ABSTRACT
The ideas of the “infra-ordinary” and “exhaustive” analysis play a central role in George Perec’s views on the city, and in Chapter 4 they are taken as points of departure for an analysis of novel that uses a square as frame. Doves on the square may be understood as an example of “the infra-ordinary,” and the use of doves in the Catalan writer Mercé Rodoreda’s novel Diamond Square reveals how the infra-ordinary may facilitate a representation of extraordinary events in private as well as public life. The novel takes a festival and a dance on the Diamond Square in Barcelona as its point of departure, but from here it follows the gradual confinement of the protagonist, who in a way becomes caged in as if she were one of the doves that she is taking care of. At the end, the novel articulates the acute tension between agoraphobic feelings and a longing for the openness of a square.
