I

Each of the 99 chapters of Georges Perec’s novel Life A User’s Manual (La vie mode d’emploi) tells the story about one room and its inhabitant(s) in a fictional 10-floor Parisian apartment building. Chapter 57 presents to the reader the top floor studio apartment (formerly one of the building’s maid’s quarters) of Mme Elzbieta Orlowska, an immigrant from Poland, who lives there with her young child. Hanging on Mme Orlowksa’s wall is a poster which portrays six men standing in a row. We are told that this poster is an illustration of a well-known Polish children’s bedtime story, and then, the narrator goes on to tell us the story, in the way that it might typically be recounted, as a dialogue between a mother and a child:

—I met six men, says the mother.
—What are they like? asks the child.
—The first has a black beard, says the mother.
—Why? asks the child.
—Because he doesn’t know how to shave, of course! says the mother.
—And the second? asks the child.
—The second has a ring, says the mother.
—Why? asks the child.
—Because he’s married, of course! says the mother.
—And the third? asks the child.
—The third has a belt on his pants, says the mother.
—Why? asks the child.
—Because if not they would fall off, of course! says the mother.
—And the fourth? asks the child.
—The fourth has torn his pants, says the mother.
—Why? asks the child.
—Because he ran very fast, of course! says the mother.
—And the fifth? asks the child.
—The fifth has only one eye open, says the mother.
—Why? asks the child.
—Because he’s going to sleep, like you, my child, says the mother in a very soft voice.
—And the last one? asks the child, murmuring.
—The last one is showing his teeth, says the mother in a whisper.
One must, above all, not say that the little child ask anything, because if he has the misfortune to say:
—Why?
—Because he’s going to eat you if you don’t sleep, of course! The mother will say in a thunderous voice.” ¹

Folktales often, as this one does, take violent turns. But the violence in a story that is told by a parent, to a child, at bedtime, serves to emphasize that the child is safe from that violent world, under the protectorship of the storyteller. The storyteller stands as a barrier between the child and the dangerous and unprotected world of the story, and renders it docile with their presence, with their body; creates for the child, in the face of horror, a feeling of reverie, the luxury of fascination, and the possibility of sleep.

In the narrative that the poster represents, the child is invited to enjoy just such a bedtime story, and we see, in the child’s questions, the will to explore the world of the story libidinally and with confidence, safe in the protected sphere of the home . But at the moment that this story turns violent, it stops being a story because the frame has been breached; the child stops being the listener, and becomes forced into the role of participant in the story. In her withdrawal at the end of the narrative (but notice that it is a narrative that is not supposed to end) the mother stops being the storyteller, and turns into an agent for the man with the bared teeth. Or, perhaps even more disarmingly, the man with the bared teeth is an agent of the mother. The mother, here, no longer a protector of the child, no longer mother, sets the child loose to live among a world of predators, if the child dares to express curiosity, or to exercise volition.

In the transition, fascination gives way to horror: the libidinous space that opens up for the child as he or she exchanges questions and answers about the world with the mother, implodes, leaving the child alone, all outside. It is an exile all the more ineluctable because it occurs under the auspices of the mother who defined the realm of protection against this exilic place. The fictional frame is here transgressed; the world of the mother and the bed is no longer safe from the dangers of the fictional realm in the story that she tells. And fiction, without the frame, ceases – by definition – to be fiction.

(Fortunately, all of this transgression happens in fiction). ²

But is the fictional frame really transgressed? Let us notice how the horrifying conclusion – when the man with the bared teeth takes over – is forever deferred. The entire story is narrated in the present tense: “’I met six men’, says the mother” (not “said” the mother, but “says”: it is happening now). Notice also that it is not the mother who is narrating the story to us; she is only telling the story to her child. Someone else (the one who says, “says the mother”) is telling the story (to us) of the mother telling the story to the child.

