The old and the new: an introduction to Georges Perec. (2024)

Georges Perec was born in Paris on 7 March 1936, and died of canceron 3 March 1982. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, and hisfirst background was Belleville, a working-class quarter to the east ofcentral Paris. Perec's father joined up at the start of the SecondWorld War and died in the defense of France in June 1940. During theGerman occupation, Perec was evacuated by the Red Cross toVillard-de-Lans, in the so-called Free Zone, where his father'ssister and her husband looked after him. His mother remained in Paris,was arrested, deported, and murdered at Auschwitz. At the war'send, Perec became the ward of his aunt and uncle, and was brought up bythem in Paris in a well-to-do, middle-class home.

Perec was educated at day schools in Paris and as a boarder atEtampes, a small town some fifty miles south of the city. He was notintellectually precocious, but in his final year he attracted theattention of his philosophy teacher, Jean Duvignaud, who encouraged himin his decision to be a writer. Perec's early attempts at fictionbrought him no success at all, and it was not until he was nearly thirtythat he got a book published. Les Choses (Things) won the Renaudot prizeand made Perec famous for a brief spell. Thereafter, he brought out anew book nearly every year, but did not regain his first celebrity untilLa Vie mode demploi (Life A User's Manual) won the Prix Medicis in1978. Only then was he able to leave his job as a scientific archivistand to work full-time as a writer. Perec completed no major work in theyears remaining to him, but diversified his already wide-rangingactivities. Stories, essays, film scripts, poetry, puzzles, and squibsof new and challenging kinds flowed from his pen with bewildering ease.He fell ill towards the end of 1981 after a spell as writer-in-residenceat the University of Queensland in Australia. He left an unfinisheddetective novel, "53 Days," and a vast and complex body ofwork which has taken many years to come into full view.

Perec led a modest life. He was never ah intellectual celebrity andavoided the fevered debates of his age over structuralism,psychoanalysis, and theory. He belonged to no school, and all that hekept in later life of his youthful Marxism was a gentle, ironicanarchism of the "Grouchist tendency." But though he rarelyheld forth on great issues, all his writing is shot through withintelligent reflection. As Claude Burgelin insists, Perec was by nomeans as isolated from the intellectual life of the Left Bank as heoften chose to appear. (1)

Perec made his life in writing. His own dogged persistence is theobvious model for the artistic and intellectual passions that inhabitthe characters of Life A User's Manual. His real ambition, heconfessed with the modesty and arrogance of a great creator, was towrite everything. He would have liked to add children's books,science fiction, strip cartoons, and libretti to the novels, plays,poems, puzzles, essays, and exercises that he did write, for there wasnothing writable to which he would not have turned his hand and hiscraft with words--not even advertising copy. The absence of anytraditional hierarchy of "literary kinds" is one of the mostsubversive and endearing features of the kaleidoscopic work that heleft.

The range of possible approaches to his labyrinthine universe iscorrespondingly vast. Toward the end of Perec's irreverent radioplay, The Machine, translated here for the first time, a computerrattles off an alphabetically ordered list of ninety-four topic headingsfor Goethe's secondary bibliography, from "Goethe andarchitecture" to "Goethe and Zelter." In the fifteenyears since the Review of Contemporary Fiction first published thisspecial issue, Perec's own bibliography has expanded to cover analmost equally large set of topics, in dozens of books and hundreds ofarticles in many different languages. In English alone, a full-lengthbiography, a pedagogical survey, a scholarly study of Perec and theOulipo, and an intriguing study of Perec's approach to games havebeen published as books, (2) and around seventy learned articles haveappeared, exploring subjects as varied (and as closely related) as:

