Present Pasts: Patrick Modiano's (Auto)Biographical Fictions (Faux Titre 255)

Present Pasts Patrick Modiano’s (Auto)Biographical Fictions

FAUX TITRE 255

Etudes de langue et littérature françaises publiées sous la direction de Keith Busby, M.J. Freeman, Sjef Houppermans, Paul Pelckmans et Co Vet

Present Pasts Patrick Modiano’s (Auto)Biographical Fictions

Dervila Cooke

AMSTERDAM - NEW YORK, NY 2005

Cover Photo: 41, boulevard Ornano, Paris. Photograph by Shigeo Shirai. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence’. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence". ISBN: 90-420-1884-4 Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2005 Printed in The Netherlands

This book is dedicated to my parents, Paddy and Ann Cooke. I would also like to thank several people for their much-appreciated help in the preparation of this book, whether with intellectual, technical, or moral support. In alphabetical order, these include Christine Capderou, Maeve Cooke, Orla Cooke, David Evans, Mary Gallagher, David Gascoigne, Mathias Girel, Mary Haslam, Akané Kawakami, Emer O’Beirne, Martin Sauter, Sophie Schvalberg, Maria Scott, Gaëlle Tallet, and Karin Zettl. Particular thanks must go to Johnnie Gratton for his careful reading and advice with the initial version of this text. Special thanks also to Sheila Burns for her patient and rigorous proofreading. Any errors that remain are my own oversights.

List of Abbreviations La Place de l’étoile (PE) La Ronde de nuit (RN) Les Boulevards de ceinture (BC) Villa triste (VT) Livret de famille (LF) Rue des Boutiques obscures (RBO) Une jeunesse (UJ) De si braves garçons (BG) Quartier perdu (QP) Dimanches d’août (DA) Remise de peine (RP) Vestiaire de l’enfance (VE) Voyage de noces (VN) Paris Tendresse (PT) Fleurs de ruine (FR) Un cirque passe (CP) Chien de printemps (CdP) Du plus loin de l’oubli (DPLO) Dora Bruder (DB) Des inconnues (DI) La Petite Bijou (PB) ‘Éphéméride’ (Éph)

Contents Introduction

11

1: Storytellers and Interpreters

15

Diffuse Autobiography and Identity Intertwined Lives: Biography in the Texts History Four Types of Modiano Reader The Imagined Author Authorial Presence and the ‘Modiano Novel Effect’ Fact and Fiction Readers and Investigation Character The Modiano Narrator – a Brief Introduction

19 22 23 25 28 30 32 34 36 42

2: Autobiography and Autofiction

49

2(i) The Autobiography Effect Shadows of the Mind Family Ties Dissonance and Versionality A Multiple and Dispersed ‘Je(u)’

55 57 59 65 69

2(ii) Modiano and the Canon of French Autobiography

70

2(iii) Modiano and Autofiction The Origin of the Term, and the Debate around It Key Practitioners of Autofiction of the Twentieth Century in France

75 77

3: The Autofictions

91

3(i) Livret de famille: Les Vies de Patrick Modiano The Fact/Fiction Problematic Autobiographical Allusiveness, History, and Secrecy Livret de famille and the Multiple-Text Reader Postmodern Practice, Postmemory, and Personal Pain

82 93 94 102 108 111

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3(ii) De si braves garçons: ‘Un léger parfum de naufrage’ A Strong Fiction Effect ‘Empty’ Narrators Filled by the Characters They Narrate Who’s Speaking, Please? The Response of the Multiple-Text Reader Fragments of Selfhood

118 121 122 126

3(iii) Remise de peine: ‘QUELQUE CHOSE DE TRÈS GRAVE’ Autobiographical Uncertainty ‘Quelque chose de très grave’ Memory, History, Garages, and the Solitary Bumper Car ‘QUELQUE CHOSE DE TRÈS GRAVE’ (bis) Mystery, Imagination, and the Development of a Writer

127 130 133 135 138 140

3(iv) La Petite Bijou: ‘J’avais rêvé tout ça’ Dreaming up the Past Translating Fictions Autofictional Connections Intertextual Mothers La Petite Bijou and the Multiple-Text Reader Memory and Forgetting

141 142 146 147 149 150 152

4: Self-Narration as Theme

155

4(i) Quartier perdu: a Dreamlike Unity Dreamlikeness and ‘the Emotional Reality Effect’ Leading, Being Led, and the ‘unité secrète’

158 162 166

4(ii) Vestiaire de l’enfance: Silent Fireworks Imagining Memories Emotion and its Repression Parents, History, and Personal Pain

168 170 173 176

4(iii) Rue des Boutiques obscures: Bumping into Possible Selves Hints and Secrets History in the Text and Autobiography on Modiano’s Part

111 116

178 184 186

Contents

9

4(iv) La Place de l’étoile: the Artifice of Identity Re-Imagining History The Emptiness of the Self: Dangers and Possibilities

192 195 196

5: Modiano and Biography

203

Parameters for Biography Biofictions Modiano and Biofiction Modiano’s Biographers as (Historical) Artists An Authority without Tyranny? Silence and Distance Gaps and Incoherence Briefness, Mystery, and ‘Biographèmes’ Why Write Biographies? (Auto)Biography ‘Possession’

206 210 215 217 219 221 222 223 225 226 228

6: Biographical Creation in Les Boulevards de ceinture and Chien de printemps

231

6(i) Les Boulevards de ceinture: un ‘lieu de passage’ An External Internality Recording the Past with an Ethos of Ambiguity The Suggestion of Photographs Familial Emotions and the (Auto)Biographical Urge Holes, Postmemory, ‘Biographèmes’, and Interpretation

232 234 237 241 243 246

6(ii) Chien de printemps: le peu de choses que l’on sait Commemoration with Minimal Betrayal Incompleteness and Uncertainty An Artful Shaping Identification and Identity Single-Text Readers and Multiple-Text Readers Open Doors and Textual Whispers

248 254 255 257 259 262 264

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7: Fusion and Distance: Biography in Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder

269

7(i) Voyage de noces ‘Les blancs, les silences et les points d’orgue’ A Sense of Ingrid Biography and History Fusion and Diffusion of Experience in Self-Narration Biographical ‘Truth’

269 270 273 274 276 282

7(ii) Dora Bruder Coinciding Lives Questions of Fictionality Rejecting Omniscience Scene and ‘Character’ Mediating the Past

283 285 288 293 295 297

Conclusion

305

The Wider Intertext Belief and Suspicion Garbo’s Eyelashes and the ‘petite musique’ Photography, Ghosts, Silence, and Interpretation An Ironic Yet ‘Connective’ Humanism

307 308 311 313 315

Bibliography

319

Index

345

Introduction This book explores diffuse autobiography, the role of the reader, and the notions of biographical and historical writing in Modiano’s work. It is the first study to examine in depth the twelve texts specifically concerned with life-writing, in both autobiographical and biographical/ historiographical projects. It discusses issues of memory and imagination in the representation of self and other in these texts, looking principally at Modiano himself but also at other figures, both real and imagined. ‘Life-writing’ is taken to mean autobiography and biography, as well as their subsets of autofiction and biofiction, and encompasses any narrativization of experience focusing on extended discussion of the self or a given other. Questions of memory are clearly of importance in the case of autobiographical writing, but are also significant on the broader level of the ‘memory by proxy’ of biographically and historically suffused writing, especially as in Modiano’s case the memories of others and the past of the ‘années noires’ are often appropriated in fiction, just as personal memories are deliberately blended with imagination. Life-writing per se has not been the focus of any full-length study of Modiano’s work to date. While Colin Nettelbeck and Penelope Hueston did much groundwork in establishing the main facts of the author’s life, and Thierry Laurent has devoted a book to the idea of Modiano’s work as autofiction (in a rather loose definition that seems to mean ‘autobiographical fiction’), no critic has so far provided an extended analysis of the texts from the point of view of the theories of autobiography and biography.1 This book aims to fill this gap, among others. Autobiographical and biographical writing are closely linked concepts, both having to do with the expression of identity. Their connection is especially pronounced in Modiano’s work, where the 1

See Nettelbeck and Hueston’s 1986 text, Patrick Modiano: pièces d’identité. Écrire l’entretemps, and Thierry Laurent’s 1997 publication, L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano: une autofiction. Alan Morris’s Patrick Modiano (1996) provides, amid much useful discussion, extensive historical references and analysis, and numerous interview quotations by Modiano. Regarding biography, it is only recently that introductory work in this domain has started to be carried out. See for example, Akané Kawakami, A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions (2000), pp. 40-47, and pp. 121-124. Bibliographical information for each work cited is given in full at the back of this book.

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problem of disentangling self from other is ever present. Also omnipresent is the question of invention, whether deliberate or unconscious. There is a recognition in Modiano’s work that elements of autobiography, biography, and fiction are involved in most narratives, especially those focused on constructing a sense of one’s self or of the other person. In La Place de l’étoile, Modiano’s first text, it is significant that the ‘biographie romancée’ (126) that Schlemilovitch embarks on in the château of the Marquise de Fougeire-Jusquiames, blends biography (based on stories the Marquise has told him), autobiography (elements from his own life), and autobiographical fiction (pastiche of Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu), in an apparent nod to these links.2 In Modiano’s case, history is also intermeshed with his sense of self and his perception of others, and memory in its historical sense is closely tied up with imagination. The ‘années noires’ of the Occupation and the Holocaust still haunt his work, as do feelings of being cut off from that past, which, though inaccessible, is vital to his understanding – and lack of understanding – of his own identity. The epigraph from René Char to Modiano’s 1977 text Livret de famille, ‘Vivre c’est s’obstiner à achever un souvenir’ is still appropriate a quarter of a century later, although in Modiano’s case the memories remain what the present ‘quatrième de couverture’ of Livret de famille terms ‘des souvenirs imaginaires’. I argue that Modiano’s personal complexes cannot be separated from historical issues, nor from his problematic relation to Jewishness and Jewish survivor guilt.3 With regard to autobiography and autofiction, Modiano’s games of autobiographical hide-and-seek are discussed along with the deliberate creation of an archetypal first-person ‘Modiano narrator’, as is the author’s displacement of autobiographical details onto secondary characters, in a type of autobiography par transposition. I draw on recent key theoreticians (Lejeune and Doubrovsky) as well as recent and contemporary practitioners (Perec, Sarraute, Barthes, Sartre, and Angot). Like these writers, Modiano shows that the narrativization of experience is always ‘fictional’, in the etymological 2

References to Modiano’s works will be made in brackets in the text, and the name of the text will only be mentioned beside the page reference where a lack of clarity would otherwise result. A list of abbreviations is given at the front of this book. 3 Several articles in the recent VanderWolk and Guyot-Bender edited Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/Stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano (1998) are examples of separatist approaches, often conflicting ones (for example the Dickstein and Rachlin articles).

Introduction

13

sense of ‘constructed’, and often even fictional in the sense of ‘invented’. On a personal level, he deliberately embraces fictionalization, seeming to believe in the general validity of imagination in autobiography. Indeed, he often seems to see a fictional ‘je’ as less artificial than a declaredly autobiographical one would be. In any case, fidelity to objectively verifiable events is not important in Modiano’s brand of diffuse autobiography, as the reader becomes the author’s analyst, tracking down the truth of the unconscious. Questions of imagination are much more ethically problematic in the biographical-cum-historical projects, yet Modiano’s biographernarrators seek to achieve narrative authority without tyranny, while stressing that every biography is shaped by its biographer, who is responsible for selecting, ordering and presenting events. Situating Modiano with respect to modern theories and practice of biography (drawing on Schwob, Maurois, and Ernaux among others), I argue that Modiano always highlights the teller behind the tale, and that this serves to legitimize imaginative speculation to a certain extent. Reader-response theory is the third element of the theoretical framework underpinning this book. This approach is in large part dictated by Modiano’s fore-grounding of interpreters through the omnipresence of investigative narrators. Like the latter, the reader is called upon to become a detective, as well as an analyst, on autobiographical, historical, and biographical levels. Furthermore, the reader functions as a vector for memory in the biographical and historical projects, and indeed must provide considerable imaginative input in order to flesh out the characters invoked, due to the mysteries and sketchiness that predominate in Modiano’s texts. Drawing on the work of theoreticians such as Genette and Booth, I distinguish between single-text readers and multiple-text readers, and between paratextually and non-paratextually informed ones. In relation to autofiction, I posit a ‘yardstick reader’ (the single-text, nonparatextually informed reader), by whom the strength of autofictionality of a text should be judged. However, I also stress the importance of the multiple-text reader, at whom Modiano’s global autobiographical project is directed, and who is also made particularly aware of the historical denseness of the texts and of the versionality of narration. Modiano reminds his readers that all is interpretation, and that partiality and inadequacy always accompany the translation of experience into language. However, despite all this, the expressive power of his and his narrators’ accounts is strong. While often playful,

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and clearly aware of the constructed, and hence subjectively biased, nature of all narratives, they create an emotional force and sense of connection, using invention, repetition, and imaginative symbolism to do so. Through the important questions raised concerning the validity of imagination, they provoke reflection on the idea of imaginative truth. It is suggested that any kind of vision can have its own truth when recognized as part of a specific context, and that it may even be valid to speak of imaginative truth in relation to the other person if the reader is given the opportunity to question that truth and to see it as the product of a subjective vision. The texts are not examined in chronological order, but are grouped according to their main focus. The eight that figure first deal mainly with questions of autobiography, and, in discussing them, I move from the autofictions through to less overtly autobiographical texts that nonetheless constitute extended reflections on autobiographical construction. The last four texts examined deal with issues of biographical writing, but since Modiano’s brand of diffuse autobiography pervades the biographical projects, the issue of selffictionalization spills over into the second half of the book, where ethical questions of imaginative representation of other people and historical events are the focus. Several of the texts have not been given much critical attention to date, amongst them De si braves garçons, Remise de peine, and Chien de printemps. Dora Bruder, though very well received by critics, falls into the same category of semi-neglect, perhaps because it is a relatively recent work. The recent La Petite Bijou is also discussed in detail, both in its own right and as part of the wider Modiano project and universe. That universe, despite the deceptively simple style of writing (especially of the post-1972 texts) is brimful of literary sophistication, exploring important questions of memory, imagination, and the blurring between them.4 4

On Modiano’s ‘écriture faussement transparente’, see Pierre Assouline, in his Modiano dossier (Lire, May 1990), and Jacques Bersani, ‘Patrick Modiano, agent double’.

1 Storytellers and Interpreters This chapter provides an overview of the foregrounding of storytellers and interpreters in Modiano’s work, in the context of autobiographical and biographical-cum-historiographical writing in the texts. It explores Modiano’s highlighting of the storytelling function – his tendency to stress the teller behind the tale. We shall see how he underlines the power invested in storytellers, who have power over the figures they portray, over the images and versions of themselves they choose to stress, and over their story in general. We shall also see some of the limitations involved in the creation of stories, due not only to personal forgetting and repression of memory but also to the general opacity of other people’s consciousnesses and of the past. The patchy nature of the material Modiano and his narrators must work from engenders a veritable need for imagination, in order to fill in some of the gaps and create a sense of character, at least for the duration of the imagining process. Indeed, Modiano emphasizes the role of imagination in both narration and reading, showing that imagination can be a valuable tool in the representation of life, while making no claim to knowledge of an objective, unchanging truth. We shall also be looking in this chapter more generally at Modiano as a writer of fiction, and at what can be called his ‘authorial presence’, which for Modiano manifests itself through a signature style or imprint. Many of Modiano’s archiving and documenting narrators are openly described as dreamers, or possessed of wild imaginations. In drawing attention to his and his narrators’ propensity to imagine, Modiano often seems to be suggesting that elements of invention are present in most narration. This suggestion that the narrativization of experience involves invention can have ethical implications, especially with the texts or passages concerned with presenting other people in writing, as well as with historiography and remembrance in general. From the point of view of autobiography, reminders of the invented and constructed nature of the texts draw attention to the psyche of the inventing narrator, and thence to that of the coordinating

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authorial figure inferred or imagined by the reader. Such reminders show Modiano’s awareness of his own construction of textual identities in a type of diffuse autobiography, and his knowledge that he is projecting emotions and experiences onto textual figures. Modiano’s use of first-person narration is a key issue, and has many important effects. Firstly, it can have a confessional effect (and in Modiano’s case often does), creating a sense of intimacy between the reader and the narrator, and encouraging belief in the narrated scenario. As Nathalie Sarraute put it, this type of narration ‘possède au moins une apparence d’expérience vécue, d’authenticité, qui tient le lecteur en respect et apaise sa méfiance’.5 In other words, readers have a tendency to allow themselves believe in the truth of what they are reading, even if they are sporadically warned that the narrator is inventing. Modiano uses this ‘apparence d’authenticité’ to convey emotion on a personal level, and often also to stress matters of historical importance. Indeed, his readers are shown that an emotional, fictional, truth can have its own validity. The texts often produce a sense of what Aragon called ‘le mentir-vrai’,6 whereby the transposition of remembered events into an imaginative composition often seems to convey a truth closer to ‘reality’ than a more factual reproduction might do. Nonetheless, it must be remembered that firstperson narration, with its limited perspective, also dramatizes the subjective nature of storytelling. The latter effect discourages readers from regarding Modiano’s narrators as the fount of all knowledge while also stressing the opacity of other people’s consciousnesses. Modiano’s narratives are in any case marked by truncation and lack of certitude. This is emphasized by the many questions that remain unanswered, whether due to uncertainties relating to memory and identity on personal or historical levels, or because of gaps in the knowledge of the narrators about the figures they narrate. In itself, the brevity of the texts often suggests that much is unknown about the characters concerned. This is reinforced by the fact that most of the characters are shown in mere glimpses, in a poetics of bits and pieces stressing the fragmented nature and absence of unity of identity, in relation both to ‘the self’ and the other person. Modiano’s view of his own identity seems particularly disconnected, and his fragmented view of himself and his experience are manifested by the extremely 5

‘L’Ère du soupçon’, p. 1583. From Aragon’s short story of the same name that gave its name to the 1980 Folio collection of his stories. 6

Storytellers and Interpreters

17

diffuse and snippet-like nature of the overarching autobiographical project in the texts. As shall be shown in more detail in Chapter Two, the texts are a bundle of reworked shreds of selfhood, which never seem to add up to an entirely solid, unambiguous picture. One of the main causes of the inconclusiveness that is such a feature of Modiano’s work is the author’s oppression by unfinished and uncertain memory. This encompasses both historical ‘memory’, which he cannot access, and more personal memories that he seems to fear disturbing. Cut off from memory of the war years and from the Holocaust through lack of direct experience, while also deliberately repressing memories such as that of his brother Rudy’s death (or at least sublimating them in fiction), Modiano seems haunted by memory and the past, but also by lack of memory. This complex problematic underlies much of the sense of unfinished business in the texts. Despite the claim of Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk that the more recent texts have ‘a sense of closure absent from the early works’, lack of closure remains a hallmark of Modiano’s work.7 For example, there is a striking lack of resolution of the central mystery in the recent La Petite Bijou – the identity of the ‘femme au manteau jaune’ – and its ending is extremely ambiguous, stressing the vulnerability of the suicidal narrator who is recovering in hospital, and thus perhaps her openness to the temptation to re-attempt suicide (she is in the ‘salle des bébés prématurés’), though she might seem to be at ‘le début d’une vie’ (the final words of the text: 154). Bar-sur-Aube, the site of the outing planned by the motherly ‘pharmacienne’, could just as well be read as ‘une barre sur l’aube’. The memory-free new beginning that the narrator at several points longs for will probably not occur, due to the weighty presence of the past. And while it remains to be seen how the author’s work will develop, the suggestion in the recent Accident nocturne that the past has perhaps once and for all been worked through may be overly optimistic in some respects. It is, after all, impossible for Modiano to work through memories that he has not directly experienced, yet these memories – of the Holocaust and of the Occupation years – seem vital to his sense of self. Despite the presence of serious questions such as these, Modiano’s work also exhibits a striking playfulness. In the ludic vein characteristic of much postmodern writing, the author often seems to be playing on the reader’s expectations, and indeed playing textual 7

Guyot-Bender and VanderWolk make this claim in their introduction to Paradigms of Memory, pp. 3-4.

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games with his characters, sometimes appearing to be stage-managing them, and pointing to their artificiality. While much of his authorial puppeteering is certainly light-hearted, this self-conscious narration sometimes seems, in the context of the general highlighting of the figure of the storyteller, to be more than mere playfulness. Oscillation between the reality effect – a sense of the diegetic world as real – and the ‘fiction effect’ – the reader’s appreciation of the textual world, or part of that world, as an authorial invention – can even be used to remind readers of their willingness to allow themselves to be led by the narrator, as it encourages them to remember that the text is a construct. Illogicalities, implausibilities, and the creation of a sense of secretiveness around the narrator all encourage readers to question narratorial trustworthiness, openness, and reliability, and to retain a critical distance from storytellers in general. These issues are clearly of greatest importance in the biographically and historically focused texts. Such techniques, while stressing the power invested in storytellers, also encourage readers to remember that these storytellers are merely, like themselves, interpreters. As many critics have pointed out, all of Modiano’s narrators are investigators of some sort, and are often detectives, whether they are investigating themselves or other people (usually both). Much has been written about the postmodern foregrounding of the figure of the detective in Modiano’s novels.8 This highlighting of the figure of the interpreter can be seen as a deliberate statement by Modiano of the parallels between himself and his readerly detectives. Like the author, the reader is faced with problems of comprehension of story and plot and the opacity of other people’s lives, and must fill in many of the gaps and uncertainties with imagination. Yet Modiano’s readers are also of great importance in their own right. While Modiano does play with his readers, often leading them astray, and frequently thwarting their desire for coherent narratives, he ultimately demonstrates a strong respect for them, and indeed a dependence on their powers of analysis and imagination. They are, after all, the activators of the text, and without them the characters would remain a void. Guy Roland of Rue des Boutiques obscures makes this point by stating ‘Je ne suis rien’ at the start of his 8

For example, Warehime, ‘Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Rue des Boutiques obscures, Quartier perdu, Dimanches d’août, and Fleurs de ruine’, Kawakami’s section on the detective genre (pp. 93-106), and Jeanne C. Ewert, ‘Lost in the Hermeneutic Funhouse: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Detective’.

Storytellers and Interpreters

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narrative’ (11). The reader also owns the narratives to an extent. Indeed, while Modiano stresses that one can never fill in all the gaps, he often also leaves it up to his readers to carry out ‘un travail d’imagination’ to fill in blanks, and, to a certain extent, to appropriate the text as they see fit. Modiano himself puts this best: ‘Je désire laisser des silences. Au cinéma et dans tous les arts, j’ai toujours été obsédé par ce qui est suggéré, ce qui est en creux, les vides’, and, on a separate occasion: ‘Moins il a d’informations, plus le lecteur doit faire un travail d’imagination et construire quelque chose’.9

Diffuse Autobiography and Identity The reader is constantly made to feel that Modiano is aware that he has infused his work with his personality, and, importantly, that he knows his readers expect this to be the case. This is evident, for example, in the fact that he closes Poupée Blonde (1983) with the image of an advertisement for a certain Paul Roche bearing the words ‘une griffe, un style’. This is clearly a nod to the fact that this text, like so many others, is a type of ‘autopastiche’, carrying the characteristic Modiano ‘griffe’ or ‘signature’. Amongst the definitions in Le Grand Robert of the word ‘griffe’, meaning, in common parlance, a fashion label, is: ‘marque de la personnalité de quelqu’un dans ses œuvres’. The strong autobiography effect of Modiano’s texts is heightened by the fact that most are narrated by markedly similar first-person narrators, and from standpoints close to the year of publication. A sense of Modiano’s main preoccupations filters through, and the reader can tentatively piece together the personal factors that helped make Modiano so obsessed with disappearance, solitude, unstable identities and the concept of ambiguity. However, readers are constantly kept guessing as to which version of events is the most accurate. They become bloodhounds, like those in chapter V of Livret de famille, and seek to nose out information as to Modiano’s life, but on some points the texts remain one long unfulfilled promise of ‘je t’expliquerai’.10 Like his narrators, Modiano seems to be beset by the 9

Dominique Montaudon, ‘Patrick Modiano: Le plus agréable c’est la rêverie’; Interview with Bernard Pivot, Apostrophes, 26 November 1982. 10 This phrase is associated with several of the secondary characters, most notably the Albert Modiano representative in Les Boulevards de ceinture, but also occurs in relation to characters more closely representative of Modiano himself – Charell, Desoto and Newman in De si braves garçons, for example –, none of whom ever provide the awaited explanations.

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desire to ‘fausser compagnie aux gens’.11 Indeed, readers sometimes feel that Modiano is deliberately teasing them, or else genuinely unable to write directly about his own life. However, his work also makes the important point that all narratives, including autobiographical ones, merely provide a version of events, as memory is eminently reshapeable, being susceptible to erosion over time, closely linked to imagination, and subject to selectivity at the moment not only of its inception but also of its activation. The questions of problematic identity that are such a feature of Modiano’s texts have several interlinking causes. Most overtly to the fore is the author’s personal drama of having to identify with a highly ambiguous paternal figure, who, though Jewish, had black-market connections during the war, which may have led him into contact with French Gestapo members. Modiano’s preference for inconclusiveness and ambiguity may be informed by the mystery and contradictions surrounding this father figure, who was generally distant towards his son, and largely absent from his life (at least in terms of physical presence). Albert Modiano’s physical absence and the moral black hole of his presumed activities must account for some of the characteristic ‘impression de vide’ in the work, as must the loss of Modiano’s brother Rudy in childhood, which seems to have created a sense of a lost self in the surviving sibling. The problematic nature of French-Jewish survivor identity is another issue of founding importance, and one that often seems inextricably connected with Modiano’s familial scenario. The obliteration of so many lives and the survivor’s sense of guilt for existing, when others have been annihilated, are frequently difficult to distinguish from Modiano’s feelings about Rudy. In similar fashion, the impossibility of knowing a part of history that one feels is vital to one’s sense of self links in with Modiano’s unrealizable desire to know his father’s past activities. To add to these familial and historical problems, a postmodern emphasis on the inconsistency of the self underscores feelings of lack of solidity of identity. Whatever the cause, there are many scenes where the narrator briefly loses all sense of who he or she is, and must repeat his or her name and address over and over in order to escape from the state of panic this induces. The inconsistency of the self is also stressed in the narrators’ awareness of the strangeness of the forgotten self or the otherness of the photographed self, as is most evident in 11

This is a phrase that recurs in the works. See Modiano’s comments in Jean Montalbetti, ‘Patrick Modiano ou l’esprit de fuite’, pp. 42-43.

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Rue des Boutiques obscures. All of this leads to the realization that a solid and unified self cannot exist for Modiano. The strangeness of the self is brought home at another level through reflection on language. In Quartier perdu, Guise’s feeling of being a stranger in Paris on returning after a long absence is heightened by the initial foreignness of his native tongue. Equally, learning a different language can allow forgetting of aspects of the self, and the narrator of story II of Des inconnues is one of many Modiano narrators who wish to leave France for a country where their language is not spoken. In La Place de l’étoile, Schlemilovitch shows that a sense of self is often created by the language of others, as he takes on both Fascist and anti-Semitic qualities in his frantic wish to find out who he is. It is clear that the self constructed by narrative is merely one aspect of selfhood, and may be ‘false’, in the sense of ‘inappropriate’, though it is also recognized that there can never be a ‘true’ one. Falseness, or at least arbitrariness, of identity is stressed by the multiplicity of false names in the text. In any case, identity is not fixed, and is subject to constant reinterpretation, and Modiano’s autofictional and autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical games point out that the ‘self’ constructed by language is merely one ‘self’ among an infinite number of possible ones. Despite the anxiety in the text concerning slippery selfhood, often stemming from the absence of strong adult figures as role models, there is a tension in the works between the desire for a solid sense of identity and the wish for a nomadic, de-centred self. There are numerous scenes where the narrators, usually sitting outside on a bench, find themselves tempted to drift into anonymity, sometimes also wishing to descend into a tramp-like existence. And the effect of Modiano’s work as a whole can even at times seem to be one of deliberate fragmentation and dispersion of something resembling a ‘self’ (as is especially clear on a single-text level in the autofictions of Livret de famille and De si braves garçons). The effect is sometimes even an apparent desire to give readers the slip, no doubt in part explicable by Modiano’s identification with hunted Jewish figures, combined with his personal predilection for playing peek-a-boo. The ambivalence is perhaps best summed up in Modiano’s description of La Place de l’étoile and La Ronde de nuit, as, respectively, ‘la recherche d’une identité’ and ‘la fuite instinctive devant toute

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identification’.12 We shall see the ramifications of these issues in greater detail in the chapters dealing more closely with autobiography.

Intertwined Lives: Biography in the Texts Modiano’s readers’ desire to identify with the author and with his narrators, and their wish to access autobiographical authenticity, are paralleled by the desires of Modiano’s biographer-narrators to connect with other psyches and to understand other people. A merging of doubles takes place as the reader is led to reflect on the distance and proximity between the selves of the biographer-narrators and the people they narrate, wondering where narrated self stops and narrated other begins. Walking in other people’s footsteps is the life-blood of many of Modiano’s narrators, incorporating the ambiguities concerning being and following inherent in the declaration ‘Je suis’, famously demonstrated in the opening pages of Breton’s Nadja (1928). The self is at times presented as the place of intersection of many voices, as when Guy Roland in Rue des Boutiques obscures declares ‘je n’étais rien, mais des ondes me traversaient, tantôt lointaines, tantôt plus fortes et tous ces échos épars qui flottaient dans l’air se cristallisaient et c’était moi’ (124). Such imagery translates into a question-mark over how much autonomy the person represented in biography can retain. The first-person narrators are parasites of a sort, as they and their stories gain sustenance from the figures they describe. However, the narrated other also depends on the narrating voice for its existence (Nathalie Sarraute describes this by calling the narrated characters in first-person narration ‘dépendances’ of the narrating ‘je’).13 Thus, the relationship is a symbiotic one. In a sense, all of the characters have qualities of fireflies as well as of moths, flying towards light, while also emitting light as they move. They possess energy, but also glean it from other selves. In the latter half of this book, we shall be exploring the extent to which the biographical projects arise from a desire to project the self onto the screen of the other person (in order, perhaps, to obtain a stronger sense of self), from a sense of duty to history and fascination with other people, or indeed from the need for an extended family. Biographical snippets, often fictionalized and containing discrepancies from text to text, are scattered throughout the works, mainly in relation to Modiano’s father, highlighting Modiano’s 12 13

Montalbetti, ‘Patrick Modiano ou l’esprit de fuite’, p. 42. ‘L’Ère du soupçon’, p. 1578.

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hauntedness by this barely-known paternal figure. Within the framework of the extended biographical inquiries – Les Boulevards de ceinture, Chien de printemps, Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder – Modiano’s poetics of fragmentation continues on a more general level. All four extended biographical inquiries are highly incomplete, momentary, and ultimately uncertain explorations of other people’s lives. Like the selves of the narrators, those of other people are shown to be disjointed, opaque and fugitive. Of all Modiano’s works, Dora Bruder is the one that conforms the most obviously to the conventional idea of a biographical inquiry. However it differs from conventional biography in some essential areas. Firstly, the narrator concentrates on a short period of Dora’s life. Secondly, he presents Dora’s story as a narrative intermeshed with his own search for traces of her, and one where his consciousness is omnipresent. Thirdly, he makes no claim of completeness or total knowledge, instead displaying the patchiness of his findings. However, he does, like Modiano’s other biographer-narrators, engage in some tentative reconstruction of possible events. We shall see that there is a strong concern in Modiano’s texts not to abuse their powers to represent the other person. While some imagining is allowed as valid in the representation of other people, the subjectivity of that imagining is always pointed out. There is also a general concern to leave the other person the dignity of mystery, and to balance a filling of gaps with the silence of respect. Where first-hand témoignage is not available, the reader is led to wonder how one should best approach the representation of the other person: whether it is best for the narrators to enumerate bare facts, or encourage empathy through speculation and personal involvement, even if the latter approach increases the element of subjectivity, and perhaps of bias, in the story.

History The general pattern of Modiano’s texts is a tri-temporal one, where a present-day narrator recollects events from the mid-1960s, with those events reaching back into the past of twenty to thirty years previously, meaning that all of the narrators’ lives are in some way linked with people who experienced the Occupation, and, to a lesser extent, with the police atmosphere in Paris of the years of the Algerian war. However, Modiano is not part of what is often derisively called ‘la mode rétro’, having been one of the earliest instigators of a return to reflection on the near past. (It should be remembered that Marcel

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Ophüls’s documentary Le Chagrin et la pitié, which focused on French attitudes to the Occupation was not released until 1971).14 He is nonetheless concerned with looking back rather than forward, refusing to allow the past to be forgotten, and stressing the intermeshing of lives unbeknownst to us as well as the historical dimension behind individual life. There is a sense that the streets and buildings of Paris have been witnesses of History, and of the need for an investigation into the secrets interred or immured in them. Even in those texts where his narrators state they wish to forget the past, the references ‘en filigrane’ to the ‘années noires’ counter this, showing that the novelist does not want his readers to forget these years. These omnipresent references to the war years and to the legacy of the Holocaust, also show that Modiano cannot himself forget them, much as he may sometimes wish to do so. In Vestiaire de l’enfance and Rue des Boutiques obscures, the damage apparently done to memory by deliberate lack of reflection on the past is both a personal warning by Modiano to himself and an admonishment to those who, through cowardice or laziness, wish to forget. In short, it is often difficult to decide whether individual or collective issues are more important in the texts. This does not invalidate an approach to Modiano’s work in terms of autobiographical and biographical projects, however, as such questions are of necessity caught up with issues of collective importance, especially in Modiano’s case. Though it could perhaps be accused of demanding too much verification by the reader, Modiano’s work is political. (Perhaps in recognition of the danger of over-allusiveness, references that elsewhere are ‘en filigrane’ become explicit in Dora Bruder).15 His very lack of conclusiveness sometimes seems to be a political statement, in that it is in direct opposition to the framing, emplotment and limits set on history by many historians, as has been recently 14

For a discussion of the return to reflection on the ‘années noires’, see Baptiste Roux, Figures de L’Occupation dans l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano, p. 33 et passim. 15 There is some validity in the argument that the hidden nature of Modiano’s historical references means that they may bypass all but the most widely informed readers. Like Perec, in his Je me souviens, Modiano taps into the collective memory of a specific generation, and is less accessible to younger readers. In relation to this point, it is significant that Roland Brasseur, in Je me souviens de Je me souviens (1998), has felt it necessary to provide glosses on Perec’s rememberings, dedicating his text to the ‘générations oublieuses’. Interspersed through this interesting text is a number of references that show what could be construed either as Modiano’s debt to Perec’s texts or merely to collective memory and his own experience.

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argued by Martine Guyot-Bender.16 One of the questions that should be kept alive is the question of French involvement in the ‘années noires’. Even the apparently valueless Swing Troubadour of La Ronde de nuit narrates a highly ideological text, challenging the ‘résistancialiste’ black-and-white view of the Occupation.17 La Place de l’étoile is political in that it encourages a certain irreverence with regard to history, as well as a duty to remember what happened. By use of blatant fictionalization, it also makes abundantly clear that history can be restructured. In a similar vein, in Vestiaire de l’enfance, Quartier perdu and Rue des Boutiques obscures, the past informs the present, but the present also reforms the past. This is also made clear in the biographical enterprises of Les Boulevards de ceinture and Voyage de noces. Fiction is constantly colliding with History in Modiano’s texts. His ‘histoires’ provoke reflection on the various meanings of the word in French. ‘Histoire’ underlies his work in the sense of ‘what happened’, as in the expression ‘dans l’histoire’, but also as the matrix in which different lives were led. Pervading these two concepts, and set on a more general level, are the ideas of ‘Histoire’ as any kind of a story, and ‘Histoire’ in the sense of deliberate falsification (as in the phrase ‘raconter des histoires’). The reader of Modiano’s work is led to wonder both whether there can be such thing as a ‘true story’, and whether this notion is necessarily a contradiction in terms. While historical events themselves are not ‘deliberately falsified’ by Modiano (though his autobiographical details sometimes are), they are often mixed with invention. One of the reasons for this is to create a vehicle for empathy through the creation of a fictional consciousness with which the reader can connect. Furthermore, imagination allows the author to create a wider web of intermeshing lives than would be possible by the use of historical event alone.

Four Types of Modiano Reader Before looking more closely at how Modiano foregrounds the storyteller behind his stories, it is necessary to discuss the main types of reading instance that seem to be addressed in his works. On a general level, I am positing virtual readers with sophisticated literary 16

See her Mémoire en dérive: Poétique et politique de l’ambiguïté chez Patrick Modiano. See also her article ‘Making Sense of Narrative Ambiguity’, especially pp. 28-35. 17 For a distinction between ‘résistants’ and ‘résistancialistes’, see Henry Rousso’s Le Syndrome de Vichy: de 1944 à nos jours.

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reading competences formed by late twentieth-century critical reading practices, who are aware of issues such as the narrator-author distinction and the fact that texts do not communicate a single stable message, and may indeed foreground undecidability of interpretation as one of their main points. Fortunately, as Modiano is a contemporary author, these virtual readers fit (at least approximately) the same horizon of cultural, ethical and literary expectations as those that conditioned the author’s own writing practices.18 In his work Seuils (1987), Gérard Genette distinguished between the text ‘à l’état nu’, and the paratext – that which surrounds the text but also goes beyond it. The paratext is made up of peritext (the physical surrounds such as preface, dedication and blurb) and epitext, which is everything to do with the text that is not physically attached to it (interviews, literary criticism, authorial statements, etc). Given the preponderance of autobiographical transposition in Modiano’s texts, it is necessary to allow for a reader who possesses the biographical and paratextual information available about Modiano at this time, and who is thus well aware of autobiographical references. We can call this the paratextually informed reader. It is also useful to posit a reader who is completely uninformed biographically, and who has not read anything in the peritext except for the title and the author’s name. This is the non-paratextually informed reader. While the title and the name of the author are arguably part of the paratext, for simplicity’s sake I use ‘nonparatextually informed’ to denote readers aware merely of the text and of these details – a very common situation. The extent of readers’ paratextual knowledge depends of course on the edition involved, among other things, as Folio texts and the Seuil editions almost systematically give at least the author’s date of birth and sometimes also his birthplace, while the Gallimard ‘blanche’ editions generally do not. However, while I sometimes refer to readers with specific or edition-related information, the division between complete paratextual information and none (except for the title and author’s name) is the main distinction to be remembered in relation to the paratext. Importantly, even for non-paratextually informed readers, the author’s presence is very strong in Modiano’s writing. Even without external biographical information, readers will build up a picture of 18

Here I am drawing on Hans Robert Jauss’s famous notion of the Erwartungshorizont, covering the set of cultural, ethical, and literary expectations of a work’s readers in the historical moment of its appearance.

