I Remember E-Book

Georges Perec

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 104

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'I remember hula hoops.''I remember Hermes handbags, with their tiny padlocks.''I remember that Stendhal liked spinach.''I remember that I dreamed of one day having all 57 varieties of Heinz.'Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec's I Remember is now available for the first time in English, with an introduction by David Bellos.In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia. As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.

Leseprobe

Georges Perec, born in Paris in 1936, was a pioneering French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist. Orphaned from an early age, many of his works deal with absence, loss and identity, often through word play. He was a member of the experimental Oulipo group and died in 1982.

Philip Terry was born in Belfast and is a Professor of Literature at the University of Essex. His translations include Raymond Queneau’s Elementary Morality, while his first novel, tapestry, was shortlisted for the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize.

David Bellos is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. The biographer of Georges Perec, Jacques Tati and Romain Gary, Bellos is also a translator whose prizes include the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and the Man Booker International Prize.

Praise for Georges Perec:

‘The effect of cascading “I remember”s is unavoidably mesmerizing’ Paris Review

‘Perec is a great storyteller and a wry humorist’ The Telegraph

‘Perec’s passion for classification, for enumeration, for lists, for patterns, for the thinginess of things, is strangely captivating and, despite an underlying melancholy, exhilarating’ Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

‘Whoever decides to read [Perec] will come away not only with a new sense of what is possible in literature, but of how strange and exciting, and how fun, real originality can be’ New Yorker

‘One of the most singular literary personalities in the world, a writer who resembled absolutely no one else’ Italo Calvino

‘To read Perec one must be ready to abandon oneself to a spirit of play. His books are studded with intellectual traps, allusions and secret systems, and … they are prodigiously entertaining’ Paul Auster

Also available from Editions Gallic:

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

The Vatican Cellars by André Gide

Clisson and Eugénie by Napoleon Bonaparte

The Gourmet by Muriel Barbery

The African by J. M. G. Le Clézio

GEORGES PEREC

I REMEMBER

GEORGES PEREC

I REMEMBER

Introduced, Translated, Annotated, Edited & Indexed by Philip Terry and David Bellos

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

First published in France as Je me souviens

Copyright © Hachette / P.O.L, 1979 ; Hachette, 1998

Ce titre a paru dans la collection «Textes du XXème siècle»,

dirigée par Maurice Olender. © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2013

First published in English in the USA in 2014 by

David R. Godine, Post Office Box 450, Jaffrey,

New Hampshire 03452

Translation copyright © Philip Terry, 2014

Introduction and notes copyright © David Bellos, 2014

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Gallic Books,

59 Ebury Street, London, SW1W 0NZ

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781805334606

Typeset in Minion by Kat Ran Press and Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Contents

IntroductionbyDAVID BELLOS

Translator’s NotebyPHILIP TERRY

I REMEMBERtranslated byPHILIP TERRY

NotesbyDAVID BELLOS

Index

Introduction

GEORGES PEREC was born in Paris in 1936 to Polish immigrant parents. His father died in the defence of France in 1940; his mother was deported in 1943 and perished at Auschwitz. During the Occupation, Perec was cared for in the French Alps by his aunt and uncle, who brought him up in Paris after the end of the war. Around the age of eighteen he decided to be a writer. His first attempts at fiction, before and after his military service (1958–1960), met with the customary rejections, and in 1961 he took a job as a librarian in a medical research laboratory, which he kept until 1979. In 1965, however, he shot to fame as the author of a short, tight-lipped portrait of his own generation, Things. Not long after, he encountered the experimental writing group Oulipo, headed by Raymond Queneau and François le Lionnais. It changed him beyond recognition; Perec for his part transformed the group by becoming its most spectacularly successful and widely loved writer.

“Almost none of my books,” Perec wrote in a famous short piece about himself for Le Figaro in 1978, “is entirely devoid of autobiographical traces … likewise, almost none is assembled without recourse to one or another Oulipian structure or constraint, even if only symbolically, without the relevant constraint or structure constraining me in the least.”*

I Remember is a striking example of such double ascendancy: it is manifestly autobiographical and also obeys a rigid (but not difficult) formal constraint. It is also one of the oddest works of literature ever written. Published in 1978 shortly after Perec’s masterpiece, Life A User’s Manual, won the Médicis Prize, I Remember is not a play, a poem, or a novel, and it’s not a memoir in the ordinary sense either. It consists exclusively of sentences beginning “I remember …”—479 of them, plus an unfinished no. 480 consisting only of “I remember …”* Despite its unique and puzzling nature, however, I Remember quickly became one of France’s most-loved short works. It has been imitated, parodied, reinvented, and adapted more than anything else Perec wrote. It’s hardly possible to utter the words “je me souviens…” in French nowadays without committing a literary allusion.

Like many of Perec’s projects, I Remember arose by happenstance. In 1970, Perec made the acquaintance of the American writer Harry Mathews. Harry, a tall and handsome expatriate, and the tousle-haired and barely solvent Parisian made a curious pair of bosom pals. Mathews was familiar with the New York art scene and told Perec about the serial autobiography that the painter Joe Brainard was bringing out, under the title I Remember, constructed exclusively of sentences beginning “I remember”. It’s not likely that Perec ever saw or read a copy of Brainard’s work, but the idea of it appealed to him, and he made it his own. First he used it as a parlour game at the writer’s retreat that he frequented, the Moulin d’Andé, in Normandy. The restrictions that Perec imposed for players of the game (which are not at all those used by Brainard) were that you had to remember something that other people could remember too; and the thing remembered had to have ceased to exist. “I’d like to say ‘I remember Vidal Sassoon,’” Perec complained, “but I can’t, because he’s still going.” (However, that didn’t stop him putting Vidal Sassoon, misspelled “Sasoon,” in the published text.)

