PÉREC, Georges

Nationality: French. Born: Paris, 7 March 1936. Education: Claude Bernard College, Paris, and Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire College, D'Etampes, 1946-54. Military Service: 1958-59. Family: Married Paulette Pétras in 1960. Career: La Ligne Générale, 1959-63; Cause Commune, 1972-73. Member: OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle; Workshop of Potential Literature), Paris. Awards: Renaudot prize, 1965; Médicis prize, 1980. Died: 3 March 1982.

Publication

Collections

Georges Perec: Les Choses, espéces d'espaces: Résumé analytique, commentaire critique, documents complémentaires, edited by Martine Schneider. 1991.

Three by Perec. 1996.

Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited by John Sturrock. 1997.

Novels

Les Choses; Une histoire des années soixante. 1965; as Les Choses; A Story of the Sixties, 1968; as Things; A Story of the Sixties, 1990.

Quel petit vélo á guidon chromé au fond de la cour? 1966.

Un Homme qui dort. 1967.

La Disparition. 1969; as A Void, 1994.

Les Revenentes. 1972.

W, ou, le souvenir d'enfance (autobiographical novel). 1975; as W, or the Memory of Childhood, 1988.

Je me souviens: Les Choses communes I. 1978. "53 jours." 1989; as "53 Days," edited by Harry Mathews and Jacques Roubaud, 1992.

Short Stories

La Vie, mode d'emploi. 1978; as Life, a User's Manual, 1987.

Le Voyage d'hiver. 1993; as The Winter Journey, 1995.

Poetry

Trompe l'œil. 1978.

La Clôture: Et autres poémes. 1980.

Ulcérations: Un jeu d'intérieur sur un texte de Georges Pérec;

Conception typographique Alain Roger. 1986.

Cantatrix sopranica L. et autres écrits scientifiques (in French and English) 1991.

Beaux présents, belles absentes. 1994.

Plays

Théâtre. 1, la poche parmentier: Précédé de l'augmentation. 1981.

Other

Petit traité invitant á la découverte de l'art subtil du go, with Pierre Lusson, and Jacques Roubaud. 1969.

La Boutique obscure; 124 rêves. 1973.

Espéces d'espaces. 1974.

Tentative d'épuisement d'un lieu parisien. 1975.

Alphabets: Cent soixante-seize onzains hétérogrammatiques. 1976.

Les Mots croisés (crossword puzzles). 1979.

Un Cabinet d'amateur: Histoire d'un tableau. 1979.

Récits d'Ellis Island: Histoires d'errance et d'espoir, with Robert Bobert. 1980; as Ellis Island, 1995.

Cocktail queneau. 1982.

Penser, classer. 1985.

Les Mots croisés II (crossword puzzles). 1986.

Vœux. 1989; as A Little Illustrated Alphabet Primer, 1996.

Entretien (avec Gabriel Simony) (interview). 1989.

Je suis né. 1990.

Perec/rinations (crossword puzzles). 1997.

Jeux intéressants (word games). 1997.

Cher, trés cher, admirable et charmant ami: Correspondence, Georges Perec-Jacques Lederer (1956-1961). 1997.

Nouveaux jeux intéressants (word games). 1998.

Translator, Le Naufrage du stade Odradek [The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium], by Harry Mathews. 1989.

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Film Adaptations:

A Man Who Sleeps, 1974.

Critical Studies:

