Espèces d'espaces

Espèces d'espaces (1974) (which has the trying-too-hard English title Species of Spaces and Other Pieces) isn't a novel, rather it's more of a freeform essay on the subject of space. Not in the "outer space" astronomical sense, but rather in the sense of how we take up space - how we inhabit it, how we imbue it.

Several times, I've tried to imagine a flat in which there'd be a completely unnecessary room, absolutely and deliberately unnecessary. It wouldn't be a storage room, or an extra bedroom, or a corridor, or a broom closet, or a corner. It would be a room without function. It would surve no purpose, it would serve nothing. It was impossible for me, however hard I tried, to complete this thought, this image. Language itself seemed incapable of describing this nothing, this void, as if you could only speak of what is full, usable and functional.
A room without function. Not "without exact function", but exactly without function; not multi-functional (anyone can do that) but afunctional.

The first thing you notice about Perec's writing is always the limitations he puts on himself; write a novel without one letter, write a novel taking place in one moment in an entire house, write an autobiography made up of singular memories, etc. So Spaces becomes an essay about that very phenomenon; that the world is entirely made up of limits. All space, whether inner or outer, from the smallest microscopical pore in our skin to the entire galaxy, can only be defined by the philosophical, physical, corporeal or conceptual limits we put on it.

If nothing obstructs our view, we can see very far. But if it's not obstructed it doesn't see anything; our gaze only sees what it hits; space is what obstructs our view, what our gaze hits, resistance...

So he starts from the space he knows best; an empty paper, a blank space he can fill, then gradually expands from his bed to his bedroom, flat, house, street, block, city, country, continent, world, universe - expands his understanding of the space he and others take up, memories that he connects to the different layers, .

I can't help noting (which Perec couldn't have predicted) that I read this as an ebook - an object which literally takes up no space at all, and yet undeniably exists because of what a dead writer has imprinted on it. I wonder what Perec would have made of the Megabyte.
** He points out that every country, these days, has an airspace covering its precise surface, and I'm struck by the idea that "airspace" didn't exist until about 1903 or so. (1909? 1915?)

Hey, guys, we've been discovered! (Indian catching sight of Christopher Columbus)

Spaces is hardly one of Perec's greatest works - quite a few times, it reads more like a scrapbook of ideas, thinking aloud to himself, trying out concepts (at one point he mentions that he's trying to write Life: A User's Manual and outlines some of his ideas for it). There are lengthy quotes from other writers, sometimes intentionally misquoted. If Perec were a film maker rather than a writer, this would probably be an extra feature on the Criterion edition of Life: A User's Manual (or W Or The Memory Of Childhood, which was written at the same time and isn't entirely unrelated, especially when he tests his theories on Auschwitz and his hypothetical childhood at the end). That said, it's well worth a read; Perec may ramble a bit in the 100-odd pages that make up this essay collection, but he does so in a charming, clever way, and I come away from it with a few new ideas to keep in mind the next time I read one of his other books.