The present tense continues through the last man, who “is showing his teeth.” It is still happening now, while the mother speaks to the child, while the mother’s speaking to the child is being recounted to us now. But then there is a change as we move down one line to the peculiar interjection of the narrator: “One must above all not say that the child ask anything.” Here we seem to come to an end to the present. The text now seems to exhaust its description of the present moment, of the story being told, and now points toward the future: at issue, how the story will be continued to be told. Most importantly, the child, at this point in the narrative, has not yet asked “why?”. We know that if the child did ask why, the child’s fate would be clinched. But the text forces us to be suspended between present and future; and the future, like all real futures (as opposed to fictional futures) is unpredictable. Placed between present and future, the “if” points to the unresolved state of the narrative. If the child goes on to ask, “why,” as he has done five times already, his mother will abandon him to the dangerous man. What the child should do is to say nothing, keep quiet, pretend to sleep, in order to stop the story, the fiction, from turning real. The onus, then, is on the child not to ask.

When we revert back to the dialogue between mother and child, it is with a sense that the narrator was unable to stop the fate of the child. One must, above all, not say that the little child ask anything. We feel the narrator’s powerlessness in the face of the child’s curiosity, a curiosity that if it were to take over the narrative would bring on the catastrophe.

The story remains suspended in this “if” as it ends. It is as if the space of childhood were under siege: the man with the bared teeth lurks on the other side of the boundary of fiction, where the future is no longer the past.

Note, still, how the child is nonetheless fictional for us; the story of the child, the dangerous end, creates a feeling of reverie for the reader. The reader enjoys the possibility of the catastrophe – anyone who likes a good story knows how well these kinds of catastrophes can be enjoyed. The moment when fiction becomes reality in the story heightens the reader’s own sense of fiction. ³

II

Can this little story that represents reality fictionally, can it help us to arrive at a definition of fiction?

What is strange about the story is that what began as fiction seems to end in reality; and as such, reality and fiction are made to co-exist. Or, as we see in the story, reality and fiction can co-exist in fiction, but cannot co-exist in reality. In the story, what we call “reality” is really only the fiction of reality, because, even though in the story the child thinks he is real, we know that the child is only a fiction and it is we who are real. (Or do we? but maybe we should not ask that question).

So, we might say something like, fiction is what is not real. Not very useful, since it only seems to say what we already know. We could give a little more heft to our definition by saying that fiction involves the imagination of real things, but not the real things themselves. Isn’t that what we do when we write, or read, or make something fictional? We imagine that something not real is real. But I suppose we already know that too.

A more practical tactic is to consider fiction as an artistic genre. Here, we oppose a work of fiction not to what is real, but to a work of non-fiction. Now, we are less interested in “reality” which is such a big word to have to deal with, but rather, in what is represented. So now, the question becomes: is the thing that is being represented (and that I am now considering) something that I just made up? Or does this representation have its origin in something real? But there’s the word again!

If the thing that is referred to in the work of fiction is not real, then the thing that is referred to in the work of non-fiction is real. But of course, once more, here “real” means something that is not fictional. If I describe the chair I am sitting on; the house I am sitting in; the city in which my house is; if I tell you that everything I am saying is true; if I do my best to represent all of this accurately, and don’t say that my house is red, when it is green; or that there is a dragon looking at me through the window while I write this; then I am, according to a pact I make with the reader, not writing fiction. So, in the bedtime story in the apartment of Mme Orlowska, even though the child is represented as being real compared to the six men, we know that the child is, in fact, fictional.

I said above that when I am not writing fiction, it is “according to a pact I make with the reader.” But why do I need to make a pact? ⁴

If I tell you that I am writing non-fiction, and then I write that my house is red when it is really green, I am not making fiction, but rather, I am lying. (The one who lies purports to make concord with reality, when in fact, he is not. The one who writes fiction does not ask you to correlate what they write with anything real.) Lying is not fiction. But neither is it non-fiction. Lying is when you represent something as real, even when it isn’t. And this helps us to nail down fiction (again) as the representation of something that is not real that we know is not real.

So far, we have two ways to define fiction which we can summarize like this: 1) Fiction is what is not real. 2) Fiction is not non-fiction.

