Time as allegory
Perec constructs the novel in two dimensions of time: one at the cosmic level of time (in which the novel is being written) and at the level of everyday time as experience by the characters. This form of everyday time is capable of stopping depending on how the characters perceive it. This everyday time also matches the temporality of the reader as s/he reads the novel so that “a little time, in its pure state” can be invoked through the form (and not the content) of the novel.
The waking dream as allegory
The novel presents the consciousness of a daydream as cinematographic imagery is created through the succession of words that produce the illusion of movement like in the cinema. Within this waking dream the characters’ dreams serve the function of dreams within dreams. In this way Perec seems to be invoking the Indian texts, the Upanishads in the way they speak of a manifest reality represented in the novel and the ultimate reality that lies beyond the Self and after self-realization. In other words, it makes the act of writing a novel a philosophical practice.
The middle class (petit bourgeois) condition as allegory for cine-roman
Perec uses lower middle-class characters as they wish to enjoy life, and then projects their anxieties onto objects so that he can write a cinematographic novel. These ‘choises’ or objects create a pure sense of consciousness which is unadulterated by representation and in some ways represents a purified image which the novel hopes to invoke. The characters are middle-class because the middle-class is a stereotype for the condition in France, whilst the writing the novel has an altogether different object i.e. to invoke different states of consciousness.
Politics as motif
In Things: A Story of the Sixties, Perec represents his own suspicion of both the Fascists and Gaullists and sympathies for the Communist cause. Perec uses the Fascists and Gaullists not as signifiers but as referents to emphasize a post-modern condition where an object can only be referred to without describing its relevance in the logic of the cine-roman. Simultaneously the writing of the novel, its description produce images whilst simultaneously replacing them with the power of language which in itself destroys the object.
Writing a novel as allegory for film criticism
Perec was part of the Oulipo movement which was in stark contrast to the nouveau roman movement lead by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Whereas the noveau-roman emphasized an objective novel emphasizing simultaneity and reality influenced by Einstein's Theory of Relativity, the Oulipo group worked much more with a mathematical approach that emphasized time as an interior in waking,dreaming and sleeping states. Here, Perec is critical of Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad (1962). (“…but they would say-quite rightly- that Marienbad was “all the same just a load of crap!”) Perec in this way is critical of the psychoanalytical procedure of reducing novel to ego, superego and id: an approach that Resnais and Robbe-Grillet take up in the 1962 film. Instead he is closer to Bergson’s approach to time where the world comprises of moving images that are between things and representations.
