2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

18
P RELUDE
of the deep interpenetration between games, the agon and the ecstasy is given by Georges
Perec with regard to a game whose purely intellectual dimension would seem to make it
alien to any rapture: the jigsaw puzzle.
[Bartlebooth,] having gone through every stage of controlled anxiety and
exasperation, reached a kind of ecstasy, a stasis, a sort of utterly oriental stupor,
akin, perhaps, to the state archers strive to reach: profound oblivion of
the body and the target, a mental void, a completely blank, receptive, and
flexible mind, an attentiveness that remained total, but which was disengaged
from the vicissitudes of being, from the contingent details of the puzzle
and its maker’s snares. In moments like that Bartlebooth could see
without looking how the delicate outlines of the jigsawed wood slotted very
precisely into each other, and taking to pieces he had ignored until then or
which perhaps he had sworn could not possibly join, he was able to fit them
together in one go.
This intimation of grace would sometimes last for several minutes, which
made Bartlebooth feel as if he had second sight: he could perceive everything,
understand everything, he could have seen grass grow, lightning
strike a tree, erosion grind down a mountain like a pyramid very gradually
worn away by the very gentle brushing of a bird’s wing: he would juxtapose
the pieces at full speed, without error, espying, beneath all the details and
subterfuges intended to obscure them, this minute claw or that imperceptible
red thread or a black-edged notch, which all ought to have indicated the
solution from the start, had he but had eyes to see [...] These privileged instants
were as rare as they were intoxicating, as fleeting as they were seemingly
effective. Bartlebooth would soon revert to being a sandbag, a lifeless
lump chained to his worktable, a blind-eyed subnormal, unable to see, waiting
hours without knowing what he was waiting for. 11
The gloire experienced by Bartlebooth is the symptom of the attained identity with the
world that the game makes possible once the threshold that separates it from reality has
been crossed. It follows that what is essential to the game is its combinatorial dimension
10. Here, I am partially following the phenomenology of play proposed by Roger Caillois in his classic
work, Les jeux et les hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). Caillois underlines, without actually explaining
it, that vertigo (or ilynx, in his terms) is one of the four basic components of every ludic activity.
11. Georges Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi (Paris: Hachette, 1978); Engl. tr. Life A user’s manual (Boston:
Godine, 1987) 338.