Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

Georges Perec (1936-1982) - “What a marvellous invention man is! He can blow on his hands to warm them up, and blow on his soup to cool it down.”

Georges Perec, age 45, told an interviewer how books by authors he loved when he was in his 20s were like pieces of a puzzle but there were still spaces between the pieces and those were the spaces where he could write. He went on to say how he would like to write everything in every way possible, including children’s books, science fiction, detective novels, cartoons, comedy, drama and film scripts. He also said that at the end of his life he would like to have used all the words in the dictionary and create some of his own words. One can only imagine the many books Georges Perec would show more have written if he lived to be 86 instead of dying of lung cancer at 46.

Ah, Georges, language as celebration; language as game; language as play. As a way of reviewing this marvelous collection, I will cite a few quotes and offer brief comments on one essay, a 95 pager, where Perec writes about spaces moving from the micro to the macro, starting with The Page, The Bed, The Bedroom, The Apartment, The Apartment Building, The Street.

The Page
“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbors, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of texts. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than the alphabet?”---------- Amazing. To view the Borgesian aleph, that all-seeing sphere, as the alphabet from which all words are created. And once words are created, is there any object or space, concept or material reality, large or small, gross or subtle, that cannot be labeled, marked, identified, described or categorized by words?

The Bed
“We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways.” ---------- Oh my goodness, to see the similarities between the page one writes on (or reads from) and the bed one sleeps on.

The Bedroom
“The resurrected space of the bedroom is enough to bring back to life, to recall, to revive memories, the most fleeting and anodyne along with the most essential.” ---------- This is certainly true for me: I can’t visualize the large upstairs attic bedroom of my youth without recalling emotions and feeling I had when a child: the fear of the shadows cast on the walls at night, the sense of wonder when the sun streamed through the windows in the morning, the unsettling feelings when looking at all those odd ceiling angles.

The Apartment
“It takes a little more imagination no doubt to picture an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses. We can imagine well enough what a gustatorium might be, or an auditory, but one might wonder what a seeery might look like, or a smellery or a feelery.” ---------- Whimsy, fancy, vision, caprice, dream.

The Street
“Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern, for system perhaps. Apply yourself. Take your time. . . . Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.” --------- One could take the author’s words here as a mini-course in creative writing and creative seeing and living. As Georges Perec said in his interview, the empty spaces he leaves after his death are an invitation for others to continue the play and game of language and writing.

And in this essay he keeps on expanding: The Neighborhood, The Town, The Countryside, The Country, Europe, The World, Space. ---------- Go for it. There’s plenty of space for everyone. show less

Espèces d'espaces (1974) (which has the trying-too-hard English title Species of Spaces and Other Pieces) isn't a novel, rather it's more of a freeform essay on the subject of space. Not in the "outer space" astronomical sense, but rather in the sense of how we take up space - how we inhabit it, how we imbue it.

Several times, I've tried to imagine a flat in which there'd be a completely unnecessary room, absolutely and deliberately unnecessary. It wouldn't be a storage room, or an extra bedroom, or a corridor, or a broom closet, or a corner. It would be a room without function. It would surve no purpose, it would serve nothing. It was impossible for me, however hard I tried, to complete this thought, this image. Language itself seemed show more incapable of describing this nothing, this void, as if you could only speak of what is full, usable and functional.
A room without function. Not "without exact function", but exactly without function; not multi-functional (anyone can do that) but afunctional.

The first thing you notice about Perec's writing is always the limitations he puts on himself; write a novel without one letter, write a novel taking place in one moment in an entire house, write an autobiography made up of singular memories, etc. So Spaces becomes an essay about that very phenomenon; that the world is entirely made up of limits. All space, whether inner or outer, from the smallest microscopical pore in our skin to the entire galaxy, can only be defined by the philosophical, physical, corporeal or conceptual limits we put on it.

If nothing obstructs our view, we can see very far. But if it's not obstructed it doesn't see anything; our gaze only sees what it hits; space is what obstructs our view, what our gaze hits, resistance...

