The compositional structure of" Life, instructions for use "On stage The compositional structure of the work of Georges Perec - who has long been known, and which was also illustrated by the author - reveals most of the questions on the text, although in a way perhaps a little disappointing for those who did not know that structure.
Life, instructions for use is a novel Oulipo. contains all the experiments and the intent of Perec and other 'followers' of potential literature. Perec sees it and realizes it as a work of 'universal', whose center is the palace and Atlas 1, rue Simon-Crubellier since the day June 23, 1975, at about 20. Indeed, Perec used a section, a section of this 9-storey building more wineries, and imagine it divided into ten vertical columns. In practice, a 10x10 chessboard is the pattern in the vertical of the building, and every chapter of the book describes one of the 100 places in the building corresponding to 100 cells (indeed, the chapters are 99, since the cellar in the lower left is skipped (*)).
first question: in order to describe the places of the building (and the stories they have generated)? Perec chose a mathematical criterion for an order neither casual nor too elementary and visible (typically an imperative Oulipo) takes one of the solutions of the known problem of covering one enigmatic chess-board, all the houses, without passing on any twice with the horse of chess, and applies it to his board 10x10.
the 100 movements of this horse gives the order of the chapters LVIPLU through the building. Part of the stairs and ends in the rooms of Bartlebooth. (Every time the horse touches the four edges of the board end part of the book, which is so divided in 6 parts)
What goes into these 100-less-1 sites?
Perec compiled a list of 21 pairs of categories (location, activities, citazione1-citazione2, number-role terzosettore-driving, walls, floors, time-place-style furnishings, length-number, age & sex-animals, clothes, fabrics (type), fabric (material)-colors, accessories, jewelry, readings, music, paintings, books, drinks, food, piccoliarredi-games & toys, feelings, paints, surfaces, volumes, flowers, ornaments, faux-manque, couples 1 and 2). for each of these 42 categories Perec chose 10 items, resulting in 420 items that will be present in some so, in the chapters of the book.
some of the categories are particularly 'strong'. the ressort, for example, often give the impression to the chapters where there are, and class 3 ° field then indicates a style of writing 'technical' (eg., recipes,
terminology literature, technical manuals, software etc.. ). a category, 'length', requires the number of pages relating to that chapter. There are two meta-categories: manque and faux: are two rules that impose, if any, to change than other categories, a sort of wildcard.
in practice, by dividing the 40 categories (all except manque et faux, of course) in groups of 4 teams will have 10 categories which are the to which they apply the rules and faux manque (manque can not comply with any of the categories, faux allows you to change the element of the class).
Perec wants in each of the 99 chapters of his novel is an element of each of the 42 categories. should then distribute these 420 items on its board. and wants to do, of course, so neither accidental nor ordained.
to this creates, for each pair of categories (they are in pairs, in fact), a 10x10 matrix composed of 10 pairs of items in each category. 21 10x10 matrices thus obtained.
these overlapping matrices of the board (in fact, since the board is the vertical split of the building, there is a more obvious when you think of approaching vertically like books on a shelf) we find that each square of the chessboard (which is a physical place in the palace) are 21 pairs of items, ie 42 items. (So \u200b\u200bthat, inter alia, the building regained in a way its depth-my impression ;-))
before doing so, however, Perec gives another stir-non-random: does not want matrices are all equal, does not want that in each element (1.1) and (a, A) (where a and A are elements of both categories of couples). then produces 21 different permutations of the matrix base 10x10, so that they comply with the rule of not have repeated elements in any row or column. The criterion to perform the permutations is borrowed from the structure of the "quenina," which is a rule of recursion rhymes rhymes created by Queneau watching the sextuplets troubadours of Arnaut Daniel. simple algorithm is a rule (I will not explain, even if it is a long way).
short, so get these Perec 21 10x10 arrays that allow distribution of 42 elements in each of its chapters 100meno1.
