L’Éternel et l’éphémère: temporalités dans l’œuvre de Georges Perec (review)

This monograph reprising ten articles published between 1998 and 2010 further establishes the validity of the neoformalist mode of reading that Bernard Magné first brought to bear on Perec’s dazzling body of work. Examining such disparate objects as the proper name in Je me souviens, the parenthesis as stylistic device, deixis in La Vie mode d’emploi, or the (in)imitable character of a list-based, enumerative style, Christelle Reggiani unites preoccupations with language, storytelling, the image, and memory under the motif of temporal suspension, or the ‘fatal instant’ (R. Queneau) in which the eternal and the ephemeral are conjoined. In contrast to Joyce’s epiphanies or to Proust’s layered instants of plenitude, Perec’s poetics of constraint postulates a time outside chronology wherein ‘temporal ascesis’ (p. 185) can be achieved. Throughout, Reggiani proves an exacting reader for whom method is paramount. In each chapter a discreet hypothesis is stated, tested, and reframed in light of deep connections that anchor textual features — however inconsequential or arbitrary at first glance — in what Magné has called the ‘Perecquian autobiotext’. Through aencrage, or textual encryption of (auto)biographical data, literary form betrays an ontological uncertainty (p. 128) and gestures towards the unsayable. Hence simple punctuation marks — parentheses — emerge as ‘le moyen typographique de creuser par l’écriture [la] tombe [de la mère]’ (p. 60), while the decentred snapshots taken during the shooting of Récits d’Ellis Island, by emptying the photograph of referents, bespeak loss and lack (p. 113). While each chapter invariably delivers taut conclusions, on occasion the critical payoff is slighter than readers might wish. Need one revisit the theory of proper names (S. Kripke, G. Kleiber, K. Jonasson . . .) as ‘paradoxical indices’ to show that Je me souviens addresses readers of Perec’s generation, and that the intelligibility of its 479 micromemories is each year less assured? To conclude that ‘Je me souviens témoigne d’un anti-art de la mémoire qui affirme l’effacement inéluctable de tout souvenir’ (p. 37) is, arguably, to relegate to the eternal present of linguistic analysis a touchstone of collective memory that since 1979 has enjoyed a vibrant cultural life of its own. More effective are excellent discussions of painting and enumerative writing in Un cabinet d’amateur; of the rapport of the photograph to ephemerality and falsity; and of the appropriation of Perec’s penchant for lists and description by contemporary artists such as C. Boltanski, S. Calle, and E. Levé. L’Éternel et l’éphémère is perhaps the first study to make full use of the two volumes of Entretiens et conférences released in 2005. Although this does, in one case, lead to a surfeit of what-might-have-beens (Perec’s largely unrealized wish to pen film scripts) at the expense of extant materials (the films Un homme qui dort and Les Lieux d’une fugue), it more often allows Reggiani to highlight key shifts and continuities in the writer’s reflection on aesthetics, from the ‘citational’ approach to the romanesque to the renunciation of poetic lyricism in favour of atemporal Oulipian constraint. There is, in short, much to choose from among these cogent critical explorations of lesser-known facets of France’s signal postmodern polygraph.