• 1 Duyckaerts Éric, Épigone, 12'13'', Mac/Val Production, 2011.
• 2 For the most talented, this goes as far as feigning the hyperobviousness of the idleness of the pa (...)
• 3 The most exhausting moralities are, of course, those ranking activity above inactivity, even when (...)
• 4 For a definition of external conditioning, see Sartre Jean-Paul, Critique of Dialectal Reason, tra (...)

1“Very, very inappropriate”1: this is how Éric Duyckaerts could have qualified the behaviour of those who remain absolutely inert at the opera. And in fact, there exists an extensive scientific literature catching spectators in the act of feigning idle immersion in the hyperobviousness of their passivity.2 As mazy as they promise to be, the morals of listening always lead to the same discovery: any spectator, even the most explicitly passive, is actually very, very active!3 The stimuli helping to heuristically enjoy the resulting expenditure are in many ways externally conditioned.4 Only three of them will be mentioned here, from the most internalised to the less latent:

• 5 Nancy Jean-Luc, Listening, translated by Charlotte Mandell, New York, Fordham University Press, 20 (...)

2- the self-excited audience, whose excitement is hardly perceptible, but so conceptually dense and phenomenologically vast that it requires a typographic display of innumerable inverted comas, brackets and italics, along with the apposition of embedded rhetorical precautions: “To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the lookout for a relation to self: not, it should be emphasized, a relationship to “me” (the supposedly given subject), or to the “self” of the other (the speaker, the musician, also supposedly given, with his subjectivity), but to the relationship in self, so to speak, as it forms a “self” or a “to itself” in general, and if something like that ever does reach the end of its formation.”5

• 6 Kaltenecker Martin, L’Oreille divisée. Les discours sur l’écoute musicale aux xviii^e et xix^e siècl (...)

3- the onto-excited audience, an objectified mirroring of the self-excited audience, sees its mental activity maintained — out of principle, or on supposition — in the tension that builds up between the audience and the work, as when concert programmer Johann Nikolaus Forkel believed figures and tropes pertained to “the faculties of the listener”.6

• 7 Szendy Peter, Listen, A History of our Ears, translated by Charlotte Mandell, New York, Fordham Un (...)
• 8 Szendy Peter, All Ears, The Aesthetics of Espionage, translated by Roland Végso, New York, Fordham (...)

4- the socio-excited audience: Thadée Tyszkiewicz’s legal action (1853) against Weber’s “Freyschutz [sic]” – which he described as “scraps sewn together without the slightest concern for stage design, without the least musical feeling” – shows that a spectator could feel so offended by a disrespectful work as to sue the Imperial Music Academy, held responsible for the “ridiculous potpourri”;7 and thanks to Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera, we know it is when discord prevails, as on “a battlefield”,8 that the audience is most active.

• 9 We must admit this excitement goes with a blind spot: the socio-typology of the under-excited audi (...)
• 10 See Bailly Jean-Christophe and his idea of the opera as a “rite of class narcissism” in “Metaclass (...)
• 11 See Feneyrou Laurent, “Réceptions de la Cinquième Symphonie”, a conference given on November 10^th, (...)

5How socio-exciting it is to produce a typology of socio-excitologists!9 From the hyperirritable mode10 to artistic stance,11 quixotic legal precedents and fanciful fictions, cases of socio-excitation are incomparably more exciting than any speculation about the listener silently getting excited. So, to prolong the excitement in our way, let us suggest a sub-typology of the socio-excited audience:

• 12 Jardin Étienne, “Les siffleurs de concerto”, a conference given in the Auditorium Rainier III de M (...)

6- inter-individual socio-excitations are the ones that most strongly tend to be explicitly expressed and reified through interaction (applause, cheering, hooting,12 shouting, flower flinging, fruit throwing, lighter waving or, in a second phase, reviews, flogging, canonising, etc.);

• 13 Lahire Bernard, La Culture des individus. Dissonances culturelles et distinction de soi, Paris, La (...)

