A man who sleeps

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A man who sleeps ( French Un homme qui there ) is a novel by the French writer Georges Perec , published in 1967. The protagonist, a 25-year-old student, refuses to live from one day to the next and withdraws into isolation and indifference . The plot has autobiographical roots. Perec himself suffered from a similar depression at a young age . The implementation is characterized by numerous intertextual references to other works of literary history. The formal design is also striking: the short novel is mainly in the present tense and in the you form. It is one of the least studied major works by George Perec and was written before his membership in the Oulipo group of authors . A film adaptation of the author together with Bernard Queysanne received the 1974 Jean Vigo Prize . Eugen Helmlé's German translation remained unpublished for a long time and was first published in 1988.

content

On a hot summer's day, an exam day for his state examination , a 25-year-old sociology student in Paris does not get up when his alarm clock goes off as usual, but simply remains lying down. Something has broken in him that has previously bound him to the world. He comes to the realization that he does not know how to live and never will. Even when friends knock on his door the next few days, he does not move. He throws away the messages pushed under the door. Only at night does he leave his five-square-meter attic room and stroll aimlessly through the streets, allowing the anonymous crowd to drive him along the Grands Boulevards from the Place de la République to the La Madeleine church .

The bells of the nearby Saint-Roch can be heard again and again in the protagonist's room.

The nameless protagonist interrupts this isolated life for a few weeks and travels to his parents in a village near Auxerre . But even there he continues the idleness , goes for long walks, sleeps a lot, speaks little. He has the feeling that he has hardly lived and yet everything has already been said. Why should you climb the top of a mountain when you have to go back down afterwards? He decides to stay out of life.

Back in Paris, his room and isolation await again. He wants to wean himself from all things in life until he ends up living a timeless plant life. He reads everything that comes under his eyes on an equal footing and goes to the first cinema in the evening. His walk to the café becomes pure food intake. The forays through Paris drive him into increasingly unknown corners, he can sink into contemplation of a tree for hours. Sometimes he doesn't leave his room for days, just studies the cracks in the ceiling or plays one solitaire after another, the order of which fascinates him. He feels untouchable, completely indifferent, free from everything that he likes or displeases, protected from any surprise. The world no longer has any power over him.

But at some point he loses the illusion of invulnerability, fear and loneliness creeps into his life. During his walks he feels like he is in a dead city. He perceives all people he meets as outcasts as he is. He feels more and more like a prisoner in his cell, like a rat in a labyrinth. With meticulous order he tries to support his life. But without the feeling of refuge, he just waits for it to all pass.

He realizes that he has achieved nothing in his attempt to get to the bottom of his existence. Loneliness has taught him nothing, has brought him no further, his indifference is pointless and does not change anything. Everything happens, whether he participates in it or whether he refuses. He felt like a martyr , but no miracle happened, no one saved him, nor did he die. The world hasn't moved and he hasn't changed. In the end time defeats his will, he commands himself: "Stop talking like a person who dreams." He finds his way back to life, where his first sensation is fear and his first act is waiting for the rain to end the Place de Clichy .

shape

construction

A man who sleeps is around 140 pages long , depending on the edition, but has been identified as a novel by the publishers since its publication, including the German version . The structure contradicts the principles of a traditional novel with a sequential plot. Leonard Fuest, who spoke of a story , saw instead of a red thread a “rampant meditation on standstill”, a collection of images, observations, reflections and fantasies: “The significant abundance of a void piles up here.”

The novel is divided into sixteen sections, in which, however, the lack of a numbering deviates from the orderly function of the usual chapter divisions. The individual sections are mono- or multi-thematic. In turn, they are divided into short sections of text, many of which can be read without reference to the previous or the following section, thus giving the novel a fragmentary character. The first two sections form an exposition . The first section provides a phenomenology of the process of falling asleep, which in terms of motifs corresponds to the subsequent withdrawal from the world and, through the ambiguity of the images used, already refers to the future course of the action. The second section introduces the protagonist, his environment and all essential elements of the plot. After this overture , the novel mainly consists of a repetition, variation and expansion of the motifs introduced . From section 14, the reprises of the motifs are increasingly withdrawn and disappear completely in a finale, which confirms the futility of the previous action. In this structure of A Man Who Sleeps , characterized by themes and variations , Stéphane Bigot saw a musical composition rather than a novel structure according to traditional rules.

