Topic in Focus: The Occult in Music- Article: Castillo Trigueros "From Perec to the Occult in Music"

From Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi to the Occult in Music, its possibilities and implications

Francisco Castillo Trigueros

Constructed with 99 chapters, Georges Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, (Life: A User’s Manual) encompasses a series of stories which happen in different times and places, though they all stem from the rooms in a building in Paris.

The main story is that of Bartlebooth, a man who devices an intricate plan to devote his life to an ideal of perfection.


“A concrete programme was designed, which can be stated succinctly as follows.

For ten years, from 1925 to 1935, Bartlebooth would acquire the art of painting watercolours.

For twenty years, from 1935 to 1955, he would travel the world, painting, at a rate of one watercolour each fortnight, five hundred seascapes of identical format (royal, 65 cm x 50 cm) depicting seaports. When each view was done, he would dispatch it to a specialist craftsman (Gaspard Winckler), who would glue it to a thin wooden backing board and cut it into a jigsaw puzzle of seven hundred and fifty pieces.

For twenty years, from 1955 to 1975, Bartlebooth, on his return to France, would reassemble the jigsaw puzzles in order, at a rate, once again, of one puzzle a fortnight. As each puzzle was finished, the seascape would be “retexturised” so that it could be removed from its backing, returned to the place where it had been painted – twenty years before – and dipped in a detergent solution whence would emerge a clean and unmarked sheet of Whatman paper.


Thus no trace would remain of an operation which would have been, throughout a period of fifty years, the sole motivation and unique activity of its author.” (Perec 118-119)


Perec gives three guiding principles to the plan, which represent Bartlebooth’s “idea of perfection”: moral, logical and aesthetic. The most interesting for our subject is the last one:


“The plan would be useless, since gratuitousness was the sole guarantor of its rigour, and would destroy itself as it proceeded; its perfection would be circular: a series of events which when concatenated nullify each other: starting from nothing, passing through precise operations on finished objects, Bartlebooth would end up with nothing.”


Bartlebooth’s plan is then, a project to which he will devote his entire life and which will leave no trace.



The Occult in Music

So, what does this have to do with the occult in music? It is clear that the main intention of Bartlebooth’s plan is not that of being occult, although it is an important requirement in it. Still, the plan has several implications that have led to subsequent questions on the role of the occult in music, which are addressed in this article.

1. Can the occult have a function in music?

2. Can the occult become an elemental aesthetic concern?

3. Considering the possibility of a completely occult piece of music, what is the role of an audience during the creation of a musical work?

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