La Potentialité des voyages contraints : Bon, Gracq, Butor

Abstract

Sheringham¹ asserts that the originality of Perec consists in transplanting the spirit of the Oulipo from text to life. Elkin and Esposito² state that the writers who today claim to be heirs of Oulipo can only realize their projects outside this group. Indeed, the group’s most creative successors may be writers who practice “existential constraint,” such as François Maspero and François Bon. But, in order to measure “the effects of Oulipo,” and the potentialities of existential constraint, we would have to take into account similar previous or contemporary enterprises. It is therefore profitable for us to examine from this point of view three representative texts based on fixed paths: Les Eaux étroites by Julien Gracq, La Modification by Michel Butor, and Paysage fer by François Bon.

Keywords:

• Existential constraint
• Bon
• Gracq
• Butor
• limitation of movement

Notes

1 Michael Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices form Surrealism to the Present, Oxford UP, 2009.

2 Lauren Elkin and Veronica Esposito, The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement, ZeroBooks, 2012.

3 Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham, “Tracking the Art of the Project: History, Theory, Practice,” The Art of the Project: Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture, Berghahn Books, 2005, pp.1–30.

4 Paris, Fayard, 2007.

5 Voir Jean-Bernard Vray, “Le Paysage fer de François Bom,” Le Génie du lieu: des paysages en littérature, Paris, Imago, 2005.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shuichiro Shiotsuka

Shuichiro Shiotsuka is a assistant professor of French literature at the University of Tokyo. His research includes two books and numerous articles on Queneau, Perec and other contemporary authors. His current research focuses on urban daily life in literature, relationship between documentary and fiction, and architecture and literature. He is one of Perec’s Japanese translators (Spieces of spaces [2003], A Void [2010]).