A man who sleeps is mostly in the present tense , which gives the actions such as addressing the protagonist the appearance of immediacy. The statements at the beginning of the novel relate to a current point in time: “You get up. You go to the window that you close. ”Later, however, the reference to the present tense expands more and more, the actions take on a repetitive, permanent character:“ Sometimes you stay in your room for three, four, five days, you don't know. “The temporal order does not obey any chronology , does not mark stages and stages, beginnings and ends, but lets the individual action segments slide into one another without separation.

Narrative perspective

The most obvious feature of the text is its narrative perspective . It is written entirely in the "you" form. This leads to a direct involvement of the reader at the beginning of the novel, which continues even after the introduction of the protagonist. The you-form makes the boundaries between narrator, protagonist and reader fluid. It can be two ways to understand: the protagonist is telling his story, or he says in a monologue about themselves the question of'll singular by the second person, according to Kathrin Glosch. Identity raised the anklinge also in the text itself: "You stir not you. You won't move Another, a doppelganger, a ghostly and conscientious double, perhaps instead of you, makes the gestures that you no longer make: he gets up, shaves, dresses, walks away. "Fuest saw in the often distant and ironic du- Form a division of the narrator from the protagonist.

Perec himself attributed the Du in A Man Who Sleeps to a mixture between diary form and the direct relationship between author and character. He also referred to the play on words “un je (ux) devenant tu”, which can be translated directly as “an I that becomes you” and as “a game that falls silent”. Perec's biographer David Bellos saw above all the problem that Perec was able to process autobiographical backgrounds without compromising in the first person or withdrawing to a lyrical self , on the one hand, and personal experiences in the he form on the other to translate into conventional fiction. The you form, on the other hand, proves to be the linguistic expression of an experiment and communicates the authentic experience directly to the reader. Roger Kleman recognized a correspondence between form and content by describing the you form as the linguistic form of absolute solitude.

intertextuality

A man who sleeps contains numerous references to other literary texts. Bellos even went so far that almost every sentence came from a different work, so the whole novel was a literary collage , or a cento . In a letter to Eugen Helmlé , Perec announced that he would have a headache when translating because the many quotations could not be discovered. Bellos saw in the stylistic device of expressing Perec's autobiographical experiences through the words of others a mechanism of self-defense and a form of modesty. Ariane Steiner, however, narrowed Bellos' thesis by saying that to this day there is no way to decipher all intertextual references in the novel. Perec kept a low profile on the subject until his death, and although his notes gave individual references, they did not reveal any structure of the intertext in its entirety.

The only quote from the novel that has been identified is the epigram , which comes from an aphorism by Kafka :

“It is not necessary for you to go out of the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don't even listen, just wait. Don't even wait, be completely still and alone. The world will offer itself to you to unmask, it cannot help it, it will wriggle in front of you in ecstasy. "

- Franz Kafka : reflections on sin, suffering, hope and the true path
Between Franz Kafka  ...
... and Herman Melville

In the course of the novel, the narrator refers to the literary role models of the protagonist, the " Robinsons , Roquentins , Meursaults , Leverkühns ". In an interview, Perec revealed the origin of the title Un homme qui there from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time . Elsewhere he stated that he wanted to step between Kafka and Melville with the novel . He would have liked to have written his Bartleby the scribe himself , since this was impossible afterwards, he had created his own Bartleby.

In addition to Bartleby , Bellos recognized numerous sentences in the novel from Melville's Moby Dick , Kafka's The Trial , Dante's Divine Comedy and Joyce's Ulysses , as well as a chapter beginning from Diderot 's Rameau's Nephew , a passage from Sartre's The Disgust , lines by Lamartine , Le Clézio and Barthes . Stéphane Bigot also deciphered quotations from Apollinaire , Breton , Rimbaud , Queneau , Prévert and Lowry . Ariane Steiner added Baudelaire , Dostoevsky , Shakespeare and Fitzgerald . The reference to Faust material ranges from Goethe to Thomas Mann , while those relating to the golem myth refer in particular to Gustav Meyrink .

