Life: A User's Manual

by Georges Perec

  This fifty-five-year old widower and invalid, whose shabby fate has been forged by wars, is obsessed with two grandiose and illusory projects.

  The first is of a fictional nature: Gratiolet would like to invent a proper hero, a true romantic hero; not some pot-bellied king of Poland absurdly obsessed with sausages and slaughter, but a true paladin, a doughty knight, a defender of women and orphans, a righter of wrongs, a parfit gentleman and a noble lord, a brilliant strategist, a man of elegance, courage, wealth, and wit; dozens of times has he thought up a face for him, with a determined chin, a broad forehead, teeth showing in a hearty smile, and a twinkle in the eyes; dozens of times has he clad him in impeccably tailored outfits with pale-yellow gloves, ruby cuff links, tiepins tipped with priceless pearls, a monocle, a gold-handled crop, but he still hasn’t managed to find him fitting first and second names.

  The second project is in the field of metaphysics: with the aim of showing that, in the words of Professor H. M. Tooten, “evolution is a hoax”, Olivier Gratiolet has undertaken an exhaustive inventory of all the imperfections and inadequacies to which the human organism is heir: vertical posture, for example, gives man only a precarious balance: muscular tension alone keeps him upright, thus causing constant fatigue and discomfort in the spinal column, which, although sixteen times stronger than it would have been were it straight, does not allow man to carry a meaningful weight on his back; feet ought to be broader, more spread out, more specifically suited to locomotion, whereas what he has are only atrophied hands deprived of prehensile ability; legs are not sturdy enough to bear the body’s weight, which makes them bend, and moreover they are a strain on the heart, which has to pump blood about three feet up, whence come swollen feet, varicose veins, etc.; hip joints are fragile and constantly prone to arthrosis or serious fractures; arms are atrophied and too slender; hands are frail, especially the little finger, which has no use, the stomach has no protection whatsoever, no more than the genitals do; the neck is rigid and limits rotation of the head, the teeth do not allow food to be grasped from the sides, the sense of smell is virtually nil, night vision is less than mediocre, hearing is very inadequate; man’s hairless and unfurred body affords no protection against cold, and, in sum, of all the animals of creation, man, who is generally considered the ultimate fruit of evolution, is the most naked of all.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  Hutting, 2

  HUTTING DOES NOT work in his large studio but in a little room off the gallery specially designed for the long sittings which he inflicts on his clients since he has become a portrait painter.

  It is a bright and cosy room, kept spick-and-span, looking nothing like the conventionally messy artist’s studio; no canvases face-down against the wall, no precarious piles of stretchers, no dented kettle on an antediluvian ring, but a black leather padded door, tall indoor plants spilling out of broad tripod stands and clambering up to the skylight, and white gloss walls, bare but for a long polished metal panel carrying three posters, attached to it by magnetised hemispheres masquerading as halved billiard balls: a colour reproduction of Roger van der Weyden’s Triptych of the Last Judgement from the Hôtel-Dieu at Beaune, the poster advertising Yves Allégret’s film, The Proud Ones, with Michèle Morgan, Gérard Philipe, and Victor Manuel Mendoza, and a photographic enlargement of a fin-de-siècle menu with flourishes reminiscent of Beardsley:

  The client is Japanese, a man with a wrinkled face, wearing a gold-rimmed pince-nez and a formal black lounge suit, white shirt, and pearl-grey tie. He is sitting on a chair with his hands on his knees, legs together, back straight, turning his eyes not towards the painter but to a little card table inlaid with a backgammon board, and on which stand a white telephone, a silver-plated coffee pot, and a wicker basket full of exotic fruits.

  Hutting is behind his easel with his palette in his hand, astride a stone lion, an inspiring sculpture whose Assyrian origin is doubted by none, but which nonetheless posed a problem for the experts, since the painter found it himself, buried at less than three feet under a field, at a time when as the standard-bearer of “Mineral Art” he was hunting for stones in the environs of Thuburbo Majus.

  Hutting is bare-chested, and he is wearing printed cotton trousers, thick white wool socks, a fine cambric cravat around his neck, and a dozen multicoloured bangles on his left wrist. All his equipment – paint tubes, pots, brushes, knives, chalk, rags, vaporisers, scrapers, quills, sponges, etc. – is stored neatly in a long printer’s case placed on his right.

  The canvas on the easel is mounted in a trapezoidal stretcher, about six feet high, two feet wide at the top, and four feet wide at the bottom, as if the painting were intended to be hung very high up and were meant to exaggerate its own perspective by a kind of anamorphosis.

  The painting is almost finished and shows three figures. Two are standing on either side of a tall dresser laden with books, small instruments, and diverse toys: astronomical kaleidoscopes exhibiting the twelve constellations of the zodiac from Aries to Pisces, miniature mechanical orreries, arithmetical gelatin lozenges, geometrical to correspond with zoological biscuits, globe-map playing balls, historically costumed dolls.

