Georges Perec's La Vie mode d'emploi; or, How to Take on Painting and Win

Notes by Perec on his reaction to paintings and on his collaboration with painters suggest a complex, but potentially conflictual relationship. In his fictional masterpiece La Vie mode d'emploi (1978) he pursues an elaborate confrontation on many levels with paintings and painters, whose prestige he recognizes as a rival to writing, which is thus challenged to reassert its primacy. Intradiegetically, the narrative turns centrally on accounts of failed projects related to painting. Extradiegetically, ‘Old Master’ paintings are dismantled to provide details for insertion into quite alien contexts in Perec's textual construction, and the aspect of framing central to traditional canvas painting is consistently challenged. Strategically, Perec's whole project in this work can be read as a calculated invasion, by the writer, of the domain of spatial representation seen since Lessing as proper to painting, and as an assertion of the supremacy of the textual.