ABSTRACT
Holocaust and its consequences—death, separation, absence, loss, nullity—are inscribed with insistence throughout Georges Perec's writings. 1 Yet these inscriptions adopt very different shapes. In Récits d'Ellis Island and Espèces d'espaces, there are direct and unequivocal allusions to the Holocaust; in Je me souviens, that order of reference is bound up in (and largely obscured by) other sorts of intertextualities, as the quotidian exerts a tyrannical force over history; in La vie mode d'emploi, stories of the Holocaust take their place in a grid of other stories elaborated with a view toward creating a new, ameliorated reality; as to La disparition, Perec's three-hundred-page novel written without the letter E, it can (and, I would argue, must) be read as an account of radical privation and loss. Even in those texts which appear most colored by formalist intransigence—crossword puzzles, heterogrammatic poetry—Perec disposes lacunas, figural of absence and loss, as the central integers in the otherwise flawless structure that is erected around them. Among his various writings, W ou le souvenir d'enfance distinguishes itself as the text where Perec grapples with the topoi of catastrophe in the most sustained and powerful manner. 2
