LITERARY QUOTATIONS IN PEREC'SLA VIE MODE D'EMPLOI

I

GEORGES PEREC'S magnificent 'novel compendium', La Vie mode(Temploi (hereafter VME1) contains 203 passages, varying in lengthfrom a few words to a full page, copied textually (with occasionalmodifications of deictic markers — pronouns, tenses, agreements etc.)from twenty different French, German, Italian, English, American,Russian and Argentinian authors.2 These literary quotations form but asmall part of the total amount of borrowed textual material incorporatedinto VME: there is a chunk of Robert2 on p. 43, an excerpt from acookery book on p. 30, a pot-pourri of various do-it-yourself equipmentmanufacturers' catalogues on pp. 102-05, sentences from Perec's Je mesouviens on pp. 552, 555, 556,3 and without doubt much else besides. Itis probable that, as more is learnt about this bafflingly complex butcompulsively readable novel, it will eventually be possible to demon-strate that it is composed almost entirely of borrowed textual material.This article seeks only to elucidate the procedures used to select,distribute, integrate and camouflage the borrowed literary material.But, since these procedures are in principle similar to those used for theinsertion of all other types of material, the following elucidations dealnot with a marginal feature of VME, but give access to its underlyingdesign, and to its thematic and metaphysical core.

The quantity and nature of borrowed material in VME tends to maketraditional critical terminology as well as theoretical constructs more ofan encumbrance than a help in describing the text. I propose to adopt asimple model not of the literary text as such, but oi written text, in orderto explain some of the basic features of VME. I shall put second-ordernotions such as 'narrative', 'icriture' and Hntertexte' to one side, and treatPerec's 695 printed pages simply as copy in the printer's sense, which Ishall call TEXT. The printed TEXT is composed of MATERIALincorporated by one of three methods: firstly, by physical, typographi-cal reproduction (REP) — as for crossword puzzles, visiting cards, thelettering on a restaurant window; secondly, by conventionalized iconicrepresentation (ICON) — as when a special cursive font is used torepresent a sentence written by hand; or thirdly, by symbolic systems(SYM) — logical notation, French, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Hun-garian, mathematical notation, musical notation, chess notation etc. Ibelieve that these three methods of textual production exhaust all thepossibilities. The MATERIAL incorporated into printed TEXT by the

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operation of these three methods may similarly be exhaustivelydescribed as falling into two different types, animate (AN) andinanimate (IN). However, the three methods do not apply equally to thetwo types of material, in Perec or elsewhere: no-one can put a live cat ona page! Furthermore, only IN material of a special sub-type —specifically, material possessing two significant dimensions only — canbe incorporated into text by REP; and only in TEXT containing non-typographic illustrations can ICON be used for anything other than thespecial sub-type of two-dimensional IN that is handwriting. The rulesthat govern the production of text can perhaps best be laid out as foursets of formulae for each of the three methods (direct reproduction,iconic representation, and symbolic representation) as they apply,respectively, to animate, three-dimensional inanimate, two-dimensional inanimate, and two-dimensional typographically realizableinanimates.

iAiB

iC

3A3B3C

REPICONSYM

REPICONSYM

(AN) !(AN) •(AN)->T

(IN(2D)) •(IN(2D)) *(IN(2D))-*T

2A2B

2C

4A4B

4c

REP (IN(3D)) !ICON (IN(3D)) *SYM (IN(3D))-»T

REP aN(2D(TY)))->TICON (IN(2D(TY)))-»TSYM (IN(2D(TY)))-»T

Legend: ! indicates theoretically and practically impossible productionprocesses.* indicates theoretically possible production processes (illustra-tions of various non-typographical kinds) not used directly byPerec in VME.

Note: rule 2A may be possible in some instances in 'pop-up' books.