 Perec and the Algerian War Perec and Antelme Perec and Autobiography Perec and the Avant-Garde Perec and Balzac Perec and Francois Bon Perec and Borges Perec and Calvino Perec and Crosswords Perec and the Everyday Perec and Fantasy Perec and Foucault Perec and Forgery Perec and Hide-and-Seek Perec and the Holocaust Perec's Left-Handedness Perec and the Lipogram Perec and Marx Perec and Melancholy Perec and Memory Perec and Memory Perec and the Missing One Perec's Mistakes Perec and Mourning Perec and Nabokov Perec and the Oulipo Perec and Perspective Perec and Photography Perec and the Post-Nouveau Roman Perec and Proust Perec and Psychoanalysis Perec and Puzzles Perec and Social Description Perec and Sport Perec and Translation Perec and Trauma Perec and Utopia Perec and Vichy Perec and the Visual Perec and W.

It is a measure of Perec's stature that the set of keys thatopen doors to the house of his writing, to use the image borrowed fromOrigen by Marcel Benabou, is remarkably large. This collection of essaysand extracts represents only some of those which seem most important tome.

Perec's career can be laid out in four parts. About the first,"Perec before Things," I have written elsewhere. (3) It isrepresented in this collection by one of the essays on literature thatPerec wrote around 1960 for the left-wing review Partisans, translatedand introduced by Rob Halpern. The second phase, labeled with onlypartial accuracy as Perec's "sociological" period, is theshort era of Things and A Man Asleep in the mid-1960s: novels andstories which attempt to grasp the self as well as a social reality, andwhich step aside from drawing conclusions through irony, ambiguity, andnarrative restraint. This moment can be approached through the interviewthat follows, given in 1965, and through Andrew Leak's study ofPerec and Roland Barthes.

Perec's third phase began in 1967, when he was co-opted byOulipo, the "Workshop for Potential Literature" founded byRaymond Queneau and the mathematician Francois Le Lionnais, and it couldbe said to culminate in the completion of Life A User's Manual in1978. Oulipo was (and is) a convivial working group of writers,scholars, and mathematicians--not a movement, a school, or a sect. Itsaims are to assist the renewal of literature by inventing, refining, andrefurbishing formal devices, which can be thought of equally well astools, or constraints, or constrictive forms. (4) Perec took to Oulipoas a duck to water; the conscious constraint of form liberated hisimagination, unblocked his creative potential. The simplest and mostaudacious of Perec's Oulipian works is A Void (1969), a wholeadventure-novel written under the constraint of a lipogram on E, that isto say, avoiding all words containing the commonest vowel in the Frenchlanguage. This intoxicated period of experimentation is represented hereby The Machine, written in collaboration with Perec's Germantranslator and close friend, Eugen Helmle, in the heady atmosphere ofthe Saarbrucken literary circle that met at Helmle's house. TheMachine is an early example of writing inspired by the existence ofmodern computers (Perec's other computer-simulation, a stage playentitled The Raise, will appear in English in 2009). (5) It pretends toanalyze and recompose, demolish and then rebuild a short lyric by Goethethat is almost indescribably well-known to all speakers and learners ofGerman--something even closer to the heart of German poetry thanWordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" might be forus. To do this, it uses pretty much all the rewriting devices inventedto date by Oulipo, and at the outset of Perec's apprenticeship to agroup that included many scientists and mathematicians far more learnedthan he, it served as a kind of demonstration piece, or Meisterstuck.Its inventiveness, irreverence, and closing sadness has made it justabout the best-loved and most frequently rebroadcast example of theNeues Horspiel, the name given to the experimental reinvention of radiodrama that was such a marked feature of German literary culture in the1960s and 1970s. Perec is nothing it not international.

Perec used his subsequent German radio plays to make furtherexperiments with form, and of course invented many very difficultconstraints for his writing in French, from the "simple"lipogram or A Void to the immensely complex structures of Life AUser's Manual ten years later. Bernard Magne's article in thisissue, one of the many he has written on Perec's textual practices,explores a range of texts written under constraint, and gives aparticularly precious insight into the mind-boggling machinery ofPerec's masterpiece.

