Georges Perec (1936-1982) was a French writer. I first read a book of his in 1989, his novel A Void (French title: La disparition), a novel written without the letter “e”. Try writing a few sentences without an “e”—it’s hard. Writing a whole novel like this is amazing. Writing one that is actually fun to read is even more amazing. (And I have to add, translating it while retaining its e-lessness was also an amazing literary feat, so all praise to translator Gilbert Adair!) It’s fun to see Perec wanting to write a word that would require an “e” and having to carefully circle around it without actually writing the forbidden word. The whole novel has this strange discursiveness.
I subsequently read his most famous book, Life: A User’s Manual, which was also great. It had an artificial structure because of the weird rules that Perec set for himself, but was in the end much more straightforward than A Void.
Perec was a child when France was invaded by the Nazis. His father died in combat against them, his mother was murdered in a concentration camp. He started writing professionally in the late 50s. In the 60s, he fell in with a literary movement called Oilipo (short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature”). Oulipo advocated for the use of literary constraints to unlock creativity. One constraint they invented was the “lipogram”, writing that excludes certain letters. La disparition is a monumental lipogram. Perec was obsessed with wordplay, lists, and classifications.
Today, I finished my third Perec book, a collection of nonfiction pieces called Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Instead of writing a review, I want to quote it, with annotations. (Which feels like a Perec-ian way to approach one of his texts.) Let’s begin!
The piece “Species of Spaces” is a list of spaces starting from small “The Page” to large “Space” with intermediate spaces between “the apartment”, “the street”, “the town”, “the world”, etc. And he writes a little something about each of these types of place—how he relates to them. For example, writing about “the town”, specifically”My town”, he writes, “Obviously, I don’t know all the streets of Paris.” But he adds his familiarity with the city means he doesn’t get lost.
“Numerous locations have precise memories attached to them: houses where friends once lived that I’ve lost touch with, or else a cafe in which I played pinball for six hours at a stretch (for an original outlay of a single 20-centime coin), or else the square in which I read Balzac’s La Peau de Chagrin while keeping my eye on my little neice as she played.”
When I read that sentence, I recalled the hours I spent at the video game arcade in Memorial City Mall. The arcade is long gone, but the mall is still there.
“The fourth mode, finally, involves the fictive, the liking for stories and adventures, the wish to write the sort of books that are devoured lying facedown on your bed.” (This is from a piece called “What I’m Looking For.”)
I used to read like this frequently, but ever since badly throwing out my back this summer, that position is unconfortable. So I read sitting under a reading lamp.
“This rearrangement of my territory rarely takes place at random. It most often corresponds to the beginning or end of a specific piece of work; it intervenes in the middle of those indecisive days when I don’t quite know whether I am going to get started and when I simply cling on to these activities of withdrawel: tidying, sorting, setting in order.” (From “The Objects That Are on My Work-Table”)
This statement struck home. Let’s say I have a project or a deadline, and I am procrastinating, as I often do. I feel guilt about procrastinating, and feel a vague desire to do something useful. But instead of getting along with the task at hand, I clean up or organize things. These are not activities that get me any closer to finishing the project, but the feel like positive things to do. So when you see my apartment cleaned up and organized, it’s usually an elaborate form of procrastination.
“What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary, the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more trains exist.” ((From “Approaches to What?”)
This reminds me of how some historical events are recorded. We students of history know of certain big events, like the bronze age collapse (circa 1200 - 1150 BCE), but if you were an average person living in, say, the Hittite empire or Mycenaean Greece at the time, would you even have noticed? Ditto with the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD. A striking event in the history of the world, but do you as a person in Spain even know it happened, or care? Your life today is unchange from your life a yeat earlier.
The last quotes I have are from an unpulished piece callede “A Scientific and Literary Friendship: Leon Burp and Marcel Gotlib.” This is an account of three fictional figures in French literary and scientific history—genre-wise, it reminds me a little of “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” by Jorge Luis Borges. Perec, like Borges (and Stanisław Lem) would get around writing a book by writing a fictional review or account of the book he would like to write. Gotlib is an insanely accomplished French writer/scientist, a combination of professions that feels like Perec’s ideal.
“Appointed the following week to be the head of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, [Gotlib] was to create there, in the course of the months that followed, some of the most notable works of those years: The Bloodred Radiator Plug, [. . .] Gault and Millau in the Far West, Who is the Son of a Bitch Who Put Soup in my Scotch? [. . .], and The Law of Gravition . . .”
All operas I want to see!
“On several occasions in his works, Marcel Gotlib makes reference to an obscure man of science of whom history has not even retained the name but to whome we owe the paper-clip, the press-stud, and the edible boomerang.”
I don’t know how I would get through a single day without that last technological innovation!
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