Georges Perec's Les Lieux d'une fugue (1978)

For three years the young Georges Perec was living with his aunt Esther Bienenfeld and her husband David at a flat at 18 Rue de l'Assomption in the 16e arrondissement. In 1965 he wrote a fifteen-page autobiographical account (Lieux d'une fugue (Runaway Places)) of the day he ran away from the flat at the age of eleven. He turned it into a forty-two minute film in 1978.

The film isn't in chronological order, has no dialogue only voiceover, and contains many images dwelling on tiny details, such as dogshit on benches, a cracked coffee bowl, the goose feather on the letter 'F' on the offices of Le Figaro (as on the 'F' on the newpaper itself), etc. There are shots of metro stations, Carré Marigny stamp market, the Champs-Élysées, Franklin-Roosevelt, rubbish bins and much more.

The point where a man finds the boy trying to sleep on a bench, starts asking him questions and then takes him to the nearest police station comes about halfway through and is ony continued at the end, where we see images of a room in the police station and learn that his uncle has been phoned and will come and pick him up in his car.

At no time is there any attempt to reconstruct Perec's flight as a child himself, only memories of places visited, no one interprets him as a boy, and only a few brief images of Perec himself involved in the film are seen: there is only the voiceover, and as Perec's older cousin Lili used to play the piano at Rue de l'Asssomption, as a memory of this, Schumann's Kreisleriana becomes increasingly predominant as soundtrack.

Héléna Marienské: Le Degré suprême de la tendresse (2008)

In the Prologue to Héléna Marienské's Le Degré suprême de la tendresse – the title being taken from the macho Salvador Dalí's definition of cannibalism – the narrator relates a fait divers or news item she heard about a drunken couple leaving a bar in the Bastille area. We are told to remember the place, the passage des Taillandiers (a taillandier being a maker of cutting tools). The young woman is forced to perform fellatio on the man, but she uses extreme force and gives him a glansectomy, cutting off his glans penis (or bell-end in common parlance), letting it roll into the gutter for the pompiers to retrieve. Yes, this is a feminist book to make men wince in parts.

And although there are some pretty gruesome episodes in it, the erotically suggestive nature of the cover conceals a very clever, and often very comical, novel. Although many in the Anglophone world would perhaps disagree with the French world's much more flexible description of this book as a 'novel', because it consists of eight very separate parts, each is linked by that particular sex act, and each written in a different pastiche of a French author: Michel Houellebecq, Gédéon Tallemant des Réaux, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Jean de La Fontaine, Christine Angot, Michel de Montaigne, Vincent Ravalec, and Georges Perec. My aim here is not to comment on all eight pastiches, but simply to comment on a few aspects of the book which particularly captured my attention.

The first – 'Restriction du domaine' – is an obvious comment on Houellebecq's Extension du domaine de la lutte, and the 'restriction' evidently relates to the severing of the organ, so we know where the stories are leading, but we don't know how. Although we know the area when we laugh at the Houellebecqian cynicism, the obsession with sex, and the restricted sex. For instance, the protagonist Pierre Hitkartoff has troubles with getting an erection, although he experiences something of a new lease of life when he becomes a writer. Needless to say, perhaps, there's a particularly violent scene in it when Pierre loses not only his glans penis but also his limbs.

I'm unfamiliar with Tallemant des Réaux (1619–92), let alone his Historiettes, but then Marienské does say in the Prologue that he's little known, and that it's not necessary to be familiar with his work to enjoy the story, and it certainly isn't. Here we have the very sassy fourteen-year-old Marquise Héloïse who's far too independent for her own good, although the reader surely applauds when she bites a few centimeters from the sexually aggressive Capitaine's organ. The king Louis XII has already experienced the young girl's cheekiness, so locks her away in a convent to, er, keep her mouth shut. On pretending to be penitent there though, she asks the Mother Superior for a a crucifix and a hairshirt: she then stuns the Mother with the former, gags her with the latter and runs off to marry a Turkish Sultan!