7- intraindividual socio-excitations are inner excitations nevertheless calibrated by repercussions of mirror interactions. They show an alterity in the for-itself of the in-itself (which is porous to the for-yourselves of the between-ourselves): music dismissed for ideological reasons (with various degrees of openness to the musical feeling itself), “shameful” or “guilty” musical pleasures (as when the music is too elementary for the listener to admit they like it), accidentally experienced musical emotions (“Ooh! That illegitimate music in the paint department, it was so moving, I wasn’t expecting it, I’m really experiencing cultural dissonances13 that I cannot use to distinguish myself, especially since everyone experiences such dissonances, frequently or occasionally”);

• 14 Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, edited by Abner Kneeland (Boston: J. Q. Adams, 1836), “Liberty (...)
• 15 Many thanks to Laura Naudeix, Manuel Comejo and Bertrand Porot for having drawn our attention to t (...)

10The tradition of fruit throwing (the genealogy of which includes a whole variety of fruit, such as cucumbers, apples, oranges and tomatoes) constitutes at once a stigma, a trophy and a consecration of the musical flop in its theatrical dimension. In 1615, in his prologue to Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, Cervantès wrote: “All these plays were staged without a single cucumber offering or any other ordinary fruit throwing, and lived a life without shouts, hoots or tumult”. In 1661, in Les Oeuvres de poésie de M. Pierre Perrin, Pierre Perrin de Chassagne wrote: “But he is not of this world the one who does not know we shouted “cuckoos!”, and that the sovereign’s guards had great difficulty protecting them delle Sischiate e delle Merangole in this libertine country.” Two years later, in Portrait du peintre, ou la Contre-Critique de l’École des femmes (1663), Molière wrote: “Will Normandy have apples enough / to throw at the poor men they laugh off?” In 1682, Jean Racine’s epigram Sur l’Aspar de M. de Fontenelle included the lines: “Boyer taught the audience how to yawn / As for Pradon, if I remember well, / He was offered many an apple.” A handwritten letter from the 1740s gives evidence of an uproar with orange throwing at the Opéra-Comique. In 1764, Voltaire put forward a new idea: fruit throwing is not the alternative to consensus, but the retort to a dishonest shaping of opinion, or the sign that a dissensus is experienced as hurtful. In “Liberty of opinion”, an entry in his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire has Boldmind say: “When we assist at a spectacle, every one freely tells his opinion of it, and the public peace is not thereby disturbed; but if some insolent protector of a poet would force all people of taste to proclaim that to be good which appears to them bad, blows would follow, and the two parties would throw apples of discord at one another’s heads, as once happened at London.”14 In 1840, it was stated in Pictures of the French that “If the sylph of the opera, the divine Taglioni, instead of fluttering in the air, were to hobble and stumble over the stage, the public would have the impudence to pelt her with orange-peel.” And this is from an 1880 issue of Le Triboulet: “All galleries patient enough to take aim will throw their apples at the first-floor boxes.”15

• 16 Not to mention the archaeology that Pierre Senges made up to honour the inside/outside tension pro (...)
• 17 Perec Georges, Cantatrix sopranica L.: Scientific Papers, translated by Antony Melville, Ian Monk (...)

11In short, if the literary sources are many,16 scientific research on the topic is highly restricted and tomatocentric. And here is the ironic twist: tomato-bashing studies are still based on a spoof paper by Georges Perec, which starts with a review of fictional scientific papers about “tomato as well as cabbages, apples, cream tarts, shoes, buts and anvil throwing (Harvar & Mercy, 1973)”.17

• 21 One should note that Perec does not consider the possibility that the soprano’s smile may be a for (...)
• 22 Regarding the becoming-gaseous of reactivity, see Corteel Delphine, Houdart Sophie, Guitard Émilie (...)
• 23 Let us remark, however, that Noah’s botanical blindness is not complete: some sources present Noah (...)

