La vie mode d'emploi: mode d'emploi

Orbis Litterarum (l984), 39, 148-159

La vie mode d’emploi: mode d’emploi Stephen E Noreiko, University of Hull, England

Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi is a fascinatingly dense, wide-ranging, and allusive novel. The article looks at some aspects of this richness of texture, paradoxically generated from an arbitrary mathematical structure, and suggests that the novel, with its deliberate contradictions, is, fittingly, an account of the process of reading.

There is no doubt that Georges Perec’s La vie mode d’emploi’ tells a fascinating story.* It tells in fact over a hundred of them, of varying lengths, sometimes recounted in one chapter, sometimes strung out over several, interlaced with strands of other stories, sometimes merely hinted at, sug- gestions of a mystery hanging over the explicit text. Such are the love of Serge Valkne for Marguerite Winckler, or the vengeance which Gaspard Winckler exacts of Bartlebooth. And for these tantalising enigmas, there are never unique solutions. The W sketched by the last piece of the last puzzle attempted by Bartlebooth may be Winckler’s signature, and the X shape of the gap where it should go may represent the unknown quantity, but X and W can be reconciled in another way? the dead Serge Valkne’s forearms crossed on his breast (p. 602)“ form an X, but the arms from shoulder to wrist also make a W

The book’s title similarly will not bear a unique interpretation. I have suggested elsewhere that the geometrical and numerological games may point to an infinite number of modes d’emploi:5 scarcely better, and perhaps even worse, than none at all. Almost all the characters in the book devote their lives to a quest, a grail (in the case of James Sherwood, literally), the pursuit of an object, invented, or appointed by fate, but assumed with self-defeating monomaniac determination. ‘Face a I’inextricable incoherence du monde’ (p. 156), their aim is ‘accomplir jusqu’au bout un programme.’ But their quests, their attempts to impose even their own limited order on the chaos, are unsatisfactory paradigms: James Sherwood’s vase is a fake; Bartlebooth never finishes his programme of puzzles (‘il serait fastidieux de dresser la liste des failles et des contradictions que se rkvklkrent dans le projet de

La vie mode d’emploi: mode d’emploi 149

Bartlebooth,’ p. 48 l), nor Valene his painting. And if Sven Ericsson eventually consummates his revenge, it is only at his victim’s pleading (p. 198).

We could of course suppose that the title is ad usum auctoris: of Bart- lebooth’s ‘trois principes directeurs’ (p. 157), the first is applicable to the writing of any novel, the second, as I shall explain, is applicable to this one, and perhaps also, as I have hinted, the third. Moreover, in the account of Winckler’s puzzle rings, puzzles only for their maker, innocent objects once crimped around a semi-precious stone, the stones which seal them shut are inhabited by the ghost of Mallarme: ‘des petites pierres, des agates, des cornalines, des pierres de Ptyx, des cailloux d u Rhin’ (p. 50). But if this is so, it can only be a hocus-pocus, not a God’s truth, solution. The vase which Sherwood pursues is the focal point of an elaborate machination, and it is suggested that Sherwood may have guessed as much: like a docile reader of novels, willingly suspending disbelief, ‘il n’aurait pas payt: pour le vase, mais pour la mise en scene’ (p. 130). Part of the mise en s c h e of the novel is an Index which is comprehensive to the point of including the names of author, literary director, and publisher (as well as the publisher’s address, and a number of other peritextual items). The book thus includes and embraces its own fictionality. As well as listing at the end the titles of (some of) the stories recounted, the novel includes (some of) them in another form within the narrative, as the ‘longue cohorte’ (p. 292)6 of Valene’s characters: once again, the book includes itself, just as Valene ‘se peindrait en train de se peindre’ (p. 291). It should not be forgotten that Vme (like Perec’s Un cabinet d’ama- teur’) is a detailed description of a non-existent painting. The last phrase of the narrative, on the page facing the plan of the building, underlines this: ‘esquisse d’un plan en coupe d’un immeuble qu’aucune figure, dksormais, ne viendrait habiter’ (p. 602).8 The 582 pages of narrative are thus denied, and the massive construction of the book, narrative and apparatus, rests on an imaginary point. This discrepancy is repeated by the chronological scale of the narrative, which covers, as the ‘reperes chronologiques’ (pp. 677-690) confirm, the period 1833-1975, and the importance which is attached to time is underlined by the provision of the chronological table, and also by the fact that two of the central characters, Bartlebooth and Valene (and two of the minor ones, p. 679), were born with the century (Valene’s birth is not in fact recorded in the ‘reperes,’ but we are told, on p. 90, that he was 19 in 1919). But a painting has no dimension of time, and the ‘Compendium’ recognises this: the 179 lines are all interpretable as frozen instants. Accor-

