The Invention of Forms: Perec`s "Life A User`s Manual" and a Virtual

The Invention of Forms: Perec's "Life A User's Manual" and a Virtual Sense of the Real
Author(s): Paul A. Harris
Reviewed work(s):
Source: SubStance, Vol. 23, No. 2, Issue 74: Special Issue: Between Science & Literature (1994),
pp. 56-85
Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
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The Invention of Forms:
Perec'sLifeA User'sManual
and a Virtual Sense of the Real
Paul A. Harris
Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi)has been
hailed since its inception as a unique achievement, primarily because of its
incredible formal conception and the sprawling range of its contents. The
daunting set of arbitrary rules and self-imposed constraints that stipulate
the text's raw materials catch the writer up in what strikes one as a neurotic
net, an intricate artifice that stretches his intelligence to its ludic limits.
Seemingly disinterested in re-presenting any single situation or extant state
of things, Perec uses a "hyperstructural conception" to weave a text out of
components existing in a "universe of lists" (Hartje, Magn6 and Neefs 30).
From this standpoint, LifeA User'sManual is an emphatically anti-mimetic
text. Yet this self-contained literary invention generates a distinctive texture; by a kind of exfoliation, from a text determined by these lists and
plans there emerges a visceral feeling for the little things in life. This
pre-text or user's manual of life does not representlife; rather, it instantiates
the real. Instead of reflecting the world by imitation, Perec manufactures
the sense of the real by copying, generating in the process a form of what I
will call second-order mimesis, an entirely different register of realism in
literature.
Inimitable as it is, Life A User's Manual still exemplifies fundamental
drives and desires of our time. In their introductory remarks to Cahierdes
charges de La Vie mode d'emploi (Perec's notebooks and lists for the text),
Hans Hartje, Bernard Magn6 and Jacques Neefs reflect that the set of
"novels," as Perec subtitled La Vie moded'emploi,"presents the formal traits
of its period in the world of a work" (ibid.; my translation). The puzzling
way in which this book founded on arbitraryconstraints also fabricates the
real is exemplary in an era characterized by, on the one hand, the receding
of reality into algorithms or codes, and on the other, a resultant investment
in or discourse about "the real."
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This link between a realm of simulation and the real also materializes
in the sciences. In L'Invention des Formes, Alain Boutot views chaos,
catastrophe theory, fractal geometry, and the study of dissipative structures as members of a set of discourses on formal invention. And even as
Boutot recounts how the emergence of form is described in mathematical
models or encoded in algorithms, he maintains that these discourses mark
a turn in science away from reductionism and quantitative theory toward
a more speculative, even "contemplative" description of forms. Boutot
believes that the description of form shifts scientific theory onto the level of
the real-back into the molar world, the scale of our lives, and confronts
science with a fundamentally qualitative problem irreducible to categories
of measure such as volume, temperature, velocity and so on. In doing so,
Boutot writes, 'These theories resurrect a very old idea of science," "thatof
a science that enables an understanding of the real, not simply an exertion
of influence on it" (1993,13; my translation).
Of course, the stakes involved in the invention of forms in the sciences
go well beyond achieving a contemplative stance or an "understanding of
the real." A desire to reinvent the real materially can be felt in a discipline
like design science, an intersection of mathematics, art and architecture
that Buckminster Fuller defined as the search "to isolate specific instances
of the pattern of a general, cosmic energy system and turn these to human
use" (in Kappraff, xi). More unsettling are the forms invented and
produced that in fact exceed our comprehension, and add qualitatively
new things to the world: Artificial Life investigations, the human genome
project and various forms of "progress" in genetic engineering.
We can establish some lines of family resemblance between these
enterprises and Perec's project from the outset. LifeA User's Manual was
first conceived in tandem with Claude Berge and Jacques Roubaud, also
members of OuLiPo (workshop for potential literature). Raymond
Queneau, the mathematician and writer who (with Franqois Le Lionnais)
founded OuLiPo in 1960, defined potential literature as "researchof forms,
of new structures that can be used by writers in any manner they please"
(Oulipo 38; my translation). And in an OuLiPo manifesto, Le Lionnais
compared the group's formal experimentation to attempts to synthesize
life artificially (Le Lionnais 30-31), while mathematicians Jacques Bens,
Claude Berge and Paul Braffort conceived a genre of "cellular prosody" as
a direct analogue to John Conway's famous "Game of Life" computer
program, cited as a prototype for Artificial Life work (Bens et al, 112).
Sydney L6vy, noting links between biology, information theory and OuLiPo, has crossed the rhetorical strains of genetics and Oulipian games to
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hatch his own "chimera," a kind of "Oulipo-critique" (1988,160). In short,
like many scientific and architectural inventors, OuLiPo members use
various artificial structures, especially mathematical constructs, as formal
models. And as in the sciences, from the 1960s on, OuLiPo members began
incorporating the computer into these investigations of the limits of form.
This essay seeks to dissect the tissue of Perec's formal invention in Life
A User's Manual,while also situating Perec's work in the historical context
of other contemporary innovations in form. The essay moves through
three broad thematics: First, I trace ways in which the "invention" of form
does not entail an originary act, but a re-creation, something produced as a
result of explorations structured by play. The formal underpinnings of
Perec's novel took shape as an elaborate puzzle he had to complete, and
this sense of gamesmanship and ludic pleasure passes into the hands of a
reader who tries to decode and reassemble the textual puzzle. The second
section elucidates the recursive nature of this re-creation process, showing
how recursion inscribes these formal dynamics in a self-referential or selfcontained model of formal invention or morphogenesis. Perec's text is
recursive in a specific Oulipian sense; it inscribes its own processes of
production into its images, themes, and content, and also implicates
readers in a potentially endless self-referential game of solving the textual
puzzle. The final section reflects on the virtual space in which the recreation of forms is played out. In material terms, the practices of mathematical, physical, biological and design sciences are carried out in the virtual
space of the computer. In the literary domain, the virtual becomes a conceptual space that designates the ground for both a speculative ontology
and a particular concept of language. Drawing on Deleuze's notion of the
virtual and the plane of linguistic "sense," I argue that it is the very virtuality of Perec's LifeA User'sManual that gives it a material texture. Thus
this novel founded on arbitrary constraints and formed from playful rules
ultimately reproduces the real-not as its mimetic representation, but as
texture woven into the inner fabric of its form.
I. Invention as Recreation
William Paulson has suggested that "a text like La Vie mode d'emploi
can be read as belonging to an era and to an episteme in which the natural
and cultural worlds are conceived not as opposed essences but as diversely
organized systems of differences" (335). Paulson's emphasis on "systems
of differences" underscores the influence of structuralism on the period
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from which Perec's work emerges, a historical factor also emphasized by
Hartje, Magn6 and Neefs's preface to the Cahierdes charges(30). Yet even
as structuralist analyses of writing as a play of intertextuality and
proclamations of "the death of the author" drew a picture of literature as
simply recombining elements of a static system, authors informed by these
ideas produced a series of startling formal innovations, from Cortazar's
Hopscotch to Calvino's If on a winter night a traveler. Structuralism thus
constitutes a necessary background to, but insufficient explanation for
Perec's invention of form.
In a 1967 lecture called "Cybernetics and Ghosts," Calvino provided
an illuminating account of what needs to be added to structuralist thought
to account for literary innovation. Calvino draws a picture of the writer's
origin as a storyteller clearly informed by Levi-Strauss's analyses of myths,
and then portrays literature as "a combinatorial game that pursues the
possibilities implicit in its own material" (1986a, 22). The literary game
places the writer inside a strange loop of production: "The so-called personality of the writer exists within the very act of writing: it is the product
and instrument of the writing process" (ibid. 14-15). The writer's creative
act becomes one of re-creation, in the sense of both a playful act and a
derivative one. Already placed at a nexus of intertextual connections, the
author becomes a literary ghost of Maxwell's demon, a "cybernetic sorting
machine" who generates narratives in the form of combinatoric matrices.