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the author Modiano as a ludic storyteller obsessed with certain themes such as the fleeting nature of existence and the mystery of other people’s lives, possessing certain biographical attributes such as an enigmatic father figure, experience of boarding school, a detailed knowledge of Paris, an artiste mother, etc. It should also be remembered that the picture of the author for the non-paratextually informed reader will include some spurious assumptions, and that there arises a considerable amount of confusion as to what the precise picture is, as discussed in Chapter Two of this book. A second important distinction is that between ‘single-text reader’ and ‘multiple-text reader’. For simplicity’s sake, multiple-text readers can generally be taken to have read all of Modiano’s output since it would be a never-ending exercise to allow for those who have read varying combinations. These hypothetical multiple-text readers are akin to what could be termed ‘Modianistes’: real-life fans, who read all the author’s books and rush to buy ‘le nouveau Modiano’ (a telling phrase, as it implies a new version of Modiano himself). It is necessary to distinguish between single-text readers and multiple-text readers in order to allow an appreciation of what seem to be deliberate echoes and sometimes ‘build-up’ tactics on Modiano’s part. The texts often seem to lead into one another, and to contain subtle echoes and foreshadowings of the events in the immediately previous and subsequent texts, so that the fact that Rocroy in Quartier perdu (1984) calls the narrator ‘un brave garçon’ should not surprise the reader aware of the directly preceding text De si braves garçons (1982). La Ronde de nuit contains weighty references to the geographical ‘place de l’étoile’; a ‘villa triste’ occurs in Les Boulevards de ceinture; Livret de famille mentions the ‘rue des Boutiques obscures’; Du plus loin de l’oubli echoes a phrase from the end of Quartier perdu, and so on. Equally, the references to shadow contrasting with harsh light that occur in most of the novels at some point, will not necessarily be understood by the reader unaware of the ‘policier’ atmosphere of the early texts Les Boulevards de ceinture and Rue des Boutiques obscures, from which this imagery gains its meaning. This allusiveness seems to assume a loyal following of Modianistes, relying on the reader’s knowledge of the Modiano universe having grown from text to text. The distinctions between paratextually and non-paratextually informed readers, and between multiple-text readers and single-text readers are important in any appreciation of Modiano’s autobiographical procedure. The multiple-text, paratextually informed

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reader is particularly frequently relied on by Modiano as a presence against which to bounce his references to problematic selfhood and memory. The roles of these different types of reader will become clear in the subsequent chapters. However, as all these types of reader have much in common, I will, in general, be referring to ‘the reader’ or ‘readers’, only distinguishing between them when the analysis requires it.

The Imagined Author Modiano’s works create a strong picture of an anthropomorphic figure with emotions and attitudes as well as a more textual figure derived from the reader’s awareness of an abstract writing instance arising from disruption of what Coleridge called ‘the willing suspension of disbelief’. Authorial presence is strong for all types of Modiano reader, but is of particular importance to the multiple-text reader, who is constantly reminded of the author in his roles both as constructor of the texts themselves and as constructor of fictionalized versions of his life-story. In discussing ‘the author’, I am aware that this term was long considered to be suspect. As recently as the late 1980s it was virtually taboo to speak of ‘the author’ in literary criticism, at least in discussions not related to autobiography.19 The idea of ‘the narrator’ was often called in to do service in many areas as an awkward and often inexact substitute. The structuralists’ and formalists’ hostility to the idea of the author was in principle a reaction to what they saw as the stultifying pre-eminence of amateur psychological criticism, and was in many ways a good thing. However, the structuralists’ approach had some major flaws. In elevating the idea of the text above all else, they sometimes forgot that the text depends on the reader for its activation. Equally fundamental an oversight was the fact that the author cannot die, despite the wishes to that effect expressed in Barthes’s seminal text ‘La Mort de l’Auteur’ in 1968. It has in fact proved impossible to get rid of the idea of the author. The awakening of interest in autobiographical studies in the mid-1970s, itself a reaction to the impersonality of structuralism, has broadened out into interest in the idea of the author in general, whether on political, historical, or aesthetic grounds.20 I see the author 19

For a useful discussion of this, see Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. 20 On these various aspects of authorship, see Sean Burke, Authorship: from Plato to the Postmodern. A Reader.

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as a kind of ghost that is always present in the reading process. He or she is always present at some level in the reader’s mind, as the organizing instance, and often an organizing consciousness, behind the text. Just as within textual worlds, first-person narrators can be said to ‘haunt’ or permeate the characters they narrate, the author is a type of ‘master ghost’, haunting all of the characters into which he is diffused, and, more generally, the text he has created. The Modiano authorial ghost is less wraith-like and ethereal than those of many other writers, since repetition of theme, imagery, character type and even structure creates a strong picture of the author as a composite entity. In this book, the author is mainly conceptualized as the ‘imagined author’. The imagined author can be defined as the picture of the author built up in the reader’s mind from textual indications, or alternatively, by biographical and other paratextual knowledge as well as by textual indications. It encompasses both the abstract concept of the writing instance, and the idea of the author as a human figure with emotions and beliefs. The single-text reader will clearly have a different picture of the author to that of the multiple-text reader. This book deals mainly with the composite imagined author: the multipletext reader’s picture of the author, as it is for this reader that Modiano mainly seems to be writing. I have chosen the term ‘imagined author’ rather than that of ‘virtual author’ as the latter term would suggest an exact counterpart of the virtual reader, which would be misleading. Whereas the notion of a virtual reader posits a hypothetical – though admittedly improbable – real human being, the imagined author does not necessarily reflect the real author. Though it may incorporate information gleaned from knowledge external to the text, it is primarily based on the image of him produced by his text, and often only on that image. Even the paratextually informed reader’s perception of the real-life Modiano comes under the heading of ‘imagined author’, insofar as it is merely an idea of the author. In this and the following chapters, the term ‘author’ is generally used instead of the more cumbersome ‘imagined author’, but my use of ‘the author’ implies ‘the imagined author’ – the reader’s image of the author – in all cases where the flesh-and-blood Modiano is not clearly in question. I am grateful to Wayne Booth’s courage in insisting in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) that the reading process calls up an image

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of the author as someone responsible for the text’s design.21 This is the main point of intersection between his ideas and mine. My notion of the imagined author, with its anthropomorphic side, and its textual aspect, exhibiting, and sometimes playing on, codes of reading and writing, is not directly equivalent to Booth’s idea of the implied author, however. This is mainly because the biographical element in my imagined author can stem from external indications as well as from textual ones, whereas Booth’s implied author is a purely textual construct. Further, I dislike the fixity and intentionality inherent in the term ‘implied’. This is partly because the term does not adequately stress the historicism of reading practices (there can be no transhistoric implied author, just as there is no trans-historic implied reader), but also because I prefer to recognize that the reader retains some autonomy in his or her imagined picture of the author, despite being likely to respond in certain ways to certain narrative techniques. Of course, real authors are free to encourage the creation of different pictures of themselves from novel to novel. Romain Gary was aware of this, and, in surreptitiously creating a new name and a new style for himself as Émile Ajar, proved the point that a real author can create many imagined authors. However, Modiano, by remaining faithful to type in all of his texts, seems to be constantly reasserting a strong picture of himself. This is fascinating, given that problems of uncertain identity are thematically important in his work, and suggests that it may be precisely because of feelings of unstable identity that the author seeks to remain faithful to the solid image of himself as a writer he has created for himself and for the reading public. Let us now examine more closely the idea of authorial presence as it manifests itself in Modiano’s work.

Authorial Presence and the ‘Modiano Novel Effect’ Modiano’s way of writing is so familiar to readers that it has become easy to parody, as demonstrated by the short story in an Australian academic journal attributed to ‘Patrick O’Modian’.22 As Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk put it in their conclusion to the Paradigms volume: ‘Readers’ expectations when they open the 21

Gerald Prince, in A Dictionary of Narratology, sums up Booth’s idea of the implied author as follows: ‘the implicit image of an author in the text, taken to be standing behind the scenes and to be responsible for its design and for the values and cultural norms it adheres to.’ 22 Colin Nettelbeck and Penelope Hueston [attrib], ‘Un soir ou un autre’.

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latest Modiano are probably stronger and more easily definable than they are for any other contemporary author’.23 It would be surprising indeed to find a Modiano text without a deliberate blurring of fact and fiction, obscure, often inexplicable angst, problematic parental figures, narrators who feel abandoned and lacking in direction, allusions to the ‘années noires’ of the Occupation and World War Two, an inconclusive quest, patches of self-conscious narration and what seem to be touches of light self-mockery by the author, imagery of light and shadow, of ships and the sea, of cinema and acting, and marginal and often vaguely criminal characters in chiaroscuro. Repetition of theme, language and character types means that, even for the nonparatextually informed reader, a certain picture of Modiano is built up, as a man with certain obsessions, but also with a sense of humour and an awareness that his narratives involve stock themes and types. Through this repetition Modiano is not only stressing the interconnectedness of his narratives but also the fact that they can never conclude, since links, when followed up, lead into a neverending series of other links. Thus, ‘the Modiano novel effect’ is not only a recognition of the Modiano universe, including its repetitiveness, but also an impression of unfinishedness.24 Modiano’s pointing to himself as author and constructor of the texts often occurs through formal symbolism, as in the use of doubling motifs in Vestiaire de l’enfance, which reinforces the stress on the split self in a highly literary manner, or the many references in that text to the strangely heavy local water, which appears to be a symbol of the Lethean waters of forgetfulness. Symbolism of placename is another favourite Modiano technique to stress the storyteller’s presence (‘le cabaret du Néant’ and ‘la place Blanche’ in La Petite Bijou, for example). Moreover, in most of the texts, the narrator is a writer or an artist of some form, and these diegetic references to the creating instance are often authorial reminders to readers that the world in which they are participating is a fictional one.25 23

Paradigms of Memory, p. 181. See also Kawakami, pp. 109-121, on ‘the Modiano Novel’. 25 The narrator of La Place de l’étoile presents himself as writing his memoirs, that of Les Boulevards de ceinture claims he is a novelist and becomes a degraded writer of pornographic fiction, Chmara in Villa triste pretends he is a detective novelist, the narrators of Livret de famille, Quartier perdu, Chien de printemps and Fleurs de ruine are professional writers, and those of Vestiaire de l’enfance and Voyage de noces are, respectively, a radio-writer and documentary maker-cum-biographer. 24

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Even in the texts that are narrated in a generally factual tone, the author seems to enjoy punctuating the documentary atmosphere with sporadic instances of implausibility, reminding the reader of the storyteller’s powers of invention. In Fleurs de ruine, for example, the general tone is one of historical, and indeed geographical, accuracy, but several elements remind the reader that these events did not necessarily happen. For example, one of the characters is called Claude Bernard, in a humoristic reference to the street in the fifth arrondissement named after the nineteenth-century physiologist. Internal echoes and formal symmetry also contribute strongly to awareness of the writing instance in Modiano’s texts, as do references to other writers through intertextuality. At times, the narrators themselves seem aware of the artificiality of their universe, occasionally referring to a sense of acting a part. This sense of artifice is enhanced by sporadic allusions to ‘décor[s] d’opérette’ and buildings ‘en carton pâte’.26 These effects, often obvious even to the single-text reader, sometimes seem to be deliberate statements of the artificiality of the texts, and are part of the general ludism characteristic of Modiano. The above techniques often create what could be called a ‘fiction effect’ that causes readers to return temporarily to a position of critical distance from the textual universe. This demonstrates a type of ironic complicity with the postmodern reader, while also forming part of Modiano’s general wish to stress that storytellers are not the repositories of any objective truth. However, matters are complicated by the fact that fiction, in the sense of a narrative of imagined events, is not unproblematically ‘unreal’ in Modiano’s work, but can purvey a real, if subjective, truth. Questions of imagination, and of the problems of distinguishing ‘actual’ event from invention, are in fact a hallmark of Modiano’s texts. Let us now look more closely at some of the issues involved.

Fact and Fiction One of Modiano’s favourite phrases in interview is that of ‘la rêverie romanesque’, and his narrators themselves have a propensity to indulge in imaginative speculation.27 In Quartier perdu, Ambrose Guise seeks to make contact with Tintin Carpentieri by telephone, but 26

See also Morris 2000, p. 43, note 22. See for example, his remarks in the interview with Montaudon: ‘Le plus agréable, c’est la rêverie’. 27

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when he dials his number the only answer he receives is a recorded message informing him that ‘il n’y a plus d’abonné au numéro que vous avez demandé’. Instead of continuing his search, Guise is content to reflect that ‘C’est important pour quelqu’un comme moi d’entendre de telles choses. Ça fait travailler l’imagination’ (86). Many of Modiano’s other narrators have similar imaginative tendencies. Mme Portier and Charell both describe Patrick in De si braves garçons as ‘un rêveur’ (147, 159), and Patoche in Remise de peine and the narrator of Fleurs de ruine are given to wild imaginings. The fact that the narrators so often point out their propensity for imaginative speculation creates doubt as to the ‘factuality’ of what they are recounting, and means that the reader often finds it impossible to distinguish between diegetic ‘fact’ and invention. The incorporation of precise topographical and historical detail into the fictions also often causes ontological blurring. On a more general level, the familiarity of Modiano’s fictional universe to the multiple-text reader can create feelings of ontological uncertainty, as it increases the solidity (and in a sense the ‘reality’) of that universe, even though it is often unclear which parts are most historically based. Modiano seems to be a figure struck by the bizarre in life, and this itself adds to the dreamlikeness of his writing. He has a predilection for characters with odd names, be they historical or fictional. Rue des Boutiques obscures includes a host of colourfully named real-life characters, including Lucky Luciano, Porfirio Rubirosa, and Hoyningen-Huene (whose name is, perhaps deliberately, misspelled as Hoynigen-Huenne: 141). This increases the ontological blurring in the texts as a whole, and means that, for the multiple-text reader, the author’s use of improbable names (Pedro McEvoy, Baby Da Silva or Yoko Tatsuké, for example) is no guarantee that they refer to invented characters. Likewise, the author’s interest in real-life coincidences (which is especially clear in Dora Bruder) means that even fictional coincidence, which often seems to be a marker of fictionality on a single-text level, can become tinged with the possibility of factuality on a multiple-text level. As Jimmy Sarano in Vestiaire de l’enfance puts it: ‘La vie ne vous réserve-t-elle pas des surprises encore plus grandes que celles qui vous attendent dans le prochain chapitre d’un roman?’ (128). The texts thus often seem to play on the reader’s desire to differentiate clearly between imagination and ‘fact’, frequently refusing to allow any clear distinction.

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Ontological blurring also arises from the fact that the narrators sporadically speak of their feeling of being in a dream. Many of the texts are extremely dreamlike, including six of the texts that will be analysed in the coming chapters: De si braves garçons, Vestiaire de l’enfance, Quartier perdu, Les Boulevards de ceinture, Voyage de noces, and La Petite Bijou. At first sight, the many references to dreaming and awakening in the texts might seem to be a clin d’œil on the author’s part as to the artificiality of his texts. However, since it is never possible to establish just what is the narrator’s dream and what is waking experience, these references ultimately seem part of a strategy to deliberately blur reality levels, and to assert the validity of the life of the mind. In many of the texts, the only reality that can be established with any certitude is often a psychological or emotional one (as has been most recently made clear in La Petite Bijou). While, on historical and biographical levels, the fact that these inventing narrators are somehow ‘untrustworthy’ encourages the reader to retain a critical distance from the events recounted, he or she may still allow that imagination can have a personal validity for the narrators.

Readers and Investigation As mentioned, a key aspect of Modiano’s texts is the fact that his storytellers are always, like the reader, investigators. Modiano never fails to make some sort of reference to detective novels in his texts, and several of the latter are strongly marked by the figure of the detective. Chmara in Villa triste claims to write detective novels. Guise in Quartier perdu is a writer of detective fiction. Roland in Rue des Boutiques obscures is a (retired) private detective, and in Les Boulevards de ceinture, Serge Alexandre attempts to become one. Dimanches d’août has a clear detective plot. Such foregrounding of interpreting characters is characteristic of contemporary fiction. Naomi Schor calls interpreting characters ‘interpretants’. She points out that ‘via the interpretant the author is trying to tell the interpreter (that is to say, the reader) something about interpretation and the interpreter would do well to listen and take note’.28 I suggest that at least part of this ‘something’ is the drive for unity and closure, goals

28

‘Fiction as Interpretation/Interpretation as Fiction’, p. 170. In order to avoid confusion with Peirce’s use of the term ‘interpretant’, I do not follow Schor’s usage, preferring the less complicated ‘interpreter’, and distinguishing between ‘narratorinterpreters’ and reader-interpreters’.

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which, in the light of Modiano’s texts, appear respectively illusory and unattainable, both on narratorial and readerly levels. Raymond Bach has recently pointed out that the device of recurring characters in Modiano’s texts stresses the affinity between the reader and the investigating narrators. With the multiple-text reader in mind, he makes the point that in trying to establish a coherent picture of all the recurring characters, the reader of Modiano’s novels comes to resemble the narrators, searching for links between loose strands: ‘the more the reader advances in Modiano’s work, the more the reader starts to resemble the individual narrators and their projects of re-assembling and linking’.29 However, these connections often run into dead ends, as discussed in the section on ‘character’ below. This is an extension of the lack of closure in Modiano’s texts on a single-text level, where characters are merely glimpsed, and mysteries often left unsolved. In playing on the reader’s desire for closure and unity, the author seems to be deliberately avoiding neat pictures of events, in favour of contradiction, ambiguities and enigma. His narrators, while apparently driven by a desire to understand similar to that of the reader, do not re-order events into a coherent picture in the fashion of Sherlock Holmes, ultimately choosing to leave their narratives open-ended. The insistent inconclusiveness of Rue des Boutiques obscures, Dimanches d’août, Vestiaire de l’enfance, Un cirque passe, and Du plus loin de l’oubli, to take merely the most striking examples in Modiano’s œuvre, plays on the detective genre, while also reflecting the sub-genre of the anti-detective novel. Narrative codes are both asserted and subverted. Rue des Boutiques obscures, for example, incorporates the detective genre’s fondness for red-herrings, while the fundamental mystery concerning the narrator’s identity remains unsolved. Where mysteries are solved, they can seem bathetic. In Du plus loin de l’oubli for example, the reader, like Jacqueline and the narrator, is disappointed by the scantiness of the sheaf of bills inside Cartaud’s suitcase, as well as by the slightly absurd stapler it contains (83). It is thus appropriate that, when the narrator is asked if what he is writing is a detective novel, he replies ‘Pas tout à fait’ (157). These games often bolster a sense of the imagined author as a playful figure, who is complicit with readers, in mutual knowledge of detective novel conventions. However, the discrepancies, ambiguities, and loose ends of Modiano’s narratives also show the reader that gaps and 29

‘Recurring Characters in Modiano’s Œuvre’, p. 175.

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contradictions can yield a fascinating sense of mystery. We are thus faced with the apparently paradoxical fact that Modiano on the one hand seeks to elucidate mystery and on the other seems actively to foster it. As suggested above, the reasons for this tension seem to lie in the author’s imaginative attachment to the mysterious figure of his father, coupled with his personal need to understand the past. While the narrators of Modiano’s texts clearly do not have all the answers, they still possess more knowledge than the reader initially does. As Ross Chambers has pointed out: ‘to tell a story is to exercise power’.30 This is true on both authorial and narratorial levels, where power involves the prerogative of ordering and presenting the events recounted, and also of selecting those events. Modiano’s narrators are often self-consciously secretive. They do not always reveal all the information possessed, even if it is vital to their stories. In Un cirque passe, for example, the narrator presumably knows what was in the suitcase left behind by Gisèle, but never describes its contents. In Rue des Boutiques obscures, the narrator, like all the Modiano narrators, provides a retrospective account, and as such must know who he is, or at least who he is not, but seems to choose to leave this unclear. The recurrence of such apparently deliberately secretive narrators marks the reader’s sense of the imagined author as someone who is aware of the powers of selection invested in storytellers (including autobiographers, as we shall see), as well as of the power of mystery to intrigue.

Character Let us now look at how Modiano uses characterization to remind his readers in a ludic manner of the considerable element of invention in what they are reading, as well as to convey emotional force and mystery. Critics have only recently started to explore the question of character in Modiano’s texts.31 It is a fascinating topic, since the fact that Modiano manages to create characters who are both convincing and artificial must go some way towards explaining his appeal to both a popular and academic readership. Despite the postmodern selfconsciousness of the texts, where characters sometimes appear as the author’s pawns, it is easy to read them without irony, as the narrators 30

Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction, p. 50. Bach’s article on character, is, to my knowledge, the only concerted study of aspects of character in Modiano’s work, and concentrates on the notion of recurring figures 31

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display strong and convincingly complex emotions, and the secondary characters are often just developed enough to generate a sense of human depth. In distinguishing ‘character-as-person’ from ‘characteras-pawn’, Vincent Jouve has elaborated a useful theory of novelistic character which involves a tripartite perception of the reader as made up of ‘lectant’, ‘lisant’ and ‘lu’.32 The ‘lu’ is the part of the reader who projects his or her subjective experience into the images evoked by the text. The ‘lisant’ is the part of the reader that submits to the referential illusion and submerges itself in the world of the text. The ‘lectant’ is the part that keeps a critical distance and ‘watches’ the ‘lu’ and the ‘lisant’ reading, taking pleasure in the workings of the text, and in any ironies called up. To the categories of ‘lectant’, ‘lisant’ and ‘lu’ correspond those of ‘effet-personnel’ (where personnel is understood as a noun), ‘effet-personne’ and ‘effet-prétexte’. With the ‘effetpersonnel’, character is perceived as the creation of the author (as part of the author’s ‘staff’ or ‘cast’), while the ‘effet-personne’ refers to the reader’s belief in the character as a person, which then authorizes the projection of subjective experience in the ‘effet-prétexte’.33 We shall mainly be focusing on the play-off between the ‘effet-personne’ and ‘effet-personnel’ groups in Modiano’s work, while generally preferring less cumbersome phraseology such as ‘human presence’ and ‘paper character’. The main opposition between the effect of human presence and of ‘paper characters’ is the difference between convincing character, where characters are fully-fleshed out or in some way suggest an authentic human presence, and artificial character, where the figures appear momentarily as linguistic or paper structures. It should be stressed that these effects always coexist in any given text, and that the extent to which convincingness or artificiality dominates is what gives each text its specificity. Let us start with the notion of the building-up of human presence around a character on a single-text level. In Modiano’s work, this occurs mainly through the presence of mystery, bolstered by the fascination that other people so often present for the narrating characters. In a recent interview, Modiano spoke of the power of mystery concerning one of the real-life models for ‘la Petite Bijou’, who lived in the same village as he did in his youth. As a boy, he knew she had acted in a film, but never knew her exact role, 32

L’Effet-personnage dans le roman. In this text, Jouve draws on groundwork done by Michel Picard, in La Lecture comme jeu. 33 See Jouve, especially pp. 81-107.

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and states: ‘Je préférais ne pas trop savoir. Je préferais qu’elle reste comme ça, avec son mystère. Elle était plus vivante’.34 The Modiano narrators themselves seem aware of the ‘life’ that stems from mystery, using it to create depth around the figures they narrate, as part of the ‘travail d’imagination’ that must be carried out by the reader. The mystery built up around the secondary characters through briefness and ellipsis is heightened by the narrators’ evident fascination with the people whose stories they tell. In Du plus loin de l’oubli, for example, the narrator declares of Peter Rachman: ‘On aurait pu écrire un roman sur sa vie’ (115). This possibility is never actualized, though one of the ‘chapters’ of the book is devoted to the narrator’s memories of an outing with Rachman, giving the reader a tantalizing glimpse of his character and a pang of regret that such a novel was never written (122-129). Another technique of creating human presence is through the use of contradictory elements. Here the characters approach what E.M. Forster saw as ‘roundness’, at least for the duration of their ‘effet-personne’. Round characters, are for Forster: ‘capable of surprising in a convincing way’.35 In Rue des Boutiques obscures, for example, Hutte is generally mysterious and person-like, not only because his past is not clear but because his change of attitude about Nice is less than fully explained. As concerns the effect of artificial character, the main marker of this on a single-text level in Modiano’s work has to do with what can be called ‘de-individualization’. This arises through the presence of strikingly similar dialogue, actions, or physical or mental attributes relating to a set of characters. De si braves garçons is an extreme case of this. Or, to take the example of Du plus loin de l’oubli again, Rachman’s ‘paper’ or ‘textual’ nature is highlighted by the fact that he seems to be introduced in order to echo Pierre Cartaud (both characters have a slightly louche aura, and for both, black cars are markers of their presence). Modiano’s awareness of his use of repetition in character is strikingly clear in the scene in Dimanches d’août (101-102) where the narrator has an eerie sense that he and his girlfriend are clones of the Neals, or vice-versa. Jurate Kaminskas has pointed out the similarity of many of the characters in Fleurs de ruine, speaking of ‘subtle harmonies’, in relation to the studied

34

Gaudemar, ‘Modiano, souvenir écrin’, p. II. Aspects of the Novel, p. 47. Forster continues on the same page: ‘The round character has the incalculability of life about it – life within the pages of a book’. 35

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predominance of blonde women in that text.36 (Interestingly, Modiano’s mother is described in Livret de famille as having fair hair, and there is also a striking predominance of blondes in De si braves garçons). These similarities are important as an assertion of authorial artifice. Once pointed out, the ‘subtle harmonies’ Kaminskas mentions become strident echoes, demonstrating the fact that readers are often so greedy for character-as-person that they do not necessarily pay enough attention to the fact that they are being led along by a storyteller. Oscillation between the perception of character as selfconsciously textual or imbued with human presence also occurs for multiple-text readers. Repetition of character type between texts is one cause of the ‘paper character’ side of such oscillation. It leads the multiple-text reader to an awareness of the author as a creator of ‘stock’ characters, thus reinforcing the text’s constructedness. In Chien de printemps, for example, the reader aware of the use of familiar themes and characters in that text may see the characters as less ‘realistic’ than may the single-text reader. Chief among the stock characters are the various father representatives. Recognizable by a touch of mystery and whiff of underhand dealings, sometimes coupled with a desire to help the narrator, they come in many forms. Those closest to the real Albert Modiano meet their sons in hotel foyers in the 17th arrondissement and display various levels of hostility to them, even going so far as to try to arrange their arrest (Dora Bruder), death (Les Boulevards de ceinture) or enrolment in the army (Dora Bruder, ‘Éphéméride’). The more helpful variety include men who are often only ten years older than the narrator, and are swathed in some sort of mystery, as with Jansen, Brossier, Rigaud, Rocroy, or Hutte (in Chien de printemps, Une jeunesse, Voyage de noces, Quartier perdu, and Rue des Boutiques obscures, respectively). Shady characters in general are a type of stock character, as is the narrator himself with his vague fears, solitary nature and obsession with the past. Modiano’s female characters tend to be especially homogeneous (disappointingly so, in fact). Apart from being predominantly blonde, they are either ‘loose women’ (especially in the earlier novels), mysterious and vulnerable younger women, or older motherly types to which the narrator is attracted as a young man. Their description frequently involves a towelling robe, spicy perfume 36

‘Modiano’s Female Trilogy: Voyage de noces, Fleurs de ruine, Un cirque passe’, p. 94.

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and slanted eyes. They are often child-women, reduced to factors of helplessness and sensuality. In Quartier perdu, ‘la fille brune’ is likened to ‘une petite fille’ (169), wears a coat that is too big for her and needs to leave the light on when sleeping. Odile in Une jeunesse also needs protection. Marie in Vestiaire de l’enfance is another childwoman, and the female characters of Des inconnues all admit to even greater feelings of helplessness than the male narrators in other texts. Repetition of name is particularly striking for the female characters, as the texts teem with a host of identical and similar names, so that the various Denises, Sylvies and Sylvianes, Jacquelines, Thérèses, and Genevièves blur into one another, as if they were all built on the same model. Yet repetition of character can also lead to the production and reinforcement of human presence around textual figures. For Raymond Bach, the reader of Modiano’s work ‘senses that the connections between the works are not fortuitous, that they fit together into “une unité secrète”, yet he also suffers from moments of extreme disorientation in which he is no longer capable of disentangling the stories he has read from one another, in which the identities of the various narrators and characters lose their clear delineation and blur together in a strange, unsettling fashion’ (176).37 This strange familiarity can, in itself, add to the human presence of the characters, in a type of cumulative fleshing-out allied to the weighty presence of mysterious contradictions. Pacheco and Pagnon, both of whom are father representatives, are two figures whose human consistency or solidity increases from text to text, despite – or because of – the presence of contradictions. The echoes and dissonances between the various characters named Pacheco are especially striking, such as those between his manifestations in Quartier perdu, Fleurs de ruine, and Modiano’s short story, ‘Mes vingt ans’, published one year before Quartier perdu, where the Pacheco character is called Pierre rather than Philippe, and has Chilean rather than Peruvian origins (‘Mes vingt ans’, 191). Not only is Pacheco different from text to text, but he also blurs into differently named charaters (and indeed into the Pagnon figure). In Quartier perdu for example, Hayward is an amalgam of Pacheco and Pagnon, with his ‘intonation faubourienne’, his association with garages, and the hint that he may have been an

37

This is a phrase from Quartier perdu, p. 87. Secret unity is particularly appropriate to that text, as shown in Chapter Four.

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airline steward.38 He also calls up Brossier of Une jeunesse, as well as these primary figures, so that a complex web-like linking system is formed.39 Modiano’s recent text, La Petite Bijou also contains several ‘inconsistencies’, both in relation to the narrator herself, and to the secondary characters. (The name of ‘la Petite Bijou’ is of course taken from a character of the same name in La Cousine Bette by that nineteenth-century pioneer of the device of recurring character, Honoré de Balzac). ‘La Petite Bijou’ seems to be the development of a character of the same name initially posited in De si braves garçons, and there is a general concordance of details between those texts insofar as she and her mother are concerned. She also seems to be linked to a blonde former child-actress briefly glimpsed in Quartier perdu, and who possesses ‘un front têtu’ (57). All of this is unproblematic until the reader reflects on the leading female character in Vestiaire de l’enfance, who also has a ‘front têtu’, but whose mother was Rose-Marie, while in La Petite Bijou and De si braves garçons ‘la Petite Bijou’ is Sonia O’ Dauyé’s child. Also, Sonia’s ‘real’ name in De si braves garçons and her purportedly ‘real’ name in La Petite Bijou are not the same. To confuse matters further, a character named Rose-Marie does appear in La Petite Bijou, but not as Bijou’s mother. So does a Frédérique, calling up the Frede in Remise de peine, and so does a Madeleine-Louis, who originally appeared in De si braves garçons.40 Likewise, readers may wonder whether Giuvia Sarano (Rue des Boutiques obscures, 179), who is Jimmy ‘Pedro’ Stern’s mother, can possibly be somehow related to Jimmy Sarano, the narrator of Vestiaire de l’enfance. Is the Roger Vincent of Remise de peine related to the Guy Vincent of Des inconnues, they wonder? Is Pacheco (who also calls himself Philippe de Bellune) related to Georges Bellune of Une jeunesse and Memory Lane? This use of similar but conflicting detail is typical of Modiano, reinforcing the image of the author as someone interested in contradictions and ambiguity. These 38

Pagnon markers usually include an association with cars, garages and the black market, and ‘une intonation faubourienne’ (in this he resembles the father figure in the recent ‘Ephéméride’), while Pacheco is usually associated with air travel and tour guiding (though also sometimes with the black market, as in Voyage de noces and Dimanches d’août). 39 For more on the idea of the web, see Bach, and also Prince in his article, ‘ReMembering Modiano: Or, Something Happened’. 40 See La Petite Bijou, pp. 64-65.

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never-ending, and sometimes contradictory, links remind readers not to expect closure, let alone coherence, in what they are reading, while also suggesting a web of intertwined human experience, as well as a sense of mystery and autonomy around the recurring characters.

The Modiano Narrator – a Brief Introduction Since all of Modiano’s texts apart from Une jeunesse are narrated in the first person, it seems necessary to devote some attention to the figure of ‘the Modiano narrator’ as ‘character’ here. (This figure is discussed more specifically in the context of autobiography in Chapter Two). These narrators are at once storytellers, who possess power over their story and their readers, and interpreters subject to the limitations of human subjectivity and the patchy nature of the material they must work with. Above all, however, they are narrating consciousnesses. That is to say, their human presence is in general more evident than their constructed, textual nature. They are in general likeable and convincing characters. Although readers may sometimes feel distanced from them by their secretiveness, and sometimes suspect that they may not always be recounting their stories in good faith, the fact that they too are subject to the limitations of human consciousness allows a certain connection. After all, they are, like Modiano’s readers themselves, often unable to understand other people’s motives, and are subject to deficiencies of memory. Readers are also encouraged to connect with the narrators by a sense that they are being called on to become involved in their emotions. The writing self presupposes a reading other, and while the texts can often be seen as interior monologues, readers are free to put themselves in the position of the addressee, and to identify with the part of himself the narrator is invoking. The sense that readers are being addressed is encouraged by the frequent presence of a ‘vous’ narratee, and the many expressions of ‘mais oui’ and ‘oui’ in the texts. Nathalie Sarraute saw the typical first-person narrator as ‘un être sans contours, indéfinissable, insaisissable et invisible’.41 Although Sarraute undeniably had a point in describing first-person narrators as ‘insaisissables’, in that they exist mainly as a entity comprised of emotions and thoughts, the ‘Modiano novel effect’ attenuates the reader’s sense that they cannot be pinned down. While each Modiano narrator on his or her own reveals only sparse information about him- or herself, the cumulative effect of so many 41

‘L’Ère du soupçon’, p. 1578.

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similar narrators creates a composite picture in the reader’s mind of ‘the Modiano narrator’. And although a sense of unity and discontinuity applies to the reader’s perception of this figure, the dominant impression is one of unity. It is possible to argue that the character of the Modiano narrator is a composite one, subject to all the experiences and sentiments attributed to it in all the texts. In discussing the figure of ‘the Modiano narrator’, one encounters the apparent paradox of the fact that he or she is always a stock character, and thus might be expected to seem deliberately shaped into a standardized paper format by the author, but is also the main consciousness with which the reader can empathize. In fact, this ‘stock character’ becomes more and more charged with emotion with each new appearance, so that even Jimmy Sarano in Vestiaire de l’enfance, who is an almost parodically empty narrator for the single-text reader, is filled out for the multiple-text reader, for whom he carries all of the normal Modiano neuroses and obsessions. I have suggested above that multiple-text readers often have a more critical approach to Modiano’s fictional universe than single-text readers. This is balanced by the fact that multiple-text readers are also more affected by the emotional force carried by certain recurrent images. The affective density of Modiano’s texts is clear, for example, in the recurrent motif of the ‘lames Gillette extra-bleues’. These originally appear in Modiano’s first text, La Place de l’étoile, as tempting tools of suicide (‘cette envie folle d’avaler les lames de rasoir’: 18242), and as the instruments with which the narrator murders Gérard (PE, 132), so that other references to these razors are heavy with significance and convey strong feelings to the multiple-text reader. Thus, the fact that the narrator of Voyage de noces wants Ingrid to buy him some of these razors, which to the single-text reader might seem an insignificant detail, consolidates the multiple-text reader’s sense of his suicidal tendencies, and tempers the seeming insouciance of the description of the Juan-les-Pins episode (VN, 37). Equally, the frequent references to buildings resembling ‘paquebots’ set up emotional resonances because of the fact that Modiano’s father is said to have always lived in such buildings (LF, 14). Each recurring reference colours each new text with the memory of all the preceding ones, so that Modiano’s apparently spare style is in fact laden with echoes of previously expressed or implied emotion. This in itself 42

See also La Place de l’étoile, p. 44.

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counteracts the effect of authorial ludism and even the deindividualization of character in Modiano’s texts. Perhaps surprisingly, given their generally strong emotional presence, Modiano’s narrators are not introspective. Though they express consistently similar feelings, they do not dwell on the reasons for them. They are slippery creatures, often refusing to give information about their pasts or to analyse their own feelings. In Villa triste, Chmara does not explain his fear and urge to flee, merely calling them ‘irraisonné’ (19), and though these sentiments are clearly important, being referred to on many occasions in the text, a satisfactory reason for them is never given. The narrator of La Ronde de nuit, though emotional, is vertiginously confused and unanalytical. This lack of analysis reflects the readerly impression of authorial reticence as to autobiographical outpouring in the work as a whole, while also encouraging readers to step in to fill the analytical gap. Despite the reader’s sense that certain painful issues are being avoided, or at least, not being directly treated in the texts, an appreciation of personal issues pertaining to ‘the Modiano narrator’ is nonetheless conveyed. The typical Modiano narrator experiences feelings of panic, loss, and abandonment, is obsessed with disappearance and absence, and with the past in general, is torn between the desire to form part of a group or family versus the urge to remain solitary, and feels a sense of imprisonment that could relate to all of these issues. He or she is generally obsessed with ambiguous parental figures, often a father. Even the female narrators of Des inconnues and La Petite Bijou do not depart from the male prototype, and the most that can be said is that they seem more lost and more panic-stricken than their male counterparts. The similarity of the firstperson narrators encourages speculation on the character of the real author, backed up by information gleaned from the apparently autobiographical or semi-autobiographical passages. Furthermore, on an epitextual level, the composite imagined author in fact seems to reflect the real author quite accurately, given the character Modiano projects in interview. However, Modiano often seems to be taking pains to distance himself from his narrators on a textual level, even while suggesting that they do reflect him in some way. We shall be looking at this in detail in Chapter Two, and on a text-by-text level in Chapters Three and Four. Whatever the forces that compel Modiano to write, a sense of the prison of the self arises through his compulsive repetition of the same themes, and his apparent inability to get to the heart of what he

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wants to say, endlessly producing narrators who cannot escape the pasts they wish to repress or who are somehow locked into repetition. In interviews, the author often speaks of himself as a prisoner.43 La Ronde de nuit ends on the image of the narrator imprisoned in an apparently never-ending car-chase, where his pursuers play at giving him the impression that they will allow him to escape only to close in on him again. Freedom is also shown to be an illusion wherever the narrators try to escape their past through the invention of new names and/or official identities, like the narrators of Vestiaire de l’enfance and Quartier perdu, and the numerous narrators who express the desire to ‘repartir à zéro’. The narrators of Villa triste, Quartier perdu, Voyage de noces, and Chien de printemps are all locked in to memory, only ever gaining a temporary respite from it. Many of the texts are circular in structure, leading back to their beginnings, and many contain imagery of restriction or imprisonment, sometimes even in their titles, as is the case for La Ronde de nuit and Les Boulevards de ceinture. Interestingly, while Modiano’s recent texts exhibit fewer games with circularity than his earlier ones, the imagery of imprisonment is still strong – perhaps even at its strongest – in Des inconnues and La Petite Bijou.44 For the multiple-text reader, the stress laid by the narrator of story III of Des inconnues on the notion of the ‘travail sur soi’ seems to be a rueful wink by the author, gesturing to the fact that he cannot escape from his fictional universe, and that the ‘travail sur soi’ of using female narration for the first time can only result in a ‘rappel de soi’ (133, 138, 141). And the recent Accident nocturne displays elements of a cyclical return to melancholy obsessions, so that the assertions to the contrary by the narrator at times seem somewhat forced. Clearly then, Modiano’s texts produce a strong sense of authorial presence, both of the author as a powerful storyteller (whether in playful mode or, more seriously, highlighting the power invested in 43

See for example his statement that ‘On est toujours prisonnier de souvenirs personnels’ in Pierre Maury, ‘Patrick Modiano: travaux de déblaiement’, p. 103, or the interview with Françoise Ducout, ‘Patrick Modiano: On est toujours prisonnier de son temps’, p. 47. 44 In these recent texts, the imagery of imprisonment surrounding female characters may also have to do with Modiano’s identification with Dora Bruder’s actual imprisonment.

