An Omnipresent Absence: Georges Perec’s Silent Protest of the Holocaust in La Disparition

Abstract

In his novel La Disparition (1969), Georges Perec raises his voice in protest to the horrors of the Holocaust in a virtually silent way. He evokes the loss of the Holocaust by making absence a central theme of the book, a lipogram in “e” meant to evoke the lack of “eux,” those who perished in the Holocaust, including his own mother. Scholars often study lacks of various sorts in this work, but food also happens to be lacking here. The hunger of numerous characters is paired with harsh conditions. And while food is largely absent, when it does surface it is unappetizing or odd, even suspicious and sinister, often lethal. Memory is also lacking. The unspeakable nature of the lipogram points to the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. What is more, the absence of food with which the protagonists of this text must live echoes the fate of the victims of the Nazi camps. This amounts to a re-writing of Proust’s madeleine episode. Despite the horrors from which this absence arises, it is personified, privileged, and valorized. Perec’s texts are a triumph of presence in the face of absence, a courageous filling of a horrible void.

Keywords:

• Georges Perec
• twentieth-century French literature
• La Disparition
• food
• memory
• hunger
• Holocaust

Notes

1 I have explored absence in these two texts (henceforth abbreviated W and Vie) in two other articles. The first is “Manger chez Perec: Food on the Threshold between Metaphor and Matter in W ou le souvenir d’enfance.” Contemporary French & Francophone Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, 2017, pp. 322–328. The second is “Dis-moi ce que tu ne manges pas…: Le Geste anti-madeleine dans La Vie mode d’emploi de Georges Perec,” to be published in a volume of selected conference proceedings of “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es”: Fictions identitaires, fictions alimentaires that took place at the Université de Strasbourg in November 2017.

2 Daisy Sainsbury contends that Perec’s ludic text “demonstrate[s] a kind of ‘littérature engagée’ (engaged literature) where you might least expect it” (313).

3 Marcel Bénabou co-authored a 2004 essay dedicated to Perec’s “aesthetics of lack” (33).

4 “an original protocol […] a recipe that would allow him to ‘cook’ well” (my translation).

5 I have chosen to quote Gilbert Adair’s brilliant English translation except where the French original seems especially necessary or insightful.

6 In the French original: “tout avait l’air pourri” (Disparition 313) [“everything looked rotten”]. The notion of things being inedible for this reason returns often in the original text, although of course in English one must opt for other terms.

7 This quote is quite different in the original: “Il a dû y avoir … un truc pas sain, un truc pourri dans la nutrition du soir!” (484; emphasis added) [“There must have been … something unhealthy, something rotten in the evening meal.”].

8 As the author Walter Abish maintains in his 1995 review of La Disparition, the lipogram is “an ideal vehicle […] for hiding the inexpressible” (11).

9 Stella Béhar argues that this anguish and tension in the face of absence becomes a metaphor for the historical and political experience of the author’s generation (20).

10 Warren Motte likens Perec’s texts to “elaborate and carefully constructed memorials” (“Mourning” 59).

11 Sainsbury highlights how Perec’s text “explore[s] questions involving documentation and testimony, silence and the obligation to bear witness” (313).

12 “Mourning” 67.

13 Lucy O’Meara argues that fiction can be used “to come to terms with the past” (48) and Marianne Hirsch might say that Perec “translate[s] the ‘gémissements’ from the past into the present and the future, where they will be heard by generations not yet born” (52).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Priya Wadhera

Priya Wadhera is Associate Professor of French at Adelphi University in New York. Her first book, Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol, was published in the Faux Titre series by Brill ǀ Rodopi in 2017. In her current book project, her focus shifts from art to food (or lack thereof).