Anything can be done badly.
Constraint begins in an evolving (as opposed to preset) form the moment the
first word is written. There are always constraints built into language and
moreso to art made of language. In forms discovered in process those
constraints may take a more subtle, or at least a differently trained, ear
to hear. I hope that Benabou has such an ear, but your quote, cris,
decontextualized, would indicate otherwise.
This is not a question of either/or. I personally think the making of
villanelles is an obsolete game, and I write under all the constraints I
can manage without the constraints of that form, but if it suits someone
else's needs or fancy all to the good.
At 09:11 AM 2/10/99 +0100, cris cheek wrote:
>Hi,
>
>sorry tobe dipping in and out as I journey out and back. Seems that another
>aspect of what has been being discussed comes under the heading of
>restraints. When Peter Riley talks of the fallacy of 'honesty' in respect
>of writing fast and loose having fewer bonds I'd agree. It's the old issue
>of 'free improv' - free from what? (often never addressed) free to do
>what? These questions are raised in the little essay by Marcel Benabou
>'Rule and Constraint', where he warms to his theme by saying, amongst other
>things which I enjoy (and love to read through with those who feel ire
>towards MacLow, Cage, Oulipo):
>
>'Constraint, as everyone knows, often has a bad press. All those who esteem
>the highest value in literature to be sincerity, emotion, realism, or
>authenticity mistrust it as a strange and dangerous whim.
>
>Why bridle one's imagination, why browbeat one's liberty through the
>voluntary imposition of constraints, or by placing obstacles in one's own
>path? . . . In the name, of course, of the sacrosanct liberty of the
>artist, which nothing must shackle; in the name of the impresciptible
>rights of inspiration.
>Certain types of constraint, however, seem to have escaped from this
>discredit. For four centuries, we have been very comfortable, apprently,
>with the laws of prosody-with the fact, for instance, that an alexandrine
>has twelve syllables, that a sonnet has fourteen lines, whose rhymes are
>disposed according to a very precise order. And we do not hesitate to
>admire in Malherbe or Valery the scrupulous respect of a demanding canon.
>In fact, it is rather difficult, except for proponents of "automatic
>writing," to imagine a poetics that does not rely on rigorous rules and,
>more generally, a literary production that does not involve the use of
>certain techniques. Even the most rabid critics of formalism are forced to
>admit that there are formal demands which a work cannot elude. Responding
>to those who were trying to confound inspiration, liberty, chance, and the
>dictates of the unconscious, the terms that Raymond Queneau employed in
>1938 are well known:". . . inspiration which consists in blind obedience to
>every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery. The classical playwright who
>writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer
>that the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the
>slave of other rules of which he is ignorant."
>
>Now it is actually in the passage from the rule to the constraint that the
>stumbling block appears: people accept the rule, they tolerate the
>technique, but they refuse constraint. Precisely because it seems like an
>unnecessary rule, a superfluous redoubling of the exigencies of technique,
>and consequently no longer belongs-so the argument goes-to the admitted
>norm but rather to the process, and thus is exaggerative and excessive. It
>is as if there were a hermetic boundary between two domains: the one
>wherein the observance of rules is a natural fact, and the one wherein the
>excess of rules is perceived as shameful artifice.'
>
>love and love
>cris
>
>
>
>
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