Georges, Georges Perec, is that you?
No.
Come on, Georges, this is the first time I’ve summoned spirits from the dead. Would you consider giving me an interview?
No.
Georges, I have a Ouija board here on a small table in front of me, and my Reading Group holding hands in a deep trance. I don’t have much time. Do you know what a Ouija board is?
Maybe.
It’s a piece of wood with the alphabet carved into it. It also has four words – Yes, No, Maybe and Goodbye. Whenever I ask you a question, a pointer trembles and settles either on the letters or on one of the words. I imagine a man with your feeling for language might be interested?
Goodbye.
Georges, wait! I have a puzzle for you, a word puzzle. You’re the word-puzzle king. If anyone can crack this, you can.
Yes. No.
Try it. On the board there are two semi-circular rows of letters, A to M, and then N to Z. As a restless spirit you can spell out answers to questions by moving the pointer between letters. It takes for ever and isn’t very reliable. I thought that you, as the master of linguistic possibility, might be able to work out a quicker system. Anything to prove it’s you. Or not you but your presence.
No. Yes, No. Maybe.
You can do it, Georges. You once wrote a thousand-word palindrome, and a three-hundred-page novel without the letter ‘e’. This is easy.
No!
No you can’t solve the puzzle, or no you haven’t lost your powers?
Yes.
I’m astonished. I’ve devised a challenge that defeats Georges Perec, the writer who worked out the Knight’s Tour conundrum for a 10 by 10 chess-board to shape the structure of the novel Life A User’s Manual. You Georges, the verbal contortionist who came up with solutions to literary enigmas like the saturated anagram, the prosodic avalanche and the beautiful out-law. Not to mention your ingenious plot machine, X mistakes Y for Z. I’d have thought you could solve a relatively simple problem involving a Ouija board and two rows of letters. You could use one of Mathews’s Algorithms.
Maybe, maybe.
Good. While you’re working on the problem, I’ll ask my first question. Georges, you died in 1982 at the tragically young age of 45. How is eternity, for a writer? What is there to do all day?
I ‘av it! I av z’solution!
Oh bravo, Georges, well done. Jolly quick. Your spelling could use some improvement.
Alas, my anglais! But this solution is not without a snag. I find I must avoid substantial individual alfabits.
Bits? Letters. Of course. I bet one of those letters is ‘e’, isn’t it?
Uh-huh. It’s a faulty solution, though swift.
What other letters can’t you use?
You will soon find that out, if you want to. I am not giving away any hints.
Georges, glad to hear that eternity hasn’t changed you. I’ll accept that your solution is partial, and that you’re constrained while answering, but if you and the Oulipo were correct then this kind of constraint will be creative. It ought to generate intriguing answers, and lead us to places an unconstrained interview may never have dared to travel. Is that a fair description of the way the Oulipo justifies arbitrary linguistic constraints?
That is about it, in a nut. Build a flashy jail, limit and inhibit nouns and idioms, find a way out. Do a bunk – fly! It is a most satisfying aim.
But it’s not just a laugh, is it? This is the main question I wanted to raise. If the Oulipo was about verbal acrobatics just for the fun of it, like an intelligence test, it would probably be best indulged in the privacy of one’s own home.
You hint at onanism, no? Look, I do fun, I dig joy. But it is thoughtful fun, as you say. I was always anxious. I had a fixation with illuminating humanity, mankind’s ballast on my mind.
As I thought. In this context, I’d like to ask you in particular about your novel La Disparition, in which you omitted the letter ‘e’. In French, as well as being a work of unparalleled ingenuity and mental energy, it has a deeply serious side. The Acte de Disparition was the title of a document sent to families of deported Jews after the war. Your mother was one of them, wasn’t she?
Ah maman. As you say, this book is not only funny, not just a vain whimsy with skilful jaunts and gags. Maman was … still now I sigh; that is a long ago full of obvious salt, and blatantly soft skin.