15Be it deliberate or not, in making a few methodological adjustments that highlight experimental variability at the very moment when her demonstration hopes to wipe it off, Marthe Bonvallet composed a literary piece of unequalled sophistication. The most striking difference between Bonvallet and Perec is that the researcher (MB) tortures any animal she can push around (Dogs, Cats, Rats, Frogs and perhaps even Wolves, Lions, Worms, Alligators…), whereas the research engineer (GP) does not torment any non-human animal; he is even concerned with the suffering of Sopranoes, ironically specifying that “the fact that the animals were not suffering from pain was shown by their constant smiling throughout the experiments.”21 How come, then, that he neglects the agonizing pain of the tomatoes crashing on the singer? Like any other antispecist, Perec is first and foremost anthropocentric in his approach since he does not show any concern for vegetal pain, and therefore widens all the more yellingly22 a gap between two kinds of living creatures. Playing with anthropomorphism, he admits an equivalence of pain in sopranoes and animals. But the anthropocentrism of his relative transpecism establishes a hierarchy in the pains to be taken into account (or not). As it has often been remarked, this botanical blind spot already guided Noah in his choice to save all living things by embarking nearly exclusively animals,23 and it is so pervasive as to loom again in the flash game “Lancer de tomates !”, which invites players to “bomb the fat ballerina with tomatoes”, instrumentalising the fruit to foreground the ballerina’s pain desired by the player, surely a lightweight fat-shamer.

• 25 However, all this being about playing with food, some people decided to make the most of this oppo (...)

16For want of a soundtrack, the game adds musical deafness to botanical blindness, thus slighting the aesthetic disappointment supposed to justify the attack. All in all, what the game designer wants, just like the player – and like Perec – is not so much to stage a real critical flogging as to feel the good old joy of playing the coconut shy.25

• 26 Appel Heidi and R.B. Cocroft, “Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewin (...)
• 27 See Christoffel David, La musique vous veut du bien, Paris, PUF, 2018, p. 33.

17When using a tomato as a projectile, you don’t care about its opinion: you assume the fruit was deaf to the lyrical performance. Yet, since the days when Perec wrote his paper, it has been discovered that plants react to strictly acoustic stimuli. Appel and Cocroft have notably exposed salads to the sound of a threatening caterpillar and shown the very sound of the predator was enough to trigger the defensive chemical reaction in the salad.26 Alas, alluding to the musical sensibility of plants remains subject to persistent irony, since the main reference on the topic is a strip by Franquin, in which Gaston Lagaffe can be seen “wishing to ensure his ivy’s general well-being by playing a little tune on his Gaffophone, and is very sad to see the dear plant fly away through the window.”27 Gaston’s ivy is not dissimilar to the poetry lover Nani Ballestrini portrays in his poem “La poésie fait beaucoup de bien” (“Poetry Makes you Feel Real Good”):

• 29 In no way do we intend to become advocates of tomato throwing, and it is precisely because we do n (...)
• 30 The specificity of playfulness may lie in the way it pushes its subject into the background and fo (...)

19Perec’s spoof presents itself as a weapon against carnivalesque research in so far as, under the pretext of dealing with the effect of a musical washout, the author stages the conditions necessary to an academic flunk. However, in strictly keeping tomato-bashing studies within a carnivalesque register, at the cost of scientific pluralism,29 the parodic and institutional game tends to lose value. This fallout is enhanced by a reception systematically focusing on Perec’s playful irony30 in Cantatrix sopranica L. Here is one of many examples:

• 32 Private correspondence with Liliane Giraudon. Email sent to the author, August 24^th 2020.