Before pursuing Calvino's analysis further, we can pause to note other
guises this figuration of the author assumes in the invention of forms
paradigm. Calvino's scenario of the writer as recombinatoric cybernetic
machine finds a curious analogue in N. Katherine Hayles's description of a
scientist and computer becoming a cybernetic feedback loop. Hayles observes that in modelling a nonlinear dynamical system, rather than "the
traditional mathematical method of theorem-proof," a scientist
canset up a recursiveprogramthatbeginswhenshe feedsinitialvaluesfor
the equationsinto the computer. Thenshe watchesas the screendisplay
generatedby the recursionevolves into constantlychanging,often unexpected patterns. As the displaycontinues,she adjuststhe parametersto
achievedifferenteffects. Withher own responsesin a feedbackloop with
the computer,she develops an intuitivefeeling of how the display and
parametersinteract... She sees that,althoughthe displaysare complex,
thereare underlyingsymmetriesthatimparta pleasing,sometimesa startlinglybeautifulqualityto them.(6)
As with the writer, the scientist plays with different combinations, using
intuition to generate an aesthetic form. The availability of the technologies
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involved here have spread this practice into a large population: books such
as FractalVision (endorsed by Hugh Kenner, no less) or TheFractalExplorer
come with software and directions for how to play with fractal forms.
In OuLiPo we find a partially analogous situation; instead of changing
parameters, the search for pattern alters the constraints involved in the
production of a work. More than a game though, this literary enterprise
comprises a rich form of play-the distinction being that a game's limits
are circumscribed by rules, whereas play is an activity that moves back and
forth across a frame. While a structuralist conception of play would show
how new events can occur within a fixed system or language game,
Oulipian play foregrounds innovation at the fundamental level of form.
Jean-JacquesThomas makes the crucial distinction that
the combinatoricaxiomaticsat work in the Oulipianenterpriseare not
era,
descriptiveand static,as would have beenthe casein the structuralist
but ratherrespondto a transformational
dynamic.It is an enterprisebased
not on a classificationof statesof a languagebuton a repertoireof operations
impliedin the productionof a text.(23;his italics)
In ThePoeticsof ExperimentWarren F. Motte, Jr.foregrounds the central
function of play in Perec's literary experimentation, while also linking it to
larger cultural or anthropological values. Motte invokes Huizinga's
theorizing of play as the basis of poetic communication, and Gregory
Bateson's analysis of how play entails a self-conscious metacommunication
that the participants are engaged in play rather than combat or idle interaction. Pursuing this link for a moment, we see that Bateson analyzes how
metacommunicational awareness that "this is play" creates a frame within
which the activity unfolds, thus defining the play-space as a virtual space
where actions actually produce a form of fiction: as Bateson puts it, in play
"the nip" replaces "the bite" which is forbidden in play, so that "the
messages or signals exchanged in play are in a certain sense untrue" and
"that which is denoted by these signals [e.g., the bite denoted by the nip] is
nonexistent" (183). As we shall see, Perec confronts this peculiar falsity of
ludic fiction directly in his writing, providing images of illusionists,
forgers, and posers who create unauthentic objects in the name of artistic
pursuit.
The stipulation that must be made here, though, is that within the
vision of a quasi-automated or virtual invention of forms, carried out by a
cybernetic sorting machine writer or researcher plugged into an information structure loop, new forms of order emerge because small, unpredictable deviations sometimes generate changes at the global scale. Just as
chaos is defined by "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" and
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genetic inheritance in chromosomes is split by chance occurrences of crossing-over, so too does what Calvino calls "the poetic result" of literature
depend on something that "slip[s] in from another level."' Elsewhere
Calvino uses a different metaphor when he calls this effect "the clinamen
which, alone, can make of the text a true work of art" (1986b, 151).2 The
dinamen is the Epicurean term for the unpredictable sway of atoms that
initiates their combination into forms. The relation between theories of
chaos and self-organization and the clinamen has been noted and used in
different ways in the work of Michel Serres, Gilles Deleuze, Ilya Prigogine
and Isabelle Stengers.3
Life A User's Manual, surely among the most elaborate combinatoric
textual games imaginable, is similarly structured by this combination of a
game's rules and the perturbations of a dinamen. Even though Perec's
elaborate formal schema for the novel has been documented in detail elsewhere,4 and one could simply refer readers to further explanations or
critical modesd'emploi,it is necessary to take the time to do so here because
Perec's conception and execution are intrinsic to an analysis of formal
invention-it is not the same without the weight of the example at hand.
"An Arbitrarily Constrained Programme with no Purpose Outside its
own Completion"
Life A User's Manual contains a multiplicity of stories (some of which
are enumerated in the "checklist of tales" Perec added as an appendix)stories that range across the globe and through the centuries, even as they
emanate from the rooms of a single building. The framing metaphor for
LifeA User'sManual is announced in Perec's preamble on "the art of jigsaw
puzzles," where he gives notice that
Puzzlingis not a solitarygame:everymove thepuzzlermakes,the puzzlemakerhas made before;every piece the puzzlerpicks up, and picks up
again, and studies and strokes,every combinationhe tries, and tries a
second time, every blunderand every insight,each hope and each discouragementhave all beendesigned,calculated,and decidedby the other.
The book as a whole, in other words, has been assembled as a massive
puzzle, cut and completed by Perec, which the reader may have the inexhaustible pleasure of solving. The reader's activity entails more than assembling a puzzle, for we need to cut the aesthetic surface of Perec's text
back up into its constituent components of lists; the "pieces" in our puzzle
must first be seen as such, and then we fit them into the puzzle by grasping
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the game Perec played to assemble the chapter or work. The central story
in LifeA User's Manual depicts all the dimensions of this very game: Percival Bartlebooth,5 a wealthy heir, seeks to combat "the inextricable incoherence of things" by executing "an arbitrarily constrained programme
with no purpose outside its own completion" (117). From 1925-35 he takes
watercolor lessons from his neighbor Valene; from 1935-55, he travels the
world, painting 500 seascapes "of identical format;"each watercolor is cut
by another neighbor Winckler into a jigsaw puzzle of 750 pieces. From
1955-75, Bartlebooth is to assemble the puzzles in order, one every two
weeks. Then, as each puzzle is completed, it is removed from the backing,
and the original watercolor is taken to the port where it was painted, and
dipped in a detergent that restores the original blank sheet of paper.
While it recapitulates many dimensions of our play with the text, this
ludicrous project only hints at the mad genius of Perec's own "arbitrarily
constrained programme." LifeA User'sManual represents the conjunction
of different sources of inspiration. Its setting is modelled on Saul
Steinberg's "The Art of Living," where the faqade of an apartment building
is cut away and we see the inhabitants at one moment in their lives.
Perec's Parisian building becomes ten floors of ten rooms each; each room
will be a chapter of the book. The text's sequence is another instance of
Perec's gamesmanship: leaving the order of proceeding through the rooms
neither to chance nor to some realist principle of plot, Perec transformed
the building into a 10 x 10 chessboard, and solved the problem Le Lionnais
termed "la polygraphie du cavalier"-how to move a knight so that it
touches every square only once. This problem also produces the textual
divisions: the chessboard is divided into quarters, and every time the
knight traverses all the quarters, a new section of the novel begins.
