Things: A Story of the Sixties; A Man Asleep Read online

  Georges Perec

  THINGS

  A STORY OF THE SIXTIES

  Translated from the French by David Bellos

  A MAN ASLEEP

  Translated from the French by Andrew Leak

  WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BELLOS

  Perec, Georges, 1936-1982 Things: a story of the sixties, with, A man asleep.

  THINGS. A STORY OF THE SIXTIES first published in France with the title Les Choses by Editions Julliard, 1965

  A MAN ASLEEP first published in France with the title Un homme qui dort by Editions Denoël, 1967

  First published in Great Britain by Collins Harvill, 1990 Les Choses © René Julliard 1965 Un homme qui dort © Editions Denoël 1967 English translations and Introduction © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1990

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THINGS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  PART TWO

  I

  II

  III

  Epilogue

  A MAN ASLEEP

  INTRODUCTION

  GEORGES PEREC was born in Paris in 1936, and his memories of early childhood and of the war years, some of which he spent as a refugee in the French Alps, are recorded in chapters of W or The Memory of Childhood (1975). He was educated in Paris and at a state boarding school at Etampes, then at the Lycée Henri-IV and the Sorbonne, where he followed courses in history and sociology for two years without much enthusiasm. He did two years' military service in a parachute regiment but was exempted from active service in Algeria. After a year spent in Sfax (Tunisia) and a short period working as a market researcher, Perec obtained a post of archivist in a medical research laboratory in Paris in 1962, and he remained employed in the same capacity until 1979. He died in March 1982 after a short illness.

  Perec decided to be a writer before he was twenty, but, for nearly ten years, apart from a few book reviews and essays on literature and film, he published nothing. Things. A Story of the Sixties was his first book and it made him famous almost instantly. A Man Asleep followed just over a year later, but created much less of a stir. These two short novels are published here in English together because, more than any other of Perec's numerous and very diverse writings, they shed light on each other, represent the two different sides of something like the same coin.

  Things. A Story of the Sixties was begun in 1962 under the title "The Great Adventure" but did not reach its final form until 1964. It was published in September 1965 as Les Choses. Une histoire des années soixante, in the "Lettres nouvelles" collection edited by Maurice Nadeau for Julliard, and was an immediate success, selling far more copies than first novels by unknown authors usually do. The award of the Renaudot prize, some two months later, confirmed, rather than created, the perception of Things as the story of a whole generation. By the end of the 1960s, it had been translated into most European languages and had found its place on French literature syllabuses throughout the world. Student editions in French were published both in Moscow and in New York; it has since also become a set text in French secondary schools.

  As is often the case with works of European literature, Things fared less well in the English-speaking world than almost anywhere else. It was at least translated (by Helen Lane) in the 1960s, but the Grove Press edition (now a bibliographic rarity) was hardly reviewed at all and was never even issued in Britain. The text published here is an entirely new translation.

  Superficially, both Things. A Story of the Sixties and A Man Asleep bear a family resemblance to the kind of avant-garde fiction which was, by the mid-sixties, no longer quite as new as the term "new novel" suggested. Neither of Perec's books has a strong narrative structure; neither has strongly delineated characters. But the use Perec made of what now looks like a period style is very different from the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Michel Butor, and opens a new and far more accessible chapter in the history of the novel.

  Things aims to exhaust all that can be said about fascination, and, more particularly, to explore what words like happiness and freedom can mean in the modern world - the world of consumerism as it was emerging in the France of de Gaulle. A Man Asleep is a similarly exhaustive exploration of its opposite, indifference. Both novels seem to arise from the banal but no less poignant contradiction between feelings of being and not being in the world.

