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:
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:
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)
But since I have said that I won't pursue this avenue (comparison of shared backgrounds), I want instead to explore briefly Derrida's sense of the not, the ne pas parler, the comment of the ne pas parler. Why, for instance, should an essay on negative theology (by his own admission) be Derrida's most autobiographical statement? Moreover, why should this autobiographical element be most telling in what has been left out of the discussion? Going very quickly, one could say that the element that is left out is the generalizable rule ordering the attempt to speak about anything at all. In this way, Derrida's discourse on negative autobiography represents one way of talking about the trace, or différance. As he says in "Comment ne pas parler": "Une trace a eu lieu.…même si elle n'arrive qu'à s'effacer, si elle n'advient qu'en s'effaçant, l'effacement aura eu lieu, fût-il de cendre. Il y a là cendre" ["A trace has taken place….even if it occurs only to efface itself, if it arises only in effacing itself, the effacement will have taken place, even if its place is only in the ashes. Il y a là cendre"] (Psyché 560-561; DNT 98; cf. Baker, DET 122). This statement (which I have cleaned up through my own use of ellipsis) clearly moves in the same area as Derrida's book-length work of ‘negative' autobiography, Feu la cendre, including ending with the statement what is the phrase-clé of that work. The trace has always already taken place: it is what permits and authorizes any kind of utterance at all; it is what allows even the effacement of that utterance, or event, even if the event is only one of effacement, elimination, disappearance: ashes there are.
Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance is, as many scholars have pointed out, a painfully difficult text to read. The strategy of alternating chapters between the fantastic history of the island of W and the account of Perec's early life presents its own difficulties for interpretation. The story of the island of W, with its social organization based around a dystopian model of sports moving inexorably toward an assimilation to the Nazi death camps, almost caused Perec to give up the work, before he resolved the issue of how to shape the material into a book by adding the personal material that apparently was written fairly quickly. There is much more that could be said, but I want to move directly into what for me (and others) is something like the center of the personal or autobiographical part of the text, the end of Chapter 8:
I don't
know if I have nothing to say, I know that I don't say anything; I don't
know if what I would have to say isn't said because it is unsayable (the
unsayable isn't woven into the writing, it is what has long ago brought
it forth); I know that what I say is blank, neutral, a sign once and for
all of an annihilation once and for all.…
I write: I write because we lived together, because I was among them, shadow
in the middle of their shadows, body close to their bodies; I write because
they have left in me their indelible mark and the trace of it is the writing:
their memory is death to the writing; the writing is the memory of their
death and the affirmation of my life. (W 58-59) [my trans.]
Since it goes deep into the heart of the mystery, each reader, I would suggest, is left to respond to such a passage by mobilizing his or her own personal or autobiographical resources. My own response to this passage, and to the autobiography of Perec in its various forms, is shaped by the death of my mother when I was seven. This cannot compare, of course, to the circumstances of the event that swallowed up Perec's mother and others in his family. What I want to point to is something that has not been completely explored in any of the other approaches I have seen to Perec's ‘negative' autobiography. An aspect of the impossibility of dealing with the death of his mother is the unspeakable, the unknowable, manner of her death. Another aspect of the impossibility of recovering his early memories is common, I would say, to nearly everyone who loses one or both parents at an early age. Not only is the other person gone forever, but so is the little person that is one's previous self. Drawing on my own experience, I can say that it is often my mother as the link to my early life that I experience as missing. So when Perec says, "Je n'ai pas de souvenirs d'enfance" ("I have no memories of childhood"), he is not only referring obliquely to the holocaust and the destruction of an entire world inhabited by myriad living persons, he is also, I think, referring literally to the lack of almost any link to his early life. It is almost too painful to be believed that his one memory of his mother is when she put him on the train that would take him to the country (and so save his life, but not her own). Philippe Lejeune has shown, through analyzing the various states of Perec's texts about this memory and comparing these in turn with the memory of living witnesses, that none of Perec's writings about this incident correspond strictly with what actually could have happened (Lejeune 79ff.). To mention only one "error" in this memory, Perec usually places this incident in 1942, whereas his older living relatives insist it must have been in 1941. But, as Derrida theorizes, and Perec's text demonstrates, there is no way not to speak of this missing part of his past, because it is what allows all the rest of his experience and writing to come into being at all. Perec moves as close to—dare we call it the truth?—of his writerly experience as it is possible to do when he says that he must write about this missing part of his past (even if he can't really know anything about it on the level that the literary researcher of textual genesis can reconstruct) because he was once part of them, his body was near to theirs, he moved in their world and they in his, and this will always be the case, despite his own inability to recall it or possess it directly.
