About the Book
"Perec is famous, not to say notorious, for his puns, parody, circular plotting, skittish wit and word-wizardry of all sorts' Independent"
THE ART AND CRAFT OF
APPROACHING YOUR HEAD OF
DEPARTMENT TO SUBMIT A
REQUEST FOR A RAISE
Georges Perec (1936–82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life A User’s Manual, which draws on many of Perec’s other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce’s Ulysses. It won the Prix Médicis and established Perec’s international reputation.
David Bellos, the translator, is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton University.
In 2005 David Bellos was awarded the Man Booker International Translator’s Prize for his many translations of the novels of the distinguished Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. He is the author of several works on Balzac, the prize-winning biography Georges Perec: A Life in Words, and a biography of Romain Gary, published in 2010.
ALSO BY GEORGES PEREC
W or the Memory of Childhood
Things: A Story of the Sixties
A Man Asleep
‘53 Days’
A Void
Life A User’s Manual
Three
Species of Spaces
Thoughts of Sorts
The Machine
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English translation © David Bellos 2011
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First published in France with the title L’Art et la manière d’aborder son chef de service pour lui demander une augmentation in December 1968 in the fourth issue of the journal Enseignement programmé (Hachette/Dunod), then as a book by Hachette Littératures in 2008
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Contents
A flow-chart designed by Jacques Perriaud and adapted into English
Introduction by David Bellos
the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise by georges perec
Introduction
Forty years ago there was no Windows, web, or email; there were no laptops and the Mac Classic had not been invented. But there were computers – huge machines in secure, air-conditioned vaults, powered by sizeable electricity substations and maintained by teams of men in white coats known as boffins. Such electronic monsters were used to crunch numbers for NASA and the nuclear deterrent by mathematicians, physicists, aeronautical engineers and astronomers. But some far-sighted minds wondered if these daunting machines could also be used, somehow or other, in the creative arts. Around 1968, a French computer company set itself the challenge of finding artists willing to have a go at using the machines that it made. By serendipity more than careful planning, the challenge ended up on the desk of a little-known writer called Georges Perec. The unclassifiable entity here called the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise is the unexpected, comical and moving outcome of an unlikely encounter.
The initial idea came from Jacques Perriaud at the Computing Service of the Humanities Research Centre in Paris. To challenge a writer to use a computer’s basic mode of operation as a writing device, he sketched out the procedure that an employee would need to follow to obtain an increase in pay in some large organisation. Then he broke it down into its individual steps and laid the procedure out as an algorithm, or flow-chart. As is well-known to all who work for big firms or government departments, such procedures do not always succeed on their first iteration. Perriaud’s flow-chart includes ample opportunities for recursion, or going back to square one.
Georges Perec accepted the challenge to write as a computer functions, but characteristically, he seems to have negotiated a number of changes to the ground-plan before he started. At all events, the flow-chart that he used, reproduced on p. viii, has comical details like a wastepaper bin and strange loops that may or may not have come from the mind of the original designer.
Georges Perec, born 7 March 1936, had recently been co-opted to full membership of a rather special group that called itself Oulipo, short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or ‘Workshop for Potential Literature’. It was founded fifty years ago, in 1960, by the writer Raymond Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais with the purpose of exploring the possible uses of mathematics and formal modes of thought in the production of new literature. Oulipo sought to invent new kinds of rules for literary composition, and also to explore the use of now-forgotten forms in the literatures of the past. Perhaps the most famous of these ancient devices – famous nowadays almost exclusively because of the work of Georges Perec – is the lipogram, which involves writing in a restricted set of characters, that is to say, without one or more letters of the alphabet. But the idea of concocting a story that proceeds by a set of programmed choices between different outturns at each juncture was also a subject of some interest. Vaguely referred to as ‘matrix literature’, the idea, similar to the structure of ‘Tracker Books’ for children, gave rise to a short but also very long experiment by Raymond Queneau called Un Conte à Votre Façon, or ‘A Story As You Like It’, which has now been put on the web in English translation. Each sentence is followed by a question with two possible answers. The reader chooses one of the answers, and goes on to the appropriately numbered sentence. If you make the other choice, the text directs you to a different sentence. In that way, from a small set of cunningly designed propositions an infinitely large set of stories can be made.
