Serie Noire at 7
Un homme qui dort (introduced by Harry Mathews) at 9:30
Reading Georges Perec
By Warren Motte
Georges Perec is the finest French writer of the twentieth century. There. I’ve wanted to stake that claim, in print, for the last twenty-five years. And it seems to me finally, now, as we listen to bleatings from every quarter telling us that the twentieth century is well behind us, that the time is ripe to do so. I can already hear the howls of righteous outrage from the Proustians, the Sartrians, the Durassians, and a variety of other battle-happy literary partisans. But tant pis! My choice is Perec. And don’t forget: you heard it here first. In CONTEXT, that is (appropriately enough). Allow me to say just a few words about Perec’s life, before turning to his works. He was born in Paris in 1936, the only son of Polish-Jewish immigrants. His father enlisted in the French army at the outbreak of World War II, and was killed at the front, shortly before the French surrender in 1940. His mother was arrested in 1943 and deported to Auschwitz; Perec was never able to learn whether she died during the journey or after she arrived at the camp. Perec himself spent the war years in a Catholic boarding school in the south of France, and after the war he went to live with the family of a paternal aunt. He studied sociology at the Sorbonne, and later worked as a public-opinion pollster and a research librarian, until his literary activity allowed him to support himself financially. He died of cancer at the age of forty-five in 1982.
Georges Perec is perhaps best described as a literary experimentalist, one who was intrigued by the question of form. He produced a score of major works, each one quite different from the others. Although he is best known for his novels, he also wrote plays, poetry, essays, filmscripts, opera librettos, and many other texts which confound traditional generic categories. “My ambition as a writer,” he explained to an interviewer in 1978, “would be to traverse all of contemporary literature, without ever feeling that I am retracing my own steps or returning to beaten ground, and to write everything that someone today can possibly write.” He once suggested that his work was animated by four major concerns: a passion for the apparently trivial details of everyday life, an impulse toward confession and autobiography, a will toward formal innovation, and a desire to tell engaging, absorbing stories. Anyone wishing to read Perec today may consider those four concerns as paths that may be followed through his otherwise labyrinthine oeuvre…(read more)