  The figure on the left is a corpulent man whose facial features are entirely hidden by his costume, a bulky outfit for underwater fishing: a glossy black-and-white-striped rubber wetsuit, a black helmet, a facemask, an oxygen cylinder, a harpoon, a cork-handled dagger, a diver’s watch, and flippers.

  The right-hand figure, obviously the aged Japanese who is posing, is dressed in a long red-tinged black robe.

  The third figure is in the foreground, kneeling, facing the other two, with his back to the viewer. He is wearing a lozenge-shaped headdress of the kind worn by staff and students at British universities at graduation ceremonies.

  The tiled floor has been painted with great precision to reproduce the geometrical motifs of the marble mosaic brought by Italian artisans around 1268 to floor the chancel of Westminster Abbey, at the time of the abbot Robert Ware.

  Ever since the heroic years of his “haze period” and of mineral art – the aesthetics of piles of stone, of which the most memorable manifestation was the “reclamation”, then the “signing”, and a little later the sale, to a town planner from Plant City, Fla, of one of the barricades put up in Rue Gay-Lussac in ’68 – Hutting cherished the ambition of becoming a portrait painter, and many were his buyers who begged him to do theirs. His problem, as in all his previous pictorial enterprises, was to develop an individual procedure, to find a recipe, as he put it, which would allow him to “cook up” a proper dish of his own.

  For some months Hutting used a method which, he said, had been revealed to him for three rounds of gin by a half-caste beggar he had met in a scruffy bar on Long Island but who wouldn’t reveal its origin despite all Hutting’s insistence. It involved selecting the colours for a portrait from an inalterable sequence of 11 hues by use of three key numbers, one provided by the date and time of the painting’s “birth”, “birth” meaning the first sitting for the painting, the second by the phase of the moon at the painting’s “conception”, “conception” meaning the circumstances which had initiated the portrait, for instance a telephone call asking for it to be done, and the third by the price.

  The system’s impersonality was the kind of thing to captivate Hutting. But perhaps because he applied it too rigidly, he obtained results more disconcerting than captivating. To be sure, his Countess of Berlingue with Red Eyes earned a deserved success, but several other portraits left critics and clients in the air, and above all Hutting had the confused and awkward feeling that he was using without any spark of genius a formula which someone else before him had obviously managed to bend to his own artistic requirements.

  The relative failure of these trials did not discourage him overmuch, but led him to refine further what his appointed panegyrist, the art critic Elzéar Nahum, felicitously called his “personal equations”: they allowed him to define a style lying somewhere
between a genre painting, a genuine portrait, pure fantasy, and historical mythology, which he baptised “the imaginary portrait”: he decided to do twenty-four of them at a rate of one a month, in a precise order, over the following two years:

  1. Tom Dooley, polishing authentic metal tractors, meets three displaced persons.

  2. Coppelia teaches Noah to crawl, as there are no amphibians on the Ark.

  3. Septimius Severus, watching the Bey nab oodles of women, negotiates his sister Septimia Octavilla’s hand.

  4. Jean-Louis Girard explicates Isaac de Bensérade’s celebrated sestet.

  5. Łukasiewicz’s German disciple, der Graf von Bellerval, a friend of the eccentric Lord Bergerac, demonstrates in his teacher’s presence that an island is an area surrounded by shores.

  6. Jules Barnavaux, owner of a respectable aviary, regretting that he had not observed the twin signs in the Ministry toilets.

  7. Nero Wolfe, wearing a bra for disguise, comes upon Captain Fierabras forcing the safe at the Chase Manhattan Bank.

  8. The dachshund Optimus Maximus swimming to shore at Calvi, noting with pleasure that the mayor is waiting for him with a bone and some bitter local vino.

  9. The “antipodee translator” wearing rich amber studs tells Orpheus he too can charm beasts.

  10. Livingstone, realising Lord Ramsay’s promised bounty has gone to another chap, manifests a fit of bad temper.

  11. R. Mutt fails graduation for claiming at the oral that Champollion invented “Dew Shampoo”.

  12. Boriet-Tory drinks Russkaya Dusha tonic with his Château-Latour whilst watching the “Wolf Man” dance the foxtrot.

  13. The young priest devising concetti in elucubrating on Lucca and T’ien Tsin.

  14. Maximilian lands in Mexico and daintily scoffs four nelumbia and eleven tortillas.

  15. The “poster of rhymes” demands that his farmer shear his wool and that his wife weave it in a hall at Issy-les-Moulineaux.

  16. Narcisse Follaninio, a finalist at the Amsterdam Poetry Festival, puts a volume of Lely on a lectern and reads a rhyming dictionary in front of the jury.

  17. Zeno of Didymus, a Caribbean Corsair, paid a handsome sum by William III, leaves defenceless Curaçao to the Dutch invaders.

  18. The Recycled Razor Works’ managing director’s wife allows her daughter out on the streets of Paris alone provided she wears her slummy “Schelm” attire and docs not carry travellers’ cheques in her bra.

  19. The actor Archibald Moon dithers for his next show between the roles of Mata Hari, Methuselah, and Joseph of Arimathæa.

