Forty years after his death, Pierre Lane recalls how the author of “things” (1965) and “life instructions” (1978) was an outstanding “language experimenger”.
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While, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Georges Perec’s death, on March 3, 1982, the threshold announces the publication in May of places, exciting unfinished site that heard, on more than Ten years, record the passage of time that alters the inventory, writing as Remembrance, Pierre Lane proposes a subtle and delicate evocation of the author of things (Renaudot 1965 price), which attached to the material life as well as traces of the past to ward off the forgetfulness where the memories are damaged.
Exploring, in 1979, their Jewish identity and their Jewish origins through the stories of Ellis Island – Robert Bober filmed while Perec took notes -, the writer confided to fear the trip to Poland, land of his erased ancestors, like their memory, during the shoah.
If he finally went there in April 1981, he renounces seeing Auschwitz where his mother was murdered in 1943; But in Lubartow, paternal cradle, he does croque a reinvented city, droicated from rare snibuses, like, Orphan Furgeur at twelve, he crashed with a clear and limpid feature, in sitting at Françoise Dolto, a world. struggle where he was without support. This will be the line and the language that will remedy it. With a visionary audacity that makes Perec, as soon as he discovers the Potential Literature Open (Oulipo) imagined by Raymond Queneau, a major figure of the movement.
poetic models
Special mention for the relevance and fantasy of the Belgo-Switzerland artist Clarence Stieret, which, from 2014, had invested, by the drawing then by volume, the 99 pieces of the fictitious building of 17 e Arrondissement where Perec has located the affair intrigue of the life of employment (Medici price 1978), until suggesting the visit to an animated film – 11 Simon-Crubecier Street – Who is there? Directed by Marc Philippine (2019).
It hides in bed to devour Jules Verne, loses his pencils or, later, a recognized writer, composed, recluse to the Moulin d’Andé, Perec appears figured as his fiction characters in such precise models as poetic. Except when the situation, too serious – the separation of with his mother whom he will not see – command the effacement of the staging, a simple drawing fixing the moment without theatricality.
Mixed with the presentation of photos, manuscripts and other documents, these sketches make justice to the facetious curiosity of a private childhood kid, who conjured amnesia by investing fiction, multiplied with malice the slopes, declined The games of words and meanings, the wildest challenges – the deletion of the letter “E” then its hegemonic reappearance, of the disappearance (1969) to the rendents (1972).
“Experimentant language” out of norm, Georges Perec, restored by this shiny puzzle, appears as the resolution of an enigma, that of conjured forgetting.