Roman, tests, inventories … Apart stylistic prowess that made him famous, like “The Disappearance” Georges Perec has explored a variety of genres. Since it would have been 80 this March 7, 2016, it is the opportunity to dive back into his work.
“When I’m tired of paint I paint to rest, “ Picasso explained. Taking the expression on his own, admitting to massive worker man “sedentary, practicing enchaisement to [his] work table” Georges Perec also said “manufacturer specific objects called books”, “merchant of verbal images, dreams,” “a man who plays with the letters” artisan or scribe moved by the project “oblique, monstrous, saturate the contemporary writing field,” or “write all that is possible for a man to write today: books wholesale and short books, novels and poems, dramas, opera librettos, detective stories, adventure stories, science fiction novels, soap operas, children’s books … (1) “ punctuating the enumeration of these possible definitions of itself, of its daily activities with this simple statement: ” I am a happy writer. “ Happy to have made this choice in writing, for acceding to the age of 40 the free use of his time, having overcome before that periods of doubt and temptations of renunciation to be and remain a man sitting at his desk, busy writing books – that is to say, every time, “reorganize the twenty-six letters of the alphabet in some way” .
This concept of happiness, the kind of joy or jubilation, as naturally contained in the act of writing, the books of Georges Perec (1936-1982) continues to spread . There are eighty years just on 7 March 1936, the writer was born – tall young man of 46, hair and scraggly beard, loving indiscriminately Paris, cats, Flaubert, jazz, Garden plants, movies, and games whatsoever. At his death March 3, 1982, the press hailed Perec in a fun and non-conformist writer, pitting him the portrait of a player, a sort of prodigious technician – man of the Oulipo (2) of the Disappearance, syntactic exploits of all kinds, great manipulator of forms, virtuoso palindrome, the lipogram, the anagram and other stylistic prowess. There was this, of course, at Georges Perec, but also many other things, as essential and deeper, the three decades since his death came slowly uncover.
The stylistic prowess? “These are my lines.”
“If I try to define what I wanted to do since I started writing, the first thing that comes to me to mind is that I have never written two such books that I have ever wanted to repeat in a book a formula, a system or a way developed in a previous book, “ expliquait- it in 1978 in an article entitled “Notes on what I search (3).” Adding: “This systematic versatility [...] earned me the reputation of being a kind of computer, a machine to produce texts. Personally, I would compare me rather a farmer who cultivate more fields; in one he would beets, in another of alfalfa, in a third corn, etc. Likewise, the books I’ve written are related to four different fields, four modes of interrogation that may arise ultimately the same question, but posed as special correspondent prospects every time for me to another type of literary work. “ and to list these four questions: first, ” sociological “ attached to the watch daily, to describe the (well, The Things Species of spaces, exhaustion Attempt of a Parisian place ); the second, “autobiographical order” to which are attached W or The Memory of Childhood, La Boutique obscure, I remember … third, “playful” , directly Oulipian; the fourth, “Finally, concerns the romance, taste stories and adventures, the desire to write books that devour face down on his bed: Life manual is an example. ” Whether therefore, to summarize, four poles – “the world around me, my own history, language, fiction” – which, unlike the geographic poles, often overlap cohabit, sometimes merge
the famous stylistic prowess, which sometimes continues even today to reduce – but less and less … – is simple:. “These are my lines, commented Perec. These exercises allow me to stretch my mind, like a pianist removes rust fingers. And I like multiply constraints when writing systems: it is the suction pumps of my imagination. “ Explanation supported and supplemented by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, who was his friend: ” To avoid the arbitrariness of existence, Perec [...] needs to impose strict rules (even if those rules are, in turn, arbitrary). But the miracle is that this poetic one might say artificial and mechanical result gives a freedom and a wealth of inexhaustible invention. “
Today The Disappearance (1969), spectacular and memorable fiction, entirely deprived of the letter” e “- that the style called lipogram – definitively ceased to appear as the top of the work of Perec. Similarly, the tasty What a small bike handlebars chrome at the back of the court? (1966) it may seem now saturated with excess references. Still more prominent, and key present in this work numerous and protean other works. The Things his first novel, published in 1965 and awarded the Prix Renaudot, lucid and despairing vision of modern materialistic civilization. With him, of course, the wonderful labyrinth of stories and characters Life A User’s Manual (1978 Prix Medicis). But also poignant W. or childhood memory (1975), all together autobiographical novel of adventure and meditation, haunted by the memory of the parents of Georges Perec, both Jews of Polish origin and died as a child: his father, a volunteer, who died in 1940 following a wound, three years before his mother to Auschwitz and there disappeared, along with his grandparents – a book that ends with these words: “I write because we lived together, because I was among them, fly in the midst of their shadows, body near their bodies. I write because they have left their indelible mark on me and the track is in writing, their memory is death to writing. Writing is the memory of their dead and the affirmation of my life. “
Alongside these books include even a series of short texts within the prose, the very personal essay, sometimes even of the inventory, list, the curveball … This brief fiction an amateur cabinet (1979), or, published posthumously, exhaustion Attempt of a Parisian place (1982) or Thinking / File (1985). “An important part of his work is like a recitation of the world, its thousands of objects and images, in a constant happiness enumeration or simple appointment of all these traces produced and constantly rejects a society “ about it analyzed his friend and scholar Claude Burgelin (4).
in this bibliography is added since 2012 The Condottière, a novel remained unpublished youth, sort of police investigation in the complex frame, centered on a forger painter and a painting of the artist of the quattrocento Antonello Messina. After all, even Perec said, “all literature is, in a way, like a detective story. It must be that at the beginning of the book we have the impression of not knowing something that will be given as and when the book will move [...] , so that everything is reabsorbed in the end, as when a puzzle is finished: there is a picture in front of you, and that’s all “
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The Condottière by Georges Perec, ed. du Seuil, coll. The library of the XXI century, 220 p., 17 €.
Magazine Europe : Georges Perec, No. 993-994 (January-February 2012), € 18.50
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Georges Perec by Patrick Modiano: A clinical way of describing the world
“The strongest memory, almost dazzled, I keep my reading Perec is the discovery of Things at the time of the publication of the novel. It was 1965, I was 20, I had not published yet, but I began to write. I was struck, impressed by the clinical way Perec had to describe the contemporary world. It was very far from me, from an aesthetic point of view, but it is often even more affected by things we read when we know unable to write. Moreover, it was the first time we saw appear as a young writer in a literary scene still largely occupied by the generation of tenors of the interwar period – Celine, Giono, Malraux … With Perec, something new was happening, it was obvious. Later, I read regularly. But I’ve never met, despite our common friendship with Raymond Queneau, who spoke to me very often of him. Despite, too, strange coincidences. So I realized that the mother of Dora Bruder was deported in 1943 in the same convoy as Perec’s mother, and the two young women were called Cecilia, first name uncommon at the time. So again, I do not know, when I published my novel Rue obscure shops, that Perec wrote a book a few years ago that was called The Dark Department – this is part of what the surrealists called “the objectives chance” … “
Last book published: the Horizon (ed Gallimard and pocket at Folio.).
This article was published Although initially March 10, 2012, on the occasion of the thirty years of the death of Georges Perec.
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