From the infraordinary to the extraordinary: Georges Perec and domesticity (original) (raw)

Abstract

The design and organisation of domestic environments is fraught with decision-making, a process often dictated by fashion. The resulting inhabitation of domestic spaces blends together the routine and the banal, with occasional forays into the extraordinary. The spaces of domesticity range from single rooms to elaborate and complex spatial arrangements in which spaces are adjoined to or nested in other spaces. The spaces of domesticity can be functionally prescribed or openended, they support furniture, behaviours, and narratives. The writer Georges Perec (1936-82) provides a way of looking at the domestic realm and ordinary life through his many interrelated writings on the subject. After developing an early reputation as a writer, Perec joined the experimental literary group known as Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) in 1967. Formed in 1960, the group brought together writers, mathematicians, and pataphysicians, inspired by the leadership of Raymond Queneau, and by older writers such as Lewis Carroll, Alfred Jarry, and Raymond Roussel. The well-known Italian writer Italo Calvino joined Oulipo in 1973. The group was devoted to rule-based and constrained writing techniques; they also exploited older forms of structured writing particularly in poetry. Often using mathematical methods, the Oulipo writers looked for textual potential and combinatory results. Their works are sometimes attacked as formalistic and mechanistic. Queneau states that the objectives of the group were: 'To propose new "structures" to writers, mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that will contribute to literary activity'. 1 Perec was one of the leading proponents of Oulipo methods, which is particularly evident in two novels, A Void (La Disparition) the book that famously does not employ the letter E (example of a lipogram, or the omission of a letter in a text) and his major work, Life A User's Manual (a clinamen, or a swerve away from convention). Beyond the formal methods that Perec employs, were the many approaches to capturing the ordinary, or the everyday, inspired by writers and theorists such as Roland Barthes. Perec asks: theory Presenting Georges Perec's work as a contemplation of domestic space, nested into the wider structures of the city, and supported by the countless, structuring microevents of the 'infraordinary'.

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References (37)

  1. Raymond Queneau, 'Potential Literature', in Warren F. Motte Jr, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998), p. 51.
  2. Georges Perec, 'Approaches to What?', in Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. by John Sturrock (London: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 206.
  3. Alison James, Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), p. 198.
  4. Tom Emerson, 'From Lieux to Place...', AA Files, 45/46 (winter 2001), 92.
  5. See Georges Perec, 'The Rue Vilin', in Species of Spaces, pp. 208-17. See 'A City in Words and Numbers: A Conversation Between Jean-Charles Depaule and Pierre Getzler', AA Files, 45/46 (winter 2001).
  6. Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties, trans. by David Bellos (Boston, MA: David R. Godine Publisher, 2010), p. 46.
  7. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. by J. Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), pp. 220-2.
  8. Cited in James, Constraining Chance, p. 194.
  9. See Perec, Species of Spaces. See also David Bellos, 'Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec', Translation Review, 58:1 (1999), 53-7.
  10. See also Charles and Ray Eames's film Powers of Ten produced in 1977.
  11. The comparison with Russian dolls is also made in Emerson, 'From Lieux to Place...', p. 92.
  12. Perec, Species of Spaces, p. 5. 13. Ibid., p. 6.
  13. This was a failed project by Perec, originally titled Lieux où j'ai dormi. See also Georges Perec, 'Three Bedrooms Remembered', in Thoughts of Sorts, trans. by David Bellos (Boston, MA: David R. Godine Publisher, 2009).
  14. Perec, Species of Spaces, pp. 21, 22.
  15. David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (Boston, MA: David R. Godine Publisher, 1993), pp. 532, 533.
  16. Perec, Species of Spaces, pp. 26, 27.
  17. Ibid., pp. 27, 28.
  18. Ibid., pp. 33-5.
  19. Georges Perec, 'Statement of Intent', in Thoughts of Sorts, pp. 3, 4.
  20. Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, p. 626.
  21. See Paul A. Harris, 'The Invention of Forms: Perec's "Life A User's Manual" and a Virtual Sense of the Real', Substance, 23:2, Issue 74 (1994).
  22. Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, p. 602. See also James, Constraining Chance, p. 147.
  23. See Claude Burgelin and Joseph Mai, 'Georges Perec, or the Spirit of Beginnings', Yale French Studies, 105 (2004).
  24. Stefanie Elisabeth Sobelle, 'The Novel Architecture of Georges Perec', in Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity, ed. by S. Edwards and J. Charley (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011), p. 184.
  25. Georges Perec, Life A User's Manual, trans. by David Belloc (Boston, MA: David R. Godine Publisher, 2009), p. 3.
  26. See, for example, Paul Auster, 'The Bartlebooth Follies', AA Files, 45/46 (winter 2001), 88, 89.
  27. Perec, Life A User's Manual, p. 69.
  28. See Anthony Sutcliffe, Paris: An Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
  29. Perec, Life A User's Manual, p. 247.
  30. Gabriel Josipovici, 'Georges Perec's Homage to Joyce (And Tradition)', The Yearbook of English Studies, 15 (1985), 188.
  31. James, Constraining Chance, p. 208.
  32. Italo Calvino, 'Multiplicity', in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. by Patrick Creagh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 122.
  33. Perec, Life A User's Manual, p. 145.
  34. See Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
  35. Georges Perec, A Man Asleep (London: Vintage Books, 2011), p. 159.
  36. Perec, Species of Spaces, p. 89. 50. Ibid., p. 90.
  37. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. by L. Asher (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 5, 6. Illustration credits arq gratefully acknowledges: The Saul Steinberg Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SOCAN, Montreal (2022), 1