Cauliflower sans Merci

In the Oulipo Compendium we read:

Transplant. This procedure was first used by Harry Mathews before his introduction to the Oulipo; it entered the Oulipian repertory during the preparation of the Atlas, in which it was described as a double lexical translation.

Two texts are chosen, of similar length but differing in genre. Each text is rewritten with the vocabulary of the other. Complete short examples are a virtual impossibility. Here are the subtitles and opening paragraphs of the two sections of Cauliflower sans Merci, where the source texts are (a) Keats' La Belle Dame sans Merci and (b) a recipe for the preparation of cauliflower with tomatoes:

And there follows indeed a short excerpt. But why "complete short examples are a virtual impossibility"? La Belle Dame isn't a terribly long poem and the Compendium contains many examples of moderate length; why not just give all of "Cauliflower sans Merci" as the example? Well, for whatever reasons, the editors, of whom Mathews was one, decided against that, which is terribly annoying, since the excerpt they do reproduce is tantalizing and it's not easy to get one's hands on the full text (it having been published in a small Canadian literary journal, "Atropos", that lasted, as far as I can tell, three issues). Until now, that is, for the full text is reproduced below, with the apparent errors from the original printing intact, but the original formatting as regards spacing, line indentation, etc. not intact. One may be interested to know that the table of contents for the issue classifies "Cauliflower sans Merci" as "fiction".

I.

Death-pale Root-son with strange faery lily-manna made squirrel-beautiful by fever.

This manna is full sweet with sides of steed and with woebegone sides of steed. The latest fresh rose-cheek manna is here full of fragrant relish—this is the beautiful day for meeting this strange making of root-sons.

For four heads, for four heads and a head, and for four heads, a head and a head.

A squirrel-long head of root-son, made in elfin lilies
A long knight-at-arms head full of fever dew
A squirrel-head of death-pale nothing-sweet
A zone for root-leaning, set in the knight-at-arms head, is beautiful too.
I can, too, set four roses-full of death-pale lily dew in the knight-at-arms head to make the root-sun death-pale.

I set the dew-wept root-son in the wild fever dew; I can set the root-leaning zone too (have I this?) I make the dew wild full sore. Here, I make it wild loitering, nothing on, for four and four dream-kisses. Here I make the foot of the root-son gape—the root-son is all fragrant. I can take a lily of root son, the root-son is beautiful, and I sure. (Full sweet, the root-son is moist and shuts in a light dream of sedge.) Here no loitering—I take the root-son and make the dew fade. I can, too, take the root-leaning zone, with the root-son, from sojourning in the wild dew. I lull the root-sone [sic] in cold dew and make the dew fade.

A head of full rose-cheek root-sons, with sides gaping, with no bird's eyes or dew (to make three roses-full of rose-cheek root-son relish).

I make long garlands of the rose-cheek relish.

A light squirrel-long zone for fever-thrall, moist with lily-manna
A lily of death-pale nothing-sweet
A bird's eye of anguish-relish
A rose-full of moist lily-manna—honey-cheek manna of lily dew
A faded rose-full of withered fever sojourned granary-manna met with a rose-full of woe-begone strange faery lily manna

I set the death-pale root-son fast in the fever-zone. I set the rose-cheek relish sideways there. I set on the nothing-sweet, the anguish-relish and withered rose-full of lily manna. I set the strange faery lily manna and the withered granary manna on the root-sons, and there I set on all the moist lily manna.

With the thirty latest dream-kisses of starving, I set the fever-zone in the brow of a fever-grot, ever full wild, and make the root-sons full of fever and the stange [sic] lily manna squirrel-beautiful. The latest dream here is no loitering and no starving.

II.

The Fine and Cold One of the Cooking-People

"Uncover the knife that pierces you, you of the people of degree, now one, keeping to this edge, and white. The vegetables are dry by the Swiss water, and the skimmers are done.

"Uncover the knife that pierces you, you of the people of degree, particularly drained and thoroughly used by cold time. The racks of the stem-mastering eight-inch people are full, and the bread-vegetables are brought in.

"You have a white floweret on the upper third of your head, washed in grating suggestion and the water of boiling, and on each white half of your face a large red floweret is rapidly draining."

"One of the cooking-people is in the large strips of vegetables and flowerets, thoroughly fine, one of the different people of piercing art, having a head as large as possible, the merest stems, and boiling head-contained useful pulps.

"Strips are made of large flowerets cut and mixed, for the head, for the edge of the upper stems, and (refreshing ones) for the tender place of this one of the cooking-people: and this one makes a suggestion of tender people and nicely boils.

"This one is placed on the quickly-getting four-stem one, and degrees of retaining melt for the white time: this one spreads to the edge and makes presentation with the kettle-boiling flavor of one of the different people of piercing art.

