I first read George Perec (1936-1982) in the early 1970s. He was radical, daring, funny and beyond cool. I didn’t realise then that his work would still have a hold on me and how I take pictures over forty years later.
Perec was the only child of Polish-Jewish parents, Icek and Cyrla Peretz, and grew up in the Belleville quartier of Paris. His father, who served with the Foreign Legion, was killed in action in 1940 and, in May of the following year, the first arrests of Jews in Paris began, with the connivance of the Vichy government. His mother managed to get Georges, known affectionately as Jojo, included in a French Red Cross convoy to Grenoble where he was able to join members of his father’s family who had escaped from German occupied Paris a few months earlier. Here he was baptised and his name changed to Perec to disguise his Jewish origins and to protect him from the authorities. His mother, who had had to stay in Paris, was required to wear the yellow star to denote her as a Jew in May 1942 and in January 1943, she was arrested by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. She was not seen alive after her arrest. Georges was never able to find out if she died on the journey or in the death camp.
In 1945, Georges returned to Paris to be looked after by the family of his paternal aunt, Esther Bienenfeld and her husband, David. He was later adopted by them. He half-heartedly studied history at Henri-IV and then sociology at the Sorbonne. In fact, although he attended some classes, including sitting in on Roland Barthes semiology classes, he never formally enrolled for a degree at the Sorbonne. Perec put this down to his poor relationship with his uncle and to his depression (of which he wrote movingly in his 1967 novel, Un home qui dort – A Man Asleep) but, in the words of his biographer, David Bellos, this was also an act of defiance:
He did not want to be an academic; he was a writer, which was something else. To some extent he also wanted to be a failure, an outcast, a marginal member of the intelligentsia, free of the burdens of success. He would be nobody’s son.
(Bellos, 1995)
After completing his national service in 1959, he married Paulette Pétras. In 1960, he started to work, ad hoc, as a public opinion pollster and transcriber, earning just enough to support the couple’s relatively bohemian Parisian lifestyle. In October 1960, Paulette got a job as a teacher in Tunisia and the couple moved to Sfax where they stayed until June 1961. On their return, Perec, the ‘stranded Left Bank intellectual’ (Bellos,1995) through the good offices of friends, was offered a job as an archivist at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne, Perec was to stay in this relatively unskilled and lowly occupation until 1978 when he was able to support himself as a writer.
During the early 1960s, Perec was an habitué of the leftist Joie de Lire bookshop group and a regular contributor to Partisans – a Marxist cultural journal.
Developing ideas he had first explored in 1963 as La Grand Aventure (which he sent to Barthes for comment – he was extremely encouraging), his first critically acclaimed novel and ‘best seller’, Les Choses: Une Histoire des Années Soixante, (‘Things, A History of the 1960s’) was published in 1965.
The novel is a critique of the seductive power of consumerism and its power to define (and destroy) personal identity. Les Choses describes the lives of a Parisian couple, Sylvie and Jérôme, often presented as a single being, living a life that was ‘conforme, adéquate’ in a world whose ‘rules’ they did not question nor seek to comprehend; a life that was: ‘comme une long trop habitude, come un ennui presque serein: une vie sans rien’ (‘a habit that had gone on too long, an almost serene boredom; a life without anything.’). This life, and the kind of chic Parisian life that they dreamed of and aspired to, is exposed not through any substantial plot but through the observation Perec makes of the things (les choses) and the patterns that constitute their everyday life:
Sylvie taught her classes, asked her pupils questions, marked their work. Jérôme went to the municipal library, read books at random: Borges, Troyat, Zeraffa. They ate at a small restaurant, at the same table almost every day: tuna salad, escalope in breadcrumbs or on skewers, or sole, fruit. They went to ‘la Régence’ for a coffee, accompanied by a glass of water. They read piles of newspapers, they watched films, they hung about on the streets.
(Sylvie donnait ses cours, interrogeait ses élèves, corrigeait ses copies. Jérôme allait à la bibliothèque municipale, lisait des livres au hasard: Borges, Troyat, Zeraffa. Ils mangeant dans un petit restaurant, a la même table presque chaque jour: salade de thon, escalope panée, ou brochette, ou sole dorée, fruits. Ils allaient à ‘la Régence’ boire un express accompagné d’une verre d’eau fraiche. Ils lisaient des tas de journaux, ils voyaient des filmes, ils traînaient dans les rues.)
The novel is not just a condemnation of consumer society (which it is) but also a recognition that life defined in terms of objects, real or imagined, does not deliver either what it promises nor what is due. The novel, despite or possibly because of its relative lack of overt emotionality and its lists of mere ‘things’ is almost unbearably sad.
Throughout his writing, Perec played with the interrogation of the ordinary objects (the ‘infra-ordinaire’) and everyday actions that occupy us. By foregrounding what is habitually overlooked, Perec was able to challenge what is conventionally defined as significant:
In our haste to measure the historic, significant and revelatory, let’s not leave aside the essential: the truly intolerable, the really unforgivable. What is scandalous isn’t the pit explosion, it’s working in coal mines.
