ABSTRACT
Turning finally to the works of Georges Perec, it is possible to argue that the horror of the machine, however irrevocable, may yet be superseded. Embracing mechanization as a formal principle, Perec composes his novels using literary “machines”: sets of “mechanical constraints” adopted as a means of liberating creative potential. Among the most famous of these “machines” is the omission of the letter “e” in A Void—a device that, as his most insightful critics have shown, silently reenacts the mechanized horrors of the Second World War: Perec’s father (père) was killed on the front, and his mother (mère) disappeared at Auschwitz; thus, the suppression of the “e” annihilates père, mère, and, indeed, Georges Perec himself. And yet, by the same gesture, the tyranny of mechanization is turned into an instrument of liberation, as the constraints of the generating mechanism become the occasion for imaginative work everywhere in excess of the rationalized principles on which it is built. In A Void, W or the Memory of Childhood, and Life a User’s Manual, Perec turns the devastating mechanical forces of the twentieth century into the instrument of their survival—and the condition of a new and infinitely creative life.
