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Life, a User's Manual Spine 2013
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Discussion - Week Four - Life, A User's Manual - Part Four
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It is as if Perec heeded my whining & filled this week's reading with enough irony & (gentle) sarcasm (& war details)–why,there's even fire & brimstone & lo the great Mephistopheles! Now we know that all the successful people in this world have made pacts with the Devil!Perec even includes a line in Hindi "Acha Botacha ( actually it shd be bahût acchhä) Sab Acha”, meaning "good,very good,all good".
Part 4 opens on a noirish note- with nods to Chandler & Cain, mysterious goings on with a Cate Blanchett look-alike American beauty,her husband & their Filipino (servant-cum-master) Carlos– something is not quite right here with the power equations being reversed- a sign of things to come? And sure enough we see increasing mental manipulation/torture of Bartlebooth by his employee Winckler.
Bb is slowly losing it:
"This man, who in the eyes of all the inhabitants of the building was the very symbol of British phlegm, of discretion, courtesy, politeness, of exquisite urbanity, a man who had never been heard to raise his voice, would on these occasions let fly with such violence that it seemed he had been concentrating all of it inside himself for years.(...)Bartlebooth would soon revert to being a sandbag, a lifeless lump chained to his worktable, a blank-eyed subnormal, unable to see, waiting hours without knowing what he was waiting for.He did not feel hunger or thirst, or heat or cold; he could stay awake for more than forty hours doing nothing apart from taking the remaining unassembled pieces one by one, staring at them..." P. 433-35
And the same story is repeated with a different set of characters: Albert Massy & Lino Margay:
"But, as time passed, these acclamations that were not for him, these honours he should have known and which only an iniquitous fatality had deprived him of, aroused in him a resentment that grew ever sharper. He began to hate those howling crowds which ignored him and stupidly adored the hero of the day who owed his victories only to him, to his experience, to his willpower, to his technique, to his abnegation. And, as though he needed, in order to confirm him in his hatred and his contempt, to see his youngster heap up trophies, he came to demand greater and greater efforts of him." P. 453
War background is more pronounced in this week's reading.Jim will like this: "War came. Massy was conscripted into the Compulsory Labour Service and left for Germany to work in a shoe factory; Josette set up a tailoring business in the saddler’s shop. In that time of penury, when almanacs recommended strengthening shoes with soles cut out of thicknesses of newsprint or old discarded felt and unpicking old pullovers so as to knit new ones, it was obligatory to have old clothes remade, so Josette was not short of work.(...)Marguerite and Mademoiselle Crespi sometimes came to keep her company. The three women sat in silence around a little wood stove for which the only fuel was sawdust-and-paper pellets, drawing their needled threads for hours on end under the dim light of their blackout lamp." P. 454
Josette & Margay's ( love) story has a touch of The Frog Prince/ The Beauty and the Beast- it's a kind of fairytale. I was happy for them.
Trivia: Rosendo Juarez, from Borges' The Man in Pink Corner' makes an entry in the Saddler's story!
This week's reading is impressionistic- rather slim pickings here–several chess boards make an appearance here & there,Rorschach's cellar felt mysterious,if only I knew what I was looking for! It's like looking for a needle in a haystack!Isabelle Gratiolet's "horror stories" were amusing- Perec makes a telling comment on French education system that treats 'imagination' as something abnormal- reminded me of that boy from Truffaut's 400 Blows.
Guys and their machines! ( and trust it their is always a woman behind it) –"Whatever the truth of the matter, the growth of David Marcia’s emotional scar tissue can be gauged by the increasing cubic capacity of his machines: Yamaha 250, Kawasaki 350, Honda 450, Kawasaki Mach III 500, a four-cylinder Honda 750, Guzzi 750, a water-cooled Suzuki 750, BSA A75 750, Laverda SF 750, BMW 900, Kawasaki 1000."P.417."
Madam Marcia didn't really need to be mean towards the newly-weds Marquiseauxs, the bride Caroline's mother,Madam Echard did the job quite well!
Regarding Chapter 74, Lift Machinery,2– "SOMETIMES HE IMAGINED the building as an iceberg whose visible tip included the main floors and eaves and whose submerged mass began below the first level of cellars"– This is Valène & his imaginative trip,yes? This whole imagined world couldn't possibly exist beneath the cellars! Perec's descriptive power is remarkable in this chapter,giving it an almost mythical dimensions.