Furthermore, each room, each chapter is itself a puzzle Perec must
assemble. The "pieces" of these puzzles are drawn from 21 lists he made
of components that would be in every chapter, lists that include body
position, jewelry, color, geometrical shape, the type of floor, ceiling, furniture, and artistic style in the room, a place on the globe and period in
history, authors and texts to be cited. Among the most intriguing lists is
"3' secteur," a category made up of different types of "texts from life," such
as calling cards, door signs, recipes, catalogues, textbooks. Each list is
composed of two sets of ten components. Finally, another mathematical
structure decides which components from each list will be included in each
chapter. For each list Perec made up a different "bi-Latin square"-two
magic squares of 10 digits superimposed or contained within one another,
so that each box has two digits.6
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The result of all these pre-texts and textual algorithms is the "cahiers
des charges,"the notebook of lists of components Perec must work into each
chapter. In summary, each list of 42 components per chapter is drawn up
as follows: find the chapter number on the knight's route through the 10 x
10 building; match the slot of that box to the corresponding one in the
bi-Latin square for each list; the two digits on the list designate the components from it that go into the chapter. For example: chapter fifty in 'la
polygraphie du cavalier" selects, on the bi-Latin square for authorial citations, the coordinates 1,0. Consulting the citations list, we find this site
marks Flaubert and Calvino for quotation. In chapter fifty, the first paragraph describing the picture is pieced together by passages from Flaubert's
SentimentalEducationand Calvino's InvisibleCities.
However, things cannot remain so straightforward; the rules of the
game contain operations that violate and transform its parameters. In
other words, the instructions for this writing machine also contain their
own disturbances. As Perec put it in an interview, any "system of constraints" must contain "an anti-constraint built into it," giving the system
"some free play, as the phrase goes . . . one needs a clinamen"
(Pawlikowska 70; my translation). Thus among the 21 lists are two
metaconstraints called "faux" and "manque." If a group of elements falls
under "faux," then the element is replaced by another of the same list (e.g.,
one writer substituted for another); if under "manque," then an element is
freely substituted for or simply skipped. The elements on each list that fall
under these metaconstraints are themselves chosen by an aleatory mathematical method (see Magn6 1984b for a detailed exposition).
A more consciously contrived perturbation in the formal structure of
the book is that while the building has 100 rooms, LifeA User'sManual has
only 99 chapters. The room described in the text, found at the extreme
bottom left corer of the 10 x 10 board, would be the 66th chapter. At the
end of chapter 65, a list of knickknacks concludes with a square biscuit box
on which a girl is seen "munching the corer of her petit-beurre"(318). The
girl has nibbled off the corer of the board-map for the book, eating the
chapter in the process. The connection between the biscuit box and 10 x 10
square of rooms is conveyed through an operation of verbal transformation favored by Perec, that of homophones (see Magne 1986, 61-62). In the
original, the square tin box is "fer-blanc, carree" (Perec 1978, 394); the
result of the girl nibbling is "faire un blanc dans le carr6"(Magnd 1990, 14).
And the whole conception of this clinamen is contained in a pun in French,
for one "piece" (room and/or puzzle piece) in the book can't find its
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place-a foreshadowing of the piece that Bartlebooth dies holding, the last
piece in a puzzle whose shape is an X, while the blank space forms a W.7
Cracking The Code of Form
This condensed summary of the formal constraints, metanarrative
games and expansive plot of LifeA User's Manual provides a sense for the
spirit of its ludic gaming and the extent of its Oulipian explorations. What
immediately strikes one is how fully Perec's conception is realized, how
successfully or neatly he assembled this text-puzzle; for the surface of the
text does not betray these rules and regulations. The book thus ends up
more complete than Bartlebooth's project: it effaces the traces of its own
game, while Bartlebooth dies unable to finish the puzzles; the reconstituted
watercolors will never be restored to an original blank sheet. In pragmatic
terms, Perec's completion of his own puzzle means that one can read along
quite happily while remaining completely oblivious to any series of intertextual allusions or quotations, or the filling in of an underlying puzzle.8
In teaching the book I have found that when, after reading the text, students are shown some of the constraints and lists, they are often struck not
so much by the incredible demands Perec made on himself as by how
incidental or peripheral they seem to the actual narrative, the wonderful
train of stories that comprise the book. If it were not for the many hints
that a game is being played in the text, and the many self-reflexive moments where the text describes itself or its own formative processes, there
would simply be a kind of incidental relation between the cahiersdes charges
and the text of LifeA User'sManual.
In a certain sense, the way in which Perec's finished novel covers the
tracks of its formal constraints, obligatory components and artificial structures is paradigmatic for the contemporary invention of forms. It is the
very smoothness of Perec's accomplishment that makes us want to ferret
out the secrets of his formal algorithms in the first place. In this era, the
desire to crack the code of form is played out most massively in the
development of molecular biology. But when the code refuses to yield not
only its components but its secret principles as well, the discontinuity
between code and form is figured as an opacity, an ureadability of the
code.
And so always lurking just behind the drive to crack the code is the
sense that rather than unveiling the secret meaning of the world, solving
the code ends in a silence, a lack of meaning. We are all texts written in
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genetic code, but, as Clement Rosset writes, while we might in principle be
able to "read" this text, it "does not, strictly speaking, contain any message." While we may feel driven "to mistake the genetic code for a book
and to look for ... a sort of key that would unlock the 'secret' of a human
being," we are left only with a blankness, an encounter with what Rosset
calls the "insignificance of the real (17).9 In broad pragmatic terms, this is
the sense we gamer in tracing Perec's text back to its roots in the cahiersdes
charges. Rather than a secret to how this fantastic text evolved, these individual components yield up no meaning in themselves; the pieces and
their fit into the puzzle-text are literally insignificant.
Perec handles the extended puzzle metaphor in ways that speak
directly to this disjunctive relation between code and form. Referring both
to Winckler's traps for Bartlebooth and the way a skillful clue in a
crossword is seemingly insoluble and then obvious in retrospect, Perec
writes that
The whole labourconsist[s]preciselyin performingthe displacement
which
gives the puzzle piece or the due its meaningand therebyrendersany
explanationtiresomeand unnecessary.(335;originalitalics)
The only "meaning" a piece has is its place in the whole; "meaning" here
does not denote the message of a code, a semantic dimension to a sign
system, but is a purely functional, self-contained meaning. The piece's
meaning disappears in the act of its transcription, of its being fitted in,
rather than this being a meaning that appears in an act of translation.'0 As
chimera-of the
Levy succinctly summarizes, "the monstrosity-the
is
that
Oulipian message"
... informationand messageare one and the same. We move thus to the
ticklingof a second level of abstraction:the differentforms of a single
messageare,in themselves,themessage.(1988,160)
Perec writes that the real conundrum faced by the puzzler is that the piece
or the
... element'sexistencedoesnot precedetheexistenceof thewhole,it comes
neitherbeforenorafterit, for thepartsdo not determinethepatternbut the
patterndeterminesthe parts:knowledgeof the patternand of its laws, of
the set and its structure,could not possibly be derived from discrete
knowledgeof the elementsthatcomposeit. (i)
While here Perec offers what could be read as a straightforward statement
of gestalt theory, this view is undercut by the simple fact that at a different
level Perec's text is literally formed by the lists of the cahiersdes charges.
And so there is ultimately a circular feedback loop that entangles Perec's
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conception of LifeA User'sManual as a whole; the plan of the building and
mathematical structures both dictate the content of chapters and are patterned or distributed by the writing.
II. Re-Creation as Recursion: Form and Self-Reference
This tangled feedback loop brings us to another definitive feature of
the postmodern paradigm of forms. Throughout the discourses of chaos,
fractal geometry, catastrophe theory and molecular biology, models for the
emergence of form display a recursive self-reference. For example, in their
introduction to UnderstandingOrigins, Francisco Varela and Jean-Pierre
Dupuy describe the "active self-reference" of the genetic program: the
program functions in a "strange loop" in that
one has a programthatneeds its own productin orderto be executed. In
fact, every step of DNA maintenanceand transcriptionis mediatedby
proteins,whicharepreciselywhatis encoded. To carryout theprogramit
must alreadyhavebeenexecuted!(4)
A similar strange loop defines the general model for several forms of
self-organized "complexity": microscopic interactions spontaneously
produce a global property or order, which in turn influences the local
interactions, entangling the local and global levels in a recursive feedback
loop.