150 Stephen Noreiko

dingly, the narrative of Vme, in spite of its extension in time, reduces also to a point, freezing all the inhabitants and visitors in the building just as they were at shortly before 8 pm on 23 July 1975. The last chapter, recapitulating, shows them all, the woman from the estate agents climbing the stairs, Gilbert Berger taking down the dustbin, Jane Sutton rereading her letter, just as the reader met them in the narrative, the fleeting moment fixed for all time. ‘Je cherche,’ says the epigraph, ‘en m&me temps I’tternel et l’tphtmere’ (p. 596). Bartlebooth is the pivotal character about whom the others turn, and their movement ceases with his death. He dies, a victim (perhaps) of Winckler’s patient cunning, at the same time (given that German occupation time was two hours ahead of French standard time), and on the same date, though 32 years later, as the German general, victim of Joseph Htbert’s bullet (perhaps). What is certain is that both are victims of the author’s imagination.

If imagination be the right word. Perec was an avowed admirer of Flaubert, and as the master, so the pupiLg Charles Bernheimer says of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, ‘one is amazed to learn that every one of these bizarre creatures derives from either a textual or a graphic original.’1° Perhaps the most bizarre of Perec’s creatures is ((Hortense)), originally Sam Horton, a guitarist who changed sex and achieved fame as a female singer. The original is the hero of Theodore Sturgeon’s The Dreaming Jewels,” Horton, later known as Sam Horton, and also a guitarist. An outcast, mutilated, runaway child, Horton is hidden under the disguise of a girl, using the name Hortense; later, the grown-up Sam Horton assumes woman’s shape to re-enact the mutilation.

Perec acknowledges (p. 695) debts to 31 authors (duly mentioned in the Index, although for Thomas Mann no page number is given).12 Some of the borrowings are substantial and easy to recognise: thus, for example, the description of Dinteville’s ancestor (p. 78), and the incantation (pp. 387-388) are too obvious to require comment. Others are transposed and modified. The picture on the wall of Dr Dinteville’s waiting room (p. 268) shows two consecutive scenes from Queneau’s Pierrot mon ami’ (pp. 6G61: in the original Pierrot drinks white wine, not beer, and his scores, on a machine giving a free game for 15,000, range from 16,000 to 31,000; the scores in Perec’s version are taken from Pma pp. 8-9). Another episode from the same novel (chapter 7, pp. 160 ff.) appears, with some modification, as a postcard of Saint-Moukzy-sur-Eon (p. loo),’ while Pierrot’s occupations (pp. 47-48) are copied by Lton Marcia (p. 228), who also owes his job to Le Vol d’lcare