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storytellers) and as an imaginative interpreter of what patchy material is available to him (using not only the reader’s imagination but also his own skills of imagination and organization in order to create human presence for his characters). Even single-text readers will be alive to the strong feelings of authorial presence produced by Modiano’s first-person narration, whether as a self-conscious writer playing with narrative codes and encouraging readers into a detectivelike role, or as a postmodern author deliberately avoiding coherence of textual identity in order to remain more faithful to life’s gaps and contradictions, or indeed through the sense of an emotional narrating consciousness that readers may well be tempted to extend to the author. For the multiple-text reader these points also apply, but authorial presence is even stronger, due to the repetition that marks Modiano’s work. This chapter has sought to present some of the main issues in the reader’s appreciation of Modiano’s universe, setting the scene for many questions relating to the narrativization of experience in the coming chapters. We shall now turn specifically to Modiano’s autobiographical project, in order to see how it relates to questions of memory and lack of memory, feelings of emptiness and confusion of identity, the need for imagination as a substitute for memory, and his general tendency to blur fact and fiction. We shall examine the general autobiographical picture, as well as the processes by which Modiano stresses the fictionalized nature of the details tracked down by the reader, and how he likes to play on readers’ expectations as to autobiographical sincerity. The reader must work hard to establish an image of the author, and is constantly forced to question aspects of that image. Fortunately however, the autobiographical picture is somewhat less hopelessly complicated than the links between characters and fictional plots in the texts. It is appropriate to lead into a discussion of autobiography with a reassertion of the idea of the imagined author, although, as stated, the less cumbersome term ‘author’ will be preferred in all cases where the real, flesh-and-blood Modiano is not in question. We shall see that Modiano’s texts point out that the imagined author is an entity imagined by a reader (usually merely from linguistic indications), and that there is a gap between language and autobiographical experience. Furthermore, the author is also re-imagining himself with each new fictionalization of his autobiographical details. We shall now look at the power of the storyteller to reinvent himself in fiction, as well as at the fact that this is an invention that stays close to certain key issues.

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Just as the author seems to be constantly reasserting himself as a solidly recognizable writer on a non-autobiographical level, he also seems to be driving home an image of himself (albeit an incomplete one) in a type of diffuse autobiography.

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2 Autobiography and Autofiction This chapter concentrates on the ways in which Modiano foregrounds the presence of imagination in the narration of the self, on how he stresses the necessity of that presence, and often gestures to its emotional validity. We shall also be looking at his autobiographical playfulness, and at the detective-like role the reader is encouraged to assume in establishing a picture of the author. These games show the author’s power to lead the reader along, but also hint at limitations and hesitations on Modiano’s part. Significantly, Modiano has spoken of the involuntary forgetfulness that marks all autobiography.45 This is highlighted in some of his works, as is the idea of more deliberate omissions. We shall be exploring Modiano’s fragmented view of himself, which leads him to a type of diffuse, highly fictionalized autobiography. His need for memory of a past he has not directly experienced – that of the war years – and his feelings of duty to remember the Holocaust, which he has not experienced either, lead him to find substitutes in imaginative experience. However imagination is at times resorted to less out of necessity than out of fear of the past, as is the case with Modiano’s imaginative sublimation of certain painful familial memories that have been largely repressed, most especially those relating to Rudy’s death. All of this, along with a sense that imagination is in any case part and parcel of all autobiography, informs what Modiano has spoken of as ‘une autobiographie rêvée’.46 One of the questions that will be discussed in the next three chapters is the extent to which fiction can become autobiography, and to which there can be a fictional truth – Aragon’s notion of the ‘mentir-vrai’. In the second and third parts of this chapter, we shall be looking at the notion of autofiction in relation to Modiano’s work, and at the author’s place in the canon of French autobiography. 45

Jean-François Josselin, ‘Mondo Modiano’, pp. 87-88. Modiano uses the term ‘autobiographie rêvée’ in Dominique Jamet, ‘Modiano s’explique’, p. 27. 46

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As we shall see, Modiano’s texts often play on his readers’ hunger for intimacy with ‘the author’ and on their desire to believe in a ‘true’ picture of events in his life. Equally, the texts underline the artifice of the self, and the multiplicity of selfhood. They stress the fragmented nature of the self (especially of Modiano’s self), as well as the many versions of one’s ‘self’ that exist. It is suggested that there is no stable or fixed self, and that the self is only temporarily unified in narration (and then only to an extent). However, certain underlying elements of personality remain relatively constant, and, these, along with certain important events in the author’s life, form the basis for this discussion of Modiano’s fictionalization of self. We shall thus be looking at the tension between a feeling of dispersed identity on the author’s part (whether due to general postmodern dissolution or Modiano’s personal circumstances, or both) and his wish to convey a series of consistent personality traits. Though Modiano does not engage in direct authorial statements about the autobiographical process within the texts, he has made some pronouncements on autobiography in interview. In a recent discussion with Antoine de Gaudemar (‘Modiano, souvenir écrin’, Libération, 26 April 2001), he spoke of autobiography and fiction in terms worth examining here. All of the quotations refer to page III of the Libération supplement. It should first be noted, however, that Modiano uses the term ‘autofiction’ in these reflections, but that this usage is not in accordance with my definition of the term, which will be discussed later in this chapter. In this interview with Gaudemar, Modiano seems to be referring to autobiographical fiction in general, and in particular to fiction with a strong autobiographical element. It seems likely that he used the term ‘autofiction’ merely in response to Gaudemar’s prompting, as he is not fond of academic terminology, generally avoiding ‘tout ce byzantinisme pour chaires et colloques’. 47 (In any case, Modiano usually avoids contradicting interviewers, generally agreeing with whatever they propose. His agreement is usually superficial, however, and he is skilled in ‘answering-but-notanswering’ questions he feels are either too personal or invalid.). Speaking then to Gaudemar of the strong element of autobiography in his fictions, Modiano claimed that fiction allows him to keep a distance from himself, and that this is one reason why he used a female ‘je’ in the recent texts: ‘Ce je d’un autre qui me parle et que j’écoute me donne de la distance par rapport à l’autobiographie’. 47

Jean-Louis Ézine, ‘Sur la sellette’, p. 5.

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Coinciding with this desire for distance, there is, however, a wish for a greater directness than can be provided by ‘le roman proprement dit’, as he seeks ‘une façon plus directe d’écrire, plus intime’. Modiano was explicitly stating that neither what passes for conventional autobiography nor the conventional novel can provide him with the direct, intimate way of writing that he seeks. He feels that autobiography is always too artificial, stating to Gaudemar that it produces ‘un effet littéraire’. (As we shall see in his practice of autofiction, he is indeed highly conscious of ‘effets littéraires’ in autobiographical writing, and uses them to show the artificiality of his narratives). Furthermore, he asserts that: ‘l’autobiographie interdit à l’imaginaire de se développer.’ He claims to use autobiographical fiction to ‘trouver la bonne distance’, speaking of ‘un compromis’ [entre le roman et l’autobiographie], plus proche de la vérité, plus honnête finalement, sans l’illusion autobiographique’. While several elements in these pronouncements seem disingenuous (Modiano’s fictions are just as full of ‘effets littéraires’ as autobiography could ever be, and, given his autobiographical games, it is hard to believe that he does not expect his texts to produce ‘une illusion autobiographique’), the comment on the importance of allowing imagination to develop demonstrates what seems to be a belief in imaginative truth closely based on autobiographical fact, as well as a view of imagination as a powerful tool in representation. It should be noted, however, that, in a slightly earlier interview, Modiano stated that he was ‘incapable d’écrire directement une autobiographie’ (my emphasis), complaining of a feeling of being imprisoned by the fictional processes he employs: ‘J’ai bien essayé d’abandonner la fiction, mais ça ne résout rien. J’ai l’impression d’être prisonnier du “je” vague et répétitif que j’utilise depuis mes premiers romans, qui ne sont d’ailleurs pas vraiment des romans. Je suis incapable d’écrire directement une autobiographie, alors c’est comme si je rédigeais la novellisation du film de ma propre vie. J’éparpille mes souvenirs ici et là, je recolle sans cesse des lambeaux de réalité, rien que des lambeaux, je cherche l’angle pour attaquer la vérité de front, pour affronter le passé en face, mais je n’y arrive pas, je tourne en rond.’48 This stated dislike of the ‘compromise’ of autobiographical fiction may indicate an awareness on Modiano’s part that while fiction can be liberating, providing him with the necessary distance from his characters, it is sometimes also constricting, in that it allows the 48

Cited in Jérôme Garcin, ‘Une jeunesse’, published on-line.

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imaginer to avoid certain narratives that might be better faced headon. Another reason for a view of fiction as inadequate may be Modiano’s feeling of never really being able to access the historical events that he views as autobiographically important. In these matters, he will never be able to ‘affronter le passé en face’, despite being locked into a desire for imaginative connection with them. While Philippe Lejeune, one of the principal theorists of autobiography in France, places great stress on labels in his definition of what is autobiography and what is a novel, Modiano seems to accord less importance to this factor, and perhaps even to play on it. In interview, he frequently wonders whether his texts are autobiography or fiction, as in the above statement that his texts ‘ne sont d’ailleurs pas vraiment des romans’, recently wryly questioning whether ‘Éphéméride’ is ‘vraiment une nouvelle’, even though it had been commissioned as one.49 In any case, the labels of ‘roman’ and ‘récit’ are not consistent from publisher to publisher, nor even from edition to edition: the original label of Les Boulevards de ceinture was ‘récit’, though Gallimard and Seuil have since called it a ‘roman’. (Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone miss this point, claiming in 1997 that only Livret de famille, De si braves garçons, Remise de peine, and Fleurs de ruine do not bear the label ‘roman’ in their original edition). 50 ‘Récit’ is a more indeterminate term than ‘roman’, and it is true that the texts that are the most autofictional or the most referential are either labelled ‘récit’ in the orginal editions or bear no label at all – and it is logical that this should be the case for Les Boulevards de ceinture, Livret de famille, Remise de peine, Fleurs de ruine, and Dora Bruder. However, matters are confused by the fact that the recent Des inconnues has no label either, as it is a group of three narratives describing three women’s lives and is clearly only loosely autobiographical. Confusion may also arise from the fact that the Folio editions generally list all the texts as ‘roman’, though this is compatible with a view of all autobiography as fictionalized. All in all, it is perhaps safest not to attach too much importance to labels in discussion of Modiano’s work. In any case, readers always have ultimate autonomy in how they read any text – whether as a novel, an autobiography or a mixture of both – which is why I do not talk of ‘pacts’ in the fashion of Lejeune, with their implications of an acceptance by the reader of

49 50

Josyane Savigneau, ‘Une conversation avec Patrick Modiano’, p. 32. L’Autobiographie, p. 272.

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terms set by the author.51 However, as we shall see, certain narrative techniques do encourage an autobiographical reading, and others a fictional one. Notwithstanding the idea that fiction may sometimes be less artificial than autobiography, Modiano’s texts display an inescapable autobiographicality, often a highly ludic one. Many of the texts play on the reader’s desire to read first-person narration as autobiographical. The fact that Quartier perdu is both a detective story and a story about events in the narrator’s life is a wry comment on many readers’ desire to become detectives themselves and to seek out autobiographical reference in first-person narrative. However, the private eye in Quartier perdu and all the other narrator-investigators are the creations of a rather private ‘I’, despite the fact that their biographical details often resemble those of the author.52 Tellingly, autobiography is mentioned in connection with the idea of the mask in Rue des Boutiques obscures, as well as being linked to the detective novel, where Roland states: ‘je lisais quelque livre de Mémoires ou l’un de ces roman policiers de la collection du Masque, qu’elle [Denise] aimait tant’ (212). A sense that Modiano is constantly reinventing himself, based on autobiographical fact, is one of the strongest effects of the œuvre on the multiple-text reader. The author comes across as an obsessive and secretive figure, but also a powerful and playful one, indulging in games of hide-and-seek. Modiano seems aware of the reader’s hunger for autobiographical intimacy, and in Les Boulevards de ceinture seems to be speaking through the narrator, who states: ‘J’avais compris que ce qui intéressait au plus haut point la clientèle, c’était la vie privée des écrivains’ (90). As he has never undertaken a selfdeclaredly ‘bona fide’ autobiography, and as he is a living author about whom no biography has yet been written, and one who has not been particularly generous in his divulgation of biographical details, even biographically informed readers cannot know whether many of 51

See Lejeune’s seminal text, Le Pacte autobiographique, where he seems to assume that the reader will read the text as it is ‘intended’ by the author, especially pp. 22-35. Elizabeth Bruss points out that: ‘Un auteur ne peut légitimement conclure un “contrat” qu’avec des lecteurs qui acceptent et comprennent les règles qui gouvernent son acte littéraire : seuls de tels lecteurs peuvent, en retour, le tenir responsable de sa production (‘L’Autobiographie considérée comme acte littéraire,’ p. 14). Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone prefer the metaphor of a testament to that of a pact in autobiography, stressing that author and reader cannot communicate (L’Autobiographie, pp. 70-81). 52 The pun is Prince’s, in Narrative as Theme, p. 121.

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the events described in the novels actually happened, and are left to try to piece together possible autobiographical details from the highly fictionalized information given in the texts. Before looking more closely at Modiano’s fictionalization of self, the concept of ‘fiction’ needs to be analysed, in order to clarify some terminological matters. In common usage, ‘fiction’ is often contrasted with ‘fact’ or ‘truth’, and its sense of ‘making-up’ is generally stressed. However, ‘fiction’ is etymologically linked to the Latin word fingere, meaning to mould or create, as well as to pretend. That is, the modern French terms ‘façonner’ and ‘feindre’ share the same root, and the notion of ‘making-up’ is close to that of simply ‘making’.53 It has become increasingly popular to point out that all narratives are ‘makings’, and to state that the term ‘fiction’ can be applied to any narrative. Critics who do this (for example, Hayden White) are aware of the connotations of invention attached to the word ‘fiction’.54 In their view, this is valid, as all making-into-narrative imposes an artificial unity on events, which can be seen as an invented unity, in the sense of a false one stemming from personal and cultural bias, whether this be an intentionally false unity or not. However, this approach begs the question of how to distinguish terminologically between representations that are deliberately invented and those, like historical narratives, that aim to be faithful to actual events, within the bounds of personal and cultural bias. While realizing that all narratives can be seen as ‘fictional’ in White’s sense, I feel it is less terminologically confusing to retain the term ‘fiction’ for literary works that are predominantly, and deliberately, works of imagination. In doing this, I allow a place for the idea of ‘fictional truth’, which, as Michael Riffaterre has pointed out, is less of an oxymoron than ‘fictitious truth’ would be.55 I use the adjective ‘fictional’ to mean: ‘occurring within a work of fiction or pertaining to elements that one would commonly expect to occur within such a work’. My reader should note, however, that, while fiction as a category (in other words, the texts that are commonly called works of fiction, or novels) has a predominance of deliberate invention, this does not necessarily hold true in hybrids such as autofiction and biofiction.

53

See also Johnnie Gratton’s entry ‘Autofiction’ in the 2001 Fitzroy-Dearborn Encyclopaedia of Life-Writing. 54 For an outline of Hayden White’s position, see his ‘Commentary’ (1986). 55 See Riffaterre’s points cited in Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, p. 3.

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2(i) The Autobiography Effect As stated in Chapter One, Modiano’s narrators are far from introspective. Several of them even display a strong reluctance to confront events in their pasts, as shall be shown in Chapter Four. However, a sense of the author’s psyche and preoccupations does filter through by way of repetition of emotion and event, and through a general autobiography effect. As Guyot-Bender and VanderWolk put it: ‘One always wonders, if, in his novels, Modiano is not simply telling his own story’.56 The autobiography effect can arise in several ways. On a basic level, non-ironic first-person narration can encourage it, as can a generally referential atmosphere of precise dates and descriptions and geographically exact indications. This is true despite the fact that a serious tone and the situation of events in a recognizably real environment are no guarantee of autobiographical sincerity, merely a convention used by many, but by no means all, autobiographers. Modiano in fact plays on this notion of accepted styles, especially in Chien de printemps, as shown in Chapter Six of this book. The autobiography effect can be reinforced by the concordance of details in the novels with the birthdate, nationality – and in some cases also the name – given in the peritext, though, as stated, these details vary from edition to edition. The list of texts ‘du même auteur’, which is uniformly present in the various editions of Modiano’s texts, reinforces the autobiography effect of Quartier perdu for example, where Ambrose Guise speaks of being in the process of writing his ninth novel, like Modiano himself. The fact that it is generally the Folio editions that provide peritextual back-up of the autobiographical details of birthdate and place given in many of the texts is significant, especially as it is through these cheaper editions that Modiano reaches his widest audience, and suggests that he wishes them to be read as in some way autobiographical. For the multiple-text reader, peritextual details are in any case often redundant, as Modiano often plays on his birthdate and place within his fictions. The autobiography effect can be punctuated by what can be called a ‘fiction effect’ and vice versa. Thus, while the reference to the improbably named Claude Bernard in Fleurs de ruine creates a fiction effect, in that it jolts the reader back to an awareness of the text as a deliberately invented work (or at least of the fact that that part of the 56

Paradigms of Memory, p. 2

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text is deliberately invented), the immediately subsequent account of the narrator’s ‘fugue’ returns to a more plausible mode of textuality, and creates an autobiography effect (38-40). It is also important to note that the autobiography effect can survive the fiction effect, if the reader’s desire to believe is strong enough. And while indeterminate labels such as ‘récit’, or the lack of a label, may encourage the autobiography effect more than the label ‘roman’ may do, a label of ‘roman’ need not mean it will not arise, at least sporadically. Repetition of similar events from text to text is the main factor in the autobiography effect of Modiano’s work. Readers have a sense of the author allowing them (consciously or unconsciously) glimpses into his life, through recurrences of the same events. This aspect of the autobiography effect corresponds to Lejeune’s idea of ‘le pacte fantasmatique’.57 It is this type of autobiography effect, stemming from repetition of various significant and credible events, and based on the idea of a global autobiographical agenda, that is of most importance for the multiple-text reader. A general picture can be pieced together. In Du plus loin de l’oubli, the description of the narrator selling second-hand books combines with similar descriptions in the other texts – Dora Bruder and ‘Éphéméride’ for example – to produce an autobiography effect. Likewise, the fact that Modiano’s narrators often talk about going to Rome or Vienna makes it seem as if Modiano himself spent some time in those cities as a young man, and the repetition of the name Jacqueline in many different contexts leads the reader to feel that it may have been the name of one of his girlfriends, or at least of one of his acquaintances. Other attributes of the Modiano narrator one is tempted to extend to the author include feelings of abandonment, a general fascination with other people, an ability to elicit people’s goodwill despite a certain bumbling timidity, reserve when describing emotions of love, feelings of rootlessness combined with a taste for nomadism, proneness to often inexplicable feelings of panic, and even vulnerability to suicide, fear of crowds, feelings of being in an aquarium or on a ship, a fascination with light and shadow, a compulsion to give people the slip, and leanings towards petty crime. The reader imagines that Modiano, like so many of his narrators, has a taste for childish food and drink such as ‘grenadine’ and ice-cream (usually ‘pistache fraise’), a distrust of alcohol and rich food, an interest in horses and horsewomen, in fur coats and towelling 57

Le Pacte autobiographique, p. 42 et passim.

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bathrobes, a love of dogs, of Mediterranean whiteness and of seaside towns, of the colour dark-red (the ‘grenat’ that figures so often), that he uses trains or taxis instead of driving, has a tendency to take refuge in cinemas and cafés, a compulsion to walk around city streets in search of echoes of the past (especially on Sunday evenings), an obsession with old newspapers and magazines and with the cinema, a fondness for detective novels and a fascination with photographs. While some of these personal ‘markers’ can be corroborated by Modiano’s actions (his involvement in the cinema and in photography, for example) or by documentary programmes such as Un siècle d’écrivains, the more intimate markers of taste and habit remain tantalizingly speculative.

Shadows of the Mind While many of the apparently autobiographical details are relatively anodyne, others are darker, and the most insistent of these seem to demand analysis. One of the most fundamental markers of a Modiano narrator is an obsession with the past, a past he or she wants, alternately, to shake off or explore. Though the precise nature of that past is generally glossed over, feelings of culpability are consistently expressed. In Vestiaire de l’enfance, for example, the narrator’s crime of ‘non-assistance à personne en danger’ is never satisfactorily explained (98), and all that is revealed is a vague feeling of guilt (51), close to the ‘sentiment de culpabilité dont l’objet demeure vague’ expressed in Fleurs de ruine (112). Thérèse in La Petite Bijou feels she is a criminal (123), Guise in Quartier perdu talks of ‘un crime que j’aurais commis’ (65), and the fear felt by many of the narrators (Roland in Rue des Boutiques obscures, Chmara in Villa triste, for example), may also be due to a feeling of having committed a crime. While on one level this ‘criminalization’ of his characters is carried out ironically, given the Jewish subtext to much of the work, and the fact that the Jews were criminalized merely for belonging to an ethnic group, these guilt feelings can also be explained by the survivor syndrome of many post-war Jews. Even though Modiano is not technically Jewish (lacking a matrilinear link), he identifies closely with Jewishness, due to the paternal connection. Modiano’s guilt feelings and survivor syndrome are important on a personal level too, as they can be related to the death of Rudy. The references in the recent ‘Éphéméride’ to the statues of Cain and Abel in one of the lost gardens of the Louvre Carrousel (again evoking the idea of a criminal brother) and the reference to a book called La Colonie pénitentiaire

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(echoing Kafka’s ‘In der Strafkolonie’ and also Perec’s W – an important reference in the works as a whole) show that feelings of culpability persist.58 The other main issue is that of what Marianne Hirsch calls ‘postmemory’, which could also be called ‘prémémoire’, in the light of Modiano’s claim that ‘ma mémoire précédait ma naissance’ (LF, 96). For Hirsch, ‘postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection’, and ‘its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’. She links this to the ‘indirect and fragmentary nature of second-generation memory’. This is clearly applicable to the need felt by Modiano and his narrators to try to understand the past of their parents, by inventing memories of that past for themselves, sparked by half-understood fragments.59 The prenatal memories the narrators create in fiction are flimsy and bitty things, due to the lack of direct access to historical events and the scarcity of documents relative to those events. Exacerbating the author’s ‘postmemory’ is the confusion created by the compromising behaviour of Modiano’s Jewish father, who moved on the fringes of what could be called collaborationist circles and was involved in the black-market, Apart from the loss of Rudy, and the effects of an aloof, ambiguous, and sometimes downright hostile father figure, who was absent for long periods while Modiano was growing up, and disappeared for good in the late 1960s, ten years before his death, the author seems to have been marked by a strong sense of abandonment by both of his parents, who sent him to boarding school while they pursued their careers. This abandonment on a personal level coexists with more general feelings of abandonment by a parental generation, who refused to talk to the younger generation about the war, and their activities during that period. (Modiano seems to be as much affected by his father’s silence about his wartime actions and experiences as by Albert’s ambiguous actions during those years). Feelings of abandonment by distant parents link in with feelings of marginality, 58

‘Éphéméride’(6). The statues of Cain and Abel also figure in Fleurs de ruine (90). See Hirsch’s chapter on ‘Mourning and Postmemory’, in her Family Frames, pp. 17-40. All of these citations come from pages 22-23. ‘La Petite Bijou’ is one of several children in Modiano’s texts who eavesdrop in an attempt to try to understand adults’ conversation: ‘À partir de quatorze ans, ce que j’ai pu écouter en cachette leurs conversations, pour essayer de comprendre’ (136). See also Patoche in Remise de peine, especially pp. 78 and 87-88.

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which have roots in Modiano’s feeling of not belonging to a familial group, as well as in the fact that the author does not feel quite at home in French society. He and his narrators are marginal figures, not only because of their identification with French-Jewishness (which is part of the ‘Other’ in terms of French identity, and also marginal due to the paucity of survivors relative to the number of murdered Jews), but also because they are largely alone in French society in being so obsessed with remembering the ‘années noires’. The need to form part of a group, and an ambivalence about this, is often associated with familial emotions. ‘L’homme des plages’ in Rue des Boutiques obscures, who constantly tries to attach himself to various groups, and who always manages to insert himself into group holiday snaps, is emblematic of all the Modiano characters who hover on the margins of groups. This wish to form part of a group mainly evokes Modiano’s personal solitude as a child. In Rue des Boutiques obscures, the narrator seems to want to be part of a family (‘se sentir en famille’: 224), and many of the narrators indulge in fantasies of familial life, often as ‘exploitants forestiers’ (Les Boulevards de ceinture, La Place de l’étoile, Livret de famille), conjuring up pictures of intimate, rural gatherings, far removed from the experience of Modiano.60 Indeed, it often seems as though Modiano needs to build a family for himself in fiction (as is perhaps most evident in Livret de famille). However, this family, though full of characters resembling Modiano’s family members, has a dual purpose, being also studded with marginal rememberer figures and references to forgotten lives, as though to spread the memorial net of remembrance as wide as possible.

Family Ties While it is clear that the war and the legacy of the Holocaust are of founding importance for Modiano, more personal familial reasons deserve to be explored in detail in their own right (while always remembering that they are part of a broader set of obsessions). Rudy’s death is one of the most important reasons for the autobiographical pain in Modiano’s work. Modiano has stated that: ‘Le choc de sa mort a été déterminant. Ma recherche perpétuelle de quelque chose de 60

In Villa triste, Chmara pretends to have a family and states: ‘Je ressentais une grande volupté à dire “ma famille”’ (67). In La Place de l’étoile, Schlemilovitch longs for a grandmother to make him jam, and in La Ronde de nuit, Troubadour expresses a wish to belong to the family of Monsieur de Bel-Respiro, in whose house he feels an intruder.

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perdu, la quête d’un passé brouillé qu’on ne peut élucider, l’enfance brusquement cassée, tout cela participe d’une même névrose qui est devenue mon état d’esprit’.61 Rudy pervades the narratives through frequent references to death (suicide, accidental death and accidents in general, as well as mysterious murders) and in the imagery of loss and absence that runs through the œuvre – explaining part of the characteristically Modianesque ‘impression de vide’.62 This ‘impression de vide’ is most striking in the many descriptions of deserted spaces, photographs (themselves tokens of absence), and the absence suggested by the ‘bare bones’ of lists and official documents. The utopian dreams of the characters (Marignan’s dreams of return to pre-Mao Shanghai in chapter II of Livret de famille, the green grass of Wyoming in Villa triste and the lakeside scene on the photograph captioned ‘Retour aux jours heureux’ in chapter III of De si braves garçons) all hint at lost happiness. Importantly, Modiano’s initial urge to write stemmed from the need to write about his brother.63 While the loss of Rudy can be seen as one of the main impetuses for Modiano’s production, direct references to the lost brother are strikingly few and often deceptively banal. Readers who are aware of the trauma of Rudy’s death are well equipped to decode the vague but omnipresent feelings of loss, and the general pattern of doubling, the references to ‘twin’ brothers and split selves, and the very title of De si braves garçons, whereas it is extremely difficult for the non-paratextually informed reader to realize the importance of this brother. However, the attentive multiple-text reader will notice the omnipresence of Rudy’s name in the dedications until 1984 (the first text not to bear the inscription is Quartier perdu), and the fact that the ‘notices biographiques’ of three of the early texts attribute Rudy’s date of birth of 1947 to Patrick (La Place de l’étoile, La Ronde de nuit, and Villa triste). Rudy is mentioned on two brief occasions in Livret de famille as ‘mon frère Rudy’, but it is not until Remise de peine, twenty years after the appearance of Modiano’s first text, that the reader learns of 61

Assouline, ‘Modiano, lieux de mémoire’, p. 36. Laurent was one of the first to point out the pervasive presence of death in Modiano’s work, allocating a chapter to ‘La Mort’ (L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano, pp. 135-156). Regarding suicide, the theme is, of course, extremely clear in Modiano’s recent texts, La Petite Bijou and Des inconnues, and is also strong in La Place de l’étoile, as well as in Voyage de noces, Une jeunesse and Villa triste. The selfdestructive tendencies of the narrator of La Ronde de nuit also seem suicidal. 63 The author states this in Josselin, ‘Mondo Modiano’, p. 87. 62

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his disappearance from Modiano’s life, in the following terse statement: ‘J’avais perdu mon frère’ (RP, 102). This is the only such statement in the entire œuvre. The facts that it took Modiano twenty years to produce a narrative focusing on (some of) his childhood experience, and that Remise de peine is so spare in its treatment of the narrator’s feelings are a measure of Modiano’s autobiographical reserve. After the watershed of Remise de peine, Rudy makes another relatively substantial appearance as the narrator’s playmate in Fleurs de ruine, and recently figures directly as ‘mon frère’, occupying one of the seven typed pages of ‘Éphéméride’ (6). Rudy can also be seen as figuring indirectly in Doisneau’s photograph of children in the Luxembourg gardens in that text (7), as well as through the reference to the brothers Cain and Abel. In Paris Tendresse (1990), a text written by Modiano to accompany a selection of Brassaï’s photographs, Rudy is part of an allusive ‘nous’ that appears briefly towards the end of the text (85). He can also be said to be present in the numerous photographs of children there, all of which Modiano pointedly ignores as subject matter for his rêverie on Brassaï’s pictures, mentioning only the series of images ominously named ‘L’Événement’, where little boys peep through a fence at something beyond. Modiano is also remarkably silent about his wife and children within the texts: there is some mention of Dominique and Zenaïde in Livret de famille, but Marie is never directly mentioned (though the paratextually informed reader might guess that the heroine of Vestiaire de l’enfance might be in homage to her). The main characters of Quartier perdu, Une jeunesse, and Livret de famille all have happy marriages with children, which may be a deliberate reflection of Modiano’s situation. (Equally, one of the narrators in De si braves garçons has two small children – but it is impossible to tell whether he is Edmond, Patrick or another of the ‘braves garçons’). Interestingly, Guise in Quartier perdu has three children. It is tempting for the paratextually informed reader to wonder whether one of them is Rudy, as to have slipped in an allusive reference to his dead brother would be typical of Modiano’s apparent urge to record and write while remaining secretive about what is highly important to him. The narrators’ obsession with shadowy father figures is much more explicit. The influence of Albert Modiano is huge, informing the ethos of ambiguity in his son’s work, and the impossibility of neat categorizations. The first three texts (La Place de l’étoile, La Ronde de nuit and Les Boulevards de ceinture) and Rue des Boutiques

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obscures constitute attempts to imagine a possible existence for Albert Modiano and the historical context in which he found himself. Equally, the rootlessness felt by many of the narrators echoes that of Modiano senior, who, though he apparently grew up in Paris, was of oriental Jewish stock.64 The son’s attempt to identify with his father is clear. It is in this light that we can interpret the fact that Patrick and Albert Modiano’s biographical details merge in several of the texts, most strikingly in Rue des Boutiques obscures, but also in La Place de l’étoile and in La Ronde de nuit. Merging is also very clear in Les Boulevards de ceinture. The emotions called up in the identification of son with father are consistently a mixture of horror, compassion, love and hate, as symbolized in the quotation from The Great Gatsby that serves as epigraph to La Ronde de nuit: ‘Pourquoi m’étais-je identifié aux objets mêmes de mon horreur et de ma compassion?’ Symbolically, Schlemilovitch, who describes himself both as a kaleidoscope and the image in a kaleidoscope, is the son of the director of Kaleidoscope Ltd, in a hint that the father is at least one of the forces directing the son’s impulse to write. Obsession with Albert Modiano is less blatant in the post-Rue des Boutiques obscures texts (that is to say, after 1978), though, for the autobiographically aware reader, father figures and references to the Occupation haunt all of Modiano’s texts. What unity there is in the highly fragmentary Fleurs de ruine comes from the fact that the narrator’s father, named as Albert, is the link between many of the narratives. Jansen in Chien de printemps also has clear links with Albert Modiano, as does Guy Vincent, alias Alberto Zymbalist, in the recent Des inconnues. Even more recently, La Petite Bijou, while ostensibly concerning a mother figure, focuses on the legacy of confusion left by the war, so that Albert Modiano can be seen to pervade that text also. In less fictionalized form, Albert also has a strong presence in Dora Bruder and in the recent ‘Ephéméride’. The texts show the father’s mysterious dealings and lack of willingness to talk to his son, both in general and about the Occupation (especially in Fleurs de ruine and Les Boulevards de ceinture). His occasional outings with his son to the cinema or to have a drink or ice-cream are markedly silent ones (as in Livret de famille, Fleurs de ruine, Chien de printemps, and Vestiaire de l’enfance). His protracted absence in Modiano’s childhood is hinted at in Remise de peine, and in episode VIII of Livret de famille. The ill will he seems to 64

See Laurent, p. 90, and Fleurs de ruine, p. 109.