While these models describe how forms arise or emerge, they do not
purport to explain these events. When asked the "cause" of self-organization, scientists often defer to "the dynamics of the system itself"dynamics described but not explained by the equations of the non-linear
system. One would somehow expect the process of form emerging in
literature to be less opaque, as it entails the labor of a person presumably
aware of the steps taken. But in Perec's reflections on his work, there lurks
a sense that the mathematical structures and intricate networks of constraints render the writing automatic. He conceived LifeA User'sManualas
"a machine for telling stories," and, after revealing some of its formative
mathematical figures, Perec states with flat irony, "there will be nothing
else left than to invent stories justifying these successive transformations"
(1979, 52; my translation)-"as if," Motte observes, "the mathematical system could engender the novel quasi-spontaneously" (1984, 36). But the
reason that these arbitrary constraints generate something like a self-organizing process in writing lies more deeply embedded in the linguistic
plane on which Perec's line of formal exploration unfolds. The operations
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Perec follows in this non-mimetic textual dimension becomes a sort of
automatic writing: in "Le Reve et le Texte," Perec writes:
My experienceof the dreamercomesfromthingsonly experiencedin writing:not a disclosureof symbols,not a floodof sense,not a flashof truth...
but the vertigoof a trainof words,the fascinationof a textwhichseemsto
produceitself.(citedin Martin,263n;my translation)
The recursive "life" or self-organizing dynamics of a text continues on
past its production, of course, as it passes into the hands of a reader.
Perec's novel produces readers who will decipher the layers of its various
puzzles; in fact, a curious problem in teaching or writing about the text is
the ever-present suspicion or fear that no amount of "expert" knowledge
precludes one being duped by some ploy in the text. The framing devices
Perec uses (the preamble on puzzling, plan of the building, index, chronology and table of tales) dearly invite playful rereadings, cross-referencings
and decipherings. Once imagined as a book that will keep readers occupied (perhaps forever), we can classify LifeA User'sManualas a recursive
text. Oulipians Bens, Berge and Braffortdefine a recurrent text as "any text
that contains, explicitly or implicitly, generative rules that invite the reader
... to pursue the production to infinity." This definition thus implies "the
existence of a statement about generation, of an algorithm," and it is this
stipulation that "places recurrent literature in the category of potential
literature" (Bens et al, 109).
The combinatoric games with already given materials that Calvino
designates as the mode of literature's production, then, play themselves
out as recursive processes. Materials are fed into the matrix of a text itself
constituted by selected materials, and the combinatoric game ensues.
From these processes qualitatively new forms arise, without an external
seed or origin; the new form then shapes microscopic sequences and combinations. We can see this process unfold in particularly striking fashion
by analyzing the trope of copying that permeates Pere's text, shaping both
some of the stylistic strategies and the structural princples of Lifea User's
Manual. If we take a literal inventory of its contents, we could even say
there is nothing "original" in Perec's text. It is as if he merely assembles
quotations from other writers, different types of what we could call "found
text" (the 3' secteur list), and faithfully adheres to the exhaustive lists-in
sum, it is as if he reorders and then copies materials already provided.1
As well as a structural principle, copying is thematized in the text in
various self-conscious ways: a Bartlebooth namesake, Bartleby, is a
scrivener, and many tales depict forgers, peddlars of simulacra,
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plagiarizers and other copiers; in retracing the puzzlemaker-writer's steps,
the reader-puzzler only recreates or copies the tracery of form. A more
impressionistic imprint of copying also arises as, in reading the painstaking inventories of rooms, the lengthy descriptions of photos or paintings,
one feels as if the narrative merely transcribes some mass of obligatory
material. Alongside the delightful melangeof stories and characters that it
proffers, the novel clutters its surface with a crushing invasion of things, a
density of descriptive detail and a propensity for endless enumeration that
lead one to feel Perec's desire may be simply to caress the quotidian.
Copying and Collecting via Terminological Exactitude
One concrete stylistic feature of Perec's writing that contributes to this
impression is its particular mode of description. As if merely copying
down what is already in some place, Perec's style seeks to provide a kind
of inventory without descriptive detail. Chapters open with the slow
neutrality of declarative sentences:
A bedroomin the big apartmenton the firstfloor. The carpetis tobaccobrown;the walls aredecoratedwithlight-greyHessianpanels.
Thereare threepeoplein the room. One is an old lady, MadameMoreau,
who owns the flat. She is lying in a largeEmpirebed undera bedspread
embroideredwithblueflowers.(68)
The objects named in these catalogues lack body or texture-what one
could call emotional embodiment-the space in which they are depicted is
already an abstracted outline, a frame of traces waiting to be filled in or
em-bodied by an other, a reader.12 This insistently impersonal descriptive
style also is evident in the fact that among the hundreds of characters
inhabiting the text's pages, there is a striking lack of facial features or
expressions.
And yet characterizing Perec's style this way fails to recognize its
precision, for the abstract or faceless quality of things or characters does
not render them generic. This economy of style must be maintained in a
novel that is itself a collection of texts, is packed with collections and
characters who collect unique objects, and whose completion makes it a
collection of lists. As Calvino puts it,
... the demonof "collectionism"
is alwaysbeatingits wings over Perec's
pages ... yet a collectorhe was not, in life, exceptof words,of the dataof
exactitudewas his way
knowledge,of thingsremembered.Terminological
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of possessingthings. Pereccollectedand gave a name to whatevercomprisesthe uniquenessof everyevent,person,or thing.(1988,122-123)
We find in Perec a strange complementarity between two activities,
copying and collecting, that may not seem intrinsically related to each
other. Some insight into this complementarity may be garnered from Walter Benjamin's piece "Unpacking my Library:On Book Collecting." There
Benjamin distinguishes between books as their written contents versus
books as single material objects, observing that
... for [thecollector],not only booksbut copiesof bookshave theirfates.
And in this sense, the most importantfate of a copy is its encounterwith
him, with his own collection. I am not exaggeratingwhen I say that to a
truecollectortheacquisitionof an old bookis its rebirth.(61)
As Calvino points out, Perec treats objects with just this kind of care, as if
they were not members of a class of like objects, but unique in themselves.
Collection is thus a form of possession, and for Benjamin, "ownership is the
most intimate relationship that one can have to objects" (67). If Benjamin's
collector is a figure of modernity, Perec as a collector of things through
words represents a displacement of the collector to a network of signs. The
intimacy one feels in Perec's pages is always mediated by the text's surface;
his reader becomes a collector of Perec's little games and puzzles, and a
feeling for their "author" may well be grounded more in an idea of the
author than the actual textual operations performed.
In Benjamins's text, the author re-emerges as an immanent presence
hovering throughout the splayed contents of the collection. The intimacy
of collecting thus overcomes an impersonal style of expression that empties
out the persona of the author: Benjamin concludes his piece by asserting
that it is
... not that they [the books] come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So
I have erectedone of his dwellings,with books as buildingstones,before
you, and now he is goingto disappearinside,as is onlyfitting.(ibid.)
Perec's presence, too, could be imagined as flitting about the rooms of his
textually manufactured dwelling, but in a fashion that follows Barthes's
image of the Author "inscribed in the novel like one of his characters,
figured in the carpet; no longer privileged... his inscription is ludic. He
becomes, as it were, a paper-author" (171).
