Perec in Australia

In 1981 Jean-Michel Raynaud, then lecturer in French at the University of Queensland, invited Perec to Australia for two months, and later documented the writer's stay in Pour un Perec, lettré, chiffré (Presses universitaires de Lille, 1987).

Throughout that September, Georges Perec was resident writer at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, where his duties consisted mainly in running a weekly Oulipian poetry workshop for students and staff. During his stay he gave an interview for a student magazine, University News, which published a brief article explaining that for many years Perec did not dare say that he was a poet and wrote secretly within a rigid framework of rules. He was quoted as saying: "Little by little, I developed, and now I think I can write the kind of poetry, which perhaps is difficult to read, but is valuable."

The books and manuscripts that Perec had brought with him were exhibited at the University library and part of the contents of the exhibition was subsequently donated to the Fryer Library, as well as manuscripts of various texts he had written during his stay. Two of these, "Morton's Ob" and "A la grave saison…" are reproduced by David Bellos in Georges Perec. A Life in Words (Harvill, 1993).

Perec had hoped that, while in Australia, he would be able to concentrate on 'Fifty-three Days', the novel that was still unfinished when he died; but progress was slow, as he found himself busier than expected.

October was spent giving lectures and interviews in Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney, some of which were duly recorded. Things, his first novel and the only one then available in English, was already on the syllabus of many universities and, as a result, Perec gave several lectures on this book. He also talked at length about poetic writing and the work of Oulipo. Unfortunately there is no trace of the lecture in English entitled "Fiction and Autobiography" that Perec was scheduled to give at Flinders University, Adelaide, on 2 October 1981.

A few days before Perec's departure for Australia, Kaye Mortley recorded a long conversation with him in English in Paris for The Listening Room, an Australian literary radio programme produced by Robyn Ravlich. The interview was eventually broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, along with extracts from various works, some time after Perec's death. It was also subsequently published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (vol. XIII, no. 1, 1993).

- At the end of my life, I would like to have used all the words of the dictionary. That's impossible. And not only to … use all of them but to create some. That's my ambition. That's why I write and how I write, at the same time.

How do you situate yourself in relationship to your readers…?
- I represent myself as something like a chess player playing [a game of chess] with the reader. I must convince him, or her, to read what I wrote, and he must begin the book and go until the end. If he doesn't, I miss my aim.

So you regard him as a sort of alter ego who reads, who is reading?
- Not exactly… yes, at the end. But I mean during the process of reading, I consider him like a chess mate - somebody who is playing a part with me. The model for that kind of thing is the detective novel, all detective novels. When you read a detective novel, you don't care really about who kills the victim and who is the murderer and… you care only about… you wonder why you don't find. And it's very interesting because in a novel you try to play with what is true, what is false, what to think, what to… - just to keep an aura of suspense, in a sense like Roland Barthes uses it. Something is suspendu - hanging - and it's a way of dreaming, of going elsewhere through the process of fiction. What is most important in a novel, it's… I could say it's not written. It's something which is… behind the words and which is never said.

©Joseph K, 2003.

Georges Perec
Entretiens
et conférences
ribiere
édition critique établie par
Dominique Bertelli & Mireille Ribière

Volume I

Vol. I extraits

Volume II

Vol. II extracts

D.Bertelli

M.Ribière

Comptes rendus & liens

Home