Georges Perec: A Life in Words by David Bellos

Author:David Bellos [Bellos, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Literary Criticism, Literary Figures, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781409019268
Google: xKVJ_3wHVigC
Amazon: 0879239808
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2010-11-30T00:00:00+00:00

By the time Perec began to work on L’Arbre, his celebrity as the winner of the 1965 Renaudot Prize had faded almost completely in France, but it had begun to return like a boomerang from abroad. Things had been put on the French literature syllabus of universities keen to stay abreast of the latest developments, and one of these, the new University of Warwick, still being built on a site on the outskirts of Coventry, invited Perec to fly over. The trip, which took place shortly after A Man Asleep appeared, made so little impact on Perec that not a trace of it is to be found in his writings, not even in those of his letters that have come to light, and Paulette, it seems, was not told about it. The tape-recording that was made allows us to hear Perec describing the composition of Things in terms of a jigsaw puzzle. The four pieces he had started with were Roland Barthes (on advertising language: the Barthes of Mythologies and the still-unpublished Fashion System); Flaubert’s Sentimental Education; Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine; and Nizan’s Conspiracy. Things was the missing piece that fitted into the gap created by juxtaposing Perec’s four “masters”; and now it would become a piece in other jigsaw puzzles, creating new shapes that other works would come to fill.

To judge by the tape recording, Perec was not at ease when he began to talk to English students of French in May 1967: I’m a writer, and as a writer, I write, I don’t talk, he said by way of apology at the start. Nor was he at ease talking about writing, especially about his own, he added: that also was not his job. He did eventually hit some kind of stride, establishing an audibly informal rapport with his audience, drawing what must have been a diagram (or a jigsaw) on the blackboard, digressing, and coming to his conclusion long before the canonical fifty minutes were up. It was an abrupt ending that sounds like the only part of the talk that had really been prepared in advance. His work as a writer, he said, was carried out within a larger social and economic system about which he was not qualified to speak. But by asserting the necessity for a writer to be in conscious control of his means of production, he believed that he, too, was contesting the established order. As an explanation of how the author of the articles in Partisans had come to be a new recruit to OuLiPo less than five years later, Perec’s almost impenetrably contracted conclusion must have seemed no more than a clumsy gesture towards the political fashions of the day. Nonetheless, it does represent the solid foundation on which all of Perec’s work from Le Condottiere to Life A User’s Manual is built: rational, conscious possession of the “means of production” of different kinds of text.

Perec had also been invited to visit American universities. He made his first crossing of the

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