the Life directions for use is - according to its subtitle in the plural Romans - a “novel” of Georges Perec published in 1978. It obtained the Prix Médicis the same year.

Genesis of work

The Vie directions for use rests on a project extremely similar to that which animates its central figure, Percival Bartlebooth: “to seize to describe to exhaust, not the totality of the world - project that its only statement is enough to ruin - but a fragment made up of this one: vis-a-vis the inextricable inconsistency of the world, it will be a question of achieving until the end of the program, undoubtedly restricted, but whole, intact, irreducible. ” Work very whole is supported by this desire of exhaustiveness. Another misadventure of the writer confronted with his project, the Valène painter, who dreams to make “hold all the house in his fabric”. Always following the example Bartlebooth, the author was haunted a long time by this project, and one can advance that just like this last, this “idea came to him whereas it was twenty years old”. At least, the first trace which one can detect goes back to the year 1967 but all leaves think that this desire was always closely related to the will clean of Georges Perec to become writer. If the “laws” which work the work are evoked as of 1969 and if a first outline is born in 1972, the final drafting occupied twenty month of the life of the author, of October 1976 in the month of April 1978. Similar finally to the ambition of Bartlebooth, the project seems to be organized according to “three guiding principles”: “The first was of a moral nature: it would not be about an exploit or of a record it would be simply, discreetly, a project, difficult certainly, but nonunrealizable, controlled from one end to another and which, in return, would control, in all its details, life of that which would be devoted to it. The second was of order logical: excluding any recourse randomly, the company would make function the time and the space as of the abstract coordinates where would come to be registered with an inescapable recurrence of the identical events occurring unrelentingly in their place, at their date. ” This second principle, as we will see it below, implicitly refers to the play of the constraint and its schedule of conditions. Lastly, a third and last principle concern esthetics: “useless, its exemption from payment being the single guarantee of its rigor, the project would destroy itself as it would be achieved; its perfection would be circular: a succession of events which, while being connected, would be cancelled”.

History

Work recalls the life of a building located at number 11 of the street (imaginary) Simon-Crubellier, in the 17th district of Paris, between 1875 and 1975. It evokes its inhabitants, the objects which rest there and the stories which directly or indirectly animated it. As in the ideal table of Valène, the professor of painting of the building, the reader discovers “a long troop of characters, with their history, their past, their legends”, human comedy where the intersected destinies are answered, with the image of the curious creation of the Grifalconi cabinetmaker, “fantastic tree structure”, “impalpable network of pulverulent galleries”. Popular engravings, masterpieces, advertizing posters offer the occasion of as many digressions and accounts: various facts, rigorous scientific description, receipt of kitchen, lists in any kind. From this attempt of inventory and exhaustion of a portion of reality, emerge from the figures specific to the imaginary perecian: swindlers and forgers, adventurers, erudite faustiens, geniuses ignored or misunderstood, invalids and miraculés, billionaires ruined, inventive, traders, humble domestic anonymous.

Constraints and freedom

This book is characterized by the way even in which its author built it: each chapter deals with part or of precise place of the building and describes it in a methodical way, almost clinical, with a jubilation of crossword enthusiast, “something like a petrified memory, as one of these tables of Magritte where it is not known very well if in fact the stone became alive or if it is the life which was momifiée, something like an image fixed once and for all, indelible”. As the quotation of Paul Klee indicates it at the head placed preamble, here, “the eye follows the ways which were spared to him in work”. Each object, each memory attached to a part, each character considered at this same second, as in instantaneous (the book is mainly written besides at the present indicative), create as many parallel stories which end up being assembled in a giant puzzle.

Because it is well of that it acts: of a Puzzle , as testify to it the preamble, taken again with identical to the height of chapter XLIV, as well as the activity of two of its principal characters.

