The Exploitation of Duty

OK, the title is a bit dramatic, especially since this is going to be fairly abstract exploration of an economics idea I've been kicking around in my head for a while. If someone were paying me to write these, there would be a lot more research and a lot more organization to the observations and arguments I'm going to make, but, they're not (but let me know if you'd like to), so this is going to be a fairly disorganized, but hopefully still understandable tour through some of my thinking about, you know, the little things in life; the relationship of market based economics to human society.

Perfectly accurate, except he's not wearing PJS.

It is accepted as truth that it is virtually impossible to make a living just by writing. Sure there are a few bestsellers and there's always the chance to sell the movie rights, but the vast majority of people who get paid to write must also get paid to do something else as well. (At least those who are writing art and entertainment. Copywriting is a different animal.) Given the kind of hours that go into a sellable piece of writing, I think it's fair to say that writing is an underpaid industry. Historically there have been about four responses when an industry's workers are underpaid. Payments rise in order to ensure the profits from the industry continue, workers organize to increase wages, the work is done by an underclass, like the immigrants working on our farms today, or the work doesn't get done and the industry vanishes. But none of those things are going to happen in the writing industry because writers don't write for the money (see above); for one reason or another they feel a duty to write. Writing fulfills a deep human need and so, no matter what the economy of the day pays writers, someone will write.

Live! Damnit live! Also! Get our your insurance card!

Now, imagine if the services provided by, say, EMTs were priced according to supply and demand. If you're in an ambulance having a heart attack or bleeding from some a wound, demand is about as high as it can possibly be and you've only got one source of supply. Essentially, according to supply and demand, an EMT could charge “Every single dollar you have,” and that would be a fair price. (Which is why healthcare makes no sense in the private market.) Same goes for fire fighters, police officers, and just about everybody else in the medical profession. But as a society, we have decided to remove medical care (somewhat) from the system of supply and demand, which means that from a purely capitalist perspective, every single person who becomes an EMT will make less than what they economically deserve. And yet, people are still EMTs. Furthermore, people are still nurses and general practitioners even though those professions demand a high amount of effort in return for a relatively minimal reward, especially when compared with other medical professionals. And yet we still have nurses, EMTs and general practitioners. Just like in writing, these professions meet a deep human need, the need to help others, and so, even though they don't make much economic sense, people will continue to do them.

There are plenty of jobs that are vital to society but are not compensated as though they are vital to society. These jobs are filled by people who feel a duty to do them and so a surplus is created. Capital that should go to these professions doesn't, because the people who do the jobs do them out of duty, rather than for profit. Duty is exploited to create a surplus of capital. Inherently, this isn't a problem. In order for a capitalist society to function, there must be some exploitation of duty because otherwise all of the capital of society would be tied up in stitches and potatoes. Essentially, there is an acceptable level of exploitation of duty. But what we have now is something much different, an extreme redistribution of that surplus, part of a grander trend of wealth concentration, that is making it even more difficult for those who follow the call of duty to live comfortable lives, while weakening and destabilizing the economy as a whole.

Simple rule: If you're a white man in a suit, never steeple your fingers

Why does a mediocre financial planner make more money per hour than a great novelist or an excellent nurse? Because odds are, the financial planner is in it for the money. I mean, nobody ever says, “I just had to follow my heart, so I became a financial planner.” Because people go into these professions for the money, they need to be paid a lot in order to do the jobs. How does a CEO who destroys a company somehow make shmillions in salaries, stock options, and bonuses? Because they are doing it for the money and so absolutely everything they do is geared towards getting as much money as possible. Nurses do what they do for the satisfaction of contributing to the wellness of other human beings, writers do what they do because there is human need to create, so nurses get paid in satisfaction and writers get paid in creations. (Of course, landlords still don't accept “creations” for rent.)

Essentially, our current political-economy redistributes the wealth of duty driven professions to profit driven professions. In a way, we already accept that there is something unjust about the level of redistribution in our current society. All of those NEA grants are, essentially, re-redistributions of the surplus of capital created by the exploitation of duty. So are the MacArthur genius fellowships. All the underwriting of PBS programs, all the grants to art organizations, all the cash prizes for books. All seek to re-redistribute an unjust redistribution. They are ways to redress the exploitation of duty.