Now Perec has 99 lists, one for each chapter, he calls his "cahier des charges". From these 99 sheets
life is born, instructions for use. Of course many of the stories were created or transcribed by Perec above. The story of Bartlebooth had conceived in 1969, for example., Solving a puzzle on a view of the port of La Rochelle. But many other stories, situations, characters, puzzles arise from combinations or oulipiane evoked from the lists. Born just meditating on the lists (and, gradually, over the whole of the novel construction that the building up a chapter after the other). Many of the ideas from the data elements are not identifiable in the chapters, while others are clearly evident.
But it is precisely the idea of \u200b\u200bwhat can be evoked from a list that is upstream of the idea of \u200b\u200bcompositional LVIPLU: a list like a puzzle to be composed / created, made up of real elements and arbitrary rules, an idea very strongly perecchiana .
A note about the specific chapters 3, 29 and 93, particularly mysterious to the vagueness of the facts and people who stay there: its cahier des charges contains several indications of "meaning" of these three chapters that speak of the apartment Foureau but the strongest evidence is the presence of ressort "resoudre une enigma" and "create" (the third is missing, faux). The citations for these chapters may give other directions, but I do not know the sources and I do not want to go and fish out at the moment.
but Chapter 3 is where the ressort "resoudre une enigma" make more history. and is the reason for the mystery of this empty apartment by the tenant can not be located, in my opinion.
(*) Chapter 66 was to be the talk of the cellar in the lower left corner, next to those of Bartlebooth. but, as the series of puzzles Bartlebooth, one of the pieces in place should not be
note: The information and images are taken from Cahier des charges de La Vie mode d'emploi, CNRS Editions - Zulma, Paris 1993
from La Vie mode d'emploi: "(...)
Bartlebooth, in other words, he decided one day to organize his life around a single project which did not have a need for an arbitrary purpose other than itself.
"The idea came to him when he was twenty. It was at first a vague idea, a question arose: what to do?, A response that is sketched: nothing. The money, power, art, women were not interested Bartlebooth. As neither the knowledge nor the game. At most, the neckties and the horses or if you prefer, inaccurate but breathing in these futile appearances (even if thousands of people order their lives around effectively ties and a greater number of horses around the Sun), a certain idea of perfection.
which unfolds in the months in the years to follow, organized around three guiding principles: "The first was moral: this was not a company or a record or a rope to climb or a deep ocean to reach. What Bartlebooth would not have been spectacular nor heroic
was simply, fairly, a project, some difficult but not impossible, which is controlled from top to bottom and that, in return, would have dominated in every detail, the life of him who would be dedicated.
"The second was a logical order: without any recourse to the case, the initiative would work as time and space coordinates in which the abstract would be included with a recurrence of events identical
inevitable inevitably produced by a certain date, in a certain place.
"The third one was to order estestico: useless, because its the only guarantee of the free rigor, the project would be destroyed only during the same its future, its perfection would be circular: a succession of events, chaining, it would be canceled: started from scratch, Bartlebooth zero would be returned through precise processing of finished articles.
"So we organized into a concrete program that we can so succinctly stating:
" For ten years, from 1925 to 1935, Bartlebooth would have started the art of watercolor.
"For twenty years, from 1935 to 1955, he traveled extensively, painting, watercolor because of a fortnight, five marinas with the same size (65x50 or 50x64 standard) representing
sea ports. Just over, each of those would Amrine been sent to a craftsman (Gaspard Winckler) and pasting it on a piece of thin wood would cut than seven hundred pieces in a puzzle.
"For twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, returned to France, would have reassembled, in order, the puzzle so prepared, because, again, a puzzle every fortnight. Gradually, the puzzle would be rebuilt, the marine would be restructured in order to detach them from their
media, transported in the same place when - twenty years earlier - had been painted, and immersed in a solvent which would not be re-emerged that the paper Whatman , virgin and intact.
"So, no trace would remain some of that operation, for fifty years, had fully mobilized its author. (...)"
These pages of "Life , instructions " describe the thin story around which Perec constructs the vast universe of hundreds of thousands of other stories and characters, objects, described anatomically
and yet with extraordinary poetic intensity.