Perec had heard about this exercise but chose to deal quite differently with the
mock-algorithm he had in front of him. Instead of leaving the reader to navigate around a labyrinth of yes/no questions and answers as Queneau had done, he chose to write out in extenso the progress of an imaginary computer-mind as it iterates a set of choices in pseudo-real time. He also chose to simulate the speed and tireless repetitiveness of a computer program by abandoning all forms of punctuation as well as the distinction between upper- and lower-case letters. The result is an almost unreadable fifty-page text that looks like (but actually is not) a single, breathless sentence.
the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise was first published in an academic review devoted to what was then called Programmed Learning, or computer-assisted education, where it lay dormant for over forty years. However, around the time of its first publication, Perec was asked by his German translator, Eugen Helmle, if he might come up with something suitable for broadcast on radio. He did: an amazing though quite different simulation of a computer taking a poem by Goethe to pieces, first broadcast in German as Die Maschine (an English translation has appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, XXIX, 1, 2009). The huge success of this irreverent radio play prompted requests for more such material, and Perec turned back to his other ‘computer’ exercise, the art and craft … for inspiration. He saw that the very design of the exercise relied on a set of six distinct and identifiable operators that could be ascribed to different voices: the situation (‘you go to see your head’); the question (‘is he? …’); the positive hypothesis (‘if he is …’); the negative hypothesis (‘if he isn’t …’); the decider (‘he isn’t …’); and the outcome (‘so off you go …’). With the help of Helmle, who had a lot of radio experience, Perec produced a text that was broadcast as Wucherungen (‘The Raise’) on Saarland Radio in November 1969. The original French text was then picked up by Marcel Cuvelier – the long-standing director of the plays of Eugène Ionesco at the Théâtre de la Huchette, in which he also acted – as an ideal script for a non-figurative, almost static, and utterly hilarious stage production. Georges Perec finally added playwright to the list of literary professions he had mastered.
The dramatic version had a successful run in Paris in 1970 but its triumph came in 1972, once again in German translation, as Die Gehaltserhöhung, in productions that were more agit-prop than absurdist, in Munich, Münster and Wiesbaden. The play is now often performed in France by amateur and professional companies and has been translated into Italian and Swedish and probably other languages too, but it has never been staged in English.
In the ‘prose’ as in the ‘radio’ version of this simulation of a flow-chart in action Perec pursues the exhilarating potential of repetitiveness and recursion, but he does not stick to the mindless monotony that a real computer would experience (if it could be said to experience anything at all). Enthralled as he is by writing with rules and with the exhaustive completion of self-devised schemes and grids, Perec seeks in these ‘logic’ texts as in all his works to communicate a human experience of the world. Each of the standard formulas he devised to represent the fixed steps in the recursive procedure is repeated often enough with precision to make the variations that he introduces at some stage both comic and significant. As time goes on, the supplicant for a raise grows older; the world around him changes ever so slightly; and the story – for there is a story buried inside – speaks to us in the end of entropy and human mortality.
Perec reused the material of the art and craft one last time in Chapter 98 of Life A User’s Manual, where he gives the topic of obtaining a raise in pay a different and more novelistic turn. Even so, the character of Maurice Réol is distinctly familiar to anyone who has read, heard or seen any one of the many versions of the project whose true original is translated here.
Translating a text which is close to being unreadable in the original is a paradoxical but not a particularly difficult task, since ordinary readability is hardly an issue. Assuming a willing explorer of this strange and wonderful corner of the universe of Georges Perec, I sought to replicate in English most especially the humour and the underlying rhythm of the French text. With that aim uppermost I chose to introduce variations on the formulas where they worked best in English, not always in exactly the same place as in French. I also took some pleasure in using a word that is not attested in any dictionary that I can find but which was taught me by my Latin master, Jim Brogden. ‘Circumperambulate’ is a word of English spoken, heard and understood by pupils and teachers at Westcliff High four and more decades ago. It really should have been logged by a lexicographer by now.