22If Cantatrix sopranica L. entered poetry territory, it was thanks to Jean-Jacques Viton, who happened to be working as a documentalist in neurophysiology. Liliane Giraudon (co-director of the poetry journal Banana Split) specifies that “after his first life as a ‘sailor’ in the Royal, [Jean-Jacques Viton] volunteered to serve as guinea pig in CNRS experiments on the effects of mescaline on sleep. He turned this experience into a text that was published both in Manteïa and in a scientific journal.”32 The two worlds were bridged not by a happening, but by Viton’s constant stance. Succumbing under the charm of Perec’s work, Viton tried to have it publish in Manteïa, but it was rejected by the rest of the editorial board, perhaps as a kind of mise en abyme of the flop. So Viton included it in his brand new journal, Banana Split, with the complicity of Perec.

• 34 Ibidem. Italics added.

24And in some kind of way, Banana Split clandestinely emerged from this institution, the keys of which were in Liliane Giraudon’s possession: “We squatted the reprography department for an entire weekend (I had the keys), in the good proletarian tradition of the ‘perruque’, working on the 500 copies (layout, printing and pasting…).”34

• 35 If the tomato had been given all due attention in contemporary poetry, surely Nathalie Quintane’s (...)
• 36 Private correspondence with Liliane Giraudon, ibid.

25This confirms the adventure was first and foremost a CNRS story, a way for its most eminent employees to make the copy machines more profitable, working overtime to produce a strictly poetic output. Hence, maybe, their distancing from musicology. While the journal, planning to publish Perec’s paper, was supposed to be entitled Tomate farcie or Le “mot Tomate”,35 Jean-Jacques Viton and Liliane Giraudon eventually went for Banana Split: “We chose this rather provocative title: a disgusting dessert with sexual connotations, Marseille’s answer to a centralised poetry that we found too postcolonial…”36 At the very moment when Lio was achieving her first success with Banana Split (the song became a number-one hit less than two months after the first issue of the homonymous journal), the editorial board may have picked the title of a current hit in order to ward off the flop Tomates farcies was promising, thus setting up a meaningful turnaround to incorporate the parody of an academic flop studying a musical flop. But the great round of fruit does not stop here: originally, Lio’s song was the cover of a hit by The Ikettes, “Peaches’n’Cream”, and Jacques Duvall, the songwriter, first imagined a more literal version (entitled “Pêche Melba”) for the Belgian singer.

• 37 Ballard Michel, Versus : la version réfléchie anglais-français, Paris, Éditions Ophrys, 2003, p. 2 (...)
• 38 Chou, O. & Lai, A.: “Further comments on inhibitory responses to tomato splitting in Soloists,” Z. (...)

26The globalisation of food industry was therefore already promising a savoury interchangeability of fruits or/and projectiles. It even forced a pre-postcolonial journal to adopt the Anglicism “banana split”, whereas Le Robert recommends37 the appellation “banane Melba” (after the name of the Australian soprano Nellie Melba, for whom the famous dessert was invented in London, in 1892). It is therefore no use quibbling over fruit differentiation, while everything is in the split. This is emphasised in Perec’s tenth bibliographical reference:38 the splitting of the banana can be seen as resulting from a jerky move possibly reminiscent of Perec’s tomato throwing or, more subtly, the splitting of socio-excitations. But are all edible projectiles really interchangeable? Do they all punish the same kinds of lemons? Do they all reflect the same idea of failure, the same more or less serious, production-driven reclaiming of failure?

• 40 Ibid., p. 15.

28While tomatoes are much like choux (puffs that “come in the cute shape of pastries such as the éclair, with the cream inside, and share the virtues of the aumônière, following an age-old tradition of stuffing”),40 the cream of the pie is uncovered, and there is no need to suppose it stuffed, as if looking for a hidden meaning in the pie-attack.

• 41 Meanwhile, other poets like Serge Pey and Julien Blaine sometimes mash tomatoes (or other items) w (...)
• 42 Private correspondence with Alain Frontier. Email sent to the author, September 7^th, 2020.
• 43 Ibidem.
• 44 “the very base pleasure to see some smart bigwig covered in cream from the tip of his tie to that (...)