But recently, these techniques have not been enough. Along with the inherent exploitation of duty every society needs to survive, we have lived for about thirty years in an era of radical wealth concentration. Everybody but the wealthy have seen their wealth diminish. There are lots of different ways to move what we have now to a sustainable society, one in which nurses are still not paid what they're worth, but are paid enough to be financially comfortable in their lives. Some of them involve reforms to specific industries, like creating a single payer universal healthcare system that shifts wealth from actuaries, administrators, and specialists to nurses, EMTs, general practitioners and other support staff that ensure treatment happens, or like Amazon not shredding to teenie bits the book industry by squeezing all of the capital out of it, so there are more stores to sell books and more money to pay authors. Some of them involve economy-wide federally driven reforms, like raising the minimum wage, which should raise wages in general, or an increase in grants and funding to important but inherently unprofitable endeavors. Some involve the rich assholes that are fucking ruining it for everyone to get a fucking sense of decency and community. (Ain't holding my breath on that one.)

As I said in my introduction, I haven't quite pulled all of this together and I'm sure there are aspects of this someone more familiar with economics would understand that I don't. I spend a lot of time in my own head and sometimes ideas congeal enough to warrant a blog post. (Hoo boy, just wait from my Subsidized vs. Unsubsidized Content post.) But one thing is pretty solid in my head. As everyone tells you, the engine of capitalism is profits, which means that capitalists will pursue profit above all else, and sometimes the “all else,” includes pretty important stuff. For as long as we have had capitalism, as a society we have done stuff to ensure at least some of that “all else,” happens, whether through government programs and regulations, or people doing things out of a sense of duty rather than profit. In fact, capitalism simply cannot work without these buttresses of “all else.” Whenever our economy has operated with a small number of the buttresses, it has to varying degrees COLLAPSED. Maybe we should reward duty a little more and money a little less.

Genre Expansion Pack: Sci Fi/Fantasy

Though Sci Fi/Fantasy was an important part of my early reading life, once I went from Heinlein to Asimov to Vonnegut, I haven't spent much time in the genre. My interests and experience took me elsewhere. But, as a young man working in a bookstore, I get asked about the Sci Fi/Fantasy section a lot (Even more before I cut my hair and shaved my beard.) and because my rent depends on having answers to book questions, I try to always have an answer. Some of the answers I can just absorb by paying attention to book media and other readers, but I've also made sure to cram some genre books into my reading life. In the cramming process, I've discovered some really good books; Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (which if you haven't read it, read it), Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller (a fundamental dystopian novel that no fan of the genre should miss) and Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson (for everyone waiting for the next George R.R. Martin). They've served me well as recommendations, but more and more I've found myself talking to people who'd already read them. (If you haven't, go read them and then come back. I can wait.) So, these last couple of months I've committed to expanding my Sci Fi/Fantasy genre knowledge. Here's what I found.

Dead Harvest by Chris F. Holm: I hope Horror-Noir is the next big fantasy genre. For some reason, I really like what happens when hardboiled heroes are forced to deal with demons, monsters, vampires, etc. If you've never read any Horror-Noir, Steven Niles' Cal McDonald comic series is a good place to start, but Dead Harvest (automatic props for the relatively obscure Dashiell Hammett reference) is a top quality entry into the new genre. Samuel is a collector; his job is to collect the souls of the damned. But, as is the case in much noir, something is wrong with his latest assignment. Though it looks to all eyes as though Kate brutally murders her family, when Samuel tries to collect her soul he discovers it is pure. To collect a pure soul would mean apocalyptic war between the Creator and the Adversary. But some powerful forces want that war to happen. What follows is that classic mix of deduction, ultra-violence, narrow escapes, shocking revelations, and sudden turns of fortune that make noir such a satisfying genre. Also, possessions, demons, seraphs, and lucky cat statues. Just fantastic enough to be entertaining, but not so unrealistic that it stretches the bounds of credulity. Like the good Die Hard. With demons. Dead Harvest is the first in The Collector series, followed by The Wrong Goodbye. (Also, props for referencing Hammett before Chandler as Hammett is much, much better than Chandler.)