Perec, 1973 Cause Commune
(Dans notre précipitation à mesurer l’historique, le significatif, le révélateur, ne laissons pas de côté l’essentiel : le véritablement intolérable, le vraiment inadmissible : le scandale, ce n’est pas le grisou, c’est le travail dans les mines.)
In doing so, Perec came close to suggesting a form of social geography or artistic anthropology:
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. Question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live; true, we breathe; true; we walk, we open doors, we walk down the stairs, we sit at the table to eat, go to bed to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?
Perec, 1973 Cause Commune
Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare them.
Make a list of what’s in your pockets, or your bag. Ask yourself where these things came from; what are they for and what will become of them?
Question your teaspoons.
What is under your wallpaper?
(Ce qu’il s’agit d’interroger, c’est la brique, le béton, le verre, nos manières de table, nos ustensiles, nos outils, nos emplois du temps, nos rythmes. Interroger ce qui semble avoir cessé à jamais de nous étonner. Nous vivons, certes; nous respirons, certes; nous marchons, nous ouvrons des portes, nous descendons des escaliers, nous nous asseyons à une table pour manger, nous nous couchons dans un lit pour dormir. Comment? Où? Quand? Pourquoi?
Décrivez votre rue. Décrivez-en une autre. Comparez.
Faites l’inventaire de vos poches, de votre sac. Interrogez-vous sur la provenance, l’usage et le devenir de chacun des objets que vous en retirez.
Questionnez vos petites cuillères.
Qu’y a-t-il sous votre papier peint?)
Les Choses was the first of Perec’s novels that I read, aged 17. The second was La Disparition (translated into English as ‘A Void’ but closer in meaning, in French, to ‘The Disappearance’). Published in 1969, the book was written entirely without using the letter ‘e’. This extraordinary, convoluted story of a group of friends looking for Anton Voyl, who has mysteriously disappeared, in a nightmare, dystopian world that suggests the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, is a truly disturbing glimpse into the ‘heart of darkness’.
The self imposition of what might appear an absurd restriction such as not using the letter ‘e’ is far from arbitrary – nor is the title which echoes the title (Acte de Disparition) of the official notification that relatives received from the French Ministry of War Veterans confirming the last known sighting of a missing family member; in Perec’s case, his mother who was last seen alive en route to Auschwitz. By not using ‘e’, Perec cannot refer to his mother (mère), his father (père), family (famille) or parents (parents) nor can he say his own name. ‘e’ in French sounds like the word for ‘them’ (‘eux’) and the book is about the agonising and fruitless search for those who will always be not there.
By the time that he wrote La Disparition, Perec had become a member of Oulipo (OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle – paraphrase: Workshop for the Literature of the Future), a group of mathematicians and writers who engaged in an extraordinary experimentation with literary forms, often based on mathematical relationships or other formal constraints.
Perec’s best known work and a work of genius, La Vie: mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual), published in 1978, uses the familiar Perec trope of a taxonomy – in this case of an imagined apartment block on the Rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris alongside a narrative that proceeds as per the ‘Knight’s Tour’ in chess; whereby the knight lands on every square on the board but only ever once.
Such an apparently arcane restriction is as vital to the the story of La Vie as the missing ‘e’ is to La Disparition in that La Vie is the story of the futility of seeking to impose any form of order on the world. The ‘plot’ of the story is itself an expression of the futility of even trying to embrace meaninglessness: Percival Bartlebooth, a rich Englishman, who has an apartment in the block, studies watercolour painting for 10 years with Valène, who also lives at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. He then spends 20 years visiting the world’s ports, painting 500 seascapes. These he sends to another resident in the block, Gaspard Winckler, who turns them into increasingly difficult jigsaw puzzles. Bartlebooth then plans to spend the next 20 years completing the puzzles before returning each jigsaw puzzle, and so each painting, to the sea in the place it was painted where the original watercolour dissolves into nothingness. But Bartlebooth’s project fails with his eyesight and his death.
But to tell the ‘story’ of La Vie is to miss everything about the book that matters; this is the infinitely tender account it gives of each of the people whose lives are intermingled and separated in the corridors and apartments of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier and of the objects that are the material framework of their lives.
Perec went on to write radio plays, film scripts and other forms of narrative; each as different from each other as he intended them to be but by then my interests had moved on.
A heavy smoker, he died in a daze of morphine, anger and resignation on the evening of 3rd March, 1982 in Hôpital Charles-Foix, at Ivry. He was 45.
It is in the attention to the plain facts of the everyday, what Buddhists often refer to as Tathātā or ‘thusness’, the mere materiality of existence through which life expresses itself, that still draws me to Perec. He asks us to ‘question our teaspoons’ in all seriousness and with humour. There is also an unfathomable melancholy in his understanding of the world – I still find it difficult to read the final pages of La Vie. His tenderness in the face of the fragility and impermanence of existence is humane and compassionate.
There is something, I hope, of Perec in my images.
Reference:
Bellos, D. (1995) Georges Perec: A Life in Words London: Harvill Press
