Much like my post on Black Shack Alley, I will format my post according to the parts of the book. I’ll also be updating this as I move through each part before I do a brief concluding reflection at the end.
Reflection on Part I
Unfortunately, I do not have quite as much to say about this as I did with Black Shack Alley. Something that does stick out to me is that just like in Combray, nothing really happens for a long time. Georges meets with the mysterious Otto Apfelstahl, and simultaneously goes on a long reflection of his past and his family, especially his father, as well as several disjointed memories from his childhood and his adulthood (especially Chapter Eight, which is filled with passages that seem vaguely connected to one another but then bounce to something else). It does seem awfully interesting though. Georges is a refugee of the Holocaust in France, and lost his parents because of the war. However, because he was a child at the time of the war and fled to safety, the war only forms a distant backdrop in this part, while the main focus is on the patchy memories of his family and childhood – lots of use of “I think” when recalling memories, and lots of instances of him correcting himself based on his family’s accounts – and the ongoing mystery of Gaspard Winckler. What I can find is that the memory of childhood is hazy indeed; we can only really remember little bits and reconstruct the rest using the memories of others – so how much is really the truth?
I also wonder why Georges agrees so readily to helping Otto in the search for Gaspard? I shall find out as I read on. (Note: I don’t.)
Reflection on Part II
Very confusingly, the parallel narrative shifts to one about the fictional island of W. I honestly do not understand what’s going on with W, and I find myself wishing to go back to the Gaspard story! I wonder how much is lost by translating into English from French?
I do find it interesting, having watched the lecture, how the island of W hides an authoritarian and horribly unjust system that not only perpetuate inequality and treats the losers brutally, but can also be extremely arbitrary (highlighted by the opening paragraph on p.117). Given the backdrop of WWII and the Holocaust, it reminds me of a course that I took on jurisprudence some time ago in my home university. In particular, my professor referred to a scene from the film Schindler’s List – while I haven’t seen the film and can’t recall the details of her explanation, the scene depicted people being arrested in Nazi Germany for crimes they did not even know about yet. This was meant to spark the question of whether unspoken law is law at all (“The Law must be known by all, but the Law cannot be known”). Fitting, then, that Perec chooses to illustrate the arbitrary injustice of the Nazis with this seemingly unrelated fiction.
In fact, as the barbarism of W is increasingly described, it is presented alongside a description of the fairly apathetic and ineffective Administration, which pays lip service to decrying various practices (such as trades) but makes no genuine effort to actually induce change. Indeed, they even seem to promote some of this barbarism at times, such as the peculiar scale of punishment for athletes who sneak into the women’s dormitories. A criticism of government?
The more I read about W, the more it makes me wonder if – or how – it is linked to the Holocaust. The brutality of it all; the apathy and cruelty of the Administration; the animalistic barbarism; the horror that the novices become privy to once they enter. In light of how Chapter Thirty ends, with some kind of optimism, I’m not terribly sure.
Chapter Thirty-Seven seems to give some confirmation, but it certainly gives me no answers!
Final Reflection
I didn’t really understand this novel. Unlike Proust, which had a clear trigger for his reminiscence, here I don’t see the connection between the various narratives taking place. What about Gaspard Winckler? What was the purpose of that short scene which spans the entire first part? What is the significance of W to Georges’s story, if there even is any? What is the point of Georges’s reflections to begin with? The various memories are strung along and alternate with the parallel narratives but doesn’t seem to tie together beyond being of Perec, the writer, and not the character. To me, this read more like a diary. I will admit though, that it was well written and often had me as hooked in as I was bored!
My question for this blog post is, therefore, why does Perec use the parallel narrative structure with multiple different narratives taking place at once?
One other thing I really want to discuss, but couldn’t understand, is the significance of Georges’s childhood memories. While I could gather some concepts and themes from W, and the part on Gaspard Winckler was too short to make much out of, the childhood memories take up such as large part of the book and yet I can’t really make anything of it.
I do have another thought about Gaspard Winckler. I still wonder why he is even in the book at all. Is he a victim of tragedy conveniently forgotten in place of something bigger, more “important”?
Some Quotes
p. 12: “However, childhood is neither longing nor terror, neither a paradise lost nor the Golden Fleece, but maybe it is a horizon, a point of
departure, a set of co-ordinates from which the axes of my life may draw their meaning.”
p. 42: ” I am not writing in order to say that I shall say nothing, I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I
write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.”
p. 68-69: “What marks this period especially is the absence of landmarks: these memories are scraps of life snatched from the void. No mooring. Nothing to anchor them or hold them down. Almost no way of ratifying them. No sequence in time, except as I have reconstructed it arbitrarily over the years: time went by. There were seasons. There was skiing and haymaking. No beginning, no end. There was no past,
and for very many years there was no future either; things simply went on. You were there.”
p. 117: “As you begin to acquaint yourself with W life, as a novice, for instance, who has moved from the Youth Homes to one of the
four villages at the age of fourteen, you soon grasp that one, and perhaps the main, feature of the world that is your world from now on is that its institutions are harsh and inflexible to an extent matched only by the vast scope of the rule-bending that goes on in them. This realization, which is one of the things which determine a newcomer’s personal safety, is consistently borne out, at all levels, at every moment. The Law is implacable, but the Law is unpredictable. The Law must be known by all, but the Law cannot be known. Between those who live under its sway and those who pronounce it stands an insurmountable barrier.”
p. 139-140: “Thus ends the novice’s first day. The following days will be spent in the same way. To begin with he does not grasp. Novices a
little more senior than he sometimes try to explain, to tell him what goes on, how things work, what he must do and what he mustn’t do. But usually they can’t do it. How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of?”
p. 145: “Each time, Henri expressed surprise that this outburst of adolescent anger had made such an impression on me: it seems to me, however, that what I deduced from this unbelievable act was not that Henri was just a child, but rather, more darkly, that he was not, was no longer, the infallible being, the model, the repository of knowledge and the dispenser of certainty which he of all people simply had to remain for me.” (I like this quote; it doesn’t have any particular significance to me but I just like how it was written)
p. 159: “The life of an Athlete of W is but a single, endless, furious striving, a pointless, debilitating pursuit of that unreal instant when triumph can bring rest.”
p. 160: “There are two worlds, the world of the Masters and the world of slaves. The Masters are unreachable, and the slaves tear at each other. But an Athlete of W does not even know that. He would rather believe in his Star. He waits for luck to smile on him.”