(p. 119). Passing mentions of Ltonie Prouillot, Luigi Voudzoi, the cat Petit- Pouce15 and the fox-terriers trained to do back somersaults (p. 585) are echoes of Pma, as are Bernard Lehameau and Mrs (sic) Weeds of Un rude hiver. A weights and measures inspector from Bordeaux recalls Le dimanche de la vie, and Julia’s mercerie is attributed to a certain Vtra, though it has been shifted to Palinsac, one of the settings for Pma. Le Chiendent (p. 79) contributes a list of domestic implements (Vme p. 62). Exercices de style, Zazie dans le Mktro, and Les Fleurs bleues are hinted at by the 84 bus (p. 272), the outlandish word forestiires (p. 360: the word is ProvenCal for ‘foreign’), and the container ‘de camping pour campeurs’ (p. 105). The borrowings, then, vary in substance from considerable (16 lines indented and italicised) to the very slightest (the 84 is the most obvious route), but col- lectively they form a dense web of allusion. They are not in fact limited to the authors Perec acknowledges explicitly. Shakespeare, for instance, is also a contributor: what is depicted by the painted plate called ‘une mauvaise farce’ (p. 317) is the murder of Hamlet’s father; Sven Ericsson’s delayed vengeance recalls one of the themes of the play; the painting ‘Un rat derrihre la tenture’ alludes to Polonius behind the arras, and the same courtier lends his name to a domino-playing hamster, while there are a number of Ger- trudes. There is also a Yorick, though he is said to be an English tragedian, author of a play whose plot is the well known medieval story of the man with two wives. The fellow of infinite jest would appear to be Perec himself.

To quote once again Bernheimer’s remarks on Flaubert: ‘it inscribes itself in a space already occupied by a textual collectivity, it does not so much invent as re-produce (...) Reliance on the library allows him (...) to write without disturbing the harmony of the already given’ (work cited, p. 100; my italics). The imaginary rue Simon-Crubellier inscribes itself in a space already occupied by existing streets (p. 20), and this comment applies equally well to Perec and Vme: a project, like Bartlebooth’s, complete and coherent in itself, arbitrary though subject to the necessity of its arbitrarily adopted rules, a fiction inscribed within a fiction, and drawing on other fictions, a book which ‘se referme sur lui-mEme sans laisser de traces’ (p. 481). I suggest that Perec has realised Flaubert’s famous ambition.

I have indicated summarily how Perec incorporates material from just a few of his many sources. As if to underline his borrowings, the book dwells frequently and with insistence on the themes of transposition and insertion: itself a book based on an imaginary painting, it accumulates accounts of

152 Stephen Noreiko

paintings and sculptures based on books, stories based on paintings, stories within stories, pictures within pictures.16 It also levels out the perspective which might differentiate them. In the ‘Compendium’ (pp. 292-298), for example, number 43 is not on the same plane as the other characters, but embedded in the Journal de Tintin (pp. 459-468; for the attribute, see p. 460) being read by a minor character whose only function is to read this magazine; 91 is the scene shown by a photograph in a paper under the arm of an equally minor character (p. 332); 153 is a picture on the wall of the Louvet apartment (p. 457), while 154 is a figment of Isabelle Gratiolet’s imagination (p. 489); 177 appears (in this book, that is) on Winckler’s bahut (p. 47), and 100, though in fact a character of considerable importance by her action, is only seen (p. 394) painted on the lid of an old biscuit tin.

Insofar as such a complex and voluminous book is about any one thing in particular, it is about puzzles and the difficulties of solving them: jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, detective stories, riddles, codes, and problems of the kind Perec used to set for the magazine ca m’intkresse. Even the apparently frivolous cards (pp. 303-304) are examples of reinterpretation and re- combination. One of the coded messages taken down by Olivier Gratiolet comes from Le Mystere de la Chambre Jaune.” The book is pieced together from fragments, and the discussion of jigsaw puzzles which serves as the introduction, though it actually fits elsewhere in the book (pp. 248-251), concludes with a paragraph (pp. 18, 251) equally applicable to the reading of novels - ‘ce n’est pas un jeu solitaire’.’* Perec contrives to put the reader in the same situation as Bartlebooth, when, in the discussion of the traps Winckler sets for Bartlebooth, he quotes as a parallel a particularly vicious clue by Robert Scipion and leaves the reader to wrestle with its intractability (p. 416; few if any readers of Vme will have noticed on a first reading that the solution is given in no 44 of the Compendium, p. 294: 6 and 8 come together again here, as the sum of the digits of page and item numbers). The reader is cast as Bartlebooth, and the author invites him or her to take up the challenge. The Index and the Post-scriptum (p. 695) are to be seen in this light. The quotation from Paul Klee at the head of the Prkambule warns explicitly of what Bartlebooth discovers only by experience about the ‘illusions de Gaspard Winckler’ (p. 415), while the epigraph to the whole book, ‘Regarde de tous tes yeux, regarde,’ is particularly sinister, even for those (like myself) who only know at second hand that it was said to Michel Strogoff just before he was blinded by the white-hot knife blade. The reader


