L’éternel et l’éphémère: temporalités dans l’œuvre de Georges Perec by Christelle Reggiani

Abstract

for his writing” (179)—ostensibly to supply useful background and causality, thereby guiding the reader through the intricacies of the plot, but also to arrive at a sharper or more precise level of realism. One entertaining as well as perceptive chapter is devoted to Balzac’s “Language of Sex”—which, despite being euphemistic and elliptical, usually remains clear. Unsurprisingly, Mortimer illustrates her close readings by regularly supplying quotes in French, followed by English translations. A very minor quibble: one wonders why it was necessary to translate , for instance, “condottieri de l’Industrie moderne” into “condottieri of modern Industry” (95). Consistently insightful and elegantly written, For Love or for Money will likely become an incontournable text for Balzac scholars. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin REGGIANI, CHRISTELLE. L’éternel et l’éphémère: temporalités dans l’œuvre de Georges Perec. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. ISBN 978-90-420-3224-8. Pp. 202. $54. While much recent critical work on Perec has examined the description of space, Reggiani’s analysis places temporality at the heart of Perec’s conception of literature. The book is composed of a series of studies united by a central claim: Perec understands writing as a form of ascetic experience, a quest for the suspension of time encapsulated in the phrase from Les revenentes (1972) that reappears as the epigraph to the final chapter of La vie mode d’emploi (1978): “Je cherche en même temps l’éternel et l’éphémère.” The first section of Reggiani’s book, “La langue et l’expérience du temps,” considers matters of style not from the point of view of Oulipian constraints, but at the level of diction, syntax, and punctuation. The first chapter shows that the rhetoric of proper names in Je me souviens (1978) negotiates between readability and referential opacity, community and secrecy. Chapter two considers Perec’s use of parentheses to demarcate spaces, bring into play a plurality of voices, give a grammatical frame to the syntactic ruptures produced by constraints, or mark out a discreet space for the personal. In the third chapter, an analysis of the anaphoric and deictic role of demonstratives in the opening of La vie mode d’emploi serves as a starting point for a broader reflection on fictional reference and the history of the realist novel. The second part of the book (“Temps et récit: le romanesque ”) focuses on questions of fictional form and narrative temporality in Perec’s masterwork La vie mode d’emploi (chapter four) and Un cabinet d’amateur (1979), read as Perec’s farewell to the genre of the novel (chapter five). The two chapters of the section “Le temps des images” reconsider the affinities of Perec’s writing with the temporality of the photographic and cinematic image. Turning to the historical context and reception of Perec’s work, the final section (“Mémoires littéraires”) seeks to elucidate two disparities: the gap between Perec’s Oulipian writing and other contemporary formalisms (chapter eight), and the dissymmetry between Perec’s relatively limited influence in the literary field and the reinterpretations of his work that have made a significant impact in the visual and plastic arts (chapter nine). Finally, the epilogue explores Perec’s problematic relation to lyric subjectivity via a reading of his last published poem, “L’éternité” (1981). Uniting Reggiani’s expertise as a specialist of ‘constrained writing’ with her scholarship on the place of rhetoric in the modern novel—her previous publications include Éloquence du roman (Droz, 2008)—the book skillfully combines attention 832 FRENCH REVIEW 86.4 to stylistic detail with an emphasis on larger problems of literary history. We encounter a number of the familiar themes of Perec criticism, drawn in particular from the groundbreaking work of Bernard Magné: the importance of the trace and the gap (the palindromic couple trace/écart), the tension between rupture and suture, the emphasis on the formal anchoring of autobiographical motifs (Magné’s aencrage). However, Reggiani resituates these critical topoi within a larger rhetorical perspective that brings welcome attention to modes of address and to problems of audience and reception. Readers of Perec will also appreciate Reggiani’s discussion of previously overlooked aspects of...