Gardens of the Moon: Volume One of The Malazan Book of the Fallen by Steven Erikson. The right amount of sword with the right amount of sorcery spread around the right amount of politics and fight scenes. One of the downsides of genre fiction is that it's not that hard to produce passable genre fiction. Readers looking to kick back and relax aren't that demanding at that moment and so a lot of eh writing ends up published. I've got no problem with that, but there are just some sensitivities I can't turn off even when I'm reading expressly for lazy entertainment. Gardens of the Moon is well-written, well-paced, well-characterized, and, on the whole, represents a fine work of craftsmanship. Perhaps the most difficult task in the epic fantasy is “setting the table” in the first book; not only because you must keep the reader interested while introducing characters, places, and histories, but because that introduction is the basis for a massive story arc and must naturally lead from one event to another. The engine must be built from scratch and run well right away. Erikson seems to have accomplished that in this first volume, bringing certain story lines to a close so we can feel as though “a book has ended,” while hinting at “the journey continues” for a set of main characters. Though a little less geopolitical (at least at this point) than George R.R. Martin it will satisfy any reader in need of a fix between volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire.

Aurorarama by Jean-Christophe Valtat: By far, this is the best book of Sci Fi/Fantasy I've read in a while. Set in New Venice, a beautifully rendered city constructed above the Arctic Circle, this book is smart and entertaining with political intrigue, romance, magic, and revolution, all told in a style that Valtat describes as “Teslapop.” Fans of the last two Dr. Whos will enjoy this as will readers who liked The Night Circus. The world building is done wonderfully. Most of the time Valtat will just use a foreign term without any explanation. Sometimes you can figure it out from the context clues and other times it's a strange term from an even stranger world. Of course, this only works where there is something inherent about the terms themselves, and Valtat creates terms and phrases that stay just on the correct side of pandering and, thus, I am totally charmed by “the Doges College Ice Rugby Club,” and “Speckstoner Sandwiches.” The best works of fantasy make you half want to live in their world; presenting something exotic enough to be thrilling and foreign enough to be an act of intellectual travel. Furthermore, there is just enough insight to let you know there is a brain behind this story. A brain like Asimov or Bradbury? I won't say yes, but Valtat has, at least, hinted at the potential. Most importantly, there are moments of prose in this book as beautiful as anything else being written now; as stunning as the aurora always hanging in the north above the action and adventure.

Just to prove I'm not praising every book I picked up in my expansion efforts, here are a few that didn't work for me and why.

The Name of the Wind and Virconium. There's a “Pull up a tankard of ale and listen to a tale of days gone by,” voice some fantasy writers use that is far more difficult to use successfully than a lot of writers and readers assume. To me, when not perfectly executed, this voice breaks me out of the story. It feels artificial, constantly reminding me, in a way distinct from, you know, magic and dragons and such, that I am reading a work of fiction. The thing about this “Teller of Tales,” voice is that it is most successful when you don't even notice it, when it is part of the fabric of the story along with the magic and dragons. In both of these, otherwise well-regarded works of fantasy, the style constantly reminded me that I was reading a work of fantasy.

The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. He seemed to just stick clauses at the end of sentences. I couldn't get through more than a few pages at a time without developing inclinations for self-harm. Yes, clause placement is that important to me. But, if clause placement is not that important to you, the little I did read was interesting and the plot and characters motivated me to read more than my grammatical inclinations preferred.

