Between Narration and Experience

This article explores the interplay between the genres of autobiography and fictional narrative in Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance . Beginning with the premise that both fiction and autobiography elicit a readerly absorption that effaces the act of enunciation such that the act of writing is foreclosed from the manifest text, I argue that in W ou le souvenir d'enfance, the enunciative plane becomes inscribed as a “blank” in the text. This elision, then, becomes an emblem for the very undepictability that, I argue, serves as the real subject of Perec's text – the memories that are missing from the writer's consciousness, and the resulting inability to identify himself with the child he once was. The text's refusal to remain secure in either the genre of fiction or autobiography emphasizes the undepictable at the expense of the represented content. Such a strategy, I argue, serves, on one level, as an approach toward depicting the trauma of the writer's childhood in occupied France, but on another level, as an exploration of the limits of the ability of narrative to represent reality.