But what does this bring us? Are we not merely restating what we already know intuitively? There is something dysfunctional, it seems to me, about both of these definitions, if we can even call them definitions. I mean, I can take anything: a dog, a lamp, a rock, for example, and oppose it to non-dogs, non-lamps, non-rocks. I can do the same for a phenomenon: like gravity; or a concept: say, time (but all of that gets too complicated. Let’s stick with what we can identify with our senses). We let the dog, for example, serve as the standard, so that everything that is not-dog lives in a privative state where the dog is the only thing that has a quality. The world becomes shaped like a dog floating in empty space. Isn’t this what exactly we do when we divide the world into reality and non-reality? Why would people look at me like I’m crazy if I insist on dividing the world into dogs and not-dogs, but not when I tell them that the world is either fiction or real.

Let us note that the doggish way of seeing the world does not tell us anything about what a dog is. Let’s try another example to understand this better: compare the difference in the relationship between cold and not-cold on the one hand; and the relationship between cold and hot, on the other. In the latter relationship, hot is not the privation of cold, but a quality, a thing, an experience, in its own right. Cold is not just not-hot (the privation of hot); rather, cold and hot are each two individual states, two different experiences. It is true that these two experiences exist in a relationship of exclusion, since something cold cannot also be something hot to the one who is experiencing it. We can call them, then, opposites, yes, but they are not negations: their qualities are distinct. An easy way to think about it would be to imagine spilling hot tea all over yourself. Your immediate reaction is much less likely to be, “This is not cold,” but rather, more like, “HOT!” What you feel has nothing to do with cold. The unique sensation happens before all categorical formation, which only comes after the experience, when you have time to recollect the incident in tranquility. (We shall come back to that idea).

If fiction means something that is not real; and real means something that is not fiction; then fiction and reality become more like the distinction dog/not-dog, than like the distinction cold/hot. Our definitions don’t seem to hold up in any meaningful way, because each depends on the other in a vicious circle. In trying to think this way, we will never know what is real about reality, or what is fictional about fiction.

But suppose I represent my red house by writing, “My house is red.” This sounds like non-fiction. My real red house is a living, changing thing. It’s redness is made of bricks, and is, interlaced with a pale white grid of mortar; even the red of the bricks is itself mottled, less brick-red than a tawny orange in parts; sometimes pink; a kind of patchwork: newer bricks from recent repairs (and those bricks are brick-red), older paler bricks on windows bricked over a long time ago, bricks worn by the weather. And it all changes with the light, such that the colors in the early morning are almost nothing like those at noon. But still in my non-fictional description, I say simply that it is a “red house.” It’s not, then, exactly my house that I’m representing; it’s not exactly any house, because my non-fictional representation is itself a kind of fiction. I’m not lying. But nonetheless, isn’t it this inability to pin down the color of my house in real life, more even than the possibility of lying, why we need a pact to tell us: “when you read this, I promise you it is not fiction.” Because we can’t keep the fiction away, in any representation, because no representation is the thing that it represents. And at the very least, before any of this talk about the nuance of color, you can’t live in a house that you read about in a story because the house is made of words; you can’t wear shoes that you see in a painting because the shoes are made of paint. ⁵ So, not the same house.

It is not clear that we can productively oppose fiction to reality, then, because even “non-fiction” starts to look fictional ⁶. And that is too bad, because the fiction/reality distinction seems to be one of the grand bases upon which we achieve knowledge of the world. But to really achieve knowledge of the world in this way, wouldn’t we need to first know what “reality” is (in the same way we can know what “cold” is) or at the very least what we mean by it before we can determine that fiction isn’t it? But all we seem to know about reality is that it is not fictional. And vice versa. We end up right back where we started. Which is ok. We should spend a little time running back and forth between fiction and reality in order to feel just how trapped we are in our own definition.

A big part of this problem turns on the word “representation.” Not only do we oppose fiction to reality, but we also oppose representation to reality. We do this when we say, for example to a child, “The house in the painting is only a picture [a representation]: it is not real.” We can read the word “only” as the expression of how a representation lacks reality.

