Fragments and Visions of a Spatial Discourse: Re-Viewing Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces

Abstract

This article accompanies a visual essay that re-views Georges Perec’s 1974 book Species of Spaces through a series of collages inspired by its most important chapters related to architecture and city. The overlapping of these two scales, the domestic and the urban, invites us to read the spaces of our lives as interior stages and the city as a “big house,” necessary for the expression and representation of ourselves and our communities. The article situates the technique of collage within Perec’s own creative approach, reflecting on its capacity to find a balance between analytical description and poetic suggestion, between reality and invention, between abstraction and memory.

Keywords:

• Perec
• space
• architecture
• city
• house
• interior
• theatre
• collage

Notes

1. The first French edition came out in 1974: Georges Perec, Espèces d’espaces (Paris, France: Édition Galilée, 1974). The first version of the book I read was the Italian one: Georges Perec, Specie di spazi, trans. Roberta Delbono (Torino, Italy: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989). For this paper I worked with the English translation: Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. and ed. John Sturrock (London, UK: Penguin Book Ltd., 1997). Similarly, for Life: A User’s Manual, my research moved between the following versions: Georges Perec, La vie mode d’emploi (Paris, France: Édition Hachette, 1978); Georges Perec, Vita. Istruzioni per l’uso, trans. Daniella Selvatico Estense (Milano, Italy: BUR, 1984); and Georges Perec, Life: A User’s Manual, trans. David Bellos (London, UK: Harvill/HarperCollins, 1992).

2. As he explains at the beginning of the chapter “The Apartment Building” - see Perec, Species of Spaces, 40.

3. Tania Ørum, “Georges Perec and the Avant-Garde in the Visual Arts,” Textual Practice 20, no. 2 (2006): 320.

4. David Gascoigne, “Georges Perec’s La Vie Mode d’Emploi; or How to Take on Painting and Win,” Nottingham French Studies 51, no. 3 (2012): 286.

5. In the article “Defense of Klee,” as quoted in David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London, UK: The Harvill Press, 1995), 212.

6. Georges Perec, Entretiens et conférences, vol. 1, ed. Dominique Bertelli and Mireille Ribière, trans. Mireille Ribière (Nantes, France: Joseph K., 2003), 186.

7. In an interview published in AA files, Pierre Getzer recalls “a reproduction of a painting I did around 1970–2. Georges Perec had it in front of him for years. It combines things I had seen with plates taken from the review of the Parisian studio of urbanism, Paris-Project.” See Jean-Charles Depaule and Pierre Getzler, “A City in Words and Numbers,” AA Files 45/46 (2001): 117.

8. Gotthold E. Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

9. Gascoigne, “Georges Perec’s La Vie Mode d’Emploi,” 295–296.

10. Ibid., 291–293.

11. On literary collage/montage, see the chapter “Verbal Paste-ups” in Jeanine Parisier Plottel, ed., Collage, vol. 10–11, (New York, NY: New York Literary Forum, 1983).

12. See the chapter “Citations” in Hans Hartje, Bernard Magné, and Jacques Neefs, eds., Georges Perec: Cahiers des charges de La Vie mode d’emploi (Paris and Cadeilhan, France: CNRS Editions/Zulma, 1993). The postscript of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual is the list of all these presences: see Perec, Life: A User’s Manual, 579.

13. “It is hard to convey the extraordinary diversity of his writings. From 1965 to his premature death, he created novels, poems, plays, short experimental exercises, musical and filmic collaborations, and work with visual artists.” Alison James, Constraining Chance: Georges Perec and the Oulipo (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 17. For an exhaustive, monumental biography of Perec, see Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words.

14. See, in particular, Stefanie Elisabeth Sobelle, “The Novel Architecture of Georges Perec,” in Writing the Modern City: Literature, Architecture, Modernity, eds. Sarah Edwards and Jonathan Charley (London, UK; New York, NY: Routledge, 2011); Peta Mitchell, “Constructing the Architext: Georges Perec’s ‘Life a User’s Manual,” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 37, no. 1 (2004); Maria Consuelo Ortiz M., “L’Autobiographie chez Perec: le Cas d’Espèces d’Espaces,” Romanische Forschungen 107 (1995); David Bellos, “Writing Spaces: Perec in Perspective,” Cambridge Architectural Journal 9 (1997–8).

