“I do no read much, but I have never stopped re-reading Flaubert and
Jules Verne, Roussel and Kafka, Leiris
and Queneau; I re-read the books I love and I love the books I re-read, and
each time it is the same enjoyment, whether I re-read twenty pages, three
chapters, or the whole book; an enjoyment of complicity, of collusion, or more
especially, and, in addition, of having in the end found kin again”
(W, or The Memory of Childhood, Georges Perec)
(W, or The Memory of Childhood, Georges Perec)
Reading George Perec is like rekindling
a kinship you savored once upon a time. You remind yourself of the rare moments
of clarity, presence of warm, intelligent mind and the gentle camaraderie you
felt all along. From Perec, who blended mathematics, reportage, linguistics,
cognitive studies and Dewey into delectable fiction, you expect nothing short
of objective and unforgettable insights, even if it is on his own orphaned childhood
etched by the holocaust.
Perec explores his own
unorganized and unyielding memories from childhood which he attempts to revisit
in his latter life. In parallel to the autobiographic narrative, he invites us
to the life in W, an allegorical nation with Olympic ideals where human spirit is
systematically crushed and enterprise is thwarted by intent and design, while
the onlookers, cheered on by petty officials among us bay for their blood. That
he draws this blood curdling picture without a drop of malice or self-pity
gives us a locus-standi to view the inner workings of inhuman machinery at its
destructive best.
Then there is rumination on
questions of writing itself. He is aware of the unending oscillation between an
as-yet undiscovered language of sincerity and subterfuges of writing worried
about shoring up own defenses. Perec sees the written words as blank, neutral,
a sign of a once-and-for-all annihilation of the urge to say what was probably
unsaid or unsayable. For he wants to rid himself of the scandal of silence, of
his kinsmen and self, and in the process assert his own life as the one who
lived amongst them.
Having escaped W, Gaspard Winckler
(the alter ego of Perec) is confronted by Otto Apfelstahl who is on a quest to
find a shipwrecked boy. Otto confirms that he has exhausted the last trace of
the boy with Gaspard. Gaspard wonders whether his luck is any better than the
boy’s. Perec suggests what’s out there for the novice from the champion of life’s
user manual in a flourish:
How can you explain that what he (novice) is seeing is not anything
horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something
he can rid his mind of? How can you explain that this is life, this is what
there’ll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it’s
pointless believing something else exists or pretend to believe in something
else, that it’s not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it’s
not even worth your time pretending to believe that there must be something behind
it, or beneath it, or above it? That’s what there is, and that’s all. There are
competitions every day, where you Win or Lose. You have to fight to live. There
is no alternative. It is not possible to close your eyes to it, it is not
possible to say no. There’s no recourse, no mercy, no salvation to be had from
anyone. There’s not even any hope that time sort thing out. There’s this, there’s
what you’ve seen, and now and again it will be less horrible that what you’ve
seen. But wherever you turn your eyes, that’s what you’ll see, you will not see
anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true”
(W, or The Memory of Childhood, Georges Perec)