can of course refuse the challenge, and read Vme (if he or she reads it at all) only for its fascinating plethora of stories, in which case the book is analogous to Winckler’s puzzle rings, since, whether or not the reader accepts the assigned role, Perec is (among many others) Winckler: Vme is first and foremost a puzzle for its author, a maze which he set for himself.

The first hints of the nature of the complex logo-rallye on which Perec intended to embark are to be found in the Oulipo volume to which Perec c~ntributed,’~ where Claude Berge talks (pp. 58-61) of a collection of stories projected in collaboration with Jacques Roubaud and Perec, based on a ‘carre bi-latin d’ordre 10.’ A Latin square is a disposition of a given number of characters in the same number of rows and columns such that each character appears once and once only in each row and each column. If another such square can be superposed on the first so that, in addition, each combination of characters is unique, the squares are said to be orthogonal, and the combined square is called a bi-Latin or (since English-speaking mathematicians traditionally use Greek and Latin characters to distinguish the squares) a Greco-Latin (the term used by Queneau) square. In the plan outlined by Berge (who gives an example of a square, that given here, Figure 1, stating it to be one of only two in existence, although there were already hundreds) each row of the square was to represent a story in which ten characters represented by the columns would embody a feature symbolised by the letter of the relevant cell of the square, and perform an action symbolised by the number. To take Berge’s example, if in the figure given, A stands for ‘passionately in love,’ and 0 for ‘does nothing,’ then in the first story (indicated by the top row) Monsieur Demaison (symbolised by the first column) would be madly in love, but do nothing. The project reappears a little later, as Perec’s own, with the title, and with added complications, in Espkces d’espaces,20 where Perec gives three guiding principles: the Greco- Latin square, a ‘pseudo-quenine d’ordre 10’ (evidently a permutation of 10, but this remains to be clarified), and the ‘polygraphie du cavalier.’ The first and last of these are elucidated further in L‘Arc (no 76, particularly p. 52, figures 2 and 3), on which my diagrams and explanation are based.

The ‘polygraphie du cavalier’ is the problem of the knight’s move: to move a knight around a chessboard landing on each square once and once only. The plan of the building given in Vme (p. 603) suggests an underlying 10 x 10 pattern: from cellars to the top attic floor there are ten storeys, and though some of the attics have had the dividing walls removed (Hutting’s atelier was

154 Stephen Noreiko

A 0

H 6

L 5

J 4

B 9

0 8

F 7

1: I

E 2

G 3

G 7

B I

H O

I 6

J 5

c 9

E 8

D 2

F 3

A 4

F 8

A 7

c 2

H I

I 0

5 6

D 9

E 3

G 4

B 5

E 9

G 8

B 7

D 3

H 2

I I

J O

F 4

A 5

C 6

J I

F 9

A 8

c 7

E 4

H 3

I 2

G 5

8 6

D O

I 3

5 2

G 9

B 8

D 7

F 5

H 4

A 6

c o

E l

H 5

I 4

5 3

A 9

C 8

E 7

G 6

B O

D I

F 2

B 2

c 3

D 4

E 5

F 6

G O

A l

H 7

I 9

J B

c 4

D 5

E 6

F O

G I

A 2

B 3

I 8

5 7

H 9

D 6

E O

F I

G 2

A 3

B 4

c 5

J 9

H 8

I 7 Figure 1. A Greco-Latin square.

