From Word To Word

This is the last time that I will write about Georges Perec.  I promise.  Well, it is the last time that I will write about Species of Spaces anyway, unless, of course, something reminds me of it, or unless another writer mentions it, or unless it is really relevant to something else that I am writing.  Otherwise, this is it.  I swear it.

Perec includes a section in Species of Spaces that he entitles “A Space Without a Use”, in which he tries to conceive of a room that is not simply unused, but that is “absolutely and intentionally useless,” a “functionless space” that “would serve for nothing, relate to nothing.”  Of course, nothing can be useless in this sense, since even an empty room or a corner serves a structural or architectural function, and Perec concludes that is “impossible to follow this idea through to the end,” because language itself is “unsuited to describing this nothing, this void.”  The problem, he implies, is that a space cannot be useless once it has become the subject of language, and that it is impossible to conceive of a space that is beyond language, because conception requires language.  The only space that would truly be without a use, therefore, would be the one that I do not know and therefore do not subject to language.

I was fascinated by this passage because I have discovered such a room in my own house.  Let me tell the story.  It will only take a minute.  When my wife and I were looking to buy our house, almost two years ago now, we did what most prospective homebuyers do.  We toured the place during the open house.  We arranged a second private tour.  We had an inspector and a contractor go through with us on a third occasion, and we found little that we did not expect.  Six months later, we moved in, and we have since had electricians, plumbers, and contractors of all descriptions doing work in every nook of the house, and we still found nothing out of the ordinary.

This fall, however, as I was removing the old sheets and pillows and upholstery that the previous owners had been using as insulation in the downstairs windows and joist spaces, I discovered that there was a window in our cold cellar.  I knew from its location that it should look out under the front porch, but I thought it odd that anyone would want a view of a crawlspace, so I pulled out the remaining mouldy fabric, and I opened the window.  There, beneath the porch, was an entire room, perhaps 10 by 18 feet and the full height of our 9 foot basement.  It had only a dirt floor, and some of the soil had been mounded up near the window so that people could easily enter and exit the room.  Scraps of carpet and wood provided some evidence that it had been used as a children’s fort at some point.  It was otherwise empty.

Until that moment, until I discovered what was there, the room was useless to me in exactly the way that Perec describes.  It was not useless altogether of course.  It had served an architectural purpose for the house’s designers and builders.  It had also served an imaginative and recreational purpose for some children at one point or another.  For me, however, who had not known that it even existed, it was entirely without use, that is, until I happened upon it and began to consider what it might have been and what it might be yet.

There is a sort of loss in this for me, the loss of something that I did not know I had until it had gone, the loss of something that I think Perec is articulating in his search for a space without a use.  What I have lost is something that might best be called the unknown or the unnamed, at least as these things appear in the small scale of my house.  Before I had found the hidden room, I did not even know that such a thing existed.  Now that I have found it, I have lost the potential to find it again.  I have lost its waiting to be discovered, though I knew nothing of this until its discovery.  I discovered what was hidden only at the cost of losing its hiddenness, as is the case with the unknown and the unnamed in every case. I can never possess the hidden, the unnamed, the useless, the unknown.  I always discover them too soon and too late.

There may be other things to find, of course.  Perhaps there is a stairway to hidden catacombs beneath my garage, or perhaps their are secret tunnels beneath my eaves, but I do not want to find them.  I want there always to be the possibility that I have not found everything, that I have not uncovered every hiddenness or explored every mystery, even in such a small thing as my house.  I want there always to be spaces that escape the uses to which I would subject them.

1. He grew the most remarkable goatee.

2. He believed that we should learn to live more on staircases.

3. He wrote a palindrome of more than 5,000 characters.

4. He kept an inventory of everything he ingested in the year 1974.

5. He listed his address as, “Georges Perec, 18 Rue de l’Assomption, Staircase A, Third Floor, Right-hand door, Paris 16e, Siene, France, Europe, The World, The Universe.”

6. He contemplated crossing Paris using only streets that began with the letter ‘c’.

7. He had as one of his ambitions to get drunk with Malcom Lowry.

8. He wrote a book of over 300 pages without ever using the letter ‘e’.

9. His defined writing in this way: “To try meticulously to retain something; to cause something to survive; to wrest a few scraps from the void as it grows; to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark, or a few signs.”

I owe a debt of gratitude to TC for introducing him to me.

I know that I will only be submitting once again to my Errol Morris fixation by showing Standard Operating Procedure at this month’s Dinner and a Doc, but I just bought my own copy of the film last week, and I have not yet seen it, so that is what we will be watching.  Those who have concerns about my obsessive relationship with Errol should feel free to direct them to my therapist.

The film explores the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  Morris, who has described the film as a non-fiction horror movie, sets out to discover the meaning of the photographs of the torture that took place in the prison, not just their sensationalized and media produced meanings or their seemingly self-evident meanings, but their broader and more contextualized meanings.  Using the words of one of the soldiers that he interviewed, Morris claims that the film tries to ask what the pictures mean outside their frames.

Those who are interested in further information can check the
trailer, a clip of the first day at the prison, the official website, and the director’s website.

As usual, the event will be at my place, 130 Dublin Street, Guelph, and all are welcome, though I do appreciate an email or a comment to let me know that you will be coming. We will eat at about 5:30 and begin the film at about 6:00.

I had someone ask me today why I never seem to post any pictures on my blog.  She is not nearly the first person to ask this question of me, so I thought that I should perhaps be more explicit about my reasons for this choice.

It is not that I am rejecting the image as such.  I would argue that images are often the most effective and the most appropriate ways to convey ideas, and my interest in film has much to do with a sincere appreciation for how images communicate.  I link to images and films not infrequently for this very reason, and there is even a sense in which this whole blog is more imagistic than literary, since the web presents writing itself as image in ways that I may or may not take the time to discuss at some later point.

What I am rejecting is the image, not in general, but in this particular space.  I am rejecting the image as a way of visualizing this writing, my writing, in particular, and I do this as a way of drawing attention to how the image has come to dominate our modes of communication at the expense of the literary and the verbal.  I am not privileging the literary essentially.  I am only isolating it, in this time and in this place, to a certain degree, to raise the question of what is lost when the visual comes to displace the literary.  I am not advocating that we do without the visual.  I am only suggesting that we consider whether we are employing it in ways that are causing us to become less fluent with the literary.

I am aware, of course, that this gesture is largely a useless one, as our textual and aural media become increasingly remediated imagistically.  I am also aware of the irony involved in advocating a renewed sense of literate textuality through the hyper-visual medium if the internet.  These things do not really concern me, however.  What concerns me is only to model a particular relation to writing that recognizes how our general relation to writing is being subsumed within a broader relation to visuality.  I aim neither to reverse the visuality of our culture nor to reject this visual culture myself, only to open the possibility that a different relation between writing and visuality might still be possible.