While reading Georges Perec’s W or The Memory of Childhood, I specifically felt parallels with “Combray”. In “Combray”, the narrator reflects on his past, with the perspective he has in his present; in this way, his reflection of the past reconstructs his present, and offers a change to his future. Similarly, in W or The Memory of Childhood, Perec recollects his memories of the past, the memories that have “many variations and imaginary details [Perec] [has] added in the telling of them”, altering or distorting them greatly (13). However, the main difference I felt was that Perec didn’t seem to have a “progressive realization”. Perec, regarding writing about the memories he had with his parents, stated, “fifteen years after drafting these two passages, it still seems to me that I could do no more than repeat them: […] it seems to me that I would manage nothing more than a reiteration of the same story, leading nowhere” (41). This statement helped me realize that Perec wasn’t necessarily seeking for something (ex. For a change) through writing. In fact, he establishes a unique environment where temporality isn’t divided up into hierarchy. In his writing, past and present seem to have equal values; the possible inaccuracies of his memories don’t seem to affect his writing and recollection of the past.

When I first read the title of this book, I had wondered what relationship “W” and “the memory of childhood” had. Although I’ve been thinking of this mysterious relationship throughout reading the whole book, I feel even more confused and fragmented after finishing the book. Thankfully, watching this week’s lecture helped me bring a new perspective to this matter, that perhaps this unresolved question, these “compilations of fragments”, were indicators of the author’s post-modernistic narrative. I also found parallels of postmodernity in the description about W. W was characterized by specific sets of laws and methods that maximize the competitiveness of athletes; at first, these laws and methods almost seemed like the ideological background of W’s political system. However, throughout most of the later parts of the book, these methods are attacked and doubted. In one example, the description stated, “the problem with this method is obviously the risk that […] it will emphasize the differences between the contestants and produce in the end a kind of vicious circle” (92). This narrative, which attacked a method established within W, seemed very close to Professor Beasley-Murray’s description of postmodernity, a “competing claims to legitimacy and truth”.

To close off my blog, I would like to ask a question: Many parts of Perec’s autobiography consisted of a childhood story of which Perec admitted to have “made up” or “distorted”. Did this affect your reading at all? Do you think this affected the reliability of Perec’s narrative?