Extrapolating from these remarks, we could say that in a somewhat
paradoxical fashion, Perec's neutral tone and passion for naming actually
generates the definitive texture of his book. As a "paper-author," the
texture of his text embodies his distinct signature. Naturally, copying and
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collecting are not unique to Perec; a clear influence on Perec's book is
Flaubert's Bouvardet Pecuchet. But Claude Burgelin (210) points out that
Perec's encyclopedic method and scope provide a perfect inversion of
those of his master; whereas Flaubert's duo's quest for complete
knowledge ends with them copying encyclopedias, copying provides access to the novel as encyclopedia in LifeA User'sManual.
In both cases, as a copy enters the encyclopedic collection, it is
refashioned or reinvented. Jacques Neefs observes that Flaubert's novel of
knowledge "must organize plasticallysubject matter that is either ideal or
cognitive or experimental," and thus generates "a new figurality [that]
uproots this subject matter from its habitual area of thought and practice,
from its internal logic, from its initial discursive statute" (157). Similarly,
Perec's collecting things through (re-)inscription is not just copying: as
Burgelin notes, the crucial question behind this elaborate recombinatoric
game is really at what point copying and repetition become innovation.
Perec, Burgelin writes, is "fascinated by the strange alchemy which
produces something new from the identical" (211; my translation).
Producing Something New from the Identical
As readers, we can analyze this "strange alchemy" whereby the copy
takes on new life by measuring the text's effects on us. We often find
ourselves left in the state that Winckler's puzzles leave Bartlebooth: stuck
for hours on a piece, "having gone through every stage of controlled
anxiety and exasperation," Bartlebooth at last would "reach a kind of
ecstasy, a stasis, a sort of oriental torpor:... a mental void, a completely
blank, receptive and flexible [state of] mind" (338). It is precisely the
self-evident, unpredicated mode in which things, people, and events are
presented in Life A User's Manual that produces this zen-like state in the
reader. Analyzing this prose style, Burgelin writes that it "neutralizes our
imagination," so that as the sentences approach a zero degree of writing,
we end up with a new mobilization of attention at the very moment of
boredom and stillness (195-201). The result is that, in a sort of recursive
feedback between text and reader, the objects named slow us down, and
we linger over them until at some limit they suddenly take on a certain
mobility or "life" of their own. The many lengthy series of descriptive
inventories in Perec's texts converge, then, in an effect that conjures things
before us only to "derealize" them (Burgelin's coinage).
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If we follow this textual effect further through the recursive loop of a
reader's ongoing experience with and knowledge of the text, we can see
how Life A User's Manual exerts its arresting powers in different stages.
Benoit Peeters argues that the surface of Perec's text as a puzzle slows us
down in reading in three ways: the uninformed reader wonders what
could have possessed Perec to gather the contents of the text; the reader
tracks down a constraint in an external source; the reader's "euphoria"
from this discovery leads him or her to mistake this secret for the text
"itself" (178-92). This conflation of transcription (from list to text) with
translation (as if this transcription were the "meaning" of the puzzle piece)
covers over or compensates for the intractable stillness of the mute objects
Perec assembles and collects in his pages. In effect, the reader who engages
in Perec's games in an attempt to give meaning to these mute objects by
tracing them from finished puzzle-text to their lists of "origin" finds not a
secret meaning but only the traces of the self-explanatory "displacement"
from list to puzzle. The object as list member betrays only an insignificance; it is itself after all. As Rosset writes, the genetic code and other
ostensible "secret" texts
bear witness to an identicalsilencecomingfrom the real, to an identical
monotony.The real is speakingbut emits only one sound (monostonos),
issues only a singlemeaning.(19)
Unending Recursive Processes
We thus come full circle in the recursive loop of reading: whether we
linger over objects as they are described in the text or treat them as puzzle
pieces whose sources we must track down in arbitrarylists and constraints,
we end on a similar plane of monotony, of a real without a message. Our
retracing Perec's steps is a form of copying; but the copy, while not identical to the original, entangles us in the same plane of insignificance. Magne
observes that the text-puzzle engages the reader in
... an intenseactivityof markingandof constructingan equivalent(butnot
identical,hicjacetlepus!)to thatwhich the writerhas unfoldedin orderto
patientlyweavehis networkof signs.(1990,23,my translation)
If we accept Rosset's notion of the real, then the texture of Perec's text
provides a copy of it, which we in turn copy again in decoding and reassembling it.13 These mutually constitutive and implicated processes
together show how, as Paulson writes,
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. . the relationbetween life and literaturein La Vie moded'emploi. . .
becomes one of neitherrepresentationnor distinction,but ratherone of
mutual referenceand implicationin unendingrecursiveprocesses....
Betweenthe patterningof life and the patterningof fiction,thereis never
identity,but alwaysstructuralcontinuity.Thenovelis simultaneouslyLife
and User'sManual.(335)
The terms Paulson uses to describe the relations between life and text
identify two opposed but complementary aspects of the dynamics of
Perec's form; on the one hand, an entangled relationship across different
levels that generates "unending recursive processes"; on the other, a
universal "structural continuity." These terms mark a contrast between a
recursive feedback loop where relations flow from bottom-up to top-down
and back again, and a more static analogy in terms of form. To show how
these apparently opposed aspects of formal dynamics are related, we can
first examine the strange loop implicitly produced in the preceding
analysis of copying, and then connect that loop to the form of LifeA User's
Manual.
In initially examining the grainy particulars, the endless objects of
Perec's text, we tacitly assume that the lists shape the texture of the narrative, and we track these objects as they become "derpalized"until we arrive
at the "displacement" of discrete pieces into the whole. But this displacement, remember, only derives its "meaning" from the whole: as the
preamble states, "the pieces [in a puzzle] are readable, take on sense, only
when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing." And in fact,
"the element's existence does not precede the whole," as we forget when
reading the text as the obligatory enumeration of lists, "but the pattern
determines the parts." We flip from bottom-up lists and detail to topdown determinate pattern.
So what is the pattern that determines the disposition of parts in LifeA
User's Manual? Taking the question at a functional level, the components
from the lists are distributed by the knight's itinerary and its route through
the mathematical structures that designate which objects appear in chapters. The act of fulfilling the discrete obligations of the cahiersdes charges,
then, crosses over into the continuous route of the narrator through the
rooms and the smooth surface of the narrative through the chapters. The
strange loop of formal invention threads the bottom-up schema whereby
the lists assign contents to be included and the top-down pattern of the
knight's route that distributes the textual components designated by the
lists.
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The knight's itinerary is more than a sequence of discrete moves from
one space to the next. The knight is singular in chess because it is the only
piece with a two-dimensional move. The knight's itinerary does not just
aim to connect the dots, to touch each space, but in its irregular move it
actively alters the texture of the space it is traversing. In conceptual terms,
this itinerary constitutes what Deleuze and Guattari call a "nomadic trajectory": while "the points determine paths" in a nomad's life,
... theyarestrictlysubordinatedto thepathstheydetermine.... A pathis
alwaysbetweentwo points,but the in-betweenhas takenon a directionof
its own. Thelife of the nomadis the intermezzo.Eventhe elementsof his
dwellingareconceivedin termsof the trajectorythatis forevermobilizing
them.(380)
This definition translates neatly into the terms of Perec's text, for it is as if
"the dwelling"-the building in Perec's texts-does not precede the book
as a place to be represented, but is generated as the knight's itinerary
distributes textual components into a complex literary matrix.
The dwelling as pure matrix renders it a network of signs whose
connections are determined by combinatoric rules. Citing both the game of
chess and Oulipian texts as examples, Sydney Levy posits that in a system
of this kind,
... theremust be a multitudeof "centers"or nodal points in which the
aleatorycombinationsoccur;the points surroundthemselveswith networks (the combinations)that are not particularto them but sharedwith
otherpoints.(1981,16)
The routes through a space where points cease to mark stable origins but
become nodes in a network have a different effect on the system as a whole.