15. In the pages of Species of Spaces, Perec refers to other literary projects he was working on: Life: A User’s Manual (in the chapter “The Apartment Building”), Lieux (in the chapter “The Bedroom”), Lieux où j’ai dormi (in the chapter “The Street”). See David Gascoigne, The Games of Fiction: Georges Perec and the Modern French Ludic Narrative (Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, International Academic Publishers, 2006), 170–171.

16. Perec, Species of Spaces, 5, 13.

17. Cause Commune was founded in 1971 by the sociologist Jean Dauvignaud, and Paul Virilio and Perec made important contributions. The journal “announced a set of sociological, political and anthropological goals, among them an ‘investigation of daily life at all its levels in its recesses and caverns that are generally disdained and repressed’.” James, Constraining Chance, 198. See also Georges Perec, L’infra-ordinaire (Paris, France: Seuil, 1989). For reflections on the relationship between Perec and Virilio, see Enrique Walker and Paul Virilio, “Paul Virilio on Georges Perec,” AA Files 45–46 (2001): 15–18.

18. Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?” in Species of Spaces, 210 (first published in Cause Commune February 1973).

19. For a deep investigation of this topic see Maria Consuelo Ortiz M., “L’endotique: thématique et forme de l’infra-ordinaire. Une analyse de l’oeuvre de Georges Perec” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cincinnati, 1997).

20. On the topic of the list see Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay, trans. Alastair McEwen (Milan, Italy: Rizzoli International, 2009).

21. James, Constraining Chance.

22. Bellos, Georges Perec, 530.

23. “Granted there is a wall, what’s going on behind it?” is a quote by French playwright Jean Tardieu that Perec uses in “The Apartment” chapter of Species of Spaces. See Perec, Species of Spaces, 39.

24. “Although every individual is contemporary first of all with himself and with his generation, he is also contemporary with the spiritual group of which he is a member. This is even more the case as regards the artist, because to him his ancestors and friends are not recollection, but presence. They stand immediately before him, in full life (…). The artist inhabits a country in time that is by no means necessarily the history of his own time (…) with equal consistency he may select examples and models from the past, and create from them a new and complete environment. He may, again, outline a future that simultaneously strikes into the present and the past.” Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles B. Hogan and George Kubler (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1989 [1934]), 134, 154.

25. Mireille Ribière, “Georges Perec’s Enduring Presence in the Visual Arts,” in The Afterlives of Georges Perec, eds. Rowan Wilken and Justin Clemens (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 23–44.

26. Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, “The Architecture of Constraint and Forgetting,” in The Afterlives of Georges Perec, 171–188.

27. Victoria Hunter, “Perecquian Perspectives: Dialogues with Site-Dance (Or, ‘On being here and there’),” Literary Geographies 3, no. 1 (2017): 34.

28. Bruno Zevi, Architecture as Space: How to Look at Architecture, ed. Joseph A. Barry, trans. Milton Gendel (New York, NY: Horizon Press, 1974 [1948]), 32. In his book Zevi makes some proposals on how to represent interior space through drawings, diagrams and schemes. Another interesting tentative suggestion for representing interior space was made by the Italian architect Luigi Moretti in the 1950s, for research published in the magazine Spazio. There, as well as a small number of analytical graphic diagrams, Moretti published photographs of models of interior space, quasi sculptures of the volume that is defined by the interior surfaces of a building. No walls, no pillars, no windows or doors, no exterior or interior facades, but only volumes used to describe the interior spaces and their relationships. These abstract procedures transform the building into a sort of cast of the negative interior space, made into a positive and concrete object. The models of some of these spaces have been used in the collage “The Page” I present here. See Luigi Moretti, “Strutture e sequenze di spazi,” Spazio 7 (1952–1953).