  Both these novels were written before Perec had any contact with the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or OuLiPo - indeed, before OuLiPo was known outside of a tiny circle. Although they are not generated by formal mechanisms of the kind used for Life A User's Manual, they are nonetheless highly crafted, constructed texts. Things, Perec said in a lecture at the University of Warwick, was written to fill the blank space created, so to speak, by the juxtaposition of four works of importance to him: Roland Barthes' Mythologies; Flaubert's Sentimental Education; Paul Nizan's La Conspiration; and a striking account of life in the concentration camps, Robert Antelme's L'Espèce humaine. A Man Asleep (its title taken from Proust's Remembrance of Things Past) is constructed more literally from its six progenitory models; Kafka, Melville, Lowry, Proust, Le Clézio, Joyce.

  Things. A Story of the Sixties was read, in the 1960s, as a sociological novel, and, very often, as a denunciation of consumer capitalism. That is no doubt why it was so rapidly translated into all the languages of Eastern Europe. For Perec, however, it was not that at all, any more than it was a celebration of its characters' fascination with material wealth. Its main idea, he said, was to explore the way "the language of advertising is reflected in us", whilst describing simply, "in barely heightened terms", the particular social world which happened to be his. The result is a masterpiece of detachment and ambiguity, with an ending that is "neither positive nor negative; you finish on ambiguity; to my mind, it's a happy ending and also the saddest ending you could possibly imagine...." Through his use of a shifting narrator, who is neither "above" his characters looking down on them, as in a traditional novel, nor "inside" them, as in more modern "stream of consciousness" writing, Perec is reaching towards the kind of simultaneous passion and detachment characteristic of Flaubert, and he achieves a mixture of understated affection and discreet irony close to the tone of many of the tales to be told a decade later in Life A User's Manual.

  A Man Asleep, published in 1967 under the title Un Homme qui dort, deals with a depression so extreme as to verge on self-annihilation. The experience is one which Perec says he went through himself around the age of twenty. It is a subject to which he returned, through self-quotation and adaptation, first in the film version of A Man Asleep, released in 1974, and then in 1978, in chapter fifty-two of Life A User's Manual. In this last variant, the character is given a name, Grégoire Simpson — echoing Kafka's Gregor Samsa (in The Metamorphosis), who wakes one morning to find life intolerable in a different way - and he seems to end up throwing himself off a railway bridge. That is no reason for believing that A Man Asleep also ends in bleak despair. It ends at Place Clichy, in the rain, waiting for it to stop. A step has been taken towards "waking up" from the sleep of indifference, but there is no guarantee that any number of further steps will take you out of hell, or back into the world of living. Perec's novel brings you only to the brink of carrying on. Like Things, and as if to mirror it, A Man Asleep ends on an ambiguity which is both moral and literary. Perec not only allows, but obliges his reader to take responsibility for the meaning of the work.

  A Man Asleep is a second-person novel. English has no equivalent
for the singular, tu form of the second person pronoun in French, used by Perec throughout the text. Whereas vous is the (plural) polite and formal way of saying "you" in French (and is the form used, for example, in Michel Butor's second-person narrative of a train journey, La Modification), the tu form is familiar, friendly, but also (in some circumstances) aggressive. What is also not clear, in the French as in the English, is who, in A Man Asleep, is saying tu to whom.

  In the film version, made by Perec himself together with Bernard Queysanne (after various attempts to turn Things into a film had come to nought), a shortened version of the novel is read as a voice-over against images of a young man silently performing the routines of self-effacement described in the text. The voice-over is read by a woman: and the choice of a female voice was made so as to avoid the implication, which a male voice would undoubtedly have had, of the text being the interior monologue of the young man seen on the screen. Is it then the voice of his conscience (a noun of feminine gender in French)? or the voice of "his" mother? or simply a voice distinct from his own? A Man Asleep, both as a film and as a novel, merges the two normal poles of communication into one, as if writer and reader (speaker and hearer) had ceased to be separable, but remain distinct from the "character" in the text or on the screen. "The teller of the tale could well be the one to whom the tale is told," Roger Kleman suggested in a review of Perec's novel. "The second person of A Man Asleep is the grammatical form of absolute loneliness, of utter deprivation." Of course the reader of the novel, in English translation, may wish to imagine that there is a character in A Man Asleep talking to himself, "as in a dream"; but the evidence of the film version shows that Perec did not wish to read his own text in that way.

