The «Habeas Corpus» of Georges Perec. From the Guilt of the Condemned to the Hyper Control of the Creator

Abstract

Just as the Habeas Corpus restores to the prisoner his physical and legal freedom, Georges Perec, orphan of the Shoah, seeks to appropriate his history by facing the court of conscience, through the multiple paths of fiction, in order to find his place, both as «master of his body», and of his corpus. From Perec’s early works, L'Attentat de Sarajevo and Le Condottière, to La clôture and Ellis Island, through W ou le souvenir d'enfance, this article investigates the analogy between the Habeas Corpus and the author’s lifestory. The act of self-accusation (and self-defense) that is expressed in Perec's texts, through different characters, emerges as an unfinished discourse which tortuously moves forward and backward, and which constantly multiplies the questions on identity, instead of resolving them.