29. Rudolf Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 13.

30. “Architecture, attesting to the tastes and attitudes of generations, to public events and private tragedies, to new and old facts, is the fixed stage for human events. The collective and the private, society and the individual, balance and confront one another in the city.” Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984 [1966]), 22.

31. Perec wrote three plays in German, five short texts and two major works in French, L’Augmentation and La Poche Parmentier. See the chapter “Poetry, Theater, and Film” in Paul Schwartz, Georges Perec: Traces of His Passage (Birmingham, UK: Summa Publications, Inc., 1988).

32. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 20.

33. See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh, UK: University of Edinburgh Press, 1956).

34. Perec, Species of Spaces, 40.

35. Perec had postcards representing them in his archive. See Jacques Neefs and Hans Hartje, Georges Perec: Images (Paris, France: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), 151.

36. See Denis Bablet, ed., Collage et montage au théâtre et dans les autres arts durant les années vingt (Lausanne, Switzerland: La Cité-L’Age d’Homme, 1978).

37. A collection of these lists and notes (and the reproductions of the original documents) related to Life: A User’s Manual is published in Hartje, Magné, and Neefs, Georges Perec: Cahiers des charges.

38. Perec, Species of Spaces, 50.

39. This was clear from the first pages of the journal Cause Commune: “Metaphors of depth predominate in this editorial pronouncement: everyday life, far from being the visible surface of the real, possesses its own underground geography.” James, Constraining Chance, 198

40. The original French term used by Perec in Species of Spaces is “ville,” which I consider closer to “city” than “town.” The English translation of the book has “town” for “ville.”

41. “In Perec, the use of space is no longer to be taken for granted; it assumes unexpected uses, transgressions that are the linguistic corollary of life (le vécu) in a moment of social reconstruction.” Maria Consuelo Ortiz M., “L’endotique,” 118. Translation from French by the author.

42. Perec, Species of Spaces, 59.

43. As Georges Teyssot points out, the buildings of the nineteenth century city are “large spaces that create vast interiors for the collective…they are all interior:” the arcades, the glasshouses, the enclosed rooms of panoramas, museums and casinos, the halls of factories and railway stations. They are containers of crowds that enclose the collective dream, public spaces of the city appearing as interiors in which citizens live, work, and represent themselves as though in a theatrical play. See Georges Teyssot, “Thresholds and Folds: Issues of Interiority,” Casabella 681 (2000): 92.

44. See Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978); the chapter “Photomontage and the Metropolis” in Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018); and Aldo Rossi’s compositional concept of the analogous city, first mentioned in the introduction to The Architecture of the City, then produced as a collage for the 1976 Venice Biennale and published as “La città analoga: tavola / The analogous city: panel” in Lotus, no. 13, 1976, 5–9.

45. Perec, Species of Spaces, 61.

46. “(…) many [scholars of the city] have recognized that beyond the elements they had enumerated there remained the âme de la cité, in other words, the quality of urban artifacts. (…) In particular I mentioned the work of Chabot, for whom the city is a totality that constructs itself and in which all the elements participate in forming the âme de la cité.” Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 32, 55.

47. Perec, Species of Spaces, 62.

48. Ibid.

49. Ernesto N. Rogers, “Programma: Domus, la casa dell’uomo,” Domus 205 (1946): 3. Translation from Italian by the author.

50. Mario Praz, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: from Pompeii to Art Nouveau, trans. William Weaver (New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 1982 [1964]), 21, 50.

51. Perec, Species of Spaces, 69.

52. Ibid., 6.

53. My postscript here is intended to echo - and to borrow from - Perec’s at the end of Life: A User’s Manual, 579.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrizio M. Martinelli

Patrizio M. Martinelli has been Assistant Professor at Miami University, Oxford (Ohio) since 2017. He studied at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV) where he earned a Master’s degree in Architecture and a PhD in Architectural Composition. At the IUAV he was involved in teaching and research, receiving grants and fellowships to study domestic interiors, adaptive reuse of industrial buildings and urban regeneration. From 2007 to 2016 he was a guest critic at the Münster School of Architecture (Germany). His research has been published in his own monographs and in architectural magazines, and presented at conferences in Europe and the USA.