"Georges Perec" by Harry Mathews, in Grand Street, 3(1), Autumn 1983, pp. 136-45; The Poetics of Experiment: A Study of the Work of Georges Perec, 1984, and "Georges Perec and the Broken Book," in Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and 'the Jewish Question' in France, edited by Lawrence D. Kritzman, both by Warren F. Motte 1994; "Literary Quotations in Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi, " in French Studies, 41(2), April 1987, pp. 181-94, and Georges Perec: A Life in Words, 1993, both by David Bellos; Georges Perec, Traces of His Passage by Paul Schwartz, 1988; Georges Perec and Felipe Alfau issue of Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1993; "Masculine/Feminine: Georges Perec's Narrative of the Missing One" by Stella Behar, in Neophilologus (Netherlands), 79(3), July 1995 July, pp. 409-19; "Puzzles and Lists: Georges Perec's Un Homme qui dort " by Chris Andrews, in MLN, 111(4), September 1996, pp. 775-96; "An Auto-bio-graphy: W, ou, le souvenir d'enfance or the Space of the Double Cover" by Michel Sirvent, in Sites, 1(2), Fall 1997, pp. 461-80; "Georges Perec, W, ou, le souvenir d'enfance " by Joyce Block Lazarus, in Strangers and Sojourners, 1999; "Georges Perec on Ellis Island" by Dan Stone, in Jewish Quarterly, 47(2), Summer 2000, p. 37; "Dreaming the Self, Writing the Dream: The Subject in the Dream-Narratives of Georges Perec" by David Gascoigne, in Subject Matters: Subject and Self in French Literature from Descartes to the Present, edited by Paul Gifford and Johnnie Gratton, 2000.

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By the time of his premature death in 1982, Georges Pérec had established himself as one of the most important and restlessly innovative writers of the French postwar period. Taken as a whole, his corpus reads as an ongoing and ever-changing experiment with literary language. In novels, essays, poetry, drama, and screenplays as well as more eclectic writerly exercises—fragmentary memoirs, crosswords, palindromes, and other word games—he dazzles his readers with his apparently effortless mastery of language and its possibilities.

Pérec's restless experimentalism as a writer, however, is indissociable from his biography. Born in Paris in 1936 to Jewish parents, he was raised from the age of six by his non-Jewish uncle and aunt in rural France after his father's death in combat and his mother's deportation to Auschwitz. These skeletal facts help make sense of the obsessive play with gaps, fragmentation, and absence that pervades each of his twenty very different books; the trauma of irretrievable loss that shapes his childhood finds itself expressed in his very mode of writing.

Pérec found a channel for his writerly obsessions in his membership of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle; Workshop of Potential Literature), a Paris-based international group of writers founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François LeLionnais. The guiding strategy of OuLiPo is "writing under constraint," an exercise whereby literature is subjected to arbitrary disciplines imported from, for example, mathematics, logic, or chess. Amongst the most famous and substantial products of this strategy is Pérec's extraordinary "lipogrammatic" novel of 1969, La Disparation. A lipogram is a text in which one or more letters is prohibited from appearing. In La Disparation the prohibited letter is perhaps the most daunting of all: e. Its "story" mimes this strategy, telling of the disappearance of a man named Anton Voyl (translated as Anton Vowl in Gilbert Adair's ingenious English translation, A Void ) and his friends' vain attempts to find him.

As many of his critics have noted, it is impossible to avoid reading into this dazzlingly sustained (the novel is around 300 pages long) experiment in linguistic absence the traumatic familial absence that shaped his life. There is little in the way of direct reference to or narration of the Holocaust in Pérec, yet its memory insinuates itself into the very texture of his writing. While he alludes to the Nazi genocide in Récits d'Ellis Island (Ellis Island ) and Espéces d'espaces (Species of Space ) and interweaves some Holocaust-related stories into the intricate narrative patchwork that makes up perhaps his most famous novel, La Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual ), it is the formal patterning more than any content of his writing that registers the memory of trauma most potently. In the structural lacunae of his texts, Pérec demonstrates the impossibility of representing that trauma directly.

This is the case even for the text that confronts the Holocaust and its effect on his life most explicitly: his 1975 book W, ou le souvenir d'enfance (W, or the Memory of Childhood ). Interweaving autobiography and fiction, the book is a painstaking demonstration of the Holocaust's stubborn resistance to conventional narration or representation. If the book is unique in his corpus for the relative directness with which it addresses his traumatic history, it is characteristic in its thoroughgoing refusal of a representational aesthetic.

—Josh Cohen

See the essay on W,or the Memory of Childhood.