In Deleuze and Guattari's constellation of tropes, a nomadic trajectory
"may follow trails or customary routes." But in doing so, it
... distributespeople ... into an open space, one that is indefiniteand
.... Itis a veryspecialkindof distribution,one without
noncommunicating
divisioninto shares,in a spacewithoutbordersor enclosure.(380)
LifeA User'sManual would seem to belie this description, for its narrative distribution proceeds within a meticulous set of divisions: open a
chapter in a room, zoom in on objects, open out into a tale, wind back into
the room. Yet at the level of the poly-graphic knight's trajectory, these
divisions do not mark borders or enclosures: the knights's move transgresses linear boundaries; each move along the trajectory is a new distribution
of components, so that each of these discrete locations has its own motley
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texture within the building-text. In the non-mimetic dimension where the
knight's trajectory unfolds,
. . each arrangement,each configurationof the pieces, each "network"
constructsa new reality,a new order,thatdisruptsthe precedingarrangementand will itselfbe destroyedby the followingmove.(Levy1981,19)
Thinking through the dynamics of Perec's narrative itinerary more generally, we would see the shifting of ensembles or collections of components as
a process of qualitative change within an evolving form.14
Vertiginous Self-Refeience
If we model the knight's itinerary as a spatial trajectory, we could
imagine it as an evolving ensemble, a thickly braided weave of 42 strands.
Here the representation of form transposes the multidimensional phasespace of chaos modelling into a kind of "constraint space." The way in
which images, themes and characters in the text are always self-reflexive
reveals the work's impulsion continually to fold its unfolding back into
itself, to perform what in chaos is termed the Baker transformation. This
self-reflexiveness is epitomized and itself described in "the fifty-first chapter"-a unique designation that arouses the reader's curiosity; using the
cahiersdes charges,we discover that the square for chapter 51 designates the
components 5,1 on the first bi-Latin square, the list for position and activity. This self-reflexive numbering then selects standing and painting
from that list, and in the chapter Valene stands at his canvas painting the
building. Or rather, he is painting the book's portrait: as each paragraph
evokes Valene painting himself painting the picture, facet after facet of the
work described dearly also refer to Perec's project and its reception. The
reader who has just solved the "fifty-first"mystery finds his or her tracks
already covered: in Valene's work, the artist's self-portrait will be "a signature to be read by initiates," found only "thanks to chance cross-reference,
or by comparing the picture with the preparatory sketches ... just as when
reading a book you come across sentences you have read before somewhere else" (226). This chapter acts as the ur-fold of the book: the midpoint that enacts the production of the entire text, the self-reflexiveness of
its production mirrored by Valene's self-portrayal in the picture of the
building; the text's form as a whole reproduced by the compendium, a list
that contains smatterings of all the other chapters. The compendium
marks this chapter as the book's soul: in the lines exactly sixty spaces long
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of the compendium, the letters a-m-e [ame = soul] successively travel from
the sixtieth space to the first. (The omission of the last line, which would
begin with "e," is Perec's auto-referential ploy, an allusion to La Disparition.)
More than a formal self-description, Valene's characterization of his
own signature also defines the emotion induced by Perec's vertiginous
self-reference. Following all these self-embedded layers down to their
foundation ends in the silence emanating from the insignificance of the
reader's fitting the piece in, or tracking these layers: In Valene's own
conception of his work, the quality "a bit special" about the artist turns out
to be "a greater blankness," one that produces a feeling of "a certain
gentleness, joy tinged perhaps with nostalgia" (226). Like what Rosset
calls "joyful cruelty," Perec's written texture leaves us without a fundamental meaning or motivation, but is not devoid of a specific affective
impact either.
The process by which the text continually folds back into itself can be
traced in much broader strokes as well. We have seen how the puzzle
provides both thematic continuity and structural principle for LifeA User's
Manual, as if we are being told that we are holding a puzzle of our own to
solve. Similarly, different lines of plot and tales have parallel themes or
types, and the characters and their roles become avatars of the game being
played by the author: there are virtuoso champions (the cycing champion
Lino Margay, the incredible memory of Leon Marcia, the Danglars, a fantastic thieving couple); artists (Valene, Winckler, Grifalconi); people involved in a search or quest (Appenzzell's desire to track a tribe, the
archaeologist Beaumont's excavations for a lost city, Dinteville's exhaustive cassification system). These images converge in a portrait of the
virtuoso artist searching for an elusive place or object; but this picture also
has a darker side: the sense of revenge felt in Winckler's obsessive traps for
Bartlebooth, that blind and eventually kill him, in Sven Ericcson's tracking
down Elizabeth Breidel for years because she let his baby drown in a tub.
Other motifs convey the sense also that art as Perec practices it is a mere
imitation, a copy-embodied in fake objects (the Very Holy Vase Sherwood purchases) or plagiarisms (LeBran-Chastal's publication of
Dinteville's life-work under his own name). In short, Perec's freely lifting
the work of others, inscribing texts and images of the world into his pages,
become processes given form in the book.
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Deleuzian Multiplicities
Tracing these different modes of formal production and self-reflexive
inscription ultimately leads to a desire to conceptuali7e the book's form in
an encompassing fashion. The text's network of potentially infinite connections (the recursive text as inexhaustible play) can be thought of as a
multiplicity in the specific sense of Deleuze and Guattari. They conceive of
multiplicities as forms always in transformation, for a multiplicity "has
neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in
nature" (8). These constitutive trajectoriesof multiplicities are its "lines of
flight," and as each line of flight unfurls, it folds back into the multiplicity
as one of its dimensions. In terms of Perec's text this dynamic describes
how the introduction of a new character, story, or component ends in its
being enfolded into the texture of the net-work.
We can then translate the concept of multiplicity into an even more
formalized language, for multiplicities display the characteristics of a fractal. Like fractal graphics, multiplicities reveal both the aspect of a twodimensional image and a layered quality enfolded into a surface. As
Deleuze and Guattari write:
All multiplicitiesare flat, in the sense that they fill or occupy all their
of multiplicities,
dimensions:we will thereforespeakof a planeofconsistency
even thoughthe dimensionsof this "plane"increasewith the numberof
connectionsthataremadeon it.
Deleuze and Guattari then map the idea of multiplicity onto the domain of
literature:
Theidealfora bookwouldbe to lay everythingouton a planeof exteriority
of this kind, on a single page, on the same sheet:lived events, historical
determinations,
concepts,individuals,groups,socialformations.(9).
This standard reminds us of the remarkable range of registers constantly
sounded in LifeA User'sManual.
