The Book of Lost Books (42 page)

Georges Perec

{1936–1982}

IS POSTMODERNISM—THAT most elusive, contradictory, and elliptical of literary movements—capable of creating a work of epic scope? Reading the works of Georges Perec, as well as thinking about those projects he left incomplete, the strong temptation is to answer: absolutely. Perec's work is an extravaganza of styles, where vaudeville is mixed with prayer, and parlor games have kabbalistic significance. The fabric of the world he evokes is as complex as humans are, as multifarious as language is.

Perec first came to prominence in 1965 when his debut novel,
Things,
won the Renaudot Prize. He was an orphan whose parents had died during the Second World War (his father in active service, his mother in Auschwitz), and he had spent his days working as an archivist in a scientific research institute, where he prepared elaborate catalogues and dealt with tedious bureaucracy. Far from plunging him into the doldrums, his day job formed an important apprenticeship for his work with a new and sophisticated literary movement: OuLiPo, l'Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, the Workshop of Potential Literature.

OuLiPo counted among its members Harry Mathews, Raymond Queneau, and Italo Calvino. Its aim was to develop new literary forms, usually where freedom of expression was obtained through the most rigorous mathematical strictures. An early attempt by Perec was the radio play
The Machine,
where a poem by Goethe was subjected to pseudoscientific analyses and permutations. It includes an example of the arithmetical substitution game S + 7, where each noun is replaced with the noun seven places on in the dictionary. It tries to capture the spirit of the poem, through interminable readings and ritual numerology, dwindling back from double Dutch to silence and mystery.

La Disparition
(1969) sets itself an almost unbelievable condition. It resurrects the lipogram, a work where one letter is forbidden. Perec wrote the entire novel without once using the commonest letter,
e.
It is a thriller about the missing Anton Vowl. One testament to Perec's ingenuity is that the earliest reviewer managed not to notice the absence of
e
s at all. His masterpiece,
Life: A User's Manual
(1978), is a compendium of new forms of intricacy. It is set in a single Parisian block of apartments. Throwing a ten-by-ten matrix over the building, the focus moves from point to point, chapter to chapter, following the Knight's Tour chess conundrum (where a single knight must touch each and every square on the board only once). From the ground-floor curio-dealer Marcia to the garret-dwelling Smautf, it is a snapshot and a history, a Boccaccio-style anthology of stories, with djinns, Holy Grails, and jigsaws. Perec's demands on himself are formidable. There is a compulsory lexicon of words to include, a library to plagiarize. It was his
Moby-Dick,
his final attempt to get over what he called his “wanting-to-be-Flaubert.” Strange tactics, unusual angles, radical trajectories: little observations vivify each strict strategy, albeit momentarily.

These stories are not trifles. Nor are they dry, anodyne puzzles, but profound examinations of how thoughts, stories, and lives are structured—a synthesis of order and clutter.
Life: A User's Manual
captures living like no other book, in all its poignancy, bravado, and surreptitious comedy.

Perec's last novel, “
53 Days,
” is a homage to the lowbrow detective stories he loved. Like Dickens's
The Mystery of Edwin Drood,
it is unfinished and thus forces the reader to become a more actively investigative collaborator. It begins in an unspecified port in North Africa, where the narrator, a mathematics tutor, is contacted by the consul apropos of the disappearance of an expatriate crime writer, Robert Serval. Serval, the pseudonym of Stéphane Réal, has left instructions that, in the event of anything untoward occurring, the narrator is to be given his unfinished manuscript,
The Crypt.

The Crypt
is set in the mist and hail of the far north, and involves the murder of a naval attaché, whose car runs off the road and explodes. The detective is convinced that another crime novel,
The Magistrate Is the
Murderer,
contains the crucial clue to unraveling this tale of industrial espionage.

As he sits sipping sherbet and cheap wine among the hunters' ivory tusks and giant tortoise shells of this sweltering, dictatorial former colony, Veyraud, the narrator, has to determine if the Nordic fragment is some convoluted allegory that explains the disappearance of Serval. Does
The Crypt
encrypt local details: does the brothel or do the police thugs have some parallel or translation? As he uncovers, or thinks he uncovers, a conspiracy by the consul concerning the theft of a statue of Queen Zenobia, he finds himself compromised at every turn. The finger of suspicion eventually points at him, even though he is the only person he is sure is innocent.

Perec only completed the first eleven chapters, but left copious notes about how the riddle would be solved. The narrator realizes the book is effectively his own gravestone: then we are shifted, abruptly, to another voice. A manuscript, entitled “
53 Days,
” about a mathematics tutor who thinks an unpublished novel about an attaché murdered in his car has some secret reference, has been found in the car of a businessman and former Maquis member who has disappeared. He is called Robert Serval.

So the mania begins again, the edge is breached, with a sequence of Chinese boxes and exponentially increasing interpretations. Perec's final joke can be seen in his working drafts. It ends in the ocher sands of Morocco, where the solution turns out to be a writer called GP, who has accepted a challenge to create this book. Instead of a Pandora's box, full of wartime suffering and hatred, the last casket is a jack-in-the-box. It is called “
53 Days
” in reference to the time it took Stendhal to write
The
Charterhouse of Parma,
and boasts several ingenious allusions, Stendhal-related constrictions, and subtle traces of the whole elaborate charade.

But all we have is a scattered skeleton of possibilities. Synopsis cannot convey the exquisite texture of reading Perec. His drinking buddy Harry Mathews refused to hear how many ploys and pranks were buried in the book, in order to have the pleasure of stumbling on these hidden text-mines; and we can barely recapture the inspiration of the final form in these now melancholy drafts.

