“I am ready to take the stand”, the middle-aged man said in a gesture of willed objectivity which reminded me of the work of another writer, George Perec. Not Life A User’s Manual. No, nothing so large, I was being reminded of a minor, mostly forgotten piece called Espece d’espaces written by Perec in 1974. The work is less than 100 pages in all, and is to be found in the ficto-documentary collection called Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (tr John Sturrock, 2008).
Perec begins Espece d’espaces with a Foreword. The first sentence goes like this, “The subject of this book is not the void exactly, but rather what there is round about it or inside it (cf fig 1)”. Figure 1 itself is printed on the front papers of the book before the contents and the foreword. The Figure is called ‘Map of the Ocean’, and consist in a drawing of a square on an otherwise blank page, except for the title underneath and then under that in brackets ‘(taken from Lewis Carroll’s, Hunting of the Snark)’.
As much as I know already from this beginning that this is an autobiographical work which Perec is giving in to, so too I knew that the sentence spoken by the middle-aged man was also the beginning of his autobiography. He himself is the subject. Of course like Perec no facts about his life will be revealed, but he will be telling what is round about it or inside it.
Giving in to becoming the subject, and it will seem to us is that it is a void. But not exactly because in this autobiographical work by Perec or a middle-aged man we are already aware of some things. For one thing we are aware of his absence. He is absent from the story, and this has already created an intensely sad atmosphere (what we know from Perec’s life: he was a Parisian Jew born in 1936, whose father enlisted as a soldier and was killed in action by the time he was six and his mother murdered in Auschwitz before the end of the war). He will not provide this information, nor he will add to or adorn his account with any other biographical details because he is confident we already know this sadness simply having opened the cover and turned the blank front pages, perhaps not even noticing the Figure 1 in the first instance.
So too the middle-aged man’s remark, “I am willing to take the stand”. As if written at the start of a foreword to his own work of autobiography, and I know already that nothing will follow, that no narrative will be provided, and no life story is to be told. There is the same absence as with Perec. And there is the same oceanic quality of sadness as in the front papers of Espece d’espace, because he has already told all the information about his life that it is necessary to know. Oceanic, and the sadness seems all in shadows, but just as Perec account of Espece d’espace unfolds, when we look closer and listen deeper what is around about it or inside it is suffused with lightness and with light.
(Espece should have a grave accent on the middle ‘e‘ . Please who can show me the key to write this?)