originally eight attic rooms (p. 62), of which four therefore are visible on the plan, which shows the front elevation cut away), the structure is ten attic rooms wide. Perec’s solution to the problem of the knight’s move on a 10 x 10 board gives the order of the chapters: starting on the left hand side of the staircase, ‘entre le troisidme et le quatridme &age’ (p. 20), that is, on one of the four central cells (the exact centre of the square is a point), the chapters proceed around the plan as shown in Figure 2, which projects Perec’s moves onto the plan from the book. The number of chapters allotted to each zone of the building thus corresponds to the number of squares it occupies on the plan: one for Valdne’s room, two for Cinoc’s flat, three for the empty third floor right, four for Hutting, five for Altamont, six for Rorschash’s duplex (which does not however appear to be symmetrical ...), twelve for the staircase, finishing with Bartlebooth 5 , on the left hand side. The six parts of unequal length into which the book is divided are defined by the same


- 59

91 HILtt ing

~~

84 6 0 96 14 47

Cinoc Dinteville 12 98 81 86 95

G o 1 61 85 13 18 27

Rorschdsll

Bergcr 99 70 ’ 26 8 0 87

Bartlebooth I 88 69 19

125 6 2 A1 tarno n t

7 1 65 20 23 8 9

Madame Moreau

5 ent ree service Marcia Antiquitls Lone

72 64 21 67

I 1 caves 1 chaufferie leaves

Albin orellet Plassaert

Nieto L Rogers JbrSme FreSnel .Breidel Valerie

4 6 5 1

56 4 9 4 4

E Winckler

1 7 s 28

C

79 A 94

L Marquiseaux I 42 29 9 3 3 I

de Beaumont G3 3 4

Louvet 2 90 75 3 9 32

Hall d’entrbe ‘ 4 38

l a 91 7 6 I

machinerie de l’ascenseur I c a v e s I

Figure 2. The knight’s move giving the order of chapters.

knight’s move, each one ending after the knight has touched all the available sides (after chapter 83 the top edge is no longer touchable). Occasional references in the text confirm the knight’s position on the board: chapter 56 (p. 332) is situated outside Dinteville’s door; Madame de Beaumont’s piano- tuner’s grandson sits on the stairs outside the flat (p. 459); chapter 90 (p. 550) presents ‘la portion droite du hall d’entrke de l’immeuble.’

There are of course only 99, not 100, chapters. Perec says (in L‘Arc no. 79), ‘la petite fille de la page 295 et p. 394 en est seule responable.’ This is ‘La petite fille qui mord dans un coin de son petit-beurre Lu’ (Compendium no 100, already mentioned). She appears in the narrative proper at the end of chapter 65, just at the point where the chapter sequence jumps from the first floor apartment of Madame Moreau to the antique shop on the ground floor, without passing through the bottom left hand corner as required by the legitimate move. The petit-beurre thus represents the plan of the building,

I56 Stephen Noreiko

and the chapter corresponding to the square left blank in Figure 2 is missing because the little girl has eaten it.

There is thus a binding constraint governing the order of the chapters, and the only departure from it is determined by an internal necessity. The content of each chapter is determined in a manner equally rigorous. If the two figures are superposed, each move of the knight selects, not only the dwelling to be considered, with its present and previous occupants, but also a unique character combination which can represent, as in the example already discussed, conditions to be met by the chapter in question. Perec’s refinement, as he explained, was to draw up, in his ‘cahier de charges,’ twenty- one paired sets of ten constraints, so that the two characters in each cell designate a total of 42 conditions which the chapter has to meet.

In the figure given here, I have followed the alphanumerical notation (from A0 to J9) used by Berge, which seems to me easier to follow. Perec himself labels his cells using the numbers 1 to 10 twice over, which has the drawback of requiring, when the constraints are to be discussed, the position of the numbers to be specified (a ‘I’ on the left does not designate the same set as a ‘I’ on the right), but has on the other hand the advantage, no doubt capital from Perec’s point of view, of distinguishing the cell representing Valhne’s room by two digits which repeat the chapter number. Hence, for this chapter, the distinctive heading, apparently trivial, ‘comme si cela avait t t t fait comme ga, en passant, un peu par hasard, parce que l’idte en serait venue sans savoir pourquoi (...) comme si cela ne devait &re qu’une signature pour initits’ (p. 290), of LE CHAPITRE LI.

