techniques of the reading body

As befits a man who wrote one novel eschewing the letter "e," and another (slimmer) one that did without "a," "i," "o," and "u," Georges Perec thought a lot about the materiality of language: its physical incarnation as marks on a page, marks that could be arranged and rearranged to reveal orders other than the merely semantic. Perec loved palindromes, for instance. Famously, in 1969 he composed a palindrome over 5,000 letters long (that's 1240 words, in each direction). It begins "Trace l'inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule." It ends "Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l'écart."

So no wonder he should have much to say about how to arrange one's books, and about the "socio-physiology" of reading.

As to "the art and manner of arranging one's books," Perec is no stickler, noting that this thorny subject raises innumerable irresolvable tensions and paradoxes. Whereas some books are "very easy to arrange," for instance "very large books, very small ones, Badeckers, [. . .] the Présence du Futur series, novels published by the Editions de Minuit," others are at best "not too difficult to arrange," such as "books on the cinema [. . .] South American novels, ethnology, psychoanalysis, cookery books, [. . .] books in the Que Sais-je? series," while that still leaves always the category of "books just about impossible to arrange."

Among the "impossible" books are "La Campagne de 1812 en Russie by Clausewitz, translated from the German by M. Bégouën, Captain-Commandant in the 31st Dragoons, Passed Staff College, with one map, Paris, Librairie Militaire R. Chapelot et Cie, 1900" as well, of course, as "fascicule 6 of Volume 91 (November 1976) of the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America (PMLA) giving the programme for the 666 working sessions of the annual congress of the said Association" (150).

Fortunately, there are some broad guidelines as to the various schemes by which one might attempt to overcome these hurdles. Books may be:

ordered alphabetically
ordered by continent or country
ordered by colour
ordered by date of acquisition
ordered by date of publication
ordered by format
ordered by genre
ordered by major periods of literary history
ordered by language
ordered by priority for future reading
ordered by binding
ordered by series (148-149)

In practice, though, as Perec observes, "every library is ordered starting from a combination of these modes of classification." Starting from: for every library also exhibits its own specific and idiosyncratic movements towards the entropy that makes even the most pragmatic and hybrid set of ordering principles only an ideal, conjectured Ur-state and/or endpoint.

On reading, Perec is equally enlightening. He takes his cue from Marcel Mauss's concept of the "techniques of the body" (a favourite, too, of Pierre Bourdieu's). These are "emergency zones of which all we know is that we don't know very much" (170), lying, as they do, at some level well beneath the ideological.

Again, however, some broad principles can be assayed. On the importance of hands, for instance, for turning the pages--which means that the one-armed are almost as handicapped for reading as are the blind. Or the "posturology of reading" which may be, as Perec concedes, dependent also on environmental factors, but can still be provisionally divided between "reading standing up (this is the best way of consulting a dictionary)," "reading sitting down," "reading lying down," "reading kneeling," "reading squatting," and "reading walking: one thinks especially of the priest taking the fresh air while reading his breviary" (175).

I read these two essays by Perec while sitting at the desk in my office, leaning back in my standard-issue orthopedically-correct swivel chair, holding the Penguin twentieth-century classics paperback in my hands. I read one essay (the first one) forwards; with the other, I started at its conclusion, and worked backwards.

Perec's book is allocated to one of the more inaccessible nooks in my office, on top of a bookcase in the far corner, with my very small collection of books devoted to Europe. It is (when I am not reading it) sandwiched between the illustrated screenplay of Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Edgar Allan Poe's Selected Tales. OK, so don't ask what the Poe is doing in the "Europe" section. I think it's because I don't have a section, even a small one, for the USA at all. And surely that Truffaut is out of order?

Comments

[Ezra]

Perec's palindrome can be found at:
http://homepage.urbanet.ch/cruci.com/lexique/palindrome.htm

[Matt]

relatedly

[Matt]

Also just came across this, from the excellent Bookforum

(via Rake's Progress)

[anonymous]

Georges Perec's `Negative' Autobiography, essay by Peter Baker (via)