In 1939, visiting a mansion on the outskirts of Le Havre in northern France, the home to parents of one of his colleagues, a young literature instructor by the name of Vincent Degraël happens upon a slim volume in the library - The Winter Journey by Hugo Venier.
The Winter Journey is also the title of this Georges Perec six-pager reminiscent of a tale by Jorge Luis Borges or Italo Calvino.
On the beginning pages of the slender book Degraël located in the mansion's library, the first-person narrator, a young man, briefly recounts his journey to a lake whereupon, along with the ferryman, he steps aboard a flat-bottomed boat so as to cross to a steep-sided small island with a tall, gloomy building in the middle.
No sooner does he set foot in the boat than "a strange-looking couple appeared: an old man and an old woman, both clad in long black capes, who seemed to rise up out of the fog and who came and placed themselves on either side of him."
Upon arrival and entering the island's sole building, all three together continue to climb the wooden staircase to a chamber. Once in the chamber, "as inexplicably as they had appeared, the old people vanished, leaving the young man alone in the middle of the room."
Does this scene of crossing a lake to a small island remind you of a painting? Perhaps Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead?
And the identity of the youth flanked by an old man and old woman who suddenly vanish, leaving him in solitude? Georges Perec's Polish father, a soldier in the French army, fell in battle in 1939 and his Jewish mother was rounded up in 1943 to be taken to Auschwitz and never seen again. Thus, at age seven Georges Perec became an orphan.
The second part of this lean opus contains "a long confession of an exacerbated lyricism, mixed with poems, with enigmatic maxims, with blasphemous incantations."
Vincent Degraël's scholarship focused on French poetry from the Parnassians to the Symbolists. With this in mind, we can imagine Vincent's disbelief as he turned the pages - it is "as if the phrases he had in front of him had become suddenly familiar, were starting irresistibly to remind him of something,". . . as if he were experiencing deja vu.
Ah, yes! Vincent can clearly see Hugo Venier simply lifted his prose and poetry from the likes of Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Nouveau, Lautréamont.
But, but, but . . . the stunning discovery: the publication date for The Winter Journey is 1864. 1864! So, as unbelievable as it might appear, the reverse is, in fact, the case: Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Nouveau, Lautréamont and others stole from Hugo Venier.
Does the entire history of French literature require a rewrite? Vincent Degraël will have to overcome a number of formidable obstacles, including how all 500 copies of The Winter Journey might have been destroyed by the plagiarists themselves.
Reading this short tale, I kept wondering: how many times did Georges Perec have the feeling what he was reading was something he himself wrote? Georges was fond of saying he wanted to write in the spaces between other books. Did he occasionally have the sense other great writers were crowding him out? With his inventive genius for language and word play, I wouldn't be surprised. Also, recognizing Georges wanted to write everything in every way possible, could he wish to write the very works of his favorite authors?
John Sturrock's translation of The Winter Journey is included in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces published by Penguin.
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