Alison James
Columbia University

Georges Perec: Politics, history and the temptation of optimism

In 1959, Georges Perec and some of his friends decided to create a review, "La Ligne générale". Its goal would be to redefine a Marxist aesthetics. Although the review never came into being, several of the group’s articles were published. Perec’s early essays on literature display a surprising optimism about humankind’s ability to master  history and the contribution of literature to a future Marxist revolution. Such political preoccupations may seem to be a far cry from novels such as "La Disparition"  and "La Vie mode d’emploi". However, the "Ligne générale" essays are above all an attempt to go beyond what Perec perceived as the great impasse facing the contemporary novel: the choice between  the Sartrian "roman engagé" and the apolitical Nouveau Roman. Seeing the Nouveau Roman as a "refus du réel," but also rejecting the possibility of a direct representation of reality, Perec wishes to renew the concept of realism in different terms. Most revealing, in relation to Perec’s later literary work, is the essay on Robert Antelme which discusses the problem of realism in relation to concentration camp literature. In Perec’s eyes, Antelme’s indirect, fragmented mode of narration is more successful than other, conventionally linear accounts of the concentration camp experience, precisely because it places a "grille" between the immediacy of the experience and the reader’s understanding.

This notion clearly owes much to the Brechtian concept of "Verfremdung," but it should not be dismissed as merely an example of a temporary Marxist phase in Perec’s life. Perec’s autobiography "W ou le souvenir d’enfance" (1975) approaches its topic in a manner which Philippe Lejeune has characterized as "oblique," and which is perhaps not very far from the method of "distanciation" propounded in the "Ligne générale" essays.  Perec’s writings on the "infra-ordinaire" (Espèces d’espaces, Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien) involve a similar but inverse shift in perspective on the part of the reader: by enumerating apparently insignificant details of everyday life, they bring us closer to things we usually ignore. Once again, the question of realism and its implications is at stake. Furthermore, we can perhaps reinterpret the role of Oulipian methods in Perec’s work in the light of the issues raised in the earlier essays (Perec joined the Oulipo in 1967). Rather than concluding that Perec simply became "less political" as he grew older, we should recognize the complexity of the shift from a Marxist to an Oulipian approach to writing, and from the idealistic optimism of the essays to the more pessimistic literary texts. Ultimately, despite his changing conception of literature, Perec’s concern with the writer’s relationship to history remains constant.