I found this novel to be quite unusual and interesting. One never expects to find two parallel narratives in a novel where one is autobiographical and the other fictional. But that is implied in the title “W” and it seems that this is an autobiography for an author without one. The stories merge into one another because Perec tells us that when he was thirteen, he made up a story that was called W and it was, in a way, “if not the story of my childhood, then at least a story of my childhood.”
It seems that what makes this autobiography important is not what he remembers, but the gaps. Perec has to rely on objects in order to create memories that cannot be confirmed but that is all he has to establish a foundation for this narrative. “W” seems at first to be an idyllic place of fairness and meritocracy, but we are give clues early on and there is no attempt to keep the truth of “W” a secret as it is too entwined with the author’s memory. The island of “W” describes tyranny and “the survival of the fittest” where equality is not just absent but abhorrent. Living in a world that is becoming more authoritarian and McCarthyist, one can extend this not just to one phase of time in one continent, but to all humanity throughout history.
The gaps in the story are never filled or the truth about his childhood. Most narratives are about rescue and closure, about setting a problem or defining a loss or creating a mystery that is solved with a return to wholeness in the final pages. But Perec instead manages to make those gaps and silences resonate with meaning as the reader moves through the stories, so that loos itself and the absence of meaning become the focus.
I write: I write because we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst their shadows, a body close to their bodies. I write because they left in me their indelible mark, whose trace is writing. Their memory is dead in writing; writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.
Questions for discussion:
How can we explain the apparent contradiction in this narrative, which is both autobiographical and fictional? To what extent can it be said that Gaspard Winckler is the fictional double of Perec?
Hi Noor,
Thanks for a fascinating read. I agree with your statement that this book is more autobiographical than it is narrative as Perec tries to reclaim a past he never knew. It is interesting how memory and imagination can be so closely intertwined which I feel is the entire premise of the fictional island of W. In some ways, I felt that Perec tries to use history to gain a better sense of identity which he cannot have due to an unknown past.
Hey Noor!
I found your analysis of the island in W as being authoritarian and McCarthian to be really interesting. I never considered how the the author’s memory and experiences might have shaped the setting of the island in the second half of the book. I agree that the author super-imposes himself into the protagonist as a way to create a false narrative because he wishes to escape his traumatic childhood. To discuss your question, I would say that Gaspard Winkler is the person that the narrator and Perec wishes he was/wants to be.