This week while reading “W or The Memory of Childhood” by Georges Perec, I felt as if I was reading someone’s personal diary mixed with some odd dark version of the Olympics. I found it a bit difficult to follow the two narratives (especially with the copious amount of footnotes) but as the book went on, I found myself quite immersed in the two worlds.
Despite the title, the narrator expresses “I have no childhood memories” (pg.6), however the autobiographical part of the book reads as a desperate attempt to salvage and revive them. The memories he has seem to be the only thing left of his identity because he is constantly on the run for safety., “…living another illegal existence, with another fragile alibi, with another fabricated past and another identity?” (pg.11). He doesn’t seem to have much to live for, with all his loved one’s dead, and is more surviving day to day as a ghost. Other than his memories of the past, as readers we don’t know many objective facts about our protagonist.
Unlike in Proust’s “Combray” or Laforet’s “Nada” where objects or places trigger certain memories, Perec seems to go out of his way to explain that physical spaces or objects do not. When reflecting on photographs, he simply describes what is pictured and nothing more. From one of the photos explaining that “of all my missing memories, that is perhaps one I most dearly wish I had” (pg.49). When visiting Rue Vilin where he lived in Paris, he explains that he doesn’t remember which part he lived in, and he hasn’t attempted to go inside any of the dwellings “since I am in any case convinced that it would do nothing to revive my memories” (pg. 48). When I read this, I was doubting the narrator’s intentions of not revisiting the place in which he grew up. Does he really think it would not revive his memories or is he too traumatized to face them? I think trauma is an important aspect of our protagonist’s narrative due to the historical context he’s grown up in and being a low-class Jewish child. I’m not a psychology major but I think that a main trauma response is to just black out those memories. It made me wonder is this what the narrator is experiencing with his so called “lost memories”? Do we trust the accuracy of our narrator despite the trauma that may affect the story? Does it even matter?