In the Perec issue of LArc, the author reveals the complete list of constraints for one chapter, 23, and the borrowings from Flaubert already referred to extend this list a little further. Even a casual reading of the book reveals other recurrent items dictated by the formal plan: octagons, ashtrays, lists, brands of whisky, crosswords, dreams, culinary lore, quotations. There are in each chapter, we are told, at least two quotations, ‘en des endroits dktermints a I’avance’ (L’Arc no 79, p. 49): Joyce and Verne are quoted in chapter 23, but Verne appears twice (the library, p. 134, is Nemo’s from 20 000 lieues sous les mers, the list of tools is from L‘lle mysthieuse: for the reference, see Vme itself, p. 428; Joyce is represented, p. 137, by the doll’s house, which is from Ulysses). But unfortunately for exegetes, even those of a mathematical bent, the identified or identifiable items do not match in any constant fashion with the constraints indicated by the Greco-Latin square.


Of the chapters quoting Flaubert, for example, 3 corresponds to B4, chapter 20 to E3, chapter 69 to JO, while allusions to Queneau occur for chapters where the constraints are H6, J7, A8. We must await the results of research based on the author’s ‘cahier de charges,’ although I suspect that even then things will not be straightforward. My own conjecture is that although sets of constraints are selected by the characters of the square, the composition of the sets is not constant, but that the elements are permuted between them according to the pseudo-quenine referred to above.

But these are perhaps minor matters. Perec appears to acknowledge this when he concludes the discussion of possible sequences of h6tel labels thus (p. 54): ‘ce n’est pas seulement difficile, ajoutait Winckler, c’est surtout inutile: en laissant les etiquettes en vrac et en en choisissant deux au hasard, on peut Ctre siir qu’elles auront toujours au moins trois points communs.’ What is important, apart from its avoidance of ‘difficult6 altatoire’ (pp. 16, 249), about Vme is its basic tension, which is that of all art (as of life itself, let us not forget the significant title), the tension between freedom and constraint. The closed horizons of the book, the three walls (the faCade has been removed) of a building in a defined place in Paris at one moment of the present time, do not inhibit the wide-ranging scope of the narrative in space and time, and the author, abdicating his authorial choice to the dictates of the maze he has constructed for himself, does not sacrifice his freedom so much as he sheds responsibility. Freed of this charge, his liberty is all the greater. The same could be said of the reader. Once the reader has agreed to read the book, the confines of the armchair and the circle of lamplight are ex- changed for the limitless horizons to which the fixed sequence of pages is the gateway. This is Perec’s (hardly original, but still fascinating) discovery, and it is not surprising that the books which have a particular place in his scheme of writing should include those, like the novels of Jules Verne, which typically open the eyes of the young reader to the panoramic vistas which reading offers, or those, like Sterne and Queneau, who explore the interstices of their medium.

Bartlebooth is a sad figure, travelling the world and seeing nothing, frag- menting his brief glimpses, and eventually, blind and frustrated, falling prey to the craftsman, the demiourgos, in whose clutches he has put himself. I have said that Bartlebooth is the reader, but in the ultimate analysis, Bartlebooth is a negative. Perec’s art, ‘comme dans cette caricature de W. E. Hill qui represente en mgme temps une jeune et une vieille femme’ (p. 415), is to

158 Stephen Noreiko

reverse the polarity, t o make the reader the positive image corresponding to Bartlebooth’s negative. To do this, and to describe himself (describing himself) doing it.

NOTES

1. Hachette, Collection POL, (1978). Vme was awarded the Prix Medicis that year, and has since been published in Livre de Poche (no 5341, 1980). The page numbering of both editions is the same. I give page references in brackets in the text only where they cannot be readily located through the Index.

2. These observations are based on a paper read to the Troika of Hull, Leeds and Sheffield French departments, 14 May 1983. I am grateful to all those who helped me with comments and encouragement.