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have shown towards his son is suggested in Les Boulevards de ceinture (‘l’épisode douloureux du métro Georges-V’: 96, 108), and is made clearer in Dora Bruder where, in a text with a highly referential tone, he is said to have tried to have his son arrested. Modiano’s perception of his father’s hostility comes across forcefully in ‘Éphéméride’, where the narrator speaks of the four years his father spent trying to have him sent to the army, corroborating a similar statement in Dora Bruder. For the multiple-text reader, aware of the historical denseness of Modiano’s texts, the mention of a barracks ‘vers l’est’ has resonances of other, less innocuous camps in the east (‘Éphéméride’, 4). Yet the sons long to understand these hostile father figures, and their feelings of anger are always tempered with compassion. This has most recently been made clear in the central section of Dora Bruder (101) and in La Petite Bijou. The latter text, though full of anger at parental abandonment, is also compassionate towards neglectful parent figures, including fathers. Luisa Colpeyn, Modiano’s mother, is somewhat less insistently present in the texts, as are, on the whole, mother figures in general. Yet from those of the texts where Modiano gives his own name to the narrating ‘je’ (Livret de famille, De si braves garçons, and Remise de peine), it can be gleaned that his mother hails from Antwerp and worked as a cinema translator and actress, as well as a showgirl, all of which seems to have been the case. In a clear manifestation of the Oedipus complex, the narrators often fall in love with aspiring actresses or artistes of some form (Yvonne in Villa triste, Rose-Marie in Vestiaire de l’enfance, Odile in Une jeunesse), models (Denise in Rue des Boutiques obscures, Annette in Voyage de noces), or showgirls (Claude Chevreuse in Livret de famille). The narrators sometimes find older mother figures attractive (Ingrid in Voyage de noces, Geneviève in Livret de famille, Mme Portier in De si braves garçons, Mireille Maximoff in Des inconnues, and the pharmacist in La Petite Bijou). Distant, negligent mothers also figure, particularly in De si braves garçons (Andrée la pute and Mme Portier), and of course very strongly in La Petite Bijou. In Vestiaire de l’enfance the narrator’s mother is particularly hostile (76-77), and the narrator states that he is alienated from both father and mother in Du plus loin de l’oubli (137), though without discussing the reasons for this. While La Petite Bijou initially seems to constitute a radical departure from the norm, since in that text the parental mystery normally attached to the father surrounds a mother figure, it is possible that the choice of a mother as a negligent and ambiguous parental figure generating

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feelings of resemblance and an attempt at comprehension is dictated by the female narration, as same-sex parent-child identification is so important in Modiano’s work. However, in recent years there does seem to be a turning of attention towards female, and often maternal, figures, which may be evidence of a personal shift in Modiano, perhaps related to the death of his father in 1978 and his discovery of Dora Bruder ten years later. In any case, the absence of direct autobiographical discussion of Modiano’s feelings about being abandoned or rejected by his father and mother is striking, given that the references to a problematic family life are so frequent. As suggested in the chapters on biography of this book, part of Modiano’s autobiographical reserve may stem from a desire to respect the privacy of other people. Modiano has stated in interview that he did not wish to ‘betray’ his brother by naming him in Remise de peine, and in Dora Bruder he states in relation to his father’s attempt to have him arrested that ‘je n’en parlerais pas aujourd’hui si cette péripétie n’avait pris pour moi un caractère symbolique’ (70). However, to invoke such ‘pudisme’ is not always entirely satisfactory, especially given the sometimes hostile mother and father figures that do appear in the texts. It seems more plausible that fictionalization is a way in which Modiano can indirectly approach strong feelings. Importantly, the reader is frequently reminded of the fictionalized nature of the autobiographical events that recur throughout the texts. The fact that apparently autobiographical events occur in fictional frameworks is significant, as invention appears to hold sway over autobiographical fact. That the events in the texts are mainly invented is usually (but not always) suggested by the tone and style of the narrative, the preponderance of coincidence, deindividualization of character, and the improbability of certain events (although, as mentioned in Chapter One, Modiano’s preference for the strange and the coincidental can temper this sense to an extent). Presumptions of some fictionalization can arise through dissonances between repeated facts or events – what I call versionality. Repetition identifies the apparently autobiographical elements, and a fictional context or slight differences in these events suggest invention or, at least imaginative reworking. Fictionalization is sometimes gestured to extremely openly, as in the recent ‘Éphéméride’, where the narrator states ‘Soyons franc [sic] jusqu’au bout’, only to counter this a few lines later with ‘Et pourtant, ce n’était pas cela, ma vie’ (12). While these utterances can be seen as a

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statement of autobiographical reserve, they also stress the impossibility of an objective truth, even when frankness is attempted. However, in many of the other texts, even where most of the events do not seem to be objectively verifiable, there is a sense that fictionalization can be the vehicle for an emotional truth. Let us now look at the ways in which Modiano stresses fictionalization, and at his approach of ‘c’est moi et ce n’est pas moi’.65

Dissonance and Versionality Pseudonyms and play on the idea of the name are an important manifestation of autobiographical ludism. Modiano’s narrators are often extremely coy about divulging their names. The anonymous narrator in Du plus loin de l’oubli avoids revealing his name to Darius, confiding to the narratee that ‘j’éprouve toujours une gêne à dire mon nom’ (154). In Villa triste, the false comte Victor Chmara admits that Chmara is not his real name, but never discloses what that real name is. In De si braves garçons a character who shares some of Modiano’s biographical details also states that he was living under an assumed name, which is, significantly, Lenormand (BG, 74), a name that Modianistes will recognize as particularly ironic given that this false Lenormand can be taken as an alter ego for the very unprovincial and un-Norman author. Jean is a common name for the Modiano narrators, and its use seems to intimate that these narrators somehow represent the author, whose full name is Jean-Patrick Modiano.66 Even for those narrators named Jean, biographical details are always distorted. For example, in Vestiaire de l’enfance the narrator who like Modiano has published ‘quelques romans à Paris’, is called Jean Moreno, echoing the Italianate Modiano, and was born on the 20th of July 1945 - not the 30th, as is actually the case. The name Moreno may even be suggesting that the text is in fact providing us with more ‘no’ – more ‘erroneous’ information as to the details of the author’s life. Likewise, Moreno’s assumed name of Sarano could be seen to reassert this idea (in Italian, ‘sarà no’ means ‘will be no’). However, in this case, as in the other texts, this is a ‘no’ that is also a fictionalized ‘yes’, and in Vestiaire de l’enfance the multiple-text reader will realize this from the importance of guilt feelings in the text. 65

Gaudemar, ‘Modiano, souvenir écrin’, p. III. Nettelbeck and Hueston make this point (Pièces d’identité, p. 5). This will of course only be apparent to the reader who has epitextual information. 66

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Using the device of repetition with difference, Modiano inserts apparently autobiographical events into different contexts, so that the reader is confronted with various versions of events. A sense of confusion and doubt is created around all these apparently autobiographical facts or events when readers are led to reflect on their inability to say with confidence which fictionalized context is closest to the author’s experience. For example, the resonances of the paternal animosity described in Les Boulevards de ceinture with the hostility described in Dora Bruder lead the reader to wonder if a scene similar to the ‘épisode douloureux du métro Georges-V’ actually occurred, especially given that the narrator in La Ronde de nuit, a version of this father figure, also has an urge to push his loved ones under a train. However, it is impossible to say which version is more ‘real’, or even whether it occurred at all. Despite these dissonances, however, the underlying emotional dynamic remains constant. It becomes apparent that the idea of traintrack murders may simply be a dramatic metaphor for a more diffuse hostility, and that the ‘épisode douloureux du métro Georges-V’ may reflect less violent events, such as those described in Dora Bruder where Modiano senior tried to sign his son up for the army without his consent, or the occasion described in Fleurs de ruine when the father called the police on his son, or may point to an even less concretized antagonism. Whatever the case, it seems clear that an antagonism was at least perceived by the authorial consciousness behind these narrator figures. The hesitation of the Modiano narrators as to whether they smoke is emblematic of the authorial ludism often attached to resonances and dissonances in the texts. The smoking motif seems to play on the reader’s desire to establish a clear picture of the author, down to his very habits. In Voyage de noces, the middle-aged narrator smokes (110), but in the subsequent Du plus loin de l’oubli the narrator, also middle-aged, says he has given up smoking (152). In the much earlier Rue des Boutiques obscures, Hélène Pilgram tells the narrator that he used to smoke (112 -113), yet he cannot remember this, and indeed seems to have forgotten how to smoke. On page 123, the taxi driver asks Pedro if he smokes and he says he has given up. However, page 171 seems to corroborate the fact that he did smoke, though, as if to hedge bets, the Pedro/Jimmy character is shown holding a cigarette to his lips but it is stressed that he is not inhaling. Another strong hint that the smoking/no smoking opposition is a game on the part of the author occurs in Quartier perdu, where the narrator

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says he does not smoke (116), but has been seen smoking just previously (108-109). There are similar games in Vestiaire de l’enfance. It is a particularly delicate case, and a clever choice by Modiano, as it is always possible to give up smoking, so that discontinuity does not mean that the Modiano narrator is not in some way ‘Modiano’. Another instance of dissonance, less playful this time, concerns the various versions of the arrest of the father figure. There are three descriptions of the arrest in the rue de Marignan (LF, 105-6; RP, 116; DB, 64-67 and 70-74), and one of an arrest in the jardin des Tuileries, in Les Boulevards de ceinture (180-182). There are also three mentions of a later arrest, which, if one is to believe La Place de l’étoile, took place in July 1942, but which Remise de peine suggests took place in 1943 (PE, 132; RP, 116). In Livret de famille, the ‘first arrest’ following a police raid of the restaurant in the rue de Marignan is mentioned as having occurred in March 1942 (105-6), whereas in Remise de peine the arrest is said to have taken place in the same restaurant but ‘un soir de février’ (116). The February 1942 version is corroborated in Dora Bruder (64-65). In Livret de famille, the father is said to have escaped when a light timer switch went off (106), which is also said to be the case in Dora Bruder (65), though in Remise de peine he is described as having escaped from outside the building (116). Further, Livret de famille mentions the father’s appearance before a man called ‘D’ (the real Darquier de Pellepoix) who is described as ‘l’homme de la rue Greffuhle’ (106), though in Dora Bruder the man in charge of the rue Greffuhle is said to be Schweblin (64). Differences between versions can also give rise to suspicions of fictionalization, even if the descriptions are not inconsistent with each other. For example, the new detail introduced in Dora Bruder to the description of the father’s arrest in the restaurant – the ‘jeune fille d’environ dix-huit ans’ who is mentioned as a co-detainee – seems as if it may have been created to fit the situation, never having been mentioned before, yet the reader can never be sure. The ‘second arrest’, leading to internment, is mentioned in three of the texts (PE, 132; RP, 116-117; FR, 112-113), and its omission in the other texts leads to a sense of uncertainty over whether in fact it took place at all. The multiple-text reader’s uncertainty is especially pronounced in Dora Bruder, where, although the son devotes a long section to the notion of being taken away in a ‘panier à salade’, the first arrest is mentioned, but not the second, more life-threatening one, though in Remise de peine it too was said to have involved a ‘panier à

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salade’. The descriptions in Remise de peine and Fleurs de ruine are consistent, as in both texts the arrest is said to have involved apprehension at the place of residence, internment at the Quai de la Gare and in both cases the narrator speculates that it was Louis ‘Eddy’ Pagnon who liberated him. (It is important to remember that the liberation by Pagnon is only ever presented as speculative).67 However, the reference in La Place de l’étoile hints that the father may have been sent as far as Drancy, as does that in Les Boulevards de ceinture (182). In Paris Tendresse, a further arrest or detention period is suggested, where Albert Modiano is said to have escaped from police-quarters (‘une caserne’) in Angoulême that had been surrounded by Germans (12). It may be lack of accurate information on Modiano’s part that engenders so many fictional hypotheses. Sometimes Modiano takes pains to remain relatively close to actual events even when describing apparently fictitious events. In Les Boulevards de ceinture, for example, the narrator’s father appears in his life when the son is seventeen, though in reality Modiano’s father disappeared at around that point in the author’s life. However the Baron Deyckecaire does also disappear soon after bursting into his son’s life, so that the idea of his vanishing from a teenager’s life is respected. At other times, events seem to be less faithful to reality as the biographically informed reader sees it. However, even when events slide towards the most fictitious end of the scale of fictionalization, and become only very loosely linked to autobiographical fact, the principle of versionality remains valid. Though memories of events can be inaccurate, all versions of reality depicted retain some truth, as even ‘false’, fictional, memory says something about the present fears and desires of the ‘rememberer’. However, while imagination seems to be a way in which the narrators and author can approach issues indirectly, it can also allow them to avoid certain narratives, as will become clear in the discussion of Vestiaire de l’enfance and Rue des Boutiques obscures. 67

In Remise de peine the narrator states that ‘Je m’imaginais – à tort ou à raison – que c’était un certain Louis Pagnon qu’on appelait “Eddy”’(117). In Fleurs de ruine, the hypothesis is presented as closer to fact: the son says he often dreamed of the father’s liberation and that it was ‘sans doute’ Pagnon who rescued him (111). This presentation of hypotheses as fact, or at least very probable, is typical of the Modiano technique, and doubtless accounts in no small way for the widespread assumption that Pagnon did rescue Modiano’s father, though this has not, to my knowledge, been established as fact.

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A Multiple and Dispersed ‘Je(u)’ Modiano’s statement in interview that ‘j’écris pour savoir que je suis, pour me trouver une identité’ seems slightly inexact, as in reality he seems to be writing in order to create multiple identities for himself.68 He is present even in distortion, and not only in the main characters, but also in the secondary ones. This is one of the points of De si braves garçons, as shown in Chapter Three of this book. Indeed, while the most fertile terrain for the autobiography effect does lie in firstperson narration, it can very well exist in the third person.69 Une jeunesse, Modiano’s only third-person text, is a fine example of this, as it contains many resonances and dissonances with the other texts, and it is possible to talk of quite a strong autobiography effect produced by this text for the reader aware of the Modiano themes or of the details of his life. For these types of reader, the difference between Modiano and Louis (the character on whose consciousness most of the text is focused) is greatly reduced. Contributing to this is the fact that Louis’s dead father is described as a cyclist who participated in races in the Vél’ d’Hiv – the notorious internment centre for Jews in the Occupation. (However, along with these autobiographical ‘markers’, authorial ludism continues, as the fact that Louis is said to have completed his military service confuses readers who are unsure whether Modiano actually did his service militaire, as this has been thrown into doubt in Dora Bruder (74), and Vestiaire de l’enfance (74) [sic]). Equally, the female narration of Des inconnues and La Petite Bijou show that maleness is not a prerequisite for Modiano representatives. All of this also serves to underline the fact that Modiano is directing most of his autobiographical project at the multiple-text reader. Such dispersion of self in fiction can at times seem distressing. Nabokov felt that transposing autobiographical details into fiction gave them a life of their own, and took away from his feeling of possessing them.70 Modiano, who has cited Nabokov as one of his influences, also complains of a dilution of self and of memories in his recent ‘Éphéméride’. This short text is presented as a series of fragmented memories, whose snippet-like nature is accentuated by typographical arrangement. The narrator’s concern at the lack of consistency of these memories is apparent both in the title and in his 68

Ézine, ‘Sur la sellette’, p. 5. See Lejeune’s comments in ‘L’Autobiographie à la troisième personne’. 70 Speak, Memory, p. 438. 69

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statement towards the end of the narrative that ‘cette mince pellicule de minces événements pouvait se déchirer et se diluer d’un instant à l’autre’ (‘Éphéméride’, 14). A few lines later on the same page he states: ‘J’avais perdu tous les minuscules points de repère de ma vie. Des lambeaux de souvenirs me traversaient qui n’étaient plus les miens, mais ceux d’inconnus, et je ne pouvais pas leur donner une forme précise.’ While Modiano is of course bemoaning the flimsiness of memory in general, it is suggested that Modiano can no longer distinguish between real and imagined memories, and that it is somehow tragic to lose the real ones. Yet as a whole, the project of fictionalized autobiography seems predominantly beneficial to the author, allowing the working through of personal problems through identification with fictional characters.

2(ii) Modiano and the Canon of French Autobiography So far we have looked at Modiano in relative isolation from his peers and predecessors in French autobiography, although some of the underlying concerns in the present era have already been touched on (relating to the modern and postmodern sense of fractured identity and suspicion of memory). Before looking at how the notion of autofiction applies to Modiano’s work, it is useful briefly to explore some of the most pressing issues in recent autobiography. I shall not, however, attempt to provide a potted history of French autobiography here.71 For one thing, personal differences between the authors of the French autobiographical canon mean that it is difficult to draw hard and fast societal or historical conclusions from their individual approaches. However, some links and contrasts need to be touched upon in order to situate Modiano in autobiographical practice, not least because he alludes to other practitioners through intertextuality in his work. One of the main factors marking modern autobiography is a strong awareness that any autobiographer is a constructor of his or her life-story, with all the involuntary omissions implied by that concept, as well as all the unconscious desires to present the past in a palatable way. The other main factor underlying most recent literary 71

For useful and detailed overviews of the issues in French autobiography I refer readers to Jacques Lecarme and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone, L’Autobiographie (Paris: Armand Colin, 1997), and Philippe Lejeune L’Autobiographie en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971).

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autobiography is a corresponding authorial awareness of the reader as an interpreter to be respected, and in some instances even to be leant on for understanding of the authorial psyche. Of themselves, these two factors distance contemporary autobiography from the inaugural model provided by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782). Let us now explore some of the ways in which contemporary autobiography has developed from its origins. Rousseau can be considered the founding father of French autobiography, due to the fact that his Confessions place more emphasis on the history of his own personality than on the spiritual growth that was previously the focus of most personal literary writing that sought to give an in-depth picture of the self. Indeed, Rousseau’s text fits neatly with Philippe Lejeune’s seminal definition of autobiography made during the wave of critical reflection on the genre in the 1970s: ‘Récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité’.72 Rousseau’s view of the importance of displaying the individual psyche for itself marks the beginning of an era, as does the importance he accorded to childhood as a determining factor in personality. An attention to childhood has in fact become one of the main constants of autobiography, backed up by Freud’s seminal theories at the turn of the twentieth century. Whether in Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913-1922), Jean-Paul Sartre’s Les Mots (1964), Roland Barthes’s provision of photographs of himself as a youth in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), or Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance (1983), most modern autobiography leaves a large place for childhood in recognition of its central importance. In Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975), the author, though traumatically cut off from certain founding memories, is also clearly aware of the importance of childhood in his psychological development. In Modiano’s texts, the absence of certain childhood memories becomes all the more significant due to the lack of direct discussion of them, and the very brevity of the painful references to childhood increases the weight of such references. While Rousseau can be considered the father of modern autobiography for the above reasons, his belief stated in the epilogue to Book IV of the Confessions that he could ‘rendre [s]on âme transparente’ to both himself and his readers does, however, betoken a faith in memory and in language that disappeared sometime in the late 72

Le Pacte autobiographique, p. 14.

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nineteenth century, around the time Nietzsche was declaring God and all previously respected ‘truths’ were dead. The subtleties of Rousseau’s text deserve more attention than is possible here, and it is true that his text can be seen as containing the seeds of doubt concerning the objectivity of his account and his control over his readers. His very defensiveness in addressing his readers (his protesting too much, as Louis Renza argues) demonstrates an awareness that he is not in full control of the reception of his text and that the language and structuring of his text may reveal to the reader much of what he might prefer to keep hidden.73 Equally, the desire to ‘peindre doublement l’état de mon âme, savoir au moment où l’événement m’est arrivé et au moment où je l’ai décrit’ shows Rousseau’s awareness of the distance between the remembering self and the self that experienced the events of the past.74 However, it cannot be denied that Rousseau’s faith in the transparency of memory, and in the authorial self as the privileged interpreter of his or her inner impulses, are far stronger then anything to be found in most informed post-Freudian autobiographical practice. Of most importance for the theories of autobiography that have developed in post-Nietzschean times is the idea of blurred boundaries between memory and imagination. On this point Rousseau seems disarmingly naïve (or again, possibly defensive). Minimizing the role of invention in memory, he claims in the opening pages of Les Confessions that: ‘Je n’ai rien tu de mauvais, rien ajouté de bon, et s’il m’est arrivé d’employer quelque ornement indifférent, ce n’a jamais été que pour remplir un vide occasionné par mon défaut de mémoire’ (my emphasis).75 Modern critics would prefer the adjective ‘nécessaire’ in place of ‘indifférent’, in order to highlight the fact that invention always accompanies memory whenever new narratives are fashioned. Most informed autobiographical texts of recent production do stress the fact that events are always reworked and ordered by the rememberer in a highly selective and subjective manner and are always in some way reconfigured by imagination. Even Serge Doubrovsky’s contemporary autobiographies, which are written almost simultaneously with life being lived and which thus maximally narrow the gap between memory and life, still problematize the remembrance and presentation of experience. 73

‘The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography’, p. 288. Ébauches des Confessions, Œuvres complètes, I, p. 1154. 75 Les Confessions, Œuvres complètes, I, p. 6. 74

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Sometimes memory is radically repressed, or absent, as in Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance where the trauma of losing loved ones in the Holocaust, and of surviving when others died, leads the narrator to provide an imaginative work, along with more apparently factual fragments of memory, as substitutes for his childhood memories of the loss of his mother and all the other murdered Jews. Perec’s text, which is of huge significance for modern autobiography, permeates Modiano’s work through intertextual echoes, as we shall see. Modiano himself is cut off from memory on two levels. Firstly, he has, like Perec, repressed aspects of his childhood – especially the death of his brother Rudy – and secondly, he feels deeply connected to past events he has not experienced, encompassing both his father’s activities during the ‘années noires’ and the Holocaust. In Modiano’s writing, as in Perec’s text, fiction steps in as a substitute for traumatic memory in the case of the childhood events. And, as already suggested, imagination also allows Modiano a sense of second-hand memory of the ‘années noires’, while also allowing him to commemorate the Holocaust through symbolic references in his fictions. On the level of structure, autobiography has become suspicious of the ordering of life into a coherent, step-by-step story. Whereas Les Confessions provided the reader with a chronological history of the development of its author’s personality, the tendency today is to follow the vagaries of memory, on the assumption that this is more faithful to the rememberer’s present sense of his or her life. Proust does this, of course, playing havoc with time and place in his monumental fictionalized autobiography, and thus stressing the fact that the remembering process constantly reorganizes the events of the past into different sequences (and indeed different versions). This is one of the main points of intersection between Modiano and the author of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, to whom Modiano makes frequent subtle allusions. Alan Morris notes several of Modiano’s main debts to Proust concerning content and device in his Patrick Modiano (1996), which has a helpful index. Apart from the connection of French Jewishness, Modiano, like Proust, deals in narrators who stay more or less the same, the creation of character through glimpses (sometimes contradictory ones), recurring images, and a stress on the disjointed nature of memory. However, Modiano’s style is far less convoluted than that of Proust, and he does not share the earlier author’s detailed attention to inner consciousness.

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Selfhood (itself dependent on memory) has come to be seen as more and more fragmented and elusive, in stark contrast with the unified picture of himself that Rousseau attempted to create in his founding text. While, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Freud posited a relatively unified self, the structuralist school of thought played an important role after the Second World War in the fragmentation of the contemporary self, with its insistence that the self was part of many different structures and discourses. Its successor, post-structuralism, further de-centred the self by demonstrating the shifting nature of the categories into which structuralism placed people. Like the narrator of Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant, many contemporary autobiographers now seem to feel that the subject is never really present. As the narrator of L’Amant puts it: ‘L’histoire de ma vie n’existe pas’ (14), implying that it cannot exist, as the subject implied in the adjective ‘ma’ is constantly changing. This stress on the versionality of the self underlies Duras’s constant renewal of herself in her fictions, which share with Modiano’s work an emphasis on repetition with difference and a deliberate fictionalization of experience.76 In contrast to Rousseau’s founding text, most recent autobiography makes a point of declaring itself open to readerly input. André Breton, in his Surrealist autobiographical work Nadja (1928) famously called his text a ‘maison de verre’ (18), calling on the reader to come and visit him there, in an enjoinder to the latter to decipher the unconscious forces shaping his text (though he also realized the relative opacity of the ‘glasshouse’ he claimed he lived in). Serge Doubrovsky stresses the important role of the reader’s input in autobiography by incorporating a (psycho)analyst into his autofictions. Through the device of the analyst, Doubrovsky is stressing the fact that perceptions of the self will differ from person to person, as well as the fact that the reader will attempt to work out the unconscious urges of the narrating je, just as the analyst does.77 Sarraute’s two conflicting narrating voices in Enfance, and Sartre’s choice of ‘Lire’ and ‘Écrire’ as sutbtitles within Les Mots seem to be similar injunctions to readers to bear at least some of the burden of analysis. Likewise, in W ou le souvenir d’enfance, the narrator 76

See also Leslie Hill, ‘Marguerite Duras and the Limits of Fiction’. Interestingly, the scene in story II of Des inconnues where the narrator wanders naked around a dormitory recalls a similar scene with Hélène Lagonelle in Duras’s L’Amant. 77 See Doubrovsky’s Autobiographiques, p. 72.

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constantly calls out to the reader to take note of motifs that recur through his text. Modiano’s games of hide-and-seek accord an equally important role to the reader. Like all of the autobiographers mentioned above, Modiano’s work displays a drive towards self-textualization that is nonetheless suspicious of overly coherent narratives. The work is also clearly marked by a suspicion of memory and an awareness of its ‘oublis involontaires’. Modiano has however considerable faith that imagination can convey memory, albeit through the screen of fiction, and that it can provide a reasonable substitute for memory, whether in the representation of personal experience or in the production of ‘prenatal’ memory. Indeed, the contemporary loss of faith in memory has, on a general level, brought with it a concomitant realization of the worth of imagination. It is, however, up to the reader to decode the imaginative narratives in order to make sense of memory for the author. Let us now turn to the reader’s role in a further respect: the question of ‘autofiction’

2(iii) Modiano and Autofiction Most of the remarks in the section on Modiano’s self-fictionalization relate to the multiple-text reader or the paratextually informed reader. However, I see ‘autofiction’ as a label that should be reserved for texts that generate a sense of authorial self-fictionalization even for a single-text reader knowing nothing other than the text, the title, and the name of the author. This single-text, non-paratextually informed reader is what I call ‘the yardstick reader’, and this concept is crucial to the idea of autofiction as I see it. As stated in Chapter One, name and title are arguably part of the paratext, but as it is extremely unlikely that any reader will skip to the text without registering at least these two elements, I do not count them as paratextual.78 In my view, autofiction mixes events from the author’s life with fiction, combines the conventions of autobiography with those of fictional writing, and presents the author as both himself or herself and a fictional character, and does this within a single work, thus encouraging confusion between fiction and autobiographical fact independently of the reader’s knowledge of other texts or of paratextual information. It is to be assumed that if a text with an autobiographical basis produces an autofiction effect without any other knowledge on the part of the 78

On the notion of the paratext see Chapter One: ‘Four Types of Modiano Reader’.

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reader it has a greater claim to the title of autofiction than autobiographically based texts that seem autofictional due to extratextual information known only to some readers, or back-cover declarations that vary from edition to edition. I stress the importance of the yardstick reader in reaction to the fact that the term ‘autofiction’ is often applied to texts that are merely autobiographical fictions, which leads to categorical chaos. Constant’s Adolphe, for example, though based on events in the author’s life, is not autofiction, as it does not problematize the distinction between autobiography and fictional writing within the text. Though Thierry Laurent calls Modiano’s work as a whole ‘une autofiction’, only Livret de famille and, to a lesser extent, De si braves garçons, Remise de peine, and La Petite Bijou have a real claim to the title in my view.79 Fleurs de ruine does not, after all, name its author within it, and only the paratextually informed reader, or the multiple-text reader, will recognize the Albert and Rudy of that text as references to Modiano’s family members. Fleurs de ruine is, in any case, not primarily autobiographically focused, placing more stress on creating a series of biographical snippets feeding into Modiano’s picture of his father. Livret de famille is, however, a prime example of autofiction, and the other three texts are also highly autofictional in their different manners, which is one of the reasons why I discuss the concept in detail. The following discussion seeks to clarify the terms of the debate around autofiction, as well as to demonstrate the existence of different types of autofiction. The question of the relative proportion of fact to fiction generally to be found in autofiction is a moot point. Most of Modiano’s autofictions combine a highly invented flavour with a presumption of a strong autobiographical basis (La Petite Bijou perhaps more problematically than the others). However, Remise de peine and the autofictions of some other practitioners (Doubrovsky’s, for example) manage to seem mainly referential, while still problematizing the objectivity of what is being said, and pointing out that the author figure is both a character and part of the authorial self. It shall be demonstrated that autofiction does not need either to be or seem mainly invented, as long as the truth of what is recounted is sufficiently problematized. I continue my effect-based approach in speaking of ‘the autofiction effect’. Like the reader’s sense of the author’s 79

This is clear from his title: L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano: une autofiction.

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fictionalization of self in general, the autofiction effect is a function of the autobiography effect. While it is true that, in Modiano’s work, fictionalization of self on a multiple-text level often has the same effect of blurring the fact/fiction boundary as occurs in his autofictions, it is perhaps best to avoid using ‘the autofiction effect’ to describe effects produced by the œuvre as a whole, or indeed by the texts other than Livret de famille, De si braves garçons and Remise de peine. At the very least, when speaking of the autofiction effect in Modiano’s work, the distinction between single-text readers and multiple-text readers should be borne in mind.

The Origin of the Term, and the Debate around It The term ‘autofiction’, coined by Serge Doubrovsky for his autobiographical novel Fils in 1977, was born out of a growing awareness by theoreticians and practitioners of autobiography that autobiography always contained an element of fiction. This is not to say that this awareness did not exist before that point – the works of Stendhal, for example, are highly conscious of their author’s manipulation and re-invention of himself in his texts. However, it cannot be denied that the last thirty years have seen an increase in the production of texts that play with the notion of fiction in autobiography, and it is perhaps as anachronistic to say that La Vie de Henry Brulard is an autofiction as it would be to say that Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a postmodern text. Doubrovsky’s Fils was in large part a challenge to Philippe Lejeune, hinging on Lejeune’s claim in Le Pacte autobiographique that, if the name of the character in a text with a fictional label is the same as that of the author, ‘ce seul fait exclut la possibilité de la fiction’.80 Doubrovsky promptly subtitled his autobiographical text ‘roman’ and made sure to mention his name in it. As Doubrovsky points out in Autobiographiques, Fils was, at least according to Lejeune’s definition (given below), not a ‘roman autobiographique’, and he thus felt obliged to invent a new label for it. However, this is clearly terminological obfuscation: autofiction should logically fit into the overarching category of autobiographical novel, as it points to itself as a novel as well as autobiographical writing. Doubrovsky recognized as much by labelling his text ‘roman’. Lejeune defined the ‘roman autobiographique’ in the following terms: ‘Textes de fiction dans lesquels le lecteur peut avoir des raisons 80

Le Pacte autobiographique, p. 31.

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de soupçonner, à partir de ressemblances qu’il croit deviner, qu’il y a identité de l’auteur et du personnage alors que l’auteur, lui, a choisi de nier cette identité, ou du moins de ne pas l’affirmer’.81 Doubrovsky’s text was ‘un texte de fiction’, but also an autobiographical one, where the author claimed identity with his narrator. The main point of Doubrovsky’s challenge to Lejeune was to demonstrate that an author can very well be both fictional and referential, and that in autobiographical writing this is in fact usually the case. Lejeune did not allow for the notion of dual identity, whereby the author – who is at the same time a fictional character – lays claim to both a referential and fictional status, or acts as if he were the author and a fictional character at the same time.82 Doubrovsky’s autofictions stress the important role played by the unconscious in writing about the self. As we shall see, there are, however, several models of autofiction, some of which pay less attention to the unconscious, preferring to highlight the blurring of the author/character distinction in order to point out that identity in autobiographical narratives is both a textual construct and imbued with human presence. These blur fact and fiction in a deliberate rather than an unconscious manner. Modiano’s texts often seem to fit the latter paradigm best. While La Petite Bijou does highlight questions of the authorial unconscious (as does De si braves garçons to a lesser extent), Modiano’s autofictions often seem to be principally 81

Ibid, p. 25. The emphasis is Lejeune’s. One of the problems with Lejeune’s definition is that it does not distinguish clearly between the pseudo-autobiographical novel and the novel with verifiably autobiographical elements. His definition incorporates the ambiguity inherent in the adjective ‘autobiographical’, which can mean ‘describing events from the author’s life’ or ‘using the style of autobiography’, and has led other critics to declare that the autobiographical novel does not need to refer to verifiably real events. Pierre Pillu makes this claim, for example, in his article ‘Lecture du roman autobiographique’. This leads to categorical chaos in my view, and I argue for a distinction between the ‘roman autobiographique’ and the ‘roman pseudo-autobiographique’. 82 Marie Darrieussecq gives the following definition of autofiction: ‘Un récit à la première personne se donnant pour fictif (souvent, on trouvera la mention roman sur la couverture), mais où l’auteur apparaît homodiégétiquement sous son nom propre, et où la vraisemblance est un enjeu maintenu par de multiples “effets de vie”’. ‘Un genre pas sérieux’, p. 377. Clearly one must contest the requirement of ‘se donnant pour fictif’, as in fact autofictional texts must posit themselves as both fictional and autobiographical. Equally, it is possible to envisage non-first-person autofiction (although Modiano has not to date provided us with any, Une jeunesse appearing autobiographical only for biographically informed readers).

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emphasizing the author’s power to mix the facts of his own life with fiction and to distort them deliberately. It is significant that Modiano has used the term ‘autofiction’ in the context of ludic deception, in a letter to Laurent describing his mother, the Belgian actress Luisa Colpeyn, as ‘pratiquant avant moi “l’autofiction”’, because she misled journalists into believing she was of Balkan extraction.83 And it is mainly in Modiano’s more novelistic texts that questions of the unconscious forces surrounding memory and forgetting take pride of place (as we shall see in the discussion of Vestiaire de l’enfance, Quartier perdu, and Rue des Boutiques obscures). Yet like Doubrovsky’s texts, Modiano’s autofictions do, in their own way, through the apparently invented nature of many of the events, gesture to the forces driving the production of what the present peritext of Livret de famille calls ‘souvenirs imaginaires’, intimating that fiction can become autobiography just as autobiography is often fictional. For Doubrovksy, the theorist of autofiction whose definition is the strictest, author, character and narrator should bear the same name, and the text should be labelled a novel, despite being based on ‘des faits et des événements strictement réels’.84 Doubrovsky’s novels seem very close to classical autobiography in their extreme introspection and their generally linear chronology, notwithstanding the overt statements within them that the Serge Julien Doubrovsky of the text is a fictional character, and despite the temporal closeness of the je of the énoncé and that of the énonciation. He himself has stated that he does not see much difference between his brand of autofiction and autobiography, talking of ‘un label de qualité posé sur une viande déjà très classique’.85 His narrators point out their power to tell their stories, and anyone else’s, as they like, but still claim to be sincere, while highlighting the distortions brought about by the unconscious, the deficiencies of memory, and the organization of events into a story. The notion of ‘l’aventure du langage’, with the implicit recognition that language is made up of unconscious as well as 83

L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano, p. 5. In his Autobiographiques, pp. 61-79, Doubrovsky discusses the passage from Fils that is reproduced on the back cover on the original edition: ‘Fiction, d’événements et de faits strictement réels; si l’on veut, autofiction, d’avoir confié le langage d’une aventure à l’aventure du langage, hors sagesse et hors syntaxe du roman, traditionnel ou nouveau. Rencontre, fils des mots, allitérations, assonances, dissonances, écriture d’avant ou d’après littérature, concrète, comme on dit musique. Ou encore autofriction, patiemment onaniste, qui espère maintenant faire partager son plaisir.’ 85 Ludovic Leonelli, ‘Entretien avec Serge Doubrovsky’, p. 86. 84

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conscious choice, stresses that all life-writing, except perhaps that of the driest, most anecdotal kind, will have fictional elements as soon as hypotheses are presented as fact or the author’s fantasies come into play. A similar sense filters through in Modiano’s work. Vincent Colonna’s definition of autofiction is broader than Doubrovsky’s. Like the latter, Colonna poses the condition of identity of name between author, narrator and character, but stresses the invention of a personality – a fictional self – summing up autofiction as follows: ‘Œuvre littéraire par laquelle un écrivain s’invente une personnalité et une existence tout en conservant son identité réelle’ (where ‘identité’ signifies identity of name between author and character). For him even Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu must thus qualify as autofiction, due to the presence of the author’s name and the creation of a largely fictional alter ego.86 Colonna’s view of autofiction seems to suppose a predominance of invention, while the practice of Doubrovsky is closer to objectively verifiable fact. Thierry Laurent, in his discussion of autobiographical writing in Modiano’s work, disputes Colonna’s insistence on the name factor but agrees with him that autofiction is a fictionalization of self where invention is more important than veracity. For Laurent, what is important is ‘que l’auteur se mette en scène dans des aventures largement inventées et non qu’il se présente ou pas sous sa véritable identité’. He claims that ‘dès qu’apparaissent des analogies fortes entre tel personnage de roman et l’auteur, il y a autofiction’.87 There are two main problems with Laurent’s approach. Firstly, he seems to rely on paratextual knowledge of the author (by his logic, Constant’s Adolphe could be called an autofiction), and secondly, his emphasis on the ‘appearance’ of strong analogies occludes the fact that a text cannot objectively be called an autofiction unless it contains some verifiably autobiographical events. If a text appears autofictional but is not autobiographical it seems best to call it a pseudo-autofiction. Laurent’s emphasis that autofiction depends on ‘des aventures largement inventées’ is also problematic. Though this does allow for more leeway than Doubrovsky’s ‘faits et événements strictement réels’, and though Modiano’s autofictions are, admittedly, 86

See Vincent Colonna, Essai sur la fictionnalisation de soi en littérature, especially pp. 34-40 (cited in Laurent, p. 11). Colonna does not seem to be perturbed by the fact that Proust’s name is connected with that of the narrator on merely two occasions in this monumental work, and rather late at that. 87 My emphasis. L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano, pp. 11-12.

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predominantly composed of invented material, I feel it is better to allow a broad spectrum of degrees of fictionality. Colonna’s and Doubrovsky’s definitions stress the necessity of the presence of the author’s name. The presence of the author’s name is indeed a crucial element in Modiano’s autofictions, especially for the yardstick reader. And the lack of the author’s name is one reason why it seems necessary to discount Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant as autofiction, at least according to yardstick criteria. L’Amant is based on events in the author’s life, follows the conventions of autobiography relatively closely (topics, chronology, introspection etc) and points out that the narrator is a fictional character. Its autobiographical flavour coexists with an insistence on the slippery nature of selfhood through the motif of the absent photograph, and mention of other versions of events. However, there is a studied avoidance of the author’s name, which means that for nonparatextually informed readers, the text may well be read as a pseudoautobiographical novel, in other words one where events are deliberately invented and merely written in an autobiographical style. Though the label ‘roman’ is important for Doubrovsky’s idea of autofiction (he calls Fils an autofiction, but labels it ‘roman’), a fictional label is not necessary in my concept of autofiction. However, elements of fictional style are important. What constitutes fictional and autobiographical styles is a moot point. Fictional style is not equivalent to a merely literary one, although Lejeune seems to propose that this is the case, recently using ‘fictionnel’ to describe ‘la mise en forme littéraire’.88 Autobiography, biography and historiography can all use literary symbolism – and often do – in order to create subjective links and to place poetic emphasis on certain elements rather than for purposes of invention. There is an accepted fictional style, however, as opposed to a merely ‘literary’ one and I reflect on this at some length in my analysis of Livret de famille and Dora Bruder. In fact, Modiano’s work often plays on accepted fictional, documentary and autobiographical styles, reminding the reader that the novel and autobiography are on the same continuum of inadequacy when it comes to representing life, and many of the differences between them stem from conventions of autobiographical and novelistic language, whose distinctions can easily become blurred. However, although many readers are aware that language can never be 88

‘Autofictions et cie. Pièce en cinq actes’, p. 8.

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neutral, and that there is no such thing as an intrinsically ‘autobiographical’ language, Modiano’s extreme use of literary symbolism can foster suspicions of deliberate invention in the reader of an autobiographical work. His use of improbability and implausibility in the events described also arouses suspicions, and can encourage the reader to view the author – at least sporadically – as a fictional character. A brief examination of how some modern French autobiographical texts stress the presence of fictionalization within them – whether this fictionalization be deliberate or involuntary – will be useful before discussing Modiano’s four autofictions, in order to situate the texts in a current of autofictional practice. The analysis continues to rely solely on the effect produced on the yardstick reader, in other words, a reader who knows merely the title, the text, and the name of the author.

