Writing Urban Aesthetics:Georges Perec and a Paris Place

Georges Perec’s posthumous project "Lieux" (Places, 2022) provides insights into his experimental urban-aesthetical writings on twelve Parisian places. Each of these places has been selected for autobiographical reasons, in order to be described twice a year by way of either on-site observation or off-site memory. The present study delves into one particular place, «Jussieu», which happens to be the first one recalled by Perec in 1969, at the outset of "Lieux". How is «Jussieu» represented in Perec’s texts, be they memory-based or resulting from reality-observation? Altogether the two «Jussieu» reports of 1969 initiate exemplary patterns which are elaborated until the mid-1970s. By its invocation of cartographic symbolic forms, the so-called "Souvenir" genre keeps a certain mental distance to the place as a bodily experienced reality. So does Perec’s opposition between distinct souvenirs, which are valued, and lifeworld habits of belonging which seem to be programmatically less important. In turn, the «Réel» («real») genre relies on an observational visit to the site proper in which visual appearances are enumerated. Still, the exteriority of Perec’s perspective privileges a focus on objects or spatial elements while it downplays the role of humans, practices, and interrelations. Nonetheless, an exceptional shift away from Perec’s preferred viewpoint happens to intensify the reader’s sense of urban life at Jussieu: a complex Parisian place which is, at once, a square, a set of streets, a metro station, a university campus, and a neighborhood on the Paris Left Bank. In the end, the present reader of Perec’s «Jussieu» – the author of this article – finds an individual point of entry into the urban text and history that Perec’s place descriptions from 1969-1975 offer to a contemporary urban-cultural readership.