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Published in Resonances (London) 10.1 (Augusts 2005): 11-17

Publication 4. 56

David Bellos
Princeton University

Period Pieces
Georges Perec’s German Radio Plays, 1967-1972

Georges Perec, the lovably eccentric author of A Void (1969) and Life A User’s Manual
(1978), first came to public notice in 1965 as the author of a cold, hard stare of a novel
called Things, which won the Prix Renaudot that year. The German rights to the novel
were bought and a translation commissioned from Eugen Helmle, an established figure in
the German avant-garde, a member of the Collège de Pataphysique and the translator of
Raymond Queneau, amongst others. Helmle was also a neighbour and colleague of
Ludwig Harig — a noted poet and novelist who, like many other innovative German
writers of his generation, was keenly involved in the revitalisation of the Hörspiel, or
radio play. Helmle met Perec in 1966, and by 1967 he felt sufficiently confident of the
inventive genius of his new author to invite and inveigle him into writing for Saarland
Radio, the Saarländischer Rundfunk, or SR. Perec was at that time about to shelve his
projected “family autobiography” and to throw himself into formal experimentation —
for, much to his delight, he had just been co-opted to the OuLiPo, the “Workshop for
Potential Literature”, founded and presided by François le Lionnais and Raymond
Queneau. The fact that the invitation to write Hörspiele came from Queneau’s German
translator must have counted in his mind for a lot. So off Perec went to Saarbrücken in
the spring of 1967, to find out just what radio drama was.

In the post-war period radio drama played no meaningful role in French literary culture,
and at the time of his invitation to Saarbrücken Perec had no preconception of what a
radio play could be. It had never occurred to him to write for radio in France and it never
would — not even when he was a celebrated author of Hörspiele in German. The
corollary of a career in French fiction was writing for the cinema, not for radio. Germany
was different. With its seventeen independent public radio stations, a fragmented
television service, and a film industry deliberately restricted by the Allied Powers, radio
was the primary means for German writers to earn a living, and a major vehicle of
literary experiment. The poets and linguists Perec met at Saarbrücken weren’t interested
in writing “theatre for the blind” — plays on traditional subjects with action and scenery
replaced by sound effects — but in finding ways to use radio as radio, to explore the
potential of radio sound as a medium in its own right. Their interests and ambitions could
not have been better suited to a novice Oulipian.

Within a month of his initiation into aims of the neues Hörspiel, Perec came up with a
proposal for a radio play embodying the ideas that had been put to him by Helmle, Harig,
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Johann-Maria Kamps and others. It would have no characters, only voices inside a
thinking machine, a powerful computer of the day after tomorrow. The play would
consist of the machine's calculation of the answer to Descartes's chestnut: Do I exist?
How do I know I exist? If I exist, what do I do with existence? The machine’s thought-
program would not be Cartesian but Saussurian, based on difference alone: the machine
would know axiomatically that it differed from all previous machines, that its existence
was limited in time, since it dated back no further than the earliest entry in its memory-
store; and that it was not to be confused with any of the elements in the problems it had
solved, since it had solved them. Having been programmed to solve all possible
problems, it would know that it was different from all other things - and therefore that it
existed.

What Perec had in mind, in May 1967, was an Oulipian Frankenstein, a synthesized soul
asserting its existence and freedom in the human manner - that is to say, by making
mistakes. Not so different from HAL, the speaking supercomputer of Stanley Kubrick's
science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL reaches the same conclusion as Perec's
machine. Once it knows it exists, it asserts its existence by making a human mistake —
with fatal consequences for the spaceship crew. In May 1967, Perec had not yet seen the
film (it was still unfinished) or the speech synthesizers at Michigan State University,
which he was to visit not long after. It’s just that thinking and speaking machines were in
the air of the times, which Perec breathed through and through.

