The abundance and variety of a Parisian littérateur’s eating habits in the 1970s stand in particularly stark contrast to the era of wartime austerity in which Perec spent the earliest parts of his childhood, not to mention to the virtual absence of nourishment that characterized life in the concentration camps. (Is it making too much of an insignificant detail to observe that the very last item on the list reads “three Vichy waters”?) Perec’s own history of loss and displacement is marked, among other places, in his surname itself, as he observes in a short prose proposal called “Ellis Island: Description of a Project” (all these pieces are included in the Penguin Species of Spaces and Other Pieces):
I was born in France, I am French, I bear a French first name, Georges, and a French surname, or almost, Perec. The difference is minuscule: there’s no acute accent on the first e of my name because Perec is the way the Poles write Peretz. If I had been born in Poland, I would have been called, let’s say, Mordecai Perec, and everyone would have known I was a Jew. But I wasn’t born in Poland, luckily for me, and I have an almost Breton name which everyone spells as Pérec or Perrec—my name isn’t written exactly as it is pronounced.
To this insignificant contradiction there attaches the tenuous but insistent, insidious, unavoidable feeling of being somewhere alien in relation to some part of myself, of being “different,” different not so much from “others” as from “my own kin.” I don’t speak the language that my parents spoke, I don’t share any of the memories they may have had. Something that was theirs, which made them who they were, their history, their culture, their creed, their hope, was not handed down to me. (136–37)
The writing-together of the linguistic and the emotional or psychological is characteristic of Perec’s approach; he has a keen ear for nuance. But his choices are often those of a writer resistant to emotion. To my eyes, a painful sense of loss hangs over the items in “Attempt at an Inventory,” but none of this is said, simply created (like certain optical illusions) in the spaces between the page’s markings. In some of his longer fictions, Perec adopts a relatively conventional approach of chronological narrative ordering, but he is clearly inclined to disrupt normal procedures wherever possible, so that the fairly straightforward narrative procedure of A Void (which is in many respects a kind of detective novel) is enabled or licensed only by the wild tactic of suppressing the e. The shorter pieces avoid chronological or conventional forms of ordering almost completely, instead adopting various formal schemes (alphabetic or otherwise) that frequently have a comical topsy-turvy aspect that delights as well as unsettles. In a project inspired by Proust’s use of the madeleine at the end of the Combray section of the novel’s first volume, Perec admits to having undertaken “to make an inventory, as exhaustive and as accurate as possible, of all the ‘Places Where I Have Slept’” and says that he has listed about two hundred:
I haven’t yet finally settled on the manner in which I shall classify them. Certainly not in chronological order. Doubtless not in alphabetical order (although it’s the only order whose pertinence requires no justification). Maybe according to their geographical arrangement, which would emphasize the ‘guidebook’ aspect of the work. Or else, according rather to a thematic perspective which might result in a sort of typology of bedrooms:
1. My bedrooms
2. Dormitories and barrack-rooms
3. Friends’ bedrooms
4. Guest rooms
5. Makeshift beds (settee, moquette plus cushions, carpet, chaise-longue, etc.)
6. Houses in the country
7. Rented villas
8. Hotel rooms
a. scruffy hotels, boarding houses
b. luxury hotels
9. Unusual conditions: nights on a train, on a plane, in a car; nights on a boat; nights on guard duty; nights in a police station; nights under canvas; nights in hospital; sleepless nights, etc. (22–23)
Elsewhere, in an appealing and funny piece called “Twelve Sidelong Glances,” Perec considers alternatives to the phenomena of fashion. Fashion is seasonal, he observes, but what if it were instead monthly, weekly, daily? “For example,” he continues, “there would be Monday clothes, Tuesday clothes, Wednesday clothes, Thursday clothes, Friday clothes, Saturday clothes and Sunday clothes,” with the result that “the expression ‘today’s fashion’ would then at last mean exactly what it says” (161).