Another name I was unfamiliar with is the contemporary Vincent Ravalec, whose writing is imitated in this way, with my translation here:

'Virgi's life at the time, it was pure Zola. One stoned evening when we were mates, real mates I mean, Virginia had told us that her father, long-term unemployed embittered by the vicissitudes of his existence, used to sodomize her without Vaseline when he wasn't bashing her mother. She found that really shitty. She was seventeen years old, [...] and no shit, Daddy's perverse practices really stank.'

She goes to see an overworked social worker who just gives her five euros for a tub of Vaseline, so with the male narrator she escapes, becomes a rich high-class prostitute and to cope takes lots of drug cocktails, and the narrative helterskelters into surreal multiple glansectomies, but somehow works its way into a kind of happy ending. Weird.

Next there is the final story dedicated to 'G.P', or Georges Perec, but Marienské couldn't say that because – unlike the previously story mentioned above which has chemical Es in it – this is like Perec's La Disparition in which there are no typographical Es in it. And there are some of the characters in Perec's novel here. There are also, like Perec's novel – many tortuous sentences which abound with foreign words and phrases ('miniskirt' for 'minijupe', 'nada' for 'rien', etc), many slang or familiar words ('toubib' for 'docteur' or 'médecin', 'gus' for 'mec', 'soutif' for 'soutien-gorge', etc), slightly odd expressions ('cubain' for 'cigare', 'RV' for 'rendez-vous') – all to dodge the e-word: inevitably, the plot tends to go adrift as you marvel at the inventiveness.

Yes, a very clever book which all-in-all manages not quite to get too lost in its own cleverness. A book with real bite (although slightly less in the French sense).

Georges Perec: Père Lachaise Columbarium #4

'Esther
BIENENFELD
1896–1974

––––––––––

Georges
PEREC
1936–1982'

The name above Perec's is his aunt's: his father died in the war in 1940, his mother was killed in Auschwitz, and his aunt and uncle adopted him. Much has been written about his being an orphan, and many speculations made about the importance of 'disappearance' in his work, of how the constraints he lived under in some way mirror the constraints Oulipo use. It's an interesting construction I suppose. But obviously the biggest constraint was his death at 45.

Richard Ayodade's Submarine (2010), Joe Dunthorne, and an Oulipian digression

Submarine is a coming-of-age story set in 1980s Swansea, Wales, and the socially inept 15-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) wants to lose his virginity to his girlfriend Jordana (Yasmin Paige), although he's also very concerned that the marriage of his parents – the extremely constipated Lloyd (Noah Taylor) and Jill (a slightly exaggerating Sally Hawkins) – is threatened by Jill's relationship with her old flame Graham (Paddy Considine), a new age performer.

With parents like these, Oliver can perhaps be excused the problems he has communicating, excused his self-absorption, and even excused his hopelessly misguided attempts to solve problems.

The obvious references have been made by critics – Nouvelle Vague cinema influence, Catcher in the Rye, Woody Allen, Roeg's evil dwarf in Don't Look Now, Adrian Mole, etc. The film works because it's (sometimes rather blackly) funny, because it's well acted (especially by Roberts and Paige), because Ayodade is so assured (occasionally too much so), and because Alex Turner's music is wistful and in keeping with the period.

Now, who's Joe Dunthorne? He wrote the novel (his first) on which this movie is based, which was published in 2008, and as far as I can tell (not having read it) the movie seems to be faithful to it. Dunthorne was a contributor to a collection of poems published under the title Generation txt, and he now has a new novel, Wild Abandon, which is set in the early 1990s, and apparently also has two suberb young people. I'll look out for that.

Interestingly, Dunthorne is also an admirer of Georges Perec, and his short article in the Guardian on three Perec translations is here. However – and coming a little later is one of my grouses that I may have made before but if so it bears repeating – Dunthorne calls Gilbert Adair's A Void (an attempted translation of Perec's La Disparition) a 'virtuoso translation'. I assume that Dunthorne has read both the original and the translation, otherwise his statement wouldn't make sense. One of the other translations he mentions is Ian Monk's The Exeter Text, which Monk translates from Perec's Les Revenentes. Monk, like Perec, belongs to Oulipo (which Perec still does, even though he's dead), but his verdict on Adair's translation is very different: he says that he 'found it an amusing work in its own right but, as a translation, frankly disappointing'. And he goes on to state his reasons for this, which are very interesting, particularly (for me) the fact that Adair missed the French pangram, and his 'translation' of it renders the sentence meaningless as such. You'll have to scroll a little, but any reader of Adair's book should read this. Rant over, and yes, I know I've highjacked my own post.

