Constraints, concealment and buried texts: reading Walter Abish with Georges Perec and the Oulipo

Walter Abish (1931-) is a contemporary Austrian-American writer, best known for his rich, experimental novels and short stories Alphabetical Africa (1974), In the future perfect (1977), and How German Is It (1980). The formal experimentation of his constraint-based writing has led certain critics to highlight the affinities between Abish and the French literary group the Oulipo (the “Ouvroir de littérature potentielle” or “Workshop of potential literature”). The Oulipo was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais and gathers together writers and mathematicians who use various forms of literary constraints in the production of their texts. Some of the best-known Oulipian texts in the English-speaking world include Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (Exercises in style) and Cent mille milliards de poèmes (One hundred million million poems), and Georges Perec’s La Disparition (A void) and La Vie mode d’emploi (Life a user’s manual). Their communal enterprise is the elaboration of constraints, mathematical, alphabetical or compositional, and the subsequent production of texts that adhere to the given constraint. Among the first to identify the link between Abish and the Oulipo were Oulipians themselves, such as Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, who described Abish’s novel Alphabetical Africa as “one of the most remarkable Oulipian works by an author not belonging to the group” (45). They continue: "The work must be qualified an Oulipian masterpiece, even though its author is unconnected to the Oulipo. The method he has used, of his own devising, is Oulipian both in its axiomatic simplicity and in the extent to which it determines both the ingenious narrative and its beguiling linguistic texture.(48)"