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Georges Perec's `Negative' Autobiography
Codesto solo oggi
possiamo dirti:
Ciò che non siamo,
ciò che non vogliamo
[Today this only
may we tell you:
What we are not,
what we do not want.]
— Eugenio Montale
I begin this presentation on the `negative' autobiography of Georges Perec with
a citation from the Italian poet Montale in part to indicate that the trope of
inexpressibility, or what in French is most often referred to as l'indicible, is
not the invention of one Georges Perec, but is rather one condition of literary
production in the twentieth century. Also, in exploring the connection between
Perec's ‘negative' autobiography and the arguably similar approach taken to
autobiography by Jacques Derrida in his recent works, I am not making any claims
for priority, influence, or even shared background. What I am trying to do is
to go beyond the approach that says Perec's autobiographical works skirt the
unsayable and then concentrates on their genesis, strategies, and models of
production, as for instance in the exemplary work of Philippe Lejeune. Despite
Perec's repeated claim not to have any childhood memories, "Je n'ai pas de
souvenirs d'enfance" ("I have no memories of childhood," W 13), he returns
repeatedly to aspects of his early life in his writings, utilizing various
strategies as he acknowledges (cf. Jsn 86). How to speak the unspeakable, or in
Derrida's formulation "Comment ne pas parler," is not an empty or rhetorical
question, nor is it a means of simply pointing to a limit to expression around
which other kinds of expression are then organized. "Comment ne pas parler" or
how to say the unsayable is an approach to how to speak (or write) of what is
not, what has been but has disappeared, what is dead but interiorized by the
subject as crypte. Like the via negativa of the medieval Christian theologians
(Derrida's ostensible subject in "Comment ne pas parler") the ‘negative'
autobiography of Georges Perec is not a non-autobiography, but an autobiography
written under the sign of the not, the absent, the disappeared.
Perec himself gives the briefest possible account of his early life, in W ou le
souvenir d'enfance, saying:
Jusqu'à ma douzième année à peu près, mon histoire tient en quelques
lignes: j'ai perdu mon père à quatre ans, ma mère à six; j'ai passé la guerre
dans diverses pensions de Villard-de-Lans. En 1945, la sœur de mon père et son
mari m'adoptèrent.
Until about my twelfth year, my history only takes a couple lines: I
lost my father when I was four, my mother when I was six; I spent the war in
various boarding-schools in Villard-de-Lans. In 1945, my father's sister and
her husband adopted me. (W 13; my trans.)
What he describes here has recently been given much greater amplication by David
Bellos in his monumental biography of Perec, the first hundred or so pages of
which detail his family background, the fate of his parents, his own extremely
fortuitous escape to the haven of Villard. Perec's father Idcek, or Izzie, was
killed as a soldier during the German invasion of France in June 1940; his
mother, Cyrla, was rounded up in Paris, and deported via Drancy to Auschwitz,
where she was murdered. Georges Perec himself was sent on a Red Cross train to
the safe haven of Villard-de-Lans, east of Grenoble—it would seem because of his
status as an "orphelin de guerre"—or he almost certainly would have perished, as
well. One of the great strengths of the Bellos biography is the thoroughness
with which he treats Perec's family background and the extended family that took
him in after his immediate family disappeared. Another of the strengths of the
Bellos work is the persistent reminders of the effects of this "disappearance"
throughout the rest of Perec's life and literary production.
How one can not speak of these things, or "Comment ne pas parler" ("How to avoid
speaking"), is a question Derrida interrogates in his essay of that title, first
delivered at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (Psyché 535-595; trans. DNT
73-142). This essay addresses negative theology, an area of philosophical
inquiry Derrida has often been associated with because of what critics view as
the negative capacity of deconstruction. But, as he says in the essay, this is
paradoxically an area he had never consciously attempted, for complex reasons,
to study. This idea of being somehow forced, or backed into, talking about the
topic leads to an unsettling autobiographical turn. In a cryptic footnote, he
says that this is his most auto-biographical essay, because he is not talking
about important areas of his personal experience. He confines himself in this
essay to discussing negative theology in the Greek and Christian contexts,
leaving out those of Jewish and Muslim thought. Derrida explains this decision:
Malgré ce silence, en vérité à cause de lui, on me permettra peut-être de
relire cette conférence comme le discours le plus «autobiographique» que j'aie
jamais risqué. On mettra à ce mot tous les guillemets qu'on pourra. Il faut
entourer de précautions l'hypothèse d'une présentation de soi passant par un
discours sur la théologie négative des autres. Mais si je devais un jour me
raconter, rien dans ce récit ne commencerait à parler de la chose même si je ne
butais sur ce fait: je n'ai encore jamais pu, faute de capacité, de compétence
ou d'auto-autorisation, parler de ce que ma naissance, comme on dit, aurait dû
me donner de plus proche: le Juif, l'Arabe.
Ce petit morceau d'autobiographie le confirme obliquement. Il est
joué dans toutes mes langues étrangères: le français, l'anglais, l'allemand, le
grec, le latin, le philosophique, le méta-philosophique, le chrétien, etc.
Bref: comment ne pas parler de soi? Mais aussi bien: comment le
faire sans se laisser inventer par l'autre? ou sans inventer l'autre?
Despite this silence, or in fact because of it, one will perhaps permit me
to interpret this lecture as the most "autobiographical" speech I have ever
risked. One will attach to this word as many quotation marks as possible. It
is necessary to surround with precautions the hypothesis of a self-presentation
passing through a speech on the negative theology of others. But if one day I
had to tell my story, nothing in this narrative would start to speak of the
thing itself if I did not come up against this fact; for lack of capacity,
competence or self-authorizations, I have never yet been able to speak of wht my
birth, as one says, should have made closest to me: the Jew, the Arab.
This small piece of autobiography confirms it obliquely. It is
performed in all of my foreign languages: French, English, German, Greek, Latin,
the philosophic, Christian, etc.
In brief: how not to speak of oneself? But also: how to do it
without allowing oneself to be invented by the other? or without inventing the
other? (Psyché 562n; trans. DNT 135-6n; cf. Baker, DET 119)
Certainly one way to connect this statement of ‘negative' autobiography with
that of Georges Perec would be through a comparison of their shared Jewish
backgrounds, as well e never ye their common lack of ease in seeing themselves
in this context (cf. Benabou 82).
But since I have said that I won't
