Things and A Man Asleep
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Authors: Georges Perec
Georges
Perec
THINGS
A STORY OF THE SIXTIES
Translated from the French by David Bellos
A MAN
ASLEEP
Translated from the French by Andrew Leak
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BELLOS
BRITISH
LIBRARY
CATALOGUING
IN
PUBLICATION
DATA
Perec, Georges,
1936-1982
Things: a story of the sixties, with, A man asleep.
I.
Title *43'9I4M
ISBN
O
-
OO
-27IO38-2
THINGS
.
A
STORY
OF
THE
SIXTIES
first published in France with the title
Les Choses
by Editions Julliard,
1965
A
MAN
ASLEEP
first published in France with the title
Un homme
qui
dort
by Editions
Denoël, 1967
First published in Great Britain by Collins Harvill,
1990
Les Choses
© René
Julliard
1965
Un homme qui
dort
©
Editions
Denoël 1967
English translations and Introduction
©
William Collins Sons
&
Co. Ltd
1990
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
G
EORGES
P
EREC
was born in Paris in 1936, and his memories of early childhood and of the war years, some of which he spent as a refugee in the French Alps, are recorded in chapters of
W or The Memory of Childhood
(1975). He was educated in Paris and at a state boarding school at Etampes, then at the Lycée Henri-IV and the Sorbonne, where he followed courses in history and sociology for two years without much enthusiasm. He did two years' military service in a parachute regiment but was exempted from active service in Algeria. After a year spent in Sfax (Tunisia) and a short period working as a market researcher, Perec obtained a post of archivist in a medical research laboratory in Paris in 1962, and he remained employed in the same capacity until 1979. He died in March 1982 after a short illness.
Perec decided to be a writer before he was twenty, but, for nearly ten years, apart from a few book reviews and essays on literature and film, he published nothing.
Things. A Story of the Sixties
was his first book and it made him famous almost instantly.
A Man Asleep
followed just over a year later, but created much less of a stir. These two short novels are published here in English together because, more than any other of Perec's numerous and very diverse writings, they shed light on each other, represent the two different sides of something like the same coin.
Things. A Story of the Sixties
was begun in 1962 under the title "The Great Adventure" but did not reach its final form until 1964. It was published in September 1965 as
Les Choses. Une histoire des années soixante
, in the "Lettres nouvelles" collection edited by Maurice Nadeau for Julliard, and was an immediate success, selling far more copies than first novels by unknown authors usually do. The award of the Renaudot prize, some two months later, confirmed, rather than created, the perception of
Things
as the story of a whole generation. By the end of the 1960s, it had been translated into most European languages and had found its place on French literature syllabuses throughout the world. Student editions in French were published both in Moscow and in New York; it has since also become a set text in French secondary schools.
As is often the case with works of European literature,
Things
fared less well in the English-speaking world than almost anywhere else. It was at least translated (by Helen Lane) in the 1960s, but the Grove Press edition (now a bibliographic rarity) was hardly reviewed at all and was never even issued in Britain. The text published here is an entirely new translation.
Superficially, both
Things. A Story of the Sixties
and
A Man Asleep
bear a family resemblance to the kind of
avant-garde
fiction which was, by the mid-sixties, no longer quite as new as the term "new novel" suggested. Neither of Perec's books has a strong narrative structure; neither has strongly delineated characters. But the use Perec made of what now looks like a period style is very different from the fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet or Michel Butor, and opens a new and far more accessible chapter in the history of the novel.
Things
aims to exhaust all that can be said about
fascination
, and, more particularly, to explore what words like
happiness
and
freedom
can mean in the modern world - the world of consumerism as it was emerging in the France of de Gaulle.
A Man Asleep
is a similarly exhaustive exploration of its opposite, indifference. Both novels seem to arise from the banal but no less poignant contradiction between feelings of being and not being in the world.
Both these novels were written before Perec had any contact with the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or OuLiPo - indeed, before OuLiPo was known outside of a tiny circle. Although they are not generated by formal mechanisms of the kind used for
Life A User's Manual
, they are nonetheless highly crafted, constructed texts.
Things,
Perec said in a lecture at the University of Warwick, was written to fill the blank space created, so to speak, by the juxtaposition of four works of importance to him: Roland Barthes'
Mythologies
; Flaubert's
Sentimental Education
; Paul Nizan's
La Conspiration
; and a striking account of life in the concentration camps, Robert Antelme's
L'Espèce humaine.
A Man Asleep
(its title taken from Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past)
is constructed more literally from its six progenitory models; Kafka, Melville, Lowry, Proust, Le Clézio, Joyce.
