Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film, and Comic Art in French Autobiography

8. Georges Perec, Memory, and Photography

189 Georges Perec, Memory, and Photography Peter Wagstaff A Crisis of Representation Georges Perec’s texts are characterized by a preoccupation with the themes of absence, loss, and emptiness; this may appear at odds with the ludic nature of much of his writing. Yet it is the unsettling tension between, on the one hand, his cryptic ingenuity and playfulness and, on the other, the void at the center of the narratives that underscores both a personal trauma and a more widely applicable crisis of expression and representation. In exploring ways to resolve that crisis of representation, Perec does more than confront the personal trauma; his narrative strategies, focusing on the delineation of emptiness, oscillate between the verbal and the visual and, 190 thereby, offer one possible solution to a problem that, through the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, has beset all those attempting to come to terms with Theodor Adorno’s aporetic dictum “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (30). Examples abound in Perec’s work of the leitmotiv of absence: the lipogrammatic omission of the letter “e” from La Disparition [A Void] and the missing final piece of the jigsaw puzzle in La Vie mode d’emploi [Life: A User’s Manual] exemplify a strategy that seeks to isolate his core concerns through a refusal to spell out the details, inviting the reader instead to pierce the opaque screen of allusion and metaphor. Perec is confronted with a twofold problem of representation , both facets of which are rooted in an awareness of the limitations of language and give full weight to the complexity of Adorno’s observation, with its insistence on the “moral peril” of attempting to give aesthetic expression to mass extermination (Martin 2). The first, common to all who have sought a means to describe the Holocaust, poses the challenge of expressing the inexpressible or, rather, of acknowledging the chasm that separates the event and the language available to describe it.1 The second facet of Perec’s problem of representation both exacerbates the challenge and offers an oblique resolution in the context of the conjunction of the unsayable and the unknowable: the uncertainty surrounding the fate of his mother at Auschwitz, ignorance of the language and culture of his forebears, incomprehension of his Jewish identity. At stake is a sense of selfhood: hence the profoundly autobiographical nature of his writing, even when the texts offer no obvious autobiographical substance. It is of course the negation of the autonomous subject—itself at the heart of the autobiographical project—that is the aim of the Nazi ideology that found its most extreme expression in the extermination camps. georges perec, memory, and photography Perec’s preoccupation with absence and the challenge of expression is one that lends itself to analysis by reference to the term “postmemory,” proposed by Marianne Hirsch to describe “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated.” Hirsch’s principal interest related to the children of Holocaust survivors, although she suggests that the term might be appropriate for “other second generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences” (22). The problematical status of memory, as it is enshrined in this formulation, seems apposite in the case of Perec who, denied access to generational memory by the deaths of his parents, in violent circumstances, in his early childhood and to a wider cultural memory by their migration to France from their native Poland before his birth, defines his relationship to the past by oblique reference to the one faculty that can provide access to it. It is in this context that I want to examine Perec’s autobiographical work and, in particular, two works from the last decade of his life. The first, W ou le souvenir d’enfance [W or the Memory of Childhood], with its two alternating and menacingly convergent narratives, one fictional, the other referential but marked by hesitation and lack of memory, is described by Philippe Lejeune as “a new autobiography” and “one of the very few books that have seemed to me to be doing something completely new in a genre—the childhood narrative—endlessly devoted to repeating the same procedures” (La Mémoire et l’oblique 71). The other is the less well...