Comparative Drama

Paul Griffths's let me tell you (2008) is a novel written in the first person, in the voice of Ophelia, using only those words assigned to her in Shakespeare's Hamlet. This formal conceit qualifies the work as Oulipian, as most reviewers have noted, though Griffiths has no specific connection with "OuLiPo" (Ouvroir de litérature potentielle), the group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais to promote bravura experiments in constricting literary forms.¹ Among the most famous works produced by the group are Georges Perec's A Void (La disparation), a 300-page novel that does not use the letter e, and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili), a collection of descriptions of fifty-five cities in eleven thematic categories that follows a complex mathematical pattern. Although Queneau described the group sardonically as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape," its founding principle is no different than that of any artist who chooses to work in a fixed or constraining form. It is the challenge of creating within constraints that stimulates the imagination (the rat) and, perhaps, results in an enhanced work of art (the escape). Poets writing sestinas or numerological poems, and composers fashioning music based on the golden ratio or the ragas of Indian classical music, have for centuries been Oulipians avant la lettre.

What distinguishes Griffiths's novel from many Oulipian experiments, however, is that his conceit is not arbitrarily self-imposed but essential to [End Page 57] what he is trying to tell us. Some Oulipian forms result in almost Dadaist nonsense, like those following the pattern "N + 7," taking an existing piece of writing and replacing every noun in it with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary. In let me tell you, while Griffiths struggles to make meaning with a vocabulary of only 483 words, his struggle mirrors Ophelia's to find the words to tell her story; she is aware, on some level, that the words she speaks are not her own, and that finding the right words is a challenge that may be beyond her. In some ways, her dilemma is a peculiar version of David Copperfield's, who wonders at the beginning of his narrative "whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by another."² Like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, moreover, Ophelia is already, as everyone knows, a supporting player in the story of Hamlet. Stoppard's characters cannot finally escape the parts that have been written for them (either by Shakespeare or Stoppard), but Griffiths's Ophelia, remarkably, may end up choosing a different path than was set down for her. The mind-bending irony is that if she does achieve this, she is still doing it in Shakespeare's language, which is perhaps itself a commentary on the intricate interrelationship of formal constraint and imaginative originality at the heart of Oulipo.³