Mémoires du quotidien: Les lieux de Perec (review)

Surveying his own career in 1978 for the purposes of a short essay entitled "Notes sur ce que je cherche," Georges Perec suggested that his work was animated by four major impulses. First, a sociological impulse, a will to examine everyday life; second, an autobiographical current; third, a ludic bent; and finally, an inclination toward narrativity, a desire to write the kind of books that one reads flat out on one's bed. Even a casual reader of Perec will appreciate that those categories are not airtight, and that there is quite a bit of backing-and-forthing among them in the writer's production. Nonetheless, they make a good deal of sense when they are taken to describe general directions in Perec's writing. Among those four principal inclinations, the first has suffered with regard to the latter three in critical considerations of Perec since his death in 1982. In Mémoires du quotidien, Derek Schilling seeks to redress that, seeking also to recontextualize Perec's work as an important link in a sustained debate on the nature of the quotidian in the second half of the twentieth century.

Without a doubt, Georges Perec was a man of his time, one who embraced the zeitgeist and put it to work in productive—and sometimes highly idiosyncratic—ways. Reasoning that Perec came of intellectual age just at the moment when a history of event was gradually giving way to a sociology of the patterns of the quotidian, Schilling chooses to focus upon those texts that the author himself designated as being sociological in inspiration: Les Choses: Une histoire des années soixante (1965); Espèces d'espaces: Journal d'un usager de l'espace (1974); and Tentative de description de quelques lieux parisiens, a project that Perec was unable to bring to fruition and which, in its very incompletion, poses interesting questions about the representation of daily life. In order to clear a stage for that discussion, Schilling devotes a chapter to a rehearsal of reflections on the quotidian from the end of the Second World War to 1980. Calling upon Fernand Braudel, Henri Lefebvre, Maurice Blanchot, and Michel de Certeau in order to exemplify certain discursive trends in history, sociology, philosophy, and anthropology, Schilling provides a useful overview of the evolving theory of the everyday, a discourse in which Perec aimed to take his place.

The notion of place was capitally important for Perec, and it is one that echoes incessantly throughout his work. In the first instance, it was a difficult idea for him, granted that he had no place that he could identify, simply and unproblematically, as his own. He was impelled, Schilling argues, to imagine places that he might invest with identity. In some cases, those might be real places, rich in personal memory. In other cases, that personal memory might be more plural in character, perhaps even collective: in those cases, it is legitimate to speak of a sociology of the quotidian. Thus, among the many things that are at work in Les Choses, one may note an effort to catalogue the commonplaces of the times, as if it were only through the clichés of the endotic that those times could be understood. Thus, too, the manner in which Perec's work on places seeks to postulate a kind of collective autobiography, invoking the everyday as a powerful social memory bank.

Upon occasion, Schilling argues his brief for Perec-as-theorist with a great deal of vigor, for instance when he concludes the chapter dealing with Espèces d'espaces: "Esquissant une géographie néo-humaniste au carrefour de la sémiologie, de l'anthropologie et de la littérature, Perec n'aura cessé de rappeler que l'espace porte en luimême, par les usages qu'on en fait ou ceux qu'on rêve d'en faire, une puissante critique de la vie quotidienne et les bases d'une véritable existence commune" (128). He is...