GEORGES PEREC

 

From “Things”:

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything. You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free. That nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you. You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, in almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions. You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing. You are invisible, limpid, transparent. You no longer exist. Across the passing hours, the succession of days, the procession of the seasons, the flow of time, you survive without joy and without sadness. Without a future and without a past. Just like that: simply, self evidently, like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing.”

From “L’Infraordinaire”:

From “Species of Spaces”:

 

From “Life A User’s Manual”:

"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 accidents 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."

 

“From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.”

"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 the foreground, three young people are climbing a path which leads to a cemetery, in the middle of which a column surmounted by an onyx basin rises from a clump of oleander and aucuba trees."

"There are no paintings on the walls, because the walls and doors are themselves the decor: they have been hung with painted wallpaper, providing a lavish panorama (a number of trompe-l'oeil effects suggest that we are dealing with a copy specially made for this room, probably based on older drawings) showing life in India as it was popularly imagined in the second half of the nineteenth century: first, a luxuriant jungle peopled with wide-eyed monkeys, then a clearing beside a marigot in which three elephants disport themselves at spraying each other; further on, in front of straw huts on stilts, women in yellow, sky- blue, and sea-green saris and men in loincloths dry tea leaves and ginger roots, whilst others, at wooden stalls, decorate large squares of silk with blocks which they dip in pots of vegetable dyes; and ?nally, on the right-hand edge, a classic tiger-hunting scene: between two rows of sepoys, two deep, shaking rattles and banging cymbals, strides a richly bedecked elephant, with a fringed and tasselled rectangular banner embossed with a red winged horse on his forehead; a howdah rises up behind the mahout squatting between the pachyderm's ears, bearing a red-haired European with sideburns and a pith helmet, and a maharajah wearing a jewel-studded costume and an immaculate turban decorated with a long plume held in place by an enormous diamond; in front of them, at the jungle's edge, half-emerging from the undergrowth, with its stomach to the ground, the big cat prepares to pounce. In the centre of the left-hand wall, there's a huge pink marble fireplace surmounted by a large mirror; on the mantel, a tall crystal vase, of rectangular cross-section, filled with everlasting flowers, and a tum-of-the-century savings box: it has the form of a full-length, grinning, somehow twisted Negro, dressed in a flowing tartan oilskin cape, mostly red, with white gloves, steel-rimmed spectacles, and a top hat decorated with the stars and stripes and emblazoned with the number "75" in blue and red figures. His left hand is outstretched, his right hand grips the knob of a walking stick. When you put a coin into the outstretched palm, the arm rises and the coin is inexorably swallowed: by way of thanks, the clockwork man shakes his legs half a dozen times, in a fairly good imitation of the jitterbug."

"In several places, the bookshelves have been made into glass-fronted display cases. That is how some old calendars, almanacs, and Second Empire diaries are shown off in the first case, on the left, together with some small posters, including Cassandre's Normandie and Paul Colin's Grand Prix of the Arc de Triomphe; in the second display case - the only reminder of the activities of the mistress of the house - there are a few old tools: three planes, two adzes, a twibill, six cold chisels, two files, three hammers, three gimlets, two angers, all bearing the monogram of the Suez Canal Company and all used during the cutting of the canal, as well as a magnificent Sheffield "Multum in parvo" looking like an ordinary pocketknife (wider, of course) but containing not just blades of various sizes but a screwdriver, a corkscrew, pincers, pen nibs, nailfiles, and punches; in the third case, various objects which had belonged to Flourens, the physiologist, and in partic- ular the skeleton, red through and through, of the young pig whose mother the scientist had fed for the last 84 days of her pregnancy on food mixed with madder to prove experimentally the direct relationship of mother and foetus; and in the fourth case, a doll's house, a parallelepipedal, three feet high, two feet nine inches wide, and two feet deep, dating from the late nine- teenth oentury and representing a typical English cottage down to the smallest detail: 1 drawing room with bay windows (2 lancets), thermometer affixed, 1 sitting room, 4 bedrooms, 2 servants' rooms, tiled kitchen with close range and scullery, lounge hall fitted with linen wallpresses.fumed oak sectional bookcase containing the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the New Century Dictionary, transverse obsolete medieval and oriental weapons, dinner gong, alabaster lamp, bowl pendant, vulcanite automatic telephone receiver with adjacent directory, hand-tufted Axminster carpet with cream ground and trellis border, loo table with pillar-and-claw legs, hearth with massive firebrasses and ormolu mantel chronometer clock, guaranteed timekeeper with cathedral chime, barometer with hygrographic chart, comfortable lounge settees and corner fitments, upholstered in ruby plush with good springing and sunk centre, three-banner Japanese screen and cuspidors and pyramidically prismatic central chandelier lustre, bentwood perch with its tame parrot."

