"53 Days"

"Yes. I thought I’d push the boat out a little bit. This is a book called “ 53 Days” by Georges Perec. Perec was a novelist best known for his book, Life: A User’s Manual , which is 600-and-something pages, set in one second, in an apartment block. It’s quite a complicated and interesting book. The chapters are a ‘knight’s tour’ from chess of this apartment block, although he sets up a 10-by-10 square rather than 8-by-8 when he travels around it, just to make it more difficult for himself. In each chapter, again much like Joyce did with Ulysses, he had strict rules—a colour has to be used, a place has to be used, a quotation from another novel and quotations from one of his own have to be used. So it’s like a puzzle to be solved—and it is in fact about jigsaw puzzles. And the whole book covers one second in time… “The author’s intentions have no more authority than anyone else’s” Perec also wrote another book translated into English as A Void , which is a brilliant translation. It’s a novel which doesn’t feature the letter ‘e’. The whole book does not have a single ‘e’. This is a neat trick, but also has a deeper purpose—Perec lost his mother in the Holocaust and his father was killed early on in the war, fighting in the French army. This book, therefore, is unable to include the word mother and father in French. That’s part of the underlying structure, their presence and absence. Absolutely. He pulls it off. The translation A Void does a similar trick—a void, the gap, the missing thing. So it’s quite a feat of translation, but the original book is quite astonishing. Perec sets himself these little problems that he has to work out, and they generate his fiction and thus meaning. So, “ 53 Days”— the title is in quotation marks. A lot of books are described as ‘post-modern’, but I think this is actually a deconstructed text. Perec was going to Australia to teach for 53 days, which he realized was how long it took Stendhal to write Charterhouse of Parma . So he decides he’s going to write a novel in 53 days, why not?! The book then incorporates a lot of stuff from his time in Australia: characters named after the pizza shop he goes to; the Commandos who descend on one scene are named after New South Wales train stations. But he’s also writing a murder mystery about a stolen book, which is itself a murder mystery. Perec, at one stage, is narrating the story of the narrator who’s narrating the plot of the book, which has a novel in it, the plot of which he’s narrating to us. There are boxes inside boxes. First of all, because the novel is in quotation marks. This was a trope of Perec’s – one of the lovely things about Life: a User’s Manual is that he starts the knight’s tour of the book in apartment No. 66 and ends in No. 99. Those are the quotation marks around the novel. So “ 53 Days” is an invented novel about an invented situation about an invented novel about an invented situation. But, also, I think it’s deconstructive in the sense that—and this wasn’t Perec’s intention—he never finished it, he couldn’t get it done. He couldn’t get it nailed down. For a start, he couldn’t do the book in 53 days. He left behind all these intriguing notes. It’s also deconstructive because he was attempting, as he always did, to ‘perform’ what I think is a really interesting idea of Perec’s, which is the idea of the ‘clinamen’. A clinamen is a fault within the system. So, for instance, in Life: a User’s Manual , the knight’s tour of 10 by 10 should cover all 100 apartments, a chapter for each. But there are only 99 chapters. He sets up these schemes, like there’s got to be a colour in every chapter, and then one chapter will be missing that colour. In a sense, he’s performing this incoherence of the text or this fact that the text can’t be fully realized. And he was fascinated by this idea of ‘clinamen’. For me, that is, in a sense, what Derrida’s doing when he looks at texts. Derrida called them ‘aporias’, things that couldn’t be resolved within a text, which prevented the text being whole. Wholeness is a misbelief which we impose from outside without realising we are doing so. Perec and Derrida draw attention to this. So, I think “53 Days” , in particular, is a very interesting case of that, deliberately through a clinamen, although we don’t know what the fault he was building was because he didn’t finish the book, and ‘accidentally’, by not finishing the book. In a sense, this itself is a beautiful deconstructive gesture as well, although I’m sure he didn’t mean his death to do that. But it does. It’s an unfinished text and therefore meanings continue to generate themselves, puzzles, clues, and new readings. His final gleeful mystification."