M\'emoire du quotidien: Les lieux de Perec
Abstract
In 1950's and 1960's France, the emergence of the everyday as a category and a concept at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and the social sciences marked an important shift in intellectual history: from the actor-event nexus to the "long duration" of Annales's historiography (Braudel); from narratives of class emancipation to an understanding of alienation in spatial terms (Lefebvre); from the existential project to the ontological priority of an everydayness without subjective content (Blanchot). As Certeau would reiterate, the quotidian composed an irreducible level of practice that dominant systems of thought had repressed by necessity but which harbored utopian qualities.^ Like these postwar thinkers, the French polygraph Georges Perec classified a significant portion of his work as a "'sociological' questioning of the everyday." From his first novel, Things, a Flaubertian montage of petty bourgeois commonplaces, to hyperrealist set pieces and time lapse experiments conducted in the streets of Paris during the 1970's, Perec redefined narrative and descriptive genres by appropriating modes of viewing, recording, and archiving often associated with descriptive ethnography, sociology, and semiology. This study examines the ways in which such texts, while establishing an inventory of material culture, reinterpret the function of writing in relation to the rhetorical tradition of artificial memory and topics described by Yates and Barthes.^ I argue that the "memory place" and the "commonplace" provide Perec, a child of the Holocaust, with tools for an oblique, serialized self-description which effaces autobiographical specificity and stresses the commonality of lived space. Esthetic minimalism and hypermnesia appear in Perec's work both as a compensatory formation and as a project in experimental poetics: places are defined negatively, in relation to another, unsayable place (Auschwitz), and positively, as the site of an exhaustive reordering of the real. In a culture where the existence of a collective memory is increasingly predicated on national ideals (cf. Nora's Lieux de memoire), Perec's description of the everyday gives symptomatic expression to historical trauma only to forge a potential memory for a collective whose sole identity lies in its passage through an inexhaustible series of places, in the city and in discourse. ^
Subject Area
Literature, Modern|Literature, Romance
Recommended Citation
Derek G Schilling,
"M\'emoire du quotidien: Les lieux de Perec"
(January 1, 1997).
Dissertations available from ProQuest.
Paper AAI9814913.
http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9814913
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