interpretation

Denial of denial

Leonard Fuest exhibited the protagonist A man who sleeps opposite Melville's Bartleby . While he still prefers not to do something, the refusal in Perec's novel goes so far that it is no longer even preferred to prefer something. Perec's protagonist is so contourless that he himself becomes nothing, a personified void . The language wins the upper hand over the subject. Again and again the objects in the novel dissolve into allegories , the protagonist looks at a tree for hours and sees in it “face, city, labyrinth or path, coat of arms and rides.” The subject itself gets lost in the pictures: “You are just now a grain of sand, a shrunken little man, a small, unfounded thing ”. In the end, however, the text depicts the previous refusal as a mere pose. The statement sounds like a reproach: "You are not dead." The protagonist did not follow his predecessors Bartleby or Gregor Samsa in the final analysis, and did not even go mad. The gesture of refusal had failed. It has long since lost its truthfulness and originality. From then on, fear becomes an essential attitude towards life.

Fuest saw the radicalism in Perec's novel in the fact that not only was participation in the world denied, but critical negation as such was negated. Not even denial of the world is worth mentioning. Here stands a man who sleeps in the tradition of deconstruction and post-structuralism . Just as the text lacks any political position, it cannot be framed in psychological, philosophical or moral categories. He withdraws into an existential game with signs. In A Man Who Sleeps , Perec is already anticipating his future development into potential literature in the Oulipo group , in which he plays with language as a poetic program, in contrast between totality and knowledge on the one hand, emptiness and annihilation on the other he lifted.

An education of the feelings

Kathrin Glosch saw the novel as a reverse development novel , in which no development but rather a growing stuntedness is portrayed, a disease story of indifference . This is experienced by the protagonist initially as freedom: "You discover, sometimes almost with a kind of drunkenness, that you are free, that nothing weighs on you, that you do not like anything and do not dislike anything." But it also leads to complete arbitrariness: " You go or you don't go. You sleep or you don't sleep. ”Ultimately, indifference is negatively documented in the novel and leads to the isolation of the individual.

Even the title A man who sleeps equates the protagonist's indifference with sleep, the absence of consciousness. Just as sleep is followed by awakening, in the end the state of indifference is also overcome, the novel is an education of feelings based on the title of the novel by Gustave Flaubert , which propagates participation in life. In the end, the protagonist turns away from his heroes, the “Robinsons, Roquentins, Meursaults, Leverkühns” and appeals: “Don't believe them, don't believe the martyrs, the heroes, the adventurers!” He also turns away from Sartre's existentialism and Camus' absurdism . Against the background of the emerging 1968 movement , Glosch ultimately interpreted the novel as a call for commitment.

Origin and autobiographical background

The protagonist's refusal in A Man Who Sleeps is based on an autobiographical background. Perec, then 20 years old, suffered from depression through 1956 . His literary attempts to date have lacked the appropriate material and confidence in their own abilities. The rapid shrinking of his social environment led to increasing loneliness. In a letter to his cousin in June 1957, he wrote: “After dropping my studies and my family, I finally dropped everything. I didn't even want to write anymore […]. By the end of May I was so tired of my rabbit hutch, sandwiches, and hot dogs that I returned [to my adoptive parents]! That didn't make it any better! ”David Bellos also deciphered many details in A Man Who Sleeps as autobiographical. In the novel, for example, the attic resembles the room on the sixth floor of 203 rue Saint-Honoré where Perec lived. The work of the protagonist in the library was carried out by Perec in the early months of 1957. The trip to the country is reminiscent of Perec's trips to Blévy.

A Man Who Sleeps was written over a period of 18 months between mid-1965 and December 1966. In interviews at the end of 1965, Perec gave information about the plot and title of his new novel, which depicts a period of his life. There are several versions that differ from the publication. One version, which Bellos estimates to be December 1965, ends with an epilogue written in the future tense , which throws a preview of a future sentimental happy ending between the protagonist and a woman. Another version from July 1966 lacks the opening chapter about falling asleep. Perec completed the work before his first invitation to Raymond Queneau's group of writers Oulipo , the principles of which determined his future work. In two of his later works, Perec revisited the story of A Man Who Sleeps : In Anton Voyls Fortgang , a Leipogramm without the letter e, and in Das Leben Instructions for use , where the “you” becomes the “he” Grégoire Simpsons.

reception

Un homme qui there is one of Perec's main works that is least discussed by literary criticism, for which Carsten Sestoft sees a possible explanation in his interface position as Perec's last pre-Oulipo work. The lack of moral opinion of the more literary-oriented book was reprimanded by Catholic or right-wing critics. Michel Rybalka spoke of a rather inconclusive reception by the public and the critics, although he himself considered Un homme qui there probably the best novel publication of 1967 in France. By 1993, Un homme qui had been translated into ten languages ​​there.