29Poets who entitle their journals with the name of a dessert claim a certain materialism, inasmuch as they carry out a literal assessment of their dessert.41 When questioned forty years later, they do recall the gustatory qualities of their dessert-as-projectile. However, while Liliane Giraudon says they opted for Banana Split because of the nauseous feeling aroused by this “disgusting dessert”, Alain Frontier finds substance in pleasure: “Besides, cream pies are damn good!”42 These two modalities of assessment outline an epistemological split in the relation to knowledge, a theoretical amplification of the physics of projectiles: the more concealed soft matters are, the more convoluted the bibliography is. Indeed, if cream-pie epistemology is of the blunt kind (“Splash!… So Tartalacrème is not a concept. It’s a burst of laughter.”)43, the cream topping being openly pictured as a frontal laughter, “a fundamental laughter freed from Freud and Bergson,”44 it is quite the opposite with the use of tomatoes: this practice playfully relies on their convolutions and mazy meanders, the hotchpotch of their inner juices, which keep on blithely hollowing out the concavity of the exegetic process. The topos of the Perecquian obliqueness bends hermeneutics into a curve that, by mimicking the hollow, inflates a vacuum.

• 45 The alphabet is pure knowledge, rationality. For a view on the relations between the becoming-pure (...)
• 46 “Chou, O. & Lai, A. Tomatic inhibition in the decerebrate baritone. Proc. koning. Akad. Wiss., Ams (...)

30Surely, the scientific onomastics that Perec brought in can be explained by the cordial atmosphere that was de rigueur in the context of Marthe Bonvallet’s retirement. However, in addition to its cheering effect, Perec’s choice of names forms a chain of signifiers on which the reader is expected to elaborate. Especially since this onomastic game (with its off-beat kind of humour that is parodical in its intention, but self-referential in its realisation) is the backbone of the text. Throughout his bibliography, Perec plays on the convention that consists in indicating only the initial letter of each first name, thus making puns proliferate without his theoretical hypotheses being that much multiplied in the process. In this game of intratextual referencing, the reader following the logic of the fictive sources is soon caught in the nets of infinite intertwining. We therefore have to roam the maze long enough to uncover its logic, without ending up doing nothing but this. For instance, references to Chou & Lai and Lai & Chou are respectively scientific publications on the one hand, and recipes on the other. When citing the recipe books, Perec reverses the alphabetic order in which he mentions the authors’ names45 when referring to scientific publications. At the same time, the reversal restores the alphabetical order of the initials (Lai, A & Chou, O.).46

• 47 The term is borrowed from the 31^st of Perec’s “35 Variations on a theme by Marcel Proust,” publish (...)
• 48 In the bibliography, out of the 8 works published in French, 7 are attributed to authors whose nam (...)

31“O. Chou & A. Lai” sounds like au chou et à l’ail (“with cabbage and garlic”) and evokes, through a labyrinthine series of isophonic47 variations, the name of the Chinese Prime Minister in the Mao era, Zhou Enlai, pronounced shoe n’ lie; but beyond wordplay, Perec’s use of initials leaves us with two plausible hypotheses: the author may be referring to a single duo, the nature of whose activity is indicated by the order of the initials in their signature (indeed, with equal investment on the part of Chou and Lai,48 Chou and al. cannot have the same research topics as Lai and al.), or he may be implicitly suggesting a concordance of initials in the names of several researchers. Considering these two hypotheses, it seems to us that the first is more probable (but also more abstract), while the second leads to an interesting (but nondemonstrable) combinatorial analysis.

• 49 Apparently, pluralism only applies to human reactions (see “Mace, I. & Doyne, J. Sur les différent (...)