Things. A Story of the Sixties
was read, in the 1960s, as a sociological novel, and, very often, as a denunciation of consumer capitalism. That is no doubt why it was so rapidly translated into all the languages of Eastern Europe. For Perec, however, it was not that at all, any more than it was a celebration of its characters' fascination with material wealth. Its main idea, he said, was to explore the way "the language of advertising is reflected in us", whilst describing simply,
4
'in barely heightened terms", the particular social world which happened to be his. The result is a masterpiece of detachment and ambiguity, with an ending that is "neither positive nor negative; you finish on ambiguity; to my mind, it's a happy ending and also the saddest ending you could possibly imagine...." Through his use of a shifting narrator, who is neither "above" his characters looking down on them, as in a traditional novel, nor "inside" them, as in more modern "stream of consciousness" writing, Perec is reaching towards the kind of simultaneous passion and detachment characteristic of Flaubert, and he achieves a mixture of understated affection and discreet irony close to the tone of many of the tales to be told a decade later in
Life A User's Manual
.
A Man Asleep
, published in 1967 under the title
Un
Homme qui
dort
, deals with a depression so extreme as to verge on self-annihilation. The experience is one which Perec says he went through himself around the age of twenty. It is a subject to which he returned, through self-quotation and adaptation, first in the film version of
A Man Asleep,
released in 1974, and then in 1978, in chapter fifty-two of
Life A User's Manual.
In this last variant, the character is given a name, Grégoire Simpson — echoing Kafka's Gregor Samsa (in
The Metamorphosis
), who wakes one morning to find life intolerable in a different way - and he seems to end up throwing himself off a railway bridge. That is no reason for believing that
A Man Asleep
also ends in bleak despair. It ends at Place Clichy, in the rain, waiting for it to stop. A step has been taken towards "waking up" from the sleep of indifference, but there is no guarantee that any number of further steps will take you out of hell, or back into the world of living. Perec's novel brings you only to the brink of carrying on. Like
Things
, and as if to mirror it,
A Man Asleep
ends on an ambiguity which is both moral and literary. Perec not only allows, but obliges his reader to take responsibility for the meaning of the work.
A Man Asleep
is a second-person novel. English has no equivalent for the singular,
tu
form of the second person pronoun in French, used by Perec throughout the text. Whereas
vous
is the (plural) polite and formal way of saying "you" in French (and is the form used, for example, in
Michel Butor's second-person narrative of a train journey,
La Modification
), the
tu
form is familiar, friendly, but also (in some circumstances) aggressive. What is also not clear, in the French as in the English, is who, in
A Man Asleep
,
is saying
tu
to whom.
In the film version, made by Perec himself together with Bernard Queysanne (after various attempts to turn
Things
into a film had come to nought), a shortened version of the novel is read as a voice-over against images of a young man silently performing the routines of self-effacement described in the text. The voice-over is read by a woman: and the choice of a female voice was made so as to avoid the implication, which a male voice would undoubtedly have had, of the text being the interior monologue of the young man seen on the screen. Is it then the voice of his conscience (a noun of feminine gender in French)? or the voice of "his" mother? or simply a voice distinct from his own?
A Man Asleep
, both as a film and as a novel, merges the two normal poles of communication into one, as if writer and reader (speaker and hearer) had ceased to be separable, but remain distinct from the "character" in the text or on the screen. "The teller of the tale could well be the one to whom the tale is told," Roger Kleman suggested in a review of Perec's novel. "The second person of
A Man Asleep
is the grammatical form of absolute loneliness, of utter deprivation." Of course the reader of the novel, in English translation, may wish to imagine that there is a character in
A Man Asleep
talking to himself, "as in a dream"; but the evidence of the film version shows that Perec did not wish to read his own text in that way.
"The idea of writing the story of my past arose almost at the same time as the idea of writing," Perec states in
W or The Memory of Childhood
(p. 26). The present introduction cannot avoid seeming to give clues (Etampes; Sfax; market research; depression) to the autobiographical content of Perec's twin novels of the nineteen-sixties. However, it would be wrong to assume, just because the material of these stories resembles some of the elements in the real life of Georges Perec, that the main interest of Perec's works is confessional. Autobiography, as readers of
W or The Memory of Childhood
are made to realise, is always fiction; the converse is perhaps not quite as true.
D
AVID
B
ELLOS
Manchester, 1989
Quotations unattributed in the text are taken from statements made by Perec in an interview with Marcel Benabou and Bruno Marcenac, published in
Les Lettres françaises.
No. 1108 (2 December 196$), pp. 14-15; and from "Pouvoirs et limites du romancier français contemporain", a lecture given at the University of Warwick in May 1967. Roger Klemans's review of
Un Homme
qui
dort
was published in
Les Lettres nouvelles,
July/September issue, 1967, pp. 158-166.
THINGS
A STORY OF THE SIXTIES
Translated from the French by David Bellos
To Denis Buffard
Incalculable are the benefits civilization has brought us, incommensurable the productive power of all classes of riches originated by the inventions and discoveries of science. Inconceivable the marvellous creations of the human sex in order to make men more happy, more free, and more perfect. Without parallel the crystalline and fecund fountains of the new life which still remains closed to the thirsty lips of the people who follow in their griping and bestial tasks.
- Malcolm Lowry
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