You are about to begin reading my new essay on the experimental literary group known as the Ouvroir de la Littérature Potentielle: The Sewing Circle of Potential Literature. Please be aware that every single fact herein is absolutely 100% true . . . I think. So relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. We must begin with some necessary backtracking, unpacking, detangling of roots; down the long trail of antecedents, back to the Nineteenth century science of imaginary solutions known as Pataphysics, which, according to Alfred Jarry, the leader of the movement, deals with “the laws which govern exceptions and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be—and perhaps should be—envisaged in the place of the traditional one.” For it is here that we locate the big bang responsible for the creation of the Oulipo. Pataphysicians believed in the truth of contradictions and exceptions. They did not believe in truth or other provable unprovables. They firmly believed in not believing in things, and especially believed only in facts that could not be proven to be unprovable or visa versa. They also disliked ice cream, cake, and all other desserts. Spearheaded by Jarry, these anti-dessert-eating literary explorers sliced a gash in space-time and established the first productive European avant-garde collective.
more from AGNI here.