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Georges Perec (1936-1982) |
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French novelist, poet, essayist, dramatist, and literary innovator, who gained fame with his formally complex and puzzling works after the nouveau roman had lost its experimentalist freshness. Perec's most famous books include La Disparation (1969, A Void), written without the letter e, and La Vie, mode d'emploi (1978, Life: A User's Manual), about the residents of an apartment building. "Yes, it could begin this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds. What happens behind the flats' heavy doors can most often be perceived only through those fragmented echoes, those splinters, remnants, shadows, those first moves or incidents or accients that happen in what are called the "common areas", soft little sounds damped by the red woollen carpet, embryos of communal life which never go further than the landing." (in Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, Boston: David R. Godine, 1987, p. 3; original title: La Vie, mode d'emploi, 1978) Georges Perec was born in Paris into a family of Polish Jews. He was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, who had emigrated to France in the 1920 and settled in Belleville, a working class area in Paris. The surname was originally a Hebrew word, but as the family scattered around the world, it had mutated into "Perez," "Peres," "Perutz," "Peiresc," and in France "Perec". When the war broke out, Perec's father enlisted in the French army and died in a field hospital in 1940 of untended wounds, the very last day of fighting, "after being wounded in the abdomen by machine-gun fire or a shell splinter.'' Other members of family, including Perec's mother, were killed in the Nazi concentration camps. Cyrla Peretz was first taken to a camp in Drancy and from there she was probably sent to Auschwitz. From 1942 Perec was brought up by his paternal aunt Esther and her husband David Bienenfeld, who was a successful pearl trader. In 1945 they formally adopted their nine-year-old foster child. After graduating from a Catholic boarding school, Perec studied history and sociology at the Sorbonne and started to write reviews and essays for the Nouvelle Revue Française and Les Lettres Nouvelles. He never got a degree. At the Étampes Lycée he enrolled in Jean Duvignaud's philosophy class. Duvignaud encouraged Perec to write and became his mentor in the Parisian literary scene. In
1958-59 Perec served in the army.
After discharge, he married Paulette Petras and lived for a few years
in Tunis, where his wife worked as a teacher. His first novel, on which
he spent three years, was rejected by one publisher. Perec rewrote it,
but when Gallimard withdrew from the project, Perec stowed the
manuscript in a suitcase. The work, Le
Condottière, was found decades later after his death. From 1962 to 1979 Perec
was employed as a poorly paid archivist at the Neuropsysiological
Research Laboratory attached to the Hôpital Saint-Antoine. A nearly
suicidal love affair with a wealthy older woman, Suzanne Lipinska,
prompted him to take up analysis with Jean-Bernard Pontalis from May
1971. This was also the period when he systematically recorded his
dreams, which were collected in La Boutique obscure: 124 rêves
(1973, La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams). At the end
of his diary Perec included an index of themes and motifs: GAG: Perec's pyschoanalyst dismissed the dream-texts as too polished to bring them into discussion. Most likely referring to Perec, Pontalis wrote in an article about an analysand, who "dreamt . . . in the way he composed crosswords, or played patience, or solved jigsaw puzzles . . . or devoted himself to games of writing. ('Manual for a Sad Life (Georges Perec),' in Paths to Contemporary French Literature, Volume 1 by John Taylor, 2005, p. 177) By the time La Boutique obscure was finished, Perec and Suzanne had already separated. After leaving Andé, he visited Paulette occasionally and had brief affairs. Still emotionally attached to the place, he wrote: "But I feel I am getting away from it even if I am not yet mobilized by other places, faces or passions. There's even the beginning of a convalescence, perhaps, at last, the real beginning." (Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos, p. 503, 1993) In the late 1960s, Perec started to write in collaboration
with his
translator Eugen Helmle and the musician Philippe Drogoz a series of
radio plays. Die Maschine
(1972) analyzed a poem by Goethe from a pseudo-scientific point of
view, utilizing an arithmetical substitution game. In the 1970s he
became interested in cinema. Perec's first film, co-directed by Bernard
Queysanne, was based on his novel Un Homme qui dort. It won the
Prix Jean Vigo in 1974. The Lieux
(Places) project, which he began in January 1969 and abandoned in 1975,
centered on twelve Parisian location; he planned to describe them
meticulously - in situ and from memory - and record their aging in the period of twelve
years. From 1976 Perec made crossword-puzzles for the
magazine Le Point. The success of La Vie mode d'emploi enabled
Perec to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1981 he was a
writer-in-residence at the University of Queensland, Australia.
