La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

No. 21: September 1970

S/Z

I go back to that bookstore where the books, most of them used, are stacked, or rather heaped, in a corner.

I’m looking for a particular book, but the bookseller says she doesn’t have it. Z. and I browse a few other titles.

I find a book; I recognize the name of the author, but nothing more; it’s a huge collection, or dictionary, of S/Z variations in the works of Balzac.

Each page has four columns:

The “attested term” and “use reference” columns give explanations, the “S” and “Z” columns indicate all the transformed words. Thus:

(Maissé is the name of a character, and Maizsé, which at first I do not understand, is — of course! how could I forget? — the name of a village in Poland.)

This goes on for pages and pages. Each term, or rather each pair, is so evident that it seems odd that it didn’t occur to anybody earlier, shocking that we had to wait for Roland Barthes to notice it.

Leafing backward through the book, Z. shows me a series of epigraphs (in red?) at the beginning of a chapter. The first says something like “Perec gives up his letters”; it’s an excerpt from an article about A Void, but I can’t find the name of the author or the name of the newspaper; I am quite pleased with it, as if this quotation were a sign of recognition (of being taken seriously).

The author of the book is a woman and I remember having read one of her novels.