32If {Chou, O. & Lai, A.} = {Lai, A. & Chou, O.}, then the first hypothesis is conceivable. But at least two factors of asymmetry would still have to be considered: why are Chou & Lai more productive than Lai & Chou (nine references against two)? Why did Chou & Lai stop writing (in 1930) when Lai & Chou had their first recipes published (in 1931)? (Could it be simply because, between 1930 and 1931, Lai was fed up with being in second position?) What’s more and even worse, the only difference between volume 1 and volume 2 of Lai & Chou’s cookbook is the mention of “other tomatoes.” As if their concern for pluralism had been a point of no return. And since it is the only moment when Perec speaks of tomatoes “other” than standard ones,49 we have no choice but to let the exegetic drive go round and round in a complete vacuum, laying out all the possibilities of pluralism opened up by Perec’s letter game.

• 50 Concerning the hypothesis that Olivier, Octavine, Odilon and Oreste could be one and the same pers (...)

34However, if {Chou, O. & Lai, A.} ≠ {Lai, A. & Chou, O.}, other leads can be followed, with the proliferation of first names implied in the initials. Thus, Octavine Chou may have worked with Antoine Lai and Anatole Lai. Unless Antoine Lai worked with Octavine Chou and Oreste Chou Except if Octavine Chou was working with Antoine Lai while Oreste Chou was working with Anatole Lai. Or else, perhaps Octavine Chou worked with Antoine Lai and Anatole Lai, and Antoine Lai with Octavie Chou and Oreste Chou… And even if the following probability is low, it is not null: there might have been as many first names50 (or homonyms) as there were cited works. Is it that relevant to take the language of publication into account? Indeed, if Chou & Lai mainly wrote in English, they also published works in French and, once, in Italian.

• 51 “Giscard d’Estaing, V. Discours aux transporteurs routiers de Rungis. C. r. Soc. fr. Tomatol. 422, (...)
• 52 Two references : “Jeanpace, L. & Desmeyeurs, P. Recherches histologiques sur les noyaux de Pesch (...)
• 53 Two references : “Lai, A. & Chou, O. Dix-sept recettes faciles au chou et à l’ail. I. Avec des tom (...)
• 54 “Alka-Seltzer, L. Untersuchungen. Uber die tomatostaltische Reflexe beim Walküre. Bayreuth Monats (...)
• 55 “Pesch, U. Experimentelle Beiträge über anterior reticularis Kerne beim Minnesänger. Von Bulow’s (...)
• 56 “Von Aitick, A. Ueber geminal-niebelungenischen Schmerz. Ztschr. exp. pathol. Tomatol.” It should (...)
• 57 “Chou, O. & Lai, A. Musicali effetti del tomatino jettatura durante il reprezentazione dell' opere (...)
• 58 “Pericoloso, O. & Sporgersi, I. Sull’effetti tomestetiche e corticali della stimolazione di legumi (...)
• 59 “Pompeiano, O., Vesuviana, A., Strombolino, H. & Lipari, G. Volcaniche effetti della formazione re (...)

35From a broader perspective, Perec’s enriching of a multilingual bibliography parodies the idea that the globalisation of references goes with a substantiation of scientific works, even if it means limiting each language to a given theme. His 68 references count 53 works in English, 8 in French, 4 in German and 3 in Italian. While the works published in French are almost systematically about food and cooking (allusions to Rungis,51 nucleus of Pesch,52 recipes53), the ones in German can all be related to Wagner’s music (allusions to the town of Bayreuth,54 the year when the festival was inaugurated55 and Niebelungen56) and the ones in Italian allude to Ausonian vocality (Verdi,57 Diva,58 funiculi funicula and bel canto59).

• 60 “Hun, O. & Deu, I. Tonic, diatonic, & catatonic stage-distress syndromes. Basel, Karger, 1960.” In (...)

