Flaubert, Barthes, Proust: those revered in Georges Perec's Things

Abstract

In addition to the clear, undeniable borrowings from Flaubert and the references to Roland Barthes, there is another, less obvious lineage that Les Choses seeks to create as soon as the young Perec appeared on the literary scene. But, as with everything that is intimate in Perec, the reader can only glimpse this “obliquely”, that is to say, by allusion and by ricochet. For Perec, an orphan since the end of World War II, the Proustian figure of the Narrator is indeed associated with the search for time forever lost. Thus, in the short extract that concerns us, the ordinary objects displayed in a shop window, in the manner of a still life by Chardin, make up a memorial to the beloved ones tragically deceased and simultaneously pay a discrete, if not secret, homage to Proust and his poetic art.