Living Room

ABSTRACT

As creatures of space, we think about space in a variety of ways, some of them fairly straightforward, others more than passingly vexed. It is legitimate to say that as much as we inhabit space, space inhabits us, significantly shaping the way we imagine ourselves and the way we come to be in the world. The French writers Georges Perec and Edmond Jabès reflected long and hard on the notion of space in an effort to adapt it to their own particular purposes. While both conceive space as one of the fundamental categories of their writerly projects, they stake out positions on that issue that are very different indeed and that define two opposing poles on a horizon of possibility. Reading Perec and Jabès, we are inevitably led to rethink our own position with regard to literature and the spaces that it limns and to ask ourselves where we stand.

KEYWORDS:

• Horizon
• inhabit
• Jabès
• literature
• Perec
• position
• reading
• space
• writers

Notes

1. “Ulcérations” was first published in 1974 as the inaugural volume of the privately printed Bibliothèque Oulipienne. It subsequently appeared in La Clôture et autres poèmes 55–67.

2. Other examples of that form can be found in La Clôture et autres poèmes.

3. See Jacques Bens, “Queneau oulipien” 25: “Car les membres de l'OuLiPo n'ont jamais caché leur horreur de l'aléatoire, des cartomanciennes de salon et du ptit-bonheur-la-chance de bastringue: ‘L'OuLiPo, c'est l'anti-hasard,' affirma un jour sans rire l'OuLiPien Claude Berge, ce qui ne laisse subsister aucun doute sur l'aversion qu'on a pour le cornet à dés.”

4. See Anne Roche's remark about Antoine Volodine: “The catastrophe has always already happened, before the first page of the book” (54).

5. See Perec's “Histoire du lipogramme” 92: “En ce sens, la suppression de la lettre, du signe typographique, du support élémentaire, est une opération plus neutre, plus nette, plus décisive, quelque chose comme le degré zéro de la contrainte, à partir duquel tout devient possible.”

6. See Jean Lescure, “Petite Histoire de l'Oulipo” 36.

7. See Goffman, Asylums 3–124.

8. Perec, Les Mots croisés 3.

9. See Joseph Guglielmi, La Ressemblance impossible 18–19: “Vouloir parler de Jabès, aujourd'hui, c'est aborder nécessairement, en son extrême complexité, la problématique du livre.”

10. Anne Roche identifies a similar effect in Volodine, pointing toward “these paradoxical spaces where one advances without advancing” (52).

11. See Blanchot 318: “Le poème est l'exil, et le poète qui lui appartient appartient à l'insatisfaction de l'exil, est toujours hors de lui-même, hors de son lieu natal, appartient à l'étranger, à ce qui est le dehors sans intimité et sans limite, cet écart que Hölderlin nomme, dans sa folie, quand il y voit l'espace infini du rythme.”

12. See Spivak's response to a question about her status as an “outsider”: “I have thought about that question. Even after nineteen years in this country, fifteen of them spent in full-time teaching, I believe the answer is yes. But then, where is the inside? To define an inside is a decision, I believe I said that night, and the critical method I am describing would question the ethico-political strategic exclusions that would define a certain set of characteristics as an ‘inside’ at a certain time. ‘The text itself,’ ‘the poem as such,’ ‘intrinsic criticism,’ are such strategic definitions. I have spoken in support of such a way of reading that would continue to break down these distinctions, never once and for all, and actively interpret ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as texts for involvement as well as change” (102). Sander Gilman remarks: “I am not neutral, I am not distanced, for being an outsider does not mean to be cool and clinical; it must mean to burn with those fires which define you as the outsider” (17). Edward Said likewise argues that a marginal position can be turned to one's advantage: “So while it is true to say that exile is the condition that characterizes the intellectual as someone who stands as a marginal figure outside the comforts of privilege, power, being-at-homeness (so to speak), it is also very important to stress that that condition carries with it certain rewards and, yes, even privileges” (59).

13. See Du désert au livre 52: “Peut-être y a-t-il quelque chose de plus profond encore et qui est constamment abordé dans mes livres, c'est ma répugnance viscérale à tout enracinement. J'ai l'impression de n'avoir d'existence que hors de toute appartenance. Cette non-appartenance est ma substance même.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Warren Motte

Notes on contributor

Warren Motte is College Professor of Distinction at the University of Colorado. He specializes in contemporary French literature, with a particular focus on experimentalist works that put accepted notions of literary form into question. His most recent books include Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990 (2003), Fiction Now: The French Novel in the Twenty-First Century (2008), Mirror Gazing (2014), and French Fiction Today (2017).