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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. "It was in the final months of his life that the artist Serge Valene conceived the idea of a painting that would reassemble his entire existence: everything his memory had recorded, all the sensations that had swept over him, all his fantasies, his passions, his hates would be recorded on canvas, a compendium of minute parts of which the sum would be his life." (in Life: A User's Manual, 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. 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. 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. His dreams he collected in La Boutique obscure: 124 rêves (1973). 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. 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.
During this period he worked with the unfinished detective novel Cinquante-Trois Jours, but ill healt forced him to return to France. Perec died of cancer at the age of forty-six on March 3, 1982. His final novel 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) he produced. "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 recti and a verso." (in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1998) Perec made his debut as a novelist with Les Choses (1965, Things), which won the Prix Renaudot. In 1967 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 (1969, A Void, translated by Gilbert Adair), 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.) 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) Selected works:
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