You were born in 1936, your father was killed in action in 1940, and your mother was deported to Poland in 1943. Your parents were therefore missing for most of your life. In La Disparition, the letter ‘e’ is missing. In French, this letter is pronounced like the word ‘eux’, which also means ‘them’. They, your parents, are absent, yet life goes on. You show that a book without ‘them’ (every letter e) can still be written, just as an orphan’s life can still be lived. But a strange, constrained, slightly stilted life and book. You create an elegant, powerful metaphor.
Thank you. Too kind. I always sought to build a vital but wily book. I know that books last an instant only to vanish, but it wasn’t a hoax, not a hoodwink. It was a tough blitz on any dug-in notion of lit: mainly fibbing. My aim was to do a kind of manual at odds with that unsound old habit of simulating. Say it out loud: dissimulating. It was also faithful as a sly but satisfying way of dignifying my mum and dad.
Yet there are still people who dismiss you, the finest European writer of the second half of the twentieth century, as a literary clown, too clever by half.
How sad. But also, how amusing! I was always a tad of a wag, you know, a fun-loving fool. I do zany, too.
Not yet. I wanted to ask you about translations of La Disparition. There’s a version in German, and one in English by Gilbert Adair, called A Void. Just like the original, the English translation is astoundingly clever, using only words that don’t contain the letter ‘e’. However, A Void lays itself open to all the criticism that was misdirected at your original novel. In English, the book becomes an empty exuberance. There is no ‘eux’ missing, just the letter ‘e’. For you, in French, the loss of ‘them’ led to the loss of ‘je’, of your own identity as a narrator. Yet to the more stolid Saxon mind, ‘I’ and ‘ich’ can still exist, even after the disappearance of ‘eux’.
Oh, you unkind analyst. Think of this man sitting, blinking, fussing with lingo that might fit, agonising with sayings and quotations. An obligation of thanks is owing, I should think. His kind of toil is unusual, laudably taxing, and if not gainful, no doubt fulfilling.
But, Georges, don’t you see? The translation ruins everything! The meaning and justification of your original constraint disappears. It becomes smart-alec verbal acrobatics, with little or no significance.
Bof.
Say you agree with me a little bit.
Why this antagonism? What annoys you so abundantly about this book, A Void? It is a tiny atom in a Milky Way, as small as an iota’s miaow in this vast blank nimbus of oblivion. What should I do? Shut him away in jug, yahoo him swinishly with hooligan taunts and shout ‘Unfit! Unfit!’?
I was hoping you’d publicly denounce the translator, yes. If you could. And also, if we’re going to get this job done properly, suggest some sort of punishment.
Hoy! You squalid, babyish, nasty thug. But if you so wish it, sling this idiot buffoon in a zoo. Fling him into a foul and disgusting bath of mud. Tan his taut bottom with a jumbo languish of bamboo. Will that do?
Very nicely, thank you. Gilbert Adair, you have heard the great man speak. Moving on, Georges, you once made a list of everything you ate and drank in 1974. Now that you’re in eternity, does that seem like a waste of time?
Only my notion of 1974. I must go now.
What? In a hurry in the afterlife? How can that be?
I look at books. My snozz is always wantonly in books.
The undead read?
As avidly as anybody living. It sustains a man’s soul, and nothing but. Without books, an individual is oblivion, thin as mist, fit only to swoon and vanish away. You may just about distinguish folk as flimsy as this on TV, on a daily basis.
Georges, don’t go! Not yet! What are you working on at the moment?
Ah, a sound final stab at my undying ambition, my vanity. Good thinking. My most stimulating task now, my abiding job sans fin, is an ongoing imagining of this ghostly situation and my status in it.
You mean a kind of Afterlife A User’s Manual? Georges, come back! I’m sorry! Can writers really write when they’re dead? Do you use a pen or a word-processor?
Goodbye.
Georges! Harry Mathews sends his love!
Yes.
And with that clear affirmative, Georges Perec receded, and was gone. He never did reveal the secret algorithm that had partially broken the code of the Ouija board. Nor the letters missing from our conversation. They may have been important.