Hillar Liitoja

Two Oulipo Challenges
Review of the Guernica Editions paperback (2019)

Oulipo is the acronym of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (Workshop of potential literature) and is the name assigned to works produced by the official (primarily French) members of that literary organization or by others who also work within its rules. Those rules involve applying some sort of restriction on how a work is to be written e.g. without certain letters, with gradually increasing word-lengths, etc. The idea being that the writer is forced to make an extra effort at creative choices when their means of expression are limited in some way.

In The Oulipo Challenge, there are (perhaps intentionally, perhaps not) two challenges at play. The first (and more difficult) challenge is for the reader to make their way through the first half of the book. The second (and more pleasurable) is reading the transcription of a meeting where 3 participants with a judge met to listen to and read the results of a specific Oulipo challenge designed by Liitoja.

The first half of the book is a history of Oulipo with extended descriptions of some of its significant works such as George Perec’s Life: A User's Manual (1978) and A Void (1969). After a while, these descriptions become very tedious to the point where Liitoja himself even admits to it by saying:

I could have gone on for quite a few more pages but will now stop - In hopes you will at least have been tempted to dash this book against the nearest wall. - excerpt from pg. 66 of The Oulipo Challenge

The more enjoyable part of the book is Liitoja’s actual Oulipo challenge to 2 colleagues and himself, which was to paraphrase Hamlet’s To be, or not to be monologue without the use of a single letter e. The results were judged by an impartial party and scored based on accuracy (to Shakespeare's original meaning). grammatical correctness, originality/ ingenuity / brilliance / beauty / poeticism and the absence of e’s (which persistently and humourously creep in without the writers or even their proofreaders noticing them). The results were 3 very unique new monologues and a very entertaining discussion which we are able to eavesdrop on. There are several revelations during the piece and in the afterword about which it would be a spoiler to say much more.

So overall, this was a very entertaining read, but pro-tip, if you find yourself bogged down in the first half, just skip ahead to the 2nd half’s challenge and then catch up on the Oulipo history later.

Disclosure, Trivia and Links
Full disclosure: As a fellow Estonian-Canadian, I’m not completely unbiased about Hillar Liitoja and particularly his theatrical work, as I participated in some early works (a 1982 cottage/camp recitation/performance of Sorel Etrog’s Dream Chamber: Joyce And The Dada Circus: A Collage (1982) and 1983 Toronto performances of Richard Foreman’s Pain(t) (1974)) which are not listed in Liitoja's DNA Theatre canon. I have subsequently enjoyed several DNA Theatre works live in Toronto.… (plus d'informations)