The General Line

Perec's poignant essays on European cultural production, translated in English for the first time.

In these writings, Georges Perec constructs a bold new critical discourse—one that remains faithful to leftist imperatives such as history, class consciousness, and revolution—while maintaining his independence from the dominant voices of the Left, whose vision had long dominated the Left’s understanding of literature and politics in postwar France.

Perec's essays traverse a wide cultural terrain, from the radical experimentation of Free Jazz to the speculative landscapes of Science Fiction, and beyond. Together, they reveal a restless intellect and an enduring love for the divergent cultural materials that would go on to shape Perec’s own literary work.Written against a backdrop of political unrest, domestic division, and global uncertainty, The General Line offers a window into a critical mind grappling with the contradictions of its time. Rob Halpern’s incisive introduction situates these early political essays within both the turbulent historical moment and the evolving trajectory of Perec’s extraordinary body of work.Beyond the Terms of Engagement: Georges Perec’s Critique of the Cultural Field, circa 1960; Or, The General Line in Context Introduction by Rob Halpern

Essays from L.G.: A 1960s Affair
The “New Novel” and the Refusal of the Real
For a Realist Literature
Engagement or Crisis of Language
Robert Antelme, or the Truth of Literature
The Universe of Science Fiction
The Perpetual Recovery (Hiroshima mon amour)
Wozzeck, or The Apocalyptic Method
*All of the above essays follow the text in L.G. Une aventure des années soixante (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992).

Fugitive Texts
Defense of Paul Klee
The Robbe-Grillet Mystery
The 6th Congress of the Communist Student Union: Discussions and Perspectives
The Thing (Free Jazz)
Powers and Limits of the Contemporary French NovelistGeorges Perec (1936–82) won the Prix Renaudot in 1965 for his first novel Things: A Story of the Sixties, and went on to exercise his unrivalled mastery of language in almost every imaginable kind of writing, from the apparently trivial to the deeply personal. He composed acrostics, anagrams, autobiography, criticism, crosswords, descriptions of dreams, film scripts, heterograms, lipograms, memories, palindromes, plays, poetry, radio plays, recipes, riddles, stories short and long, travel notes, univocalics, and, of course, novels. Life A User's Manual, which draws on many of Perec‘s other works, appeared in 1978 after nine years in the making and was acclaimed a masterpiece to put beside Joyce‘s Ulysses. It won the Prix Médicis and established Perec‘s international reputation.

Rob Halpern is Professor of Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University. He coordinates The Writers’ Bloc, a poetry writing workshop inside Huron Valley Women’s Prison. His books include Music for Porn (Nightboat 2012) and Hieroglyphs of the Inverted World (Kenning Editions 2021)."