Kenneth Goldsmith in The Believer, October 2011

I'm a little late getting round to this article, but I think it's something I should make a note of as it's so challenging to our conception of literature. As indeed it's meant to be. The full title of the article in The Believer, including the subtitles, is 'Kenneth Goldsmith (Poet): What Happens when Sense is not Foregrounded as Being of Primary Importance: Some Books Better Thought about than Read: Finnegans Wake[,] The Making of Americans[,] The works of Kenneth Goldsmith'. Dave Mandl writes an introduction about Goldsmith, and then has an email interview with him.

Goldsmith has written books such as Soliloquy, which contains every word he spoke in a week; The Weather, which is a transcript of a radio station's weather reports over a whole year; and Day, which is the text of an issue of The New York Times retyped. You get the idea.

And that's what this is all about: ideas. Goldsmith calls himself a 'conceptual writer', and says he has a 'thinkership' rather than a readership: his books are evidently more or less unreadable, so their value is as thinking tools, or what Goldsmith calls ''pataphysical reference books', an expression that made me immediately think of Alfred Jarry and Oulipo, so I was hardly surprised to find Goldsmith enthusing over Michel Houellebecq enthusing over Georges Perec and Jorge Luis Borges, or to learn that he has established an educational resource called UbuWeb.

Goldsmith also works at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches 'poetic practice and the art of plagiarism'.

And the interview is here.

Georges Perec: Le voyage d'hiver (1979)

Georges Perec's short story 'Le voyage d'hiver' ('The Winter Journey') was originally published in 1979 in Saisons: Nouvelles with Cyrus Rezvani's 'Dernier Printemps', Jean Freustié's 'L'été lointain', and Jacques Chessex's 'Octobre est le plus beau mois'. It was published on its own by Éditions du Seuil in 1993.

In August 1939 Vincent Degraël, a young teacher from Paris, goes to Le Havre to stay for a few days with his colleague Denis Borade and his parents. But the day before his departure he picks up a book from Borade's parents' library that has such an effect on him that he retires to the bedroom to read it. It's called Le voyage d'Hiver, by Hugo Vernier, a writer unknown to him.

The book is thin and divided into two parts. The first part is about a fifth of the total length, and concerns a man who is ferried to a small island on a lake, where an elderly couple lead him to a bedroom in a building, where a meal is laid out on a table for him, and where he begins to eat alone. Then the second part begins, which is a long declaration interspersed with poems, enigmatic sayings and blasphemous incantations. The effect it has on him is profound, and this is just one sentence:

'Hardly had he begun to read than Vincent Degraël felt an unease which was impossible to define precisely, but which grew in proportion as he turned the pages of the book with an increasingly trembling hand: it was as if the sentences before his eyes were suddenly becoming more familiar to him, were irresistibly reminding him of something, as if the reading of each was imposing, or rather was superimposing, the memory - at once precise and vague - of a sentence which must have been almost identical and which he must have read elsewhere; as if these words, more tender than caresses and more perfidious than poisons, alternately transparent and opaque, obscene and warm, dazzling, labyrinthine, and incessantly oscillating like a maddened compass needle between a hallucinatory violence and a fabulous serenity, were sketching out a confused configuration in which there seemed to be a hotchpotch of Germain Nouveau and Tristan Corbière, Villiers and Banville, Rimbaud and Verhaeren, Charles Cros and Léon Bloy.'

Degraël begins to recognise a large number of quotations from late 19th century poets, but is stunned to discover that the book was published in 1864 - before any of the quoted poets had been published. Searching his friend's parents' library, he can find no reference to Vernier. With the help of his friend, they find nearly 350 quotations from nearly 30 authors - or rather, which have been attributed to those authors, as it seems clear that they have been directly borrowing from Le voyage d'hiver: the implications are enormous. The war intervenes, and Degraël is unable to continue his research apart from verifying at the British Museum that there was no printing error, and the book was in fact published in 1864.