Outside relatively small avant-garde circles, his fiction was almost
totally unknown in
the country.
During this period he worked on a project "to write a book in
fifty-three days," but did
not get very far with it. While in Syndey, he pursued poetry. Throughout
his writing career, Perec used three special typewriters: an Underwood
Four Million, his companion for two decades, an IBM golf-ball machine
and an Olivetti ET 221. (Afterlives of Georges Perec, edited
by Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens, 2017, p. 227) Perec died of
cancer at the age of forty-six on March 3, 1982.
His final novel, Cinquante-Trois
Jours (53 Days), a
homage to the low-brow detective stories, contained references to an
unfinished manuscript, The Crypt.
Perec only completed the first eleven chapters, but left notes how the
riddle would be solved – at the end there is a writer called GP who has
accepted a challenge to create this book. The title of the novel refers
to the time it took Stendhal to write Charterhouse
of Parma. The last six years of his life, Perec lived with the director Catherine Binet, whose film Les jeux de la Comtesse Dolingen de Gratz (1981, The Games of Countess Dolingen) he produced. This visually impressive drama was partly based on Bram Stoker's short story 'Dracula's Guest' (1914). "When it's all over, one recalls a pleasurable experience without having a clue to what really was going on." (Vincent Canby, The New York Times, April 20, 1982) Perec died before the premiere of the film. "Before, there was nothingm or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn't much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, right and a left, a recto and a verso." (in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited with an introduction and translated by John Sturrock, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 10; original title: Espèces d'espaces, 1974) Perec entered the French literary scene with Les Choses (1965, Things), which won the Prix Renaudot and sold 100,000 copies. Two years later Perec joined the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a group of writers and mathematicians founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. OuLiPo became Perec's intellectual home. The group devoted to exploring the creative potentials of formal rules, and specialized in anagrams, palindromes, mathematical word games, and other puzzles. Perec's longest palindrome - a sentence or a word which reads the same both ways - consisted of more than 5,000 words. Experimenting with the lipogram - a text which one or more letters of the alphabet may not appear - Perec produced La Disparition, a 200-page detective novel (in some sources 311-page novel), in which the central puzzle deals with the disappearance of the e from the alphabet. (But the letter appears outside the main text.) La Disparation was largely composed at Suzanne Lipinska's house at Le Moulin d'Andé, a refuge for artists and writers. The Australian satirist Ryan O'Neill has claimed that Perec stole the idea for the book from a work by the fictional avant-garde writer, Arthur RuhtrA, founder of the Kanganoulipo. Arthur did not use the letter c. in his own novel Long Time No See. ""I should have known," he wrote in a letter published in Le Monde denouncing the French writer. "After all, Perec is an anagram of creep." (Their Brilliant Careers: Winner of the 2017 Pennington Prize by Ryan O'Neill, 2016) When the book was translated into Finnish (2023, Häviäminen) the translator Ville Keynäs did not use a, the most common letter in Finnish. Perec's translator, Gilbert Adair, managed to replicate the feat in English, although the pioneering work is Ernest Vincent Wright Gads, a novel with over 50000 words, written in English without the letter E. "But the paradox of liberating fetters is not one that will puzzle us, not when we think of the way we all narrow our options in order to expand our horizons in everyday life. Think of the new possibilities you have found in denying yourself, no matter what, the use of the far right lane; in never humming a tune whose lyrics employ "baby" or "girl" or "doncha know"; in going one day at a time without using the P-word (pr*bl*m*t*c)." (James R. Kincaid in The New York Times, March 12, 1995) Later Perec used all the saved e's from La Disparition in Les Revenentes (1972), which was written without the vowels a, i, o, u, but contained e. Espèces d'espaces (1974) examined spaces around and outside us, from one's bed to the universum. Perec's starting point was how letters, words, and lines fill a blank sheet of paper, forming a kind of space: "before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn't much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso." W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975, W or the Memory of Childhood) is