Perec in his third phase was by no means exclusively an explorer ofthe potential of constrictive form. Like many other members of Oulipo,he also wrote works that are not especially indebted to Oulipianinventions. He never ceased to work and rework the material ofautobiography, the idea of which, he said, had arisen in him almost atthe same time as the idea of writing. The painful development of W orThe Memory of Childhood, Perec's principal autobiographical text,is studied here by Philippe Lejeune, who has had privileged access tothe drafts. (6) At first sight, there would seem to be almost norelation between the anguished autobiographer who appears between thelines of Lejeune and the cunning fixer grinning from Magne's pages,but they are nonetheless two faces of the same man at much the sametime. The paradox of Perec is that these different and equallyunprecedented kinds of writing are each bound up with the other in waysthat escape easy explanation. The extract from Jacques Roubaud'snovel The Great Fire of London allows us to see an important, mysteriousconnection between them.

A third aspect of Perec in the 1970s is presented by Gilbert Adair:Perec the observer of micro-events, the artless chronicler of"everydayness" of passing time and of passing traffic. Thereare connections to be made, of course, between the flat style ofPerec's "infraordinary" descriptions and the fragmentaryplainness of his autobiographical chapters, just as the observation ofeveryday life reconnects with the "sociological eye" of Perecin his second phase. Both these connections can be seen in Perec'sOulipian monument and masterpiece, Life A User's Manual, which isdevoid neither of exhaustingly monotonous list-poems nor of acutemicrosocial perceptions. But to point out these elements of coherencedoes not diminish the jubilant multiplicity of Perec's mind andwriting.

The fourth and regrettably brief phase of Perec's career hadno clear dynamic. In prose, he developed ever more constructed forms,but in poetry, he developed what he called "soft constraint,"and also wrote two pieces allegedly with no constraint at all. Becausehe regarded no writing task as beneath him, there was almost no kind ofwriting that he was not keen to tackle and to decorate with his ownspecial mark--from travel pieces for the Air France in-flight magazineto essays, detective fiction, and pastiche. In the "Englishinterview" of 1981 included here, Perec talked with enthusiasm ofan almost boundless range of writing interests, ending with the humbleart of translation.

Les Choses, Perec's first novel, was the first to betranslated into English. It appeared in New York in May 1968, when othernews from Paris was attracting the world's attention. Partlybecause of the unfortunate timing, Les Choses was barely reviewed inAmerica, was never released in the UK, and was quickly forgotten.Despite the efforts of Harry Mathews, Perec's close friend, and theauthor of a memoir on Perec in "I remember" form, The Orchard,Perec remained virtually unknown in English for the following twentyyears.

Perec made his real entry into English posthumously, and inreverse. "The Winter Journey," a Borgesian tale of literatureand madness written in 1979, appeared in translation in 1985. Life AUser's Manual carne out in America and Britain in 1987. It wasgreeted with almost unanimous enthusiasm in Britain, America, andAustralia, and achieved the rare feat (for a translated work) of bothcritical and popular success. W or The Memory of Childhood (1975)appeared the following year, and a new translation of Things togetherwith A Man Asleep (1965 and 1967, respectively) was published in 1990.This reverse order of acquaintance gave Perec's work a more easilygrasped coherence in English than it had had in French. The intenselyconnected nature of Perec's books has been easier to see in thesmaller range of texts, published at shorter intervals and in reverseorder of composition, than in the more disparate and ever-changingoeuvre that became available in French over the first thirty years ofPerec's life in words, from the 1960s to the 1990s. But the pastfifteen years has seen almost all of Perec's other prose writingsbrought into English as well. Gilbert Adair published a masterful,jubilantly free transposition of Perec's lipogram-novel, A Void, in1994, and Ian Monk followed this up with three novellas (Three byPerec), including The Exeter Text, which uses no vowel except E.Perec's unfinished detective story, "53 Days" wastranslated in 1992 in the UK, and was also released in the U.S. in 2000.John Sturrock assembled some of Perec's essays in a volume entitledSpecies of Spaces and Other Pieces; some of Perec's urbanobservation texts and many other smaller pieces have appeared injournals in the UK and the U.S. With a fully revised edition of Life AUser's Manual about to appear in the U.S. in 2009, and the expectedpublication of a posthumous volume of essays and exercises under thetitle Thoughts of Sorts, nearly all the pieces of the puzzle are now inplace.

