Oulipo Colloquium: avatars in the organization and exploration of archives

Abstract

In August 1981, the then director of the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy and the writer Jacques Bens exchanged correspondence. The objective was to organize the Oulipo decade at the center, 20 years after the first meeting at which a group of literary enthusiasts, gathered first under the name of Séminaire de Littérature Expérimentale (Sélitex) and then as Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Oulipo), had met.
In the exchanges that followed, the organization became more complex until its cancellation, due to differences between the conception of the organization of the colloquia in that cultural center and the operating modes of the literary group.
An archival work that reviewed both the minutes of the group's meetings in the digitized Oulipo Fund at the National Library of France and the correspondence between Heurgon and Bens preserved in the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy Fund, at the Institut pour la Mémoire de l'Edition Contemporainne (IMEC), at the Abbey of Ardennes (Normandy), allows us to understand the real reasons why the colloquium was cancelled and to contrast them with the ways the group proclaimed as its form of organization and operating.