Deux chronotopes qui diffèrent à une lettre près : La Disparition et Les Revenentes de Georges Perec

The present article analyses two novels by Georges Perec, La Disparition (1969) et Les Revenentes (1972). Essential works of the Oulipo literary movement, they both represent a formal constraint. La Disparition is a lipogramme, i. e. a novel in which the letter e is missing, Les Revenentes is a monovocalism, the only vowel used being the vowel e. It follows that these two novels are complementary and mutually exclusive in the sense that no word from one novel can appear in the other (except for rare words with no vowels at all). Larger consequences can be drawn from this as far as the chronotope is concerned, as these two also occupy two different universes because the place and time denominations cannot be the same. We take this fact as the starting premise and develop in from a literary point of view and that of time and space considerations.