Photophages : Tourists, natives, and stylistic quirks in Georges Perec’s Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien

In October 1974, Georges Perec spent three days observing everyday life of the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris’s 6th arrondissement. Examining the written trace of that experiment, Tentative d’epuisement d’un lieu parisien (1975), this article demonstrates how travel and critical race theories can be used to open up new perspectives on the politics and poetics of Oulipian writing exercises. Whereas many critics have read this text as pure formal experimentation or in relation to biographical concerns, the present article shows the importance of evolving patterns of global circulation in the mid-1970s for understanding TELP’s stylistic oddities and modalities of enunciation. It further explores how the disproportionate attention paid to passing tourists and tour buses creates tiny fissures in a writing project meant to focus on the banal and the ordinary. Promoting a new anthropology of the self, Perec attempts to concentrate on the ‘endotique’ rather than the ‘exotique’ in his chosen terrain. However, the fr...