Genre is an organization and selection tool. Stores and libraries use plot and character patterns to organize the books in their fiction sections to make it a little easier for readers to select what they want. Genre is a description, not an evaluation. But it can't be denied that genres settle into patterns and forms, that even though there is no inherent reason why stories organized around their plots into Fantasy, Sci Fi, Mystery, Romance or whatever else should have a lot of what is essentially “commercial product,” they do. (Though, I honestly believe there is a lot more “commercial product” in what is considered “literary fiction,” than most would care to admit.) There isn't room in this post to actually consider this question, but entertainment is an important part of the human experience and I think we could learn a lot about ourselves exploring why we accept different levels of quality for different types of stories, what the reading mechanism is that allows bad sentences to tell entertaining stories, and how the “reading” mind interacts with the “entertaining” mind. If it is biologically true that “we are what we eat,” I think there is at the very least some neurological truth to the idea that “we are what we read.”

Winter Institute 8 Galley Haul

Winter Institute is an annual booksellers educational conference that features workshops, panels, meals, authors, presentations and, much more importantly, books, talking, drinking, eating, drinking, talking, and books. Never having been to any other conferences I can't say, with any empirical data, that WI is the best conference that happens anytime anywhere, but you'd have to present some apple on the head kind of data to convince me otherwise. (I'll accept water flowing over the sides of the bathtub as well, but only if you show your work.) Afterward, I always find myself lugging a now full suitcase of books home, though lugging isn't quite the right word as lugging generally does not imply the level of joy I feel in the transportation process. Here are some of the highlights. (Also, I have the next issue of Lucky Peach. Figured I'd get that bit of gloating out of the way.)

The Arcadia Project edited by Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep. I bumped into Meg, the sales representative for Small Press Distribution, and she said, “I've got one copy of this galley and it's for you.” As someone who matches books to readers for a living, that might be the single best sentence I can hear. I love G.C. Waldrep's poetry, especially Archicembalo and think he'd bring a fascinating curatorial gaze to the project. Also, the first truly American poets, Uncle Walt and Aunt Emily, brought a daring, experimental edge to looking at the world around them and wrote a lot of pastoral poems from that perspective. If you really look at Frost (especially his angrier poems) and some of Bishop, you can see traces of that perspective on nature, but for the most part, American nature poetry tends to be the most vacant works committed to paper. The Arcadia Project could, not only, reveal an important current of American poetry I have just missed, it could reclaim and revitalize what should be a fundamental genre of American poetry. (Just noticed this is actually a finished copy. Do you think it would be poor taste to ask Meg to marry me in a blog post?)

Ravickians by Renee Gladman. The Ravickians is the second volume in Renee Gladmans series set in the strange and shifting city of Ravicka. The first volume Event Factory is like walking through the Escher print with all of those stairs; you know you're moving through space, but it's hard to see where you are going. As such, it was a little difficult to know exactly how I felt about the book. What I hope from this volume (and I believe there's a third as well) is a deepening and expanding of that experience so that I can be, to use a very strange phrase, more constructively lost. And my real hope is ultimately, the books maintain the quality of the first and are published in a single volume, because that book would gather much wider reader, critic, review, and award attention than the separate small volumes.

Surfaces & Essences: Analogy as the Fuel of Fire & Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander. As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how meaning is made, both in the literature artistic sense and the neurological psychological sense. The question always being something like, “Are we narrating our life, reading a narration of our life, or a paradoxical combination of both?” The function of analogy plays into this question in a challenging way because you are lead back to wonder what the original thing was that was used to understand the next thing. (Which could lead into the critical essay on House of Leaves and The Raw Shark Text that's been kicking around a bit in my head.) Hofstadter has done this kind of big thinking book before so if anyone can pull this off, he can.

