by Georges Perec
tags: perec, space, bed, inventory, oulipo, essay
"For a long time I went to bed in writing"
We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways. 'Italian' beds are only to be found in fairy tales or in altogether abnormal and usually serious circumstances. Even when we utilize the bed the more usual way round, it's almost always a sign of a catastrophe if several people have to sleep in it. The bed is an instrument conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two persons, but no more.
This also means - and it is easily verified in practice - that we have only one bed, which is our bed. When there are other beds in a house or an apartment, they are said to be guest beds or spare beds. It seems we only sleep well in our own bed.
"Lit = île"
It was lying face-down on my bed that I read Twenty Years After, The Mysterious Island and Jerry on the Island. The bed became a trapper's cabin, or a lifeboat on the raging ocean, or a baobab tree threatened by fire, a tent erected in the desert, or a propitious crevice that my enemies passed within inches of, unavailingly.
I travelled a great deal at the bottom of my bed. For survival, I carried sugar lumps I went and stole from the kitchen and hid under my bolster (they scratched . . .). Fear - terror even - was always present, despite the protection of the blankets and pillow.
I like my bed. I've had it for a little over two years. Before that, it belonged to a woman friend of mine who had just moved into an apartment so tiny that her bed, though of perfectly orthodox dimensions, would barely fit in the room intended to receive it, so she swapped it for the one I then had, which was slightly narrower.
I like my bed. I like to stretch out on my bed and to gaze at the ceiling with a tranquil eye. I would gladly devote the major part of my time to this. I like ceilings, I like mouldings and ceiling roses. They often serve me instead of a Muse. But people no longer pay any attention to ceilings. They are made dispiritingly rectilinear or, worse still, done up with so-called exposed beams.
A huge plank has long served me as a bedhead. With the exception of solid foodstuffs, everything I couldn't do without was to be found assembled there, in the areas of both the necessary and the pointless:
inventory · 20 objects on and around the bed
We spend more than a third of our lives in a bed.
The bed is one of the rare places where we adopt roughly speaking a horizontal posture. The others are more specialized: operating table, bench in a sauna, chaise-longue, beach, psychoanalyst's couch . . .
Techniques of sleeping: the idea that lying down is something natural is quite inaccurate (see Marcel Mauss, 'Techniques of the Body', in Sociologie et Anthropologie, p. 378; the whole paragraph - too succinct, alas! - would be worth quoting).
And what about hammocks? And paliasses? And bedsteads? And box-beds? And divans deep as the grave? And straw pallets? And railway couchettes? And camp beds? And sleeping-bags resting on air-beds themselves resting on a carpet of earth?
things I could do as from today, for example
things which I tell myself that, were I to do them, would perhaps make my life easier
things linked to a more profound desire for change
things linked to dreams of time or space
among all the things I don't yet know, there are certain ones I'd like to have the time to discover properly
lots of things I'd like to learn, but I know I won't because it would take me too long
things connected with my work as a writer
there's one more thing I'd like to do, but I don't know where it belongs
things it's impossible to envisage from now on but which would have been possible not so long ago
etc., etc.
There are lots of others for sure.
I gladly stop at 37.
The list is taxonomic: each tier describes a different relationship to possibility. The impossible ones at the end are not afterthoughts - they are the point. The list of what can no longer be done is the shadow cast by the list of what still could be.
"Plants are divided into trees, flowers and vegetables."
25 sections · ordered by a Calvino cipher · click any letter
Z is the only letter absent - the one category that cannot be classified.
* sections lettered in order of first appearance in Calvino's Dans un réseau de lignes entrecroisées - the title alone carries D through O
At the different stages of preparation for this essay - notes scribbled on notebooks or loose sheets of paper, quotations copied out, 'ideas', see, cf., etc. - Perec naturally accumulated small piles: lower-case b, CAPITAL I, thirdly, part two. When the time came to bring these elements together, it rapidly became clear that he would never manage to organize them into a discourse.
What came to the surface was the nature of the fuzzy, the uncertain, the fugitive and the unfinished. He chose deliberately to preserve the hesitant and perplexed character of these shapeless scraps, abandoning the pretence of organizing them into something with a beginning, a middle and an end.
The order of the alphabet is arbitrary, inexpressive and therefore neutral. Objectively speaking, A is no better than B, the ABC is not a sign of excellence but only of a beginning. But the mere fact that there is an order means that, sooner or later, each element in the series becomes the insidious bearer of a qualitative coefficient. A = excellent; B = less good; Z = hopeless (a Z-movie).
Borges's Chinese encyclopedia classifies animals as: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) domesticated, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) dogs running free, (h) included in the present classification, (i) which gesticulate like madmen, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) which have just broken the pitcher, (n) which look from a distance like flies.
An almost equally mind-boggling enumeration might be extracted simply enough from government documents. Animals subject to French regulation include: (a) animals on which bets are laid, (b) animals the hunting of which is banned between 1 April and 15 September, (c) stranded whales, (d) animals whose entry within national frontiers is subject to quarantine, (e) animals held in joint ownership, (f) stuffed animals, (g) etcetera, (h) animals liable to transmit leprosy, (i) guide-dogs for the blind, (j) animals in receipt of significant legacies, (k) animals able to be transported in the cabin, (l) stray dogs without collars, (m) donkeys, (n) mares assumed to be with foal.
There is something at once uplifting and terrifying about the idea that nothing in the world is so unique that it can't be entered on a list. Everything can be listed: the editions of Tasso, the islands on the Atlantic Coast, the ingredients required to make a pear tart, the relics of the major saints, masculine substantives with a feminine plural (amours, délices, orgues), Wimbledon finalists.
How I think when I'm thinking? How I think when I'm not thinking? The words penser/classer, for example, make me think of passer/clamser, or alternatively clapet sensé, or even quand c'est placé. Is this called 'thinking'?
It is a matter, above all, of montage, of distortion, of contortion, of detours, of a mirror, indeed of a formula - the paragraph that follows will demonstrate.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI