Georges Perec, W, and the Memory of Vichy France

IN THE TWO DECADES OR SO SINCE THE 1975 PUBLICATION of W ou le
souvenir d’enfance, critics have expended considerable effort mapping out
the network of reflexive meanings that yoke Georges Perec’s
autobiographical account of his wartime childhood to the seemingly unre-
lated tale he also tells of life on W, a remote island on the fringes of the
Antarctic, where an entire human community lives “in thrall to the Olym-
pic ideal” (WIMemory iii).2 Following interpretive leads the author himself
provided on the novel’s back cover, these critics have shed considerable
light on the narrative nexus binding the fragmentary (hi)story of loss and
dislocation Perec suffered as a child in Nazi Occupied France to the ideol-
ogy of mastery ruling what readers gradually come to see as W’s dystopic,
and all-too-functional sports regime.