Living Room

As creatures of space, we think about space in a variety of ways, some of them fairly straightforward, others more than passingly vexed. It is legitimate to say that as much as we inhabit space, space inhabits us, significantly shaping the way we imagine ourselves and the way we come to be in the world. The French writers Georges Perec and Edmond Jabes reflected long and hard on the notion of space in an effort to adapt it to their own particular purposes. While both conceive space as one of the fundamental categories of their writerly projects, they stake out positions on that issue that are very different indeed and that define two opposing poles on a horizon of possibility. Reading Perec and Jabes, we are inevitably led to rethink our own position with regard to literature and the spaces that it limns and to ask ourselves where we stand.