4 - UnSearching for Rue Simon-Crubellier: Perec Out-of-Sync

Summary

My idea of literature was of something that could and would intervene in reality. Or at least that's the way I thought of it then.

Italo Calvino

When nothing is sure, everything is possible.

Margaret Drabble

All other resemblances to living persons or to people having lived in reality or fiction can only be coincidental.

Georges Perec

Stay, illusion!

Shakespeare

One of the things writing does is wipe things out.

Marguerite Duras

Art consists of limitation.

G. K. Chesterton

I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done.

Lucille Ball

‘A SCHEDULE OF’ COMPLICATIONS

While it might seem like a surfeit of epigrams prefacing this tapestry that you are about to Unweave (essay, text, fly specs on a page or screen, the subliminal flicker of codified light), this assemblage of samples already performs what you are about to do in reading this text. It has already said what will have to be, and have been said. All a matter of tense, colliding times, duration and anachrony, it puts the pieces together in the manner of a jigsaw, then takes it apart, out-of-context, out-of-time. Epigrams are at once rhetorical figures of what is to come, other words doing the work for someone else, suggestive, prefatory and oracular. They are a kind of mime or ventriloquism, prolonging entry into another text with the sign-sound proxies of others speaking. Not ‘dismantled’, ‘broken down’, ‘read’ or ‘interpreted’. They are gestures out-of-sync.

A label then, on a parcel addressed to someone, is another assemblage of Unwords. Its specificity is a contract between signs and atoms, artifice and edifice:

In another context its dark borders and curlicue italics would announce a death, notifying a recent absence which can no longer be delivered, made present or signed for. The brittle uncertainty and rigorous ambivalence of the pharmakon, the either/and/or of writing, becomes the excessive irresolution in print of a street address in a verifiably real city that is nowhere to be found outside page space. Yet, it is potentially located somewhere in a city that exists in empirical space if it is sought after with enough suspension of belief as well as its opposite.