However, the wealth of reading now available in English does notmake it any easier to find your way around what the Avignon Festivalcalled "The Perec Galaxy." Perec himself gave a deceptivelysimple set of readers' instructions in his lapidary "Statementof Intent" where he likens himself to a farmer growing fourdifferent crops in four fields: the fields of sociology, autobiography,the "ludic," and narrative. But he only set up thecrop-rotation model so as to be able to break it down by asserting thatnot one of his works fits unambiguously into any one field, and not oneof them is without relationship to all four. Perec's apparenthelpfulness to the reader looking for a map or guide is acharacteristically gentle and effective trap, forcing us to find our ownpath through his universe of words, every part of which is different,and yet a constituent of an elusive whole.

There are many aspects of Perec's writing that are bestapproached with little regard for chronological development, or for theill-fenced "fields" of his literary farm. Two such are studiedhere: the question of what it is that Perec does with his Jewishness,discussed with privileged insight by Perec's long-standing friend,Marcel Benabou; and the role of the visual in Perec's writing,examined by Patrizia Molteni.

English and American literature provided Perec with many of hismost treasured models and mentors: Sterne, Melville, Joyce, Nabokov, andLowry, in particular. Perec was disappointed to be known in England,Australia, and America only as the author of a conveniently slim"modern classic" used in French first-year programs as anexample of the "new novel," or of social relevance, or of theFrench moralist tradition. The fate of Things at the hands of teachersof French has led critics to dig perhaps too wide a trench betweenPerec's writings before and after his contact with Oulipo. All thesame, what makes Perec a force in contemporary writing is quitedifferent from the grounds used to canonize Things.

What strikes me most about Perec now is that he has renovated thecraft of writing by taking it back to some of its overlooked roots. Herediscovered the joy and the difficulty of placing letters into regularshapes, as our ancestors did in carmina figurata, in acrostics,palindromes, and pattern-poetry of all kinds. He reinvented the simpleart of making lists, one of the very first uses of literacy in thehistorical sense, and also in every child's experience of learningto use pencil and paper. Despite the uncompromising experimentalism ofhis formal work, he remained faithful to his own childhood discovery ofthe imagination in Dumas, in Jules Verne, and in detective stories, andhe reinvented the pleasures of reading "flat out" for thestory itself. He made no distinction between his play and his work, and,like some superintelligent child, he constructed games that involve hisreaders entirely, and thereby dignify the act of reading itself. ForPerec, despite his reticence about theory, knew very well what he waswriting for, and he made himself perfectly clear in the early articlesto which Marcel Benabou refers on p. 161 below: to make a sense of theself, and of the world. Because words never say things exactly, becausethere is always a gap between the intention and the expression, Perecmade gap or absence the constitutive device of all his writing, beforeand after his meeting with Oulipo. By means that are sometimesstunningly simple (write without E!) and sometimes of mountainousdifficulty (the machinery of Life A User's Manual), Perec put thesituation of the writer at the heart of his writing, and therebyasserted his mastery, his control, and his existence nonetheless.

The devices of self-mirroring and the half-playful self-references,nods, and winks in Perec's texts therefore take on an altogethermore serious function. Perec's work is explicitly built on nothing,on the absence that lies at the heart of language, and which is thetruest expression of the self. Perec described himself as being like achild who does not know what he wants or fears the most: to stay hidden,or to be found. In fact, there is no tension in Perec's workbetween self-affirmation and denial. What he achieved through intensereflection on the writer's material, and through the acquisition ofunparalleled craft with words, is the paradoxical assertion of the selfby the conscious construction of its absence. Observation, formalism,wit, and autobiography combine on such premises to make Perec'swork not just entertaining, provoking, and formally bizarre, but also,for those who wish to hear, sharply poignant too. Perec's tortuous"procedures" are not ways of hiding sentiment but his ownnecessary means of arriving at simple emotion.