36The scientific ideal of research teamwork is sometimes replaced by that of a nice alphanumerical series of initials. On the major condition that the letter O be pronounced like the number 0 (/zeʀo/ in French) and the letter I, like 1 (/œ̃/), the sequence 1,0,2,1 is half homophonic and half homographic with the names of the authors cited: “Hun, O. & Deu, I.”, pronounced /œ̃zeʀodøœ̃/ (or, if translated, the reference could be “Wan, O. & To, I.”). One can therefore suppose the only reason why there is no third contributor is that there is no letter resembling a 2. Hence the sudden shift, in “Tonic, diatonic, & catatonic stage-distress syndromes”60, from a diatonic system to the catatonic distress of the duo, who surely would have liked to be 12 or 26 or ∞ on stage (respectively in a chromatic, alphabetic or numeral system).

• 61 See our typology of listening modes in the introduction to “Tomato bashing,” Transposition n° 10, (...)
• 62 Roubaud Jacques, Poétique. Remarques. Poésie, mémoire, nombre, temps, rythme, contrainte, forme, e (...)

37Whether you consider the combining of Chou & Lai’s initials or the alphanumeric games based on 0,1,2,1, any attempt to decipher the meaning of the puns more or less subtly encrypted in Perec’s bibliography leads you to go round and round in a circle going from Perec to Perec. But this circularity may itself be part of the scientific parody, implicitly pointing to researchers’ tendency to cite their own works.61 This is even a self-portrait of the Oulipian as “a rat constructing the labyrinth from which it plans to escape”,62 as Jacques Roubaud said, implicitly quoting Georges Perec who was explicitly quoting Raymond Queneau. The reading contract is defined by the explicit presence of the implied. The reader’s task would therefore consist in finding the user’s manual. But the rat always wriggles out of the labyrinth, while the reader ends up absorbed and lost in the maze of their readings. Opting for a scientific register works as a convenient excuse.

• 64 As when Perec refers to Perec in a Perecquian way.

39In Cantatrix sopranica L., Perec neglects the importance of field work. For instance, he never asks the sopranos if they are happy to get shot down with tomatoes. He rejects the hypothesis of a masochistic tendency. The fact that singers be constantly smiling seems to suggest they enjoy being tomatoed down and that the pleasure taken in the suffering is derived from its elective dimension: being the only singer to be targeted can be narcissising for the cantatrix. However, with masochism as with narcissism, one can always identify primary and secondary forms. Having distinguished a primary narcissism (Perec referring to Perec) from a secondary one (disappointed in his hope to see his external desire satisfied, or having done his best to satisfy it himself — knowing there would be no better option, for he has been long aware that he is self-ignorant and that no one can offer him the climax he can reach on his own — the subject returns to himself),64 Freud symmetrically distinguishes primary masochism (which can be satisfied by yourself in your own little maze) from secondary masochism (which requires the intervention of a persecuting outsider, such as a slightly sadistic reader). As usual, the difference between the primary and the secondary fits in a behavioural scheme with a stimulus and a response. Hence the ease with which these categories can be appropriated. In focusing the psychological drama on the author of the paper, Perec missed the following question: can the soprano be a secondary masochist if her basher [lyncheur] is a primary narcissist? No doubt is it a way for him to re-channel the pleasure towards himself. And what about the tomato? Or the pervert third party hidden in Luberon, miles away from any opera, namely, the trader who neither produced nor threw the tomato, but made it possible for everyone to have a nice little go at it? Or the psychiatrist believing they can find a way out in recoding the entire labyrinth into a factual biographical reality, which is just as much labyrinthine?

• 65 Corcos Maurice, Penser la mélancolie, Paris, Albin Michel, 2005, p. 16.
• 66 Such associations are not merely psychoanalytical; Perec’s formal games have been associated with (...)

40In Penser la mélancolie. Une lecture de Georges Perec, Maurice Corcos sees Maman behind all of Perec’s opera singers, who “are nearly systematically in love. Perec’s mother, who was such a wonderful singer, probably knew how to love.”65 Based on a detailed reading of Perec’s texts, the violent hermeneutic association of the tomatoed singer with the deported mother (a consecrated practice which consists in finding out autobiographical elements in constraints, literary playfulness or parody) is irrevocable.66 It tackles a trauma, colligates history with family intimacy, dramatises the filial link, embeds the comical in the tragical, and hystericises the opera. It takes a thief to catch a thief.

