About the work
“Die Gehaltserhöhung” (French: “L'Augmentation”) is a play for six characters by Georges Perec that premiered on 26 February 1970 at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse in Paris, directed by Marcel Cuvelier. It grew out of a flowchart drawn up by the researcher Jacques Perriault, which Perec first turned into a prose text consisting of a single unpunctuated sentence, published in 1968 in the journal “Enseignement programmé”. Together with his translator Eugen Helmlé he then adapted it in 1969 as the radio play “Wucherungen” for Saarländischer Rundfunk. Helmlé's German version of the play was first staged in 1972 at the TamS theatre in Munich.
Plot
An employee who has worked for the same company for many years wants to ask his head of department for a raise. The play runs through every conceivable route to that goal: is the boss in his office, will the petitioner be let in, what mood will he find him in? Every branch leads back to the starting point, and at the end the beginning comes round again. Instead of named characters, the stations of the diagram speak, such as the proposition, the alternative, the positive and the negative hypothesis, the choice and the conclusion, joined by a seventh voice, the measles.
Cultural significance
In the terminology of the Oulipo group the text follows an “anti-arborescence”: rather than branching out a plot, it exhausts every path through a single scheme, a method Perec also used in “La Disparition” and “Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien”. The great success of the radio play “Wucherungen” led to further commissions from radio. Hachette published the underlying prose text as a book for the first time in 2008, followed by translations into German in 2009 and into English in 2011.