Things: A Story Of The Sixties; A Man Asleep (2010) - Plot & Excerpts
A Man Asleep was published in 1967, and translated in 1990. It is about a young man who gives up his examinations, his friends, and his purpose in life. He does as little as possible, wants as little as possible, takes as little interest in life as he can. He is "asleep."[return][return]The interest here is the form of life Perec is trying to imagine. Here are some possibilities, starting with ones I don't think are right:[return][return]1. Because the character does very little, and spends days on end in his tiny garret, it seems to owe its torpor and pessimism to Beckett, especially early Beckett like "Murphy." But Beckett's willful self-paralysis is presented as a condition of life, of living. Here, it's something the narrator has to train himself for, and it's an illness, from which he will finally awaken. (The introduction by David Bellos makes it sound as if it's not likely the character will survive his "hell": but at the end, the narrator has several crucial insights. "You were alone and that is all there is to it and you wanted to protect yourself... But your refusal is futile. Your neutrality is meaningless." A character in Beckett would never "wake up" in that fashion.)[return][return]2. Because the character wanders all around Paris -- the book is practically an inventory of every park, boulevard, and museum in the city -- it is reminiscent of Guy Debord. But I don't think that's right either, because Perec is at pains to say that his character is not a flaneur: he doesn't take any interest in what he sees, and in fact he trains himself not to care. The only two people in the book who attract the narrator's attention are a possibly psychotic man in a park, who does nothing but sit and stare, and the narrator's neighbor in the garret, whom he hears through the wall. This is the opposite of Debord's psychogeographies and his d�rive.[return][return]3. A more plausible source, I think, is Duchamp. The narrator cultivates indifference; he trains himself not to judge, not to care. He has an interest in lack of affect. "Indifference has neither beginning nor end... indifference dissolves language and scrambles the sigs" (p. 185). There's a telling passage in which he's out in the country, looking at a tree. He says he could spend his whole life looking at the tree, "never exhausting it and never understanding it, because there is nothing for you to understand, just something to look at: when all is said and done, all you can say about the tree is that it is a tree; all the tree can say to you is that it is a tree." (p. 153) This isn't especially Duchampian�it is more late-Romantic natural philosophy�but what comes next shows that for Perec, the tree is the opposite of affect: "This is why, perhaps, you never go walking with a dog, because the dog looks at you, pleads with you, speaks to you... You cannot remain neutral in the company of a dog." (p. 154)[return][return]4. I also think Nietzsche's animal is behind some of this. Perec's narrator imagines a life without history, without past or future. Simple, self-evident life, "like a drop of water forming on a drinking tap on a landing, like six socks soaking in a pink plastic bowl, like a fly or a mollusc, like a cow or a snail, like a child or an old man, like a rat." (p. 177) The character is trying to strip himself of human motivations, which means culture, which means history. "To let yourself be carried along by the crowds, and the streets. To walk the length of the embankments... to waste your time. To have no projects, to feel no impatience. To be without desire, or resentment, or revolt." (p. 161)[return][return]As an elective affinity, I'd choose Kenneth Goldsmith. The narrator here reads "Le Monde" every day from five to seven o'clock, and sometimes re-reads entire issues. He reads "line by line, systematically. It is an excellent exercise." (p. 168) But "reading Le Monde is simply a way of wasting, or gaining, an hour or two, of measuring once again your indifference." (p. 169) Perec comes close to the supposedly affectless, rule-bound, rote, non-semantic sort of reading that Goldsmith's books imply. (But which Goldsmith himself completely ignores when he reads: but that's another matter.)[return][return]The book is also interesting for its second-person narration. Perec uses the second-person singular informal French "tu," so that the book sounds, in English, like an inner monologue. But it was not intended that way. This edition has an excellent very brief introduction by David Bellos, which quotes a line from a review by Roger Kleman: "The teller of the tale could well be the one to whom the tale is told� The second person of 'A Man Asleep' is te grammatical form of absolute loneliness, of utter deprivation." In addition a film version that Perec helped make has a woman's voice narrating the young man's life: all this by way of saying the voice isn't the character's inner monologue, but a speech directed to him.