Key Practitioners of Autofiction of the Twentieth Century in France Many of the ‘grands noms’ of French writing turned their interest to self-writing as the twentieth century edged towards completion. Most, like Roland Barthes, did so while stressing the fragmentary nature and contradictory nature of the self, and also, importantly, the constructed nature of the self. Barthes’s enjoinder in his experimental text Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975) that: ‘Tout ceci doit être consideré comme dit par un personnage de roman – ou plutôt par plusieurs’ (123) is often referred to in discussions of modern autobiography. Barthes’s text is a series of meditations classed in short sections in more or less alphabetical order, along with some more personal reflections, outlining the various ideological and theoretical positions that the author assumed throughout his critical career. As such, it is highly un-novelistic from a conventional point of view. Barthes’s view of himself as a character in a novel is, however, valid, if one considers that any textual shaping of self can be seen as making one into a fictional character. Barthes’s notion that the author of ‘his’ text is not only one fictional character but many underlines his idea that each textual undertaking constructs a different self. It is also a reference to the fact that one’s self – or rather one’s selves – must be seen as not only constructed by the individual agent but also as shaped by societal codes, discourses and systems, all structures that Barthes devoted his critical career to analysing. In this light, Roland Barthes par Roland

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Barthes is as validly ‘autobiographical’ as Rousseau’s Confessions, which stressed the development of inner consciousness from an emotional standpoint. As Barthes sees it, his varying ideologies are as much part of his autobiography as his inner psyche. Yet Barthes’s text is also referential. His statement that, as the author of the text, he is a fictional character is just one part of the equation. Tellingly, this statement figures not only in typewritten form in the text but also in, as Paul John Eakin points out, a facsimile reproduction of Barthes’s own handwriting. Who is this referent then if he is not Barthes?, asks Eakin, with justification.89 In this textual reproduction of his handwriting, Barthes is playfully-yet-seriously insisting on the blurring between referentiality and fictionality in selfwriting. However, by including a series of photographs (of himself and the family he grew up with) at the start of his book – cutting them off from the type-written text by placing them in a separate block – Barthes is also stressing the gap between the bodily self and the textual self, or between the extratextual self and the written one.90 Sartre, in his slightly earlier text Les Mots (1964), cleverly confuses literature and life, hinting that even life can be fictional by stressing his narrating character Poulou’s propensity for assuming alternative identities at will. The child Poulou proposes to live his life as a story, or, more exactly, several stories. Like Barthes’s text, Sartre’s experimental autobiography stresses the influence of codes and expectations on the shaping of the self, showing that even lived experience is in some way fictional in the etymological sense of moulded or constructed. Poulou is indeed a highly constructed character, who even as a child is aware of literary fore-runners and of his family’s bourgeois expectations for the child Jean-Paul Sartre, displaying what Eakin calls a ‘mastery of the repertoire of poses’.91 Les Mots also draws the reader’s attention to Sartre as authorcreator, showing him to be an expert in artifice who pastiches the styles of fables or fairy stories as well as adult texts by established writers. The caricature of the narrating character of Poulou helps to distance him from the author and to turn him into a fictional character. Amid such strong insistence on the textual nature of the written self, micro-narratives of emotional directness are also provided, such as the 89

Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography, p. 3. On this, see also Germaine Bree, Narcissus Absconditus: The Problematic Art of Autobiography in Contemporary France. 91 Fictions in Autobiography, p. 137. 90

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incident where Sartre feels drawn upon to protect his mother from a strange man, while browsing with her at a book stall by the Seine (183-184). However, this human directness and vulnerability is relatively obscured by the reader’s sense of Sartre as strongly in control of his narrative, even in the analysis of the foibles of his past self. Like Barthes’s text, it provides a rather analytical model of autofiction. However, like all autofictional texts, it also assumes that the textual self will be based on an anthropomorphic picture, relying on the reader’s connection with the ‘authorial ghost’ to do this. Other practitioners of autofiction focus more closely on emotional experience, choosing to highlight the problematic of invented memories more than that of invented selves, even while stressing the intertwined nature of memory and identity. Enfance by Sarraute and Perec’s W ou le souvenir d’enfance both fit into this category. Sarraute’s Enfance stresses the deficiency of memory and the concealing powers of the unconscious by providing a dialogue between two aspects of the self, one of which generally adopts a remonstrative matter-of-fact tone to keep the more expansive and sentimental one in check, drawing it back to the ‘facts’ of the case. However these voices often blur, so that a neat dichotomy between fact and fiction becomes impossible. The main stress on the unreliability of memory occurs through the provision of contrasting versions of events, for example with the divergent feelings the author ‘remembers’ having as her father tiptoed out of her bedroom after singing her to sleep as a child (52-54). The author’s reflections on memory are coupled with a thematization of the notion of invention in self-writing (perhaps most strongly in the episode where the child Natacha invents a fictional life for herself in a school essay: 207217).92 As touched on above, Perec, the author of the poignant W ou le souvenir d’enfance, is even more problematically distanced from memory. As the most important memory of his childhood has been largely blanked out (the traumatic loss of his mother in the Holocaust), the author is condemned to make do with other fragments of memory, which are in any case presented as provisional and subject to 92

For a concise discussion of autobiographical issues in Enfance, especially the problematic of the role of the reader, see Sheringham, Devices and Desires, pp. 156164. For a more detailed discussion of Sarraute and the reader see Emer O’ Beirne, Reading Nathalie Sarraute: Dialogue and Distance or Valerie Minogue, Nathalie Sarraute: The War of the Words.

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involuntarily reworking by his subconscious. In a key episode – the train scene at the Gare de Lyon, which is Perec’s last ‘memory’ of his mother – the details are later proven to be erroneous.93 Even while providing tiny fragments of memory, Perec declares ‘je n’ai pas de souvenirs d’enfance’ (17), thus underlining the unstable and even in a sense ‘imaginary’ nature of memory. The attentive reader will, however, keep in mind the title of Perec’s text: W ou le souvenir d’enfance. The story of W is singled out by the singular definite article as being the defining imaginary ‘memory’ – or set of imaginary memories – in the text. Perec’s horrific account of the fictional island of W, inspired by the grotesque master-and-slave existence of the deathcamps, is an imaginative reworking from memory of a story invented in childhood which was already a substitution for the trauma caused by the loss of his mother. Involuntary and voluntary reworking of memory are shown to coincide in this imaginative story, which is clearly both fictional and autobiographical. Perec includes an overtly fictional alter ego to tell the tale of W, in the character of Gaspard Winckler (who himself has usurped his identity from another character). However, as Michael Sheringham points out, it is up to the reader to effect the crossover between the W fictions and the snippets from Perec’s life, which are in any case set apart typographically, while physically alternating with one another.94 By stressing the importance of the fictional account of W as a way of encapsulating certain key issues relating to his self, Perec can, like Sartre and Barthes, be said to be focusing on the blurring between life and text, yet in a much more emotional and poignant manner. Christine Angot’s recent Sujet Angot (1998) is proof of the continuing interest in autofiction in France. The text demonstrates a strong debt to previous practitioners, its very title underlining the fact that Angot has become part of the text through writing. She is its subject in at least two senses of the word: the subject of enunciation and what the text is about. As most of the text is presented as stemming from letters from Claude to a character called Christine Angot, the presentation of her text from Claude’s point of view allows the author to become even more obviously a fictional character than would have been the case had she told the story with a narrator called Angot. This text plays particularly strongly on the reader’s 93

See also Lejeune’s analysis in La Mémoire et l’oblique. Georges Perec autobiographe, p.79 et passim. 94 Devices and Desires, pp. 320-326, especially pp. 320-321.

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expectations of autobiography, making the fact/fiction problematic always present by the impossibility of knowing whether the lover’s letters – and by extension all events in the text – are transcribed verbatim or to a greater or lesser extent invented by the writer Angot. As such it is an example of autofiction that plays heavily on readers’ expectations of autobiographical ‘truth’. It stresses that the Christine Angot of the text is a fictional character, while also existing independently of the text, and with some of the same, or similar, experiences. In its ludic mode, it resembles the texts of Sartre or Barthes more closely than those of Sarraute or Perec. All of these texts, from Sartre to Angot, en passant par Doubrovsky, play on autobiographical conventions, stress that the author is a fictional character as well as a referential figure, and blur the distinction between fact and fiction. All problematize the distinction between autobiography and fictional narration for the yardstick reader. In all these cases there is also identity of name – or the transparency of near-identity of name – between author, narrator and character. Yet the autofictional style of each is different, and all emphasize different issues. Doubrovsky’s texts show that the creation of a sense of considerable fictionalization is, strictly speaking, unnecessary, although Modiano’s autofictions tend to stress a predominance of invention. In Angot’s text, there is a clear sense of the author’s power to confuse the reader as to fact and fiction, and this is often also the case in Modiano’s texts, as we shall see. Whereas the concealing powers of the unconscious are clearly in focus in some of the texts, as with those of Perec, Sarraute and Doubrovsky, some authors, like Barthes and Sartre, place more stress on the process of shaping what they view as the ‘fiction’, or imaginative construct, of the self. Yet all of the above texts, in their different ways, are autofictions, stressing that readers of autobiography must participate in a project of deciphering the construct of the textual self, while always remembering the gaps between memory and life, and between text and experience. Notwithstanding the inadequacy of narrative to express life, all of these authors participate in what Paul Ricoeur calls the ‘demande de récit’, encompassing the human need to tell stories (and to read or listen to them).95 Despite (or perhaps because of) feelings of 95

On this, see David Carr, ‘Ricoeur on Narrative’, especially p. 169, and Ricoeur, ‘Life in Quest of Narrative’, especially p. 29, where he speaks of life as ‘an activity and a passion in search of a narrative’.

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fragmentation of selfhood and unreliable memory, the drive towards textualization continues, due to the desire to provide a relatively unified picture of one’s self, and often also of other people. In his study of recent autobiography, Paul John Eakin speaks of Sartre’s wish to ‘transform the contingency of his existence into the permanence of a book’, and this is a desire that applies to all practitioners of autofiction, including Modiano. Yet the narratives produced are merely textual butterflies: flimsy, flitting things.96 This chapter has situated Modiano in a current of contemporary autobiographical practice, while stressing the specificity of his postmodern, self-aware, diffuse fictionalization of self. For the multiple-text reader, his work produces an effect of distorted autobiography, and sometimes an autofiction effect, caused by a sense of the author’s repeated insertion of events relating to his own life into fiction – the obsessive rewriting of the same sketchy story. As shown in the initial section of this chapter, multiple-text readers and readers who are paratextually informed are likely to feel a strong sense of autobiographical ludism in all of Modiano’s texts. Nonetheless, the concept of the yardstick reader who knows nothing but the text, the title, and the author’s name is important in order to distinguish the autofictions from the rest, and to distinguish the most autofictional texts from the less autofictional ones. In discussing the admittedly relativistic concept of autofiction, I have disputed some of the preconditions set by the Doubrovsky, Colonna, Darrieussecq, and Laurent definitions, including the importance of a fictional label, and have proposed the existence of several strands of autofiction, along a spectrum leading from the mainly fictional to the mainly referential. I have also shown that, while some autofictions stress the limitations of the author by emphasizing the unreliability of memory and the role of the unconscious, others place more emphasis on the author’s powers of deliberate shaping, and the writerly prerogative to fictionalize experience. Modiano’s autobiographical games give a particularly strong sense of the author as a secretive figure, and one who can choose to confuse the reader as to autobiographical fact, often 96

Fictions in Autobiography, p. 129 for the quotation, and p. 148 for Sartre’s view of his own narratives as butterflies. See Morris 2000, p. 93, for a useful list of butterfly and moth images in Modiano’s texts.

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appearing to play on the reader’s expectations of autobiographical and fictional writing, especially in first-person narration. Although certain techniques generally produce certain effects, it should always be borne in mind that there is also much power invested in the reader, who cannot be forced to read the text in a certain way, either as autobiography, autofiction, or pure fiction. Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone stress the reader’s ultimate autonomy: ‘Le plaisir du lecteur est aussi de transgresser le code, ou plutôt le mode d’emploi, qui lui est suggéré’.97 This is one reason why the term ‘autofiction’ is so slippery, as it requires an objectively autobiographical basis, while also needing to be read ‘correctly’, that is, as a problematization of fact and fiction. Likewise, for the autobiography or autofiction effects to be produced, knowledge of the real author is strictly speaking, unnecessary. This means that readers may believe texts are autofictions even if they have no autobiographical basis and cannot in fact be classified as such. Nonetheless, textual clues are important. As we shall see, these are what encourage the reader to interpret some of Modiano’s autobiographical texts in autofictional ways. The next chapter focuses on autofictional processes in Livret de famille, De si braves garçons, Remise de peine, and La Petite Bijou. These texts are strong examples of the truncation and ambiguity that mark Modiano’s work, in their fragmented nature and in their demonstration that referentiality in autobiography is always mixed with fictionality. Modiano’s practice is, I argue, indebted to all of his predecessors in autofiction. However, he has his own specificities, some of which we have already touched on. His work shows, for example, that autofiction does not necessarily equal introspection. While the Doubrovsky and Sarraute texts portray a highly introspective narrator, and Sujet Angot is at times a type of introspection by proxy, Modiano’s narrators shun self-analysis. Of all the practitioners described in this chapter, he is perhaps the one who leaves most decoding of the authorial self up to the reader. And while most of the autofictions described above aim to provide a relatively complete overview of whatever part of the author’s life they are

97

L’Autobiographie, p. 64.

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concentrating on, Modiano favours a more fragmented view, as we shall see.

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3 The Autofictions Livret de famille (1977) is clearly the most autofictional of Modiano’s four autofictions, followed by De si braves garçons (1982), Remise de peine (1988), and the recent La Petite Bijou (2001). All four texts problematize the idea of authorial voice more than any of the others, exploiting the tendency of the yardstick reader to seek out autobiographical references, while playing on the reader’s expectations of first-person narration. All of them stress the textual/imagined nature of the characters called Patrick or Patoche (Remise de peine perhaps more subtly than the others), while also suggesting their referentiality. And all show that autobiographical writing depends on imagination as well as memory. Yet the approach to autofiction varies from text to text. Neither La Petite Bijou nor De si braves garçons contain as many autobiographical conventions as does Livret de famille, and both can at best be said to be semiautobiographical in form, yet both play on the autobiographical convention of the presence of the author’s name and on doubling patterns, as we shall see. La Petite Bijou makes the most use of overt intertextuality with other French autofictions. Remise de peine is the most autobiographical in form, but is arguably not as explicit as the others in its problematization of autobiographical truth and authorial identity. Fleurs de ruine is not discussed in this chapter, since, as stated, it is at best a borderline case. In that text the narrator is anonymous, so that although the names of the author’s father and brother are given as Albert and Rudy, they mean nothing to the yardstick reader. Furthermore, while Fleurs de ruine combines a generally factual tone and some factual basis with some apparently deliberate invention, it is much more externally oriented than autobiographically focused, despite containing a few autobiographically focused elements. This lack of an autobiographical focus is exacerbated by the absence of the author’s name. All of this makes the autobiographical element of Fleurs de ruine unclear to the yardstick reader.

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While Modiano’s four autofictions do not reflect in any explicit, directly autobiographical form on the problems inherent in writing the self, they all have their own emotional agendas. Remise de peine gives an insight into the personal pain stemming from Modiano’s feelings of grief at Rudy’s death, as well as feelings of abandonment by his parents, due to its sustained focus on part of the narrator’s childhood. However, the emotions expressed are muted. Familial problems are also hinted at in Livret de famille, but the author neglects to go into the precise nature of his familial experience and of his feelings concerning this. De si braves garçons and La Petite Bijou are perhaps the most emotional of all four, despite – or because of – the considerable fictionalization and displacement of feeling onto ‘secondary’ characters. While the pain in La Petite Bijou seems to stem less from personal circumstances than from History, even the historical events alluded to can be seen as ‘autobiographical’ for Modiano, due to the close connection between his sense of self and the events of the ‘années noires’. In all four texts, it also seems that the author is creating an alternative family in fiction, although the substitute mothers and fathers in the text are not necessarily comforting ones. The author’s hide-and-seek tactics seem particularly evident in these texts, especially in Livret de famille, De si braves garçons, and La Petite Bijou, which place the most stress on the fluidity of the author’s various textual identities. The theme of acting is particularly strong in these three texts, which is appropriate, given that actors’ selves always inform the identity they take on for the duration of the lines spoken. Acting sometimes symbolizes a deliberately distanced role. And at times the acting metaphor also seems to be a recognition that the self produced by language is hemmed in, and even in some way preprogrammed, by the language used. While Modiano’s early practice of autofiction does not overtly foreground the workings of the unconscious, La Petite Bijou does so to a considerable extent. Yet all of the texts demonstrate that self-narration leaves the presentation of the self open to unconscious, as well as conscious, forces: Doubrovsky’s ‘aventure du langage’. This is also a a ‘jeu de langage’ that can blur boundaries between the factual and the fictional, the heart-felt and the ironic. The third autofiction, Remise de peine, is the least slippery of the four, perhaps due a growing need on Modiano’s part for his reader to understand his childhood traumas. Assumption of such understanding by his multiple-text reader may explain Modiano’s reversion to a strong emphasis on fictionalization in La Petite Bijou.

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The 2001 text seems to allow the author to display painful emotion more strongly than the other three, no doubt due to the liberating distance of greater fictionality. These four texts, both separately and as a whole, also show that self-narration is always inadequate and partial, especially in Modiano’s case. Yet it seems that, even if narrated identity is incoherent and ephemeral, it still imposes some sort of unity onto the self, and as such is to be welcomed. As argued, part of the author’s persistent sense of fragmented identity stems from the loss of a ‘twin’ self with the death of Rudy, and the greater loss of ‘brothers’ in the Holocaust. Fractured selfhood is also underlain by lack of understanding of the historical past, which in itself may be one reason why Modiano keeps writing: in order to keep a grip on elements of that past that haunt him. While this sense is particularly to the fore in La Petite Bijou, we shall see that the historical and the autobiographical merge in all these texts, as in all Modiano’s work, due to the sense of being haunted by flimsy, imagined, ‘memories’ that are not his own.

3(i) Livret de famille (1977): Les Vies de Patrick Modiano Livret de famille is the first stand-alone autofiction to appear in the Modiano corpus. It qualifies as such on the strength of its use of several aspects of an autobiographical framework, its combination of autobiographical and fictional content, its capacity within the text itself to confuse the reader as to what is autobiographical fact and what is fiction, and the presentation of the author as a referential figure as well as a fictional character. This latter aspect is based on the presence of more than one Patrick, exaggeration and improbabilities, the presence of a fictional tone in several places, suggestive symbolism, and a thematization of the idea of invention. Game-playing with the author’s name and with referential ambiguity greatly heightens the autofictionality of the text, suggesting that extratextual ‘identity’ can merge with fictional ‘identity’, and allowing the narrator to oscillate between acting as if he were the author and then as a fictional character. In all editions so far, this text declares its ambiguity peritextually by professing to merge ‘l’autobiographie la plus précise’ with ‘souvenirs imaginaires’. However, Livret de famille seems strongly autofictional even without this explicit declaration.

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Much of Livret de famille makes most sense in the context of the point brought across in the final chapter that, although author and character may resemble each other, they cannot merge in a unified and unproblematic identity, even when there is identity of name between these two entities. Readers are also given a sense of the author’s capacity to invent versions of himself, and of his power to confuse them as to what is autobiographical fact and what is fiction. I focus mainly on appreciation of the autofiction effect by the yardstick reader, but also look at the multiple-text reader’s reaction. Let us first explore how the author creates a climate in which his textual representative hovers between suspected fictionality and apparent autobiographical sincerity, before focusing on the autobiographical issues raised and the reader’s impression of authorial secrecy.

The Fact/Fiction Problematic Assumptions of at least partial referentiality arise from the presence of autobiographical conventions in the text. Autobiographical expectations are initially raised from the promise inherent in the title and, to date, in the peritext (which also raises expectations of biographical and historical coverage). These are later bolstered by the presence of the author’s name, and to some extent by the presence of stock autobiographical topics such as birth, young adulthood, parents, siblings, and literary vocation. However, many elements distort the conventions of autobiography. Though the reader might expect to hear of mother, father, siblings, offspring, births and deaths in more or less chronological order, traditional linear chronology is replaced by an apparently random one, closed in on either end by the image of the baby Zénaïde. It is not until chapter II that the narrator is named as Modiano, and only in chapter VIII is the reader informed of the basic autobiographical fact of the date of birth of the narrator. That this nonconventional approach is a deliberate authorial decision seems clear from the remarks in the key Harry Dressel episode in chapter XII, where the narrator speaks of the biographer’s ‘duty’ to start his description from birth and to progress chronologically through childhood and youth (147). There is a blithe disregard for unity of chronology or space in general. The transitions and links between chapters are not explained and it is not uncommon for the narrator to move between many different times and spaces within one chapter, as in chapter XIV. These distortions do not in themselves make the text an autofiction, but do contribute to alerting the reader to the atypical nature of this

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autobiographical project. It must be remembered, moreover, that the idea of uncertain identity is introduced from the very start. The narrator is not named in the first chapter, and his father is named merely under a pseudonym, making it impossible to identify either the narrator or his father. It is, however, mainly the improbabilities with which the text is peppered, and the density of its echoes and symbolic links that encourage a general climate of readerly suspicion as to the referentiality of (some of) the events and characters described. As mentioned in Chapter Two, literarity does not necessarily exclude autobiographical sincerity. A margin of poetic and subjective vision is always acceptable. As Guyot-Bender puts it: ‘Writing one’s life-story is, above all, writing a story’.98 However, literary symbolism, when used in great quantities, may make the reader wonder whether the events described are based on precise fact, and the extreme literarity of Livret de famille does give the sense of an author playing with echoes between events and characters, as we shall see. Doubt as to the referentiality of all the events described is quickly introduced. Chapters I and II are tinged with improbability, due to the burlesque nature of the race to the Town Hall, and the events described therein, the bathos of the pseudo-‘policier’ tension in which Marignan and his ‘complice’ Modiano await an unlikely departure for China and the passing allusion to the ‘Grands Magasins Sincère’ [sic] which occurs as part of a list of names appearing in a telephone directory of Shanghai (32) and is not otherwise explained. Yet in Chapter III, the mystery surrounding the grandparents’ life and the presumed deportation of their relative, James Levy, is described in a more serious tone, with no improbability of event, which reasserts the sincerity of the autobiographical project in the text. This is typical of Modiano’s hovering between referential and invented tones in this text. Improbability is a large part of the fiction effect. The unlikely idea of a job consisting in collecting rented tape-recorders in chapter VI, and the narrator’s itinerary in chapter VI with its symbolic references to Proust and to memory, and the attribution of the name of Muzzli to a parodically Swiss character all seem too good to be true. To paraphrase a comment by the narrator in that chapter, they are ‘trop

98

‘Making Sense of Narrative Ambiguity,’ p. 22.

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appuyé(s) pour être vrai’ (97). 99 The allusion to Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities is also clear, and may be a nod to the very incomplete nature of the personality-picture of Modiano available to the reader from this text. The bizarre title Captain Van Mers du Sud also seems fictional, and leads to presumptions of fictionalization, though not of complete fictitiousness, as the statement on the back cover that Modiano has written the scenario for a film leads to speculation that at least some of the material has a basis in reality. Hints that much of the material may be the author’s own invention also stem from the insistence on coincidence in the text, at least for the yardstick reader. However, for the multiple-text reader, who is aware that Modiano also highlights real-life coincidences in some of his other texts, the stress on coincidence merely underlines the impossibility of knowing what is ‘real’ and what is deliberately invented in this text. The illogicality of ‘remembering’ other people’s experiences fosters suspicions of inventedness. In chapter IV the narrator is shown to invent experiences for his mother, which, given the reader’s preexistent doubts, problematizes the reliability of his description of his own experiences in the preceding and subsequent chapters. This invention of experience for other people is repeated in the Bourlagoff episode in chapter VI (very blatantly in this case), and in the Harry Dressel episode in chapter XII, where the narrator is shown mixing copious amounts of invented material with the facts he has been able to gather about Dressel, all of which adds to the reader’s suspicions that he may be inventing material elsewhere too. The notion that the narrator can remember events from before his birth is itself not credible, unless construed metaphorically. Chapter VII is also important for the idea of invention, as it deals with the production of a work of art, in this case a film, which, as Nettelbeck and Hueston point out, is a particularly significant choice of art form, as cinema is a mixture of the imaginary and the real.100 However, although there is a general climate of embellishment, and it seems clear that fact is being mixed with fiction, it is by no means clear which elements are true and which are deliberately invented or embellished. The final image of Chapter II, where the 99

The Proust references include those to ‘L’église de la Madeleine’ (72), the ‘Place Saint-Augustin’ (72), and the address at 45 rue de Courcelles (76). The latter was one of Proust’s residences, and is reused in Quartier perdu. 100 Pièces d’identité, p. 84.

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narrator and Marignan fade into a foggy oblivion as they wait for Godot in the guise of Georges Wo, may simply be a dramatic rendering of a real-life thwarted expectation. (Admittedly, when readers later learn that Marignan shares the name of the street where the narrator’s father was arrested in 1942, their sense of the improbability of the existence of a real-life Marignan is heightened). Many links – not necessarily ‘untrue’ – show that the author has created and organized the narrative, and has imposed his subjective vision on events, for example the motif of bombardment linking chapter I and chapter IV. Elsewhere in the text, formal symmetry clearly shows the hand of the author (the recurrences of the motif of the ‘banquette arrière’, the structuring device of the plane tree, of the pyramid, and many others), but again, it is never possible to say what is invented or what is merely embellished. Simply put, despite strong hints that much is being invented, without external information nothing can be guaranteed to be referentially exact or inexact.101 There is much oscillation between a sense of referentiality and inventedness within the chapters themselves. Chapter XII, the Dressel chapter, starts like a piece of prose fiction, its opening sentence reading ‘Foucré parlait à voix basse avec quelqu’un, devant la fenêtre’. The reader is never informed who Foucré is, and his function seems merely to anchor the text in the accepted style of fiction temporarily. The fact that in the same chapter the narrator mentions his name twice as ‘M. P. Modiano’ (149) leads the reader to wonder which part of the events, if any, is factual. At other times, hypothesis is initially presented as fact and then revealed as mere speculation, for example in the son’s reconstruction of his parents’ life together in the apartment on the Quai Conti. The scene is at first presented as fact but then diluted with ‘sans doute’ and ‘j’imagine’ (173). This technique subtly reminds readers of the power of the author to mislead them by presenting invention as fact. At yet other times the author seems to be playing on the fact that it is possible, and in fact likely, that readers will suspend their 101

Furthermore, the paratextually informed reader will be aware that even elements that are not problematized through extreme literarity or improbability may lack a basis in fact. For example, Modiano has stated that Chapter V was largely invented, yet it is not particularly strongly imbued with fictional markers. Equally, the narrator’s ‘pauvre soeur Corinne’ is, though a real person, not part of his biological family. Yet only the biographically and historically informed reader knows she represents Corinne Luchaire, the daughter of Jean Luchaire, the collaborationist businessman. See Nettelbeck and Hueston, Pièces d’identité, pp. 127 and 129, notes 38 and 62.

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disbelief even if they have been warned that the text they are about to read is a product of the narrator’s or author’s imagination. In chapter IV for example, the narrator alerts readers to the fact that he is fictionalizing events. Here the tone of the chapter changes from the documentary to the fictionalized at the point where the narrator states that he can see his mother walking in the streets of the past (almost as if in a film): ‘Je la vois qui traverse l’avenue tandis qu’un tramway passe en brinquebalant, et la brume finit par noyer sa lumière jaune’ (40). While this would be an acceptable type of ‘mental realism’ if the narrator were recounting his own memories, and although the narrator backs up his story at one point with the phrase ‘d’après ce que m’en a dit ma mère’ (41), part of the reader is aware that it is impossible for him to have known all the details recounted. However another part of the reader has a tendency to get carried away by the referential illusion. The conventionally literary punchline image of the felt hat at the end of this chapter jolts readers back to an awareness of the narrator as storyteller, and to a remembrance that he could not have been present at the time of the events, and thus reminds them of his powers of invention. The author is fictionalized by such techniques. He is also fictionalized by association with the characters he creates and with whom he claims to associate. There is considerable artificiality of character in Livret de famille, and it is mainly the device of resemblance between characters in the text that detracts from their convincingness. Rollner and Tellegen echo each other in their lack of energy and their penchant for alcohol, and, as mentioned, both have paternal imagery attached to them. There are four red-headed men in the text, three of whom are also fat: Oncle Michel, ‘le premier fusil de France’, in chapter V, who has ‘une carnation de rouquin’(69); the patron in chapter VI who is a ‘gros roux’ (74); the ‘roux et gros Aloulou Cherif’ in chapter XIII (159); and the estate agent in chapter XIV who is ‘un gros roux brillantiné’ (163). The unlikely occurrence of so many red-headed men and of shared attributes between characters encourages readers to doubt the precise referentiality of what they are reading. Links between props and symbols (which also create links between characters) contribute to an awareness of the author as an organizing – and possibly inventing – consciousness. Though Denise Dressel at times seems quite human due to an emphasis on her emotions, she is turned into a paper character through the device of the leopardskin bedcover, echoing the leopardskin rug in the Moulin Yang Tsé, as much as through the de-individualization

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caused by her resemblance to Claude Chevreuse (both are young women with slanted eyes). In the final chapter, echoes in the description of characters and play on the author’s name underlie the emphatic autofiction effect of the last passages. Though the author’s name is mentioned directly or indirectly in seven of the fifteen chapters, it is here that the identity of name between narrator and author is of greatest importance. Here, the reader is confronted with a ‘brun à tête de bélier’ (178). The improbability of the neat contrast between this brown-haired, ramfaced man and the ‘blond à tête de mouton’ who figured as a policeman in the Bourlagoff chapter (75) reminds the reader of the author’s powers of invention. More importantly, the taxi-driver’s friend detracts from the uniqueness that hitherto surrounded the author’s name, as he too is called Patrick. When the narrator learns this fact, his comments on his discovery are rich with meaning: ‘Ainsi, le brun à tête de bélier portait le même prénom que moi, ce prénom qui avait connu une grande vogue en 1945, peut-être à cause des soldats anglo-saxons, des jeeps et des premiers bars américains qui s’ouvraient. L’année 1945 était tout entière dans les deux syllabes de “Patrick”. Nous aussi, nous avions été des bébés’ (178). On one level these lines refer to the theme of lost innocence that is so present in the text, as well as to the fact that the narrator and all the babies born in the immediate post-war period have a difficult past to come to terms with in that of their parents. However, the presence of another Patrick echoing the narrator also calls more subtle resonances into play, stressing the fact that the narrator is a double for yet another Patrick – the author. Though the Patrick Modiano of the text resembles what the paratextually informed reader knows of the real Modiano, or even what a reader might expect without any paratextual knowledge, he is not the author’s extratextual self. Moreover, as Kawakami has pointed out, the fact that these lines mention the existence of many Patricks can be seen as a comment on the fact that the author Patrick has not merely created a double in his fictional namesake but has divided himself into many parts and created many alternative selves in the characters he describes.102 I see this as subtly underlined by the facts that Tellegen (suggesting ‘tell again’) is described as sharing the narrator’s unusual height (88), and that the ‘dame flamande’ who acts as a substitute mother for Denise appears to echo the Flemish mother 102

A Self-Conscious Art, p. 14.

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of the Modiano of the text. These echoes are evident even to the yardstick reader. Modiano has even more alternative selves than Dressel in Les Vies de Harry Dressel, a fact which suggests an alternative title for Livret de famille, and for the œuvre in general: Les Vies de Patrick Modiano. Patrick, then, can be a pseudonym. Pseudonyms and the notion of disguise are very important in this text. The father has several false names, including Guy Jaaspard and Guy Jaaspard de Jonghe. Darquier de Pellepoix doubles as Robert Gerbauld, and Oncle Alex calls himself François Aubert. Pseudonyms imply doubleness, and the doubling motif is strong in the text, perhaps best summed up by the two sets of twins. The many references to ghostliness also emphasize the theme of the double. Like the characters just named, Marignan and Harry Dressel also lead double lives. This emphasis on approximate doubles highlights the idea that difference is inherent in the notion of resemblance, while also implying that resemblance can create difficulties in telling people apart. The resemblances discussed so far have been subtle ones. The theme of resemblance is made even clearer through many explicit statements in the text. The narrator says his wife is very like the Arab singer and spy Asmahane (160), and, faced with a photo of Badrawi’s cousin Scouffi, the narrator comments that: ‘leur ressemblance était si frappante que je crus longtemps qu’il s’agissait d’une photo de Badrawi lui-même’(110). A considerable number of the characters are said to resemble film actors. Micheline Carole from chapter IX is described as resembling the film actress Martine Carol, and Henri Seroka from the same chapter is said to resemble Errol Flynn. In chapter XI, Oncle Alex is taken for the Russian actor Gregory Ratoff (a highly ironic reference on Modiano’s part, given his uncle Alex’s longing for French roots, as Ratoff became typecast as a heavily accented foreigner in Hollywood films from the 1930s). The narrator’s father is said to resemble Howard Hughes, who was an aviator but also a film-director, in another hint that Albert Modiano is ‘directing’ the son’s impulse to write (172). On another occasion he is said to resemble Clark Gable/Rhett Butler (13) from Gone with the Wind, and the mother resembles Vivien Leigh (43). References to Gone with the Wind in fact pervade the text, generating a sense of loss and change. The Egyptian villa in the Dressel chapter was, like Tara, burned down, and the wind blows Modiano’s mother’s hat off in chapter IV, and is also present in the chapter dealing with the film shoots (VII). The latter reference seems to be hinting at the ephemeral nature of art as

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well as of existence, and thus, perhaps, at the ephemeral nature of the author’s textual identity, which is only actualized for the duration of the reading process. Clearly, besides its symbolic function of representing a mixture of imaginary events and reality, and sometimes carrying connotations of theme or content, the importance of the references to the cinema also hinges on the notion of acting a part, as the narrator ‘Patrick Modiano’ is at times (en)acting the part written for him by the author Modiano, and by language. The narrator’s ‘prémonition’ in chapter IX echoes the many other premonitions of the narrators of other Modiano texts. He states: ‘J’étais sûr d’avoir déjà vécu cette journée’ (110), and on hearing the sentence ‘Il est au bar, Monsieur’ he adds: ‘Cette phrase, je l’attendais. J’aurais pu même la lui souffler’. Here the narrator is both the prompter and the prompted, echoing his twin roles as author and narrator. Even in his authorial role he is prompted, by language and his unconscious drives. The theme of coincidence seems to drive home the point that the Modiano of the text is subject to the author’s design. Chance and coincidence abound. They are present from the start through the fact that the narrator’s father and Koromindé had dined in 1942 at the very restaurant where the narrator bumps into Koromindé again (12). In chapter VII, the narrator says of Stocklin: ‘je me suis souvent demandé par quel hasard lui-même avait appris que j’existais’, echoing the reader’s own wonderings about this (79). In chapter IX, the narrator slyly precedes his account of Henri Seroka and Robert Gerbauld’s separate arrivals at his hotel with the statement: ‘Il se produisit alors de bien étranges coïncidences’ (107). Complicity with the reader’s awareness of the improbability of this is reinforced by the repetition a few pages later of the same sentiment: ‘Oui, il y a de bien étranges coïncidences’ (110). Improbability thus combines with the notion of destiny to show that the narrator’s experiences are subject to the author’s desire. Despite being sporadically shown to be a pawn of the author, the narrator also takes on imaginary flesh and blood by encouraging a sense of empathy in the reader and an impression of sincerity. The autofiction effect thrives on this swing between convincingness and artificiality in the narrating character. A confessional effect is particularly strong in places where the narrator seems to be addressing the reader in a dialogic style (64, 122). The emotions of the narrator, who after all is called Patrick Modiano, do come across strongly. The narrator’s feelings of incompleteness due to his claimed lack of an état

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civil are mentioned in chapter I, and these are very ‘human’ feelings. His feelings of rootlessnes and the need for antecedents are alluded to in II, III, VIII and XIII, his sense of lost innocence in VI and XV, his feeling of oppression by the burden of History in IX and XV, his fear of confronting the past in the person of Darquier de Pellepoix in IX, his nostalgia for a lost past in XV, and his perception of the weakness of his father in V. This humanism is a necessary part of the autofiction effect, just as essential as sporadic artificiality of character.

Autobiographical Allusiveness, History, and Secrecy Though readers might expect some explicit authorial reflection on the issue of writing the self, as the text is one of the few Modiano texts where the narrator shares the author’s name, such problems are merely implied by issues arising in the text. The most relevant of these relate to the narrator’s life-writing project concerning Harry Dressel in chapter XII. Part of the focus of that episode concerns the fact that invention is a part of life-writing. There, imagination is shown to be a vital element in reconstructing the past, due to the insufficiency of the collective archive and the deficiencies of individual memory, as the narrator is only able to find one acquaintance of Dressel, and the memories this acquaintance has of him are far from illuminating. They throw up contradictions with Denise Dressel’s view of things and provide merely paltry remnants of the past such as the name of Dressel’s hair-cream. While it is suggested that writing imposes a somehow false unity on the human subject, since identity is always multiple, the narrator nonetheless claims that imagination can lead him to a kind of creative truth: ‘je comptais laisser aller mon imagination. Elle m’aiderait à retrouver le vrai Dressel’ (155). Though imagination is arguably necessary in this case, where satisfactory records are lacking, the reader is also led to wonder why the narrator, who at times appears to speak in the author’s voice, feels the need to imagine memories for himself. Let us now focus on some of the possible reasons for this. The Dressel chapter demonstrates the narrator’s need for love – he, like many other Modiano narrators, declares of his lady love that ‘j’aurais fait n’importe quoi pour elle’ (145) – and the references to Scheherazade of the 1001 Nights may gesture to the narrator’s need to keep Denise Dressel with him. However, one of the most important basic points to emerge from this chapter is the need to recount life, through the figure of Denise who longs above all else to have a coherent record of her father and a picture of him as an important

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man. While the Dressel chapter admittedly has a biographical focus rather than an autobiographical one, the narrator clearly also has a need to textualize experience, and to put his own stamp on it, as well as a need for imagination. Part of what he is doing is creating a substitute family in fiction, while approaching the issue with much allusiveness. Yet he also goes beyond the bounds of the family to demonstrate the importance of collective issues for his own psyche. Despite the presence of much autobiographical convention, much of Livret de famille is externally focused. The promise of the title and the references in the blurbs of all editions so far to the links between ‘tout être humain’ and ‘la société dans laquelle il vient au monde’ forewarn the reader of the importance likely to be accorded to external/collective issues. Indeed, in its considerable external focus, the text often seems closer to memoirs than to autobiography (and in other respects to a volume of short stories), but as the narrator was not alive for many of the events described, it might be more appropriate to describe them as ‘prémémoires’ – or, by analogy with Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, ‘postmémoires’.103 Several chapters focus on issues of collective significance, such as war or collective suffering. In other cases, there seems to be a type of displacement occurring, as when the theme of lost happiness and lost youth is attributed to the narrator (Chapter VI), but also, and more strongly, to other characters, as with Le Gros in chapter X or the narrator’s father and Koromindé in chapter I. Some oblique remarks spark the watchful reader’s curiosity as to the personal reasons for the psychological disposition of this narrator. The first and most explicable of these remarks occurs relatively early on, in chapter II, where the narrator mentions his lack of roots and territory, but also of a family life – a ‘foyer’ (34). (The multiple-text reader is of course aware that the longing for a stable family is a recurrent theme in Modiano’s texts).104 In chapter I, the absence of the narrator’s parents at his child’s naming is in fact striking, their function being filled, by chance, by a family friend. Strangely, given the title of the text, the following chapter focuses on Marignan, who does not seem to be connected with the family in any way. It becomes progressively clear that the narrator is creating a 103

For a distinction between memoirs and autobiography, see Lecarme and LecarmeTabone, L’Autobiographie, p. 49. For a reminder of Hirsch’s concept of postmemory see the rubric ‘Shadows of the Mind’, in Chapter Two. 104 See ‘Family Ties’, Chapter Two.

