A manivelle is a hand-crank. I took the name for this constraint from an item described by Georges Perec in his short novel Un cabinet d’amateur (1979), translated by Ian Monk as “A Gallery Portrait” in Three By Perec (Godine/Verba Mundi, 2004). Before I come to the constraint, a little more about this book.
Un cabinet d’amateur uses the “gallery” constraint I described in Administrative Assemblages (Proteotypes, 2009). A picture gallery is organized as a sequence or an array of pictures, and a written gallery (what the French used to call a “salon,” a recognized literary form) is a sequence (hard to do salon hanging in writing) of descriptions or analyses of or responses to those pictures. The sequence in which the pictures are “hung” may or may not create a narrative, but a “gallery” will certainly create a sequence and use it to comment on the nature and use of the art image. Perec has used the form in a nearly exhaustive variety of ways: first, description as in a catalogue of an exhibition (the collection of the German-American brewer Hermann Raffke is being shown at the 1913 Pittsburgh celebration of the anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s accession); thereafter a detailed description of one painting, Un cabinet d’amateur, by the German-born Heinrich Kürz, which represents a gallery in the manner of Willem van Haecht’s Art Cabinet of 1628
or Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre (1832-3), or a number of others, all known to Perec and listed by him.
The “cabinet” Kürz paints is that of his patron Raffke, and includes all the paintings shown in Pittsburgh, which hung alongside his and were therefore already present twice in the exhibition. Like his predecessors, Kürz puts human figures into the gallery, or rather he includes one figure, Raffke’s, in the clothes, the chair, and the very posture in which, some years later, when dead, Raffke has himself stuffed and buried in a sealed vault with his collection, all disposed as in Kürz’s painting and including that painting. The Borgesian theme of infinite regression further appears in Kürz’s including his own painting in his painting of Raffke’s collection, and so visitors to the show in Pittsburgh saw the entire collection a third time, still including his own painting, and so the entire collection a fourth time … Perec has fun with this.
But the novel continues after the exhibition closes. Perec summarizes art-historical analysis, the contents of an auction catalogue from the first sale of work from Raffke’s collection and the prices realized, Raffke’s autobiography including his account of building his collection, a book on Kürz’s painting, in the course of which the author produces evidence authenticating every painting in the collection represented in Kürz’s great work; finally, we are given an account of a second sale of the Raffke collection, all its treasures, and the prices realized, and a final shocking revelation. Perec continues to have fun, largely at the expense of a connoisseurship too focused on the extraordinary images of art, and on its authenticity as established by provenance-stemmas, and too prone to set a value in dollars. At any of a score of places in this novel, stories far more interesting than the one being told start to take form around a suggestive structural element, such as one of those provenance-summaries that list how a work of art passed from one hand to another, or around the excited spectators advancing with their loupes to examine the third-generation copies of masterworks in the painting nesting inside the painting nesting inside Kürz's painting. Perec does not allow any of those stories to develop; he sticks close to his matter-of-fact descriptive account.
In the first sale, one of the items sold is a “paysage à manivelle” — a long scroll-like canvas painted with a mostly continuous landscape, and wrapped around a pair of standing rollers turned by hand-cranks. (Presumably some sort of frame supports rollers and canvas.) Perec’s commentator speculates that it was used as the back-drop in a marionette theater, the scene being changed by a sufficient number of turns of the crank. Where the landscape is continuous, the scene changes gradually, and one imagines the characters in motion, a displacement that is already more novelistic than dramatic. Yet at certain points there are vertical bands of canvas, termini at which the scene changes abruptly and completely. What there is no record of at all is the theater or the play for which this scenery was created. All Perec gives us is the flat description, which moves from the banks of a canal past a lock, past fishers, into a forest and out onto a lane that gradually becomes a city street, which becomes a road leading into “hot country,” passing an oasis with a painted Arab, then finding the sea and a port, before the scene jumps to a carpenter’s shop and carries on. We are left to imagine the story that was enacted before this backdrop and the characters that enacted it.
So the “manivelle” constraint, I infer, consists in reducing a narrative to its setting; in creating a spatial narrative attentive to scenes and objects, but not people, where the time-dimension is present purely as sequence, perhaps of rate as well. Time passes as the crank is turned, and places change but what took place is not represented. The causal sequences of plot must be imagined. We are left some latitude for such imagining by the absence of many very marked features that might suggest actions. The places that Perec describes are not extraordinary, like the works of art collected by Hermann Raffke, and this particular piece is “more a curiosity than a work of art.” The scene represented is, in Perec’s word, “infra-ordinary.” It is an unframed landscape, at least on the sides; nothing is foregrounded because it is entirely a background, but it multiplies the banal realities of every day, which might include an orientalist cliché like the oasis and Arab. If the crank stopped turning, some element could become important by receiving sustained attention, but of course it would depend on just where the crank ceased to turn. For Perec the importance of the infra-ordinary was just the noticing of what we habitually overlook because it is the continuous, hardly varying backdrop of our lives. He wants us to question the habitual, and to give a tongue to common things, which will articulate an anthropology of our own everyday life, what Perec calls the “endotic,” the anti-exotic.
Perec would, I think, have enjoyed the “myriorama” discussed a few posts ago: also a landscape framed between two horizons, but sliced into strips that can be recombined.