"The artist has put his painting in the painting, so that the art collector, sitting in his gallery, has in his line of sight, on the far wall, the painting which represents himself looking at his collection of paintings, then all of the paintings themselves reproduced again without any loss of precision through the first, second and third reflections, until they are nothing more than minute brush-strokes on the canvas. A Gallery Portrait is not just the anecdotic depiction of a private collection, it is also, in its play of succeeding reflections and in the near-magical charm that these increasingly minuscule repetitions create, a work of art which tips us into its own oneiric universe where its power of seduction has been amplified to an infinite degree and where the agonizing precision of the medium, far from being an end in itself, suddenly opens out into the vertiginous spirituality of the Eternal Return".

"In one of the attics in Chateau de la Muette he had found the remains of a table. Its oval top, wonderfully inlaid with mother-of-pearl, was exceptionally well preserved; but its base, a massive, spindle-shaped column of grained wood, turned out to be completely worm-eaten. The worms had done their work in covert, subterranean fashion, creating innumerable ducts and microscopic channels now filled with pulverized wood. No sign of this insidious labor showed on the surface. Grifalconi saw that the only way of preserving the original base-hollowed out as it was, it could no longer support the weight of the top-was to reinforce it from within; so once he had completely emptied the canals of their wood dust by suction, he set about injecting them with an almost liquid mixture of lead, alum, and asbestos fiber. The operation was successful; but it quickly became apparent that, even thus strengthened, the base was too weak, and Grifalconi had to resign himself to replacing it. It was after he had done this that he thought of dissolving what was left of the original wood so as to disclose the fabulous arborescence within, this exact record of the worms' life inside the wooden mass: a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted their blind existence, their undeviating single-mindedness, their obstinate itineraries; the faithful materialization of all they had eaten and digested as they forced from their dense surroundings the invisible elements needed for their survival, the explicit, visible, immeasurably disturbing image of the endless progressions that had reduced the hardest of woods to an impalpable network of crumbling galleries."

"When he retired in nineteen sixty-five, after fifty-three years of scrupulous service, he had disposed of hundreds and thousands of tools, techniques, customs, beliefs, sayings, dishes, games, nick-names, weights and measures; he had wiped dozens of islands, hundreds of cities and rivers, and thousands of townships off the map; he had returned to taxonomic anonymity hundreds of varieties of cattle, species of birds, insects, and snakes, rather special sorts of fish, kinds of crustaceans, slightly dissimilar plants and particular breeds of vegetables and fruit; and cohorts of geographers, missionaries, entomologists, Church Fathers, men of letters, generals, Gods & Demons had been swept by his hand into eternal obscurity."

"In its heyday Rorschach's bathroom was a thing of luxury. Along the whole of the rear wall, connecting all the sanitary fixtures to each other, was a complex arrangement of lead and copper piping graced with lavishly convoluted bifurcations, as well as a probably superfluous plethora of manometers, temperature gauges, flowmeters, hygrometers, clappers, cocks, taps, control levers, handles, valves, and stoppers, providing a machine-room backdrop which made a striking contrast to the refinement of the remainder of the decor: a veined marble bath; a medieval font for a washbasin, a fin-de-siecle towel rail; bronze taps carved in the shapes of radiant suns, lions' heads, swans' necks; and a few curios and objets d'art: a crystal ball, of the kind you used to see in dance halls, was hung from the ceiling, refracting the light in its myriad cat's-eye mirrors; and there was also a lapanese ceremonial sabre, a screen made of two panes of glass trapping a host of dried hydrangea flowers, and a painted wooden Louis XV low table, holding three crudely moulded tall jars for bath salts, perfume, and bath oil which represented three maybe ancient statuettes: a very youthful Atlas carrying a scale world globe on his left shoulder, an ithyphallic Pan, and a frightened Syrinx already half-transformed into a reed."

"It is the twenty-third of June nineteen seventy-five, and it is eight o'clock in the evening. Seated at his jigsaw puzzle, Bartlebooth has just died. On the tablecloth, somewhere in the crepuscular sky of the four hundred and thirty-ninth puzzle, the black hole of the sole piece not yet filled in has the almost perfect shape of an X. But the ironical thing, which could have been foreseen long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W." (Last paragraph of the last chapter)