Perec, Georges

Bio Sketch

Georges Perec (1936–1982) was a French writer and member of the Oulipo group, celebrated for his experimental, constraint-based fiction and his meticulous investigations of the everyday. His L'Infra-ordinaire and Les Lieux (Places) seek to recover the "infra-ordinary" — the banal, quotidian, background noise of existence that habit renders invisible. He matters to Geoffrey's research as the exemplary practitioner of a fragmentary, inventory-based description of the everyday.

Key Works

L'Infra-ordinaire (1989) — the "infra-ordinary": the banal, the quotidian, the background noise; "making inventories" (faire les inventaires).
Les Lieux (Places, 1969) — a long-term project describing twelve Paris locations, alternating neutral on-site description with memory-based "memory places" (lieux souvenirs).
*Species of Spaces and Other Pieces* (1974; "The Apartment," 2006) — "What is there under your wallpaper?"; its opening essay "The Apartment" is the wiki's primary Perec text: the functional definition of rooms, the nycthemeral timetable, and the alternative layouts (functional relationships, senses, heptadian rhythms, thematic arrangements).
La Vie mode d'emploi / Life A User's Manual (1978) — the Parisian apartment house at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier, its ninety-nine chapters generated by a knight's tour and an orthogonal Latin bi-square order 10; the object-rooms of the infra-ordinary at novelistic scale. Analyzed at length in Carley's "Puzzle" (2018); read from the inhabitation side in Spuybroek (2025).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

Everyday Life — the everyday as the "infra-ordinary," recovered through inventory and description.
Appropriation — Perec's Species of Spaces and Life: A User's Manual as the literary enactment of inhabitation as appropriation via the gameboard.
Voluntary Constraints — the Oulipian method: "systems of formal constraint – far from restricting a writer – actually affords a field of creative liberty" (via Carley 2018).
Oulipo — the group (Queneau & Le Lionnais, 1960) whose Potential Literature program Perec's Life is the landmark of.
Clinamen — the built-in error: "there must be some play in it; it must, as they say, 'creak' a bit."
Potential Space — "a space of creative inquiry guided by voluntary constraints" (Carley's design-transposition of Potential Literature).
Infra-Ordinary — the concept page for Perec's term.
Nycthemeral — Perec's coinage for the 24-hour sequential procedure ("unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral") by which the apartment's rooms receive the day's slices of time.
Heptadian — Perec's coinage for the weekly-rhythm division: the seven-room apartment of Mondayery to Sundayery, half-realized in the weekend home.
Thematic Arrangement — the themed room as total design constraint: the brothel-hostel genealogy, the boat-Mondayery, the Pole Tuesdayery, the Dame Tartine's Palace Wednesdayery.
Interior as Biography — Life's objects with "itinerant histories" constructing "a partial biography of the resident."
Still Life — the room-as-still-life chapters ("narrative and still life… artfully combined," Wardrip-Fruin).

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Perec is the model for the descriptive recovery of the everyday that Clucas's "negative phenomenology" proposes: "making inventories" of the banal without reducing it to a system. His "What is there under your wallpaper?" is quoted by Seigworth & Gardiner as an epigraph to their rethinking of everyday life. He gives Geoffrey a concrete, literary-practical method for the everyday that complements the theoretical accounts of Lefebvre, de Certeau, and Felski. "The Apartment" adds the interior-scale, apartment-scale wing of that method: the functional definition and nycthemeral timetable as the everyday's designed form, and the four alternative layout-principles as constraint-procedures that could run directly as studio methods (the bridge between Carley's constraint-armature and the everyday cluster).

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki that draw on Perec:

The Apartment (Perec 1974/2006) — the wiki's primary Perec text (the Intimus excerpt from Species of Spaces, pp. 27–33): the functional definition of rooms and the two "elementary" definitions; the nycthemeral timetable ("unequivocal, sequential and nycthemeral"; 07.00–22.00); the broom-closet/bedroom equivalence; the pseudo-modular equivalence ("not a kitchen but a cooking-area"); and the four alternative layouts (functional relationships, senses, heptadian rhythms, thematic arrangements) — the apartment-scale companion to Life's constraint-generated interiors.
Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday (Clucas 2000) — the "infra-ordinary," inventories, Les Lieux.
Rethinking Everyday Life (Seigworth & Gardiner 2004) — "What is there under your wallpaper?"
Habit and Inhabit, Stuff and Trash (Spuybroek 2025) — Spuybroek's reading of Species of Spaces and Life: A User's Manual: the gameboard as the space of the possible; the Knight's Tour; the gap between interiors (plural) and the interior (singular) as the space of appropriation.
Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — Perec's "dense thing-worlds" cited in the Introduction as one pole of literary modernism's distinctive concern with the everyday (with Alain Robbe-Grillet).
Puzzle (Carley 2018) — the constraint-method reading: Life's knight's tour and bi-square; the anti-inspiration, anti-habit program; the clinamen; the object-mediated interiors transposed to the design studio.