Figure 1

The rules laid out in Figure 1 apply to all texts, necessarily, but dolittle to assist understanding of most of them. They become interestingin those texts, such as VME, where they are made to functionrecursively. Many writers before Perec have exploited textual recursionin minor ways {Olympia, ou Us vengeances romaines, a fragmentary textincorporated by reproduction into Balzac's La Muse du dipartement, isa well- known example); and recursion of narrative and visual materialis but another way of naming the well-known device of mise en abyme.Perec, however, makes consistent and meticulous use of the recursivepotential of the text production rules, and on an unprecedented scale.Understanding textual recursion is the principal key to grasping

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Perec's success in camouflaging huge quantities of borrowed material inVME.

A recursive rule is simply a rule which applies to itself or to itsproduct. Take rule 4A, which says that TEXT may be produced by thereproduction of a typographic, two-dimensional inanimate object. Thatobject itself is also a 'TEXT' at second level, and can only have beenproduced by one or another of the rules laid out in Figure 1. Now it mustbe understood that once the rules are applied by recursion, that is to sayfrom second level 'TEXT' and on, the restrictions marked * in Figure 1do not need to apply in VME. Thus rule iB, asterisked because Perecallows only typographical material to constitute the 'copy' of his novel,becomes operable at and below level 2: Perec does not give a sketch ofWinckler's cat, but he does incorporate by description (rule 3C)pictures which portray (by rule iB) people; or, to take an intentionallybizarre instance, there is a description of an automaton representing(iB) a negro whose hat incorporates (4A) a mathematical expression('75^') enjoining people to insert a coin to make it simulate animation.

By combining the third and fourth set of rules with an exhaustivetypology of textual objects, from books and letters to chess problems,crosswords, catalogues, tickets, hotel stickers, address labels, faire-parts, shopping lists, domestic accounts, culs-de-lampe, colophons,games boards, maps, title-pages, inscriptions on walls and doors,windows and T-shirts, cake-boxes, biscuit-tins, sight test cards,invoices, advertisements, stencil markings on crates and tea-chests,manuscripts, homework exercise books, wrappers, postcards, phylac-teries and filing cards, VME celebrates with humour the full extent ofGutenberg's galactic contribution to civilized life. This type of materialis particularly well-suited to the recursive application of text productionrules, that is to say, a chunk of text may be embedded at almost anydepth: at level 7, for example, you can have a notice on a window in apicture reproduced in a book in a room described in a letter incorporatedinto the text. And if that notice consists of a sentence taken from, let ussay, James Joyce's Ulysses, it is, at that level of textual embedding, veryhard to recognize as a quotation.

II

La Vie mode d'emploi describes a single moment (towards eight in theevening on 23 June, 1975) in the life of a block of flats at 11 rue Simon-Crubelh'er, Paris XVIIe. Its outer design is vaguely reminiscent of theopening of Le Pire Goriot (Perec mentions Gengi Monogatori* as ananalogue) and was directly inspired by a painting by Saul Steinberg of aNew York apartment house seen as if its facade had been removed to

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reveal the contents and occupants of every front-facing room, corridor,staircase, lift-shaft, cellar and attic.5 The theme of the book is simple: aman is dying; you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thoughtand his memories pervade the whole. The lives of other people in thebook seem perfectly realistic, but the reader is kept ignorant of theidentity of the dying man. The man is the book. The other lives are butcommentaries to the main subject: we follow the gentle old chess-playerSchwarz who sits down on a chair in a room to teach an orphan themoves of the knight, and so forth. The preceding sentences are of courseby Vladimir Nabokov6 and describe the fictional masterpiece, TheDoubtful Asphodel, which Sebastian Knight never published; but theyalso describe quite succinctly the outer narrative of VME — such thatVME in a sense is the realization of Knight's plan. The orphan boy mustbe Perec (his father died in 1940, and his mother in 1943, when Perecwas six), since VME is spectacular proof of his learning the moves of theknight, and of solving the chess-player's conundrum — how to get thepiece around the board alighting on each square once only.

