The Art and Craft of Approaching Your Head of Department to Submit a Request for a Raise by Georges Perec Page A
Authors: Georges Perec
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labyrinth of yes/no questions and answers as Queneau had done, he chose to write out in extenso the progress of an imaginary computer-mind as it iterates a set of choices in pseudo-real time. He also chose to simulate the speed and tireless repetitiveness of a computer program by abandoning all forms of punctuation as well as the distinction between upper- and lower-case letters. The result is an almost unreadable fifty-page text that looks like (but actually is not) a single, breathless sentence.
the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise was first published in an academic review devoted to what was then called Programmed Learning, or computer-assisted education, where it lay dormant for over forty years. However, around the time of its first publication, Perec was asked by his German translator, Eugen Helmle, if he might come up with something suitable for broadcast on radio. He did: an amazing though quite different simulation of a computer taking a poem by Goethe to pieces, first broadcast in German as Die Maschine (an English translation has appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction , XXIX, 1, 2009). The huge success of this irreverent radio play prompted requests for more such material, and Perec turned back to his other ‘computer’ exercise, the art and craft … for inspiration. He saw that the very design of the exercise relied on a set of six distinct and identifiable operators that could be ascribed to different voices: the situation (‘you go to see your head’); the question (‘is he? …’); the positive hypothesis (‘if he is …’); the negative hypothesis (‘if he isn’t …’); the decider (‘he isn’t …’); and the outcome (‘so off you go …’). With the help of Helmle, who had a lot of radio experience, Perec produced a text that was broadcast as Wucherungen (‘ The Raise ’) on Saarland Radio in November 1969. The original French text was then picked up by Marcel Cuvelier – the long-standing director of the plays of Eugène Ionesco at the Théâtre de la Huchette, in which he also acted – as an ideal script for a non-figurative, almost static, and utterly hilarious stage production. Georges Perec finally added playwright to the list of literary professions he had mastered.
The dramatic version had a successful run in Paris in 1970 but its triumph came in 1972, once again in German translation, as Die Gehaltserhöhung , in productions that were more agit-prop than absurdist, in Munich, Münster and Wiesbaden. The play is now often performed in France by amateur and professional companies and has been translated into Italian and Swedish and probably other languages too, but it has never been staged in English.
In the ‘prose’ as in the ‘radio’ version of this simulation of a flow-chart in action Perec pursues the exhilarating potential of repetitiveness and recursion, but he does not stick to the mindless monotony that a real computer would experience (if it could be said to experience anything at all). Enthralled as he is by writing with rules and with the exhaustive completion of self-devised schemes and grids, Perec seeks in these ‘logic’ texts as in all his works to communicate a human experience of the world. Each of the standard formulas he devised to represent the fixed steps in the recursive procedure is repeated often enough with precision to make the variations that he introduces at some stage both comic and significant. As time goes on, the supplicant for a raise grows older; the world around him changes ever so slightly; and the story – for there is a story buried inside – speaks to us in the end of entropy and human mortality.
Perec reused the material of the art and craft one last time in Chapter 98 of Life A User’s Manual , where he gives the topic of obtaining a raise in pay a different and more novelistic turn. Even so, the character of Maurice Réol is distinctly familiar to anyone who has
the art and craft of approaching your head of department to submit a request for a raise was first published in an academic review devoted to what was then called Programmed Learning, or computer-assisted education, where it lay dormant for over forty years. However, around the time of its first publication, Perec was asked by his German translator, Eugen Helmle, if he might come up with something suitable for broadcast on radio. He did: an amazing though quite different simulation of a computer taking a poem by Goethe to pieces, first broadcast in German as Die Maschine (an English translation has appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction , XXIX, 1, 2009). The huge success of this irreverent radio play prompted requests for more such material, and Perec turned back to his other ‘computer’ exercise, the art and craft … for inspiration. He saw that the very design of the exercise relied on a set of six distinct and identifiable operators that could be ascribed to different voices: the situation (‘you go to see your head’); the question (‘is he? …’); the positive hypothesis (‘if he is …’); the negative hypothesis (‘if he isn’t …’); the decider (‘he isn’t …’); and the outcome (‘so off you go …’). With the help of Helmle, who had a lot of radio experience, Perec produced a text that was broadcast as Wucherungen (‘ The Raise ’) on Saarland Radio in November 1969. The original French text was then picked up by Marcel Cuvelier – the long-standing director of the plays of Eugène Ionesco at the Théâtre de la Huchette, in which he also acted – as an ideal script for a non-figurative, almost static, and utterly hilarious stage production. Georges Perec finally added playwright to the list of literary professions he had mastered.
The dramatic version had a successful run in Paris in 1970 but its triumph came in 1972, once again in German translation, as Die Gehaltserhöhung , in productions that were more agit-prop than absurdist, in Munich, Münster and Wiesbaden. The play is now often performed in France by amateur and professional companies and has been translated into Italian and Swedish and probably other languages too, but it has never been staged in English.
In the ‘prose’ as in the ‘radio’ version of this simulation of a flow-chart in action Perec pursues the exhilarating potential of repetitiveness and recursion, but he does not stick to the mindless monotony that a real computer would experience (if it could be said to experience anything at all). Enthralled as he is by writing with rules and with the exhaustive completion of self-devised schemes and grids, Perec seeks in these ‘logic’ texts as in all his works to communicate a human experience of the world. Each of the standard formulas he devised to represent the fixed steps in the recursive procedure is repeated often enough with precision to make the variations that he introduces at some stage both comic and significant. As time goes on, the supplicant for a raise grows older; the world around him changes ever so slightly; and the story – for there is a story buried inside – speaks to us in the end of entropy and human mortality.
Perec reused the material of the art and craft one last time in Chapter 98 of Life A User’s Manual , where he gives the topic of obtaining a raise in pay a different and more novelistic turn. Even so, the character of Maurice Réol is distinctly familiar to anyone who has
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