• 68 See Coppel-Batsch Marthe, “Penser la mélancolie. Une lecture de Georges Perec de Maurice Corcos”, (...)
• 69 Corcos Maurice, op. cit., p. 129.
• 70 Perec Georges, Cantatrix sopranica L., op. cit.

41Recalling the “lack of air that can be felt by Perec’s readers,68 and that evokes a writing gesture in the throes of a near death”,69 the psychiatrist enters the game of citation by prolonging infratextuality and the pleasure of endless hermeneutics. Could he be taking charge of one of Perec’s blind spots? As a matter of fact, Perec’s paper does not linger over the psychology of the individuals taking part in the experiment. The protocol even goes as far as to empty the attack out of any intentionality, the subjectivity of the throw disappearing in its mechanisation: “Tomatoes (Tomato rungisia vulgaris) were thrown by an automatic tomatothrower (Wait & See, 1972) monitored by an all-purpose laboratory computer (DID/92/85/P/331) operated on-line.”70 In fine, automation minimises the polysemy of the throw: actively getting a new grip on one’s own tastes and opinions; appropriating the flop as a wonderful opportunity for the audience to be more than a receptacle tied down to a numbered seat; hoping to ward off that silent, passively tolerated uneasiness by re-focusing the performance on the tomatoing; and, finally, finding pleasure in taking part in the show by throwing stagewards something that could have been ingested… In brief, all the ways in which tomato bashing can short-circuit the binary assigning of roles opposing the audience’s reception to the singer’s performance.

• 72 To the best of our knowledge, no one in the entire Heinz dynasty ever bore a first name beginning (...)

43Perec does not dwell upon the various states of the tomato (the hard fruit and the puree being the only ones under study in Cantatrix Sopranica L.), but it is at the one and only moment when he considers the tomato in its semi-liquid state (namely, ketchup), that he trustfully refers to a Heinz typified72 by a single initial letter: “25. Heinz, D. “Biological effects of ketchup splatching”. J. Food Cosmet. Ind. 72, 42-62, 1952.”

• 73 Malet Jean-Baptiste, op. cit.

44In its historic reality, Heinzism was a social project contemplating the creation of entire villages with gyms, swimming pools and libraries “where books and papers have been carefully selected. Workers are supervised and educated in accordance with their boss’ puritan values. Any other kind of publication is forbidden.”73 Hence, while the standard tomato grew from a society of the disciplinary kind, the hyperrationalisation of fruit fluxes led to the invention, in 1968, of the ketchup single serve packet, which contains more than 50% of concentrated global flexibility in production and storage. And meanwhile, Perec was declaring war on the Nouveau Roman so that tomatoes shan’t be looked upon with myopic eyes:

• 75 Ibidem.
• 76 To pursue this enquiry on the neo-musicological potentials of tomato bullying, and by way of concl (...)

45Literature has already assimilated the tomato to a model of standardisation. General smoothing out generates general repugnance and, consequently, the tomato is, in strictly generic terms, the projectile. While Perec’s criticism of Robbe-Grillet’s descriptive habits in Les Gommes seems to us ripe enough, his “de-myopic” stance does not make him less obstinately blind to the various states, shapes and origins… of tomatoes. The tomato that Robbe-Grillet idealises in the smoothness of the velouté of his verbal description (“A quarter of tomato that is quite faultless, cut up by the machine into a perfectly symmetrical fruit.”)75 hasn’t much to do with the juicy, slightly overripe tomato bashers dream of. Even when tomatoes are in a semi-liquid state, Perec struggles with the paradoxical fact that the best tomato to be thrown is riddled with GMO (Genitively Motivating Opportunities): when throwing the tomato, the basher can be obsessed with the fruit, impressed by its history or subjugated by it, and therefore replaces the beauty of a gesture with a bashing.76