What happens when two people don’t share the same sense of humor? They fail to connect. This is definitely true of me and the waiter in this Café Tabac in Place de Saint-Sulpice, a café known to some as Café Perec. Wittgenstein said that when two people don’t share the same sense of humor, it’s as if, whereas it’s the custom between certain individuals for one to throw a ball to the other, and for the other person to catch it and throw it back, there are some who, instead of returning the ball, put it in their pocket. I decide to forget about the waiter with the different sense of humor and look across at the church of Saint-Sulpice. I am in the same observation post where, in the 1970s, Georges Perec decided to sit and catalogue this square, taking note of “that which is generally not taken note of, that which is not noticed, that which has no importance: what happens when nothing happens other than the weather, people, cars and clouds.” This is where he wrote An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a book that consists of a long, meticulous list of what he saw in the square over a period of three days. I remember reading it with great delight. Perec had noted down everything that happened when nothing was happening, excluding from his list only those things that might be deemed too important, and, in particular, anything that had already been “described, inventoried, photographed, talked about or registered.”
I drink my coffee and remember “The Parachute Jump,” a brilliant short text included in I Was Born. When he was still a mere beginner, around 1959, at the end of an editorial meeting of the journal Arguments, Perec asked to speak, and someone, happily, decided to record what he said. Perec recounted, in a way that was both inspired and hesitant, a very personal experience (“I’m telling you this because I’m a little drunk…that is, I’ve had a drink”), the tale of his brief time as a parachutist, and the story of how he came to realize that, in literature and in life, you had, at all costs, to “launch yourself,” to throw yourself out into the void, “in order to be convinced that it might perhaps have a meaning, might perhaps have repercussions you didn’t know about yourself.”
Perec’s books were always there among the books that, early on, changed my life, books that I remember reading with utter fascination, returning to the author, page by page, each of the euphoric balls he threw to me. Right from the start, I could see that Perec was inseparable from Roussel and from Kafka, the other two writers I was most interested in at the time, because they had shown me that it was possible to do things with a novel that were totally at odds with the methods preached in my own country. In those days, for some reason, things seemed to happen very naturally. And there was something very natural about the way Kafka, Roussel, and Perec came to me, almost simultaneously, and the same thing happened with other key books, like the novel-cum-essay Maupassant and the Other, in which Alberto Savinio, on the pretext of talking about Maupassant, ends up talking about everything, for all he had to do was to connect an idea, any idea, to his central, non-existent subject. Or books like Salvador Dalí’s The Tragic Myth of Millet’s “Angelus,” whose very attractive working method, far removed from the usual dogmas about the novel, was also based on the association of ideas, associations that spread out to form a tapestry, which, in expanding to follow every possible itinerary, grew and grew inexhaustibly.
A number 63 bus passes, and I meticulously note that down along with everything else. Then a number 96 passes, going to Montparnasse. A dry cold, gray sky. An elegant woman goes by, holding a large bouquet of flowers, stems up. The 96 is the same bus that Perec set down in his notes, and the same one that, later on, will take me to my hotel here in Paris, the Littré. A ray of sunlight. Wind. A green Citroën Méhari. A distant flight of pigeons. Moments of emptiness. No cars. Then five. Then one. I believe Nabokov once said, “The plot is a bourgeois vulgarism.” And I recall John Banville saying in an interview, “The style strides triumphantly forwards, and the plot shuffles behind.”
It may be that those two quotations are like throwing a ball that will never be returned to us by those whose sense of humor still places the nineteenth-century plot on an absolute pedestal. The novel of the future will see the plot as rather silly, something that was once all the rage, and will laugh at the cliché that weighed so heavily on me when I was young, the idea that the novel—“as the Anglo-Saxon world well knows”—always favors plot. I am glad now that I quickly came to realize that, as with so many ideas, there was no reason to consider that very British idea to be a fixed, immovable rule. I burst out laughing the day I heard Kurt Vonnegut say how few plots there really were and how there was no need to give them too much importance, but simply to incorporate one of them—chosen almost at random—into the book you were writing, then spend more time on what really mattered: style.
And what were those plots? Vonnegut knew them by heart and had a rather Perecquian list: “…somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way; a virtuous person is falsely accused of sin; a sinful person is believed to be virtuous; a person faces a challenge bravely, and succeeds or fails…”
And what happens when nothing happens? Well, sometimes you remember the origins of your fascination with unconventional plots, the moment you discovered that it was possible to create freewheeling books with unusual structures, full of associations and ruminations built around absent centers. It’s twelve minutes past midday. A Printemps Brummell truck passes. Wind. I think about those methods based on hyper-associations of ideas which—as in the books of Savinio and Dalí—never exhaust the subject being studied and observed. An absolute masterpiece of this new genre was, without doubt, Life A User’s Manual, in which all of Vonnegut’s plots appear, only to be dynamited, rather as Flaubert did with Madame Bovary, when he put paid to realism by taking it to its ultimate extreme: being more realist than the realists. I think of the twenty-nine years and eleven months since Life A User’s Manual first appeared: a book that, for many reasons—“the novelty of its rendering; the compendium of a narrative tradition and the encyclopedic summa of things known that lend substance to a particular image of the world; the feeling of ‘today’ that is made from accumulations of the past and the vertigo of the void”—Italo Calvino considered to be “the last real ‘event’ in the history of the novel so far,” a puzzle in which the puzzle itself gives the novel its plot and its formal scheme, in which, with astonishing naturalness, “the pursuit of a definite structural project and the imponderable element of poetry become one and the same thing.”
Indeed, for a long time, and for many people, Life A User’s Manual really was the last real event in the history of the modern novel. Later came Roberto Bolaño’s Savage Detectives, which, with extraordinary boldness and panache, took up the gauntlet thrown down by Perec. A gray day, a dry cold. Wind. A gentleman walks past, looking like the “provisionally permanent” secretary of some secret society of aphorists. He could easily have stepped straight out of one of the most amusing pages in Perec’s Thoughts of Sorts. He might perfectly well be called Bénabou. Another number 63 bus passes. Then a 96. Weary eyes. Repressed laughter. Different moods. I keep taking notes. A curtain twitches. The bell on the Saint-Sulpice church rings out. The past accumulates as does the vertigo of the void, and I duly note it down.
(Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)
Enrique Vila-Matas is considered to be one of Spain’s finest writers, with many prizewinning books translated into numerous languages; his novel Mac & His Problem, published in 2019, was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. His translator, Margaret Jull Costa, has been doing literary translations from Spanish and Portuguese for over thirty years.