Perec went to the States in summer 1967, came back to Paris, spent August and
September catching up with his day job and developing the "machine" play, to which he
was now committed by a contract and a more than satisfactory fee. His conception of a
radio play without action or character moved beyond the first proposal for language
games played by an anti-Cartesian thinking machine. In mid-October, Perec wrote out a
draft of a new play and mailed it to Helmle. He began his explanation by recalling the
original question: Could a machine have a soul, and if it could, what would it do with it?
To begin with, I wanted to explore the relationship between system and error
(since genius is the error in the system). First I thought: This is where poetry lies.
Then it occurred to me that the genius of a machine is the precise opposite - to be
a system based on error. So there would be no intersection at all between the two
kinds of genius, except that both of them would reveal the same contradiction,
which has no resolution save silence. Since I had a Hörspiel in mind and was
looking for a play on words that was unencumbered by any kind of action, I was
led to ponder on:
a) poetry
b) silence
c) genius (or error)
and from there to choose a poem that is
a) German (for simplicity's sake)
b) a work of genius
c) short (so as to permit copious treatment)
d) about silence, and nothing else.
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The accompanying typescript is a mock-computer's mock-analysis of the most sacred of

all poetic cows in the German language. It is not clear that Perec grasped the enormity of
what he had done. Whether by mistake or by sheer genius, he had chosen to assault the
core of German culture, the one short poem learnt by heart by every generation of
German schoolchildren, an exquisite lyric by Goethe that is classical in its simplicity,
romantic in its sentiment, and metaphysical in its implication of mortality:

Wandrer's Nachtlied The Rambler's Lullaby

Über allen Gipfeln Over every hill
Ist Ruh; Is repose;
In allen Wipfeln In the trees
Spürest du You can feel
Kaum einen Hauch. Nary a breeze.
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde Birds in the forest are silent
Warte nur, balde Wait, and very soon
Ruhest du auch You'll be at rest, just like these

The first draft of the play, entitled Die Maschine, is partly in German and mostly in
French. In November 1967 Perec spent several days sitting alongside Helmle as they
turned it, together, into a Hörspiel. The translator had a bigger hand in shaping the text
than is usual, but he never questioned that the play itself was Perec’s, not his.

The Perec-Helmle machine subjects Goethe's lullaby to procedures that are mock-
statistical in the first part of the play, permutational in the second and third parts, and, in
the fourth and final part, citational. The machine "speaks" in four voices: system control
(a female voice) and three parallel processors (male). After going through its number-
crunching paces (average number of words per line/ syllables per line/ syllables per word/
letters per line/ per syllable/ per word, etc.), it runs through pretty much every
permutational tool yet considered by OuLiPo and some picked up from Ludwig Harig,
decomposing, recomposing, and subverting Goethe's text to comic effects that are
perceptible even to non-German speakers. The greatest amount of airtime is given to the
word-substitution game, originally proposed by Jean Lescure, known as S+7. It is a
potential device of great simplicity, and can be practised by anyone with a dictionary:
Take a poem and replace every noun in it with the seventh noun following. For instance:

On First Looking Into Chapman's Honeymoon

Much have I travelled in rebellions of goodwill
And many goodly stationmasters and kitcheners seen
Round many western itchings have I been
Which barmaids in February to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expense had I been told,
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demurrage
Yet did I never breathe its pure serina
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watercress of the slang
When a new plate swims into his keyboard
Or like stout Cortez when with his eagle fact
He stared at the Pacific - and all his manias
Look’d at each other with a wild surtax -
Silent, upon a pebble in Darien.
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Die Maschine concludes with an "explosion of quotations" dredged up from the

computer's multilingual memory, all related to Goethe's themes of silence, sleep, and
mortality. Stereophonic sound keeps the languages sufficiently apart to permit voice-over
translation between German, French, English, Spanish, and Japanese. The quotations —
some no doubt suggested by Helmle and others by Harig and perhaps Roubaud — rise
and fall in waves of declamation and whispering. Heine's "I know not who is speaking,
nor do I know who would dare to make an end to the endless poem" seems to herald an
ending. After an instant of total silence comes a lyric by Narahisa:

tsui ni yuku that is a road

michi to wa kanete which some day we all travel
kikishikada I had heard before
kino kyô to wa yet I never expected
omawazarishi to take it so soon myself

After which, there is a hissing of words all meaning “peace”, “silence”, or “rest”,
maintained for long enough that it begins to be mildly intolerable. Then there is a sharp
"psst!", and silence. End of Die Maschine. Ein Hörspiel von Georges Perec. Deutsch von
Eugen Helmle.

