On E.R.'s Blog, 2

Will assume that most of you reading Life A User's Manual for the upcoming 4/30 group read are already aware of the postcript where Perec admits to borrowing or adapting "quotations" from a number of different writers.  While I'm not far enough into the novel yet to see how meta Perec gets with these fictions, I do look forward at some point to comparing stuff like "The Tale of the Acrobat who did not want to get off his trapeze ever again" (for me, one of the many highlights so far) with Kafka's "First Sorrow" & etc. to see if something other than just a playful rewrite is involved.  For now, though, I'm going to take the lazy man's way out and draw your attention once again to that post that e.r., one of my favorite bloggers anywhere, put up on his blog at the end of last month.  E.R. points out that Gaspard Winckler, the character charged with turning Bartlebooth's watercolors into jigsaw puzzles in Life A User's Manual, learned his craft from a man named Gouttman.  Incredibly, another Goutman with a very similar set of credentials but with only one "t" to his name also appears as a character in Flaubert's posthumously-published novel Bouvard and Pécuchet.  Doing the intertextual math, e.r. hypothesizes that the Goutman of Flaubert's novel could very well be the same Gouttman of Perec's novel reappearing 70 years after his encounters with Bouvard and Pécuchet just in time to train the young Gaspard Winckler in his craft.  An astonishing shelf life for such a minor character, no?

Perec: "Another time, with sudden warmth, [Winckler] told Valène about the man who had taught him his work.  He was called Monsieur Gouttman, and he made religious artefacts which he sold himself in churches and procurators' offices: crosses, medals, and rosaries of every size, candelabra for oratories, portable altars, artificial jewellry, bouquets, sacred hearts in blue cardboard, red-bearded Saint Josephs, china calvaries.  Gouttman took him on as an apprentice when he had just turned twelve."

Flaubert:  "One time she brought along a portly individual, who had small eyes like a Chinaman and a nose like a vulture's beak.  This was Mr. Goutman, a dealer in religious artifacts.  Out by the shed, he took a few items from their boxes: crosses, medallions, and rosaries in all sizes, candelabras for shrines, portable altars, tinsel bouquets, as well as Sacred Hearts made of blue cardboard, Saint Josephs with reddish beards, and porcelain crucifixes.  Pécuchet coveted them all; only the price held him back."

Not sure how important all this is in the grand scheme of things, but it's amusing to note that a character named Gaspard Winckler himself appears in multiple Perec novels.  The puzzles, they just keep on coming!

Bibliography

• e.r., barcoborracho
• Flaubert, Gustave.  Bouvard and Pécuchet [translated by Mark Polizzotti].  Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005, p. 214.
• Perec, Georges.  Life A User's Manual [translated by David Bellos].  Boston: Godine, 2009, p. 37.

On E.R.'s Blog, 1

About a third of the way into Life A User's Manual, I'm way enjoying Perec's storytelling virtuosity and his ability to pull the literary equivalent of a rabbit out of the hat in practically every chapter.  Also excited about the apparently random way Perec chose to sequence his stories, which on closer inspection isn't random at all.  To make this more clear, here's a map I borrowed from e.r.'s barcoborracho which shows how Life A User's Manual moves throughout the apartment building at the heart of the novel to get from Chapter 1 to Chapter 99 in a series of structured maneuvers.  And here are some words from Perec himself describing how he settled on this decision:

"It would have been tedious to describe the building floor by floor and apartment by apartment; but that was no reason to leave the chapter sequence to chance.  So I decided to use a principle derived from an old problem well known to chess enthusiasts and known as the Knight's Tour; it requires moving a knight around the 64 squares of a chess-board without its ever landing more than once on the same square.  Thousands of solutions exist, of which some, like Euler's, also form magic squares.  For the special case of Life A User's Manual, a solution for a 10 x 10 chess-board had to be found; I managed this, rather miraculously, by trial and error.  The division of the book into six parts was derived from the same principle: each time the knight has finished touching all four sides of the square, a new section begins...  It should nevertheless be noted that the book has not 100 chapters but 99.  For this the little girl on pages 295 and 394 is solely responsible [pages 231 and 318 in the English translation]."  --Georges Perec, in Oulipo Compendium, p. 175

Suffice it to say that all these games, as clever as they are, wouldn't mean much if Perec's stories weren't as satisfying as they so often are.  However, learning about some of the constraints Perec imposed on himself in the writing of Life and the creative solutions he came up with to work around them has made reading the novel a much richer experience for me.  For more on Perec's delight in the novel as jeu, see e.r.'s rather smashing post on Life A User's Manual in Spanish here or stay tuned for my own comment on e.r.'s intertextual detective work in English later here.  Voilà!

Queneau, 1

Life A User's Manual is dedicated to the memory of Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), the ex-surrealist and lifelong mathematics devotee who co-founded the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) with François Le Lionnais in 1960.  Key works include the 1947 Exercises de style [Exercises in Style], "a series of texts by Raymond Queneau in which the same inconsequential story is told in 99 different ways,"* and--at the other end of the spectrum--the 1960 Cent mille milliards de poèmes [A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems a/k/a 100,000,0000,000 Poems], "a sequence of 10 14-line sonnets" that, when read in all its possible combinations of interchangeable lines, might take someone reading the book 24 hours a day a total of 190,258,751 years to complete according to Queneau's calculations.**  Not having a calculator handy, I've decided to accept Queneau's figures on good faith.  Source: Oulipo Compendium (edited by Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie).  London: Atlas Press, 2005, pp. 14** and 147*.

Perec, 1

"I detest what's called psychology, especially in fiction.  I prefer books in which characters are described by their actions, their gestures, and their surroundings.  [...]  It's something that belongs to the great tradition of realism in the English and German novel of the nineteenth century, which I've exaggerated a little, almost taking it to hyperrealism."  Georges Perec, 1981

Remembering the debate at the outset of last year's 2666 readalong sparked by whether Roberto Bolaño's wordiness in The Part About the Critics was too much of a good thing (for those who missed it, the group was quickly divided into camps of those who hated Bolaño's level of detail and those who were enamored with his prose), I was tickled to find the quote above in David Bellos' Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill, 1993, p. 573) because I think it does a lot to explain why Perec and maybe Bolaño made some of the storytelling choices that they did.  Having said that, I also have to wonder how the haters would have reacted to Life A User's Manual and the deliberately frisky provocation posed by its room-by-room description of the current and former inhabitants of a Parisian apartment block with all their significant belongings (and even a home repair catalogue at one point) included.  Too funny!