  20. The painter Hutting tries to get a proper equation of tax and allowances from a trouble-shooting revenue inspector.

  21. Dr LaJoie is struck off the medical register for having stated, in front of Ray Monk, Ken O’Leary, and others that, after seeing Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst had put a price on Orson Welles’s head.

  22. Before leaving on the Hamburg coach, Javert recalls Valjean’s key value in saving his life.

  23. The geographer Lecomte, descending the Hamilton River, is sheltered by Eskimos and to thank them helps their village accrue both fame and food supplies.

  24. Listing from his album Irish mitzvahs and lively portraits of Vinteuil, Elstir, Bergotte and La Berma, the critic Molinet lectures at the Collège de France on the myths of impressionist art which readers of Proust and Joyce have by no means fully elucidated yet.

  All paintings, and above all portraits, are, as Hutting explains, the confluence of a dream and of a reality. The very concept of the “imaginary portrait” grew out of this basic notion: the buyer, the person who wants a portrait of himself or of someone dear to him painted, constitutes only one element of the picture, and perhaps the least important one – who would still have heard of Monsieur Bertin without Ingres? – but that person is the initial element, and it seems right that he or she should play a determining, “founding” role in the picture: not as an aesthetic model, dictating shapes, colours, “verisimilitude”, or indeed even the narrative content of the picture, but as a structural model: the commissioner or, more appropriately – as for medieval painting – the donator, would be the initiator of his or her portrait: the donator’s identity, rather than his features, would nourish the artist’s creative forces and slake his thirst for the imaginary.

  One single portrait evades these laws, number twenty, the one depicting Hutting himself. A self-portrait was clearly called for within this unique series, but its eventual form was dictated, the painter asserts, by six years of continual battling with the income tax office, the outcome of which was a final victory for his point of view. His problem was this: Hutting sold three-quarters of his production in the United States, but he was obviously determined to pay tax in France, where he paid at much lower rates; in itself that was perfectly permissible, but in addition the painter wanted his income to count not as “income accruing overseas” – which is what the revenue office counted it as, with virtually no offsets or allowances – but as “income accruing from manufactures exported overseas” and thus eligible to benefit from the considerable allowances through which the State encourages exports. Now was there in the whole world a product more deserving of the term manufacture than a picture painted manually by the hand of an Artist? The Inspector of Taxes was forced to concede the etymological point, but took his revenge immediately by refusing to count as “French manufactures” paintings which, granted that they had been made manually, had been so made in a studio on the other side of the Atlantic, and it was only after brilliant exchanges of counsels’ cases that it was established that Hutting’s hand remained a French hand even when painting abroad and that, in consequence, even allowing for Hutting’s dual nationality, since he had an American father and a French mother, it was right and proper to recognise the moral, intellectual, and artistic benefit which the world-wide exportation of Franz Hutting’s æuvre brought to France, and therefore to apply the desired abatements to his income for tax purposes, a victory which Hutting celebrated by depicting himself as a Don Quixote with a long lance pursuing feeble and pallid black-clad functionaries scuttling out of the Treasury like rats leaving a sinking ship.

  All the other paintings were based on the name, forename, and profession of the twenty-three amateurs who commissioned them and who committed themselves in writing to refraining from disputing either the title or the subject of the work, or the place they would be given in it. After being subjected to various linguistic and numerical procedures, the buyer’s identity and profession determined, in order, the painting’s dimensions, the number of represented figures, the dominant colours, the “semantic field” [mythology (2,9), fiction (22), mathematics (5), diplomacy (3), show business (19), travel (13), history (14,17), detective investigation (7), etc.], the main narrative content, the secondary details (historical and geographical allusions, items of clothing, props, etc.) and finally the price. All the same, the system was subject to two overriding constraints: the buyer – or the person whose portrait the buyer wanted – had to be explicitly represented on the canvas; and one of the elements of narrative, in other respects determined rigorously without reference to the model’s personality, had to coincide precisely with the buyer or his subject.

  Putting the buyer’s name in the painting’s title was obviously thought too facile, and Hutting resigned himself to doing so on only three occasions: for No. 4, a portrait of the detective-novel writer Jean-Louis Girard, for No. 12, a portrait of the Swiss surgeon Boriet-Tory, director of the Department of Experimental Cryostatics at the World Health Organization, and for No. 19, a veritable virtuoso performance inspired by holography, in which the actor Archibald Moon is painted in such a way that as you move your eyes one way and then another across the painting you see him alternately as Joseph of Arimathæa, with a long white beard, grey wool burnous and pilgrim’s staff, as Methuselah, and as a bare-breasted, red-headed Mata Hari, with studded leather bracelets on wrists and ankles. On the other hand, No. 8
, though it does portray a dachshund – a dog belonging to the Venezuelan film producer Melchior Aristoteles, who sees it as the only true successor to Rin Tin Tin – the dachshund it portrays is not called Optimus Maximus at all but answers to the much more euphonious name of Freischütz.