The Games of Fiction: Georges Perec and Modern French Ludic Narrative (review)

This is an excellent presentation of La Vie mode d'emploi for English-language students able to read an 800-page multi-novel in French, since it gives all quotations in the original, without translations. Such readers represent a small subset of the actual student readers of Perec's work, which is more frequently to be found on reading lists in anthropology, architecture and sociology than in French literature, and an even smaller subset of Perec's English-language fans, who are more likely to be computer scientists, crossword-puzzle solvers or mathematicians than students of literature. But this is nonetheless a welcome, measured and well-informed presentation of what Calvino considered to be 'the last great novel of the twentieth century' and it serves its intended users better than most available French-language criticism, much of which is overloaded with technojargon or psychobabble. Gascoigne steers a judicious path through predecessors and parallels in Roussel, serial music and the nouveau roman before sketching out a place for La Vie mode d'emploi within Perec's development as a writer. However, although only four of the eleven chapters are explicitly devoted to it, La Vie mode d'emploi is the centre-piece, the focus and the culmination of this study, as it was of Perec's career. Gascoigne assembles a great deal of information from thirty years of scholarship and, if he does not add anything specific to the hoard, he lays it out with order, clarity and occasional wit. His principal argument, which has also always been my own, is that with La Vie mode d'emploi Perec used a superficially anti-humanist writing strategy (made of games, machines, grids and rules) to express with exquisite power and modesty his simple and moving humanity. Among the problems this lecture-like book does not solve —but how could it? —is the 'real meaning' of Winckler's revenge. One possibly useful addition to the tools for describing the narrative style of the novel is the distinction Gascoigne makes between the Descriptor, the Chronicler and the Fabulator; however, this neat characterization of the functions of the narrative voice deflects attention from Perec's ambition to pastiche 99 different kinds of narrative in his 99 chapters. This book is not heavily referenced. Footnotes tend to be used for expansions and retractions, not for the source and history of the information provided. A number of British and French Perec scholars (this reviewer included, particularly with reference to p. 290) may feel that more acknowledgement of their work would have been appropriate.