Perec’s works are often puzzling or difficult, but they are also playful, giving them a certain (admittedly perverse) accessibility. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is a closely contemporary experiment in style, a singularly unorthodox autobiography by the distinguished critic and theorist—also a superlative stylist, and with a playful streak that at times matched Perec’s, but working in a mode that foregrounds an aesthetics of difficulty alien to Perec’s writing.7 The broadest literary and intellectual context for this sort of writing might go back to the classic autobiographical narratives of the Western tradition: St. Augustine’s Confessions and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, Michel de Montaigne’s essays, spiritual autobiographies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, twentieth-century precursors like Jean-Paul Sartre’s compelling The Words (Les Mots). It may be worth briefly gesturing to the widespread move that took place in the middle third of the twentieth century away from the representational practices of modernism to a postmodernism increasingly uninterested in the trappings of realism and naturalism. Moving on from Joyce’s late writings and the prose and plays of Samuel Beckett, the most prominent body of French literature roughly contemporaneous with Barthes’s career might be said to be the nouveau roman, whose practitioners (including Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet) wanted to break down everything about the conventional structure of the novel. Barthes’s choices in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes may also emerge from a tradition that includes the surrealists’ preference for collage; Perec once likened his own practice to William Burroughs’s cut-up technique, while Barthes’s strange autobiography calls to mind André Breton’s troubling and beautiful Nadja, with its pastiche of images and words.
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is a small book, an engaging oddity. The epigraph reads “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel” (“Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman,” the words reproduced in Barthes’s own handwriting), and while the opening sections feature a curious selection of childhood photos, the author announces there will be “only the figurations of the body’s prehistory,” with pictures ceasing to be reproduced “at the onset of productive life.” The project is distinctly Proustian, but where Proust revels and luxuriates in copious sentences, Barthes is a master of ellipsis; he leaves things out, he breaks off unexpectedly, he works by elision and juxtaposition rather than by elaboration. Barthes had experimented elsewhere with unconventional ordering principles (Le plaisir du texte is organized alphabetically), and there is a strong alphabetical component to the ordering here as well, with few concessions to chronology or to sustained narrative and small chunks of text organized primarily by keyword instead. The play between indiscretion and discretion provides part of the book’s charm, and some of what Barthes reveals remains cryptic, mysterious; there is no guarantee that everything can be decoded.
Some bits, then, to give the feel of the thing. The first is distinctly difficult in terms of the abstraction and subtlety of the thoughts expressed (at times Barthes uses the third person when writing of himself, particularly when discussing his published works):
L’écriture commence par le style ∼ Writing begins with style
Sometimes he attempts to use the asyndeton so much admired by Chateaubriand under the name of anacoluthon: what relation can be found between milk and the Jesuits? The following: “…those milky phonemes which the remarkable Jesuit, van Ginnekin, posited between writing and language” (The Pleasure of the Text). Then there are the countless antitheses (deliberate, farfetched, corseted) and word play from which a whole system is derived (pleasure: precarious/bliss:
precocious). In short, countless traces of the work of style, in the oldest sense of the word. Yet this style serves to praise a new value, writing, which is excess, overflow of style toward other regions of language and subject, far from a classed literary code (exhausted code of a doomed class). This contradiction may perhaps be explained and justified as follows: his way of writing was formed at a moment when the writing of the essay sought a renewal by the combination of political intentions, philosophical notions, and true rhetorical figures (Sartre is full of them). But above all, style is somehow the beginning of writing: however timidly, by committing itself to great risks of recuperation, it sketches the reign of the signifier. (76)
I can parse some of these sentences, but the paragraph as a whole remains elusive to me. It might be that I resist following Barthes to his conclusion because it finally asserts that even this form of play may be thought of as having an agenda, an ideology of sorts: Barthes’s “writing” is a very particular kind of engagement with language and the world, not just a name for the most general form of linguistic play, and though I’m attracted to this idea of “writing” I cannot in the final analysis happily engage in it myself. Asyndeton is simply the omission of conjunctions (a classic example can be found in the line veni, vidi, vici; “I came, I saw, I conquered”); anacoluthon involves a swerve in which a sentence that begins as though it will have one structure changes rules midway, sometimes naming an object that then works as a sort of hinge for the swing or swerve. (It can be either an error or something deliberately sought for its rhetorical effect, the textbook example being drawn from Milton’s Lycidas—“Had ye been there—for what could that have done?”; Joyce often used it to capture the feel of the stream of a character’s consciousness.) The parenthetical aside “(deliberate, farfetched, corseted)” is of course itself an asyndeton, with the surprising nature of the third adjective in the sequence enacting precisely the sort of play that Barthes treats. The distinction between style and writing is more idiosyncratic, tendentious, harder to follow unless one has steeped oneself in Barthes’s work more generally: it has something to do with the luxury or excess of which language is capable.
