Can you tell us about your background? How has it led you to the JEUX project?
Throughout my career, I’ve worked on how the novel keeps reinventing itself. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the novel suddenly becomes very popular in Europe. Novelists write relatively short historical texts like the Princess of Cleves, mix realism with comedy as in Francion, or devise large, complex narratives like Don Quixote. It is not at all obvious what a novel should look like in those years. Novelists were using any means at their disposal to devise structures for the novel. In my second book (A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics. OUP, 2017), I suggest that writers map the possibility space of the novel with the help of the “rules” that were originally devised for different genres. The dramatic unities and their rule of “one space, one day, one action” could be applied to give coherence to the storyworld of a novel, for example. These rules, however, could also come from literary games. And novelists, I think, used these games and their rules to try out new ways of writing novels.
A second line of my research also contributes to JEUX. My last book project was about creativity in literary writing. I interviewed authors, looked into manuscripts and authors’ reflections on what it means to write. What emerged was that creativity goes together with contingency (Creativity and Contingency in Literary Writing, Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Novelists, I argue, have a particular sense for the contingent, namely, that things do not have to be the way in which they appear to us now. Alternatives can always be imagined, and chance and the unexpected have a key place in what writers do. Gameplay provides one way of provoking and managing contingency, and in my book I discuss for example Charlotte Brontë’s playful writing practices. While doing the research for Creativity and Contingency, I also came across Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de la Force’s Les Jeux d’esprit and her salon games. The literary games of the salons, however, demanded their own project, and that I developed with JEUX.
What are you hoping to find?
The salons were an extraordinary cultural space. People met to play literary games, improvise storytelling and be creative together. Most novelists in seventeenth-century France were part of one or another of the salons in Paris at the time. While a lot of work has been done on who met there and why, but we don’t know enough about how the gameplay, oral improvisation and collective setting had an impact on writing novels. With JEUX, I’m making links between early novelists’ practices in the salons, their writings and the larger reflections around what the (modern) novel could be, which all came together in these years.
Literary games are spontaneous, played orally and collectively. That is rather different from the novel, which is written across multiple versions and devised by a single author. Two modes of working creatively are in tension here, and I hope to be able to reconstruct some of the processes that went into translating between these modes. This promises to tell us something about how the novel remains so flexible across its history, readily incorporating new social, cultural and media developments. It also might shed some light on creative practices in a period of literary history when these practices are almost invisble, because the author interview had yet to be invented and because we don’t have manuscript drafts to look at.
Where do the creative-writing workshops come into the picture?
Les jeux d’esprit provide not only the reflections of a novelist on playing literary games. La Force also gives the rules of six literary games and shows her characters playing these games. When I read La Force’s book, I had the hunch that these games are still playable. And if they are still playable, they may tell us quite a lot about the links and tensions between gameplay and literary writing – provided we can get creative writers to play them. The JEUX workshops come from these deliberations. We play all six of La Force’s games over two days, and then reflect together with the writers on how these early-modern games might spark creativity even today. The point is not to re-enact the gameplay in the salons. Rather, I expect that creative writers’ intuitions will provide enlightening contrasts to the gameplay as its unfolds in La Force’s text. And, hopefully, the games will also inspire new ways into the creative process for writers today.
You've seen the gameplay in several pilots and in the first workshop already - what has surprised you the most?
Just how much fun these games are. Players enjoyed themselves enormously during the pilots, and at our first Oxford workshop, the place rang with laughter. Early-modern games are strange and different from the kinds of games we play today. It takes a moment to get used to them. Yet once the game is going, even the scary task of improvising a novel together with five other people, that is, playing the game of the novel, turns into an enjoyable activity, it seems.
What's next in the project - what are you especially looking forward to?
The workshops are only the first step in the project, and JEUX will build on them in different ways. First, the workshops were designed as an anthropological experiment, and we have hours of video footage and other data to analyse to see precisely what happens when today’s creative writers work with games from the seventeenth century. We will also interview the writers about their expertise and experience in playing these games. And we look forward to continuing the dialogue with them, developing JEUX as a shared knowledge project with these practitioners.
Second, I’m currently finalising my translation of La Force’s Les Jeux d’esprit into English. It’s not only a document for gameplay in the salons, but also a fascinating text in its own right, as La Force shows historical celebrities playing games, discussing how the game of the novel should be played and then developing an entire novel in the second half of the book. La Force is today perhaps best known as a fairy-tale author (an early version of Rapunzel is hers), but she was also a bestselling novelist and on the theoretical cutting edge when thinking about the genre in Les Jeux d’esprit.
Third, from January 2025, the JEUX team will be completed with three doctoral students taking up their posts. Mylène Garin, Michela La Grotteria and Elisa Saggioro are going to join us with three exciting projects that will shed new light on different aspects of literary games, play and the early-modern novel. I myself will then also return to the archive and work on other novelists who drew on literary gameplay for the book I am planning for the JEUX project.