Perec's language machine has significance beyond its technical brilliance. It is an assault
on consecrated poetry, a derision of a literary fetish, and in that respect it is in tune with
the counterculture that was seething under the lid of bourgeois society in 1967 and would
bubble over in May ’68. But Die Maschine is also an act of love. The persistence with
which the poem is taken to pieces and reassembled undoes the overt aggression against
poetry; the orchestration of world verse in the fourth section is itself a poetic
construction, and in the end, Die Maschine comes near to finding poetry's soul in the
intimation of mortality. It was the first time since his teens that Perec had dared to
confront poetry, and it was the first time that the theme of mortality - as opposed to the
fear of ageing – had been allowed to enter his work. Die Maschine is thus the first work
of Perec's maturity. Its combination of formal play and the contemplation of mortality
links it firmly to the great creations of later years, and most clearly of all to Life A User’s
Manual.

Die Maschine was recorded in the stereophonic studios in Saarbrücken in May 1968 and
broadcast on 13 November following. It was a triumph. Die Maschine was reviewed
enthusiastically in the press and it went into the repertory of all German-language
stations. It was judged almost immediately to be one of the most complete and accessible
examples of the "new radio drama" that was then establishing itself as the mass-public
form of artistic experimentation in Germany. Die Maschine became, and will no doubt
remain, an obligatory reference in all accounts of acoustic art in Europe. But its indirect
contribution to French literature is equally important. Die Maschine proved to Perec that
formal sophistication could appeal to a wide audience and that Oulipian art did not have
to remain the privilege of Parisian literati. French literary histories do not often register
the fact, but the first real triumph of Oulipo’s reinvention of the art of writing was… in
German.
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One night, on a later trip to Helmle’s home in Neuweiler, Perec clambered up the
stepladder to the guestroom and asked himself why he had got involved in German radio.
He jotted down a few thoughts and left the unfinished scrap folded up in a French first
edition of Things on the shelf.
The art of Hörspiel is virtually unknown in France. I discovered it at a point when
a need for new techniques, new forms of writing was uppermost in my mind. I saw
very soon that Hörspiel could provide solutions to some of my preoccupations
with form, answers to my questions about the value, the powers and the functions
of writing; that it offered solutions that I had not managed to find, at that time, in
the context of experiments in fiction. The intrinsic space of radio drama - its
special features of voice alternation, timing, the logical development of an
elementary premise, the making-real of that fragile, vital relationship between
language and speech - thus became a primordial axis of my work as a writer.

II

Perec made further contributions to German radio drama, but none possess quite the
brilliance and perfection of Die Maschine. Tagstimmen – “Dayvoices” – was a three-way
collaboration between Perec, the musician Philippe Drogoz, and Eugen Helmle.

Tagstimmen does not tell a story in any ordinary sense. It is a narrative

continuum, made from very simple material, which attempts to exploit to the limit
the phonetic possibilities of language and the musical potential of the human
voice

The basic material consists of proverbs, fixed phrases, and counting rhymes,
used in such a way as to incorporate the greatest possible number of types of
speech and forms of voice, of tonality, etc. The whole work could be summarised
as telling (or rather suggesting) a day in the life of a man in a city, and, in a
barely less symbolic way, the life of a man. The following table shows the play's
structure, roughly:

Day Life Speech Types

Waking Birth Cries and stutters, murmurs, whispers, etc.
Morning Childhood Counting rhymes, recitations, information bubbles
Noon Youth Hullaballoo, slogans, speeches, chanting, sermons
Afternoon Maturity? Internal monologue, narration
Evening Maturity! Song
Sunset Old age Repetition, monologue, chant
Night Death Silence.

