Je me souviens

In 1970, the American painter Joe Brainard published I Remember with Angel Hair Books in New York: a slim 35-page volume of short texts, each beginning with the words “I Remember,” printed in 700 copies. According to David Bellos, Harry Mathews mentioned the book to Perec shortly afterward, without giving him a copy (D. Bellos, Georges Perec: Une vie dans les mots, Seuil, p. 482). It was not translated into French until 1997, by Actes Sud.

Brainard subsequently published two further volumes, More I Remember (1972) and More I Remember More (1973). It was in 1973, on 21 January, that Perec noted the first of his own “Je me souviens” (Bellos, op. cit., p. 542).

Brainard and his New York publisher, Full Court Press, then combined the three published collections and added new texts: in all, some 1,480 “I Remember” entries appeared under the generic title I Remember, printed in 112 numbered copies. The following year, Perec’s first “Je me souviens” texts were published in Les Cahiers du chemin (no. 26, 15 January 1976, pp. 83–108): a small herbarium of memories in which Perec pinned down 163 specimens drawn from his own past, prefaced by the note: “The title, form and, to some extent, the spirit of these texts are inspired by Joe Brainard’s I Remember.”

Perec expanded his collection to 480 entries for its book publication in 1978 by Hachette, in the P.O.L. series created by Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, who would go on to found the publishing house P.O.L. in 1983. The P.O.L. logo is itself a tribute to Perec, who, in chapter 94 of La Vie mode d’emploi, describes “seven marble discs, four black and three white, arranged to represent the position known in go as Ko, or Eternity.”

The manuscript of Je me souviens, preserved in the Fonds Perec at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Arsenal site), consists of around a hundred leaves, containing mainly texts 1 to 348, along with fragments titled “Espèces d’espaces” and “Notes de chevet et de fragments sans titre,” dated 1973 and 1977. It represents a deliberate and considered undertaking, one Perec knew to be riddled with errors: “I know that Je me souviens is full of mistakes, and that my memories are therefore false!” (in Je suis né, “Le travail de la mémoire,” p. 91) — but no matter.

A few months after Je me souviens appeared, La Vie mode d’emploi was published, going on to win the Prix Médicis and crown Perec’s career. Although the two deluxe issues were of almost identical size (20 copies for one, 21 for the other), Je me souviens is encountered far less often than La Vie mode d’emploi: we have traced 12 of the 21 copies of La Vie mode d’emploi, against only 3 for Je me souviens (copies no. 2, in wrappers, and no. 13, bound by Jean de Gonet). But let us be wary: “I know that Je me souviens is full of mistakes, and that my memories are therefore false!”