If we think of Life A User's Manual as a fractal text, the "single page"
metaphor makes some sense. Like the self-similarity across scale in a
fractal, each episode, every thematic line, every character contains in some
way the imprinted form of the whole, a structural principle that obtains
across many different scales of the book. Not all these scales exist on the
same level of abstraction; the text presents a hierarchy of levels in terms of
its contents, from single constraints and episodes up to the unfolding tale
of Bartlebooth. But it is a fractal hierarchy in that upper and lower levels
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refract one another. As David Bohm and F. David Peat put it, fractals
suggest "a new notion of hierarchy, in which the more general principle is
immanent, that is, actively pervading and indwelling" (164). The notion of
fractal hierarchy thus carries an internal paradox of sorts, as it is a spatial
construct that contains both a series of embedded levels (scales) and a
formal principle that cuts across them (scaling).15
Having reduced Life A User's Manual to the sheen of a shape on a
computer screen, I hasten to reiterate its reproduction of the real, and the
recursive relation it engenders between 'life" and "literature." We could
term this form of fiction a kind of second-order mimesis, where the selfreferentiality of the text runs so deeply that it becomes mimetic of nothing
but itself. While it might initially seem that a book so heavily dependent
on copying other books and things would be mimetic in some fashion, we
traced the fundamental difference between copying and imitation: copying something into a narrative is a literalization of imitation, an operation
that, when utilized in Perec's ludic, strategic way, renders the copy opaque. For the copy ceases altogether to be one, or rather never instantiates
itself as one in the first place. Instead, the transcription of the copy accomplishes a "displacement": just as displacement marks the operation
where a piece is finally fit (back into) its proper place, so too does displacement characterize the puzzlemaker's lifting of "originals" to use as pieces
in the puzzle-text. The play of copying then becomes a re-creation of form
at a further level.16
III. The Texture of the Virtual and the Emergence of Sense
Playing off the Oulipian signature of "potential literature," we may
locate this second-order mimesis in the domain of the virtual. The computer revolution has made the virtual a place of experimentation and
innovation; mathematics, via the computer workstation, is an experimental
science, and simulation locates itself as a third term between theory and
experiment (Weissert 1992). The play and invention of forms in virtual
space takes on a different life of its own, though, as the desire to lay hands
on a synthetic origin or simulate morphogenesis is given literal representation in what appears as a concrete practice. Chris Langton, organizer
of the first conferences on Artificial Life, expresses a goal to "build models
that are so lifelike they would cease to be models of life and become
examples of life themselves" (cited in Doyle, 224). This drive to reach an
origin of life also implicitly informs Boutot's portrayal of the invention of
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forms in the sciences. In justifying the larger philosophical significance of
the scientific models of morphogenesis, Boutot speaks of the nearly
"ethereal" realm that science enters. Boutot sees the practitioners involved
as a "new genre" of scientists and thinkers who place themselves in "an
intermediate zone," a "sort of in-between," in which they seek to engage
the "humus of the living world, the ultimate source of sense" (14; my
translation).
The rhetoric of discovery or invention in the sciences takes on this
absolutist tinge all too quickly, for in manipulating parameters of artificial
life worlds or models of morphogenesis, the scientist may feel that he/she
pulls the strings of the sense of the world itself. Richard Doyle shows how
the rhetoric of artificial life reveals a desire to discover an essence of life
that could be deployed in automata, while the human genome project is
driven by an ideology of mastery, the dream to control the gene that
contains the essential mechanics of life (Doyle 1993). In these discourses,
rhetorical encodings, what Doyle calls certain discursive "softwares," serve
to collapse the virtual cyberspace onto the real rather seamlessly. The
contrast we find in turning to literary experimentation by Oulipians is that,
rather than feeling they control the grounds or originary humus of things,
they engage in activities whose byproduct is this sticky sense of things.
And, of course, the recursive text implicates the reader in the taking apart
of the puzzle and reassembling it as the textual network, so that the "other"
serves continually to refigure the limits of the formal invention.
We have seen different ways in which "potential literature" unfolds in
this virtual realm, from the games with parameters and constraints to the
recursive play of the text with the reader. Through these processes, the
"potential" form of literature unfolds as a specific way in which language
comes to function, and behind which we can sense two very different
dimensions of language at work. For potential literature, as seen in Perec's
novel, combines an in-forming pattern, a logic or plan with which the
"puzzle" is executed, and an immersion in the minute, the most opaque
workings of words-letter combinations, lists of things, the names of all
kinds of things, what Perec called "the inner mechanism of poetry" (cited
in Magn6 1986, 63; my translation).
These two inflections of potential literature create a combinatoric
matrix generating a web of connections that spreads out from the recursive
text. It is only at the level of a second-order mimesis that the potential
plane reproduces the real: the texture of a text's multiplicity resulting from
its play-not the writer's formal machinations alone-is what generates
the texture of the real. Jacques Bens puts this matter clearly:
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If one beginsto considerthatpotentiality,
morethana techniqueof composition,is a certainway of conceivingthe literaryobject,it would perhapsbe
allowed that the idea of potentialityopens into a perfectly authentic
modem realism. Sincerealityneverrevealsmorethana partof its totality,
it therebyjustifiesa thousandinterpretations,
significationsand solutions,
all equallyprobable.(citedin Thomas,20)
Sense: Occupying the Space of "Displacement"
The link between the potentiality of literature and the virtual domain
can be made through Deleuze's thought, where the reality of the virtual
plays itself out in language on the "plane of sense." Sense designates both
the sense of a proposition or statement that precedes it, and what is expressed by the proposition. Sense does not exist apart from expressions in
which it is contained; thus "we cannot say that sense exists, but rather that
it inheres or subsists" (1990, 21). In itself, then, sense is the independent
dimension of difference between the informing sense of the expression and
its outgoing or resultant sense. Sense thus circulates in a recursive loop
within language along a moebius strip-like dimension of its own. Sense is
a condition of truth or form of possibility of language; while signification
potentially slides along a play of differences, sense is the linguistic
equivalent to a subject's informing ground on which to predicate statements (1990, 18). Sense thus precedes the linguistic unit. Yet sense simultaneously issues from what is expressed by language, as the sense of
utterances. Like the writer as both "instrument and product of the writing
process," the plane of sense inheres as both the condition and result of
language.
Translated into the linguistic operations we have traced in Perec,
Deleuzian sense occupies the space of "displacement," an abrupt shift of an
opaque shape into its proper place in a surface. Similarly, Deleuze identifies sense as a displacement that connects two heterogeneous series (1990,
39-41). The way in which sense inheres as a connective plane nested between different dimensions in language clarifies the function ascribed to
the itinerary of Perec's knight. The knight's path, as it touches all places,
collects all the list components as it goes; it also distributes them onto the
multiplicity-form of the text that is in constant transformation. The knight
occupies a middle plane: gathering the scattered particulars up, and putting them down in an intricate pattern. This distribution combines the
codes of formal constraints with the various cinamen that perturb these
algorithms. As Magne points out, Perec's writing operates between the
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material signifiers of constraints and an obligation to make sense with
respect to a signified domain, so that just as "the world is born in the
deviation in an atom's trajectory, the same holds true for the constraint;
sense appears with the timely perturbation of a deterministic ensemble"
(1986, 66, 68; my translation). The nomadic distribution traces the circulation of sense in Deleuze's writing as well, for a nomadic distribution embodies a definitive paradox of sense (1990, 75).
"Structure is the Reality of the Virtual"
In Deleuze's work, there is an analogy between the relationship of
sense to language and the virtual to the real. The virtual, he argues, "is not
opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality itself." This reality subsists in
thought; "the virtual... is the character of the Idea;" or, in different terms,
"structure is the reality of the virtual" (1968, 272, my translation). The
virtual, in short, is the space in which forms are figured as qualitative
objects or tools. The difficulty in thinking through the virtual is that "its
process is actualization"-i.e., taking shape. However, as with the disparity between the puzzle-design and a single piece (or simple equations
and fractal forms), the actualized form does not allow one to infer the
virtual plane from which it took shape. Similar to the "displacement" that
etches the place of sense, Deleuze stipulates that the "actualization of the
virtual is always done by difference, divergence ... Never do the actual
terms resemble the virtuality they actualize" (1968, 273; my translation).
Analogously, sense "does not merge at all with the proposition, for it has
an objective which is quite distinct. What is expressed has no resemblance
to the expression" (1990, 21).
The virtual and sense both emerge as substantive or opaque dimensions, at once already embedded in the real and something formed by an
immanent process, like the lines of flight that continually transform a
multiplicity. In LifeA User'sManual, this broad dynamic is expressed in a
striking trope-the strange object that Grifalconi gives Valene. At first, the
painter thinks it is "a large cluster of coral." But it turns out that Grifalconi
took the worm-eaten base of an antique table, and filled its "innumerable
ducts and microscopic channels" with a lead/alum mixture. When this
failed to make the table usable, he dissolved the wood "so as to disclose the
fabulous arborescence within": the resultant object is
... a static, mineral accumulation of all the movements that had constituted
theirblind existence,theirundeviatingsinglemindedness,theirobstinate
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81
of all theyhad eatenanddigestedas
itineraries;the faithfulmaterialization
theyforcedfromtheirdensesurroundingstheinvisibleelementsneededfor
their survival,the explicit,visible,immeasurabledisturbingimage of the
endless progressionsthathad reducedthe hardestof woods to an impalpablenetworkof crumblinggalleries.(123)
The passage recapitulates the text's very process of formal invention: hidden inside a containing shell, like the text encased in the building, we find
the "accumulation" of Perec's knight-narrator's movements as it consumes
("eats" and "digests") the lists. The solidity of the world, as it is consumed
into text, is transformed into the fine dust, minute particulate details and
rarefied consistency of this "impalpable [textual] network."
