Free Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec Page A

Sixteenth Edge of This Cube seems to have been produced by one of those service companies to which French television so often has recourse.
    In fact Rorschach’s television career was conducted exclusively in office-work. Under the vague title of “Project Controller to the Managing Director” or “Test and Research Resources Reorganisation Officer”, his sole function consisted of daily attendance at pre-meetings, joint meetings, study workshops, management boards, interdisciplinary discussion meetings, general meetings, plenary meetings, reading-panel meetings, and other working parties which, at this level of the hierarchy, make up the main business of life in the French broadcasting organisation, alongside phone calls, conversations in the corridor, business lunches, rush screenings, and trips abroad. There’s no reason not to think he might have put forth the idea of an Anglo-French opera at one of these sessions, or of a history serial based on Suetonius, but it’s more likely he spent his time drawing up or extrapolating from audience surveys, trimming budgets, drafting reports on the utilisation rates of editing studios, dictating memos, and going from meeting room to conference suite, taking care to be at all times indispensable in at least two places at once so that scarcely had he sat down than he would be called to the phone, and have to leave, unavoidably.
    Such multifarious activities satisfied Rorschach’s vanity, his taste for power, his talent for plotting and haggling, but they gave no nourishment to his nostalgic desire to be “creative”: in fifteen years, he managed nonetheless to put his name to two productions, both educational serials for export: the first, Doudoune et Mambo , was on French-language teaching for black Africa; the second – Anamous et Pamplenas – used exactly the same scenario, but it aimed “to introduce the pupils of overseas colleges run by the Alliance Française to the beauty and harmony of Greek civilisation”.
    In the early seventies, Rorschach got wind of Bartlebooth’s enterprise. At the time, though Bartlebooth had been back for fifteen years, no one really knew the whole story. Those who could have known something about it said little or nothing; others were aware that Madame Hourcade, for instance, had supplied him with boxes, or that he’d had a funny sort of machine set up in Morellet’s room, or, to take another example, that he’d travelled right around the world for twenty years with his servant and that over the twenty years Winckler had received about two parcels a month from all over the world. But no one really knew how these pieces fitted together, and, what’s more, nobody really tried to find out. And Bartlebooth, though he wasn’t unaware that the little secrets which cloaked his existence were the subject of contradictory and often incoherent theories around the building, didn’t ever dream that anyone could come one day and upset his plans.
    But Rorschach got keen, and what he heard in fragments about those twenty years of circumnavigation, about the paintings cut in pieces, reassembled, and reseparated, etc., as well as all Winckler’s and Morellet’s stories, gave him the idea of a huge programme in which nothing less than the whole story would be re-enacted.
    Bartlebooth said no, obviously. He let Rorschach in for a quarter of an hour and had him shown out. Rorschach persisted, interrogating Smautf and the other servants, grilling Morellet who buried him in increasingly incomprehensible heaps of mumbo jumbo, harassing Winckler who stayed obstinately silent, going out as far as Montargis to talk (pointlessly, for him) to Madame Hourcade, and falling back on Madame Nochère, who didn’t know much but didn’t mind elaborating.
    Since there was no law forbidding him to tell a story of a man who did watercolours and jigsaw puzzles, Rorschach decided to go over Bartlebooth’s head, and submitted to Programme Control a proposal for