So he starts from the space he knows best; an empty paper*, a blank space he can fill, then gradually expands from his bed to his bedroom, flat, house, street, block, city, country**, continent, world, universe - expands his understanding of the space he and others take up, memories that he connects to the different layers, .

* I can't help noting (which Perec couldn't have predicted) that I read this as an ebook - an object which literally takes up no space at all, and yet undeniably exists because of what a dead writer has imprinted on it. I wonder what Perec would have made of the Megabyte.
** He points out that every country, these days, has an airspace covering its precise surface, and I'm struck by the idea that "airspace" didn't exist until about 1903 or so. (1909? 1915?)

Hey, guys, we've been discovered! (Indian catching sight of Christopher Columbus)

Spaces is hardly one of Perec's greatest works - quite a few times, it reads more like a scrapbook of ideas, thinking aloud to himself, trying out concepts (at one point he mentions that he's trying to write Life: A User's Manual and outlines some of his ideas for it). There are lengthy quotes from other writers, sometimes intentionally misquoted. If Perec were a film maker rather than a writer, this would probably be an extra feature on the Criterion edition of Life: A User's Manual (or W Or The Memory Of Childhood, which was written at the same time and isn't entirely unrelated, especially when he tests his theories on Auschwitz and his hypothetical childhood at the end). That said, it's well worth a read; Perec may ramble a bit in the 100-odd pages that make up this essay collection, but he does so in a charming, clever way, and I come away from it with a few new ideas to keep in mind the next time I read one of his other books. show less

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is collection of non-fiction bits (translated into English for the first time) written between 1965 and 1981, though ‘non-fiction’ hardly conveys a sense of what Perec was up to. Some of the titles hint at the tone here: “M. Raymond Roussel’s mobile home,” “Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Color,” “The Gnocchi of Autumn,” “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books,” “Some of the Things I Really Must do Before I Die.”

As Perec says in a magazine interview from 1979 (included here), he wrote of his own experience, but experience that could not be apprehended by consciousness or feelings or ideology; ‘it’s experience grasped at the level of the show more setting in which your body moves, the gesture it makes, all the ordinariness connected with your clothes, with food, with traveling, with your daily routine, with the exploring of your space.’ He was meticulous in his submission to experience, since, as he says, all that we can ever really know is a very small bit of the world, ‘tiny incursions into disembodied vestiges, small, incidental excitements.’ We waste too much time measuring the historic, the significant and the revelatory.

What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.

“Reading: A Socio-physiological Outline” (1976) will make anyone with a stack of books next to them cry and sing and tremble deliriously in empathy, and “Species of Spaces” (1974) so resonates with our contemporary situation that the 2020 Thessalonika International Film Festival (virtual because of the pandemic) commissioned works from 22 home-bound film artists to create their own experiences of space, inspired by Perec. Brilliant. show less

I have been meaning to write something about Species of Spaces and Other Pieces for a while now. I read this one years ago and have returned again and again to it over the years. I need to buy a new copy as my paperback is falling apart from use.

Georges Perec was a kind of literary scientist, a very rationalist humanist, a light and free obsessive capable of making objects and buildings speak and giving them a soul simply by enumerating them in taxonomies dictated by his sensitivity as a spectator of the world.

In this little book, Perec asks what space is, from the blank of the page to that of a bed, a room, a city or the whole world: and with simple considerations, lists of visual elements and observation exercises that are proposed to show more doing - as if it were a very personal notebook - teaches the reader to SEE. Reading it brought me back to Betty Edwards' famous manual "Drawing with the right side of the brain", where we strive to make the aspiring designer see the world for what it is, eliminating the mental constructs we learn to superimpose on them since kindergarten .

For this reason Species of Spaces and Other Pieces is also a very photographic book. One of the exercises proposes: "Observe the road in a systematic way [...] write down what you see. Is there something that strikes us? Nothing strikes us. We do not know how to see". This condition of virgin observer is precisely the one in which I aspire to find myself when I photograph, because it brings back the joy of discovering the world and the pleasure of seeing.