"This one gets stems of food eathing [sic] and uncovers tender flavor for bread and gets different milk, and thoroughly adds the suggestion that this one is melting for one of the people of degree.

"This one places the one one of degree in a cold oven, large and particularly different, and this one drains through the head-contained pulps and pierces to the core, and this one's boiling pulps are contained by four head-masterings.

"And this one, by spreading minutes with tender suggestions, makes the one of the people of degree drop to be refreshed; and into the refreshing is mixed a presentation (this is the rack), the fresh, fresh presentation of the one of degree on the cold edge of the upper strip.

"In the presentation are white people of full degree and people of large degree, and white knife-mastering people, and this people make the boiling suggestion that this one of the people of piercing art, fine and cold, is placed mastering over the one of the people of degree.

"In the presentation at the chop-edges of this people when the white time is melting are drained and peeled back with piercing useful suggestion. The presentation melts, and the one of the people of degree is uncovered and now placed on the cold edge of the upper strip.

"And if the vegetables are dry by the Swiss water and the skimmers are done, this retains the one of the people of degree, now one, keeping to this edge, and white."

Comments

[horus]

Oulipo, like Dogma 95, serves to emphasize what is already the condition of art, namely constrained choice. What interests me most about examples like this: it's very unclear to me where the boundary between choice and constraint lies, and just what the role of choice is in the finished product. I'm reminded of the claim that all Dogma directors broke some of the rules at some point during production. This isn't so for all Oulipo - in A Void for instance, the constraint is specific and clear enough that its boundary is certain (and Perec follows it religiously is my recollection). That he chose as the theme the very absence forced by the constraint seems like a choice which elevates the novel to art. But "rewriting with the vocabulary of the other" is much more ambiguous - what constitutes legitimate technique here? What serves to elevate the exercise to art? What specific role does the writer play in creating emotive and intellectual effect?

I demand commentary.

[ben w]

You demand commentary? Then you shall have, at least, a comment, in bullet point form.

-> I don't see why it's less clear here than in A Void where the boundary between choice and constraint lies: in either case, we can immediately tell if the text offends (in A Void, if the text contains an "e"; here, if either part contains a word not appearing in its prescribed source). Perhaps it's looser here because it's unclear whether or not Mathews has succeeded in "rewriting" the recipe using the constrained vocabulary of the poem, or vice versa (though I think he's done a pretty admirable job)—we can tell that he's only used the requisite vocabulary, and come up with a text that can be read in parallel with the original, but rewritten? If anything, though, there's less choice here than in A Void, since there's a constraint on both content and form (no doubt part of why Mathews described the composition process as "agony"), whereas Perec's novel could have been about anything. He follows the constrained religiously, but in very many ways it allows for a great deal of freedom. (The multiple constraints of Life a User's Manual are less obvious but perhaps more constraining ultimately.)

-> I don't really understand why the reflection of the constraint of A Void in its plot elevates it to art. Is it the mere fact of involution in "On the Sonnet" or A Fit of Something Against Something" that elevate them to art? They're certainly pleasing feats, but there are any number of sonnets and sestine that aren't about their own constraints, and one could write a sonnet on the sonnet that was artless and sucky. Though maybe all you mean is that in this case, i.e. that of A Void, the alignment of plot and constraint is what turned the trick—but that seems strange to me, too, or at least I'm not sure why one would think so.

-> I'm not really comfortable, in general, with questions like "what elevates the exercise to art?" (though lord knows I do employ the term art as an honorific, and in propria persona, even). I believe it is the standard Oulipo line that their constraints are to be thought of as techniques one might employ for various reasons, spurs to creativity or new formal strictures or whatever, and nothing more; they're experimental, and just because you've employed one, that doesn't mean you've created anything of worth. (And thus that the examples used to demonstrate them at Oulipo meetings or in things like the Compendium aren't what their real worth should be judged by, since they're just toy demonstrations: here's how the thing works, now go employ it in an actually ambitious work, if you wish to.) If anything elevates this particular piece to art, it would be, for me, the feel of the results; I find the texture and rhythms and odd reaching for meaning in the prose delightful. And those things probably would not have been produced but for the bizarre constraint Mathews labored under. But it isn't the constraint that makes the art, it's what Mathews did with it. (One also has to wonder how in the world it occurred to him to do this at all.)

[horus]

Hmmm, well I did mean commentary on the role of constrained choice in artistic practice, not on my comment, but I guess the third bullet point addresses that.

I do think the question of how specific the constraints are should be relevant here, and on that score I do still think the "transplant" idea seems much more liberal than a constraint as specific as avoid a particular letter (or word, or whatever) - for instance, must one always replace the same word in one text with the same translation from the other? Must one replace every single word? May the "is" of text A be replaced by the "is" of text B? etc. Of course, we could perhaps recover how all these choices were made in this instance by examining the original text - but the crucial issue (the constraint is underdetermined) still stands.

