Perec, Borges, and a silent solution for La Disparition

So the person who knows how to read, byfollowing up various clues, he can unerringlyarrive at the hidden meaning for himself.

St. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana

( . . . )

Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d'enfance

Introduction

On page 111 of Perec's lipogrammatic novel La Disparition, we read:

Or donc, attaqua Amaury Conson un instant plus tard, j'ai lu un bon bout, sinon la plupart du Journal d'Anton Voyl. Il y fait cinq ou six fois allusion à un roman qui, dit-il, fournirait la solution. Il y a, par ci, par là, tout un tas d'indications qui, croyons-nous, ont pour but d'approfondir la signification du roman, sans pourtant nous affranchir tout à fait.

Let us briefly recall the plot of the novel. Anton Voyl has disappeared and his friends try to find clues or possible explanations. One of them, Amaury Conson, finds Voyl's journal. The journal has the same title as the novel within which it exists. Like Amaury Conson, we too are after written clues within La Disparition. The goal of my essay is to provide the above paragraph with the most complete sense possible, that is, in the words of Amaury Conson, to provide la solution to Perec's La Disparition, and to show how this solution helps to approfondir la signification du roman. Which will lead to the strong claim, I anticipate, that Georges Perec enters the Oulipo less through the work and ideas of Raymond Queneau than through those of Jorge Luis Borges.

A Curious Omission

The history of the reading of La Disparition is worth reviewing. Legend has it that when first published, some of its early reviewers failed to perceive the lipogram. They read it as an intriguing, even irritating novel, in unexplainably awkward language, telling convoluted stories of people doomed by hereditary damnations, with a narrative reminiscent of detective fiction. Other early readers were non-readers to a higher degree: Roland Barthes, for instance, who had been supportive of Perec at the beginning of his career, refused to so much as open the book. Barthes' example would prove to be paradigmatic as a response: La Disparition is one of those books that many people feel they need not go to the trouble of reading because they know the procedure used to compose it, as if the text could be no more than the evidence of that which they already know. Moreover, they do not think much of the procedure itself, regarded as little more than a trick, however well executed and elaborate. This, however, is to mistake La Disparition for one of those conceptual works in which the concept—in this case, the procedure—exhausts the novel. Perhaps the Oulipo is not innocent of that kind of works, but in the case of La Disparition, this approach is a mistake. Not only because Perec's novel is not a conceptual work in this sense, but also and chiefly because the text demands to be read and re-read.

This was understood by the few who took the trouble to read the novel with attention. Slowly but firmly, a solid body of criticism started to develop around La Disparition. And in the forty years since it was published, even if it is still the case that many people keep mistaking the procedure for the book, the list of works devoted to analyzing its technical devices, the matter of its narrative, the borrowings and allusions, the self-references and autobiographical marks, among other aspects, is constantly growing, and reaching the condition of an exegetical tradition in itself. La Disparition may well be an irritating book—and in that respect it would be in the same class as Finnegans Wake, Tender Buttons, or Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique. But a strong case can be made that this is the masterpiece of the irritating book.

However, another form of non-reading occurs within this tradition as well, to the point that we could talk about a disparition that takes place in the reading of La Disparition: that of Borges. I offer two...