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mansards

mansarde

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5e6tage

4c6tage

3e6tage

2e6tage

ierltage

rez-de-chauss&

sous-sol

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Figure 2. The plan of the chapters of VME

The order of the chapters of VME is determined not by the narrativedesign, but by mapping a cross-section of the block of flats onto a square

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grid of ten smaller squares in each dimension, and moving around thisoversize chess-board by two squares in one dimension, one square in theother dimension, at each move.7 The starting point (grid square 5 along,4 up) is arbitrary; but each subsequent move is necessary, because thesolution to the knight's move problem on a 10 x 10 board is notobvious, and Perec found it only 'par tfitonnements, d'une facon plutotmiraculeuse' (L'Arc 76 (1979) p. 51).

Though Perec has a solution to the knight's move problem, he hasintentionally mutilated the pattern in constructing VME: instead of 100chapters, there are 99, because the sixty-sixth move of the knight, togrid square 0,0, does not produce a corresponding chapter. (The moveitself is not missed: to go from chapter 65 to the chapter called 66, youhave to pass through grid square 0,0 in a knight's move which is absentonly from the textual level.) At this secret, ludic, but profoundlysignificant level, Perec displays the borrowed nature of all his material,commencing at the origin (the mathematical name of the graph location0,0) with an absent open quotation mark '66' and ending with a closequotation mark of chapter '99'. As we shall see later, at every level ofVME, cunning formal, mathematical and narrative structures and plotsare implemented in ways which could in principle be completedperfectly, but they are broken and mutilated by conscious design.

The material included in each chapter of VME is determined by amathematical puzzle known as the Magic Square. Durer's Melencolia I(1574) contains what is said to be the earliest European instance:

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Figure 3

As can be seen, the numbers along each row of the square add up tothe same total, as do the numbers down each column, and at the sametime the 4 x 4 square distributes each of the numbers between 1 and 16

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without any of them appearing twice. Perec used a 10 x 10 magic squarewhich has the special property of being a Graeco-Latin bi-square (orbicarri latin orthogonal). It is a distribution of pairs of numbers between0-9 inclusive along each row and down each column of a 10 x 10 gridsuch that, on each side of the pair, every number is present once onlyalong each row and down each column. Thus, like Durer's MagicSquare, the sum of the digits on either side of the pair in any dimensionis the same; and no pair of numbers occurs more than once. Thenumbers in the grid square corresponding to the chapter (as determinedby Figure 2) determine the material to be included in that chapter.

9

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Figure 4

Perec compiled 42 lists, bracketed into 21 pairs of lists, eachcontaining 10 list elements. This is not the place to reveal the contents ofall the lists, but to elucidate the two pairs of lists entitled Citations 1 andCitations 2, on the one hand, and Faux and Manque on the other. For

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each of the 21 pairs of lists, Perec used a different version of the bicarrilatin orthogonal, obtained by applying a formula devised by RaymondQueneau and known as the pseudo-quinine to his original magic square.The 'number-jumble' obtained by one particular operation of thepseudo-quinine for the Citations list-pair is given below in Figure 4,8 andthe contents of the two lists in Figure 5.9

A

0

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9

BUTOR

FLAUBERT

STERNE

PROUST

KAFKA

LEIRIS

ROUSSEL

QUENEAU

VERNE

BORGES

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0

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78

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CALVINO

MANN

NABOKOV

ROUBAUD

MATHEWS

RABELAIS

FREUD

STENDHAL

JOYCE

LOWRY

Figure 5

Initial operation of the machinery laid out is simple. Chapter 1 islocated on the stairs, is necessarily the first chapter to be located there,and is entitled therefore Escaliers, 1. Its grid reference is 5,4; grid square5,4 in Figure 4 contains the numbers 4 and 9, which correspond in thequotations lists (Figure 5) to KAFKA and LOWRY. Any reader cannow work out (a) that La Vie mode d'emploi ought to contain 198 (2 x 99)passages copied from other authors, and (b) in which chapters whichauthors are present. All that remains is to find the quotations!