Oh! You Pretty Things"De petits êtres dociles, les fidèles reflets du monde qui les narguait. Ils étaient enfoncés jusqu'au cou dans un gâteau dont ils n'auraient jamais que les miettes."L’écriture de Perec a deux faces, celle d’un scalpel et celle d’un pinceau. Son écriture est à la fois chirurgicale et impressionniste. Il dissèque autant qu’il peint. Et le lire relève autant d’assister à une opération qu’admirer un tableau de maître. Chaque bibelot décrit est un coup de pinceau, chaque chapitre est une précise incision. Et là est toute la puissance de ce roman aussi court que redoutable.L’auteur oulipolien raconte une "histoire", celle d’un couple, Jérôme et Sylvie, mais il construit son récit comme le négatif d’une photographie, en ce sens que les objets, le matériel, la dimension consumériste inhérente à une vision du bonheur, tout ce qui est inerte ou ne devrait pas avoir d’importance, de poids sur une soi-disant intrigue ou sur une quelconque une évolution narrative, tout cela est minutieusement décrit pour mieux mettre à l’air un cœur, des cœurs, façonnés par les choses, justement. Le matériel influe sur les cœurs, et non l’inverse.En peignant les choses du quotidien, les choses possédées, les choses voulues, Perec fait l’autopsie d’un couple, représentant d’une société, l’autopsie d’un bonheur impossible au sein d’une vie qui s’essouffle de plus en plus. Posséder, mais pour quoi? Pour qui? La quête d'une image du bonheur ou du bonheur lui-même? Se poser les mauvaises questions revient à faire le vide d’un monde paradoxalement rempli, débordant de choses. Un monde où le plaisir du cher est parfois aussi si ce n’est plus fort que celui de la chair. L'auteur n'hésite pas à nous plonger dans la boutique obscure de ces protagonistes, leurs rêves plein d'espérance. La confrontation avec la réalité en devient incroyablement brutale.Au-delà de cette violence, une véritable cruauté suinte des pages, et peut-être l'ombre d'un wake-up call avant que la lumière de la réalité ne l’estompe. C’est comme sortir de la Matrice, même si on sait qu’on y replongera. Mais une fois le livre refermé, on regarde autour de nous, les objets sur l'étagère, les cadres au mur, la lampe de chevet, Ikea probablement à l'instar de la table... Et tout prend une dimension étrange, fausse, ou disons faussée. Chaque objet devient un miroir, un miroir tendu vers se propre personne. On se sentirait presque comme Orson Welles à la fin de The Lady from Shanghai.Je me souviens, l'année dernière, je me suis fait cambrioler. La façon rationnelle d'aborder la chose avait été simple: "Ce n'est que matériel." Un MacBook, ça se rachète, d’ailleurs, j’écris cette critique du dernier modèle, un MacBook Pro avec plus de mémoire, et un appareil photo Pentax reste un appareil photo. Son propriétaire va bien, c’est le principal. Oui, et puis il y a toujours l'assurance. C’est important ça, d’être assuré. On ne sait jamais. Ce roman de Perec a beau dater des années 60, la société plus consumériste que jamais a contribué à sa puissance intemporelle."Ils étaient à bout de course, au terme de cette trajectoire ambiguë qui avait été leur vie pendant six ans, au terme de cette quête indécise qui ne les avait menés nulle part, qui ne leur avait rien appris."Rechercher la vérité fait partie de la vérité, selon Marx, cité à la fin du récit. Perec questionne nos vies. À nous de déterminer notre vérité et surtout, par-dessus tout, à nous d'apprendre. Car apprendre, c'est aller quelque part, c’est lutter contre l’inertie, cette condition horrible et vampirique, et après, on pourra se questionner sur la vérité du bonheur, et des choses, et sur leur véritable mode d’emploi.
What do You think about Things: A Story Of The Sixties; A Man Asleep (2010)?
If I had to use one word to describe both stories it would be ennui. In Things: A Story of the Sixties, Jerome and Sylvie lust after things out of their means and ignore what they can do, eventually creating the ennui their lives become. In A Man Asleep, the ennui is there from the beginning in the unnamed protagonist's desire to do nothing while making his life an undeviating routine. While Perec does make some great observations in the story, it sends the reader into his/her own ennui, which makes its ending a great relief.
—Manheim Wagner
Perec's snappy Story of the Sixties should be subtitled 'The Rise and Fall of the Hipster.' Modern, timeless and deliciously snarky. The only glaring anachronism is the married protagonists' irregular employment as market researchers - replace that with freelance web or graphic design and Perec has perfectly parodied any couple in their late 20s currently vibing on down in Hoxton, Williamsburg or Fitzroy. Highly recommended, this is a satisifying yet quick read UNLESS you over-indulge in the litany of ideal home furnishings that Perec satirises in the opening chapters. His descriptive prowess provoked a two hour SchadenGoogle as I abandoned the book to conduct an impromptu search for the perfect bookcase to populate my perfect library currently being equity funded via the currency of hopes, dreams and delusions. I AM the person that Perec is parodying. Excellent. Four stars, that man. Sadly, the novella in the bunk below, 'A Man Asleep', is all rather hopeless - a shuffling two star character sketch that attempts to describe a student teetering on the precipice of lethargy. Oblomov it isn't. The narrator's voice tees off in a very self-assured tone, conjuring up the odd shapes that flit across our corneas as we descend into (or ascend from) a semi-somnolent state. It's all very precise, a bit tricksy and totally misses the mark. Perec trots on, blithely assuming he's hammered home a winning streak of images and allusions whereas he's executed the literary equivalent of nailing a jelly to the wall. Flabby, incoherent and really rather dull.
—Simon Hollway
Things: A Story of the Sixties predates all those tiresome novels about corporate-culture ennui, Ballardian death of affect, and dehumanisation through advertising and leaves them weeping into their MaxPower V9 toasters-cum-dildos. What a heartbreaking and beautiful novella! Oh Georges, is it really so sad? Perec narrates from a distance, leaving his characters Sylvie and Jérôme to fumble through a blank lower bourgeois existence, besotted with appliances and desperate to shimmy up the ladder without accepting their place as adults. By piling up descriptions, razor-sharp character analysis and cultural scene-setting, Perec captures the painful loneliness of upwardly mobile corporate life—his writing glitters with perfect, wrenching subtlety and humour. Oh Georges, Georges, Georges! And then there’s A Man Asleep, a beautiful exploration of complete disengagement from the culture, written in energetic second-person prose, chock with penetrating insights into man’s desire to escape the terror and horror of everyday life. An absolutely magnificent duo of novellas—epochal, strange and powerful.
—MJ Nicholls