Eugen Helmlé , who had previously translated other works by Perec into German for various publishers, also made the translation A man who sleeps . The German version remained unpublished for over ten years until Helmlé found the Manholt publishing house in Bremen, which in 1988 opened the publication of a whole series of Perec's works with the novel. The late publication of the early work of an author who has also become well-known in the German-speaking area led to some reviews in the feature pages.

In the Hamburger Abendblatt Heinz Albers 'review' published an unusual novel. Perec's pictorial, floating lyrical prose depicts the external and internal conditions of an imperfectly searching existence […] Immersed in his own existence, Perecs Sleeper experiences the eternal old dilemma of people who constantly ask about the meaning of their life and never get a satisfactory answer. " Petra Mies wrote in the Frankfurter Rundschau about the paperback edition of 2002 : “ A man who sleeps is a treatise on the self without the others. With calm, almost prayer-like sentences, the nameless one draws the reader into his self-chosen world of madness. [...] A book that makes you calm. And at the same time seems more and more unsettling. Big and crazy. "

Publication of the novel was also considered in the GDR, but an internal publisher's report by the people and the world in May 1967 ultimately came to a negative verdict. Although it was a man who sleeps as "precise, clear and, although there is little plot, interesting" judged as Perec's first- Things . But a “reference to social reality”, to the “concrete” was missing, a politically desired “interpretation of a middle-class and petty-bourgeois youth in relation to a society that no longer has any ideals to offer”. Since the call in the end to “help determine fate, not to give up” immediately turned into fear and insecurity, the conclusion remained: “It's a shame, it's a clean piece of literature”, but there was no justification for its publication.

When asked about a book recommendation, the Swiss writer Peter Stamm replied in 2005: “A book that I always like to recommend because it is little known is: A Man Who Sleeps by Georges Perec.” His novel, published in 2006, On a day like this is through a quote from A Man Who Sleeps Introduced.

filming

In 1973, Perec filmed the novel with the director Bernard Queysanne under the title Un homme qui there . Jacques Spiesser played the main role , Ludmila Mikaël read passages from the novel. The female voice was intended to prevent a clear assignment of the "you" as an inner monologue and to maintain the ambivalent narrative perspective of the novel. In addition to its main character, the film, shot in black and white, also features little-known Parisian angles. In contrast to the novel, the film adaptation of Un homme qui is based on mathematical principles. Six sections of the film show exactly the same things, places and movements, which are recorded each time through different camera angles. Text and music are also based on a six-part permutation and - with the exception of a few random moments and the final sequence - do not match the images shown.

Both directors stated that they preferred Hollywood productions to art films privately, and the film was also too experimental for cinema chains. It was not until the award of the Jean Vigo Prize in March 1974 that it finally led to a commercial publication. The film was shown in French cinemas from March 24th to October 8th 1974 and was shown at various international film festivals. An English and an Italian language version were created. In 2007 Un homme qui was published there in a DVD version, which also contains a German soundtrack, spoken by Andrea Kopsch.

literature

Text output

  • Georges Perec: Un homme qui there . Denoël, Paris 1967. (French first edition)
  • Georges Perec: Un homme qui there . With a comment by Stéphane Bigot. Gallimard, Paris 1998, ISBN 2-07-040367-X .
  • Georges Perec: a man who sleeps . Manholt, Bremen 1988, ISBN 3-924903-65-4 . (German first edition)
  • Georges Perec: a man who sleeps . dtv, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-423-12981-6 .
  • Georges Perec: a man who sleeps . Diaphanes, 2012, ISBN 3-03734-241-2 .

Secondary literature

  • David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words. Godine, Boston 1993, ISBN 0-87923-980-8 , ibs. Pp. 344-347, 359-363, 538-542.
  • Leonhard Fuest: The Poetics of Not (s) doing. Refusal strategies in literature since 1800. Fink, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7705-4614-5 , pp. 243-254.
  • Kathrin Glosch: "Cela m'était égal". On the staging and function of indifference in 20th century French literature . Metzler, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-476-45264-6 , pp. 207-221.