In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods by Matt Bell. This was the galley that made it on the plane ride home (which there should be an award for somehow) not just because Matt Bell, also an editor at Dzanc Books let me pitch my novel to him at the hotel bar, not just because it has one of the best, if not the best, cover design of the books I saw, and not just because the title is so intriguing; I also opened it and started reading. (Early plot description: Rustic, folktale, Eraserhead. Yep.) Bell writes in a very challenging voice I like to think of Neo-Folklore, where the prose takes on the voice, tone, and rhythm of a story that has been told around campfires and bedsides for centuries. To make matters even more difficult, unlike Jesse Ball perhaps the best practioner of this style, who tends to use a distant perspective, Bell's novel is in first person and so the voice has to be ignorant of some of the mysterious forces driving the events in the story, and have a voice that differs distinctly from contemporary speech, and still have enough insight to communicate events and ideas. So far, Bell is balancing on that tiny pinnacle.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. To roll out a little jargon for you, this book is an Advanced Reader's Edition with french flaps, deckle edges, AND an embossed cover. I don't think I've ever seen a publisher spend this much money on a galley and in such a way that clearly states, “We really, really, really, believe in the quality of this book.” Marra has won a number of big awards for a relatively young writer. Set in strifeworn Chechnya this book is calling to the squalor connoisseur in me and if it also pays off in literary quality and significance, I will gladly help make it a bestseller.

The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon. There are lots of typical reasons for this to end up on the highlight list; the author is a cute 20-something Brit still at Oxford, Bloomsbury signed her up for seven books in the series, they've already sold the movie rights, it's being published in a gillion countries, etc. It makes my highlight list because Kenny Coble (@kennycoble) told everyone to get it. At breakfast it came out in conversation I review poetry, he asked me what I was working on, I told him Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, he responded that he'd read every book put out by that publisher. To sum up: a bookseller who is intimately familiar with the list of a small poetry publisher insistently recommended a book marketed, essentially, as the next Harry Potter. I don't know exactly what it is, but something is definitely up with that.

If You Could Be Mine by Sara Farizan. As a book about sexual identity in teenage girls in Iran, this novel could be a powerful prism through which we can find a new perspective on the challenges of sexual identity in our much more open, but still rather closed, society. For a number of years now, I've sold books for the Lesley Low-Residency MFA Faculty readings, sitting out in the lobby of a theater with a couple of tables worth of books, watching young writers pass back and forth. Sara is the first graduate of the program who has come across my radar as a published author. It was very cool to see her at the start of what should be an awesome career.

I also got my mom her birthday present, which I will discuss no further here.

Click here to see all the other books I brought back with me.

It Must Be Style: On Exercises in Style by Raymond Queneau

Exactly what Tim Gunn is talking about

It is often said there are really only X number of stories, two, four, seven. A man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. Sometimes the idea will be varied to conclude that every story has already been told, probably by Shakespeare, or some other dead guy who is no longer trying to make a living. I think there is some truth to this idea, but too often the implications of this idea don't move beyond a vague acceptance of the impossibility of originality. Then we try to be original anyway. If there are a limited number of stories, than the distinguishing feature of all stories, what separates them, what makes one narrative good and another not good, is style. How the story is told becomes the absolute defining feature of a work of narrative. It's not that originality is entirely impossible, but that it rests solely in the realm of style.

I'm not sure I agree with the absoluteness of storytelling archetypes beyond a kind of conversational shorthand. To me, the idea of the limits of plot originality is as much about the way we organize the world into patterns as it is about, well, the limits of plot originality. Essentially, there are an infinite number of stories that can be told and in order to get a handle on the storytelling beast dwelling in the labyrinth of our brain we categorize, organize, and limit.

Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style confronts the idea of absolute patterns in storytelling and then reduces the idea absolutely. A banal story is told in 99 different ways. (Queneau, like Jay-Z, did not have a “bitch” problem.) A young man with a long neck and a strange hat believes a man standing next to him on a bus is purposefully treading on his feet every time someone gets on our off the bus. When a seat opens up, he sits in it. Later that same day, the narrator sees the young man somewhere else, and notices a friend of the young man advising him on the placement of a button on his overcoat. Using constraints, formats, styles, voices, substitutions, translations, and other techniques, Queneau writes a kind of Metamorphoses, transforming a single event into an exploration of the fundamental actions of telling others about a single event. Like If on a winter's night a traveler, and other works by Oulipo, Queneau breaks apart the act of storytelling into its constituent parts. He splits the atom of narrative.

