. So like the students occupying the Sorbonne or the disappearance of Moroccan revolutionary Ben Baka, who's referred to as Ibn Baka. And that a lot of the things that we say about the book in theory, that you can't refer to group or you can't refer to east, to refer to different kinds of political groups is just not true in practice. And that GREC finds different kinds of workarounds like using acronyms JCR becomes, you know, communist, a traziest group. So he finds all of these different ways of referring to the constraint.
- [22:09]
C
And.
- [22:11]
D
This message may be shocking to many millennials. If you are one, you might want to sit down. Right now, loads of people are searching the following on Depop. Low rise jeans, Holzer top, Velour tracksuit, puka shell necklace, disc belt. You likely placed these in the dark of your closet in 2004, never to be seen again. But if you can find it in yourself to dust them off, there are a lot of people who will give you money for them. Sell on Depop, where taste recognizes taste.
- [22:42]
E
Toast the holidays in a new way and raise a glass of Rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. Enjoy it over ice or in your coffee. Rumchata. Your holiday cocktails just got sweeter. Tap or click the banner for more. Drink responsibly Caribbean rum with real dairy cream, natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Pojoa, Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
- [23:10]
C
In particular, how is this book a collective work? And what are the implications of that group activity? Referring to, as you said, the second presentation of the Moulin Dante.
- [23:20]
A
Sure, it's well established that Brecht invited friends and inhabitants at the Moulin to play in the game of gathering the linguistic materials for the text. And if you look at the manuscript and preparatory materials for La Disparation, it's written in multiple hands. You find all kinds of lists of words without the letter E, verbs beginning with different letters, so, and so on and so forth. And we know that he asked friends to contribute to the text and that these contributions in some cases are separate from the main manuscripts. And again, they're either in typescript or they're handwritten by other authors. And most have been identified, but I. And they're often people that were living at the Boulogne, like Maurice Pons or there are other Olympians, but there are a few that are anonymous and I. And there are a few others that I was able to identify myself, notably one about May 68, and I think about, you know, who are the potential candidates who could have authored this sort of short contribution about Main 6, May 68. But my main intervention is to look about the way to look at the ways in which these contributions have been incorporated into the text and to demonstrate that they're often set apart as clients, clues or red herrings, and that in this kind of way, another kind of code that Parek was writing in is to kind of lay bare the seams of the text's creation.
- [24:52]
C
And one of the people who. Who contributed to this is Monique Etique, who's the subject of your next chapter, but who was not actually a member of ulipo, although she was also participating in these activities. How do her texts fit your definition of Ludic's? And why did she also have a fraught relationship to political writing, despite being a known activist with the mlf, for example?
- [25:15]
A
Yeah, you know, Marie Wittig again came of age politically at the exact moment of Georges Perek. So she encountered the same issues of reception after her first novel, Le Poupon Axe, which plays with a phenomenal on. And narrating from this, she was received as the first or the kind of newest new novelist on the horizon, and was supported by writers like Mario Duras, Claude Simon and Natalie Sarrette. But after she wrote Le Galire and became active in the movement pour la Liberation des Femmes and other sort of early Maoist groups, she was perceived primarily as a political writer and even as a lesbian writer. And so interestingly enough, in her essay the the Point of View, she really lamented this. And she was frustrated that once you become what she calls a minority writer and she's drawing on Marx and Engels and the German ideology here, your work is no longer read as literature, but it's read as propaganda. And so she didn't like this reception where she was perceived as for her political identity and that there was a kind of negligence when it came to her formal innovation. So what I try to do in this chapter is to understand her Marxist materialist understanding of literature. So this idea that for her that language can fundamentally alter our sense of reality and then alter reality in turn, but that in order for a text to have this kind of political impact, it has to circulate as literature, be read as part of a canon and so on. And I, so I talk about this sort of materialist understanding of literature that she has and then I try to describe what I call her invasive procedures. And these are not just feminization, which is of course a very kind of operative invasive thing that is done to the French language, but also the elaborate methods that she uses to collect and manipulate or cannibalize and fundamentally alter various inner texts. And so, and this is the case in but also another follow up text that she co wrote with her partner, Bouillon Flandiction never des Amortes. And her sources run the gambit from Greco Roman sources which have been sort of well documented, but also things like medical manuals, Welsh mythology, Maoist standbys and so on.
