Georges Perec : the Missing Jew-el of 20th Century Literature
Posted on June 21, 2008
Filed Under Guest Columnist | 1 Comment
Who is Georges Perec ?
The question above implies more than one answer, in order to accomplish his complex image and to shed light on the multiple facets of this mysterious jewel, shining from the middle of 20th century literature. Georges Perec (1936 -1982) is mostly known as a French writer, who was awarded the Renaudot prize for his first novel Les Choses (Things, 1965) and the Medicis Prize for La Vie mode d’emploi, Romans (Life : A User’s Manual, Novels,1978). However, before acquiring the distinguished position of a highly-regarded writer, Georges Perec must have been considered as a Polish-Jew orphan, whose father died enlisted in the French Army, from unattended gunfire or sharpnel wounds, when the child was four years old; and whose mother was killed in Auschwitz, an infamous Nazi concentration camp, when he was only six years old.
The unexpected loss of his parents sealed his destiny and represents the starting point for his literary career. It will be this emptiness, this void generated in his early childhood which he will endeavour hard to fill in, by trying to explain it, by putting it into words. Nevertheless, this kind of loss is inexplicable and irreplaceable, and Georges Perec will struggle his entire life searching for a new identity, by eventually building up one himself. Since History decided to deprive him of a close family, he will decide to take revenge for it and to make up a new one, more powerful, more stable and more reliable. This everlasting and fictional family is composed of all his favourite writers, to whom he is returning over and over again : Flaubert, Verne, Roussel, Joyce, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Leiris, Queneau are always there for him, as many strong reference points.
As soon as he manages to establish his new family, Perec strives to conceive his new identity as well. Projected in the lineage of so many famous writers, he cannot have another status as that of a commonly known writer either. Nevertheless, one cannot have a complete overview over this literary innovator by reading only some of his works. One has to read them all, in order to understand him better and to have a glimpse of each of his miscellaneous facets. Every piece of work of Georges Perec is different from the other one, like the many glowing sides of the same diamond, every one reflecting a divergent expression of his inner self.
Let us take a closer look at some of his glamorous pieces of work, trying to bear in mind that the missing root is always there, revealing itself more obvious and conspicuous by its own absence. A stunning example of this erased period of his life is La Disparition (1969, A Void), a lipogrammatic novel, written without using the vowel “Eâ€. Knowing that this letter is the most common in the French vocabulary, one can easily imagine the laborious work as well as the genius of the author of those 311 pages, that the critic applauded as an interesting detective novel, without even noticing the missing of the “E†vowel. Perec won the bet made with his contemporaneity, but he was aiming at a higher goal, the one regarding more farther, up to the Posterity.
After paying this homage to “Eâ€, alias “Eux†in French, which also means “Them†alias “The Parentsâ€, “The Departedâ€, Perec consecrated his next novel to this same problematic letter, Les Revenentes (The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex, 1972), by smoothly erasing the other vowels of the alphabet, id est : A, I, O, U. This is, by far, the raunchiest of Perec’s works, focused on a jewel theft, which involves an extended orgy, both clerical and criminal.
The History decided that there will be no place left on Earth for his Jewish family; in his Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1974), Perec definitely testifies that an entire world can enter in the restraint and limited space of a blank piece of paper, starting from some black signs, the letters as the messengers of words, therefore the symbols of walls, of rooms, of apartments, of streets, of cities, of countries, and so on, until the expanded and undefined frontiers of the Universe.
The subliminal search for a secure place of his own is softly passing in his next novel W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975, W or the Memory of Childhood), a two-side canvas woven around the central image of the same classical void, emphasised by his own confession: “I have no childhood memoriesâ€. The back side of his autobiographical canvas, where all his memories are faded and blurred, represents the pretext for depicting the front side of it, in a far too vivid tonality. Every hue of the blood colour of the background where the Athletes of Tierra del Fuego are trying hard to follow the absurd changing rules, made up by the leaders of the W Island, is reminding, in a parallel plan, every single shade of the blood colour of the Nazi Holocaust.
Completely aware that he will never be able to fully understand and accept the absurd canons and controversial decisions of Fate, Perec will decide to indulge himself in the role of the Demiurge, through his fictional world, in order to make up his own rules and undertake his own verdicts and resolutions. In Life: A User’s Manual (1978) he brings to life more than one hundred interwoven intriguing stories. The main rule which sustains the conception of this novel is conveyed to the passionate reader only in the draft of the book, Cahiers de charges de La Vie mode d’emploi (1993): the structure of the novel is governed by the knight’s move on a chessboard of ten squares by ten, as a symbol of the 100 pieces of the building. Otherwise, each room is assigned to a chapter, and the order of the chapters is given by the knight’s moves on the grid. In this fictional Universe, nothing can escape the author’s pattern, nothing is happening by chance. The secret is to stick to the countless constraints settled by the writer : there are very accurate algorithms which convey to the description of every room of the building a certain number of colours, of books, of pictures and so on. Nevertheless, by respecting scrupulously the severe constraints, the main framework of the novel will highlight the possibility that there will always be a piece of the jigsaw puzzle which will remain irreconcilable with the original gap.
Trying to find his path throughout the inextricable and magic forest of the 20th century literature, Perec successfully corroborates the idea that even if History raped his childhood, It didn’t manage to kill his Child Spirit. The writer loves to play with the words, therefore he’s becoming a devoted member of OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or “Workshop of Potential Literature), where he is one of the undeniable masters of the crosswords puzzles, of the lipograms, of the anagrams and other funny word games. The playground for this word-juggler is boundless and his strong passion enables him to create the longest palindrome ever written, containing more than five thousand words.
By carefully putting together all the pieces of this gigantic jigsaw puzzle, paradoxically, the unique and outstanding portray of Georges Perec still remains incomplete. The glittering jewel cannot be lightened up all at the same time. By illuminating one aspect of it, we are inevitably shading some others. Even so, we are plainly aware that the brilliance of this jewel of 20th century literature is focusing on his Jewish origin, this eternal void that he is persistently trying to fill, throughout his entire life and literary achievements.
submitted on www.indiantvtoday.com by Adrianna Iorgulescu
Born in Bucarest, Romania, I live in Nice, France, for five years now. Nevertheless, I enjoy travelling all over the globe, in order to discover new cultures and places and to enrich, as well, my linguistic laggage. I am passioned by letters, therefore I’m completing a PhD in French literature. Moreover, I fully agree with Buddha’s assessement : “All that is now is the result of what we thought before.†Therefore, I think we should pay attention at every one of our thoughts, since it can generate a whole new Universe.
Comments
One Response to “Georges Perec : the Missing Jew-el of 20th Century Literature”
Leave a Reply
[...] it! Sites you may be interested in LAUG 2.0 News » Blog Archive » Facebook: The Missing Manual Georges Perec : the Missing Jew-el of 20th Century Literature : Indian TV Today Tags panic attack eft ebook emotions therapy fear headache Verschiedene Keywords This product [...]