ABSTRACT
This chapter first outlines how key features of Perec’s biography are reflected in the style and form of his writing, including how his creative use of rules is widely understood to be related to his personal encounters with loss and displacement. Perec’s marginal history and narrow escape from Nazi genocide are discussed alongside anticolonial sentiments expressed in his second book, as well as highlighting his (albeit also ironised) left political engagements. These general considerations provide a context for the close reading of Les Choses/Things (1956/1967) that follows, which explores materiality in the form of things as possessions. The emerging picture puts into question the ‘thingly’ status of the material goods as much as attending to the material fabrication of humans, since the former appears more vital than the flattened subjectivities of the main protagonists. Childhood appears at the beginning and end of Les Choses/Things as a generational but also socially weighted category. The Child as method analysis of this text highlights two features: first, how the key moment of reflexive transformation occurs in a postcolonial context (Tunisia) of distance from the protagonists’ metropolitan pleasures and pressures. Second, this not only produces a capitulation to the normative developmental trajectories of provincial bourgeois life of the normative White French citizen that they had been warding off, but its symbolisation shows the protagonists’ submission to these class and gendered generational imperatives as well as enactments of racial privilege built on an unreflected-upon colonial past. Child functions here as a marker of the classing and racialising of generational order, combining the commodified logic of accumulation with that of reproduction.