The writing oulipienne of the Life directions for use

To design the novel, Perec considered a cut of the building, as if one looked it without frontage, by seeing the interior of the parts directly. This drawing, it has it squared of 100 squares (10 by 10). In this checkerwork, a model of circulation forms a new constraint. The passage of a part/chapter obeys a precise rule indeed, the polygraphy of the rider or algorithm of the rider. This technique oulipienne rests on a schedule of conditions (ISBN 2-012355-579) containing the job cards of Perec.

It establishes a grid by topic (style of furniture, objects, animals, forms, colors, arises…), each box of the grid of 10 by 10 container a number which defers to a list. It draws the coordinates starting from the coordinates where its virtual rider in the realization of the chapter is located (chapter 1 starts arbitrarily in the stair-well in (6,4)). Boxes X, Y of two grids are without doubled blooms. These constraints make him create a card by chapter, containing a list of words/topics to be used in the chapter.

To this constraint, he adds: to speak about an event of the day of writing (topicality, anecdote…) ; a grid saying if the list must be included or excluded from the writing of the chapter. It is the use in a literary project of biquadratic orthogonal Latin of order 10, whose each box of the grid of 10 by 10 contains a single couple of figures ranging between 0 and 9. Lastly, Georges Perec applies to this diagram the permutation of the sextine of the troubadours.

Here summarized what one finds detailed in the Schedule of conditions of the Life Directions for use.

The pain-killer and the romantic one

These constraints, which can appear crushing, give place to this rich novel, swarming with details, of stories. It is a true typewriter, machine to be invented, “to tell stories”, a literary algorithm which justifies the plural of the subtitle fully. A puzzle made up of an infinity of details, accumulated by the author as for a gigantic catalog; an accumulation the small ones and great stories, beings modest or rich, alive or dead, behaviors noble, ridiculous, banals or touching. Life, quite simply.

The place of the author

In more than one way, the Life directions for use is an autobiographical company, heavy dramas which marked the life of Perec, full with memories, sometimes pain-killers, and where “the friendship, the history and the literature” as the incipit indicates it, level in each page. On this point, one can again follow his author, who offers in “ the chapter LI”, in a very metaphorical way, the most completed expression his place within the architecture of work:

“It would be itself in the table, with the manner of the painters of the Rebirth who always reserved a tiny place but an apparently inoffensive place, as if that had been done like that, while passing, a little by chance, as if that were to be only one signature for initiates. Hardly the died painter, that would become an anecdote which would be transmitted from generation to generation until, one day, one in redécouvre the proof, thanks to steppings of fortune, or while comparing the table with preparatory drafts found in the attics of a museum and perhaps then would go one counts of what there always had been of private individual in this small character something which would resemble comprehension, with a certain softness, a perhaps tinted joy of nostalgia.”

Thus, the Schedule of conditions contains a heading “allusion to a daily event occurred during the reaction of the chapter”. Readings and friends of the author, in the form of indirect references or “quotations, sometimes slightly modified”, the striking facts of its existence and the negligible details of its daily newspaper, the elements of a personal mythology and the loans with its own former works - the W of the memory and revenge, the scar, the family saga… As many elements which make it possible to advance than the Life directions for use is well the book of a life. And these discrete marks, that Bernard Magné indicated under the happy name of “æncrages” - inking/anchoring - make the Life directions for use an intimate book, and sometimes even intimist.

Various information

• the book is dedicated to the memory of Raymond Queneau.

• It begins with a quotation of Jules Verne, drawn from Michel Strogoff : “Looks of all your eyes, looks at. ”.
• the building of which it is question in the novel finds with 11 rue Simon-Crubellier, 75017 Paris. According to the text, this street obliquely cuts the rectangle ranging between the streets Médéric, Jadin, De Chazelles and Leon Jost. The street Simon-Crubellier does not exist, but this rectangle, yes. On its site in particular the technical school is J. Drouant.
• the layout of the polygraphy of the rider used by Perec excludes one from the boxes, the book not comprising like 99 chapters.
• the schedule of conditions of the Life directions for use: ISBN 2-012355-579.

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