I’ve been slowly making my way through this book. which is really a collection of essays and articles, on various themes – the book title is ” Species of Spaces and other pieces”. I bought it last week and don’t intend now to read it all the way through, but just to dip in from time to time.
Space (continuation and end) p.91
After reading Meeka Walsh’s quotes on ‘Species …’ I wanted to check those passages to see if there were other relevant passages to my proposed work from this section. Sure enough, following the quote in the second paragraph of Walsh’s article that I cited, Perec goes on to say, ” … I shall look at a few yellowing photographs with broken edges without recognising them.” This reminds me so much of opening my wallet, seeing the first documents (passes to enter the university building, where I researched in the mid-seventies, outside normal hours) and not remembering them at all at first, then they suddenly snapped into my active memory.
Perec also mentions in the first paragraphs of Continuation and End that he would like spaces to exist and be stable, referring to his birthplace and memories of childhood. His father went off to war, his mother to a concentration camp, so he has no childhood memories of the everyday happenings in growing up, or the places where they would have happened. That also resonates with me, though not to the extent of Perec. My first childhood home, with my grandparents, was razed in an”urban renewal” plan, which still hasn’t been completed 50 years later; we were ‘forced out’ of my parents’ home during the Troubles in Northern Ireland; my great-grandparents were burnt out of their farm in Co. Monaghan, Ireland a year after the Easter Rising. I have my grandfather’s ring and his sports medals and my grandmother’s writing bureau. Everyday things.
The last sentences of ‘Species …’ are also powerful ; ” Space melts like sand running through one’s fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds.
To write and try to meticulously to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs.
PARIS 1973-1974″
Dali
I had been thinking of Dali’s melting clock metaphor previously. Maybe it can be incorporated with this from Perec?
References.
Perec, G. and Sturrock, J. (2008) Species of spaces and other pieces. London: Penguin. Penguin classics. p91.
Walsh, M. (2011) ‘Georges Perec: Soft Chalk and Pigeons’, Border Crossings, 30, pp. 12-13.