However, rather than hardening into a "static, mineral accumulation"
as a gluey mixture does when it dries, this impalpable network remains an
incorporeal sense inhering on the plane of potential literature. The routes
through the network are not fixed, as the virtuality of the text only actualizes itself in the forms that it takes in the minds of readers. Calvino points
to this virtual quality in his memo on "Multiplicity," where Life A User's
Manual provides his ultimate example. He characterizes the contemporary
novel as "an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and above all as a
network of connections between the events, the people, and things of the
world" (1988, 105). But he notes that
... what tendsto emergefromthe greatnovelsof the twentiethcenturyis
the idea of an open encyclopedia,an adjectivethatcertainlycontradictsthe
noun encyclopedia,which etymologicallyimplies an attemptto exhaust
knowledgeof the world by enclosingit in a circle. But today we can no
longer think in terms of a totalitythat is not potential,conjectural,and
manifold.(1988,116).
One can easily imagine LifeA User'sManualbeing classified as another
modernist work that seeks to write the "total book." But though this novel
claims to be about "life," it also remains a pre-text, a "user's manual." The
encyclopedia is an open text; its desire to catalogue and enumerate creates
a potential totality. The totality of the encyclopedia is, in its contemporary
avatar, but a fallen version of the absolute or infinite. As Brian Rotman
puts it, "what before was the smooth-running mathematics of the infinite
becomes replaced by the unfathomable complexity of a rewritten finite."
But as a result,
... the "finite"is itselftransmogrified:whatis "finite"dissolvesinto what
is or can be broughtinto being;it becomesa part,a precondition,a consequenceof ... the fragile,contingent,and disaster-proneconditionof all
humanbecomingand all significationin whichthis becomingtakesplace.
(157-58)
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Thus the itinerary of what previously we would have experienced as a
metaphysical desire, folds back on itself. The final inflection I would like
to give this condensed sketch of the invention of forms is the way that its
recombinatoric play generates a distinct texture, down to the graininess of
things. The different ways that forms appear in this paradigm change their
texture-from the virtual sheen of fractal graphics to the strings of information in molecular biology. Though also rendered in a virtual language,
in literature this texture ultimately settles as a fine dust, the little things in
"life." A passage that crystallizes my "sense" of Life A User's Manual is
found when Valene ruminates on "the tranquil life of things": he thinks
... of cartonsof books,of the harshlight of barebulbsswingingon their
wires,of the slow installationof furnitureand objects,of the slow adaptation of the body to space, that whole sum of minute, nonexistent, untellable
events-choosing a lampstand, a reproduction, a knickknack,placing a tall
rectangular mirrorbetween two doors... -all those infinitesimal gestures
in whichthe life of a flatis alwaysmostfaithfullyencapsulated... (128)
Irvine/LosAngeles
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NOTES
1. Calvino defines this other level as the unconscious, and traces the relationship
between the unconscious and artistic activity in the work of Ernst Kris. A more
powerful and perhaps appropriate link between combinatoric matrices and the unconscious is found in Anton Ehrenzweig's notion of "unconscious scanning," which
probes different disjunctive, virtual matrices co-existing in the creative process, and
finds a route through them to form.
2. I have explored the central role of the dinamen as a concept and trope in
Calvino's work elsewhere. See Harris 1990.
3. For an overview of uses of the clinamen in criticism and poetics from
Lucretius to Harold Bloom, see Motte, "ClinamenRedux."
4. Bernard Magne's work has provided French readers with many studies of
Perec's formal conception, while David Bellos's biography GeorgesPerec:A Life in
Words(Harvill, 1993) only just came out as this essay was completed. Rather than
trying to incorporate Bellos's book too quickly, I have let the essay stand on its own.
5. Bartlebooth's name itself is a portmanteau word, a crossing of Melville's
motionless Bartlebyand Larbaud'srestless traveller Barnabooth;portmanteau words
are one of the linguistic operations exploited in Oulipo's investigations.
6. While Perec recorded these four formal figures in "QuatreFigures pour La Vie
mode d'emploi,"Magn6 (1985) derives a fifth figure for the novel from which the
bi-Latin squares can be generated.
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7. For a thorough investigation of the large significance of the W in Perec's work,
especially its associations with lost childhood and a lost Jewish culture, see Motte,
"Embellirles lettres."
8. Paulson points out that while high modernist literature demands that one
notes and is familiar with such allusive ploys as "a prerequisite to inteApleting an
otherwise incoherent or undecidable text," Perec's intertextuality "could be said to be
non-threatening, non-exclusionary" (325).
9. For an original, sustained exploration of the "allergies of reading" found in
the history of rhetoric surrounding the genetic code, see Doyle 1993, Ch. 4.
10. If the formal aspect of the fit of the piece is insignificant, however, Perec's
depiction of the power struggle that permeates and surrounds the puzzle-solving
game reminds us that if there is no "meaning"to cracking the code, there are immense
issues of power involved. This struggle is played out in the obsessive confrontation
between Winckler and Bartlebooth, "that ponderous business of two senile
monomaniacs churning over their feigned histories and their wretched traps and
snares" (220) which eventually kills both men.
11. Noreiko (1984, 151) uses a remark of Charles Bernheimer on Flaubert to
describe this facet of Perec's text: "'it does not so much invent as re-produce ... to
write without disturbing the harmony of the already given.'"
12. Perec's neutral mode of inscription verges on mathematical expression. For
a treatment of how mathematics depends on "real"readers to do the calculations the
text enjoins them to carry out, and the implications of this phenomenon, see Rotman
1993.
13. Here I am arguing for a different set of semantic relations in Oulipian work
than is usually perceived. Levy (1988, 159) finds that "Oulipo wants to move away
from the real, using the oulipisms, permutations incuded, as a vehicle for achieving a
distance from the real." I rather align Perec with how, Lvy sees the work of Pongewhich he casts as a foil to OuLiPo: in a move to "transmitthe real through language,"
Ponge's "permutationbecomes a way to transmit the complexity of the real." Levy of
course is not considering Perec's novel in this context, but more rigorous formal
games of permutation.
14. Perec's text, seen in this way, plays out an internal dynamic explored in the
1973 Changede Formecolloquium at Cerisy, whose "Biology and Prosody" volume
opens with a talk by Oulipian Jacques Roubaud that models change as reconfigurations of elements in collections (see Faye and Roubaud 1975).
15. The fabric from which fractal hierarchies are cut is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as "smooth space," a space that does not precede that which occupies it,
but has a dimensionality identical with what fills it. There is a continuous variation or
direction in smooth space; no orienting tangent can be calculated, so that the space
unfolds in a continuous patchwork traversed by a logic of local connections.
16. This dynamic where play, copying and re-creationconverge is performed in
Levy's "Oulipo-critique." See his Post-Scriptum, where he notes that to analyze
Oulipian products entailed adapting these methods, and so his essay "reorganized
itself to the image of the very thing it was studying and became, itself (and I, with it),
a chimera" (1988, 160). In doing so, one notes, it becomes a chimera of the chimera
Borges creates in "Borges and I," whose unmistakable echo is heard in Levy's conclusion.
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