Perec did not complete several other projects: his inventory of everything he ate in a year,
Beds I Have Slept In,
the script of an “adventurous movie” involving five thousand Kirghiz horsemen. But the most tantalizing, since he spent a lifetime pondering it, is
L'Arbre,
or
The Tree.

Like a grain of sand niggling and accumulating inside an oyster, the idea of writing a family genealogy obsessed Perec: but no pearl was produced. The riddling Perec is self-effacing at the best of times, and even the final surprise appearance in “
53 Days
” was left unwritten. He wrote up various ideas, about the Peretz and Beinenfeld branches, his rich uncle's pearl brokerage, the strange interconnections of family relations. Would he, with both parents lost to Hitler, have dared to look square on at the worst of the twentieth century?

Conclusion

WHAT BETTER SYMBOL for the facile optimism of the 1980s than the spinning mirror of the compact disc?

The CD seemed like a heaven-sent solution to the problem of preserving recorded sound. Magnetic tape was prone to snarling. Vinyl deteriorated from the first minute it was played, as the stylus roughly ground down the very fabric of what it was supposed to be playing. They were no less frail than the earliest wax cylinders.

The CD was different; a futuristically gleaming circle, digitally encoded, replayed by the softest caress of a laser. Advertisements showed them being smeared with jam and dunked in dishwater, and yet the information burned onto them did not suffer in the slightest. Of course, there were caveats about dust, magnets, and scratches, but, with moderate care and attention, the CD fulfilled a millennia-old human dream: perfect imperishability.

Or so we were led to believe. In the early years of the twenty-first century, CD users started to complain that the discs were becoming erratic. Moreover, they were subtly changing color, from silver to gold: a phenomenon that became known as “bronzing” or, more prosaically, “CD rot.” At first, the industry retorted by saying that all the stunts and pranks featured in ads were not to be taken seriously, and that clear guidelines about damp, heat, electrical fields, and not touching the surface of the disc made it obvious that the CD required a little special handling.

When, however, CDs that had been kept in their packaging since purchase also showed signs of deterioration, another explanation had to be found. A protective lacquer was dropped onto the disc to seal it, and, it was suggested, in some cases the centrifugal force had insufficiently coated the CD. This allowed air—specifically, oxygen—to penetrate to the aluminum layer containing the data. The aluminum was oxidizing, just as copper turns to verdigris. In short, the CDs were slowly charring. Permanence eluded us again.

At the same time as the CD was being busily marketed, a remarkable discovery was made at Herculaneum, the town buried in 79 C.E. when Vesuvius erupted. During the excavation of a building later known as the Villa dei Papiri, or House of the Papyrii, archaeologists realized that the burned bundles previously thought to be grain bags were actually ancient manuscripts. The force of the pyroclastic explosion had carbonized them in their entirety.

Normally, the organic elements in papyrii cause them to gradually corrode. The intense heat of the Vesuvius eruption had eradicated those compounds. The blackened scrolls were disinfected. The very same catastrophe that had destroyed the town had preserved the manuscripts.

Reading them, however, was a painstaking process. The heat had rendered them friable, only just holding out against their own disintegration into ashes. Slowly, in preservative solutions, they were unwrapped. X-ray and digital photography gradually revealed differences between the black of ink and the black of burned papyrus. Computer enhancement clarified the image, and a text thought lost forever was read again.

To date, the library at Herculaneum has not offered us a copy of the
Margites,
or a play by Agathon, or a collection of poetry by Gallus. Many of the texts were already known: the idea that such a library would lack
The Aeneid
or
The Iliad
would have created more mysteries than it solved. Many Epicurean tractates, hitherto unknown, have been clawed back from the edge; and many more scrolls remain to be deciphered. Similarly, at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland, a refuse pit that previous generations of archaeologists dug through enthusiastically in search of combs or brooches or statuettes has been revealed to contain wooden writing tablets, preserved in the peaty soil. They had been indistinguishable from dirt. Letters, requisitions, and more copies of Virgil have been identified, but, as yet, no great new ancient work.

The papyrus and the CD, the codex and the Web page: human ingenuity strives, not only to find a permanent medium for its culture, but to reclaim that which was fixed on a more fragile form. It is a struggle we cannot win.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics—the law of entropy—proves that there is no perfect way to change energy from one form into another. In any transformation, a dissipation occurs. Two billiard balls click, and the momentum transfers from one to the other, with a slither lost in the click and the heat or the momentary abrasion between the balls. If we look beyond our own tiny section of the universe's history, the picture appears bleak.

The coronosphere of our sun will eventually edge forward, engulfing Mercury, frazzling Venus. In thousands and thousands of years, Earth will scorch like an insignificant piece of paper. As the Bible says, the skies will roll up like parchment. Perhaps by then, like a long-lost science fiction story, future humanity will have fled to a safer, moist and rocky planet, with a Noah's Ark of knowledge. This only defers the inevitable. All matter will eventually be spread as fine interstellar dust, or concentrated in a black hole's gorged interior. Loss is not an anomaly, or a deviation, or an exception. It is the norm. It is the rule. It is inescapable.

Why, then, do we strive? In trying to preserve what makes us human, we prove our own humanity. A German proverb says
einmal ist keinmal—
once is never. This is not true. Something does not lose its meaning, or its significance, just because it ceases to be. Just as any human life reverberates, causes change, and affects our thinking and feeling even after the death of the individual person, so does our culture, that accumulation of countless lost lives. We struggle unsuccessfully against oblivion, and the struggling itself is our success.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”