2.The first practice for the manivelle constraint, then, is to create as nearly endless a continuous description of setting as is possible. It could be your own creation, this linear world, or you could abstract it from someone else’s story or even a folk tale or Arthurian legend or the Bible or Odyssey. Such a setting should change at a steady rate, so that some limit must be enforced upon amplifications, which will slow things down, and on cursory listing, which will speed them up. Metaphor and other figurative language must be rigorously excluded; this is to be a literal description, and numerical measurements and compass directions have their place in it. The setting should contain objects in such numbers and describe them in such detail as one might notice while walking past them without stopping.
In short, this writhing exercise is a different from one I used to assign, the description of a room in which a murder or some other calamity was about to happen. For that assignment I actively encouraged adding attention-value beyond what the infra-ordinary contents of the room would normally call for, stressing that moods are not created by naming them but by the intensity and color of the description. The manivelle landscape should not project a mood at all. It should foreground nothing. Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends, but a story set within this landscape must choose where it begins and where it ends, and where in the middle it comes to a boil; and that will be the work of the reader.
So then a second stage would be to pass one’s manivelle to a reader and have that person write a story without adding any description of setting, using only what occurs between some starting point and some ending, but adding characters and actions. It would be interesting, for that second writer, to choose at random a place to start a story and a place to end it.
A “gallery” would lend itself to a similar exercise. Create a series of descriptions of pictures, which could be landscapes, portraits, history-paintings, still lives, abstractions — but your job is limited to description. Then give what you wrote to someone else to create a story from it. You can come to an agreement whether the “pictures” should be used in the order given or may be rearranged. When we practiced the manivelle in the last meeting of the Writhing Society, one writher, Angelo Pastormerlo, created a written storyboard, drawn from Howard Hawks’ movie The Big Sleep. The story that Casey Soloff derived from it was quite interestingly different, though it shared an atmosphere with the original, perhaps because Angelo had left some dead bodies and suicide notes in the description.
Here is what Jacqueline Cantwell produced by way of description, followed by my narratization of it. Both were written without revision in a space of two hours.
The wave’s edges cast shadows. The lines, shadows of dense water, move across the sandy shore, inches below the water. The shadows are edges, borders in the littoral zone. The shadowlines are shaped in ripples and rhomboids. Glare spots fall on the bottom — question — are the lines reflections from the water’s surface or do the lines also repeat in the actual water? — does the water between the surface and bottom contain changes in density equal to waves on the surface? How much does the edge influence the whole? How is the edge between water and air measured?
Edges and an edge. Always looking from edge — living on the edge, falling off the edge, needing an edge —
The undertow of the world pulling me toward an edge — Living on the edge without a net. Edges and borders require sharp observation. Reports of rain and storms so fierce that the sea’s surface merges into the rain. Swamped — where you can’t see the edge of the sky — A border without a horizon. Not my place — must always see the way out.
The horizon is an edge — the border between sky and water. Land doesn’t count unless it is empty. Space needs to be empty and clear.
The edge is it repeated against the sky just as waves repeat on a shore. The wind moves over the water’s surface and interacts on the edge — How far down does wind stir water — How deep is a surface — The underside of water
The surface is an edge — boundary — like reflections —
The surface — edge — boundary — reflection — spaces of intersection, mingling, ambiguity. The space between the horizon and truck a type of trick — balancing on the edge — because anything big enough to be interesting will overpower the onlooker. Nothing says you get to live. No contract for your life — quite the opposite. Winnding by how gracefully you fail when you get too far out.
Select the most productive edges — edges with swirls and loops and drapery and cures — edges that lead into a freedom — Avoid edges that limit and harm, that turn into cruelty.
Seeing this as a meditation on edges, I followed the directions in the last section.
Jacob and Anna walked along the beach. Each to each was still a silhouette, since they had just met. When he said they were in the zone between the high-tide mark and the low-tide mark, where some species of shellfish and crabs live out their entire lives, she saw beyond the remark to a life of science, unspeakably dull to her, and asked, “Are you studying marine life?” A flatness in her voice marked a limit he thought to turn aside from but then boldly attacked. “I am a crab man,” he said, and his words, the tone of them, the little flash of humor, sank into her soul, but whether she enjoyed them or loathed them was not clear, and his silhouette began to fill, but with two different aspects, one appetizing, one merely there, a generic man. “I cook them,” she replied, as a test, having rejected the much stronger test of telling him how she had caught a bad case of crabs once from a student. That she had suppressed that response led Anna to the realization that too bold a challenge always contains a sexual dimension, and she was wondering how he would have reacted. He noticed she was playing with a button on her shirt as she frowned, and, uncertain what this combination of gestures might mean, did not answer her, did not change his expression, but picked up a stick and walked to a tidal pool where he thought a crab might lurk, left behind by the receding ocean. She watched him wave the stick and wondered if he thought he was casting a spell or what the hell he was doing, when a claw sprang from the pool and gripped the stick. Jacob raised the crab into the air, turned, and moved toward Anna, across whose face amazement moved from the forehead down, chasing irony from the eyes, the nostrils, the mouth and the set of the jaw — it was as if he could see the terminator advance.