In an introductory essay on La Vie mode d'emploi, Gabriel Josipovicifound one of these programmed quotations out of his own Joyceanexpertise (chapter 23, grid square 3,2 = Moreau, 2, = quotations 8,8, =VERNE, JOYCE; VME, p. 135, lines 7-34 thus copy the Frenchtranslation of Ulysses, Penguin edition, p. 634).10 On the basis of thissingle recognition, he argues plausibly — and perhaps not entirelyerroneously—that Perec's novel is a homage to Joyce. However, it is nowobvious (prior to further exploration of Perec's textual practice with hisprogrammed quotations) that VME is structurally just as much a homageto Sterne, to Nabokov, to Queneau, to Rabelais etc. (see Figure 5 again).

There are in fact not 198 but 203 programmed quotations in Perec'snovel. The paired lists entitled Faux and Manque, with the distribution

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of their list elements by chapter determined by a different transforma-tion of the magic bi-square, determine which of the other 20 list-pairelements will be got wrong (faux) in, and which will be missed {manque)from each chapter, and the operation of this device sporadically (butmathematically) inflects the occurrence of quotations, as of all othertypes of programmed material. The relevant instances are:

Chapter n°

1

59

12

14

16194176

79

81

Grid square

549,65,80,63,7

4,84,38,59,0

5,5

2,6

Quotationnumbers

A

46894

5338

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2

B91

775

1690

0

9

Distortion

Manque: B9Manque: A6Manque: B7Manque: A9Faux: Proust (A3)for Kafka (A4)Manque: A5Manque: B6Manque: A3Faux: Stendhal(B7) for Verne (A8)Faux: Leiris (A5)for Sterne (A2)Manque: A2

Figure 6

In addition, the two quotations (Ai, B5; Flaubert, Rabelais) which areprogrammed for grid square 0,0, cannot appear as the chapter itself ismissing; and, finally, in a paradoxical break with the entire, insanelyordered distribution, Perec simply added a few supplements, in chap-ters 74 (Calvino), 83 (Flaubert), 88 (Mann), 97 (Queneau) and 99(Lowry). (For technical reasons11 these supplements are included here inthe account of the programmed quotations; there are other additionalliterary quotations in the novel from authors not on either of thequotation lists,12 which would raise the stated figure of 203 copiedliterary passages).

The omissions, 'mistakes' and suppltments break the perfection of themagic square which lies at the origin of the distribution pattern. At thisstructural level, as on the various levels of narrative, the achievement ofperfection, completeness, oneness, is not so much 'subverted' asprevented by design. One consequence of the randomizing effect offaux, manque and supplement is, of course, that even if an encyclopaedic

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reader succeeded in recognizing all of the programmed quotations, hecould not reconstruct Figure 4 by mathematical induction alone.

Ill

The distribution pattern, invisible and consciously camouflaged bymutilation as it is, does not account for the invisibility of the quasi-totality of the borrowed literary material in VME. Perec's paradoxicalachievement confounds inherited notions of stylistic unity, stylisticharmony, of style tout court: how can you copy 203 passages, including10 in sixteenth-century French, from twenty exceedingly diverse and —one would have thought — very recognizable hands without anyonenoticing, bar Josipovici's recognition of a piece of Joyce?

