On Joining Oulipo by Accident
Nice to know we American's aren't the only ones who can ask trivial questions about the death of things. This time it's an unnamed French magazine asking the question, and the translator (of Pynchon, Vollmann, Gass, and others) and novelist, Claro responds, in French.
Lauren Elkin translated and republishes his response on her blog:
What bothers me is not that it is provocative (and, to say the least, absurd); no, what bothers me (not that I'm losing sleep over it) is that it contributes tot he reification of this disastrous notion of "French literature" as a defined body of work, a paper entity, go figure– and the question of the morality of this corpus, whether or not this is in question, conspires to personify an object of study which is all the same difficult to define . . .
So contested is the idea of French literature in the writers' responses in said article, that the mere fact that [the editors] thought it might produce something useful says more about literary criticism than it does about literature.
Amen.
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