- [27:43]
C
And moving on from money fatigue, the second part of your book jumps forward in time until after the fall of the USSR and the collapse of global communism. And could you tell us a little bit more about your first figure here, Jacques Jouet, who might be a less well known figure to an Anglophone audience?
- [28:00]
A
Sure. In the second half of the book I was interested in looking at members of the same generation, the same generational cohort that I've mentioned, but those who continued living well into the 21st century and so who over time sort of saw the fallout from May 68 and began to encounter a different political environment. So Jacquesue has this odd status of being a political Lippian or the political member of an apolitical group. And his background is quite interesting because he was never a card carrying Communist. But he was raised, he came of age in the Maison, the Maison de Genesque Communistes, which were kind of communist youth centers that had attachments to this and other major trade unions. And he was also a student at Nanterre when it was a radical sort of 68 experiment. And he's a third generation Olipian, meaning he joined in 1983 after Cano died and just after Parek had died. So at the moment at which he joins Ulipo, it's really no longer secret, but it's in the process of renewal, rethinking the group and adding new members. And while I think the legacy and the model of the committed author continues into this period, you know, beginning in the 1970s, the. The French author has. Has to kind of increasingly encounter the assumption that literature, or that whatever the author thinks is politically irrelevant. So we're no longer in an environment in which the author is the center of the political universe, like Sachs. And there are lots of really important exceptions to this. Lots of post or anti colonial writers were major political figures in the, in the French speaking world. And it's somewhat changing, you know, in the 2010s with examples of very public authors like Michel Welbeck, who Edouard Louis. Generally speaking, literature is just not as politicized as it used to be, nor is the literary field hyper politicized in the same way. So Joue is starting to write at this point in time. And he's probably most famous for his metro poem in which a friend of his, Pierre Roussentille, created an algorithm that allowed him to visit every metro stop in Paris and to compose poems along the way. But he actually has a very extensive ovre, a lot of which has been translated into English. And I argue that it's demonstrative of what I call his work site poetics, or a kind of political commitment to never adopt a singular form, but to always narrate his work in multiple, sort of unfinished, continuously developing ways and through multiple practices and voices. And so I look at some of his early and later poetry about working on a work site. He grew up working on summers on construction sites, or his memories of May 68, his disillusionment with the May 68. And I especially look at a novel called the Coup Communiste, which features a series of different communist contexts, but generally speaking is thinking about a kind of disillusionment or melancholia that arises in the moment after the collapse of French communism in the 1970s. And that kind of continues into the presence present and after the Fall of the Iron Curtain.
- [31:32]
C
And although you show him having a sort of ambivalence towards the legacy of communism, you do point out that you see him as constructing what you call literary republicanism. And I was just wondering if you can talk a little bit about what you mean by literary republicanism and maybe give us an example.
- [31:52]
A
Sure. So Joue and Masquerade are, you know, are both of this generation that were very invested in communism and what it could have been. And we're, we're completely devastated by the collapse of French communism or the loss of dominance of French, the French Communism, the French Communist Party, the legacy of the Soviet Union or, you know, various ethno nationalist conflicts that arose out of the collapse of Yugoslavia. And they're both interested in a, in a certain extent to documenting this collapse, but they do this in different ways. And you know, the term literary republicanism comes from his kind of return to republicanism and return to a French republican model in light of this disillusionment with communism. But, and it's his term, but functionally, the way that he understands it has more to do with his aesthetics than with, than his politics. So it's this idea of 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, a militant couple, that it's ultimately defined by bourgeois values. An ex union militant who becomes a lackluster businessman and so on. But he's really interested in this idea of creating an expansive literary universe that can welcome a variety of different kinds of political types.
- [33:25]
C
And your final full chapter, as you brought up there, deals with Francois Masperoux, who's perhaps better known to our audience through his role as a third World, as publisher. What is his own literary output like and where do you see the place of Ludic in his work?
