Monday, November 23, 2009
Quotes from Georges Perec's
Les choses, which I studied for French 5 this semester. I thought some of the quotes were really applicable to modern asian society, particularly our times, when we are plugged with so much news and ads about opulence, affluence, and success.
To give a short summary of the entire tale:
It recounts the life of a young couple — Sylvie and Jerome, both marketing researchers — in the 1960s. At the end of the book, they depart to live in Tunisia.
The characters in the novel do not hold as much textual importance as the things (
les choses) meticulously described throughout. Perec's use of the conditional tense plunges the reader into the dreams of the characters in the novel (consider, for example, the first line:
"L'œil, d'abord, glisserait sur la moquette grise d'un long corridor, haut et étroit" [The eye, at first, would have glided over the grey carpet of a long hallway, tall and narrow]). The characters themselves are only introduced in the third chapter; the principle place being reserved for
les choses, which are omnipresent in this novel.
This novel also explores "happiness" in a consumer society.
"But the mere prospect of work involved scared them. They would have to borrow, to save, to invest. They could not bring themselves to do it. Their hearts weren't in it: they thought only in terms of all or nothing. The bookcase would be light oak or it would not be. It was not. Books piled up on two dirty wooden shelving stacks, and, in double rows, in cupboards which should never have been used that way. For three yeras an electric point remained unrepaired, without their making up their minds to call in an electrician, whilst along almost every wall ran crudely spliced and shoddily extended leads. It took them six months to replace a curtain pulley-rope. And the slightest hold-up in regular maintenance resulted within 24 hours a mess which the beneficent presence of trees and gardens soclose at hand made even more unbearable.
"The temporary, the provisional held absolute sway. They were in wait only of a miracle. They would have summoned architects, contractors, builders, plumbers, decorators and painters. They would have gone on a cruise and on their return would have found a flat transformed, converted, refurbished, a model apartment, miraculously enlarged, full of custome-built details, removable partitions, sliding doors, an efficient and unobtrusive heating system, invisible electrical wiring, good quality furniture.
"But between these too grand daydreams in which they wallowed with strange self-indulgence, and their total lack of any actual doing, no rational plan, matching the objective necessities to their financial means, arose to fill the gap. The vastness of their desires paralysed them.""But they were wrong all the same. They were beginning to lose their way. Already they were starting to feel they were being propelled along a path of which they knew neither the turns nor the terminus. They did on occasion feel frightened. Most often, however, all they felt was impatience: they felt ready; they were available; they were waiting to live, they were waiting for money."
"People who choose to earn money first, people who put off their real
plans until later, until they are rich, are not necessarily wrong. People who want only to live, and who reckon living is absolute freedom, the exclusive pursuit of happiness, the sole satisfaction of their desires and instincts, the immediate enjoyment of the boundless riches of the world - Jerome and Sylvie had taken on this vast programme for themselves - such people will always be unhappy. It is true, they would admit, that there are people for whom this kind of dilemma does not arise, or hardly arises, either because they are too poor and have no requirements beyond a slightly better diet, slightly better housing, slightly less work, or because they are too rich, from the start, to understand the import or even the meaning of such a distinction. But nowadays and in our part of the world, more and more people are neither rich nor poor: they dream of wealth, and could become wealthy; and that is where their misfortunes begin.
"Let us take a young man who does a year or two at university, then completes his military service honourably. Around the age of 25, there he is, as naked as the day he was born, although he is also, by virtue of his education, already in virtual possession of more money than he ever wished for. That is to say, he knows with certainty that the day will come when he will have his flat in the city, his country cottage, his car, his hi-fi. It so happens, however, that these elating promises continue to evade his actual grasp. By their very nature they belong to a process which also includes, if you care to think about it, marriage, parenthood, a change in values, social attitudes and patterns of personal behaviour. In short, our young man will have to settle down, and it will take him fifteen years.
Such a prospect is not comforting. No-on embarks upon it without protest.... Impatience, thought Jerome and Sylvie, is a 20th century virtue. At 20, when they saw, or thought they saw, what life could be, the sum of bliss it held, the endless conquests it allowed, etc, they realised they would not have the strength to wait. Like anyone else, they could have made it; but all they wanted was to have it made. That is probably the sense in which they were what they are commonly called intellectuals.
