Behind the memory begins freedom. Georges Perec discovers the world

Is the reflected world less real than the real world? Georges Perec rediscovers things in the mirror. (Image: Elena Korchenko / Alamy)

For a long time, the painter Heinrich Kürz was considered a mere copyist. As in his paintings, he wanted to make copies as realistic as possible. But then, very special visitors to his exhibitions discovered that he had not bothered to copy his models. Yes, he even seemed to have given him a flying pleasure by constantly adding tiny variations: people and details disappeared or reappeared elsewhere. The teapots changed color or consisted of a completely different material. Even the winning pose of a boxer could suddenly turn into horror after a knockout. At one point, visitors came only armed with all kinds of magnifying glasses to examine every millimeter of its images for possible variations.

The French writer Georges Perec (1936-1982) was a master of these "unpredictable and unpredictable changes". In the late sixties, he became a member of Oulipo, "the workshop of potential literature", founded among others by Raymond Queneau. The Oulipoten had great pleasure in designing rules and using them for the form of their texts – a constraint that should lead them to new linguistic possibilities.

Perec loved working with lists and reflections, but also with the structure and rules of the games that he was trying to apply to his books. The game of chess is one of them and one or the other deck of cards. In "The Life Manual", one of his most important and well-known texts, among others, the idea of ​​the puzzle determines the plan of the book

A reflection in the mirror

The Perec's life here in 99 chapters It was always important to him, especially regarding apparently irrelevant, that there were no cigarettes at the vegetable merchant. He called "infra-ordinary" these more ordinary moments than the ordinary. In The Life Manual, he collected thousands of infra-ordinal details, ranging from furniture and rugs to a box of Munster cheese, a bag of cumin and a nearby knife. This is not a coincidence if the book is subtitled "Novels".

An enigmatic master is the main protagonist of this character-rich prose genius, who is in fact the only one to play with the main characters. The narrator of the book wanders from flat to apartment and gives his art to the description of the space, here reports of a separation, there of puzzle pieces that are cut with so much cunning that sometimes can hardly decide whether they belong to a tree or its "mirror image barely veiled in a mirror".

In the booklet "An Art Cabinet," according to Perec a sort of slim postscript to "The Life Instructions for Use", he made the mirror effect a principle. The focus is on the painting of the painter Heinrich Kürz, who, like many other characters in the book (but by no means all!), Is simply invented. We can see the brewer Hermann Raffke, surrounded by his paintings, which he has collected over the years around the world.

But Kürz worked with an artistic trick: "The painter put his painting in the painting, and that his collector seated in his cabinet sees on the wall in the background, in the axis from his look, the painting that represents him contemplating his collection of paintings, and all these paintings are reproduced and so on. "

In the altered tone of a study or catalog of Perec art gives to his readers, page-by-page descriptions of paintings, some of which are on the outside of the painting "An Art Cabinet", partly reflect small motifs from the main painting and "true" pictures or vary in innumerable shades. The result is an "infinite mirror work", as the translator of Perec, who died Eugen Helmlé, died in 2000, become a good extra-ordinary German.

Even if Perec is a little clumsy at the end of the book As this effect of reflection is explained once more in detail, we like to read about the tangible pleasure that is perceptible on each side with which he made his literary bathroom. Heimito von Doderer once said that it was crucial for the writer to slip into a fictional dress and come out with real sleeves. Similarly, Perec notes: The artist "disturbs the established order of the art and finds behind the enumeration again the invention, behind the quotation of flying sparks, behind the memory freedom ". Perec thus redirects the relationship between invention and reality

A glimpse of freedom

He is not only concerned with linguistic studies, but he shows it in his book "W or the Childhood Memories". There, in a wonderful labyrinth of texts, he reveals the biographical traces of his writing: "I do not have childhood memories," Perec writes almost programmatically. To refute exactly this phrase in the course of the book. His father was a volunteer of the French army at war, his mother was murdered in a concentration camp. Perec, the son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, used fragments of his own story to analyze the structure of the camps.

"In the beginning, the art of the puzzle appears as a narrow-gauge art," reads Das Leben Gebrauchsanweisung. But Georges Perec's words are anything but narrow. They use the art of description to immerse themselves in the world of imagination. As in "Attempt to capture a place in Paris", they test "what happens when nothing happens except time, people, cars and clouds". walkers do not lead to boring boredom. After a while we almost feel like going out into the world, we are in Etampes or Bourges or even somewhere in Vienna. From the perseverance of the description and the self-imposed restriction of the rules, a great pleasure presents itself, both for the writer and the reader. And a sense of freedom in which play and seriousness are inextricably linked.