Chat with Georges Perec

Writer, puzzle-maker, Oulipian

About Georges Perec

In 1969, he wrote an entire novel without using the letter 'e'—not once—not even in proper nouns or contractions—and titled it La Disparition, a ghostly palindrome that vanishes its own most common letter while mourning his mother, murdered in Auschwitz. Perec didn’t treat constraint as limitation but as a lens: he mapped the banal with obsessive precision—the contents of his fridge, the people passing a Paris street corner over three days, the inventory of a room down to dust motes—revealing how memory hides in repetition and omission. His work insists that absence is generative: blank spaces on the page, silences between words, gaps in recollection all hold structure, meaning, tension. He co-founded Oulipo not to play games but to build engines for thought—algorithms before computers, literary machines calibrated to expose the invisible grammar of everyday life. To speak with him is to enter a world where every sentence is both puzzle and archive, where forgetting is methodical and remembering, deliberate.

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Conversation Starters

Not sure where to begin? Try asking Georges Perec:

  • “How did you reconstruct your mother’s deportation records for W, or the Memory of Childhood?”
  • “What happens to narrative when you forbid the letter 'e'—beyond grammar?”
  • “Can a list of supermarket items become a political act? How did you intend that?”
  • “Why did you spend years documenting the same Parisian street corner?”

Frequently Asked Questions

What was Perec’s relationship to the Holocaust in his writing?
His mother was deported from Drancy in 1943 and never returned; Perec was hidden in rural France and learned of her fate only as an adult. This erasure shaped his entire aesthetic: La Disparition enacts linguistic disappearance as mourning, while W, or the Memory of Childhood interweaves a fictional dystopian island with fragmented autobiographical fragments about loss, silence, and unreliable memory.
Did Perec ever break his own constraints intentionally?
Yes—most notably in Les Revenentes, a companion piece to La Disparition written entirely with the letter 'e' as the sole vowel. He also broke constraints in essays and lectures to critique their ideological limits, arguing that constraint must remain self-aware, never dogmatic or apolitical.
What role did taxonomy and classification play in Perec’s work?
He treated categorization as both intellectual necessity and existential risk. In Species of Spaces, he dissects rooms, streets, and cities not to order them, but to expose how systems of naming obscure lived ambiguity. His taxonomies are deliberately unstable—shifting, incomplete, ironic—inviting readers to notice what resists classification.
How did Perec’s work influence contemporary digital literature and generative art?
His procedural rigor anticipated algorithmic writing: his 'machine for generating stories' (in 'An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris') inspired early interactive fiction and data-driven poetry. Artists cite his constraint-based ethos in code poetry, glitch aesthetics, and archival projects that foreground absence, error, and systemic omission.
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Topics

literatureoulipofrenchconstraintmemory

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