L’ombre est tombée sur le corps : Georges Perec

Abstract

Objectives

This article delves into an understanding of the figures of the body in the creative process of Georges Perec's autobiographical work, “W or the Memory of Childhood,” as well as “A Man Asleep.” It seeks to examine how the shadow of Perec's parents, who disappeared during his early childhood, cast itself upon his body and his writing, resonating with Freud's famous expression to define melancholy: “the shadow of the object has fallen upon the ego.” Drawing inspiration from Didier Anzieu's work on the “Body of the Work,” this article aims to define the role played by the shadow of the object that falls upon the body in the creative process of contemporary works. Additionally, it aims to explore an interpretative key for Perec's work and creative processes in general. This exploration takes place in light of the evolving paradigms of current psychoanalytic interpretation, focusing on the crucial representation of the object's absence, as opposed to other modes of interpretation.

Methodology

The method employed for “listening” to literary texts draws inspiration from clinical psychoanalysis. This article proposes an examination of “W or the Memory of Childhood” and “A Man Asleep” through the lens of psychoanalytic practice with patients who, like Perec, claim to lack childhood memories and show signs of being marked by significant losses and/or traumas during their early years. Contemporary clinical practice often encounters states of subjective withdrawal that numerous forms of contemporary art attempt to represent. The interaction between a psychoanalytic approach to Perec's work and psychoanalytic clinical work can shed light on certain particularities of the creative process. The focus will be on listening to the sensory impressions conveyed in the text and the writer's associations stemming from his bodily experiences as a child.

Results

This contribution puts forth the hypothesis of the role played in the creative process by incorporative identification. The shadow of Perec's parents’ bodies is particularly evident in the autobiographical fiction of “W,” where the writing portrays a body fragmented into shattered islands – memories and body parts crushed, wrecked, and petrified. These enigmatic traces of object presence gradually gain coherence as we progress in our reading. According to this perspective, the writing is unconsciously driven to “disincorporate,” so to speak, the petrified objects within the writer, attempting to emerge from psychic petrification. In “A Man Asleep,” another autobiographical fiction related to the author's late adolescence, the shadow of what did not take place with the object inhabits the narrative. This text encourages the psychoanalyst, particularly in clinical practice with patients suffering from chronic depression, to try to release the patients from melancholic incorporations, enabling them to break free from petrification and revitalize their psychic life. In the creative process of Perec's two books, as well as in listening to patients with borderline issues, the aim is to identify a form of associativity in the sequence of hallucinated sensations, much like the formal signifiers that stem from primary forms of symbolization. These signifiers somehow narrate the initial modalities of the relationship with the object.

Discussion

This analysis of the creative process based on the figures of the body and the role played by incorporative identifications opens up a discussion on a psychoanalytic approach centered around the theorization of the symbolization of absence in the therapeutic process, specifically in the presence/absence of the analyst. This approach could facilitate the process of mourning the mother.

Conclusion

Georges Perec's autobiographical work resonates with the analytical listening to certain patients who also claim to have no childhood memories. One way of listening to experiences of blankness, erasure, or annihilation, with zones of withdrawal from subjectivity, involves paying attention to how the shadow of the object has fallen upon the patient's body. The analytical work consists of attempting to weave together disparate bodily experiences with fragments of memories related to the object, essentially recontextualizing sensory impressions within the history of the patient's early attachments to objects. The dynamics of the creative act, both in writing and in therapy, thus involve an internal constraint to give form and meaning to traumatic experiences rooted in the body.