Collected Prose

long ago, is that the piece the dead man holds between his fingers is shaped like a W.”
    Like many of the other stores in Life , Bartlebooth’s weird saga can be read as a parable (of sorts) about the efforts of the human mind to impose an arbitrary order on the world. Again and again, Perec’s characters are swindled, hoaxed, and thwarted in their schemes, and if there is a darker side to this book, it is perhaps to be found in this emphasis on the inevitability of failure. Even a self-annihilating project such as Bartlebooth’s cannot be completed, and when we learn in the Epilogue that Valène’s enormous painting (which for all intents and purposes is the book we have just been reading) has come no farther than a preliminary sketch, we realize that Perec does not exempt himself from the follies of his characters. It is this sense of self-mockery that turns a potentially daunting novel into a hospitable work, a book that for all its high-jinx and japery finally wins us over with the warmth of its human understanding.

    1987

PREFACES

Jacques Dupin

    It is not easy to come to terms with Jacques Dupin’s poetry. Uncompromisingly hermetic in attitude and rigorously concise in utterance, it does not demand of us a reading so much as an absorption. For the nature of the poem has undergone a metamorphosis, and in order to meet it on its own ground, we must change the nature of our expectations. The poem is no longer a record of feelings, a song, or a meditation. Rather, it is the field in mental space in which a struggle is permitted to unfold: between the destruction of the poem and the quest for the possible poem — for the poem can be born only when all chances for its life have been destroyed. Dupin’s work is the progeny of this contradiction, existing within the narrowest of confines, like an invisible seed lodged in the core of stone. The struggle is not a simple either/or conflict between this and that, either destroy or create, either speak or be silent — it is a matter of destroying in order to create, and of maintaining a silent vigil within the word until the last living moment, when the word begins to crumble from the pressure that has been placed upon it.
    That which I see, and do not speak of, frightens me. What I speak of, and do not know, delivers me. Do not deliver me.
    Dupin has accepted these difficulties deliberately, choosing poverty and the astringencies of denial in place of facility. Because his purpose is not to subjugate his surroundings by means of some vain notion of mastery, but to harmonize with them, to enter into relation with them, and finally, to live within them, the poetic operation becomes a process whereby he unburdens himself of his garments, his tools, and his possessions, in order to assume, in nakedness, the fullness of being. In this sense, the poem is a kind of spiritual purification. But if a monk can fashion a worldly poverty for himself in the knowledge that it will draw him nearer to his God, Dupin is not able to give himself such assurances. He takes on the distress of what is around him as a way of ending his separation from it, but there is no sign to lead him, and nothing to guarantee him salvation. Yet, in spite of this austerity, or perhaps because of it, his work holds an uncommon richness. This stems at least in part from the fact that all his poems are grounded in a landscape, firmly rooted in the palpability of the real. The problems he confronts are never posed as abstractions, but present themselves in and through this landscape, and in the end cannot be separated from it. The universe he brings forth is an alchemical itinerary through the elements, the transfiguration of the seemingly indivisible by means of the word. Similar in spirit to the cosmic correspondences revealed in the pre-Socratic fragments, it is a universe in which speech and metaphor are synonymous. Dupin has not made nature his object, he carries it within him, and when he finally speaks, it is with the force of what he already contains. Like Rilke, he finds himself in what is around him. His voice does more than conjure the presences of things, it gives them the power of speech as well. But whereas Rilke is usually passive in his relation to things — attempting to isolate the thing and penetrate its essence in transcendent stillness — Dupin is active, seeing things in their interconnectedness, as perpetually changing.
    To shatter, to retake, and thus, to rebuild. In the