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surrogate family for himself by the characters he describes or indeed creates. In creating an ‘extended’ or metaphorical family, he is drawing the orphans of the world into his fold, but is also blurring boundaries between sons and fathers, as is clear when he conscripts Bourlagoff – who is also a father figure – as his son. Georges Rollner states in chapter VII that: ‘Nous sommes tous parents entre nous – le cinéma est une grande famille’ (90). The second remark concerns the ‘impression de vide’ felt by the narrator ‘depuis que j’avais compris que les gens et les choses vous quittent ou disparaissent un jour’ (158). Encouraged by their sense of the narrator’s need to create a substitute family, readers may assume that the feelings of loss are connected with the narrator’s family. Their picture of that family is coloured by the passages showing a father with one adolescent son, and a mother figure present merely when the narrator was five. The narrator’s brother Rudy is mentioned as a child, but not as an adolescent. What glimpses there are of the narrator’s childhood are confined to a reference to the baptism of the narrator and his brother, the mention of the rue du Docteur-Kurzenne as a street where they lived, and to the image of the brothers watching the light of the bâteau-mouche sweep through their bedroom on the Quai Conti. In itself, the fact that childhood is relatively absent in the various glimpses given of the narrator’s life means that readers attuned to expect a relatively detailed focus on childhood in autobiographical writing may be left with a feeling that much is being left unsaid in that respect. It is the father figure who dominates the familial references. As early as chapter II, the narrator muses that Marignan may have been ‘l’une des multiples incarnations de mon père’ (23), and there are father figures in almost every chapter. Chapter V is suffused with the presence of the father, and chapter XII is taken up with the idea of the quest for traces of Denise Dressel’s father. In the Biarritz episode the father is a businessman working in Brazzaville, and chapter IX concerns his arrest and near-death in the Occupation. From the start the father is present by his absence, and this absence/presence duality runs through the whole text. The numerous references in the text concerning Albert Modiano are often extremely subtle. The narrator’s quest for a magnifying glass to read the tiny print of Captain Van Mers du Sud (81) may be a recognition of how hard it is to understand the full significance of Modiano’s texts, as there is so much hidden in them. There are many links and echoes whose symbolism is not always immediately obvious. For example, it is not until chapter XIV that the striking

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recurrence of the colour sky blue that permeates the text seems to be linked to the image of the father, who has wooden panelling of that colour in his room in the Quai Conti apartment (165).105 Likewise, the many references to aviation may find their ultimate significance in the fact that the father resembled Howard Hughes. The structuring motif of the pyramids may be explicable by the father’s link to the Orient (echoing Albert Modiano’s own link).106 The colour ‘bleu marine’ is, like sky blue, associated with the father (the marriage contract is, strangely, on navy blue paper), and it is thus significant that Rollner and Bourlagoff, both father figures at some point, are portrayed as wearing, respectively, an ‘éternel anorak bleu marine’ and a ‘pardessus bleu marine’ (86, 73). The repetition of this colour is particularly symbolic for the multiple-text reader, who is aware that navy is often the colour of the middle-aged men’s suits and coats in the other texts. Most of the male characters in the text echo the symbolism attached to the father character in some way. Just as the father is said to have many ‘incarnations’ he is also said to have had ‘[de] nombreux pardessus’ (163). Here, ‘pardessus’ seems to signify ‘version’ (though the father figures are also ‘creations’, calling up the idea of author as designer). In the first chapter, Koromindé is the same age as the narrator’s father, and like him has foreign ancestry. He looks at the narrator with ‘un regard très doux, presque paternel’ (20). Marignan himself is linked to the father through his double life and the fact that the China of the 1930s resembles several sides of occupied Paris with its ‘pullulement de vrais et de faux généraux’ and its atmosphere of seedy excess (24). The plight of the Jewish Openfelds in chapter IV echoes that of the father.107 Le Gros in chapter X says to the narrator ‘J’ai envie de vous adopter’ (125). The official at the ‘mairie’, Rollner, and Tellegen are also described as 105

Previous incidences of the colour include the Nursery Caroline Herrick, which is ‘blanc et bleu ciel’ (9), the mother’s employment contract on ‘papier bleu ciel’ (41), Bourlagoff’s sky blue pastry wrapper and nursery (74, 77) and Denise’s ‘coiffeuse bleu ciel’ (158). 106 The biographically informed reader will know that the Modiano family have roots in Salonica (also known as Thessalonika) in Greece, also possessing links with Alexandria in Egypt. The Orient is a very diffuse notion in this text, encompassing China, Indochina, Indonesia, Egypt, Tunisia, and Russia. See Nettelbeck and Hueston, Pièces d’identité, p. 85. 107 The paratextually informed reader will know that Bourlagoff of chapter VI was born only one year later than Albert Modiano, and like him had links with the Orient.

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‘paternel’ or in language drawn from fatherhood (20, 86, 90). ‘Oncle Alex’ is also a father figure, and like the father is ‘un homme de nulle part’ (130). Harry Dressel has links with the Orient and with the Occupation, and like the narrator’s father seems to have led a double life. This pervasive, if diffuse, paternal presence, conveyed in bits and pieces that the reader must assemble, means that the reader ultimately receives a picture of Albert Modiano as an important figure (just as Denise wanted Harry Dressel to appear important), yet not in the sense of famous, noble, or brave, as Denise might have wished, but rather in the sense of psychologically significant for the narrator. Like so many of Modiano’s texts, this one is an attempt by the narrator to identify with a mysterious parent, and to link himself with that parent through writing. Formal links emphasize the father-son continuum. Symbolically, the text is enclosed by chapters describing the narrator as a father. Both father and son regret their lost youth (22, 72), and both are in some way rootless. The Mémoires de Bülow given to the narrator by Denise Dressel were also read by the father as a young man, and the copy of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle she gives him resonates with the father’s bust of Buffon in the apartment on the Quai Conti (146, 173, 165). The father is associated with the ‘quartier des Ternes’ in chapter I, and the son’s visit to a cinema in that area in chapter VII evokes the father’s textual ghost. The ‘toile de Jouy’ associated with the father in the Quai Conti apartment echoes the son’s remembrances of his time as a child in Jouy-en-Josas (166, 91). The repeated references to the ‘banquette arrière’ show the son on the back seat of a car, and link the father to the bloodstained back seat of Geza Pellemont’s car (173, 175, 176), while also showing father and son sharing a back seat in Reynolde’s Ford (67). Most importantly perhaps, the son deliberately merges with the father by appropriating ‘memories’ of the Occupation. This is clearest in chapters IX and XIV. In fact the sometimes indirect references to the wartime experiences of the narrator’s Jewish father can be seen to account in large part for the burden of memory felt by the narrator. The allusive description of the game hunt in chapter V being ‘comme à Varsovie’ (71) is presumably a reference to the pogroms there (Modiano ironically rhymes Sologne with the implied Pologne). Reynolde and the father are described as often meeting in the hall du Claridge (50), which, as the historically informed reader will know, was frequented by the Gestapo and as such was a particularly risky

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place for a Jew involved in shady transactions to meet his clients.108 Many of these references are even more subtle. Maurice Sachs, who resembles the narrator’s father in his Jewishness, his double life, and his black-market activities appears very allusively in the guise of his book La Chasse à Courre (62), in the reference to Marignan dying ‘pour l’état civil’ in Berlin in 1945 (25), and in the references to the narrator’s family apartment at 15 quai Conti, in which very apartment Sachs also once lived, all of which references need to be decoded by paratextual information.109 While the theme of memory is of prime importance in Livret de famille, the burden and duty of collective memory are accorded more emphasis than the questions of individual remembrance usually stressed in autobiography. The burden of memory that forms the subject of the final lines, and also of the first ones, through retrospective symbolic linking via the image of the baby, centres ostensibly on remembrance of the collective past. And the feelings the narrator wishes to escape in chapter IX concern memories he himself could not have had. There he states: ‘J’aurais donné tout au monde pour devenir amnésique’, but it is not painful personal memory but History – avec sa grande Hache (Perec) – that is presented as oppressing him. Some might say that collective issues are in fact foregrounded in the text, as references to the Jews, and usually also to their persecution, are present in all chapters between I and IX, and again between XIV and XV. It is in any case true that these matters are less ambiguously ‘real’ than issues of personal significance, since although readers can never be sure whether the events recounted by the narrator actually occurred in the author’s life, external guarantees assure them of the veracity of the historical events recounted. The stress on the general rather than the personal is exemplified by the symbolic importance of the kennels owner in chapter XII, whose ‘tourment’ was ‘de penser à tous ces milliers et ces milliers de chiens morts dans l’anonymat total et sans qu’ils eussent laissé la moindre trace’ (154). (As always in Modiano’s work, the motif of the dog, especially in large groups, calls up La Place de l’étoile with its ‘six 108

Of greater ambiguity is the fact that the narrator’s parents are said to have spent New Year 1942 at the Beaulieu (169), though it is not stated that this meeting place was the social headquarters for the Gestapo, requiring an in-depth historical knowledge on the reader’s part. See Guyot-Bender, ‘Making Sense of Narrative Ambiguity’, p. 27. 109 See Morris 1996 for biographical details on Sachs (p. 61, note 114; p. 93, note 48).

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millions de chiens’ representing the murdered Jews: 158).110 In fact, it is arguable that only the most attentive of readers will notice the passing, enigmatic references to personal pain in Livret de famille. While the narrator’s comment in chapter IX that ‘la mémoire elle-même est rongée par un acide’ clearly refers to France’s collective amnesia over the decades following World War Two, it seems that his memories of family life have been attacked by a bilious acid too. Although this son is clearly obsessed with his father, the nature of their relationship is merely hinted at, in the references to cinema going and sorbet outings (166), and in the image of the father in chapter V as a passive and uncourageous figure putting his son through pain for personal gain (though the son still felt a certain closeness to him). The latter chapter subtly suggests the complicated nature of their relationship, so that it is difficult to establish the level of irony inherent in the son’s appreciation of his father’s ‘grande gentillesse’ (68). And as mentioned, the reasons for the realization that ‘les gens et les choses vous quittent ou disparaissent un jour’ are not given. Thus, for the yardstick reader, the mystery of the narrator’s family experience remains largely unsolved, like the mystery of Megève in chapter I. This reader will see the text as primarily focusing on the fact that the narrator’s historical ‘memories’ are autobiographical for him, and that their very flimsiness leads to a slippery identity, a slipperiness encouraged by the author’s consciousness of the author/character distinction and the strong element of ludism in his approach to self-writing in this text. However, the multiple-text reader will be aware that the narrator’s feelings of loss not only concern the murdered Jews of the Holocaust but also Modiano’s feelings of abandonment by his parents and of bereavement in relation to Rudy. Let us now look briefly at the response of the multiple-text reader on a general level.

Livret de famille and the Multiple-Text Reader Multiple-text readers are better equipped to decode Modiano’s allusive references to more personal pain. They have a picture of the author as having been abandoned to his own devices, bandied about in childhood and adolescence from guardians to boarding schools, while 110

Guy Neumann has recently made this point, in his study of the figure of the dog in the œuvre: ‘“Aux carrefours de la vie”: Le chien dans les romans de Patrick Modiano’.

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his parents pursued their acting and business careers. The biographically informed reader is aware that this is true. The multipletext reader can also explain at least part of Modiano’s ‘sentiment de vide’ by his brother’s disappearance – of which the reader of Remise de peine (1988) is aware, despite the fact that the actual death and illness of Modiano’s brother is not mentioned in any of the texts. For the biographically aware reader, Rudy’s death is symbolized by the many deaths in Livret de famille. In this respect it should be remembered that family deaths are an important part of the official ‘livret de famille’ given to all French couples on marriage, as it carries spaces for the deaths of the partners, and for the deaths of children as well as their births. Deaths in Livret de famille encompass those of strangers and acquaintances (Bourlagoff and Le Gros, Georges Mandel and Geza Pellemont), but only one (distant) relative, James Levy. It is of course impossible to forget the death the father escaped in avoiding deportation, and all the unnamed dead of the camps and the Occupation in general, but Rudy’s own death is shrouded in silence. As concerns the fact-fiction problematic in a broader sense, multiple-text readers not only have increased presumptions of (diffuse) autobiographicality, but also have stronger suspicions of inventedness. While some of the coincidences in the text will have slightly more plausibility for readers aware from other texts of Modiano’s interest in real-life coincidences, this is countered by the presence of stock types, and the echoes and foreshadowings of other Modiano texts, which point to invention and imaginative reworking. The references to ghostliness refer, for the multiple-text reader, not only to people who have lost consistency through being forgotten, but also to the spectral recurrence of characters from previous texts. Harry Dressel is a ‘revenant’, having first appeared in Villa triste, lending a particular irony to the narrator’s question in chapter XII: ‘Avais-je rencontré cet homme au cours d’une vie antérieure?’ (LF, 142).111 Echoes of previous texts centre on Les Boulevards de ceinture, which is appropriate, given that text’s emphasis on the father figure.112 In 111

In Modiano’s earlier text Villa triste, Dressel appears as a Dutch film actor (43, 46) – in other words after his disappearance in 1951 (45). 112 A selection of these include the impassiveness of the father in both texts; the narrator’s doubts concerning the nobility of the duke in Chapter V of Livret de famille, and his similar doubts about ‘le comte’ de Marcheret in Les Boulevards de ceinture; the fact that the father in Les Boulevards de ceinture is called ‘le gros’; the advice given to the narrator in Livret de famille to become an ‘exploitant forestier’

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typically Modianesque fashion many of the references are followed up in the immediately subsequent text, in this case Rue des Boutiques obscures. The multiple-text reader meets the real-life character Scouffi again there with the actual books that he wrote (RBO, 101), and also encounters Denise again, in the form of Denise Coudreuse, who has the same blond hair, almond eyes and spicy perfume (RBO, 134). The ground for this reunion is prepared in Livret de famille, when the narator claims that ‘elle sentait un parfum qu’il m’arrive de reconnaître au passage de quelqu’un d’autre’ (LF, 155). Again, in characteristically Modianesque fashion, dissonances are also rife. Though the Denise of Livret de famille played in a sand pit, as does a little girl in the subsequent Rue des Boutiques obscures, and eats ‘une glace pistache-fraise’ (LF, 148), the little girl given ‘une glace vert et rose’ in Rue des Boutiques obscures belongs to another Denise, here a Denise Coudreuse (RBO, 152). Thus, Denise Dressel seems to reappear in Rue des Boutiques obscures as both Denise Coudreuse and as the ‘fillette’, possibly her daughter. As if aware of the multiple-text reader’s puzzlement, the narrator ends that chapter of Rue des Boutiques obscures with the words ‘Qui était-elle?’.113 For multiple-text readers, these ‘ghosts’ add to the sense of endless repetition with difference in the Modiano universe, bolstering the sense that the author is creating various versions of himself in the different characters in the text. These ‘revenants’ are thus supplementary autofictional markers for the benefit of the multipletext reader. Yet, the improbabilities in the text and the sense of an author playing with echoes between events and characters, which are apparent even to the single-text reader, along with the problematization of the notion of identity and the thematization of the notion of invention, are sufficiently strong indications of the ‘yardstick’ autofictional status of Livret de famille.

(132), as the narrator dreams of doing in Les Boulevards de ceinture; the fact that Dressel’s dog is called Mektoub, echoing the Villa Mektoub in the 1972 text; and the smell of ‘chypre’ attached to the father in Livret de famille and to Murraille in the earlier text. 113 It is of course no accident that Le Gros and the narrator eat sandwiches in a bar in the ‘rue des boutiques obscures’ (LF, 173). Mansoure in Rue des Boutiques obscures has character traits both of Georges Jansenne, who does not want to meet the narrator in a public place, (LF, 149) and of Badrawi, who lived in fear of being assassinated (LF, 101; RBO, 137, 143). Similarly, Chevert – le ‘plouc de l’île Maurice’ (LF, 54, 56) – prefigures Claude Howard in Rue des Boutiques obscures.

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Postmodern Practice, Postmemory, and Personal Pain The general playfulness of Livret de famille is balanced by a firstperson narrator who conveys a sense of strong emotion surrounding issues of loss, change, and the lack of a satisfactory archive to document people’s passage through life. However, the narrative focuses almost exclusively on the external world, and insists that the narrator is not the author, though he may at times resemble him strongly. Even readers aware that all life-writing incorporates imaginative depictions and that textual representatives of the author can only ever reflect part of the author’s self (and, even then, inadequately, due to the gap between language and experience) may wonder why there is so much use of imagination in this text. While the effects of postmemory explain the need for imaginative investment on a historical level, in order to appropriate, at least temporarily, memories of the past, the glaring absence of reflection on the forces that formed the author’s sense of self may prompt readers to reflect on what exactly the author is avoiding on a personal level. Though the narrator claims in the Harry Dressel episode that there is a subjective truth contained in imaginative writing, the apparent need for imagination implies certain hesitations on the author’s part. While the biographically informed reader can decode allusive references to a certain extent, the yardstick reader is left with a strong sense of autobiographical secrecy. The author comes across as a powerful figure, capable of confusing the reader as to what is fact and fiction, able to reinvent himself infinitely in fiction in multiple and fluid textual identities, and in possession of ultimate power over his characters. A general sense of his sadness and obsession with disappearance also filters through. However, readers may also feel that the history of the author’s own personality is being avoided. The circularity of the text, its reference to Sheherezade (145), and Georges Rollner’s ennui at endless cinematic repetition all call up Modiano’s own never-ending story and point to the author’s awareness of his own imprisonment in his obsessions and his inability or unwillingness to get to the bottom of things.

3(ii) De si braves garçons (1982): ‘Un léger parfum de naufrage’ De si braves garçons is the next text after Livret de famille to contain a narrator called Patrick. The writer J.M.G. Le Clézio has mentioned it

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as one of his favourite books, and Serge Doubrovsky was enthralled by the subtlety of the narratorial games, placing it in the category of ‘le fantastique’ as it inhabits the realm of uncertainty.114 However, others dismiss the text as a failed and confusing experiment, and it has not been the focus of many in-depth studies. I argue that the text is deliberately confusing, both for autofictional purposes, and in order to convey the author’s confusion regarding his own identity. In most of the chapters the identity of the narrator is debatable, underscoring Modiano’s own feelings of instability of identity. As stated in the previous chapters, these stem from the author’s feeling of having lost a ‘twin’ self with the death of his brother Rudy, the inadequacy of his paternal role model (and of the parent generation in general), and his lack of a solid picture of the historical past. While the style of De si braves garçons is not autobiographical, and although there is minimal emphasis on the feelings, or indeed the experiences, of what can be ultimately seen as a main narrator, it qualifies as an autofiction due to play on the author’s name and a general problematization of narratorial identity that stems in part from the Modianesque device of merging of character. One of the effects of the text is to subvert the reader’s desire to see the first-person narrator as the sole reflection of the author, firstly by creating more than one narrator and secondly by allowing more than one character to share Modiano’s autobiographical details. Another of its main effects is to allow the reader to presume certain things about the authorial consciousness on an autobiographical level, while giving the impression that the author is deliberately setting a distance between himself and the reader. In chapter X of De si braves garçons, the narrator states that he writes ‘des romans policiers’ (147). Given the enigmas concerning the identity of the narrators and autobiographical referentiality, it is highly symbolic that this remark is made in a chapter where the name Patrick is attached to a narrator for the first time. While the detective-novel atmosphere stems ostensibly from several unsolved mysteries, including the activities and shooting of Charell, the question of Newman’s past, and the black-market activities of Michel Karvé’s parents and Christian Portier’s father, it becomes progressively clear that this text, like Livret de famille, is also a ‘roman policier’ on an autobiographical level, where the readerly detective must attempt to 114

See Doubrovsky’s remarks in the 1982 television interview with Modiano entitled ‘La qualité française’, which concerns this text.

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establish the number and names of the narrators, as well as autobiographical references. The image of a match with which the text closes (apparently a hockey match if one is to judge from page 100) is appropriate to Modiano’s readers’ sense that they are playing against, rather than with, the author in this text. Typically, the identity of many of the characters is problematic. Sonia O’Dauyé, the ‘ancien’, Newman, and ‘Baby da Silva’ are not who they appear to be, and nor is Patrick. An elaborate mechanism is put in place to show that, although what appears to be a main narrator can be tentatively given the name Patrick, this identity is by no means certain. What seems to be Patrick is in fact a collection of floating fragments of selfhood. These fragments, which on one level can be seen as flotsam from the many emotional ‘naufrages’ that inform the narrative, stress the dispersed and ultimately elusive nature of Modiano’s identity. However, a sense of the authorial consciousness does filter through, so that it seems by the end, or at least on rereading, that the reader has a stronger sense of the author’s identity than he does. This text is also pervaded by references to death, if relatively indirectly. It is enclosed by the figure of Oberkampf, who appears in both the first and final chapters, and who initially seems an innocuous figure, being primarily famous for cloth-making, However, his tomb seems to have cast a spell over both Patrick and Newman, who are drawn to the sepulchral enclosure but often feel trapped there, as if they cannot escape its force (169). The opening chapter not only contains a reference to Oberkampf but also to the ‘monument aux morts’ in its opening sequence, which concerns the schoolboys’ annual procession during the 11th of November ceremonies commemorating the two world wars. The ‘collège’ is particularly strongly linked to the most recent war, having been used by key members in the Luftwaffe (14). There is of course direct discussion of the deportations through the figure of ‘Johnny’, whose identity is one of two that the ‘main’ narrator infiltrates through inside views. However, the principal source of reference to the Holocaust is an intertextual one, to Perec’s autofictional W ou le souvenir d’enfance. That the ‘collège’ was a school ‘où le sport primait tout’ (100) seems to be a deliberate echo of Perec’s text, like the numerous references to floating and drowning, which echo the shipwreck where Perec’s original Gaspard Winckler disappeared. The chemistry teacher, Lafaure, with his ‘démarche de fantôme’ and his nickname of ‘Le Mort’, thus symbolizes a heavy burden of deaths. For the

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biographically attuned reader, the desire for fraternal companionship and the very plurality of the title gestures to Rudy’s death, as does the general doubling through which Modiano gives his lost brother a new existence of a textual kind, through the companionship of the ‘main’ narrator with each of the ‘braves garçons’ in turn. It is also worth pointing out that Albert Modiano had died a few years previously, and that his death may also pervade the text through the many absent parental figures. The references to Perec’s troubled and guilt-ridden autobiographical fragment about the trauma of losing loved ones, and specifically the trauma of the Holocaust, are part of the enigma of the text, and are set out for readerly decoding with Modiano’s characteristic allusiveness. Valvert has two ‘V’s, as in W. Both Daniel Desoto and ‘Johnny’ are Jewish. McFowles dies in a bobsleigh accident and breaks his arm, both of which are references to Perec’s text. McFowles’s self-harming behaviour may also be an oblique reference to the survivor guilt feelings of both Perec and Modiano. The train that appears in the first chapter and at the end calls up more sinister trains departing for the east, as does the train that figures in Perec’s key last ‘memory’ of his mother at the Gare de Lyon. Even the dreamlike nature of Modiano’s narrative seems to be a reference to Gaspard Winckler’s account in W. As such it is apposite that the Valvert school flag should be ‘bleu nuit’, with its golden triangle evoking the triangles on the clothing of the victims of the ‘W’ sports villages, as well as the identificatory triangles the real-life concentration camp victims were forced to wear. While this omnipresence of death and of loss explains some of the fractured selfhood in the text, the notion of parental neglect is perhaps even more important. Family issues stand out on a personal level, and also, in a metaphorical sense, through their reference to a problematic parent generation. Anger at parental neglect is the strongest directly expressed emotion by these ‘enfants du hasard et de nulle part’, who are ‘tous perturbés par leur situation familiale’ (11, 26). This anger is especially clear in the case of the neglectful Karvé parents, and with Bob McFowles’s rage at ‘la putain de mer’ (with its homonym ‘mère’), and also Newman’s desire to kill a father figure who ignores him, which figures in a prominent position at the end of the book. It is significant that the references to guilt and criminality common in Modiano texts mainly concern parental figures here. And while anger at mother figures seems, at least superficially, to be more intense, Newman’s lack of compunction about his plot to kill a father

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figure is striking (though until now he has always backed out at the last moment, due to fear of being caught). Both parents are at fault, and it is significant that father and mother merge in the address of the neglectful parent Sonia O’Dauyé: ‘cours Albert 1er, roi des Belges’ (75), a point which will be of importance later in La Petite Bijou, where the mother figure bears many aspects of Modiano’s father. The parents’ absence is in some way remedied (if meagerly) by the provision of a fictionalized presence for them. In the case of the mother this takes the form of oedipal attraction: Claude Portier has a strangely flirtatious relationship with her son, and Newman says of his mother-in-law: ‘La mère est aussi bien que la fille’ (180). Female figures of romantic allure are of the actress/starlet type (like Modiano’s own mother), and Yotlande has a Belgian fiancée. There is also some merging of details of the ‘garçons’ with Modiano’s mother’s nationality: Daniel Desoto obtains Belgian nationality, and Charell has a Belgian parent and indeed sees himself as Belgian (89, 154). Albert Modiano is conjured up by several figures, including ‘Baby da Silva’, through the South American persona of ‘le Brésilien’ and the porthole-like windows of da Silva’s apartment building. Christian Portier’s real father is called ‘le Grec’, in a nod to the Modiano family’s Greek connections, and had dealings with Eddy Pagnon, as Albert Modiano is thought to have done. Two of Christian Portier’s surrogate fathers call up Albert Modiano representatives from other texts: M. Weiler due to his ‘chypre’ perfume,115 and Ludo due to his ‘pardessus bleu marine’, his links to the father figure of Livret de famille via Howard Hughes in the aviation reference (142), and through his status of ‘Grand Invalide de Guerre’. The latter point suggests a tempering of authorial anger at parental neglect with an enduring compassion for Albert’s lostness and lack of direction during the war years.116 While the multiple-text reader will have little difficulty decoding Modiano’s need for fictionalization of his parents, even the yardstick reader will be alive to the pervasive absence of any ‘real’ parental figures. Father figures seem in especially short supply. Of Portier the narrator says, ‘je me demandais si Christian avait un père’, since Portier’s father disappeared such a long time previously that it seems as though he never existed (127, 128, 131). The frail old M. 115

This perfume links Weiler to the father in Livret de famille, as well as to Murraille in Les Boulevards de ceinture. 116 For an overt discussion of this by Modiano, see Dora Bruder, p. 101.

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Condriatseff who comes (infrequently) to visit Newman is an overt example of the lack of solidity of Modiano’s substitute fathers. Just as the recurrent theme of falseness generates a strong sense of fronts and hiddenness, both in relation to identity and in general, Condriatseff’s symbolic lack of solidity suggests that his ‘son’’s name of ‘Newman’ betokens Modiano’s forced reinvention of himself in fictions through lack of any solid paternal figure. While there is much posturing and falseness of identity in this text, the diamonds and expensive jewels are always real. There is a surfeit of money relative to parental love, so that it is particularly apposite that the triangle on the school flag should be a golden one. In this text, Modiano is not only ‘dreaming’ of the War in terms of the Holocaust, but also in terms of the widespread trafficking that occurred. Perhaps more important is the fact that this trafficking took place while the Jews were being coldly rounded up, in many cases with the aid – whether active or passive – of French citizens. Such a country can scarcely offer much in terms of the ‘réconfort d’une patrie’ mentioned in ironical fashion by the narrator of the opening sequence. Such a country is likely to make those of its ‘children’ that seek to remember the shameful elements of its past feel like outsiders or misfits: ‘des soldats d’une légion étrangère’ (12).

A Strong Fiction Effect The back covers of the present Folio edition and of the Gallimard edition of De si braves garçons encourage an autofiction effect by talking of ‘le narrateur, qui est peut-être Modiano lui-même’. This is obviously of great importance, but, as explained in the previous chapter, in order to gauge the autofictionality of the text, it seems necessary to ignore this for the moment, and to start by speculating on the reactions of the yardstick reader, who is merely aware of the body of the text, its title, and the author’s name. For this type of reader, the autobiography effect, and consequently the autofiction effect, is minimal until quite late in the narrative, when, in the tenth chapter, the name of one of the narrators is revealed to be ‘Patrick’. In fact the fiction effect is very strong, both up to and after this point, as the text draws attention to itself as constructed, and in many areas probably invented. On an objective level, the events and characters in the texts are probably mainly invented. Modiano has admitted in interview (‘La qualité française’) that although he knew people similar to those described, his characters were composites and were all filtered through fiction. Fact is also mixed with fiction for the external

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characters and events. Grout de l’Ain seems to have been based on Francis Bout-de-l’An, and the real-life collège de Moncel seems to be the model for Valvert, as there is a château de Vilvert nearby.117 Readers’ expectations of a realistic and clear narrative context are thwarted from an early stage. The unexplained transition of voices confuses them, and points to the author as the organizer of the text. Who exactly, and where, is this Edmond who takes up the narration in the middle of chapter II? Is it he who continues in the final section of that chapter and when, if ever, does the initial narrator return? In the ‘ancien du collège’ episode in chapter V, the time-levels of narration are confused, and it is again unclear whether it is the ‘ancien’ himself who is speaking, or whether a primary narrator is reporting his words. Further, whereas in traditionally realist narratives first-person narration usually pits one consciousness against external ones, the minds of Philippe Yotlande and Johnny seem to be permeated by the character narrating them (a point that is of great importance in the autofiction and autobiography effects of the narrative as a whole, as we shall see). The dreamlikeness of the hangar episode in chapter XII, where the narrator and Newman seem to be imagining things, is typical of the atmosphere. The comparison of Pedro’s house to that of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs adds to the fictional tonality (13), as does Newman’s name itself, given his reinvention of himself. The fact that the narrator ‘a assisté par hasard’ at the honeymoon of his friend Bob McFowles in Chapter IV is highly improbable (45). It is thus not surprising that Patrick, who turns out to be, in all probability, the main narrator, should be described as a ‘rêveur’ by both Mme Portier and Charell (147, 159). A sense of an organizing and inventing authorial instance (here an impression of the author as primarily a creator of fiction) also stems from the symmetry and formal symbolism of the text (including the linking imagery of dead leaves and ‘guitares hawaïennes’), from phrasal resonances, and from the repetition of event and character.118 The text is extremely symmetrical: Edmond appears in the second and second-last chapters; Valvert is the subject of the opening and final scenes; and the train mentioned in the final lines of chapter I reappears in the final chapter. There is much echoing between characters. Mme 117

Morris 1996, p. 118, note 37, and p. 117, note 32. See also Nettelbeck and Hueston, Pièces d’identité, p. 131, note 91. 118 Phrasal resonances include the references to precious stones linking the narrators of chapters VII and VIII, and the phrase: ‘a giovedì amici miei’ linking the narrator of the final chapter with that of chapter III.

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Portier and Arlette d’Alwyn are associated with the same Modianesque spicy fragrance, Mme Portier and Suzanne are both associated with horses, Newman and ‘l’ancien’ both worked in ‘import-export’, Mme Portier’s old husband is as undesired as old Grout de l’Ain, and the statue of Oberkampf prefigures those of Albert the First and Simon Bolivar, specifically described as symmetrical (75). Much of this neatness could not logically be in the control of the main narrator. Given the chaos of the real world, the improbability that all these echoes are referentially faithful gestures to the author as imaginer, and asserts his role as creator of the narrative. It is only in chapter X, where the narrator of that chapter is called Patrick, that the author becomes strongly present on an emotional level, as the object of autobiographical investigation. Thus, the author seems to be initially asserting himself as a creator of fiction, and only later as an autobiographer. A sense of emotional issues nonetheless filters through, though in a diffuse and indirect manner. Let us now look at how this occurs.

‘Empty’ Narrators Filled By the Characters They Narrate By the time readers realize that one of the narrators is called Patrick and that he is probably the main speaker, they will have registered a certain emptiness in the narrative voices. Emotions are rarely mentioned by the narrators, and can only be deduced.119 The ‘main narrator’ is obviously of a nostalgic disposition, as he is driven to narrate the stories of the ‘braves garçons’ and lay flowers on Oberkampf’s tomb (chapter XII). However, he does not elaborate on the reasons for his actions, and in fact does not know why he and Marc Newman visited Oberkampf’s tomb so frequently (169). Edmond does not seem to have any views on Newman’s planned ‘liquidation’ of Grout-de-l’Ain, saying ‘je hochais bêtement la tête’ (183). For one of the narrators (probably Patrick), running away from school as a boy was motivated by the vague feeling of being ‘à la recherche de quelque chose’ and when asked if he ran away because he was unhappy he claims not to know (27). Symbolically perhaps, Edmond admits merely to ‘la sensation d’un vide’ when he learns that Valvert has been destroyed and sold to property developers (24). By the time they have reached the tenth chapter, however, readers will also have registered the similarity of the narrators with the narrated characters. The narrators take on a certain consistency by 119

Kawakami (pp. 7-24) accords a chapter to the empty narrator in Modiano’s work.

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association with the characters they recount and with whom they empathize and link themselves. In chapter VI, the narrator, who in retrospect seems to be Patrick, identifies with Philippe Yotlande, hinting at common feelings shared with him, as if to say: ‘Philippe Yotlande, c’est moi’. He states: Je n’avais pas besoin de lui parler. Je devinais ses états d’âme’ (77). The reader has a similar sense of narratorial identification with other characters when the anonymous narrator – who, again, is probably Patrick – tells the story of ‘Johnny’. In the above two episodes, the narrating voice is particularly empty, being above all a vehicle for Yotlande and Johnny, but it is also full of the narrated characters, and this is ultimately the case throughout the text. There is much to link the narrators with the characters they describe. ‘Nous’ is frequently used to encourage a sense of similarity, as when a narrator talks of ‘nous qui étions des enfants du hasard et de nulle part’, or of the fact that ‘nous avions tous, selon l’expression de notre professeur de chimie, M. Lafaure, un “grain”’ (11, 53).120 Edmond states that ‘le collège nous avait laissés bien désarmés devant la vie’ (184). In most of the chapters the narrators start with a description of importance to all of the ‘braves garçons,’ such as a description of school rituals or teachers, before moving on to describe their meeting with one of their ex-school friends fifteen or twenty years later, or their imaginings about that character. Similarity is also stressed by individual resemblances. Patrick is shoddily dressed, but so is Michel Karvé; he is helped out by Mme Portier just as he himself helps Karvé out; he was born in July 1945 but so was Michel; he is attracted to Mme Portier just as Yotlande and Johnny are attracted to older women; he is ‘in love’ with Yvon’s sister Martine like all the rest of the boys at school (his only distinction, as he himself muses, is that he has known her the longest); he, like Winegrain, Bourdon, Charell, and Desoto is a ‘projectionniste’ for the school cinema; he, like Newman, lays flowers on Oberkampf’s tomb. He is of a melancholy disposition, having internalized the story of the deported Johnny, but McFowles, Karvé and Charell are described as equally melancholy. His main distinguishing characteristic is that he ran away from school, but even that is not a very distinctive mark, given that so many of the characters seem to have done their best to be expelled from Valvert. All the boys have been abandoned by their 120

This is the short form of ‘avoir un grain de folie’. The Dictionnaire des Expressions et des Locutions (Le Robert) glosses this as ‘être un peu fou’.

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parents, and both Karvé and Patrick visit their friends rather than their families at the weekend. Even verbal tics appear to be shared by characters. Though it is Charell who uses the phrase ‘Je t’expliquerai’ the most frequently, Desoto also uses the phrase, as does Newman. Clearly, there is little to distinguish these ‘braves garçons’. The emotions attributed to the ‘braves garçons’ – and which reflect back on the narrators by this process of identification – are mainly painful ones. ‘L’ancien’, who reflects at some length on his life and feelings, comes across as a lonely and obsessive person, though a sensitive and caring one. Yotlande seems imprisoned in the past, and Johnny’s life, like those of most of the other characters, is marked by loneliness. The notion of problematic childhood is strongly present. Desoto’s weakness, explained by Dr Réoyon as an unhealthy infantilism and unwillingness to grow up, is an attitude shared by the more self-aware Yotlande. Another false ‘child’, Richard Mouliade, alias ‘Baby da Silva’, is a vaguely sinister presence in the text. However, Portier is described by the narrator as ‘un enfant trop vite mûri’ (126). Such references hint at Modiano’s own frustration at not being able to leave his traumatic childhood and adolescence behind. It is also, of course, on an historical level, a reference to traumatic parenting by the parent generation. Most of these character are confused or lost in some way. Charell’s lostness is clear from his clinging to Patrick as a bulwark against the criminal world into which he has sunk, and Newman professes feelings of insecurity. Bob’s pain and rage clearly has to do with ‘cette putain de mer’ (52), which in the light of the negligent mothers in the text must surely be a homonym for ‘mère’. ‘Andrée la Pute’ (alias Mme Karvé), Sonia O’Dauyé, and Mme Portier are all negligent mothers, and Patrick often ends up sharing these inadequate maternal figures with his classmates, presumably due to the absence of his own mother. Karvé’s anger at his parents is evident in his sullen denunciation of them by writing ‘trafic d’influences’ as their occupation in a school questionnaire (33). Though the Patrick of the text does not stress his relationship with his mother, his similarity to the other characters means that the repeated rage against mother figures in the text has been presumed to be autobiographical. While Modiano has denied this, the weight of this anger at maternal neglect cannot be discounted.121 121

See Modiano’s written disclaimer in Laurent, p. 7.

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A strong fiction effect thus combines with the presence of much emotion (mainly anger) and a composite sense of the narrator to allow the author to indulge in indirect divulgation of personal feelings. Just as Philippe Yotlande and Johnny are permeated by a narratorial consciousness, all of the characters are permeated by an authorial one. However, the yardstick reader does not become fully aware of the autobiographicality of the text until chapter X, with the appearance of the name ‘Patrick’. Let us now look at the complications brought by the appearance of this name.