an exceptional Holocaus narrative, in which chapters of childhood memories alternate with chapters of a fictional story. "I have no memories of childhood," Perec confessed. He compares his isolated memories with photograps, and imagines comforting scenes from his unfulfilled childhood: "As for me, I would have liked to help mother clear the dinner from kitchen table. There would have been a blue, small-checkered oilcloth on the table, and above it, a counterpoise lamp with a shade shaped almost like a plate, made of white porcelain or enamelled tin, and a pulley system with pear-shaped weights. Then I'd have fetched my satchel, got out my books and my writing pad and my wooden pencil-box. I'd have put them on the table and done my homework. That's what happened in the books I read at school." The fictional material consists of a story of a false identity and a dystopia set on an island called W, somewhere off Tierra del Fuego. Aryans have created on the island a totalitarian society. It based on a bizarre conception of sports, in which men are separated from women, children from their mothers, and losers receive grisly punishments. In the end the two complementary narratives unite when Perec refers to a book, which describes how sporting competition was developed in concentration camps into a vehicle of destruction. Life: A User's Manual was awarded the prestigious Prix Médicis. It has over 100 interwoven stories which concern the inhabitants of a large Parisian apartment building situated at 11 rue Simon-Crubellier. The structure of the novel is governed by chessboard of ten squares by ten, knight's moves, algorithms, and principles which the author only knows. The building was inspired by a Saul Steinberg drawing of a New York apartment house with its façade removed. One of the characters is Percival Bartlebooth, an English millionaire, who decides to bring artistic and formal control of his life to its outermost limits: he would study watercolor painting with Serge Valene for ten years, then he would travel the world for 20 years and paint pictures of different ports. The watercolors are cut into jigsaw puzzles in Paris. The rest of his life-plan, 20 years, Bartlebooth reassembles the jigsaws, which finally are dipped into a detergent solution until nothing else is left but a blank paper. However, Bartlebooth dies before he has finished all 500 of his jigsaw puzzles. Perec reveals nothing of Bartlebooth's childhood; the final pieces are not put together. For further reading: The Poetics of Experiment by Warren Motte (1984); Perec ou les textes croisés by J. Pedersen (1985); Pour un Perec lettré, chiffré by J-M. Raynaud (1987) Georges Perec by Claude Burgelin (1988); Georges Perec: Traces of His Passage by Paul Schwartz (1988); Perecollages 1981-1988 by Bernard Magné (1989); La Mémoire et l'oblique by Philippe Lejeune (1991); Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos (1993); Georges Perec: Ecrire Pour Ne Pas Dire by Stella Béhar (1995); Georges Perec Et I'Histoire, ed. Carsten Sestoft & Steen Bille Jorgensen (2000); Elämät sanoissa: eletty ja kerrottu epäjatkuvuus Sarrauten, Durasin, Robbe-Grillet'n ja Perecin omaelämäkerrallisissa teksteissä by Päivi Kosonen (2000); 'Dreaming the Self, Writing the Dream: The Subject in the Dream-Narratives of Georges Perec,' in Subject Matters: Subject and Self in French Literature from Descartes to the Present, edited by Paul Gifford & Johnnie Gratton (2000); 'La vie mode d'emploi by Georges Perec: the Archive as a Game,' in Narrating from the Archive: Novels, Records, and Bureaucrats in the Modern Age by Marco Codebò (2010); 'Disordered Sentences: Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante,' in Reading Style: a Life in Sentences by Jenny Davidson (2014); Les choses, modes d'emploi: comment on lit Georges Perec by Jacques Leenhardt (2014); Memory Across Borders: Nabokov, Perec, Chamoiseau by Sara-Louise Cooper (2016); The Afterlives of Georges Perec, edited by Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens (2017); Mémoires de l'oubli: William Faulkner, Joseph Roth, Georges Perec et W.G. Sebald by Raphaëlle Guidée (2017); Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol by Priya Wadhera (2017); ''Miksi joka päivä ei tapahdu mitään? Jäännökselliyyden potentiaalisuus Georges Perecin arkipäiväisyys- projektissa' by Mikko Mankinen, in niin & näin nro 98 syksy (3/2018); Menetelmällisen kirjallisuuden antologia, toim. Teemu Ikonen (2019); 'Postcards for Georges Perec,' in Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings, 1967-2017 by Paul Auster (2019); Le Paris de Georges Perec: la ville mode d’emploi by Denis Cornard (2022); Georges Perec by Claude Burgelin (2023); Dancing with Georges Perec: Embodying OuLiPo by Leslie Satin (2024) Selected works:
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