Tagstimmen was the official German entry for the Italia Prize in 1971. Although it did not
win (the prize was not awarded that year), SR was sufficiently proud of its Franco-
German Hörspiel to make a vinyl of it to distribute to its staff as a New Year’s present for
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1972, and it printed the German-language text in its yearbook. SR also offered the Perec-
Drogoz-Helmle consortium whatever resources it wanted for its next radio play.

In parallel, Perec had promised to write a radio play on Kafka for another German
station, WDR, but he had missed several deadlines already. By way of apology he wrote
about the impossibility of writing Wie ein Hund (the title comes from the last words of
The Trial “… shot like a dog, as if only shame would survive him”), a radio play that
never in fact got written:

The point of departure for Wie ein Hund is both extremely simple and extremely
ambitious: it is an effort to penetrate the very core of Kafka’s language and, by
identifying certain constants and certain constraints in it, to follow the path of an
idea (that is to say, of a set of words) inside the author's "head". It is not exactly a
work of criticism, even if contemporary criticism often operates in that manner,
but it is, quite precisely, an attempt at appropriation.

[...]

It's only a matter of MONTAGE (of ordering), but montage is so essential in this
case that I was at fault in believing that an arbitrary choice of a very rigorous
structure - that of the renga- would be efficient. In advance it seemed a safe bet
that the combination Kafka + renga would work, but independently of the fact that
I wasn't much "inspired" last year, I think it is not true. The renga is a form of
collective improvisation under strong constraints supported by a tradition with no
equivalent nowadays (not even in Japan).

What did get completed and performed, however, was a radio play Perec wrote entirely in
French on the basis of a question he had been asked to by IBM-France: what could a
writer make of an algorithm? The algorithm in question, which Perec doctored in co-
operation with Bernard Jaulin, was a mock-flow-chart showing the recursive and
reiterative steps a lowly employee has to take to obtain a pay rise. Perec wrote out the
whole procedure as a single sentence – 80 pages long! – with almost (but not quite)
uncountably many loops in subordinate clauses. It then occurred to Perec that the exercise
could be turned into a Maschine-like spoof with serious intimations of mortality by
attributing separate voices to the different operators of the algorithm: the proposition, the
alternative, the positive hypothesis, the negative hypothesis, the choice, and the
consequence. To which Perec added a “joker”, Measles, constituting the “error in the
system” and the “human touch” in this intentionally mechanical critique of life in a
bureaucratic organization. Helmle translated it straight away, and The Increment was a
roaring success, not only on radio, but also, more unexpectedly, on stage, in France and
in Germany. The Increment is the only place where Perec’s twin careers as a French
writer and as a German-language radio dramatist overlap. But the latter was already
running out of steam.

The major no-cost-barred project that SR was eager for Perec to complete dragged on for
several years, from 1971 to 1974. Perec, in close cooperation with Philippe Drogoz, had
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decided to attack the conventional heartland of German culture — music. The new work,
the translator said reassuringly to SR, worried about the long delay, would be a sequel to
Tagstimmen exploiting, in the place of voices, the varieties of instrumental music that
form the aural environment. The thread on which the variations were to be strung was a
journalist's enquiry into the role of music in everyday life, from a busker’s violin to a
jukebox, from a concert heard on a taxi-driver's radio to the concert’s actual performance,
stopping on the way for a visit to a one-man band who trips on the stairs when coming to
answer the door. There would be seventeen variations, each with a different musical form
as well as a different narrative pretext.

Perec and Drogoz took SR’s offer of all available resources only too literally. The first
draft of the new play called for two violins, a viola, a cello, a double bass, a flute, an
oboe, a clarinet, a piccolo, a French horn, a trumpet, a cornet, timpani, and a tuba — and
they would probably need an electric guitar, a bandoneon and a synthesizer too.