Queneau was also a pioneer in photo booth vaudeville

I think it makes for a freaking awesome book. Funny, insightful, weird, baffling. Why do words produce certain effects? What is plot if it can be surrounded by infinitely mutable style? How do words come to having the meanings they do? Patterns of speech. Political leanings. Poetic forms. In essence, Queneau has produced a nearly definitive text book on how to get an event out of your head and into the world. But Queneau doesn't quite go all the way into the land of textbook. In the original edition, (the new one from New Directions has additional exercises both by Queneau and some of today's best and brightest) Queneau manages to create a surprise ending. Yes. The 99th permutation of the same banal story has a totally realistic, totally believable, totally shocking, surprise ending. (That sound you heard a couple of weeks ago, might very well have been my brain exploding.) Still I could see why some (OK, many) people would not be interested enough in the gears of the literature machine to read an entire book about them.

And that is fine by me. However, just become one might not be interested in the book, doesn't make the book self-indulgent or pretentious or any of the other pejorative words often thrown at experimental writing. Sure, it probably is most interesting to readers who write and/or readers curious about writing, but that doesn't mean Queneau was just showing off. Here's how I think about this idea; I don't read the Lancet, but I'm glad my doctor does. Even though articles in the Lancet would be totally impenetrable to me, filled with references, jargon, allusion, and extremely complex sentence construction, it doesn't mean the authors are just “showing off,” and it doesn't mean those who read the Lancet are “showing off.” In every profession, there are experts who do stuff to make everybody else in their field better at what they do. We don't dismiss their materials. We probably don't read them very much, but we don't dismiss them. In some ways, “specialist” literature is even more accessible, democratic, populist, than any other specializations, because you can use basic reading skills to teach yourself how to read and appreciate them. The Lancet is pretty much always going to be impossible for me to read, but anybody could reach a point in their reading lives, if they want to put in a bit of effort, where they can read and enjoy Exercises in Style. But even if few readers decide on that course, the writers who have read Exercises in Style will write better and more interesting books. Because of Queneau and Oulipo and every other writer who has experimented, dared, pushed the limits, made mistakes, failed at creating a new form, wrote something terrible in the process, mainstream books get better. Like labs and the Lancet, books need Raymond Queneaus.

But, beyond all that “gears of literature” stuff (or maybe because of it) I think there's another ultimate truth expressed in Exercises in Style, one connected to some of the other great works of literature, Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, and In Search of Lost Time. (Don't look at me like that.) We have very little control over what happens to us in life, but we can decide how our life is told. To put this another way. Plot constrains, style frees.

Dream Dictionaries Lie: On George Perec's La Boutique Obscure

I am skeptical of every dream sequence I encounter in an work of intentional creation. The problem with created dream sequences is that they have a different level of freedom of imagery than the rest of the work in which they appear. Essentially, when events normally permissible within the framework of the narrative cannot directly communicate whatever it is the creator wants to communicate, a dream sequence is inserted to bear overt symbols from one part of the narrative to the other and magically we know the protagonist is chosen for the quest, or uncomfortable with their title, or desperate for the affection of an otherwise distant other, or whatever other emotion or phenomenal fact of human existence that doesn't routinely come up in the course of every day existence.

Don't get me wrong. Dream sequences can sometimes do other things, shifting the narrative to a realm of fantastic and surreal imagery to present a kind of alternative reality to what makes up the bulk of the story, for example, but it's clear that dreams are sometimes narrative lean-tos for the creatively lazy, techniques that let them organize their supplies for the real storytelling ahead. And it is also clear that sometimes dream sequences can absolutely shatter whatever storytelling momentum the creator has mounted until that point. At worst, it's like somebody farted in a car. But I'd go so far as to question whether the very idea of the interpretation of dreams makes any sense at all. First of all, we never analyze the dreams themselves, but the memories of our dreams; we analyze the chaos of our dreams as preserved by the chaos of our memories. Second, I see no reason why we should assume systems of conscious meaning, like symbol and metaphor, work in our unconscious as well. Finally, we still don't know, biologically, why we sleep at all. Odds are, dreams are just neurological excretion produced by some neurological maintenance process. It seems like it would make sense to figure out what dreams are first, before assuming they tell us anything. Assuming we know what they tells us then, is right out.