For these reasons, it seems to me to matter rather little whetherLife A User's Manual is or is not the highest peak of postmodernfiction, or, in Italo Calvino's words, "the last great eventin the history of the novel." It is the crowning achievement of alife's work that combines older traditions of craft with adetermined pursuit of the new, and has thereby made literature possibleagain.

Manchester, UK, 1993--Princeton, NJ, 2009

The editor and publisher wish to thank the contributors and Harvill(London), David R. Godine (Boston), Universite Laval (Quebec), Editionsdu Seuil (Paris), and the Estate of Georges Perec for permission toreproduce and to translate copyrighted material.

REFERENCES

References to books by Georges Perec available in Englishtranslation are given in square brackets, using title abbreviationsfollowed by a page number:

T Things (Les Choses, 1965). Translated by David Bellos. With A ManAsleep. Boston: David R. Godine, 1990.

3P Which Moped with Chrome-plated Handlebars at the Back of theYard? (Quel petit velo a guidon chrome au fond de la cour?, 1966).Translated by Ian Monk. In Three by Perec. London: Harvill, 1996.

MA Man Asleep (Un Homme qui dort, 1967). Translated by Andrew Leak.With Things. Boston: David R. Godine, 1990.

MA The Machine (Die Maschine, 1968). In this volume.

V A Void (La Disparition, 1969). Translated by Gilbert Adair.London: Harvill, 1994.

3P The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets and Sex (Les Revenentes, 1972).Translated by Ian Monk. In Three by Perec. London: Harvill, 1996.

SS Species of Spaces (Especes despaces, 1974). Translated by JohnSturrock. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

W W or The Memory of Childhood (W ou le souvenir d'enfance,1975). Translated by David Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine, 1988.

L Life A User's Manual (La Vie mode demploi, 1978). Translatedby David Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine, 1987. A revised and correctededition in preparation (2009) will have slightly altered pagination.

3P A Gallery Portrait (Un Cabinet d'amateur, 1979) Translatedby Ian Monk. In Three by Perec. London: Harvill, 1996.

EI Ellis Island (Recits d'Ellis Island. Histoires derrances etdespoir, 1981). Translated by Harry Mathews. New York: The Free Press,1995.

TS Thoughts of Sorts (Penser/Classer, 1985). Translated by DavidBellos. Boston: David R. Godine, 2009

53D "53 Days" ("53 jours," 1989). Translated byDavid Bellos. Boston: David R. Godine, 2000.

References to books by Georges Perec not fully available in Englishare given under these title abbreviations:

inf l'infra-ordinaire. Paris: Le Seuil, 1989.

Jms Je me souviens. Paris: Hachette, 1978.

Jsn Je suis ne. Paris: Seuil, 1990.

LG L.G. Une histoire des annees soixante. Paris: Seuil, 1992.

EC refers to Georges Perec, Entretiens et conferences, edited byMireille Ribiere and Dominique Bertelli. Paris: Joseph K, 2003. Twovolumes. CGP refers to volumes of the Cahiers Georges Perec:

I: Paris: P.O.L., 1985.

II: Number 21 of Textue1 34/44. Universite de Paris-VII, 1988.

III: "Proletaires et Presbyteres." Paris: Editions duLimon, 1989.

IV: "Melanges." Paris: Editions du Limon, 1991.

V: "Les Poemes heterogrammatiques." Paris: Editions duLimon, 1992.

In articles translated from French, interpolations by thetranslator are put in italics in square brackets.