Back in Paris after the war he continues his research and finds frequent references to Vernier in original diaries and letters of poets, even discovering that the famous 'Je est un autre' ('I is another') of Rimbaud, and Lautréamont's 'La poésie doit être faite par tous. Non par un.' ('Poetry must be made by all. Not by one') originate from the pen of Vernier.

Alas, he cannot get his hands on a copy of Vernier's book: Borade's parents' house was destroyed during the Le Havre bombing, the Bibliothèque nationale de France lost its copy on the way to the bindery, and not another copy can be found anywhere after searches in hundreds of libraries, archives, and bookshops. He concludes that the poets themselves must have destroyed the other copies of the single print run of 500. Apart from discovering that Vernier was born in Vimy (Pas de Calais) on 3 September 1836, nothing more can be learned.

After 30 years of searching in vain for proof of the existence of Vernier and of his work, Degraël dies in the psychiatric hospital in Verrières (where Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir (The Red and the Black) begins). His former students undertake to gather his huge pile of documents and manuscripts. Among them, they find a book carefully inscribed Le voyage d'hiver: its first eight pages tell of the fruitless searches Degraël made, and the remaining 392 pages are blank.

Ian Monk's Homage to Georges Perec

Below is a link to Ian Monk's homage (in English) to Georges Perec, and also contains his criticism of Adair's translation of Perec's La disparition (A Void), with which he finds several faults. It also contains examples of Monk's own playful work. Monk is the only living English member of Oulipo, although not the only English one ever, and even on death you're still a member. Last November, Oulipo celebrated its 5000th anniversary: Oulipian years are 100 times shorter than ours. Monks's homage is here.

Georges Perec's Les Choses (1965)

Les choses: Une histoire des années soixante (Things: A Story of the Sixties) is about er, things, and - as if peripheral subjects - Jérôme and Sylvie, who are psycho-sociologists. This is just a highfallutin term for market researchers, and doesn't pay them much, leaves them longing for things, for so many might bes, could bes, which become might have beens and could have beens, and lead to literally neverending discontentment, desires that are never accomplished, lists of things to do that will never be done.

So they leave the Parisian world of constant lack for Tunisia, but of course that just leads to more desire, and more lack. In Tunisia, they could have had, but of course didn't, so go back to Paris, where - needless to say - they can't have what they didn't have the first time.

Les choses was Georges Perec's first published novel, and earned him the Prix Renaudot. Many saw it as a criticism of Gaullist consumer society, which annoyed Perec, because it couldn't have been: it was about things promised but never granted. But after so many obscure years, Perec's name was now known, he had money coming in, could do things, could have things...

However, the next year Perec followed through, as it were, with Quel petit vélo à guidon chromé au fond de la cour? (Which Moped with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the Back of the Yard?), which sank almost without trace: even David Bellos, the author of the huge biography Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: The Harvill Press, 1995), thought that the novel written in the manner of Raymond Queneau was a good joke for only a few pages. But Perec wouldn't (couldn't) compromise his art for the things that money and popularity would bring him (in fact he found popular books positively suspicious), and went back into the shadows for several more years, when things turned out better for him, although not for long, as he died when he was still 45.  Ah, he could have...

Georges Perec's La Disparition (1969; trans. Adair as A Void, 1994)

A Sort of Parody

This is an odd book with a missing mark, a loss shouting loudly about its own lack, a howl of an orphan child, full of many words from many lands, along with slang words and gros mots, in short a hotchpotch of lingos fighting it out, so many words with so many strings of consonants all looking for this unknown thing.

To a lot of us it is possibly a tad mad, but Mr P. is in control of his work, showing us a vast array of humans, guiding us around his story – whilst avoiding a profusion of pitfalls – with circumlocutory facility.

On many occasions I thought that this book was slightly sagging, that it ran risks of imploding into its own loss; a vital thing is missing, an important 1 in a row of 26: fifth along, that is to say.

ADDENDUM: Well, I wrote this some time ago, before I'd read Ian Monk's criticisms of this translation, and I certainly wouldn't be writing a praise of it now. There were a number of things Adair missed in Perec's book, and I'm not talking about all the 'e's. He missed a common French pangram, for instance, and consequently made a complete hash of this sentence. In fact, the translation is something of a mess itself.