'Mais les passages n'appartiennent à personne': The Passage Choiseul in Georges Perec's Lieux

The Passage Choiseul is one of the twelve locations of Perec's unfinished Lieux project, devoted (mostly) to the description and remembering of sites of personal significance. However, Perec had difficulty explaining the inclusion of the covered arcade, maintaining that in general the Paris passages belonged to no-one. This article sets out to explore the possible meanings of the the arcade in Lieux on three levels: structural, personal and intertextual. On a structural level, Perec's arcade is envisaged as devoid of associations, allowing it to accommodate reflection on the resonances of the other sites. But this structural vocation is frustrated by the occupation of the arcade by personal and intertextual assocations. On the personal level, Perec's choice of the arcade antagonized his wife Paulette, who felt that it was 'her' place rather than his. On the intertextual level, the arcade hosted a previous occupant: the novelist Céline, who spent part of his childhood there and integrated it into his early work. Perec does not discuss Céline but Lieux effectively reappropriates a space associated with a notoriously anti-Semitic writer, and so resonates with Perec's own family history, particularly the death of his mother in a Nazi extermination camp. Overall, this means that the supposedly empty space of the arcade is in fact a crowded one; far from belonging to no-one, the Passage Choiseul is subject to contesting claims, including Perec's own paradoxical attempt to appropriate it for his own ends by declaring it common property.