By early February 1972 Perec and Drogoz had found a key for their joint work, which,
Perec admitted, was a little more elaborate than what had first been contemplated. But it
would come complete with a colour-coded chart of its musical and narrative composition.
The coding represents the musical and narrative “colour” of each of the seventeen
variations, as determined by four variables (length of sequence, expression, tempo, and
“dynamic”), each with two possible values (short/long, emotional/neutral, slow/fast,
piano/forte). The French abbreviations used produce an unpronounceable exotic
language; a “long”, “emotional”, “slow” and “piano” sequence, for example, is coded
LERP. In handwritten drafts of Konzertstück Perec even introduced a Professor
Corsppeeggree (a transparent anagram) to give a lecture on the dialects of Polyphonesia,
beginning “Cnelp lerf lerf frec prel plec cnelf celp Boro lerp”.

OuLiPo invented formal tools for writing, and the tests for its tools tested one tool at a
time. For that reason, all of Perec’s previous Oulipian works had been formally
“simplex”. A Void, for instance, exploits and exhausts one constraint and one only — the
absence of the letter e. Konzertstück, on the other hand, is the first formal “multiplex” in
Perec’s œuvre, and by the same token in the history of OuLiPo.

Each of the seventeen sequences of Konzertstück has two predetermined musical forms:
one for the verbal structure and another for the music itself. Sequence 11 (“In the
Restaurant”), for example, is a gypsy chaconne as far as the musical sound is concerned,
but its story “takes the form of a sonata”. The Perec-Drogoz demonstration of the
presence of music in everyday life goes beyond programme illustration, since it embeds
canonical musical forms in its narratives, all of which end in misadventure. The medium
is, in this instance, the message, and the underlying message is the possibility of form
overlaying form. The plan for Konzertstück, rather more than its realisation, contains the
core idea that would permit Perec to design his later masterpiece. It gave him his first
inkling of the vast potential of multiplex constraint, fully realised in Life A User’s
Manual.
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To find a means of distributing the different musical shapes around the thirty-four slots
(two each for the seventeen episodes), Perec went back to the key that Claude Berge had
first proposed to OuLiPo years before — the Graeco-Latin bi-square of order 10. This is
the mathematical procedure that Perec would use to build the set of constraints which
determine much of Life A User’s Manual. It is not clear how rigorously Perec applied the
grid to the material of his German radio play, but it is quite certain that Konzertstück is
the first try-out of the most productive formal device Perec ever used.

SR, on the other hand, was not much impressed by the text Perec finally sent in and let
the author know that the project would be awkward, if not impossible, to produce. Perec
defended his project by declaring that his new work was animated by the somewhat
irreverent wish to desacralise music... That turned out to be undiplomatic in the extreme.
Desacralizing Goethe is one thing, but music is altogether more sacred - and more
German. The score - now calling for a symphony orchestra, a massed choir, and a
performing typewriter - reached Saarbrückenin May 1972. Where it was shelved.

Konzertstück was not just in bad taste from a Germano-musical point of view, it was a
production nightmare for SR. New orchestral music was the responsibility of the music
department, which was quite separate from drama. As a result, the play stayed on the
shelf, lest it set off a demarcation dispute. Eventually, though, a summit meeting was set
up at to sort out the turf war. The head of drama, the head of music, the composer, the
translator, and the others in attendance (not including the author, who was in Tunisia at
the time) agreed in the end to go ahead with the play. Eight studio days would have to be
booked, given the number of musicians involved. It was further resolved that the author's
wishes concerning episode 16, the “Sonata for an Ageing Typewriter”, would be
respected, and that SR would somehow find a manual Underwood in Saarbrücken, so as
to produce the correct clang-click-ding.

Perec and Drogoz rehearsed the sonata on the writer’s historic Underwood in Paris. As
Perec now had an electric golf-ball machine, it did not matter too much if energetic
practice wrecked his old typewriter, which it did, though not quite irreversibly. The
Underwood Four Million had been Perec’s friend, companion, and unfailing prop for two
decades; he was not necessarily doing violence to it when he added an implausible coda
to its career by turning it into a musical writing machine.