Perec uses three basic insertion techniques for literary material inVME, which I shall call visual truncation, textual truncation, and textualembedding respectively. Visual truncation resembles somewhat thetechnique of low-budget films, where a scene set fictionally, in say,Moscow, is given a visual reference by a stock shot of Dundee.13 InVME, visual truncations involve the insertion of a descriptive passage,at any level of textual production, borrowed from another author, todescribe an object incorporated into VME which is not the same as theobject described by the passage in its 'original' location. For example:on p. 295, Olivier Gratiolet comes across a stack of old educationalpenny prints in his cellar. The topmost and therefore visible print'repr&ente la rencontre sur un vaisseau de guerre du Czar et duPresident de la Ripublique'. These words, and the passage that followsto the end of the chapter, are copied from Kafka's story, Blumfeld, anelderly bachelor:

It shows a meeting between the Czar of Russia and the President of France. Thistakes places on a ship. All about as far as can be seen are many other ships, thesmoke from their funnels rambling in the bright sky. Both Czar and Presidenthave rushed towards each other with long strides and are clasping one anotherby the hand. Behind the President stand two men. By comparison with the gayfaces of the Czar and the President, the faces of the other attendants are verysolemn, the eyes of each group focused on their master. Lower down — thescene evidently takes place on the top deck — stand long lines of saluting sailorscut off by the margin.14

In terms of the model established in section I above, this passage is madeof level 2 IN (2D) material incorporating (borrowed) level 3 IN (2D)material — except that what is not borrowed is the picture Kafka wasdescribing, supplanted by a new fictional referent, the topmost print ona pile found by Gratiolet in his cellar. Kafka's picture is absent, butvestigially, or potentially present in the memory of the story of Blumfeld

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carried by the words of that textual construction. Visually truncatedinsertions are in a sense only the mortal remains of the originalsplundered, for they involve the excision of the original referent; butperhaps they also offer a kind of secret survival, the vague memory ofthe original which, potentially at least, they could activate. The paintingby 'Organ Trapp' of a gas station at Sheridan, Wyoming, hanging on thewall of Cyrille Altamont's study, is just recognizable, perhaps, as theOhio roadside seen from Humbert Humbert's sedan: VME, p. 409,second paragraph, second sentence, from the colon, is of courseNabokov's Lolita, p. 207.

What have been termed textually embedded insertions occur only in IN(2D(TY)) at level 3 or below incorporated by reproduction or iconicrepresentation. It is by this device and by observing the statedrestriction on its use that Perec sidesteps the reader's 'stylistic' reflexesand manages to insert whole chunks of (for example) Rabelais, withoutdisturbing the register, vocabulary and syntax of his own prose. Inchapter 14 the text incorporates by direct reproduction a page from theworks of 'Cadignan' giving (by symbolic representation) a 'portraitsaisissant' of one of Dr Dinteville's ancestors, a page and a portraitwhich are none other than Rabelais' portrait of Panurge (VME, p. 78;Pantagruel 11. xii).

In principle at least, textually embedded and visually truncatedinsertions could be recognized by skilled and knowledgeable readers,and thus carry with them the power to activate memory, which is apotential for continued life. But on occasions Perec makes his embeddedborrowed textual material utterly invisible by a kind of optical trick, byan exposure so obvious and insistent that recognition is effectivelysubverted, or averted. In chapter 6, he puts a brief quotation fromRabelais (also from 11. xii) in bold Gothic capitals centered on the pageand set off by white lines: but the typographic exposure of the borrowedand archaic nature of the material is diverted away from the true originby the frame narrative which makes the text on the page an iconicrepresentation of the legend beneath a picture (itself a copy of a well-known canvas by Bosch!) hanging on the wall of Beatrice Breidel'sstudy-room. Similarly, a long sentence from Le Temps retrouvS (inKilmartin's translation, ill. 1101) is 'hidden' on p. 398 by being set initalic (IC0N(IN(2D))) as lines of verse from Ibn Zaydun. Even morespectacular is the occlusion by exposure of two lines from Freud'sTraumdeutung (ch. vi, part 2: an account of one of Freud's own dreams)in chapter 45. They are printed on a level 2 IN(2D(TY)) object foundamongst the junk in Troyan's former room, and are thought (by thefinder) to have once served as an optician's sight test card. This test of

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sight is offered to the reader in bold capitals in a black line frame offsetby white lines: 'On est pri6 de fermer un ceil', 'On est pri6 de fermer lesyeux' (p. 257). And of course we follow the injunction, but withoutknowing what we are closing our eyes to! Absence of camouflage besthides the material; even more, the presence of insistent narrative andtypographic indications of the borrowed nature of material systemati-cally diverts recognition away from the true origin.