What do we mean when we say, “representation”? We run the risk again of getting lost in negations again. Here, however, something gives. Let us start here with our ordinary, working understanding of reality, the one we know when we see it. We don’t have a definition for “reality,” but we know that things that have substance are for us real things. This, again, is not a definition of reality, but it will serve for lack of anything better, much in the same way you might ask a class of kindergartners, “What is a leaf?” Someone will inevitably answer, “a tree has them.” It’s a start.

So, something that has substance – something that you can see, that you can touch – is real. That seems to be an accurate rendition of the way – or at least one way – that we use the word “reality.”

But a representation has substance only because it is made of something: of ink; of paint; of sound; of stone; of wood, of pixels, of light. Again: if something is a representation, then, it is made of something, something substantial, something we can or could perceive, something that can be touched, something that could be measured, and so, necessarily real.

In this sense, we can say that fiction, because it is a representation, is real. That is, because fiction is a representation, it is made of some kind of stuff, stuff that we must be able to come into contact with perceptually (because representations are perceptual). That may not be very satisfying; because, we still know there is a difference between the warm dog at my feet, and the dragon that I just drew. But in what way are they different? Well clearly, the dog exists (because I am telling you that it does, and I am promising you that I am not lying) ⁷; the dragon that I just drew does not, however, exist outside the drawing, or whatever other representations of dragons that you might be thinking of as you read this. If we define “real” as “not fiction,” this definition only obscures this problem: if fiction is a representation of reality, and representations are real; then where is the part of fiction that is not real? We could say, “It’s easy! The drawing of the dragon has substance, is real, yes of course, but the “dragon” itself, of which the drawing is a representation, has no substance, is not real!” And yet, if it truly has no substance (other than my drawing of it), and if we can’t see it, if we can’t sense it, if we can only know it is there because of the representation, then the dragon does not seem to be a fiction, since fiction is a representation. All that there is is the real drawing: and the drawing is as real as the dog at my feet!

And then, if I drew the dog at my feet? That would give me a representation of the real dog, yes; but it is not the real dog, since it, among other things, is only two-dimensional, whereas the “real” dog is three-dimensional. The dog-drawing is by no means the same thing as the flesh-and-blood dog, but it is no less real. It is a real thing, and it is a fictional representation. So, once again: if fiction is a representation of reality; and representations are real; then what part of fiction is not real? (You’ll say, “but it’s not a real dog,” or “it’s not really alive” in each instance having to qualify the word “real” with something, without addressing reality.)

To really answer the question “What part of fiction is not real”, we would have to ask what we mean by “is.”

III

The first-century Latin poet, Lucretius, a writer, who despite his antiquity, was instrumental in the creation of Georges Perec’s novel ⁸, might offer us another, way to look at the relationship between “fiction” and “reality,” in his long poem De Rerum Natura (“The way things are”). At the beginning of the poem’s second chapter, Lucretius writes:

How sweet it is, when whirlwinds roil great ocean,
To watch from land, the danger of another,
…Nothing is more sweet than full possession
Of those calm heights, well-built and well-fortified
By wise men’s teaching, to look down from here
At others wandering below, men lost,
Confused, in hectic search for the right road. (52)

Lucretius makes a distinction between the way we struggle through the contingency and adversity of life, and the capacity we have (at times) to get above that struggle, to look down, and to see life. This is what the story in Mme Orlowska’s apartment seemed to promise—in positioning the audience as being safely above the violence—able to see it, but protected from it. This is a promise which it ultimately betrays when the audience is made to be participant. How do we find this perspective where we can look down “At others wandering below, men lost / Confused, in hectic search for the right road”?

Lucretius knows, of course, that we cannot forever remain outside of the struggle that life requires: the confrontation with mortality, with vulnerability, with short-sightedness. Yet, he nonetheless posits a realm, one he says is enterable, where insofar as the struggle ceases, the view opens up to us (and with it, the “sweetness” that comes from not suffering). Lucretius seems to be referring to a kind of absence from the physical activity of life: a place outside of life, but nonetheless in life: a place where we can maintain all the mental activity involved in living, but where we don’t have to direct all that mental activity to survival, but rather, to seeing, and in seeing, understanding (seeing as understanding is one of humanity’s oldest metaphors. ⁹) A place where we are free to understand.

