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December 05, 2005
Life A User's Manual
In "Unpacking My Library," Walter Benjamin provides this gloss on ownership of unread books: "Suffice it to quote the answer which Anatole France gave to a philistine who admired his library and then finished with the standard question, "And have you read all these books, Monsieur France?" "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sevres china every day?" Life A User's Manual has been sitting on my bookshelf, unread, for a nearly a decade. Sometimes I think that it is simply the length of the novel that prevents me from reading it, but then, I've read other long books. And my copy is relatively small, so I'm not deterred by an unwillingness to lug it around. What makes reading it so daunting is my awareness that the book is structured as a sort of puzzle or game, and will therefore involve a degree of continuous active involvement not required by most other works of fiction.
In the preamble, Perec makes two key points about puzzles, and the experience of putting them together. The first is that the magic lies not in the image -- the content, if you will -- but in the form. He suggests, rightly, that the enjoyment provided by a puzzle does not depend on whether the completed image is a Vermeer or a Pollock, or even a complete blank. whwat matters is the relationship between each piece and the pieces around it. The second point Perec makes is that a puzzle is, like all art, an act of communication. Thus, the true puzzler derives little pleasure from a machine-cut puzzle because the message it sends is like a play written by 100 monkeys at typewriters; it may be Hamlet or Quixote, but it is most likely just gibberish. The hand-cut puzzle, on the other hand, represents an artist's attempt to convey meaning, to communicate, through the medium of the puzzle.
Posted by Sai Sriskandarajah at December 5, 2005 10:42 AM