However, by far the worst device for the reader seeking to 'master' theplay of quotation in Perec is the type of insertion dubbed textualtruncation. This involves taking little bits of sentences from a pro-grammed author and reassembling them into different sentences, as in ajigsaw puzzle. Jigsaw insertions occur characteristically at level 1, and itis through this device (which some might say is not literary quotation atall, but just a perverse game) that Perec succeeds in incorporatingBorges, Calvino, Sterne and so forth without any apparent traces of'stylistic' disharmony. For example, in chapter 41, the songs by'Hortense' which failed to make the Top 50 in Variety — SusquehannaMammy, Slumbering Wabash, Mississippi Sunset, Dismal Siuamp, I'mHomesick for being Homesick — are all phrases (only some of themserving as song titles) dotted around Lowry's Under the Volcano. Inchapter 50, level 2 IN(2D) material — a picture as yet unhung onGenevieve Foulerot's wall — is made of a jigsaw puzzle of bits ofFlaubert and Calvino. The picture itself portrays (IC0N(IN(3D))) alevel 3 room:

Sur I'apput de la fenetre il y a un bocal de potssons rouges et un pot de risida. Par lafenetre grande ouverte on apergoit un paysage champetre: le del d'un bleu tendre,arrondi comme un ddme, s'appute a I'honzon sur la dentelure des bois; au premierplan, sur le bord de la route, unepetitefille, nu-pieds dans la poussiere, fait pattre unevache. Plus loin, un peintre en blouse bleue travaiUe avec sa boite de couleurs sur lesgenoux. Tout au fond miroite unlacsurlesnves duquel se dresse une ville brumeuseavec des mcnsons aux virandas entassies les unes sur les autres et des rues hautes dontles parapets a balustres dominent I'eau.

L'Education sentimentale (Editions Gallimard, 1965) p. 454: 'a un bocalde poissons rouges pres d'un pot de re"s£da sur une fenetre'; ibid.,p. 354: 'Le ciel d'un bleu tendre, arrondi comme un d6me, s'appuyant al'horizon sur le dentelure des bois'; ibid., p. 355: 'En bas, sur le bord dela route, une petite fille, nu-pieds dans la poussiere, faisait paitre unevache.'; ibid., p. 351: 'Un peintre en blouse bleue travaillait au piedd'un ch6ne, avec sa boite a couleurs sur les genoux.' Italo Calvino,Imaginary Cities (Picador 1979), trsl. W. Weaver, p. 43: 'on the shoresof a lake, with houses all verandas one above the other, and high streetswhose railed parapets look out over the water'.

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IV

The theme of the book is simple. A man is dying: Percival Bartlebooth,millionaire, the inhabitant of the big flat on the third floor left, is cut off,towards eight in the evening on 23 June, 1975, with his life incomplete.With no need for a career, no passion for women or power, he haddesigned his life at the age of twenty-five as a comprehensive way offilling his remaining fifty years inoffensively, aesthetically, and insig-nificantly. For ten years he learnt to paint watercolours, from Valene,whom he managed to house for convenience in the rightmost room onthe lower attic floor (9,8). For twenty years, accompanied by bis butlerSmautf, now at 29, he toured the world, painting a seascape eachfortnight, five hundred in all. Each watercolour was mailed back toWinckler, in the flat on 7,7 — 9,7, who mounted it on ash and cut it intoa jigsaw, following a different and increasingly diabolical pattern ofcutting on each occasion. On his return to Paris, Bartlebooth settleddown to the last twenty-year cycle of his life-plan, reassembling onejigsaw each fortnight. Each jigsaw, once completed, was glued togetherby a technician (living in 6,9) and by a special process the watercolourwas reseparated from its backing, then dispatched to its place ofpainting with a bottle of solvent and instructions to a local agent toreturn the blank sheet of paper to Paris where it had originated. The lifeof these sheets of Whatman art paper — first blank, then painted, thenstuck to a backing, then mutilated by Winckler's jigsaw, reintegrated byBartlebooth, detached, washed out, finally blank — can be seen as amirror for the life Bartlebooth tried to design for himself; and it reflectsuncannily the apparently self-annihilating 'machinery' which went toproduce VME but is nowhere visible in the text.

