Remembrance of things past: trauma and mourning in Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance.

Perec's W is studied as a "memory text' revealing the effects of the trauma associated with the loss of his parents during the Second World War. Perec's text recognizes the mourning process as an engagement with the aporia created by the inability to bear witness. A dialogical relationship is produced by the juxtaposition of "autobiographical" narrative and fantasy text (the fictional representation of the island of W). This enables the latter to function as a heuristic device allowing the writer to come to terms with loss. Viewed as an ethical act, Perec's writing project stages the mourning process of a fractured life as a reparative gesture enabling the 'other' to be kept alive.

Keywords: Holocaust, maternal loss, memory, mourning, trauma

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'The Holocaust is a mystery whose secret is best left in the dark: the point is, rather, that there is no secret mystery of the Holocaust to be brought to light, no enigma to be resolved.' (Slavoj Zizek, 2001: 65-6)

'To begin (writing, living) we must have death ... I like the dead, they are the doorkeepers who while closing one side give 'way to the other.' (Cixous, 1993)

The question of memory and its relationship to trauma and mourning are central to the articulation of Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance (1975). (1) The text's narrative peregrinations reveal the writer's desire for origins, a nostalgia for an impossible return to a lost childhood, interrupted by war and the death of his parents, and which have remained cognitively somewhat inaccessible. The challenge for him is to transcribe the memory of a past dominated 'by the war, the camps': one which cannot be fully remembered.

 
   My childhood belongs to those things which I know I don't know 
   much about. It is behind me; yet it is the ground on which I grew, 
   and it once belonged to me, however obstinately I assert that it 
   no longer does ... childhood ... maybe it is a horizon, a point 
   of departure, a set of co-ordinates from which the axes of my 
   life may draw their meaning. (12)