Who’s Speaking, Please? The most intriguing questions about the narration of De si braves garçons concern the number and identity of its narrators. As mentioned, the peritextually informed reader will have read on the back cover of the text of ‘le narrateur qui est peut-être Modiano luimême’. If this mention of ‘le narrateur’ in the singular is an editorial slip-up it is an understandable one, given the generic nature of the narrators in the text. Admittedly, it is clear from early on that there are at least two narrators, as Edmond Claude appears as the narrator of chapter II. However from chapter III on, the reader (even the yardstick reader, who does not know of the peritextual statement concerning ‘le narrateur’) can easily become carried away by the similarity of the narrating voices in all chapters into feeling that the rest of the text is being narrated by the same person, a unitary, though anonymous, identity. While the sudden appearance of the name Patrick in the tenth chapter might initially seem to confirm those suspicions, the insistent occurrences of the name in the following chapter (the name Patrick is mentioned six times there) and the reappearance of Edmond Claude as narrator in chapter XIII actually throw narratorial identity into question again and exhort the reader to re-read the text to find out who is speaking in the various sections. In this light, Edmond Claude’s statement that ‘J’ai un tout petit rôle’ is misleading (175), as his role in disrupting the reader’s assumption of a unified narratorial identity is one of considerable importance. This is a text that emphatically demands to be re-read. Symbolically, the suspension points of the final line of the book (‘Nous étions de si braves garçons…’) lead back into the title, and the text ends on the image of a whistle being blown allowing a match to begin. However, it is crucial to note that even the reader who does reread the text, painstakingly establishing thematic links and phrasal resonances, can never be sure who is narrating the sections, though

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the narrator of all but chapters XIII and the middle of chapter II does appear to be the Patrick mentioned in chapters X and XI. The narrative structure of this text thus has several autobiographical and autofictional functions. Firstly, it conveys authorial feelings of unstable identity. Secondly, while setting a distance between reader and author and stressing that the Patrick of the text is an authorial invention, it also suggests that the underlying consciousness may in fact be a reasonable representation of that of Modiano. The vagueness, fluidity, and indeed porosity of identity in the text reflect back on the identity of the real Patrick. While the initial response of the reader seems to be correct (that of reading the text as mainly stemming from one narrator), by calling for a re-reading that destabilizes this sense, the text strongly asserts that the identities of both diegetic and extratextual Patricks are fragmented and uncertain. It is also clear that, although all of the characters in the text exhibit aspects of the author, he is not contained in his entirety in any one of them, and cannot be, even were he to speak in autobiographical sincerity through one of them. The strong fiction effect and the narrative structure combine with the autobiography effect of firstperson narration, the presence of the name Patrick, and a sense of dispersion of autobiographicality into all of the characters, to assert both a distance between the author and his textual representatives and his resemblance to them. This text is an example of the autofictional urge to declare that, as Genette put it, with disdain, ‘c’est moi et ce n’est pas moi’, though one that seems shot through with authorial distress at instability of identity, due to the problematic nature of his ‘situation familiale’, on both personal and collective levels.122

The Response of the Multiple-Text Reader This discussion has until now focused on the yardstick reader, who has less tendency than the multiple-text reader to see the text as autobiographical until chapter X. Let us now look at the reactions of multiple-text readers, who are encouraged early on to see all of the characters as fictionalizations of Modiano, while also being led to reflect on the dispersion and fragmentation of his identity. Indeed the dispersed and fragmented nature of the author’s experiences as presented in this text has increased weight for multiple-text readers, who have encountered so many different versions of (parts of) the author’s psyche in his other texts. It is tempting to see the reference to 122

Fiction et Diction, p. 87.

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the ‘toile de Jouy’ invented by Oberkampf (who figures so symbolically in both opening and closing chapters) as a nod to the multiple-text reader, suggesting that Modiano’s childhood with Rudy, the latter’s subsequent death, and the surviving sibling’s feelings of parental abandonment, all later associated with Jouy-en-Josas in Remise de peine, are part of the ‘fabric’ of the author’s identity. In chapter I, the narrator goes to school in Jouy-en-Josas, is abandoned by his parents, and speaks of running away from school. All of this echoes Modiano’s own autobiographical details, and tallies with the events later described in Remise de peine and Fleurs de ruine. In chapter III, the narrator speaks of looking for traces of people in newspapers and old photos, as do so many other Modiano narrators, and also claims in that chapter to have been born in July 1945, like Modiano himself. Michel Karvé too was born in July 1945, and the ‘ancien du collège – who is much older than both the ‘Patrick’ of the text and the real-life Patrick – was born, like Modiano, near the Bois de Boulogne (42, 70). Bob McFowles shares the author’s great height, which also features in other Modiano texts, though usually in connection with the narrators themselves.123 The theme of mummified youth appears, to the multiple-text reader, to be a reference to the preservation of trauma from that time in Modiano’s texts, as well as being a self-mocking comment by the author on his attachment to presenting the experiences of men in their early twenties, an age when the author seems to have found a brief sense of ‘insouciance’. Here it is Newman who has inherited the Modiano narrator’s ‘timidité maladive’ (or at least the appearance of such timidity), and wants to ‘recommencer à zéro’ (177). Yotlande has frequented ‘une belle Danoise’, like the figures who appear in Fleurs de ruine and Voyage de noces, sometimes described as speaking French very well, even favouring slang, but with a slight accent.124 Christian Portier arguably possesses the largest number of the characteristics typically attached to Modiano narrators. His father was involved in the black-market, and he had a negligent mother, both of whom were helped to escape by Pagnon. Christian also has several surrogate fathers, gesturing to Modiano’s many fictional substitutes for his own father. Yet, in this text, black-market activities are 123

Paratextually informed readers will note that in the last section of chapter II, the narrator tells us he has ‘deux petites filles’, as does Modiano by this time. 124 The figure of the ‘Danoise’ must be Anna Karina, the New Wave cinema actress, who knew Modiano’s mother. Modiano has written a postface to Karina’s Jusqu’au bout du hasard (Paris: Grasset, 1998).

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ultimately less important than feelings of parental neglect, and these affect all of the ‘braves garçons’. As such, it is difficult to single out any character as being the main Modiano representative. De si braves garçons is Modiano’s most recycled text, as three of the chapters had appeared previously as short stories.125 Echoes of the longer texts include the reappearance of Jeanschmidt, head of the ‘collège de Luiza et d’Albany’ from Rue des Boutiques obscures (203), who crops up there as Pedro Jeanschmidt, and of Winegrain and Bourdon from Memory Lane.126 Newman contains an element of Marcheret in Les Boulevards de ceinture (BC, 72), in that he has been in the Foreign Legion and on his return was so distraught that he could not cross the road by himself (178). ‘Andrée la pute’ recurs in Modiano’s next text Quartier perdu and in Remise de peine (the next autofiction), and Ludo may be reincarnated in Ludo Fouquet in Quartier perdu, though his temperament in that text seems to have changed. Other clins d’œil that add to the fictional tone include the nightly rounds by Pedro (16), evoking the title of Modiano’s second text, the fact that Newman’s prospective step-daughter is called Corinne, like ‘ma pauvre soeur Corinne’ from Livret de famille, and has ice-cream bought for her, like so many other little girls in Modiano’s texts, and that the brasserie where Charell wants to meet Patrick (153) is called ‘L’Espérance,’ echoing ‘L’Esperia’ in Livret de famille. 127 De si braves garçons is also of course the first text to mention ‘la Petite Bijou’. In the text of that name, published almost twenty years later, there is still much confusion and anger regarding the parent generation, as we shall see in Chapter Seven. While the fact that so many images recur from text to text stimulates speculation as to autobiographicality, their presence also reminds readers of the importance of imaginative reworking in 125

Chapter V was originally ‘La Seine’, chapter IX was ‘Johnny’, and chapter VII was ‘Docteur Weiszt’. 126 Morris 1996 (p. 109) gives details of Jeanschmidt’s bit-parts. Morris also notes that the description of arriving in Valbreuse of Rue des Boutiques obscures (82-83) closely resembles that of arriving in Valvert in De si braves garçons (185). 127 Recurring props and imagery include a tin suitcase (138), references to aviation (170), bathrobes (120, 138, 179), boat imagery for buildings (134), dogs (Choura and Charell’s dog), and the presence of a Lancia (115) such as that used by Pagnon to liberate a father figure in Fleurs de ruine (113). Choura, one of the masters’ dogs, reappears as the hero of children’s books some years later, and Mme Portier of chapter X seems to reappear as herself in Dimanches d’août (47). In the latter text, the Villa Sainte-Anne in Nice resembles her apartment in De si braves garçons in the same town, with its birds in cages and musty smell.

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Modiano’s texts. In terms of authorial repetition of autobiographical matters, this is most potently symbolized by the many re-screenings of the Carrefour des Archers in De si braves garçons, where the ‘ancien’ revisits the past over and over in search of ‘la Petite Bijou’. The ‘ancien’ is, however, only ever able to find her in the ephemeral projection provided by the cinematic narrative in which she appears, itself a reflection of Modiano’s own flimsy, ephemeral projections in fiction. On the level of personal familial pain, the feelings of melancholy and parental abandonment that are repeated within the text – part of the ‘léger parfum de naufrage’ (120) – feed into the wide network of such feelings in the work as a whole, and to some extent explain the reader’s sense of what the narrator of Livret de famille was hinting at on a personal level. One link with that text that will not go unnoticed by the multiple-text reader is Karvé’s attachment to the advertisement bearing the legend ‘Retour aux jours heureux’ (42), echoing the inscription ‘Jours heureux’ on the life-belt in chapter IX of Livret de famille. It is in fact unclear whether Karvé ever knew any happiness, or whether something happened to make him lose it, and the reader may feel that explanation is being deliberately withheld on this point. It is not until Remise de peine, six years later, where the pervasive references to an ‘imbécile heureux’ stress a childhood loss of innocence through death and abandonment, that the theme of lost happiness is explained, albeit only partially. In his presentation of the enigmatic Newman, who ‘s’entourait de mystère’ (177), the author seems to be commenting on his own autobiographical reticence. No doubt significantly, Newman, who ‘s’entourait de mystère’ at school, is portrayed as hiding behind the front of his ‘timidité maladive’, in order not to have to answer his interlocutors (177), perhaps in an authorial admission that his own notorious public timidity is, at least partly, a front. However, despite this suggestion of a front, the fog of mystery enveloping Newman arises ‘à son corps défendant’, in a suggestion that Modiano might want to delve more deeply into past pain, but somehow cannot (178). Nonetheless, through the mask of Newman’s plan to murder a father figure, Modiano can express some of his fury at paternal neglect, just as he seems to deflect bitterness at maternal negligence of a personal nature onto the fictional ‘mauvaises mères’ in the text.

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Fragments of Selfhood As an autofiction, De si braves garçons plays on the reader’s expectations of first-person narration to an even greater extent than Livret de famille. It plays not only on the distance between the writing Patrick and the written one, including the expectation that a narrator called Patrick will necessarily be the privileged representative of the author, but also on the assumption that the narrator will remain the same from start to finish. As in many Modiano texts, there are numerous references to acting in this text. Johnny and Mme Portier resemble the cinema actors Johnny Weissmuller and Yvette Lebon respectively, and the cinema at Valvert has also served as a theatre.128 All of this underlines the notion of acting a part, and the Patrick of this text seems to deliberately project himself onto other figures even more than the Patrick of Livret de famille, in order to express strong emotion. In encouraging the belief that there is a main narrator, while leaving the identity of that main narrator deliberately vague even when the text is re-read, De si braves garçons also underlines the uncertainty of the author’s identity to an even greater extent than in Livret de famille. It combines this with a strong atmosphere of fictionality, setting a distance between the writing Patrick and the written one. However, by an emphasis on common experiences between what appears to be Patrick and the other characters, the text also conveys a sense of autobiographical issues that even the yardstick reader is tempted to extend to the author. The fact that the text demands to be re-read is important. Most overtly, this constitutes an emphatic authorial assertion of his own problematic sense of identity. It is also an indirect appeal for readers to appreciate the emotions in the text, and even to analyse the author’s psyche, perhaps for want of an authorial desire for direct self-examination. Identity in this work is both textual and human, fictional and declaredly autobiographical, and therefore autofictional. While De si braves garçons is, like Livret de famille, sometimes rather playful in its demonstration that the narrated self is always an imaginative construct, the 1982 text also confirms that Modiano’s particular brand of autofiction is bound up with painful questions of history, forgetting, 128

Nettelbeck and Hueston have spoken of ‘une mise en scène théâtrale’ in relation to this novel (Pièces d’identité, p. 113), and it is true that the main narrator could be seen as a theatrical narrator calling up Edmond and ‘l’ancien’ – both of whom are actual actors – who are waiting in the wings.

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memory and repression of memory. These stem from Modiano’s own familial experience but also from wider historical questions, the mysterious, absent parents of this text reflecting on a metaphorical level Modiano’s sense of being cut off from a past that was not adequately transmitted by the parent generation, as well as the problematic notion of black-market activities with possible Gestapo links (via Pagnon), all of which seems, again, tied up with the burden of the Jewish tragedy.

3(iii) Remise de peine (1988): ‘QUELQUE CHOSE DE TRÈS GRAVE’ Five years separate the publication of Livret de famille and the hesitant and convoluted autobiographical divulgations of De si braves garçons. The next time the author attaches his own name to a narrator is not until six years after that, in Remise de peine, where the author does, to a certain extent, explain himself. There, some aspects of his childhood are finally described in some detail, though without direct exploration of his feelings about Rudy’s death. While it is true that nowhere in any of the texts is the theme of lost innocence specifically explained, Remise de peine comes closest to providing such explanation. It provides a more direct and sustained overview of the personal and family childhood experience hinted at in the two preceding autofictions. However, the text also contains several strong indications of fictionalization, both for yardstick and multiple-text readers, again drawing attention to the author’s tendency to indulge in imaginative reconstruction on an autobiographical level. The following discussion explores fictional, autobiographical, and autofictional markers within the text itself, while speculating on the autobiographical ‘message’ to be deduced through Modiano’s characteristic allusiveness, as well as on the reasons for the importance of fiction in his autobiographical project. In interview with Jean-François Josselin, Modiano spoke of this text as ‘plutôt quelque chose de romanesque avec des éléments autobiographiques’.129 By this he presumably meant that the text uses elements of fictional style and convention, as well as some deliberate distortion of his experience as a child in the care of guardians in Jouyen-Josas. It is typical of Modiano to problematize the extent to which the basis for the events recounted is veridical. However, many of the 129

‘Mondo Modiano’, p. 88.

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events depicted are broadly sound. His text also seems more autobiographical than his previous autofictions, no doubt due to the sustained focus on a period of childhood.130 Significantly, Josselin speaks of it as ‘votre premier texte qui se veut ouvertement autobiographique’.131 It should be remembered, of course, that modern critics such as Josselin are liable to assume that a certain level of invention is acceptable in autobiography, and that Josselin’s description of ‘ouvertement autobiographique’ may thus mean ‘ouvertement autofictionnel’. Most critics today would indeed expect a level of invention in modern autobiographical practice – and a textual pointing to such invention –, as discussed in Chapters One and Two. The text uses many of the conventions of autobiography, or at least those of the ‘récit d’enfance’, in terms of subject matter and organization.132 While it only covers a section of the author’s childhood, and is thus perhaps best termed an autobiographical fragment, or a fragment of a ‘récit d’enfance’, it is far less piecemeal and less ‘disrupted’ in terms of focus than Livret de famille or De si braves garçons. While Livret de famille plays havoc with time and place and De si braves garçons does the same with viewpoint and character, Remise de peine remains faithful to the same narrator, at (predominantly) the same time, place, and situation. The text is also relatively chronological, covering a few years from when the narrator was ten years of age. In terms of autobiographical reflection on the influence of childhood on the authorial self, the narrative can even be said to show the development of a personality, albeit in neither a stepby-step nor introspective manner. Reasons are also suggested for the author’s development as a writer – in the sense of his attachment to imaginary reconstruction – through the references to his childhood predilection for invention and some of the forces that shaped that predilection. In typically Modianesque fashion, the text is markedly silent about one of its most important impetuses, the death of Rudy, which is mentioned (merely as a ‘loss’) towards the end of the text, almost hidden in the midst of a paragraph ostensibly focused on ‘Jean D.’ 130

See the documentary on Modiano in the ‘Un siècle d’écrivains’ series, or Assouline’s 1990 Lire dossier, pp. 36-37. 131 ‘Mondo Modiano’, p. 87. 132 For a concise discussion of the ‘récit d’enfance’ genre, see Lecarme and LecarmeTabone, L’Autobiographie, pp. 28-30, and Damien Zanone’s work of the same title, pp. 44-46.

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(102).133 Rudy is referred to obliquely as ‘mon frère’ throughout. The narrator’s feelings of being both involved in and cut off from mysterious activities in the past are in stronger focus, as are general feelings of abandonment. Yet, as in De si braves garçons, death is omnipresent, if allusively so. References to the tomb of ‘le Docteur Guillotin’ situated in the garden of the boys’ house figure in the opening and closing sequences, and the ‘monument aux morts’ holds a prominent place at the end of the very first ‘chapter’.134 Death also underlies the notion of accidents, and informs the ‘quelque chose de très grave’ that runs through the narrator’s memory, flashing up in connection with the ‘grave accident’ suffered by ‘la petite Hélène’ (135-138, 145). As we shall see, these ‘accidents’ or ‘cassures’ can be seen as representing the more serious fracturing caused by Rudy’s death and the Holocaust.135 The latter event is evoked extremely discreetly in this text (at least for the yardstick reader), and its appearance is, as always in Modiano’s texts, linked with the loss of Rudy, just as the father is inextricably linked with the milieu of the mid-century ‘marché noir’. As we shall see, brother, father and the lost Jews are all connected through the motif of the ‘garage perdu’, a complex metaphor for selfhood in this text. It should also be noted that thoughts of death surface in the narrator’s attitude to his parents, but in this case they seem to have mainly to do with very strong anger on Modiano’s part. His surprising claim to the police that: ‘Ils sont morts’ hints at the violence of emotion that must have led to such a statement (164). The title of this text indicates the complexity of its autobiographical project. Juliette Dickstein is one of those who have commented on its polysemic nature.136 As Dickstein points out, ‘une remise de peine’ can mean, in legal terms, the lessening of a prison sentence, but also the postponement of something painful. With the first understanding of the expression, it is possible to deduce that 133

See the section on ‘Family Ties’ in Chapter Two for Modiano’s views on the founding importance of Rudy’s death in his psychological make-up. 134 See also the reference to Guillotin’s tomb on p. 65. Guillotin was of course the inventor of the notorious Guillotine. 135 Freud mooted the idea of screen memories in 1899, concluding that all childhood memories are screen memories and show us our early years not as they were but as they appeared in later years when the memories were ‘recovered’. See his essay, ‘Childhood and Screen Memories’. 136 ‘Inventing French-Jewish Memory. The Legacy of the Occupation in the Works of Patrick Modiano’, p. 162, note 11.

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writing will allow both the narrator and Modiano to ‘se remettre de plusieurs peines’. The notion of postponement, by contrast, ties in with the idea of a project constantly ‘remis au lendemain’, like the ‘visites sans cesse remises’ to the Salter castle at night (95, 131). It does in fact seem that Modiano, through his studied allusiveness, is postponing more direct discussion of the pain of Rudy’s death. Dickstein suggests that the title may also relate to the setting back into motion of sorrow. With this last understanding, and taking into account the relative silence in which Rudy’s death (among other things) is shrouded, the autobiographical project becomes more of a sad, enforced, cyclical return to the past, from which no closure can be achieved. This is due to the haunting nature of memory in the case of Rudy’s death, but also a haunting lack of ‘memory’, in the sense of lack of access to Albert Modiano’s past, from which Modiano is cut off, just as he is cut off from the experience of the murdered Jews of the Holocaust. Another meaning of the word ‘remise’ is also of great importance: that of garage or provisional storage area. While objects are generally placed in a ‘remise’ only provisionally, they often end up remaining there for ever. There is a sense in which Modiano and his narrators are stranded in ‘the garage of the soul’, the authorial self resembling the abandoned cars stuck in the dark corners of Buck Danny’s garage, eternally awaiting repairs that will not come (108). Equally important, as I see it, is the sense of handing something over to the reader, as in ‘la remise des clefs’. This handing over of keys is at the same time the transference of ‘une peine’, which the reader may come to share with Modiano. Readers are also called upon to take up the burden of history. Before taking on the role of detectives as concerns the autobiographical and historical ‘secrets’ in Remise de peine, let us focus on the manner in which the text creates a climate of ambiguity – or of autofictionality – tagging itself as both autobiographical in scope and fictionalized.

Autobiographical Uncertainty From the start, the text hovers between genres for the yardstick reader. While a ‘je’ features as the narrating voice on the first page, along with references to ‘mon frère’ and ‘ma mère’, the first mention of the narrator’s name (as ‘Patoche’) does not occur until the middle of the fifth short ‘chapter’ (29). There is no explicit statement of autobiographical intent, and no immediate indication of date. Furthermore, the place of the action is not named, merely described as

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‘un village des environs de Paris’ (11). Admittedly, the extremely detailed description of the narrator’s house and village does create a largely factual tone in the first ‘chapter’ of the text (11-14). However, it is not until pages 38-39 that the nearby ‘hameau des Mets’ and the Bièvre river are mentioned, permitting tentative situation of this village and speculation that it may be Jouy. For the yardstick reader, then, the lack of precision on an externally referential level discourages an entirely autobiographical reading of the text, or at least can be said not to encourage actively such a reading initially, while leaving this possibility open. For the multiple-text reader the issue is more complex. While the description of the village tallies with those that can be associated with Jouy in the previous De si braves garçons, and Rue des Boutiques obscures, and the narrator of Livret de famille speaks of Jouy as a place where he lived with his brother, the streetname of ‘la rue du Docteur-Dordaine’ matches that only of De si braves garçons (101) stressing the autofictional continuum between it and Remise de peine. In Livret de famille, and in the later ‘Éphéméride’, the street is called ‘la rue du Docteur-Kurzenne’ (LF, 91, ‘Éph’, 6).137 It is in the fourth ‘chapter’ that the notion of invention becomes most prominent, as it becomes clear that this is a type of autobiographical fairytale. Blanche-Neige, who minds the two boys and whose ‘real’ name is never given, is in their eyes ‘un personnage de conte’ (24). The fact that this reference occurs just before the narrator introduces himself as ‘Patoche’ is no doubt a strategic positioning, suggesting that Patoche – a textual, childhood Patrick distanced by both fiction and time – is in a way a fairytale character. The ‘Auberge Robin des Bois’ (first mentioned on page 13) now takes on more mythical resonances. The ‘tournées théâtrales’ mentioned in the first line of the text begin to apply, in retrospect, to the characters, who seem alternately mythico-theatrical and human (like the ‘pantins’ referred to later in the text: 102). As the reader progresses, the fairytale or legend-like quality of the text becomes ever more pronounced. Mathilde, ‘toujours habillée de sombre’ (17) with her strict chignon and her harsh words plays the role of the mandatory witch, completing the Snow White reference carried over from De si braves garçons (BG, 13). The fantastical Eliot Salter, ‘marquis de Caussade’ and ‘roi de l’armagnac’, occupies a central role from early on (41-55). The narrator’s father, who bolsters the aura of myth 137

See also Morris 1996, p. 149.

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around Salter, becomes a fantasy figure by association with him, while also taking on some of the characteristics of a rag doll as he waves his hand limply behind the car window (47). Roger Vincent’s Chesire cat smile adds an Alice-in-Wonderland glow, and the ‘histoires de Roger Vincent’ are themselves equated with ‘légendes anciennes’ (64, 66). The narrator and his brother turn one of Annie’s friends into ‘Buck Danny’, a comic-book hero (107). Progressively then, the ‘village des environs de Paris’ takes on a mythical aura worthy of a fairytale village. Tense plays its part in the blurring between reality and fiction. As Jean-Michel Adam has pointed out, the use of the imperfect to denote ‘fact’ slides at several points into an imperfect of speculation. This occurs in the depiction of the narrator’s hypothesis concerning his female guardians’ initial meeting (18), and his childhood flights of fancy about the nearby ‘château’ and the mysterious Eliot Salter (4555). Interestingly, this use of the imperfect to describe hypothetical events also occurs in the speculative description of the father’s initial encounter with Eddy Pagnon. Such subtlety is typical of Modiano in presenting hypothesis as having actually occurred (120).138 The lack of a precise timeframe has been mentioned above. Instead, the narrator makes the reader work out the time of events from a textual clue given relatively early on. If Frede was twenty in 1939 and about thirty five at the time the narrator knew her, the year of the Jouy events must be about 1954 (19-20). The relative vagueness concerning dates is reinforced by the narrator’s statement that: ‘Nous sommes restés bien plus d’un an rue du Docteur-Dordaine. Les saisons se succèdaient dans mon souvenir.’ (91).139 The narrator makes little mention of the present time of writing (which remains uncertain in terms of date), most references being concentrated on the Jouy period, and most of the allusions to a later time period being to his attempts to write a first book as a twenty year old (97, 115). This lack of temporal precision combines with the geographical indeterminacy to ally the text somewhat to dream, despite the fact that the tone is not dreamlike and the text has none of the fade-in/fade-out between fact and dream common in Modiano’s more overtly oneiric 138

See Jean-Michel Adam, ‘Mémoire et fiction dans Remise de peine de Modiano’ for more detailed comments on tense. 139 Assouline’s 1990 Lire dossier suggests that the time spent in Jouy was in fact only two years: ‘L’Empreinte du frère absent’ (pp. 36-37). To confuse matters further, De si braves garçons suggests it may have been closer to three years (101).

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texts. Multiple-text readers, for their part, will be further disconcerted by the narrator’s claim that he was baptised ‘un an auparavant’ (62), that is at the age of eight, which does not match the picture of Modiano receiving baptism at the age of five in Livret de famille (94). Significantly, the epigraph makes reference to dreams, being taken from Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Un Chapitre sur les rêves’.140 Though technically paratextual, the epigraph is an important supplementary marker of autofictionality in this text. It is in any case likely to figure in most editions, as epigraphs are usually recognised by editors as part of the author’s production. This epigraph thematizes the notion of dreaming, or more exactly in the case of Modiano the acts of day-dreaming and ‘rêverie romanesque’. It talks of the impetus to imagination provided by the fact that all families would probably have some slight claim to a castle or noble title were they to search far enough back in the past, adding that these claims would not, however, stand up in court. In stating that one’s claim on one’s past is even more precarious than this, the epigraph suggests that the past and memory are in some way imaginary, a notion of clear significance in the context of autofictionality.

‘Quelque chose de très grave’ The fact that this dream has aspects of nightmare is initially played down. Mathilde, as the token witch, often seems quite benign, and while Rudy died in 1957 (presumably while Modiano was at Jouy), the only reference to this event is the laconic ‘J’avais perdu mon frère.’ – distanced by its very tense (102). Yet several elements in the text suggest that the narrator – the former ‘imbécile heureux’ who becomes the writer Patrick during the text (98) – is still alive to traumatic elements in his past. It is clear that the narrator has an extremely sharp memory for detail, as demonstrated by his intricate descriptions of place and his claim that words from the past have burned themselves indelibly on his memory (36, 127, 133, 145, 163). However, on several occasions, he also suggests that he knows more than he is willing to tell (58, 78, 127). While part of the reason for this 140

The original source is Stevenson’s ‘A Chapter on Dreams’ in his Across the Plains (1892). The epigraph in French translation is as follows: ‘Il n’est guère de famille pour peu qu’elle puisse remonter à quatre générations qui ne prétende avoir des droits sur quelque titre en sommeil ou bien sur quelque château ou domaine, des droits qui ne sauraient être soutenus devant un tribunal mais qui flattent l’imagination et qui écourtent les heures d’oisiveté. Les droits qu’un homme a sur son propre passé sont plus précaires encore.’

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is an ethical hesitation about divulging elements of other people’s lives, some of these secrets seem to relate to personal pain. He is clearly haunted by his past, not only by the mysteries surrounding Annie and company but also, we can deduce, by the pain of abandonment and solitude (140, 141, 158). Even the yardstick reader will pick up on the narrator’s problematic family situation. The ‘choses troubles et douloureuses de la vie’ (117) concern, among other things, his ‘drôle de famille’, a phrase the narrator uses in relation to his substitute family in Jouy (33), but which can also be seen as referring to his absent parents and lack of familial support. The narrator’s mother is strongly present by her absence, and also in the guise of so many substitute mothers, both good and bad, including Mathilde. The father is more directly present, and is arguably shown more affection, as a figure full of slightly absent-minded bonhomie (in contrast to more hostile father representatives in other Modiano texts). While the narrator seems to have been very attached to his substitute family (with at times the exception of Mathilde) even the yardstick reader may speculate that it is the absence of his real parents and the loss of his brother that led to the narrator’s running away from boarding school (142). Yet he is highly reserved about the feelings that must have underlain the ‘fugue’ and its repercussions. Strong feelings nonetheless come across, their force increased by the device of the child’s vantage point. The pictures of innocent little boys in pyjamas, sharing secrets, finding magic in the world and in words, and being thrilled to be allowed outside in their dressing gowns, make the poignancy of their abandonment even more pronounced. As stated, however, the presence of the ‘witch’ Mathilde at first appears, by and large, to be the only thorn in the rosebush. The reference to the ‘monument aux morts’ at first seems to be merely a topographical marker, and the fear of the ‘tête brûlée’ seems merely a normal childhood fear, and even slightly hammed up (35-36, 53). Even the hint that ‘quelque chose de très grave’, first mentioned on page 36, will happen at some point in the future gets lost in the general atmosphere of nostalgia. However, the tonality shifts when the loss of the narrator’s brother is mentioned, abruptly and tersely, a little over half-way into the text. At that point, the narrator speaks of the difficulty of discussing the past, having bumped into Jean D. again at the age of twenty, in the company of the latter’s girlfriend: ‘Il valait mieux, au fond, que cette fille soit là, sinon nous aurions parlé, Jean D. et moi. Ce n’était pas facile, je l’ai lu dans son regard. Aux premiers mots, nous aurions été comme les pantins des stands de tir

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que s’écroulent quand la balle a frappé le point sensible. Annie, la petite Hélène, Roger Vincent, avaient certainement fini en prison… J’avais perdu mon frère. Le fil avait été brisé. Un fil de la Vierge. Il ne restait rien de tout ça’. (101-102). Even the yardstick reader will feel here than the jolly puppets and fairytale characters are coming tumbling down. Yet they are pulled down by the weight of what is not said but rather implied in this rapid declaration: the pain of Rudy’s death, which is only fully comprehensible by the multiple-text reader. Interestingly, the ‘premier livre’ the narrator was attempting to write when he met Jean D. may have been a first version of Remise de peine, although this information is not stated in the text but rather given in the interview with Josselin that appeared close to the time of publication. There, Modiano stated that Remise de peine was the first text he attempted to produce and that he had been trying to write it for twenty years.141 For epitextually informed readers, the allusive reference to the problematic ‘premier livre’ combines with the sense of obstacles to self-expression on the narrator’s part to highlight Modiano’s own ambivalence about opening up his painful past to others. Another person unable to talk about the past is the narrator’s father. While the son senses the father would like to talk about his experience of arrest and near-deportation, he is also aware that the latter has ‘pas de mots’ for his experience of the ‘choses troubles et douloureuses de la vie’. These remarks stress the difficulty of speaking of painful matters in the past, as well as Modiano’s ability to feel compassion for Albert. On an historical level, we shall see that the narrator must in fact speak in place of the father, both as concerns Albert Modiano, and metaphorically construed as the parent generation who refused adequate discussion of the events of the ‘années noires’.

Memory, History, Garages, and the Solitary Bumper Car In Remise de peine, the ‘auto’ of autobiography is closely linked with the ‘auto’ of automobile. This is especially clear in the narrator’s wry statement that, ‘toutes ces années n’auront été, pour moi, qu’une longue et vaine recherche d’un garage perdu’, in a clear echo of the title of Proust’s monumental autobiography (123). Cars figure 141

See Josselin ‘Mondo Modiano’ and ‘Patrick tel qu’en Patoche’ for Modiano’s comments on the apparent block he experienced for twenty years in trying to write Remise de peine, even though it was his initial project.

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strongly in the text, with Roger Vincent’s ‘décapotable américain’ assuming almost mythical proportions in the minds of the two small boys. It and Annie’s ‘quatre-chevaux’ are highly present in their lives. Jean D. is known in later life as ‘le Grand à la Jaguar’ (99, 103). Of most significance however is the ‘auto tamponneuse’ bought for the boys, which sits in surreal and solitary fashion in the middle of their garden. This toytown car seems bereft, not whole but detached from the system that gave it meaning. It is all that is left when the narrator’s ‘drôle de famille’ disappear (and by implication also his brother). Like all of these ‘autos’, the narrator has been abandoned. And like a solitary bumper car he cannot function. Indeed in this text, it behoves the reader to act as a second bumper car for both narrator and author, as a presence against which they can bounce their memories of the past. The reader is also important as a vector for memory of the collective past, where the metaphor of the solitary bumper car gains added importance, as we shall see. As the quotation from Proust and the very title of the text suggest, garages are of equal importance with cars in this text. Typically for Modiano, the right garage seems always out of reach. This is the case even when the narrator has the opportunity of gleaning more information about Roger Vincent from the garage where Vincent used to leave his car (and which thus may be the very same garage as that of Buck Danny). He declines to follow up this ‘piste’, claiming that: ‘J’avais consacré tant de journées à chercher des garages dans Paris sans les trouver que je n’y croyais plus.’ (128). Yet as this garage does seem to be the right one, why then does the narrator balk at the prospect of unearthing the past? The narrator’s refusal to go any further may be due to Modiano’s knowledge that fiction will not in fact allow him to access the past in any objective manner. It may also be an indication of his reluctance to discuss the pain of the past he does know. As always with Modiano, what is known on a personal level but locked away (Rudy’s death and parental neglect) coexists, and often merges, with a sense of being cut off from a past that is equally locked away but was never known – the past of his father and the ‘années noires’ of the Occupation. There is a clear link between garages and Pagnon, the black marketeer with links to the French Gestapo, who worked for some time in the car industry and is connected to the ‘drôle de famille’ of the rue du Docteur-Dordaine via the ‘bande de la rue Lauriston’ (through Andrée K. and Roger Vincent). As Pagnon may have freed the narrator’s father from the Drancy holding camp, where thousands

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of Jews were imprisoned before being sent to the death camps, the narrator is obsessed with elucidating the links between the two men (115-123). The Pagnon connection is thus part of both the narratorial and authorial autobiographical projects. The list of garages possibly associated with Pagnon is of great symbolic significance in relation to the narrator’s feelings of loss combined with a sense of something impossible to access: his ‘garage perdu’. While some of the names seem to be red-herrings, enough information is given to keep the reader on the autobiographical trail. Garages called ‘Lancien frère’ and the utopian-sounding ‘Eden Garage’ figure alongside a host of star-studded names calling up the ignominy of the treatment of the Jews (L’Étoile du Nord; Garage de la Comète; Société Ancienne du Garage-Auto-Star). Intermingled with them are references to Modiano’s father (mainly via intertextual nods to various ‘Villas’, calling up the ‘Villa triste’ of Les Boulevards de ceinture and Modiano’s earlier text of the same name), and to Modiano’s mother’s docker family via the ‘Garage aux Docks de la Jonquière’ (121-122). This list, which seems to be addressed largely to the biographically attuned reader, associates selfhood with the brother who was lost, the father who is by now dead too and who was never adequately known, the Jewish ‘brothers’ who were lost in the Holocaust, and with Modiano’s sense of abandonment by his parents. As such, it is appropriate that the ‘auto’ of selfhood should figure strongly in the list (Villa de l’Auto; Auto-Sport Garage; Auto-Lux; Matford Automobiles; Dixmude-Palace-Auto; Autos-Remises’).142 This is one of the Modiano texts best fitted to Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory.143 Like Patoche, who reads material that is ‘pas de [s]on âge’, Modiano is steeped in an era of a different generation (27-28). Importantly, much listening at doors and watching at windows goes on in the text, leading to a feeling of being left out of secrets and to half-understood snippets of information fitted into the narrator’s world-view as a child (34, 75, 89, 96). The infamous ‘bande de la rue Lauriston’ becomes an inoffensive children’s neighbourhood gang in his small boy’s perception, but remains to haunt him throughout his life, as it is never sufficiently understood (87-88; 115123). These semi-comprehended fragments underline the distance from which Modiano must attempt to connect with the past that haunts 142

The ‘Garage de la Comète’ also figures in the earlier Rue des Boutiques obscures (240). See also Morris 2000, p. 20, for a list of garages in Modiano’s work. 143 See the rubric ‘Shadows of the Mind’ in Chapter Two of this book.

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him – the past of the Occupation years and particularly the blackmarket milieu, due to his father’s involvement there. The lack of understanding shown by the boy trying to fit words and the world into his childish perception of things points to the many things the adult narrator does not understand despite his meticulous research, and suggests that this is always the case for those who seek to access a past not personally known to them. Memory and the past are somehow surreal in this text. Modiano’s nods to the Surrealist movement extend further than the narrator’s fascination with signs in physical place and in the more textual space of newspapers, and his reference to having lived near the Place Blanche.144 A Surrealist influence also underlies his attention to solitary objects, three of which are particularly strongly linked through standing out on their own: the ‘casque allemand’, the black-market ‘étui en crocodile’, and the ‘auto tamponneuse’. It is vital to remember that the ‘auto tamponneuse’, with its links to the ‘auto’ of autobiography is ultimately, along with the ‘étui’, the only proof of the existence of Annie’s ‘bande’. Like the solitary bumper car, the narrator is left as the only witness of events, just as Modiano is one of the few French writers to continue to carry the burden of remembering the ‘années noires’. Just as Patoche’s memories of his past seem unreal, as they stem from ‘une période de ma vie dont je ne pouvais parler à personne’ (141), collective memory of the past also runs the risk of starting to seem unreal through lack of public debate or commemoration.