The marriage of Olivia Norvell & Jeremy Bishop– even as far back as 1946, people knew the value of personal brand merchandising! –"the public, paying ten Australian dollars per person (about five pounds sterling), was permitted to enter the young couple’s new home (...)For ten dollars more, you could even go into the nuptial chamber to admire the conjugal bed carved out of the trunk of a sequoia, a joint gift from the Wood and Allied Industries’ Trades Association and the National Union of Foresters and Woodcutters.(...) That was her first marriage. It lasted twelve days. Rorschach was her fifth husband." P.487
One question– while the other 'failures' in this book are mostly victims of circumstances/fate– isn't Bartlebooth's failure self-inflicted? And what was the motivation behind it? The text still hasn't been able to provide any reason/logic for this self negation in an otherwise very materialistically indulgent man.In his desire to play God, he "wanted the whole project to come full circle without leaving a mark, like an oily sea closing over a drowning man; his aim was for nothing, nothing at all, to subsist, for nothing but the void to emerge from it, for only the immaculate whiteness of a blank to remain, only the gratuitous perfection of a project entirely devoid of utility". It is his hubris that brought him down.
What did you think of the very horrid 'modern' painting in Hutting's bedroom with which this week's read ended?
Wonderful, as always, Mala.My thought re: Bartlebooth's failure is that it is useful to reflect on his "guiding principles" in Chapter 37. They do not fully address root cause, but they do speak to intent.
Mod
In the original Faust story, Faust was unhappy with his merely human power and knowledge. He sold his soul to have 20 years of god-like powers on earth.
Big Reveal: rearrange the letters of "Smautf" and you get "M. Faust" - Monsieur Faust.
Faust was raised by a wealthy uncle. Bartlebooth received his fortune from a wealthy uncle.
In this story, Smautf takes on the role of Mephistopheles, who, in the original version, was Faust's servant, sworn to provide every service to Faust during his 20 years of omnipotence.
Faust reads many books of forbidden knowledge to achieve his power. Bartlebooth seeks his knowledge first from Valène who teaches him the "secrets" of watercolors. Later he enlists the services of various tenants to create the black boxes, reconstitute the paper after the puzzles were reassembled, and of course, our Satan character, Winckler, who creates the puzzles that reclaim Bartlebooth's life one puzzle at a time.
I haven't finished the book, so I won't conclude these thoughts, but I have to imagine Perec had some of this in mind. "Smautf"??! As if....
Big Reveal: rearrange the letters of "Smautf" and you get "M. Faust" - Monsieur Faust.Whoa! That name always struck me as strange but I never paused to think that it could be an anagram cause Perec masterfully got me lost amongst the puzzle of the objects!
Bravo,Jim! I think,you are going absolutely right with your analysis.
I guess, it means that I shd read each & every book on the BP roster but in order to do so I'll need to sign a pact with the devil! (cause I've neither the time nor energy to do so.)
Mod
Me too, but I didn't see it until I reached chapter 65 and then bing! The piece snapped into place.
From the Preamble:
The pieces are readable, take on a sense, only when assembled; in isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing - just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded, after minutes of trial and error, or after a prodigious half-second flash of inspiration, in fitting it into one of its neighbors, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece.
As soon as I read the Faust analogy in chapter 65, the piece disappeared and the whole Bartlebooth/Smautf project and its Faustian basis appeared like a finished puzzle - or in this case, a part of a finished puzzle since I haven't finished the book yet. Perec is a crafty, master puzzle-maker, isn't he?!
Best book discussion ever!I haven't been joining in as I read this too long ago to remember many details, but loving revisiting it via this discussion and its revelations. Looking forward to a reread armed with a whole new understanding!
Whitney wrote:"Best book discussion ever!"All credit to Jim. When the man puts on his thinking cap,he is amazing!
Mod
...and when I've had enough coffee.
Question to all of you. If Bartlebooth has indeed made a kind of Faustian bargain, what would you say is his "sin"?
Hmmm I think I already mentioned that though in different words– that he thinks he can create & destroy ( as God is both a creator & destroyer[ & also sustainer,as in Hinduism, but not in this context]), I'll say it's ambition, God-complex,but perhaps you've a better word for it,Jim?I remember reading in this week's section somewhere,how he admired Beaumont's supreme confidence in his theories related to archaeological sites in Spain ( Beaumont section earlier in the book was heavily dominated by Borgesian ref),& we know how that turned out i.e in failure & suicide.
Part Four begins with a modern Mephistopheles story of two Americans trapped in a Faustian bargain with a Filipino blackmailer – sort of…