Georges Perec from a zone of whispers

Without a hint of drama, the protagonist of A Man Who Sleeps—a barely sketched figure, nameless, with no attributes that distinguish him—decides to withdraw from the social game; he suspends the impulse to respond, to inscribe himself in the daily flow, to assert himself among others. Born from a radical skepticism toward any alibi for meaning—neither a renunciation, nor a sentimental withdrawal, nor an intimate defeat— Georges Perec (1936–1982) essays an active form of abstention in this novel.

The use of the second person singular—that "you" that structures the narrative—functions here as a dissociative lens. It doesn't interpellate, but rather unfolds. The reader is exposed to a voice that simultaneously implicates and separates them; it makes them a spectator and accomplice in a methodical evaporation. Identity doesn't vanish, but it becomes irrelevant. Perec writes from a zone of silence where nothing remains to be said, but where, nevertheless, something continues to resonate. Hence, it is not metaphysical heights or allegorical tinsel that he pursues, but rather a concrete work on minimal gestures, imperceptible movements, routines that endure even on the brink of disappearance.

Nothing happens, or rather: everything is reduced to something almost motionless. One walks aimlessly, one looks without desire, one sleeps without fatigue. The city, unnamed but recognizable—Paris or its specter—becomes a map without a key, a cartography of detachment. Its streets, its shop windows, its cafés are recorded with the precision of someone who no longer expects anything from them. The world has not ceased to exist, but it has lost its capacity to affect. Rather than embellishing this indifference or turning it into a symbol, Perec examines it, transforming it into an atmosphere, a texture, a form of relating to reality.

The prose—sorrowful, hypnotic, with an almost liquid cadence—explores a certain form of excess: lists, repetitions, redundant gestures. From this accumulation emerges a deliberate, rigorously orchestrated monotony. And yet, something vibrates. It is not the return of desire, nor a redemption through words. What erupts is a crack, opened by the very insistence of the discourse. But where others would have sought a certain emphasis or pathos, Perec cultivates nuance. That is why this is less a meditation on solitude than a meticulous study of its form. What does it mean to live a life without purpose, without a project, without a narrative to guide it?

There is an inescapable legacy in A Man Who Sleeps. Echoes of Camus or Beckett can be heard, but the consummate negativity of Melville's Bartleby or the existential inertia of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov resonate more clearly. However, Perec's character does not formulate an irreducible resistance; nor does he nestle in reverie. His suspension is far from melancholic or enigmatic: it is methodical; and moreover, it offers no emphasis. Instead of proposing a metaphor or a symbol, he takes the gesture to the extreme: not to speak, not to intervene. And by taking this logic to its minimal consequences, he is completely dissolved in the impersonal texture of the world.

Perec doesn't deny the possibility of meaning, but he avoids imposing it. His gesture, rather, is to open an interval, a space of purposeless waiting, where even nothingness takes shape in "the fallacious intoxication of suspended life." The protagonist doesn't commit suicide, doesn't go mad, doesn't become someone else. He simply persists. And in that duration, in that refusal to reinsert himself into the habitual flow of time, a kind of politics of the minor is articulated: the possibility of not doing, of not fulfilling.

Written at the age of 26, between Les th'things and his entry into the Oulipo, the novel dispenses with the combinatorial, taxonomies, and formal structures that would later define Perec's work. Here, there are no games or artifices, but rather an austere discipline on the contemplation of pure existence. Without narrative progression, without conflict or revelation, Perec posits an ethic that eludes both drama and epiphany. His aim is rather different: to record what persists when the vector of desire is left in parentheses. Thus, it is not the story that matters, but its absence: a writing that accompanies minimal events, the mere existence without a story. The character is unaccountable; there is no secret or depth to decipher. And Perec manages to sustain this opacity without turning it into a mystery.

A Man Who Sleeps doesn't offer a plot, but rather a mode of attention; a way of being, even if only for a moment, outside the hustle and bustle of the world and the imperative need to move forward. Perec doesn't push his creature back into the world, nor does he construct a retrospective justification for it. He leaves it where it is, in a fragile balance between wakefulness and fainting, lucidity and withdrawal. In that final gesture, in that unresolved stillness, lies something more than a renunciation: a tenuous affirmation, a form of secret fidelity to the inconspicuous, to that which persists even when all narrative has ceased.

A Man Who Sleeps, by Georges Perec. Trans. Mercedes Cebrián. Impedimenta, 136 pp.