SOURCES

"Back to Basics" first appeared in issue no. 23 of LaBibliotheque oulipienne (Paris: 1984), p. 43. [c] Harry Mathews.

The essays by Gilbert Adair, Andrew Leak, and Patrizia Molteni werewritten for the original Perec number of the Review of ContemporaryFiction. The essay by Rob Halpern was written for this reissue. DavidBellos's introduction has been revised for this reissue.

"Commitment or the Crisis of Language" was firstpublished as "Engagement ou crise du langage" in Partisans 7(November-December 1962): 171-182. This translation follows the text inL.G. Une aventure des annees soixante (Paris: Editions du seuil, 1992).Translation [c] Rob Halpern, 2009.

"Georges Perec Owns Up" was first published as"Georges Perec s'explique" in Les Lettres Francaises, no.1108 (2 December 1965): 14-15. This translation [c] David Bellos.

"Statement of Intent" first appeared as "Notes surce que je cherche" in Le Figaro, 22 November 1978. This translationalso appears in TS.

"The Doing of Fiction" has been broadcast on RadioHelicon (Sydney, Australia) several rimes, and also in fragments byFrance-Culture, in Intercalaires pour Georges Perec, March 1982. It hasbeen reprinted in EC II: 244-262. [c] Estate of Georges Perec.

The Machine was first published in German as Die Maschine,translated by Eugen Helmle. Stuttgart: Reclam'sUniversal-Bibliothek, 1972. This translation [c] Ulrich Schonherr, 2009.

Marcel Benabou's essay on "Perec's Jewishness"was first given as a talk at the ten-day Perec conference atCerisy-la-Salle in 1984, then published in French in CGP I, 15-30.

Philippe Lejeune has spoken and written about the history andstructure of W or The Memory of Childhood in many places, most notablyin CGP II, 101-69. The essay translated in this issue is a speciallycommissioned resume of "Le Bourreau Veritas" a chapter of LaMemoire et l'oblique. Georges Perec autobiographe (Paris: P.O.L.,1991).

Jacques Roubaud's "The Transition from W to M in Life AUser's Manual" is taken from his novel The Great Fire ofLondon, translated by Dominic Di Bernardi (Elmwood Park: Dalkey ArchivePress, 1991), pp. 128, 255-56.

Bernard Magne's essay appeared as "De l'ecart a latrace. Les avatars de la contrainte" in Etudes litteraires(Universite Lavai, Quebec City, PQ, 1991), volume 23, pp. 9-26. Thistranslation@David Bellos.

NOTES

(1) Claude Burgelin, Georges Perec. Paris: Seuil, 1988.

(2) David Bellos, Georges Perec. A Life in Words. Boston: D. R.Godine, 1993; David Gascoigne, The Games of Fiction: Georges Perec andModern French Ludic Narrative. Berne: Peter Lang, 2006; KimberlyBohman-Kalaja, Reading Games: An Aesthetics of Play in FlannO'Brien, Samuel Beckett and Georges Perec. Urbana-Champaign, IL:Dalkey Archive Press, 2007; Alison James, Constraining Chance: GeorgesPerec and the Oulipo. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009.

(3) "Perec avant Perec" Ecritures 2 (1992) in summaryform; at greater length in Georges Perec: A Life in Words.

(4) Warren Motte, Jr., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature(Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1986) is a good introduction to thegroup and its work; The Oulipo Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews andAlastair Brotchie (New York: Exact Change, 1998), is a store oftreasures not to be missed.

(5) Hannah Higgins and Douglas Kahn, editors, MainframeExperimentalism. University of California Press, forthcoming.

(6) The original manuscript, now at the Kungliga Biblioteket inStockholm, had not been discovered when Lejeune wrote this essay. See my"Perec en Suede" Bulletin de l'Association Georges Perec,34 (1998) and "The Third Dimension of Georges Perec's W ou lesouvenir denfance," French Studies Bulletin 70.1 (Spring 1999) forfurther details.