The book is also interesting for its architectural and urbanistic implications (what is a neighborhood?) And contains an anticipation of that monumental labyrinth that is "Life instructions for use", which appears here as an idea for a future work. show less

It just goes to prove that oftentimes the best things come in small packages. Perec essentially looks at the various "Spaces" we inhabit in our everyday lives - from our bedrooms to our city blocks to our neighbors, our country and the world at large. His clever insights make the mundane seem extraordinary. I think he challenges us to open our minds to creatively look at the world around us not as a series of confinements but as a series of opportunities for reflection, playfulness and adventure. It's refreshingly original.

Georges Perec (1936-1982) - “What a marvellous invention man is! He can blow on his hands to warm them up, and blow on his soup to cool it down.”

Georges Perec, age 45, told an interviewer how books by authors he loved when he was in his 20s were like pieces of a puzzle but there were still spaces between the pieces and those were the spaces where he could write. He went on to say how he would like to write everything in every way possible, including children’s books, science fiction, detective novels, cartoons, comedy, drama and film scripts. He also said that at the end of his life he would like to have used all the words in the dictionary and create some of his own words. One can only imagine the many books Georges Perec would show more have written if he lived to be 86 instead of dying of lung cancer at 46.

Ah, Georges, language as celebration; language as game; language as play. As a way of reviewing this marvelous collection, I will cite a few quotes and offer brief comments on one essay, a 95 pager, where Perec writes about spaces moving from the micro to the macro, starting with The Page, The Bed, The Bedroom, The Apartment, The Apartment Building, The Street.

The Page
“This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbors, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of texts. Is the aleph, that place in Borges from which the entire world is visible simultaneously, anything other than the alphabet?”---------- Amazing. To view the Borgesian aleph, that all-seeing sphere, as the alphabet from which all words are created. And once words are created, is there any object or space, concept or material reality, large or small, gross or subtle, that cannot be labeled, marked, identified, described or categorized by words?

The Bed
“We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways.” ---------- Oh my goodness, to see the similarities between the page one writes on (or reads from) and the bed one sleeps on.

The Bedroom
“The resurrected space of the bedroom is enough to bring back to life, to recall, to revive memories, the most fleeting and anodyne along with the most essential.” ---------- This is certainly true for me: I can’t visualize the large upstairs attic bedroom of my youth without recalling emotions and feeling I had when a child: the fear of the shadows cast on the walls at night, the sense of wonder when the sun streamed through the windows in the morning, the unsettling feelings when looking at all those odd ceiling angles.

The Apartment
“It takes a little more imagination no doubt to picture an apartment whose layout was based on the functioning of the senses. We can imagine well enough what a gustatorium might be, or an auditory, but one might wonder what a seeery might look like, or a smellery or a feelery.” ---------- Whimsy, fancy, vision, caprice, dream.

The Street
“Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern, for system perhaps. Apply yourself. Take your time. . . . Note down what you can see. Anything worthy of note going on. Do you know how to see what’s worthy of note? Is there anything that strikes you? Nothing strikes you. You don’t know how to see. You must set about it more slowly, almost stupidly. Force yourself to write down what is of no interest, what is most obvious, most common, most colourless.” --------- One could take the author’s words here as a mini-course in creative writing and creative seeing and living. As Georges Perec said in his interview, the empty spaces he leaves after his death are an invitation for others to continue the play and game of language and writing.

And in this essay he keeps on expanding: The Neighborhood, The Town, The Countryside, The Country, Europe, The World, Space. ---------- Go for it. There’s plenty of space for everyone. show less

By far my favorite work of Perec, and probably in my top ten books of all time. It is a great introduction to his style; if you can't get into this, don't bother with Perec. One of my favorite works struggling with the enigma of the written word, what it means to be a writer, what it means to be a reader.