Passages of abstraction that pose some difficulty to the reader are balanced, both here and elsewhere in Barthes’s work, with much more immediately accessible and vivid fragments. The second “bit” I promised appears a page or so after the one I have just quoted (the sequence having progressed alphabetically from L’écriture to L’écrivain—Howard provides the French subheadings for each of these sections so that the logic of the progression will remain clear to the English-language reader):
L’écrivain comme fantasme ∼ The writer as fantasy
Surely there is no longer a single adolescent who has this fantasy: to be a writer! Imagine wanting to copy not the works but the practices of any contemporary—his way of strolling through the world, a notebook in his pocket and a phrase in his head (the way I imagined Gide traveling from Russia to the Congo, reading his classics and writing his notebooks in the dining car, waiting for the meals to be served; the way I actually saw him, one day in 1939, in the gloom of the Brasserie Lutétia, eating a pear and reading a book)! For what the fantasy imposes is the writer as we can see him in his private diary, the writer minus his work: supreme form of the sacred: the mark and the void. (77–78)
One way of thinking about this difference of manner is to say that Barthes is willing to become novelistic, to extrude particular detail and vivid visual example in order to seduce and pleasure his reader. Elsewhere, he writes:
It is a good thing, he thought, that out of consideration for the reader, there should pass through the essay’s discourse, from time to time, a sensual object (as in Werther, where suddenly there appear a dish of green peas cooked in butter and a peeled orange separated into sections). A double advantage: sumptuous appearance of a materiality and a distortion, a sudden gap wedged into the intellectual murmur. (135)
The gesture here, in some sense, is simply toward a criticism that engulfs certain properties of the novel. Sensual objects have a place in criticism after all. The green peas in butter, the peeled orange—they make the mouth water, as it were, appealing to the senses rather than purely to the intellect. Barthes enumerates the double effect: “sumptuous appearance of a materiality” (a sumptuous repast!), a disruption of the “intellectual murmur.”
Elsewhere in the book Barthes characterizes his own style as operating by means of fragments, a choice justified on the grounds that “incoherence is preferable to a distorting order,” and attributes his delight in wrestling matches to the fact that each match is itself “a series of fragments, a sum of spectacles…subject in its very structure to asyndeton and anacoluthon, figures of interruption and short-circuiting” (93). Along with these figures, Barthes praises parataxis (the placing together of sentences without conjunctions or transitions, in the manner of beads on a string) over hypotaxis (the “subordination” of phrases and sentences, a more shapely or architectural construction). At various points during the book, he contemplates the different sorts of meaning that can be created by way of this kind of technique: the parlor game of taking half-a-dozen words and creating a discourse that links them together (in that case, the fragment in which such a parlor game is defined or described may itself fit the stipulations of the game); the juxtaposition of fragments to create meaning in their interstices, like the lyrics in a song cycle. This sort of “antistructural criticism…[brings] objects into view with the help of simple figures of contiguity (metonymies and asyndetons)”:
L’ordre dont je ne me souviens plus ∼ The order I no longer remember
He more or less remembers the order in which he wrote these fragments; but where did that order come from? In the course of what classification, of what succession? He no longer remembers. The alphabetical order erases everything, banishes every origin. Perhaps in places, certain fragments seem to follow one another by some affinity; but the important thing is that these little networks not be connected, that they not slide into a single enormous network which would be the structure of this book, its meaning. It is in order to halt, to deflect, to divide this descent of discourse toward a destiny of the subject, that at certain moments the alphabet calls you to order (to disorder) and says: Cut! Resume the story in another way (but also, sometimes, for the same reason, you must break up the alphabet). (148)
“How will I know that the book is finished?” Barthes later asks.
Having uttered the substance of these fragments for some months, what happens to me subsequently is arranged quite spontaneously (without forcing) under the utterances that have already been made: the structure is gradually woven, and in creating itself, it increasingly magnetizes: thus it constructs for itself, without any plan on my part, a repertoire which is both finite and perpetual, like that of language. At a certain moment, no further transformation is possible but the one which occurred to the ship Argo: I could keep the book a very long time, by gradually changing each of its fragments. (162–63)
The word “uttered” has some of the forceful materiality of the English word “expressed” as it is used to describe the production of breast milk; the process of organization Barthes describes invokes a series of self-generating patterns, as iron filings may be shunted into an array by the invisible action of a magnet.8 Barthes’s memoir is contingent rather than inevitable, it could have taken any number of different forms, and yet its distinctive identity (like that of the Argo) is established regardless of the contingency of its parts. Here is Barthes at his most Perecian, in a long fragment which I will quote in full:
J’aime, je n’aime pas ∼ I like, I don’t like
I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all k
inds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.
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