The mirroring of the different layers of narrative, and the mirroringof the recursive generating machinery of the novel in the narrative isobviously important; but these multiple mises en abyme are also traps. Itis not enough for readers and critics of Perec merely to admire theclever, aesthetically pleasing harmony of narrative and formal struc-tures. What are much more important are the flaws in the mirror, theincomplete reflections, the distortions of the pattern. Bartlebooth's lifeis not like the life of a sheet of art paper; the order of the chapters is notquite like the solution to the knight's move problem; just as textproduction rule 1A is an absent combination of method and material,just as the Kafka and Queneau and Mann quotations are not like thosepassages in Kafka and Queneau and Mann. What is present in the text inall its dimensions are absences: absence of completeness, absence ofperfection, absence of unison.

The novel's moment, towards eight in the evening etc., is the momentof Bartlebooth's dying. He has not completed his 500th jigsaw. He has

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PEREC 193

not even correctly completed his 439th, which he has attempted toassemble by touch alone, since he went blind some time before. He holdsin his hand the last remaining piece, which is shaped like an X; whereasthe last remaining gap in the puzzle laid out on the table is shaped like a W.

It seems to me that VME invites and provokes the reader tocontemplate something very difficult, which is not exactly the inevita-bility of death, but the constitutive role of death (and its proleptic forms:physical decay, ill-health, accident, random disasters, manquementsdivers) in the mode d'emploi of life. Its formal structure makes absentwhat is necessarily present (the origin, grid location 0,0; the referents ofvisually truncated quotations; the regularity of the magic square) byconscious, direct mutilation. The central point of VME — Bartle-booth's dying, the only event to occur in the timespan of the novel'souter frame — is decentered, and it is not until chapter 99 that thereader knows whose death it is that hovers over, or underlies, thepreceding 600 pages of text. For as in Nabokov's or Knight's absentmasterpiece, the book itself is dying.

What Perec seems to be saying is that material things (IN) maypossibly be completed, but can be incorporated into La Vie only whenrendered incomplete. Bartlebooth's plan to complete a life withoutleaving a trace or ripple on the surface of things must fail because itignores death, or rather seeks to treat death only as an event that followsthe completion of life, rather than as the radical imperfection that is inlife and constitutes mortal existence.

Perec's novel, conceived of under the title of La Vie from the earlieststage15 does not itself ignore death, but incorporates it at every levelthrough symbolic representation as interruption, hiatus, truncation,faux and manque. It is as if Perec had been familiar with Gilbert Ryle'sderision of metaphysical concepts as 'ghosts in the machine' and haddesigned 'ghosts' into his machine in order to become Flaubert'sperfect, metaphysical novelist, 'comme Dieu dans l'univers, presentpartout et nulle part visible'. The systematic distortions of the systemsof the novel may well be what makes VME a paradox and a work ofgenius: a totally constructed, and totally deconstructible, text made outof the lifeless remnants of European literature and a whole shelf-stack ofencyclopaedias, dictionaries, catalogues, bibliographies and so forth,which is at the same time a novel infused with life. Perhaps the ultimatechallenge for the maestro of textual tours deforce was to get round the !restriction on rule 1A in Figure 1; but what is certain is that like all thegreat masters of the novel whose works he plunders, Perec did indeedfind a way to generate that mysterious, moving supplement whichreaders, if not critics, continue to attribute to works of genius.