Web links

  • Excerpt from A man who sleeps on lyrikwelt.de

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stéphane Bigot: Dossier . In: Georges Perec: Un homme qui there (1998), pp. 155–156.
  2. ^ A b Leonhard Fuest: The Poetics of Not (s) doing. Refusal strategies in literature since 1800 , p. 244.
  3. ↑ Stéphane Bigot: Dossier . In: Georges Perec: Un homme qui there (1998), pp. 156–163.
  4. ↑ Georges Perec: A man who sleeps (2002), p. 16.
  5. ↑ a b Georges Perec: A man who sleeps (2002), p. 86.
  6. ↑ Stéphane Bigot: Dossier . In: Georges Perec: Un homme qui there (1998), pp. 171–173.
  7. ↑ Georges Perec: A man who sleeps (2002), p. 17.
  8. ↑ Kathrin Glosch: "Cela m'était égal". On the staging and function of indifference in French literature of the 20th century , pp. 207–208.
  9. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , p. 346.
  10. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , pp. 346-347.
  11. ↑ Roger Kleman: Un homme qui there de Georges Perc . In: Les Lettres Nouvelles . July-September 1967, pp. 159-166. After: David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , p. 362.
  12. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , pp. 347, 361-363.
  13. ^ A b Ariane Steiner: Georges Perec and Germany. The puzzle about the void . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2001, ISBN 3-8260-2008-1 , pp. 107-108.
  14. ↑ Reflections on Sin, Suffering, Hope, and the True Path . ( Wikisource )
  15. ↑ a b Georges Perec: A man who sleeps (2002), p. 136.
  16. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , p. 345.
  17. ↑ Stéphane Bigot: Dossier . In: Georges Perec: Un homme qui there (1998), p. 186.
  18. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , p. 361.
  19. ↑ Stéphane Bigot: Dossier. In: Georges Perec: Un homme qui there (1998), pp. 182-184.
  20. ↑ Georges Perec: A man who sleeps (2002), p. 38.
  21. ↑ Georges Perec: A man who sleeps (2002), p. 130.
  22. ↑ Georges Perec: A man who sleeps (2002), p. 140.
  23. ↑ Cf. Leonhard Fuest: Poetics of not doing (s). Refusal strategies in literature since 1800 , pp. 243–254.
  24. ↑ Georges Perec: A man who sleeps (2002), p. 74.
  25. ↑ Kathrin Glosch: "Cela m'était égal". On the staging and function of indifference in French literature of the 20th century , pp. 207–221.
  26. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , pp. 149-151.
  27. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , p. 166. German translation based on the English text by Bellos.
  28. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , p. 362.
  29. ↑ Stéphane Bigot: Dossier . In: Georges Perec: Un homme qui there (1998), pp. 151, 174-175.
  30. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , pp. 346, 363.
  31. ↑ Stéphane Bigot: Dossier . In: Georges Perec: Un homme qui there (1998), p. 153.
  32. ↑ Carsten Sestoft: Georges Perec et la critique journalistique . (PDF) Arbejdspapir no. 36, Institut for Litteraturvidenskab, University of Copenhagen , 1996, pp. 5-6. (pdf; 813 kB)
  33. ↑ Michel Rybalka: Critique of Un homme qui there . In: The French Review 41 (February 1968), pp. 586-587.
  34. ^ David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , p. 719.
  35. ^ Ariane Steiner: Georges Perec and Germany. The Void Puzzle , p. 265.
  36. ↑ Heinz Albers: When only silence answers you . In: Hamburger Abendblatt from March 19, 1989. Quoted from: Ariane Steiner: Georges Perec and Germany. The Void Puzzle , p. 266.
  37. ↑ Petra Mies: Exposed Life . In: Frankfurter Rundschau from July 27, 2002. Reprint ( memento of the original from April 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on lyrikwelt.de . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lyrikwelt.de
  38. ^ Ariane Steiner: Georges Perec and Germany. The Void Puzzle , p. 251.
  39. ↑ Interview . with Peter Stamm on wort-kunst.de .
  40. ↑ Un homme qui there in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  41. ↑ See section: David Bellos: Georges Perec. A Life in Words , pp. 538-542, 741.
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on May 13, 2011 in this version .