Perec’s Unsure Text: Exploring Depression Equivocally with Un homme qui dort

During a nightmarishly sleepless night, neither the first nor last endured by the protagonist of Georges Perec's Un homme qui dort, there appears a passage which seems to summon a self-reflexive reading: 'Il devrait y avoir des textes à ce sujet, des textes sûrs, qui permettraient de faire face à ces situations, beaucoup plus fréquentes qu'on ne le croit généralement.' 1 The protagonist, a student in post-war Paris, is in the midst of a crisis that -as this article explores -might be termed depression.The self-reflexive reading would ask if Un homme qui dort fills the gap it here signals, if it is itself a 'texte sûr', an unequivocal text, sufficiently self-assured that it might reliably guide those facing similar situations.This is the sort of reading I will be undertaking here.Un homme qui dort is a text charged with the question of literature's therapeutic potential, one which has attracted a great deal of interest in recent years.The World Health Organization has published a review of the role of the arts (including literature) in improving health and well-being, 2 while 'bibliotherapists' including Régine Detambel in France and Ella Berthould and Susan Elderkin in the UK have been prescribing books to clients, and literary scholars have been exploring questions about literature's therapeutic potential and ambitions. 3 The present study intends to contribute to this ongoing discussion through its reading of Perec's unsure text, a text that problematizes the language and categories through which mental distress is apprehended, but