David Bellos
Princeton, 10 October 2010
the art and craft of
approaching your head
of department to
submit a request for a
raise
having carefully weighed the pros and cons you gird up your loins and make up your mind to go and see your head of department to ask for a raise so you go to see your head of department let us assume to keep things simple – for we must do our best to keep things simple – that his name is mr xavier that’s to say mister or rather mr x so you go to see mr x it’s one or t’other either mr x is at his desk or mr x is not at his desk if mr x is at his desk it will be quite straightforward but obviously mr x is not at his desk so all you can do is stand in the corridor waiting for him to come back or come in but let us suppose not that he never comes in that case there would be but one solution to go back to your own desk and wait for the afternoon or the morrow to launch your campaign afresh but as is often the case that he takes his time in which case all you can really do instead of walking up and down in the corridor is to go and see your colleague ms y whom we shall call henceforth ms wye to give a touch of human warmth to our schematic demonstration but it’s one or t’other either ms wye is at her desk or ms wye is not at her desk if ms wye is at her desk it would be quite straightforward but let us suppose that ms wye is not at her desk in which case seeing as you have no desire to carry on walking up and down in the corridor while waiting for mr x either to return or to come in whichever may be the case the only course now available to you is to circumperambulate the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organisation of which you are an employee then go back to see mr x while hoping that this time he has indeed come back or in it’s one or t’other either mr x is at his desk or mr x is not at his desk let us grant that he is not so you await his coming back or his coming in by walking up and down in the corridor sure but let’s just suppose he’s taking his time in this case you go and see if ms wye is at her desk it’s one or t’other either she is in or she is not if she is not the best thing you can do is to circumperambulate the various departments which taken together constitute
the whole or part of the organisation of which you are an employee but let’s rather assume she is at her desk in this case it’s one or t’other either ms wye is in a good mood or ms wye is not in a good mood let’s suppose for starters that ms wye is not i mean really not in a good mood in this case you don’t let it get you down and circumperambulate the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organisation of which you are an employee then go back to see mr x hoping he has come in it’s one or t’other either mr x is at his desk or mr x is not at his desk are you at your desk no so why expect mr x to be at his maybe he is at your desk expecting to give you a drubbing when you get back or maybe he is walking up and down in the corridor outside his boss’s office that’s mr zosthene whom we will henceforth designate as mr z so mr x is not at his desk and as a result you look out for his coming back or coming in while walking up and down in the corridor outside his office we grant without reservation that a certain length of time may elapse before mr x comes back or comes in we advise you that in order to cope with the boredom that your monotonous pacing could easily prompt you should go have a chinwag with your colleague ms wye provided of course not only that ms wye is at her desk i
f she is not you would not have much of a choice save to circumperambulate the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organisation of which you are an employee unless of course you were to go back to your own desk to wait for more auspicious times but also that she is in a good mood if ms wye is at her desk and in a bad mood circumperambulate the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organisation of which you are an employee but let us rather assume to keep things simple – for we must do our best to keep things simple – that ms wye is both in her office and a good mood in this case you enter ms wye’s office and you have a chinwag with her at any rate it’s one or t’other as time goes by either you spy mr x coming back or going in to his office or else you do not see mr x coming back or going in to his office let us assume the most likely outcome namely that you do not see mr x for the good reason that mr x does not come that is to say we are ruling out a hypothesis that would have been disastrous for our demonstration namely mr x coming back or going in without your noticing it from being engrossed in conversation with ms wye in this case you would have to carry on chatting with ms wye unless of course by misfortune your conversation had put ms wye in a bad mood if this latter circumstance had arisen you would have had no choice but to circumperambulate the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organisation of which you are an employee then wander back to your own desk lost in thought and awaiting happier days but in the end there has to be a moment while chatting with ms wye when you see mr x go past on his way in to or out of his office you must then act with speed and skill by finding a good excuse for getting out of ms wye’s office otherwise you might ruffle her feathers and next time she won’t even let you have a chinwag with her which would oblige you to circumperambulate the various departments which taken together constitute the whole or part of the organisation of which you are an employee in perambulations that would eventually become suspicious and maybe even annoy your head of department which is obviously not what you had in mind so you find a good excuse for getting out for example i have to pop out to feed the parking meter or i’m afraid i swallowed a fish bone at lunch or excuse me but i must go and have a vaccination against measles you go and see mr x with every reason to believe that since you just saw him going by mr x is now well and truly at his desk we shall suppose to keep things simple – for we must do our best to keep things simple – that mr x is indeed in his office although we should never forget as eugene ionesco once said that when there’s a ring on the doorbell sometimes someone is there and sometimes not the truth lying somewhere between the two so mr x is in his office and as mr x is your line manager you knock before entering then await a response obviously it’s one or t’other either mr x raises his eyes or mr x does not raise his eyes if he raises his eyes that means at least that he noticed your knocking and intends to respond to it either positively or negatively a mystery that will soon be solved by a decision that we could then subject to analysis but if he does not raise his eyes but carries on talking on the telephone reading his file refilling his fountain pen in short doing whatever he had been doing at the point when you knocked on his door that means either that he hasn’t heard and yet i’m sure you knocked clearly and firmly or else that he doesn’t want to hear in any case that comes to exactly the same thing from your point of view because if he has not heard your knocking it would be quite inappropriate and even unseemly to persist so if he does not raise his eyes you go back to your desk and decide to try your luck afresh in the afternoon or tomorrow or next tuesday or forty days later obviously when you do go back