3. I am indebted to Margaret Atack for this insight. 4. The sum of these digits is 8. Pages whose numbers add up to 8, or are palindromic,

are frequently significant. I refer to my ‘Note on 8 or co’, Quinquereme 6 (1983),

5 . See ‘8 or 00’. In what follows, my debt is to D. A. Williams, who insisted on the importance of quests, and particularly Sherwood’s.

6. This was published separately as a poem (whose metre is based on typographical length, not syllable count: each line is 60 characters long, though quotation marks are not counted): ‘Compendium Libri de Vita et Modo utendi’, PoPsie no 4. See L‘Arc no 76, p. 8. This issue of LArc contains much information about Vme, and my thanks are due to Mireille Ribikre for bringing it to my attention, and to Carole for looking it up.

pp. 102-105.

7. Paris, Balland, 1979. 8. DPsormuis may be ambiguous: because the painter is dead - or because the book

9. See Perec, ‘Emprunts a Flaubert’, LArc no 79, pp. 49-50. 10. Fluubert and Kuflzu: studies in psychopoetic structure (Yale UP, 1982), p. 99 (italics

in the original). My gratitude here is to Rachel Killick for showing me the relevant pages.

1 1 . New York, Greenberg, 1950; published in France as Cristal qui songe (Paris, Hachette, 1952).

12. The Index is not infallible: in my copy there is no page number for Woody Herman either (I am unable to supply one), and an incorrect reference (224 for 225) is given under Veine, La; under Marcia, Clara, XXXIII should read XXXII. In the ‘Rappel’ (p. 691), the ‘Histoire de la cantatrice russe’ should refer to (chapter) 6 not 5. Grutiolet is once misprinted in the plan. There may be other errors, though Beaumont 3 (pp. 181, 698) is not one: the missing ‘Beaumont 2’ is replaced by Breidel, chapter VI.

13. The following works of Queneau (published in Paris by Gallimard) will be referred to (where a paperback edition is mentioned, page references are to this): Le Chiendent (1933; Folio 588, 1974), Le dimanche de la vie (1952), Exercices de style (1947), Les Fleurs bleues (1965), Pierrot mon m i (1942: Folio 226, 1972), Un rude hiver (1939), Le Vol d’lcure (1968), Zuzie duns Ze MPtro (1959).

is finished?


14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Mme Moreau is a native of St-Mouezy (for the origin of the name, see my article in Milunges Garnet Rees (Paris, Minard, 1980), p. 240, n. 14) and the village is thus alluded to several times. The opening of this chapter of Pma is also quoted almost verbatim in Vme, but I admit here that I have been unable to find it again: see below the discussion of the importance of the epigraph to the book, and the quotation from Paul Klee. A voyeur in Perec’s novel: for the importance of voir, voyou, voyeur in Pma, see my article referred to above. See ‘8 or 00’ for mention of some of these. I could add the plagiarising of Dinteville’s work on his medical ancestor, Rorschash’s programmes on identical scenarios, Madame Trevins’ biography of her fictitious nieces, to say nothing of the various pictures and posters which include themselves. First published (according to Petit Robert 2 ) in 1907; the edition I have is Livre de Poche 547-548, 1960. For further consideration of the loneliness of the long distance novel reader, see my ‘Person to person’, French Studies XXXVII (1983), pp. 59-67. On French crosswords, see my ‘Recreation and re-creation’ (cf. Vme, p. 6), Quinquereme, pp. 233-238 and on word games in general, see my book Word Games, in preparation. La Littirature potentielle: creations, re-criations, ricriations (Paris, Gallimard, 1973, Collection Idees, 289). Queneau had earlier raised the topic of the squares in Bords (Paris, Hermann, 1963), p. 35, where he gives the reference to the account by Martin Gardner which may perhaps be found more conveniently in New Mathematical Diversions (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1966), pp. 162-168. Paris, Galilee, 1974, p. 57.

S. F. Noreiko. Born 1943. M.Phil. (University of Southampton). Lecturer in French at the University of Hull. Has published on Chretien de Troyes, the tenses of the Modern French verb, and popular French.

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La vie mode d'emploi: mode d'emploi