In the mid-1970s Perec started to use the “I remember” formula for a written exercise. He jotted down memories, mostly of his teenage years, in clutches, in 1973, 1975, and 1977. In 1976 he published a group of them in a periodical, and then decided to continue the routine until it made a whole book. As with many formally structured texts, the potential meaning of the work is partly a function of its length. A dozen “I remembers” might be just curious; a hundred of them could be irritating; beyond a certain point, however, a repeat-formula text creates new effects. It was Perec’s peculiar genius to know how far he could go too far. The inventory of Mme Altamont’s basement in Chapter 33 of Life A User’s Manual, for example, exceeds all bounds of narrative relevance and common sense, but precisely because of its fantastical length it inspires exhilaration. Obstinate and unrelenting attempts at exhaustiveness provoke hilarity—and also a sense of the futility of all lists.

The “I remember” formula is eminently shareable. Anyone can write their own “I remembers”: no special training or command of language is required, nor a jot of poetic or divine inspiration. It is therefore emblematic of the Oulipo’s aim to invent tools for writing to be used by others. Perec requested his publishers to leave several blank pages at the end of each edition “for readers to write their own ‘I remembers’ which the reading of these ones will hopefully have inspired.”

The formula has a personal function for Perec, whose other works are dotted with oblique and mostly invisible self-allusions. A memory entered here as something that Perec remembers may match exactly or else throw light on some tiny fragment you remember being mentioned somewhere else in his œuvre. I Remember allows the intensive reader of Life A User’s Manual and other works to join things up, and to redraw the lines between fiction, memory, and history. Inevitably and no doubt intentionally, too, this book draws that other work into the field of autobiography. For example, why does François Breidel, the luckless husband of Mme de Beaumont’s murdered daughter, pass through Château d’Oex (Life A User’s Manual, p. 158)? See I Remember, no. 8. Why does Perec remember that Junot had been made Duc d’Abrantès (no. 20)? Because he must have spent some time gazing at the name-plate of the Avenue Junot (where the identity of Junot and Abrantès is explained) when writing the relevant sections of his Places project, involving repeated real-time descriptions of twelve different places in Paris, one of which was, precisely, Avenue Junot. Some of these links and echoes are mentioned in the notes at the end of the volume; readers may enjoy tracking down many others.

The restriction of “I remembers” to public or quasi-public facts and events has a significant consequence. The set of people who remember the Franco-Egyptian crooner Reda Caire performing at the Porte de Saint-Cloud cinema (no. 1) may or may not include members of the set of people who remember a Citroën 11CV with registration plate 7070RL2 (no. 2). Obviously, the small community established in the intersection of those two memory-groups automatically includes Georges Perec. Similarly, Perec belongs to the set of people who remember Sixteen Tons (no. 425), as I do, and to the set of those who remember that André Gide was mayor of a small town in Normandy (no. 222), which excludes me, but not a whole corporation of Gide scholars. In this way I Remember creates waves of partly overlapping sets of readers who share or do not share this or that memory, pushing each reader now closer to the centre and now further away from it, but leaving one and only one inhabitant of the intersection of all 479 memories. That inhabitant is obviously Georges Perec, described, or rather, defined geometrically, in rich and intricate detail and in terms of his multiple relationships to groups and individuals among his contemporaries. When you stop to think, it’s an amazing achievement, all the more so because it is done with the simplest of techniques. The “I remember” device using only shareable memories seems at first glance to dissolve the individual memoirist in a collective identity (that’s to say, as a person who, just like thousands of others, remembers Garry Davis, or the capitulation of Japan), but in practice, when pursued far enough, it does quite the opposite: it locates the autobiographer in a 479-dimensional space in which his specific identity is made unique in a way that no amount of personal confession could achieve.

There is no known order or narrative logic to the memories that Perec listed in I Remember, and for that reason his formula harks back to many earlier uses of the “unordered list”—in ancient chronicles, for example, or in the famous chapter “The Year 1817” in Les Misérables, where Victor Hugo recites, higgledy-piggledy, over a hundred things he recalls from his youth. However, the addition of a repeated starting formula (“I remember…”) and the numbering of the items turns “chaotic enumeration” into something more like a poem—that’s to say, Perec’s idea of a poem. The best example of this comes in Life A User’s Manual, where he gives a catalogue of the hand-tools marketed by Mme Moreau’s home decorating business, culled from the actual catalogues of two French manufacturers (pp. 79–83). At the end of each catalogue entry, Perec added “Fully guaranteed 1 yr.” as a refrain; by his own account, that’s what made his cut-and-paste catalogue a poem.

I Remember has prompted more and less serious variations of the device by writers great and small, in works called I Don’t Remember…, I’ve Forgotten… and so forth. However, the Canadian movie called Je ne me souviens pas (“I don’t remember”) owes its title not to Perec, but to the motto of the Province of Quebec, Je me souviens. Perec probably didn’t remember it from his very short stay in Montreal, where he wrote the voice-over for an anthropological documentary whose material he adapted to construct the narrative of Chapter 25 of Life A User’s Manual.