MANCHESTER DAVID BELLOS

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194 DAVID BELLOS1 Hachette, 1978; 2nd edition, Livre de Poche, 1979; 3rd edition, Hachette, 1985. All

editions have identical pagination. VME won the Prix M6dicis in 1978 and was selected at the1985 Salon du Livre as the best novel published in French in the previous decade. A Germantranslation by Eugen Helmle (Dai Leben. Gebrauchsamoeistmgen.) appeared in 1982 (Frank-furt, Zweitausendeins) and an Italian version in 1983. The English translation (by the presentauthor) will be published by Collins-Harvill (UK) and D. R. Godine (USA) in September1987.

2 The 'Post Scriptum' on p. 695 acknowledges that the novel contains passages, 'parfoislegerement modifiers', from a list of thirty authors. The 'post scnptum', which is itself a kind ofquotation or pastiche of Ren6 Belletto's Ltvre d'Hisunre (see the article by Ewa Pawlikowskacited below), camouflages the twenty sources we are concerned with here by mixing into thealphabetical list the names of the authors often books to which allusions are distributed aroundthe text by a separate formal device described by Bernard Magn6 m 'Lavis Mode d'Emploi',Cahers Georges Perec 1 (1985), 232-46.

3 Georges Perec, Je me soittnens (Hachette, 1978), entries 118,380 and 11 respectively. Notealso that VME chapter 98 = Georges Perec, L'Augmentatum (1970), and chapter 52 = GeorgesPerec, Un Homme qm don (Denoel, 1967).

4 Espices d'espaces (Galilee, 1974) 57.3 S. Steinberg, The An of Living (London, H. Hamilton, 1952), quoted by Perec in Espices

d'espaces, 58.6 From 'The theme . . .', with unmarked omissions. (V. Nabokov, The Real Life of

Sebastian Knight (1941), Penguin edition, 146-47)7 Perec gave two accounts of the 'polygraphie du cavalier5, first in Espices d'espaces, loc. cit ,

and then in 'Quatre figures pour La Vie mode Semplof, L'Arc, 76 (1979), 50-53. VME itselfcontains a schematic plan of 11, rue Simon-Crubelher, but it is misleading as far as the chaptermoves are concerned since, in accordance with the shape of the pages of printed books, it isdisplayed as an oblong, not as a square

8 The table given is my own computation, derived m part from information made availableby Eugen Helmle and Lili Bienenfeld, to whom I must express especial thanks. It is to behoped that those who have authorized access to Perec'spapers will soon make all the bi-squaresused in VME available; but I will eat my hat if the Citations bi-square differs from the oneprinted as Figure 4.

9 Published by E. Pawhkowska, 'Citation, prise d'ecnture', Cahen Georges Perec 1 (1985),227.

10 G. Josipovici, 'Georges Perec's Homage to Joyce (and tradition)', Yearbook of English5^^1049(1985) 180-200." E . Pawhkowska is preparing a doctoral on' La Citation dans La Vie mode templet under the

direction of Bernard Magn£, and has authorized access to papers kindly made available to me mpreparing the English translation. Publication of the documentary evidence for the claimsmade in Figure 6 must await the completion of Ms Pawhkowska's thesis.

12 For example, VME, p. 171, line 17 'fenitrestemblablesadesyeuxsanspensee' is Edgar AllanPoe, Fall of the House of Usher, in Selected Wntmgs (Penguin edition), 138, 'vacant eye-likewindows'.

13 An Englishman Abroad, BBC 2.14 F. Kafka, Description of a Struggle and the Great Wall of Chma, trsl. Muir and Stern

(London, Seeker and Warburg, i960,151-52).15 Espices d'espaces, 57.

This article is © David Bellos 1986

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