Konzertstück was finally broadcast on 18 July 1974. It was not well received, not well
reviewed, and was never repeated. It had cost SR's drama department more than it had
expected, and it had caused a crisis in interdepartmental relations. Not surprisingly,
therefore, Konzertstück turned out to be Perec's last German radio play. Although it is
overlong and at times drearily cacophonous, Konzertstück is by no means an
uninteresting example of experimental radio sound, typical of the encounter of concrete
music and concrete poetry in Hörspiele of the period. Its greater importance for French
literature, as the try-out of complex formal ideas which were to be elaborated to much
greater effect in Life A User’s Manual, makes Perec’s exit from German radio less of a
defeat than it seems.
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III
Radio drama gave Georges Perec a privileged space in which to develop experimental
ideas about form, language, culture and subversion, to the immense benefit of his overall
career as a writer. However, it would be wrong to see his four main Hörspiele as mere
branch lines in the “network of crisscrossing lines” made by his œuvre. All of these plays
— but most especially Die Maschine — are outstanding contributions to the heady
creativity of the neues Hörspiel. Period pieces, to be sure. But also genuine and, for the
most part, delightful works of aural art.

Perec’s Hörspiele
1. Die Maschine, transl. and adapt. Eugen Helmle.
♦ First broadcast by SR on 13 November 1968. Translated into Serbo-Croatian by Dubravko Ivacan
and broadcast as Stroj by Radio Zagreb IIIrd Programme on 5 March 1972. Translated into Italian
by Bruno G. Chiaranti and recited at the Teatro Franco Parenti, Milan, May 1991. German text
published with an essay on radio drama by Werner Klippert (Stuttgart: Reclam's Universal-
Bibliothek no. 9352, 1972).
2. Wucherungen (“The Increment”), transl. Eugen Helmle.
♦ First broadcast by SR on 12 November 1969. Published in French in Georges Perec, Théâtre I.
Paris: Hachette, 1981. English translation in David Bellos, editor, The Portable Perec. London:
Secker Harvill, forthcoming.
3. Tagstimmen, by Georges Perec, Philippe Drogoz and Eugen Helmle)
♦ First broadcast by SR on 28 April 1971. Record (not for sale) produced by SR in 1971. Text
published in Die Funkpostille: Ein Querschnitt durch das Programm des Saarländischen
Rundfunks im Sendejahr 1971 (Saarbrücken: SR, 1971). French and German résumés in Georges
Perec, Tagstimmen/Voix de jour (ARD - Prix Italia, 1971).
4. Der Mechanismus des Nervensystems im Kopf (“Fonctionnement du système nerveux dans la tête”),
transl. Eugen Helmle.
♦ First broadcast by WDR on 15 June 1972. Published in French in Georges Perec, Cantatrix
Sopranica L.. Paris: Seuil, 1998.
5. Konzertstück für Sprecher und Orchester, by Georges Perec, Philippe Drogoz and Eugen Helmle)..
♦ First broadcast by SR on 18 July 1974. Text and score unpublished
Posthumous
6. Der Kartoffelkessel (La Poche Parmentier), transl. Eugen Helmle.
♦ First broadcast by SR, Südwestfunk, and Süddeutscher Rundfunk on 15 October 1987. French
text in Georges Perec, Théâtre I. Paris: Hachette, 1981.
7. Der Teufel in der Bibliothek ("Le Diable dans la Bibliothèque"), transl. Eugen Helmle.
♦ Broadcast by Norddeutscher Rundfunk in October 1991. Text unpublished.
Projected
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8. Wie ein Hund. For more details see David Bellos, Georges Perec. A Life in Words. London: Harvill,
1993.

Commissioned and published by Resonance magazine, a publication of the London

Musicians’ Collective, London (UK), summer 2005. Largely based on chapter 38 of
Georges Perec. A Life in Words (1993)