This would be the strong sense of Perec's remark in "Notes sur ce que je cherche" ("Notes on what I am seeking" 1978) that "presque aucun de mes livres n'échappe tout à fait à un certain marquage auto-biographique" ("almost none of my books escapes entirely a certain autobiographical marking"), as opposed to his relatively banal follow-up parenthetical sense, "(par example en insérant dans un chapitre en cours une allusion à un événement survenu dans la journée ["for example by inserting in a chapter in progress an allusion to an event that happened during the day" )" (P/C 10-11). Yet, even here, one would have to say that Perec's special genius as a writer was to have been able to blend in the most banal, quotidian, everyday events into the constantly changing—and constrained—structures of his fictional and poetic creations. When he comments in an interview from roughly the same time, "Le travail de la mémoire" ("Memory Work" 1979), on the different approaches to autobiographical materials in his writings, his comments go even further:
Therefore, if you will, there are three aspects in the work of memorializing. First quotidian existence flatly presented, then the search for my own history in a traditional manner and finally this fictional memory. There is even a fourth which would be of the domain of, how to say it, of ‘encryption,' of an inscription so completely encrypted, and which would be the notation of elements of memory as in a fiction like Life a User's Manual but with a practically internal usage. [my trans.]
Following Perec's categories, as Philippe Lejeune among others has done, we would place Je me souviens in the first category, W ou le souvenir d'enfance in the second, and Récits d'Ellis Island in the third, with Perec himself placing La Vie mode d'emploi into an even more interesting fourth category (along with Les choses, La disparition, and other of Perec's most accomplished works).
The self-imposed constraint that Perec posed for the composition of Je me souviens was that each of the memories that he came up with should be available to anyone roughly his age in his culture. This leads to the desired effect that Lejeune has described with uncharacteristic delicacy: "Pendant que ces figures collectives s'agitent sur le devant de la scène, éclairées par les projecteurs, chacun entraperçoit, du coin de l'œil, dans la pénombre des coulisses, les fantômes de sa vie à soi" ("While these collective figures move about in the front of the stage, lit by floodlights, each person catches a glimpse, from the corner of their eye, in the shadow of the offstage space, the phantoms of their interior life" 241-42). The great success of the work, then, following Lejeune's analysis, is that Perec lays out the richness of memory, its deep embeddedness in culture and life-forms, at the same time as the level of expression and even the memories themselves remain on a level that is, as Perec says, as flat as possible. For myself, I have to say that I experience this richness mostly from the outside, as a tantalizing reminder of the untranslatability of culture despite the completely transparent meaning of the language used. Even where there is a shared experience, as in "Je me souviens de Lee Harvey Oswald" ("I remember Lee Harvey Oswald" [#265]), there is fundamental element of asymmetry that is in itself quite fascinating. I also had the experience of being sent back to the text that Perec himself says he used as an intertext, Joe Brainard's I Remember (1970), and discovering there both a quite different kind of textual experiment from Perec's (in this I am in agreement with Lejeune) and an interesting vehicle of experiencing both that text and my own memory materials. In short, Perec's Je me souviens crystallizes an exemplary act of generosity.
Derrida, in "Comment ne pas parler," tosses off some tantalizing remarks linking le don, or the gift, with cendre, or ashes. I think it would be possible, given a further expansion of some of the ideas developed here, to indicate with some precision that Perec's gift stems inevitably from those elements of his `negative' autobiography around which all of his work circles. To make these links, one would have to attend to the common thinking of both Perec and Derrida on the cryptogramme. For example, Perec in "Histoire du lipogramme," his contribition to the first collective Oulipo volume, begins with one of his only sustained references to the literature of Jewish mysticism. Developing the mystical approach to the task of writing the holy, which he seems to have taken equally from Scholem and Borges, Perec says, in part: "le Livre est un cryptogramme dont l'Alphabet est le chiffre" ("the Book is a cryptogram of which the Alphabet is the cipher" 73). Later in the same essay he makes an even stronger link between the lipogram and the cryptogram, in a sentence that begins: "La probabilité lipogrammatique (qui est une des bases de la cryptographie)…" ("Lipogrammatic probabilility [which is one of the bases of cryptography]" 77). These very slight references give some fuller context for the action of "encryptage" ("encryption") that he claimed to characterize his use of autobiographical materials in La Vie mode d'emploi and elsewhere. Derrida, in ways that I have explored more fully elsewhere, has consistent recourse to the notions of crypte and cryptogramme, stemming both from the psychoanalytic discourse of Abraham and Torok, and from his own ongoing reflections on writing. A fuller exploration of the connections between Derrida's theorizing and Perec's more complexly autobiographical works, such as La Vie mode d'emploi, will undoubtedly have to await yet another occasion.
Peter Baker, Towson University