  "The idea of writing the story of my past arose almost at the same time as the idea of writing," Perec states in W or The Memory of Childhood (p. 26). The present introduction cannot avoid seeming to give clues (Etampes; Sfax; market research; depression) to the autobiographical content of Perec's twin novels of the nineteen-sixties. However, it would be wrong to assume, just because the material of these stories resembles some of the elements in the real life of Georges Perec, that the main interest of Perec's works is confessional. Autobiography, as readers of W or The Memory of Childhood are made to realise, is always fiction; the converse is perhaps not quite as true.

  DAVID BELLOS Manchester, 1989

  Quotations unattributed in the text are taken from statements made by Perec in an interview with Marcel Benabou and Bruno Marcenac, published in Les Lettres françaises. No. 1108 (2 December 1965), pp. 14-15; and from "Pouvoirs et limites du romancier français contemporain", a lecture given at the University of Warwick in May 1967. Roger Klemans's review of Un Homme qui dort was published in Les Lettres nouvelles, July/September issue, 1967, pp. 158-166.

  THINGS

  A STORY OF THE SIXTIES

  Translated from the French by David Bellos

  To Denis Buffard

  Incalculable are the benefits civilization has brought us, incommensurable the productive power of all classes of riches originated by the inventions and discoveries of science. Inconceivable the marvellous creations of the human sex in order to make men more happy, more free, and more perfect. Without parallel the crystalline and fecund fountains of the new life which still remains closed to the thirsty lips of the people who follow in their griping and bestial tasks.

  - Malcolm Lowry

  I

  Your eye, first of all, would glide over the grey fitted carpet in the narrow, long and high-ceilinged corridor. Its walls would be cupboards, in light-coloured wood, with fittings of gleaming brass. Three prints, depicting, respectively, the Derby winner Thunderbird, a paddle-steamer named Ville-de-Motitereau, and a Stephenson locomotive, would lead to a leather curtain hanging on thick, black, grainy wooden rings which would slide back at the merest touch. There, the carpet would give way to an almost yellow woodblock floor, partly covered by three faded rugs.

  It would be a living room about twenty-three feet long by ten feet wide. On the left, in a kind of recess, there would be a large sofa upholstered in worn black leather, with pale cherrywood bookcases on either side, heaped with books in untidy piles. Above the sofa, a mariner's chart would fill the whole length of that section of the wall. On the other side of a small low table, and beneath a silk prayer-mat nailed to the wall with three large-headed brass studs, matching the leather curtain, there would be another sofa, at right angles to the first, with a light-brown velvet covering; it would lead on to a small and spindly piece of furniture, lacquered in dark red and providing three display shelves for knick-knacks: agates and stone eggs, snuffboxes, candy-boxes, jade ashtrays, a mother-of-pearl oystershell, a silver fob watch, a cut-glass glass, a crystal pyramid, a miniature in an oval frame. Further on, beyond a padded door, there would be shelving on both sides of the corner, for caskets and for records, beside a closed gramophone of which only four machined-steel knobs would be visible, and above it, a print depicting The Great Parade of the Military Tattoo. Through the window, draped with white and brown curtains in cloth imitating Jouy wallpaper, you would glimpse a few trees, a tiny park, a bit of street. A roll-top desk littered with papers and pen-holders would go with a small cane-seated chair. On a console table would be a telephone, a leather diary, a writing pad. Then, on the other side of another door, beyond a low, square revolving bookcase supporting a large, cylindrical vase decorated in blue and filled with yellow roses, set beneath an oblong mirror in a mahogany frame, there would be a narrow table with its two benches upholstered in tartan, which would bring your eye back to the leather curtain.