For everything contradicted them, beginning with life itself. They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership. They wanted to stay free, and virtually innocent, but time went by notwithstanding, and brought them nothing. The others ended up seeing wealth as an end in itself, but as for them, they didn't have any money at all.""At other times they could not stand it a moment longer. They wanted to fight, and to win. But how could they fight? Whom would they fight? What should they fight? They lived in a strange and shimmering world, the bedazzling universe of a market culture, in prisons of plenty, in the bewitching traps of comfort and happiness...
The enemy was unseen. Or, rather, the enemy was within them, it had rotted them, infected them, eaten them away. They were the hollow men, the turkey round the stuffing. Tame pets, faithfully relecting a world which taunted them. They were up to their necks in a cream cake from which they would only ever be able to nibble crumbs."
"They did not despise money. Perhaps it was the opposite: that they loved it too much. They would have liked substance, certainty, a calm, clear way to the future. They were alert to all signs of permanence: they wanted to be rich. ANd if they still refused to make themselves rich, it was because they did not need a salary. Their imagination, their culture allowed them to think only in millions."
"They tried to run away.
You cannot live in a frenzy for very long. In a world which promised so much and delivered nothing, the tension was too great. They ran out of patience. They realised, one day, or so they thought, that they had to have a place to escape to.
Their lives in Paris were treading water. They had stopped advancing."
"They felt neither joy, not sadness, nor even boredom, but they did wonder sometimes if they still existed, if they really existed. They drew no special satisfaction from asking this deceptive question, beyond this: on occasions it seemed to them, in a muddled and murky way, that the life they were leading was appropriate, adequate and, paradoxically, necessary. They were in the centre of a vacuum, they had settled into a no man's land of parallel streets, yellow sand, inlets and dusty palm trees, a world they did not understand, that they did not seek to understand, because, in their past lives, they had never equipped themselves to have to adapt, one day, to change, to mould themselves to a different kind of scenery, or climate, o style of living....
Their life was like an unrelinquished habit, an almost unruffled tedium: a life sans everything."
"A world without memories, without memory. More time passed, days and weeks of desert waste, which did not count. They had stopped wanting. An indifferent world. Trains came, ships docked, unloaded machine-tools, medicines, ball-bearings, took on phosphates and olive-oil. Lorries loaded with straw crossed the town on their way to the South, where there was a famine. Their life went on identically: teaching, espressos at
La Régence, old films in the evening, newspapers, crosswords. They were walking in their sleep. They no longer knew what they wanted. They were dispossessed.
It now seemed to them that before - and each day, that
before receded further into the past, as if their anterior life was falling slowly into the domain of legend, of the unreal, or of the shapeless - before, they had had at least a passion for possessing. Often it was wanting that had been all their existence. They had felt drawn towards the future, impatient, consumed with desire.
And then what? What had they done? What had happened?
Something resembling a quiet and very gentle tragedy was entering the heart of their decelerating lives. They were adrift in the rubble of a very ancient dream, lost amidst unrecognisable ruins.
There was nothing left. They were at the finishing line, at the terminus of hte doubtful trajectory which had been their life for 6 years, at the end of theat uncertain quest which had taken them nowhere, which had taught them nothing."
When I finished the book, I felt rather disgusted, really. It's one thing to be materialistic and have the desire to roll about in filthy lucre, it's another thing entirely to sit on your asses, refuse to take up proper work and expect to be rich.
And my lecturer says this is the thinking of an entire generation of french people in the 1960s.
C'est incroyable! Next they'll be expecting to warp the laws of physics. If you don't put anything in, how're you going to expect anything to come out of it? If you don't work, how can you even BEGIN to be rich? A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
It reminds me of the time I was in Paris. I was walking past a newsstand and the headlines was about one of Sarkozy's policies.
"Travaillez plus, gagnez plus!" (Work more, earn more!) Someone had scribbled over it,
"Mon oeil! Which means, 'my foot!' Jean-Baptiste later elucidated this, he said, "The french want to work
less, but still earn the same wages."
I've never heard more nonsense in my life.
But anyway, the parts on materialism and the consumer society are so applicable to modern Singaporeans. It's a good short story.
Omnia mutantur
7:03 PM