How do we do this? We pretend as if we could leave the body, and find a safe place to look down on the body. In “inventing” that perspective through the capacity to represent, we have invented fiction. Anytime we see something that we should not be able to see because of the constraints of our physical body, we are seeing from a fictional vantage. Fiction permits, through representation, the ability to stand outside of life, while we are in life. The basis of fiction is the perspective on life that does not exist while we are in it. But we have to do it in life, since we can’t leave life to get there. That is what is fictional about fiction. And that is the special quality of representation, where we use things to make language. We could even say that this fictional perspective is built into our language, in the very fact that we have a structure in language by which we can represent something to which we have no immediate access. If I am writing to you, I am present to myself, at least, and you (even if you are nameless and faceless, since I don’t know who you are) nonetheless stand in an immediate relationship with me. Let’s compare two sentences.

In the sentence, |“For a long time I went to bed early,”| ¹⁰ the speaker is present to the speaker’s consciousness. It doesn’t matter whether this is a “real” or a “fictional” sentence; it doesn’t matter if the speaker is telling the truth or lying (I borrow from mathematics the notation of absolute value to indicate this).

But in the sentence, |“It’s limping, he thought quickly,”| ¹¹ there is no speaker present to the consciousness of the subject (“he”). Rather, the speaker of this sentence represents the consciousness of another, as if the speaker had access to that perspective. In other words, even though I read this sentence in “absolute value,” it is essentially fictional: it requires that the reader inhabit an impossible perspective: that of entering into someone else’s thought. The linguist Émile Benveniste reminds us that in Arabic, the grammatical name for the third person pronoun (he, she, they, it) is, literally, “the absent one” (165). The third person is the one who is talked about, but whose presence is not necessary; who is neither the addresser, nor the addressee. That linguistic possibility, we might say, is what makes fiction possible. And so, we see that that fiction is built into language itself! But if we can take the position of the absent one as perceiver (not as speaker), then we, being neither addresser, nor addressed, can find a (fictional) place, outside of life to see life, where what is fictional about this place is that it is precisely outside life. I know when I perceive. If you tell me you perceive something, I will either believe or not believe what you say. But to say that she or he or they perceives something, when at no time was this particular she or he or they a you or an I to me, that impossible perspective is exactly what we call fiction.

If fiction offers us a place outside of life, where we can observe life, while still being in life; then what is fictional about fiction is that what it represents is not life. And in fact, all representations, in that sense, point to our inability to understand, to apprehend, the magnitude of life. So that what fiction points to is its inadequacy as representation of life, of the impossibility of anything really being represented. The very fact that we can ascribe consciousness like “ours” to someone who is not there, and then attempt to see the world from that manufactured perspective points to an essential limitation in our perception of “reality”. While we may not know what reality is, we do know that our understanding of it is inadequate. But fiction offers a structure (at the very least a beginning, middle, end), a boundary that protects what is inside from what is outside. The structure that fiction offers is less like reality, than protection from reality. But that structure itself is a fiction! It is the fiction that reality has a structure.

What makes fiction fiction is that we know that the man lurking with the bared teeth is not real. But if representations are “real,” and if fiction is a representation, how do we keep the predator at bay?

How would it affect our reading of the story of the mother, the child, and the six men, to know that the real Georges Perec was taken, at 5 years old, in 1941, by his real mother, whose name was Cyrla Shulevitz, to the Gare de Lyon (train terminal) in Paris; that she had put his arm in a sling to make him look like he had broken it because only injured children were at that time getting through; that she had sent him off alone, on a convoy organized by the Red Cross, where he traveled South, passing from out of Paris and the Nazi-occupied zone of France to the “free zone.” He was picked up at his arrival in the city of Grenoble by an aunt and uncle. Some months later, Cyrla, who wore the yellow star, was picked up and put in a van, along with her father, and taken first to the French concentration camp at Drancy, and then to Auschwitz, the German run death camp in Poland, where she was never heard from again.