- [33:38]
A
Yeah, so just as a recall for the audience, you know, Maspero is known for Edition Maspero, which was the militant press of the post war era. It's important for publishing Althusser Fanon or translating thinkers like Che Guevara, among others. It was also the de facto propaganda organ for the FLN or the Fronde de Libation Nationale, the pro Algerian nationalist party during the Algerian war. And Edition Vasquelo did things like publishing testimonials of the French army's use of torture or state sanctioned massacres like 10-17-1961. So, you know, if anyone can understand what it's like to Be a committed editor. It's Francois Mespille. You know, his publishing house was heavily censored and fined. His bookstore was bombed. He was shot at one point. So he was really the kind of committed editor who put his body on the line. And while his publishing house existed for a long time, it also, you know, it's hard to describe. It's known for this reputation, but it's hard to describe everything that he published it. You know, he often said that it was a kind of strange salad, that it wasn't politically homogenous. He introduced imprints that had to do with translated poetry. In later years, it focused a lot on democratic socialism in Eastern Europe. And Maspero didn't come to become a writer until relatively late in life. So he became a novelist after he abandoned being an editor at the age of 52. And at this point he started writing a lot of auto fiction about being a militant editor or about his childhood during World War II. And around the same time he was also working as a journalist. And he traveled all around the world, to Algeria, to Cuba. He was in Sarajevo during the siege of Sarajevo in the Bosnian War. And he was also. So he was. He was a novelist, he was a journalist, and he was also a translator. And he translated major thinkers like John Reed, along with lots of poetry from Spanish and a little bit some text from English and a little bit of Italian. So if anyone has heard of his writing, they've probably heard of his 1990 text called Les Passages, A Journey into the Parisian Suburbs. And this book is what I would call a kind of novel travelogue, or again to use Sheringham and Grattan's turn, a project, meaning that the writing process involved traveling along the rerb with his friend, the photographer Anais Frost. And they had to find housing on the spot and do other things to sort of produce surprise encounters. And this is a ludicro process that I think of as unscripted encounters, or this idea of paradoxically trying to foster improvisational travel or natural interactions with strangers. And, you know, Mascara was doing this as a kind of response to interactions with journalists who he thought were trying to get something particular out of their interviews with people, but also as an homage to Parek's own spatial procedures. And so Les Passager duo expresses has been read and gotten some responses. But Maspero also wrote a follow up text in 1995 called Balkan's Transit that deployed the same strategies, but this time instead of traveling through the kind of ex red belt of Paris, he was traveling through parts of the former Yugoslavia and through Eastern Europe, so Albania, Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria and Romania. And this time he was traveling with the younger Franco Slovenian photographer Clavdish Slubin.
- [37:41]
C
And following up on that, since he was traveling with a photographer, what's the role of images in Mas Barod's work?
- [37:48]
A
Yeah, so I mean, it's interesting because it's different in the two texts, but both were really, you know, the. His photographers were his trans. His. His tribal companions. And in general, it's still part of this sort of overarching project of thinking about the life in ex communist para or ex communist suburbs of the life of ex communist Yugoslavia. In the first, you know, it's good to remember that Maspero's brother was a communist militant in World War II who died as a soldier and a translator, and that his father was interned and died at Buschenwald, and his mother actually survived Raven's book Rook. So he actually kind of constantly bore the weight of history of. On his shoulders. And he often has this very serious way of thinking about the legacy of communism and makes a point of. Of traveling with his photographers to places that would really document the dark side of socio socialism. You know, Albania or sort of vestiges of Albania under the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. Monumental architecture and block houses, et cetera. And then like someone like vt Gorgeous way. He's also, you know, traveling first and foremost through literature, and he reads the work of Albanian writers like Ismail Kadare, or looks at historical testimonies like those of the journalist Albert Nomondre or Lord Byron's travels through Greece. So this is sort of Masqueroul's project. His. His travel companions and his photographers offer different insights. Anais France is really documenting people that they encounter throughout the banlieue. And there's a certain kind of racial diversity, but then a number of discussions around the people they encounter and whether or not they want to be photographed, how they feel about being photographed, that is being incorporated into the text. But there are also some images that are kind of gimmicky. Like here's Maskil holding a suitcase, and here he is holding a baguette over the aqueduct and things like that, versus, I think, the tone in the second text. And Clavdige's pictures in particular are quite different, in part because Slupin's, you know, they had initially met while traveling abroad in Eastern Europe, and they came into contact more than once, incidentally. But the photos that are included in Balkan's Transit come from a number of projects that Slubin was undertaking at the time. And they're not limited to pictures that are. That were taken during his. During the trip that they took together. But any which way, you know, Slubin as well, takes pictures of the author and produces these kinds of images that remind us of the author as a constructed figure and what the trip was like from a different perspective. And I think that adds to a kind of novelistic or ludic quality because it points to the gaps between what Masperoux does and doesn't say in the text proper.