  It would be all in browns, ochres, duns and yellows: a world of slightly dull colours, in carefully graded shades, calculated with almost too much artistry, in the midst of which would be some striking, brighter splashes - a cushion in almost garish orange, a few multicoloured book jackets amongst the leather-bound volumes. During the day, the light flooding in would make this room seem a little sad, despite the roses. It would be an evening room. But in the winter, with the curtains drawn, some spots illuminated - the bookcase corner, the record shelves, the desk, the low table between the two settees, and the vague reflections in the mirror — and large expanses in shadow, whence all the things would gleam - the polished wood, the rich, heavy silks, the cut glass, the softened leather — it would be a haven of peace, a land of happiness.

  The first door would open onto a bedroom, its floor covered with a light-coloured fitted carpet. An English double bed would fill the whole rear part of it. On the right, to both sides of the window, there would be tall and narrow sets of shelves holding a few books, to be read and read again, photograph albums, packs of cards, pots, necklaces, paste jewellery. To the left, an old oak wardrobe and two clothes horses of wood and brass would stand opposite a small wing-chair upholstered in thin-striped grey silk and a dressing table. Through a half-open door giving on to a bathroom you would glimpse thick bathrobes, swan-neck taps in solid brass, a large adjustable mirror, a pair of cut-throat razors and their green leather sheaths, bottles, horn-handled brushes, sponges. The bedroom walls would be papered with chintz; the bedspread would be a tartan blanket. A bedside table, with an openwork copper band running round three of its sides, would support a silver candlestick lamp topped with a very pale grey silk shade, a square carriage clock, a rose in a stem-vase, and, on its lower shelf, folded newspapers and some magazines. Further on, at the foot of the bed, there would be a big pouf in natural hide. At the window, the gauze curtains would slide on brass rods; the thick woollen double curtains would be half drawn. In the half-light the room would still be bright. On the wall, above the bed made up and turned down for the night, between two small wall lamps, the astonishing, long, narrow black-and-white photograph of a bird in the sky would surprise you by its slightly formal perfection.

  The second door would reveal a study. From top to bottom the walls would be lined with books and periodicals with, here and there, so as to break t
he continuity of bindings and jackets, a number of prints, drawings and photographs - Antonello da Messina's Saint Jerome, a detail from The Triumph of Saint George, one of Piranesi's dungeons, a portrait by Ingres, a little pen-and-ink landscape by Klee, a sepia-tint photograph of Renan in his room at the Collège de France, a Steinberg department store, Cranach's Melanchthon - pinned to wooden panels set into the shelving. Slightly to the left of the window and at a shallow angle would be a long country table covered with a large red blotter. Wooden boxes, flat pen-holders and pots of all kinds would hold pencils, paper-clips, staples large and small. A glass tile would serve as an ashtray. A circular black leather box decorated with gold-leaf arabesques would be filled with cigarettes. Light would come from an old desk-lamp, adjustable only with difficulty, fitted with a green opaline lampshade shaped like a visor. On each side of the table, virtually facing each other, would be two high-backed wood and leather armchairs. Still further to the left, along the wall, would be a narrow table overflowing with books. A wing-chair in bottle-green leather would lead to grey metal filing cabinets and light wooden card-index boxes. On a third, even smaller table would be a Swedish lamp and a typewriter under its canvas dust-cover. Right at the back would be a narrow bed covered in ultramarine velvet and stacked with cushions of all colours. On a painted wooden stand, almost in the middle of the room, there would be a globe made of papier-mâché and nickel silver, illustrated in naïf style, a fake antique. Behind the desk, half-hidden by the red curtain at the window, would be an oiled-wood ladder which could slide on a brass rail all the way round the room.

  There, life would be easy, simple. All the servitudes, all the problems brought by material existence would find a natural solution. A cleaning lady would come every morning. Every fortnight, wine, oil and sugar would be delivered. There would be a huge, bright kitchen with blue tiles decorated with heraldic emblems, three china plates decorated with yellow arabesques in metallic paint, cupboards everywhere, a handsome whitewood table in the middle with stools and bench-seats. It would be pleasant to come and sit there, every morning, after a shower, scarcely dressed. On the table there would be a sizeable stoneware butter dish, jars of marmalade, honey, toast, grapefruit cut in two. It would be early. It would be May, the start of a long summer's day.