Yep. A Look into this guy's brain.

Even with those doubts, even if you can't be sure what you are seeing, dreams offer a look into another person's brain and I wanted to look into George Perec's brain. A founding member of Oulipo, the literary group that experimented with form and constraint as a way to drive creative literature, Perec is one of those figures in contemporary literature, at the moment, always in the background. Whenever a writer tries some kind of formal experimentation, Perec's A Void, an entire novel written without the letter “e,” hangs over the writer. And his Life: A User's Manual is one of my favorite books, a brilliant, massive, novel of a moment in a building and all the life that goes into every moment in every building that should be considered along with Gravity's Rainbow, Underground, and Infinite Jest, as one of the great post-modern novels and could stand up favorably in comparison to any of the great novels of any time. Perec's imagination, his commitment to formal exploration, his belief in constraint and structures, make him uniquely suited to explore the mystery of dreams. Essentially, I trust him to actually share what he dreams to the best he can remember, without any yearning for stable symbolism.

It's French for "The Boutique Obscure."

The result, La Boutique Obscure, is a collection of dreams that actually feel like the dreams I have, not because I've got a mind like Perec's (at least, that's not what I assume) but because these dreams have all the chaos and nonsense of the dreams I have. I recognize the mechanisms of phenomena in Perec's dreams, that are almost always absent from dreams presented in narrative. The chaotic passage of time, change in location, and presence of character. Knowing you know something without knowing how you know it. Sudden change in event without explanation and without any disorientation from the unexplained change. Lack of conclusion. All of the things that make dreams totally useless purveyors of narrative meaning. For example here's how “The refusal to testify,” opens; “I think I've found a large room in my apartment, but it turns out it's not mine, and, in fact, it's the street.” And there's this from “Decorated with medals,” “L. does not look like himself. He has a beard. He looks more like Bernard P. would if Bernard P. grew a beard. His wife looks vaguely like Bernard P.'s wife.”

Which is not to say that Perec's dreams are totally devoid of images and events that make us think of symbolism and meaning, but that says more about the state of the mind than the state of dreams. As a writer, Perec thought a lot about symbolism and meaning, and so naturally, aspects of that would show up in his dream as surely as this does in “The hypothalamus;” “It starts with a few harmless comments, but soon there's not denying it: there are several Es in A Void./ First one, then two, then twenty, then thousands!/ I can't believe my eyes./ I discuss it with Claude...How did nobody every notice?”

(I don't know if other writers would feel the same way, but it's hard to describe just how comforting it is to me, to see George Perec have a nightmare about A Void. And that it's this specific nightmare, about the one mistake he cannot make; I don't know.)

Read in succession and with a containing conscious structure, it's clear that what occurs in Perec's dreams does not follow the rules and systems of symbol and metaphor. And when they appear to, as in Perec's dream “The puzzle,” in which he dreams “Close up, though, you realize the whole thing is a puzzle: the puzzle itself (the painting) is but a fragment of a larger puzzle, unfinished because it can't be finished,” you're not experiencing direct communication through the mechanisms of literary meaning, your brain is just processing what you spend your time thinking about. Perec actually thought about puzzles. A lot. Along with the puzzle nature of much of his work, he also wrote crossword puzzzles. Of course, at some point he would dream about puzzles, not because they had some deeper symbolic meaning in his life, but because he was constantly thinking about puzzles. If dreams tell us anything at all that is of any use at all in our waking lives, they tell us what is on our minds.

If we learn anything applicable to consciousness from Perec's or anyone's dreams it is that we are drawn to interpret, whether there is meaning to be found or not. We have dreams and so, just like with the arrangement of stars in the sky over time, the seasonal patterns of migratory birds, or the way tea leaves collect in the bottom of a cup, we interpret them. “Interpretation,” might be the mythical name of the double-edge sword held by human consciousness; everything that makes us beautiful and everything that makes us repulsive comes from our ability to see what is not there.