- [41:00]
C
Thank you. And finally, in the coda to your book, you deal with the gender dynamics within the Ulipo group in more contemporary times. How is the example of Michel Houdin exemplary of the issues here? And what is her relationship to politics on a larger scale?
- [41:15]
A
Yeah, sadly, Michel Houdin passed just a few weeks ago, and it's such an enormous loss. But she was a mathematician by training and then a kind of historian and novelist by practice, and really a model of an unabashedly political Olympian, along with someone like Jaques. She was unapologetically feminist. She was deeply invested in the history of communism. She had a blog on the commune on militantism. She had a book on militantism and mathematics during World War II and after. And in particular, you know, she is the daughter, just as a reminder, she's the daughter of Maurice Odin, who is a mathematician, who was a pro Algerian independence activist and militant who was disappeared by the French army during the Algerian War when she was 3. So a lot of Udon's legacy has been to publicly intervene on behalf of her father's case. Over the course of her entire life, she's advocated for releasing archives related to the Algerian war, police archives, army archives, those related to his death, and really had this public face as her father's advocate.
- [42:34]
C
And could you elaborate maybe a little bit on her interventions about gender in the Ulipo group as well?
- [42:41]
A
Sure, yeah. The Coda grapples sort of with her as this kind of feminist Olympian, communist Olympian, someone who's invested in certain kinds of politicized legacies of mathematics and more generally. Dakota is interested in the role of women in ulipo. So some kinds of classic debates around the absence of women, the representation of women, or there were discussions within the group about gender parity, gender equality within the group. There are more women today, but still relatively few, with respect, within the history of the group. And a lot of scholars focus on someone like Anne Gerritard, who was famous for her kind of gender experimentation in a novel like Spanx that has two lead characters that don't have any grammatical markers of gender, and thinking about her with respect, and her kind of creative interventions and formalist interventions related to gender and her relationship to the group. But she is not particularly active within Ulipo anymore. So I wanted to look at someone who was more representative of lipo today and what they're doing today. And a lot of Michel Houdin's works use various ludic methods to engage in what Saidiya Hartman calls critical fabulation or a kind of attempt at reconstructing the lives of everyday individuals who are only just barely visible in the archives. So I argue that, you know, she developed certain practices that, you know, culling the archives in and of itself in the particular way is a kind of ludic practice. And she does that to reconstitute the life of her own father, and in part her father, beyond the cause celebre of his death by looking at family journals and financial logbooks, memories, the records of the Ministry of Defense since he was educated by the French state, and so on. And that, you know, I argue that she's invested in a kind of radical form of micro history, especially in a text like, which has about two sentences of information about a very distant female relative. And Michel Houdin takes this and spins out everything that we could possibly know about this relative based on a kind of bare bones information.
- [45:09]
C
Great. So that gives us a lot as readers to look forward to in this book. And as we come to the end of our time here, do you have any upcoming projects that you would like to share with listeners?
- [45:20]
A
Sure. As always, go to my faculty page and check out my related work. I've written on I Remember Poetry After Joe Brainard. I've written on pataphysics during May 68 and Matt Bro's Life as a Journalist. So sort of side projects that have echoes here. But the last couple of years my research has really pivoted into the visual arts and especially comics and graphic narratives. And right now I'm writing a book about comics journalism. And so the creation of graphic nonfiction albums or the revival of illustrated newspapers as a means of representing current events. And very recently this is the book in progress. I have been thinking about graphic journalism as emblematic of a. As a emblematic of a kind of slow journalism or a compromise between in depth embedded investigative reporting and op eds or kind of subjective opinion driven responses to our current mediascape. So I'm looking. I'm looking forward to seeing to seeing where. Where this project goes.
- [46:28]
C
And we can all look forward to that as well. So, once again, my guest today was Aubrey Gable with the book the Politics of Ulipo and the Legacy of French literary Ludics. Dr. Gable, thank you so much.
- [46:40]
A
Thank you for having me.