The idea does seem to me a natural extension of the cutup technique, and one way in which it's an interesting extension is the change in the ordering of constraint and choice. In cutup, there is choice in choosing the initial texts, then presumably one must strictly adhere to the result of juxtaposing them post cutup, or one sullies the exercise. Here, there is choice of texts, then translation is in some degree mechanical, but with choices interspersed (which word to use as translation etc.).

I guess the elevating to art point may be off base - if constrained choice is an essential feature of art, then it seems to me these sorts of exercises, which are self-conscious about this aspect of art and push it to the extreme, have the power to reveal something about the essential nature of art. I would be hard pressed to state it myself, though, which is why I asked you. For what it's worth, I think the question is more interesting here if we take "art" in a deflated, rather than honorific, sense.

The point about A Void was meant to be particular to it. There, I guess, the apparently arbitrary nature of the constraint receives justification from its marriage to theme. In the case of sonnets, although there are some aspects of the constraint which are arbitrary, much of it is justified, not the least of which justification being simple historical precedent (if writing novels without an "e" became a standard practice, a recognized genre, then thematizing them on absence would no longer be interesting).

There's an amazing moment in Xenakis' dissertation defense, where Messiaen challenges him on this issue. Xenakis has put all his effort into defending algorithmic music, music where all the choice goes into choosing the algorithm and the rest is mechanical, and Messiaen relates a moment when he passed Xenakis in his office writing music, and Xenakis, reflecting on something his algorithm had generated, erases it saying, no that wouldn't sound good at all. For Messiaen, it was the standards by which the choices to break form are made which were interesting, and it was exactly those which Xenakis' emphasis on establishing the form ignored.

[ben w]

I've seen variations on the last point before, I think on Kyle Gann's blog, talking about how the profusion of options for varying tone rows and setting up initial conditions, etc., had the effect of rendering the strictness of serialism more apparent than real. (Also, interesting, in one of Andrew Hussie's periodic process reflections on the composition of MS Paint Adventures, which theoretically was initially driven by reader responses—it has the form of a text adventure, and there are attached forums, in which readers can respond to the "what do you do now?" prompts—just taking the first response led to a total mess, and as soon as he gave himself latitude to pick a response, he discovered that given the volume of responses, he could just pick whatever he wanted, so it didn't really work as a constraint anymore.) There's an officially sanctioned concept in Oulipian practice for this kind of thing—they've adopted the term "clinamen" for a chosen deviation from a constraint ("chosen" meaning to capture the idea that it's not a clinamen if you just don't know how to proceed within the constraint).

Possibly related—a good exchange, or at least a good quotation, from the interview linked in my previous comment:

INTERVIEWER

Do you not care whether your stories make sense?

MATHEWS

I don’t say there is no sense or no meaning. There is, but it’s not one that exists outside of the work. Robert Louis Stevenson—and he’s not exactly considered a modernist writer—once wrote: “The novel, which is a work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are forced and material, as a shoe must consist of leather, but by its immeasurable difference from life, which is both designed and significant, and is both the method and the meaning of the work.”

To be honest, I don't really understand why you think there's more choice in this constraint than with a lipogram; at best I'd think there's no grounds for comparison. Certainly to say "you must use these words and no others to rewrite (however construed) this text" leaves open whether you can, say, use "is" for "is" or whether you can vary the use of words in the new vocabulary to capture the words in the target text—but banning "e" doesn't tell you whether you can sometimes write "copulation" and sometimes "fucking" for "sex" (of course a lipogrammatical composition isn't to be thought of as a translation of a text with the full range of letters into a new text with a reduced range—unless, of course, that is sometimes what happens, as it does with several poems in A Void—which is just another reason for thinking that the constraints are too different for meaningful comparison). It's perfectly possible to tell in each case whether the constraint has been violated: use of a word not in the source text; use of the banned letter. Your complaint seems to be that there might be ways of further constraining transplant that aren't specifically addressed—but why must they be? I don't understand why it's underdetermined as is, just because there could be a more determinate form. (One wishes to say: Moses, do whatever you want!. Yes, I know the cases aren't strictly analogous.)

Actually, one thing that might be revealed by procedures like this just is that since they're self-conscious adoptions of a constraint they (maybe? could?) help explode the idea that less self-conscious cases aren't enabled by some (potentially feeble) free adoption of a constraint, even if it's (merely?) generic (and doesn't descend into e.g. specific word choices or orderings)—Mathews actually puts it well in the part of the interview where he calls the composition of "Cauliflower sans Merci" agony: "But I discovered something very important, which is that once you start on a project like that, no matter how insane it is, you rapidly become convinced that there’s a solution, which is, of course, nonsense. You have to make it happen."—I mean to call out the "You have to make it happen" part. It's not just going to happen naturally.