annihilation

Perec on Friday

The first in an occasional series, foreshadowed by "techniques of the reading body".

W or The Memory of Childhood. The "or" in the title is ambivalent. It straddles the conjunction's two meanings: both (either) repetition, as in "right or starboard"; and (or) difference, as in "right or left." For this is a book that likewise straddles two narratives, two stories that both repeat and differ. On the one hand, a fiction involving a deaf mute child, shipwrecked off Tierra del Fuego, whose name has been appropriated by an army deserter. On the other hand, a memoir of Perec's own life in the shadow of his parents' deaths, his father we are told in the forces as the Germans advanced on Paris, his mother in or on the way to Auschwitz.

The two texts cross-pollinate each other by means of subterranean resonances. As Perec himself says, "you might almost believe they had nothing in common, but they are in fact inextricably bound up with each other." Both, most obviously, are concerned with muteness, with what can and cannot be said, with what lies beyond language and writing.

Here, then, is part of the memoir, at the end of a chapter in which Perec reprints an earlier account of his memories of his parents, correcting his errors by means of footnotes, but also preserving those errors as testament to the uncertainty and provisionality of his recollection:

I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do not know if what I might have to say is unsaid because it is unsayable (the unsayable is not buried in writing, it is what prompted it in the first place); I know that what I say is blank, is neutral, is a sign, once and for all, of a once-and-for-all annihilation.

[. . .] All I shall ever find in my very reiteration is the final refraction of a voice that is absent from writing, the scandal of their silence and of mine. I am not writing in order to say that I shall say nothing, I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say. I write: I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life. (42)

Comments

[s0metim3s]

The more recent post on the chronicle makes an interesting companion piece to this.

[Matt]

Indeed. Jon, thanks for this.

I see there's some Perec-related at The Complete Review.