Articles Available Online

I do not know whether I have anything to say, I know that I am saying nothing; I do not know if what I might have to say is unsaid because it is unsayable (the unsayable is not buried inside writing, it is what prompted it in the first place); I know that what I say is blank, is neutral, is a sign, once and for all, of a once-and-for-all annihilation —Georges Perec, W, or the Memory of Childhood     If Reality Hunger by David Shields represents one strand of literary prognostication to which Perec’s writing offers a fruitful response, there is another strand that Perec answers just as well: those gleeful prophets of the novel’s death   In order to tell this story we need to take a step back Perec’s writing was in sync with its times in the sense that it partook in the epic process of cultural commodification occurring over the second half of the twentieth century Products, beliefs and fashions that once existed on the boundaries of society were resolutely transformed into mass consumable versions that were bought up by the middle classes Things, Perec’s best-selling popularisation of the bohemian lifestyle, is one example of how he was part of this process Another would be Life A User’s Manual, which transmutes into literary gold hundreds of things that one would have never thought to put in a literary novel beforehand   One important thing Perec helped commodify was negation Negation was a huge thing in the 1960s, when Perec began to write It informed and empowered the groups then fighting against capitalistic culture In his essay ‘E Unibus Pluram,’ David Foster Wallace put forth the argument that the second half of the twentieth century was a time of two great changes: first, the development of this ‘no’ of resistance against capitalistic culture, and second, the co-opting of this ‘no’ of resistance into a catchy sales pitch Wallace identified the ‘no’ of resistance with irony—long a potent weapon of the oppressed—and then he went on to argue that the appeal of this irony had been taken