‘QUELQUE CHOSE DE TRÈS GRAVE’ (bis) Even before the snapping of the strings of the textual puppetshow on page 102, historically informed readers may realize that a multitude of references to horror lie behind this seemingly innocuous tale, as they progressively become aware of the links between Annie’s ‘bande’ and the ‘bande de la rue Lauriston’ and hence with the French Gestapo. The notion of something outwardly innocent concealing something far more sinister is in fact present from the start in the ‘tête brûlée’ hidden behind Annie’s apparently transparent eyes and smile: ‘J’avais beau regarder le visage d’Annie, je n’y trouvais que douceur. Derrière ces yeux limpides et ce sourire, il y avait donc une tête brûlée?’ (36). 144

The area of the Place Blanche in Paris was a favourite haunt of the Surrealists. In Remise de peine, its connotations of blankness add to the feeling that France’s dark past has been, by many people at least, ‘wiped out’.

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Significantly, the first reference to the ‘quelque chose de très grave’ appears on the same page as the first mention of the ‘tête brûlée’. This phrase recurs on several occasions, notably in connection with Hélène’s ‘accident de cirque’ (145). This ‘grave accident’, like the narrator’s memory of climbing dangerously high in a tree and thus, in Hélène’s eyes, risking death, may be seen as screen memories, whereby Modiano focuses on real, remembered incidents of a relatively innocuous nature in order to hide, but at the same time indirectly allude to, the more painful or unpalatable facts of Rudy’s death and of the Holocaust (125, 136). The multiple-text reader will understand the significance that Hélène’s accident took place in a circus, an allusive reference to the Holocaust from La Place de l’étoile, where the ‘cirque de Médrano’ is associated with the grotesque clown-like figures of condemned Jews forced to act the part of stage-Jewishness. The haunting image of the ‘tête brûlée, linked to Annie and to Eliot Salter, who can both be seen as substitute father figures (Annie because of her ‘blouson d’homme’ and risky dealings, and Salter because of his fantastical aura) calls up the spectre of narrowly avoided deportation for the multiple-text reader aware of Albert Modiano’s situation as a Jew in a highly dangerous position.145 Though roughly translatable as ‘daredevil’, it also conjures up the ‘burning wind’ that is the etymological root of the Holocaust. In such a context, the ‘Institution Jeanne-d’Arc’ becomes a metaphor for the ‘Résistancialistes’ who wish to whitewash the confusion and horror of the war years. This explains why that worthy institution should view the narrator as troublesome and seek to get rid of him as a schoolboy, and why, at a later school, he fears the ‘premier fusil de France’ (71, 142-143). Even the single-text reader will grasp the importance of the father’s black-market links in the narrator’s psychological make-up, and will see that history is being woven into the text. However, the ‘quelque chose de très grave’ of the Holocaust is so discreetly treated and so tightly intermeshed with Modiano’s personal survivor syndrome that arguably only the multiple-text reader will be able to unpick (some of) the tangled mesh where self, family, the lost brother, and the metaphor of the Jewish star are bound up together.

145

The expression is also used in connection with father figures in Villa triste and Des inconnues.

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Mystery, Imagination, and the Development of a Writer Both parents provide an imaginative impetus for the narrator: the mother because of her links with the magical (but ultimately horrific) world of the circus (15, 96), the father due to the provision of much fascinating material in the Eliot Salter fantasy. The father encourages him in his imaginings, and can be said to enter into the story he himself has brought into being. As the multiple-text reader is aware, both the narrator and his father merge in the person of Jean D., who significantly, has been in prison and has a tendency to disappear. This tall, seemingly ageless man, who figures on the front of the Points Seuil edition of the text in a picture by Pierre Le-Tan, calls up Jean Dekker, the narrator of Quartier perdu, as well as all the other narrators called Jean in Modiano’s work. His implied surname also evokes the baron Deyckecaire – the Albert Modiano figure from Les Boulevards de ceinture. By linking himself with a fictional character who merges aspects of both father and son from diverse sources, Modiano is once more pointing out that his external identity has become blurred with his fictional ones. Remise de peine shows most clearly that Modiano’s roots lie in fiction. This is true not only in relation to the fictions generated in place of concrete knowledge about his father’s activities and the recent past, but also because of the fictions that Modiano creates for himself as a basis for selfhood. In his attachment to myth and mysterious garages and castles, Modiano at times seems to enjoy the lack of firm foundations in his picture of his father’s past. Yet behind his Cheshire Cat smile lies the haunting image of the ‘tête brûlée’. There is ultimately no romanticisation of violence in this text. The ‘marque au fer rouge sur l’épaule de Milady’ that remains in Patoche’s memory from his reading of Dumas’s Three Musketeers (referred to again in the recent ‘Éphéméride’: 6) conjures up France’s self-prostitution during the war and the ignoble branding of the Jews.146 Interestingly, Jean D. suggests that Patoche will graduate to reading the ‘série noire’ crime mysteries, after his consumption of more mythical tales as a child (72-73). This of course reflects Modiano’s own development as a writer obsessed with mystery and unanswered questions relating to France’s ‘années noires’.

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Milady was branded for prostitution with the fleur de lys: the mark of the French kings.

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3(iv) La Petite Bijou (2001): ‘J’avais rêvé tout ça’ Modiano’s 2001 text La Petite Bijou is a difficult text to measure in terms of autofiction. For the multiple-text reader it is clearly autofictional, linking into the problematic of fictionalized autobiography in Modiano’s other texts. The multiple-text reader will immediately see the autobiographical resonances of the mother figure who is (briefly) a minor actress, the absence of a father figure (and the notion of absent/neglectful parents in general), along with the need to understand and identify with a parental role model of the same sex. Multiple-text readers will know that identity is largely fictional for Modiano, and can thus at once explain Thérèse’s feelings of uncertain identity by the fact that, for the Modiano narrator, identity is doomed to remain imaginary, dispersed, and uncertain, due to the author’s view of selfhood as fractured and floating, partly because it is bound up with an uncertain historical past. By yardstick criteria, however, the autofictional status of the text needs much more decoding by the reader. It hinges mainly on the presence of the author’s name (albeit only in the childlike form of ‘Patoche’, whereas Remise de peine also mentions the name ‘Patrick’: 98); a semi-autobiographical format within the text itself; and, importantly, a powerful intertextual linkage with other twentieth-century autofictions in France. Other intertextual links connect the text to themes and images in texts by the Hungarian poet József Attila and the modernist Flemish writer Paul van Ostaijen. However the autobiographical force of all this intertextuality is most apparent to the multiple-text reader. It is perhaps significant in this respect that Modiano’s editors at Gallimard have so far placed the extract from the text hinting that the name ‘Patoche’ is as much a ‘nom d’artiste’ as that of ‘la Petite Bijou’ on the quatrième de couverture of the ‘édition blanche’, perhaps out of concern that the autobiographical qualities of the text might not be understood by the yardstick reader. There are several reasons why the autobiographical and autofictional qualities of the text do not seem immediately clear by yardstick criteria. The author’s name appears only in the form mentioned above (merely once, and rather late at that), and is attached to an apparently secondary character. The reader will also be encouraged into ‘fiction reading mode’ by the fact that Modiano’s typically male representative has here become a young woman of nineteen. Moreover, the text seems blatantly fictional, being extremely dreamlike and containing a set of coincidences that are too wildly

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improbable to be based on objective events, with a series of overly neat doubling patterns. However, this mirroring ultimately serves to increase the autobiographical force of the text, since it suggests strong links between the female narrating ‘je’ and the ‘Patoche’ of the translator, whose profession represents Modiano’s own process of translating from life and literature in his writing. It becomes progressively clear that Moreau-Badmaev is one of the main hinges on whom the autofictional status of the text turns, both by yardstick criteria and for the multiple-text reader. Let us now focus more closely on the text’s various subtle indications of autobiographicality amid strong fictionality for the single-text non-paratextually informed reader, up to and beyond the suggestion in the ninth ‘chapter’ that Moreau-Badmaev may have been called ‘Patoche’ in his childhood.

Dreaming up the Past At the outset, the reader is plunged into a series of micro-events rather than the discussion or summary of key life events often found at the start of more conventional autobiographical writing. And if autobiography is considered as a deliberate attempt to construct a story around one’s life, or part thereof, in pursuit of self-understanding and self-construction, the text does not immediately fit the paradigm. Furthermore, a clear time frame seems deliberately withheld and readers are immediately transported to a previous era without any indication of the year, or of the present time of enunciation.147 Dream is mentioned on the very first page, and the question of whether the events recounted happened anywhere but in the narrator’s mind imposes itself strongly. Indeed, Thérèse soon posits the hypothesis that the encounter with her mother was merely a dream, and soon after that speaks of being haunted by bad dreams along with ‘mauvais souvenirs’ (24, 33). Despite the typically precise provision of the names of the Vincennes bar, of metro stations, and of streets, vagueness and confusion soon become dominant. While this ultimately serves to reinforce the climate of uncertainty upon which autofiction thrives, its initial effect is merely to create a sense of a narrator who is haunted by mysteries in her past and who is prone to 147

While this vagueness can no doubt partly be explained by a desire to reinforce the climate of uncertainty in the text, Modiano claimed in an interview with the ‘Grand livre du mois’ bookclub published online (‘Le Club Grand Livre du Mois reçoit Patrick Modiano. Interview du 20/04/2001’) that ‘cela aurait été artificiel de dater’, as childhood memories are ‘intemporels’.

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hallucination and dreaming. Jérôme Garcin has gone so far as to call her ‘une fabulatrice neurasthénique’.148 It gradually becomes clear, nonetheless, that the narrator is trying to understand her own life through allowing this story to surface in dreamlike form. Just as the metro tunnels seem to represent the recesses of Thérèse’s unconscious mind, the reader must seek the ‘correspondances’ (58). In terms of her life, the two main factors that ally the text to autobiography are her stated desire to ‘voir plus clair’ in her own life through narrative, and her return to, or near to, the site of her birth by inhabiting the building that figures on her ‘acte de naissance’ (33, 43). Yet the narrator’s ‘autobiographical’ writing requires a more than usually great input by the reader, who must work very hard in order to reconstruct the order of events, particularly in relation to those surrounding the ‘reappearance’ of her mother.149 And for the yardstick reader, the indicators of a narratorial autobiographical quest do not, by themselves, suggest that the quest can be extended to the author. Yet combined with the strong sense of what Lejeune calls ‘le pacte fantasmatique’ (here, the effect of firstperson narration and the insistent repetition of key emotions and situations, creating a sense that the author has put much of himself into his fictional creations), they do play their part in suggesting this. In typically Modianesque fashion, the very factor that suggests that the text is an authorial/and or narratorial invention – the strong presence of coincidences and of doubling patterns – also reinforces presumptions of autobiographicality. While the author is most prominent as an inventing instance in the coincidence of the fact that Thérèse happens upon the very building where her mother lived at the time of her birth, and the doubling of place (the two pharmacies and the neat oppositions between peripheral East/West and North/South locations), Modiano’s role as the inventing (and underlying) consciousness is more marked in the doubling between people in the text. This occurs most strongly between the narrator and ‘la petite’; the narrator and Moreau-Badmaev; the latter and the narrator’s 148

‘Un roman de Modiano. “La Petite Bijou”, c’est moi’, p. 132. The reappearance of the mother can, however, be situated in the late 1950s, before the arrival of the ‘tapis roulant’ in Montparnasse. The time frame can be reconstructed as follows: At around age nineteen the narrator starts looking through her tin of odds and ends (116), then sees the advertisement for the room in the rue Coustou (44), then meets Moreau Badmaev, and starts to see the ghost of her mother, getting the Valadier job ‘deux ou trois semaines après (36, 58). After living ‘quelques mois’ near the Place Blanche she meets the ‘pharmacienne’ (86, 97). 149

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mother; Véra Valadier and the mother; the ‘pharmacienne’ and the mother; and between the narrator herself and her mother, serving to highlight the notion of traumatic childhood, feelings of guilt coupled with anger, the desire for a reassuring maternal/parental presence, and the injuries caused by a neglectful one. Since the doubling between the narrator and her mother is ultimately of most importance, and since Moreau-Badmaev, who seems to be able to read the narrator’s thoughts, is the link between both figures (he is, like the narrator, a marginal figure, hints at a traumatic childhood, and inhabits an apartment that directly mirrors the mother’s Vincennes dwelling place), a web of significance progressively builds up around this man. It is of course highly symbolic that the narrator had known him ‘depuis quelque temps’ (32) before she started to see/hallucinate her mother (a nod to Modiano’s long-standing relationship with his own fictional representatives). Also significant is the fact that it is in the section telling of the first meeting with him that the text becomes more of an autobiographical quest from a narratorial point of view. The historically informed reader will see that the radio translator is largely based on the figure of Armand Robin, who was also the author of a set of poems published in 1940 named, symbolically, Ma vie sans moi. Importantly, MoreauBadmaev spends his life crossing virtual boundaries, his radio work meaning that, ‘il finissait par ne plus bien savoir dans quel pays il était’ (39), just as Thérèse crosses constantly between past and present, and between reality and fiction, like Modiano himself. Identity is in any case problematized from the start of the text – in the very first line, in fact, where it is made clear that names can be pseudonyms. It is soon stated that the mother’s name and selfconstructed identity are also false, and the Valadier couple may not be who they say they are. At the point when the text starts to seem like an autobiographical quest on the part of the narrator, we learn that Moreau-Badmaev is equally content to use either of his names (a hint that Modiano might accept that character as part of his own identity, as well as that of Thérèse herself). The timing of the divulgation of names in this text is also interesting, since the narrator’s ‘real’ name is first given on page 37 along with the information that MoreauBadmaev does not like to use his first name and seems to be hiding something, like Modiano himself, out of a desire to ‘se protéger et de garder ses distances’ (37). And a suggestion of alternative identities occurs simultaneously for both characters, when the narrator tells Moreau-Badmaev that ‘quand j’avais sept ans on m’appelait la Petite

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Bijou’ on the very same page that the name of ‘Patoche’ is suggested as a possible identity for the translator (120). The narrator’s personal circumstances of course account for some of her identity problems, since she has had an artificial identity imposed upon her by her mother, and possesses no firm knowledge of who her father was. However, the past of the ‘années noires’ and of the Holocaust, which is more overtly present in this text than in any of Modiano’s output since Dora Bruder, seems to play an even greater part in her lack of understanding of who she is. Even the yardstick reader will perceive the importance of History in the psychological make-up of this narrator, whose account is full of stars, scars, and imagery of branding and imprisonment, along with suggestions of shady trafficking on the part of the Valadier couple and the mother’s implied connections with the Germans. This narrator is beset by the desire to understand her past and that of her mother, as her very origins seem shaky, forcing her to declare: ‘Tout me paraissait si confus depuis le début’ (33). She is haunted by not knowing why her mother was nicknamed ‘La Boche’ nor her activities during the war, and spent most of her time during early adolescence listening at doors when the talk turned to her mother and trying to understand. It is this confusion, that has been with her since childhood, that is the source of her bad dreams, and of the particular bad dream of this narrative. Her desire to understand the past leads her to identify with her mother, through whom she ultimately hopes to understand herself. The mother’s uncertain age stresses the continuing presence of the past in the narrator’s life while also underlining the blurring of age between child and parent through imaginative identification. Thérèse also seems to be attempting to identify with Jewishness. This is evident through her reference to another double, ‘la grande Thérèse’, who bears a starfish tattoo recalling the ignoble branding of the Jews, and by her projection of aspects of the Jewish tragedy onto her mother, who bears a scar, and whose coat recalls not only the yellow of an old photograph but the stars of the Fascist years. Even the yardstick reader will sense that the narrator’s feelings of having lost something may have to do not only with the loss of a faithful companion in the form of the black dog, but also with a confused impression of loss arising from more tragic historical occurrences. The narrator’s absorption of aspects of Jewish identity coexists with much anger concerning the criminal elements of the parent generation with their ‘visages lisses d’assassins qui

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demeureraient longtemps impunis faute de preuves’: 107). There is also considerable anger at the suppression of memory and at the silence surrounding the events of the past. The narrator’s mother sends a postcard from ‘la Place de France’ in Casablanca before her presumed death, suggesting a whitewashed house that in turn suggests a whitewashing of memory, and in her daughter’s case, a blank space where memory should be (29). Rage at abandonment by the parent generation thus feeds into feelings of being cut off from the past, not only due to temporal distance, but also due to lack of communication. All of this coexists with fury at having to bear the burden of an obsessive desire for memory caused by repression of the past by previous generations. This narrator must, like Modiano, take up the burden of memory in place of others. Symbolically, the narrator pays off her mother’s accumulation of rent owing, just as Modiano pays the debts of previous generations through taking up (as best he can) the weight of the past. Yet, neither the narrator nor Modiano can bear witness to the events of the ‘années noires’, only to the feelings of guilt and confusion surrounding them, as they are cut off from that past while remaining constantly haunted by it.

Translating Fictions Modiano translates a confused reality into a confused fiction, reflecting the lack of clarity surrounding the memory, and lack of memory, of the war years. The motif of translation is strongly present, as is that of the foreign language. Many of the characters have something foreign about them, in line with the text’s sustained metaphor of the past as a foreign country whence they are conjured up. Just as Moreau-Badmaev translates radio snippets from foreign languages into French and produces summaries as part of his work, Modiano provides glimpses of the past and boiled-down versions of events, recording fragments that have become ‘foreign’ through the forces of forgetting. Importantly, Thérèse associates herself with Moreau-Badmaev’s work (90). And like him, she is tinged with a type of foreignness, occupying a marginal position as rememberer of the past. While Moreau-Badmaev turns the confused babble of foreign languages into French, the reader must translate Modiano’s apparently spare and transparent prose into what is actually a dense network of signs full of a legacy of confusion from the ‘années noires’, as well as

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the weight and horror of the Holocaust (and, to a lesser extent, the pain of Modiano’s personal past).150 The Occupation years, then, are both a foreign country, and a foreign language, best summed up by the image of ‘le persan des prairies’, which is not taught anywhere in Paris, and which is surrounded by an aura of inaccessibility and distance. MoreauBadmaev and Thérèse are the only people interested in ‘le persan des prairies’, just as the events of the past interest only those willing to take up the burden of memory. The mythical aura of this language suggests that the Occupation past has lost solidity, almost seeming imaginary in the contemporary consciousness due to temporal distance, general forgetting, and lack of first-hand experience. However, ‘le persan des prairies’ does seem to exist, as MoreauBadmaev travels to Iran and finds people there who speak it, a reminder that the past will not go away merely through being ignored. And while the ‘pays natal’ of the ‘années noires’ has been pushed away into a lonely suburb of the French psyche, to the extent that it no longer even seems to exist, it does subsist in Thérèse’s mind, which explains why she can speak to herself of ‘ton pays natal’ (61, 147).

Autofictional Connections Modiano’s use of intertextual gestures to key twentieth-century autofictions in France – a type of translation between fictions of selfhood – is one of the strongest indicators of the potential autofictionality of his text before the appearance of the name ‘Patoche’. It reinforces the reader’s impression that fiction is here, at times, a substitute for memory, especially through the emphatic references to Perec’s survivor-guilt-ridden W ou le souvenir d’enfance, where traumatic memory pertains even more strongly to the Holocaust, as Perec’s mother died in the camps. Intertextual gesturing to W starts early on, with references to the mother’s scar; the train imagery (including the crowded metro ‘wagons’ recalling other trains leaving for Eastern Europe); the allusion to a book called Le Vieux Cheval de cirque and to the ‘caniche noire’ recalling Perec’s Michaël, Chien de cirque (W, 194); the pervasive presence of sea imagery and of drowning and floating; the motif of accidents; the liberation of emotions through dreamlikeness; and the appeal of 150

As Pierre Lepape puts it: ‘les thèmes […] sont des îles. C’est le lecteur qui jette des ponts, comble les blancs, meuble les silences, trace les trajectoires, reconstitue des continuités, des logiques’. ‘Un petit pan de manteau jaune’, p. II.

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forgetting. Significantly, Thérèse’s apartment is at the point of a triangle. Véra Valadier’s very name, with its double ‘v’, seems to be another nod to W, as does the very notion of proliferating double lives (‘des doubles vies’) in fiction. Like Perec, Modiano and his narrator are cut off from the past, through the repression of painful personal memories and also – and most importantly in this text – from a past they have not experienced but that is vital to their sense of self. Both writers also seek to bear witness to that past, but are forced to provide fiction in place of memory. Yet fiction has its own force, both politically and poetically, as the powerful resonances with Perec’s text demonstrate. Like Modiano’s text, W also questions the nature of reality, and suggests that imagination can be ‘real’. (In La Petite Bijou, this is reinforced by the intertextual links with Breton’s autobiographical text Nadja, whose eponymous heroine is given to dreamlike wandering and finds an affective clarity in hallucination).151 The Perec links also lead the reader to question the nature of memory, and to reflect on the sense of second-hand memory that fiction, and the process of writing fiction can create. On a more general level, both the Perec and Modiano texts show that fiction is always a part of memory, as memory is subject to constant reworking by the unconscious. The references to autofictional texts by Sarraute and Sartre (Enfance and Les Mots) further support a view of selfhood and memory as always in some way fictional. With his usual subtlety, Modiano uses the notion of the ‘chien écrasé’ to conjure up the subject matter of the school essay that Sarraute uses to demonstrate the creation of alternative selves in fiction. The frequent references to ‘cahiers de classe’ strengthen this link. The ‘Véra’ of Modiano’s text must also owe something to Sarraute’s bad stepmother of the same name, while also reinforcing that emotional veracity of the narrator’s dreamlike account. Ultimately however, as with the reference to Sartre, in the attribution of the name ‘Poulou’ as a possible name for Moreau-Badmaev, the references 151

The links with Nadja come into sharp focus in the narrator’s statement that she was ‘si sensible aux regards et aux mains’(35), like the heroine of Breton’s text, as well as by the prominence of the Place Blanche, a favourite Surrealist haunt. The capital letters accorded to signs reinforce the sense of a Surrealist heritage, as does the general stress on coincidence. For Modiano’s own sense of this text as surreal, see his remarks in the abovementioned ‘Grand Livre du mois’ interview and in ‘Rencontre avec Patrick Modiano à l’occasion de la parution de La Petite Bijou’, also published online, anonymously.

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serve most strongly to underline the importance of childhood in the text.

Intertextual Mothers The mother, as the place of birth, or the ‘Pays Natal’ to which Thérèse wishes to return, is clearly a problematic notion, directly related to the War years. The narrator’s constant seeking out of mothers and mother substitutes is part of the powerful desire to be reunited with what could be termed a national maternal space, despite the negative emotions involved. The constant references to the sea, liquidity, and to floating highlight the lack of fixity of the narrator’s sense of self (her ‘flottement perpétuel’: 36), and suggest a homophony between ‘la mère’ and ‘la mer’. The excerpt from ‘De Sirenen’, part of the 1932 volume Diergaarden voor Kinder van nu by Ostaijen (who was from Modiano’s own mother’s home town of Antwerp), speaks of snared mermaids, feeding into the imagery of the sea as well as that of imprisonment surrounding the mother in this text. And the most enigmatic element of the text – the source of the two verses the narrator reproduces while claiming she has forgotten what they meant or who wrote them – turns out to be the poem ‘Mama’ (1934) by Attila, about a child’s longing to be reunited with a dead mother. In Thérèse’s case, reunion is as impossible as it is for Attila, since the ‘pays natal’ has been lost with the passage of time, and the ‘mother’ is in many senses an imaginary matrix from which her memory and lack of memory have sprung.152 (The historically informed reader will be aware that Attila committed suicide, in a sinister prefiguring of Thérèse’s attempt to do the same). This stress on France as a problematic mother country makes it highly appropriate that MoreauBadmaev, who, like the author, is of mixed French and foreign parentage, should have a French mother rather than a French father. Given the desire for a good and comforting mother, or a reassuring maternal presence, it is symbolic that the appearance of a good mother figure in the person of the ‘pharmacienne’ comes exactly at the centre-point of the book, in typically Modianesque fashion, on page 77 out of 154. Yet this desire is doomed to remain unassuaged. While the ending of the narrative seems to herald a new birth, accompanied by a symbolic breaking of the waters and by what Antoine de Gaudemar calls its ‘faible lueur d’espoir’, Modiano has 152

The importance of mothers of itself links it to Perec’s W, which is based on the desire to lay the memory of a mother to rest.

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admitted this hope is ‘un leurre’.153 He and his narrators seem condemned never to achieve a comforting closure, as it is impossible to fully assimilate that which one does not understand, whether for purposes of comprehension or of forgetting.

La Petite Bijou and the Multiple-Text Reader De si braves garçons is perhaps the most important of the intertextual references from Modiano’s own universe, being the first text to mention the character of ‘la Petite Bijou’. It resembles Modiano’s 2001 text in many ways, in its studied allusiveness, its dreamlike nature, the presence of Holocaust references (and use of Perec’s W), the notion of neglectful parents, the importance of childhood, and its considerable anger. Remise de peine is the next most important Modiano reference, due to the stress on childhood, confusion, ‘unreal’ parents, the narrator’s name of ‘Patoche’, and its references to the rue Coustou and the Place Blanche (RP, 97). Livret de famille is also important, providing a more humane picture of Modiano’s real actress mother, along with the presence of dogs, a strong sense of loss, and multiple incarnations of a parent figure. While La Petite Bijou might initially seem to be a radical departure from the normal Modiano paradigm of a male narrator seeking to identify with a father figure, the text constitutes, at bottom, a transposition of the same problematic onto a same-sex female model. (This is largely dictated by the presence of a female narrator, whose main function, like those of Des inconnues seems to be to ensure that Modiano can remain imaginatively connected with the deported Dora Bruder. Multiple-text readers will be particularly alive to the connections with Dora forged through an emphasis on lostness and imprisonment). The same basic notion of ‘poursuivre un fantôme en reconnaissance de paternité’ formulated in Les Boulevards de ceinture (154) here applies to the notion of ‘maternité’. Here the mother ‘is’ in any case also the father, with her neglect of her child, and her presumed links with the Germans during the War. She lives at the escalier A (evoking Albert Modiano), and her predecessor in De si braves garçons lives at the cours Albert 1er (BG, 75). In a nod to the multiple-text reader, Moreau-Badmaev takes on maternal links through his ‘léger accent d’Anvers’, while also being geographically 153

See Gaudemar ‘Modiano, souvenir écrin’, p. II, and Modiano’s apparent realization that there can be no closure, in the abovementioned ‘Grand livre du mois’ interview.

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related to Albert Modiano through the ‘porte d’Orléans’, where many father figures meet their sons in other Modiano texts.154 Even for the yardstick reader, mother and father merge in this male mother substitute whose apartment mirrors so exactly the Vincennes room. However, the stress on problematic mother-child relationships does throw up interesting issues in its own right. It is even possible to argue that Modiano may be attempting here to forge a matrilinear link with Jewishness, to which he is only indirectly related through his father. This would partly explain why the ‘guilty’ mother figure is also treated with compassion. As shown, the mother does seem to represent Modiano’s Jewishness (among so many other things), and this is especially clear for the multiple-text reader. The accident to her ankle that dashed her career hopes gains most of its symbolic force as a brutal rupture recalling the Holocaust in the light of the symbolic ‘GRAVE ACCIDENT’ of Remise de peine, where ankle injuries also figure. The image of her as a condemned circus horse with a yellow harness links her to the condemned ‘circus Jews’ in La Place de l’étoile and to the horse slaughterhouses of Des inconnues evoking the deathcamps. The female pharmacist ‘mother’ works close to the Gare de Lyon, often linked to Jewish attempts to flee to the South in Modiano’s work. Equally, the mother’s status of ‘ancienne danseuse’ may be a link not only to Modiano’s own mother but also the tragic figure of the Jewish Ingrid of Voyage de noces, who also has feelings of depression. These are ultimately suicidal in Ingrid’s case, and it is possible that this outcome may also apply to Thérèse’s mother (61). Multiple-text readers will link the narrator’s name with the Theresienstadt camp of La Place de l’étoile, understanding that Modiano is still beset by feelings of confusion relating to the past, like the Schlemilovitch of the 1967 text. They will, however, be aware of the contrast between this more sober text and the hysterical 1967 creation. While the Jewish tragedy is arguably as present in both, La Petite Bijou is by far the less direct of the two, despite its sustained 154

By his connections with Armand Robin, Moreau-Badmaev takes on further paternal links through the notion of ambiguity and mystery. Robin was a highly original and headstrong figure, who briefly worked for the ‘Ministère de l’information’ during the war (apparently at the request of his wife) while at the same time (and for much longer) working for the ‘Service clandestin’ and for the communist ‘Humanité’ news service. It is also no doubt significant that Robin died in mysterious, hushed-up circumstances (possibly due to defiance of the police). Given Modiano’s highly intelligent subtlety, it is perhaps not too extravagant to see this also as an indirect allusion to the relative silence surrounding the deaths of the Jews.

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emphasis on the Holocaust. Multiple-text readers will also understand Thérèse’s feeling that the past has almost become imaginary due to the even greater distance from which Modiano must contemplate it in 2001. In this light, the ‘Luna Park’ of La Petite Bijou can be seen as a more silent and even more distanced version of the grotesque deathcamp funfair in La Place de l’étoile (PB, 139-141; PE, 155-157). Multiple-text readers will better understand the blurring of identities in this text, due to Modiano’s compulsion to identify with his parents and with his lost brother Rudy. (Just as Rudy is evoked by the lost dog, the narrator herself feels like an abandoned dog). Multiple-text readers will also understand more clearly the confusion in this text, including the compassion for some of the ‘bourreaux’, even for the Valadier couple, and the presence of considerable pity for the mother, which not only stems from the Jewish connection but also from Modiano’s feelings about his father, who was forced into blackmarket and possibly Gestapo-linked activities in order to survive. The general blurring between ‘bourreau’ and ‘victime’ is of course also due to Modiano’s survivor guilt, decipherable in the narrator’s statement that she feels like ‘une criminelle qui finit par oublier son crime’ (123). Multiple-text readers may also see the presence of ‘the petite’ and the urge to protect her as a reference to the loss of Rudy. While Rudy’s death is largely overshadowed by the Holocaust in this text, the importance of the number twelve (the age at which Modiano lost Rudy) has a strong symbolic presence, and is mentioned in the very first lines of the text.155

Memory and Forgetting It is ultimately impossible for Thérèse and Modiano himself to kill either memory or lack of memory (the mother’s nickname of ‘Trompe-la-Mort’ is highly significant in this respect), haunted as they both are by second-hand memories of the war years and the Holocaust, as well as by lack of direct access to that past.156 The epigraph from René Char to Livret de famille, ‘Vivre c’est s’obstiner à achever un souvenir’, is still appropriate twenty-four years later. And if the connotations of completion (and perfection) attached to the 155

See also my remarks on the twelve lost years in the section on Rue des Boutiques obscures. 156 Modiano has spoken of the ‘childhood memories’ in this text as a boomerang always destined to come back, mixing this image with that of a building standing on foundations that were rotten from the start and thus doomed to collapse (Gaudemar, ‘Modiano, souvenir écrin’, p. II).

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number twelve in Judaic tradition are taken into account, it is no doubt significant that this text has only eleven ‘chapters’. Thérèse realizes that closure requires working through her traumatic sense of the past and seems to imply that she is not sure an end is possible: ‘Avant de couper les ponts il fallait allait jusqu’au bout, sans savoir très bien ce que voulait dire “jusqu’au bout”’ (77). There is nonetheless a powerful tension between the desire to forget and the duty to remember in this text. Thérèse has moments of wishing to sever all links with the past, and despite wishing to be reunited with her mother, she also wishes to kill her. While the ‘Néant’ café symbolizes the dangers of not remembering the past, through its black colour linking it to the lost dog, it is also a place of deathly obsession and of mummification. Equally, the place Blanche, while linked to a perfidious emptiness of memory via the blankness of the Casablanca, is also a place where life continues without obsession, in contrast to the room in the rue Coustou (89). Ultimately however, the need for memory and especially for understanding of the past are the stronger forces in this text. Modiano’s subtle interweaving of references to the Occupation and the Holocaust into his text make clear that he feels memory must be kept alive, even if the past sometimes seems like a secret language that can only ever reach us in fragmentary form. Clearly then, these four texts have much in common, while also each possessing their own specificities. All contain the author’s name and are fictionalized autobiography of a highly self-conscious type that plays on autobiographical conventions, or more generally on modes of autobiographicality, even for the reader unaware of anything but the text, the title, and the name of the author. Three of the four imply a strong predominance of invention, while Remise de peine displays a less invented tonality. In Livret de famille, there is a forceful sense of the author’s power to mislead the reader as to autobiographical events, just as there are hints of a hesitation to describe directly events that have caused him personal pain. In De si braves garçons the author seems even more elusive on the face of things, and continues to avoid a frankly autobiographical ‘je’, but readers are more strongly encouraged to examine other characters for autobiographicality. However it too is quite reserved autobiographically, and makes its readers work hard to decipher what they can of the author’s personality, while hinting that Modiano might prefer to be less

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oblique. In both texts, the themes of acting and resemblance feed into the idea that Patrick the author is playing with ‘Patrick’ the actor/character, whom he resembles but with whom he is not identical, while conveying the author’s distress at his feelings of uncertain identity. It is not until Remise de peine that Modiano seems to feel able to discuss his childhood experience in a more directly autobiographical (though still overtly fictionalized) mode. These experiences are then taken up again in La Petite Bijou, there in a much more oneiric and fictional form that allows strong emotion to be expressed at a safe distance, as had the previous dreamlike narrative of De si braves garçons. Of all these works, La Petite Bijou, Modiano’s twentieth full-length text, relies most heavily on the input of the multiple-text reader, due to the very indirect nature of its autofictional divulgations. The unfinished and inconcludable nature of Modiano’s postmemory syndrome no doubt accounts for the fact that La Petite Bijou is pervaded so deeply by imagery of imprisonment. Of the four autofictions it is by far the darkest and the least ludic, suggesting that the effect on Modiano of the eight years he took to write and research Dora Bruder has left its mark very strongly on the 2001 text. There, history and autobiography are as tightly linked as in Livret de famille, and the history in question is a more exclusively horrific one, being principally focused on the Holocaust, or the margins of that horrific event. The greater sense of distance from the past in La Petite Bijou can be explained by the sheer weight of the twenty four extra years that separate it from the 1977 text. The confused babble produced by Thérèse shows that Modiano is still haunted by lack of a solid story about the past. And while his female representative is not as hysterically in search of an identity as her counterparts in La Place de l’étoile or Rue des Boutiques obscures, her confusion and her need for identification with imagined figures suggests that selfhood still constitutes a considerable problem for the author. Let us now turn back to four previous works by Modiano that highlight problematic identity in a manner that cannot, at least for the yardstick reader, be said to be autofictional, but which are nonetheless all texts that thematize the autobiographical process.

4 Self-Narration as Theme Apart from Livret de famille, De si braves garçons, Remise de peine, and La Petite Bijou, only four other Modiano texts overtly focus on self-narration as a type of autobiography. These are Quartier perdu (1984), Vestiaire de l’enfance (1989), Rue des Boutiques obscures (1978), and La Place de l’étoile (1968). In all of these texts, there is a concern on the narrator’s part to attempt to understand past experiences and to construct a sense of self through an extended reflection on those experiences. Yet in none of them is the narrator named ‘Patrick’ or ‘Modiano’, and all present themselves as unambiguously novelistic to the yardstick reader. All of these reasons make it valid to talk of these texts in terms of ‘fictitious autobiographical projects’ or ‘pseudo-autobiographical projects’. The distinction of form and content between these four texts and the rest of the corpus must be remembered, as critics tend to abuse terms like ‘imaginary autobiography’, often applying such terms to all of Modiano’s retrospective first-person narratives.157 In brief, in this chapter we shall be discussing the texts that, for the yardstick reader, do not seem to describe actual events from the author’s life, but that do mirror autobiographical form and theme. Alongside the autofictions, these are the four texts that throw up the greatest number of issues pertaining to narrating the self, in particular issues of memory, imagination, the conscious and unconscious restructuring of reality in writing, the desire to interpret, and the strangeness, porosity, and multiplicity of the self. All four texts provoke reflection on the fact that memory is inseparable from consciousness, not constative but performative. All demonstrate that memory and self-narration involve a selection and a reworking of base data, whether by deliberate effort or not.

157

See for example Morris, 1996, p. 76, and Guyot-Bender’s ‘Making sense of Narrative Ambiguity’, especially pp. 19-22.

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It is useful to restate Lejeune’s definition of autobiography in Le Pacte autobiographique: ‘Récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité’.158 When ‘fictitious’ or ‘pseudo’ autobiography is defined following Lejeune’s model, substituting ‘une personne fictive’ for ‘une personne réelle’, it is clear that not all of these texts fit entirely neatly into Lejeune’s definition. In some respects La Place de l’étoile comes closest to that definition. It portrays its narrator as writing about his experiences in order to gain or express a sense of self, which is the basis of all autobiography. However, it is Schlemilovitch’s crazed imagination that furnishes the material for his experiences, so that the notion of ‘sa propre existence’ is problematic. Furthermore, the events described often take place as he writes, so that the text frequently does not comply with Lejeune’s condition of retrospectivity. Yet it would be difficult to deny that the text uses several important autobiographical conventions. Likewise, the narrative of Rue des Boutiques obscures does not comply with Lejeune’s terms, not being an explicitly written project. However, its narrator Guy Roland reflects extensively on the past while desperately trying to find a sense of self, and as such it too can be said to mirror the autobiographical process. While these texts show imagination to be inadequate, unable to recapture the past ‘as it was’, or to express a desired essence of self, they still show that imagination can be the vehicle of emotional truth. Indeed, these texts, while often, like the autofictions, stinging their readers with doubts as to the logicality and ‘reality’ of what has been narrated, ultimately lead them to realize that there is an affective truth in what has been told. However, as we shall see, imagination can also be used as a way of avoiding direct confrontation with painful facts. While the emotions tied up with the urge to narrate the self are explored, the corollary urge to avoid certain narratives is often also suggested. This is especially true in the three texts focused on the past, which all demonstrate a strong ambivalence concerning memory and forgetting. The implications in these texts, expressed on a diegetic level (and most overtly in La Place de l’étoile), that fiction can become autobiography and autobiography can become fiction are notions that underlie Modiano’s work, and most of modern autobiography, as 158

Le Pacte autobiographique, p. 14.

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suggested in the preceding chapters of this book. While La Place de l’étoile dispenses with illusions of coherence and credibility, the reader’s wish to distinguish ‘real’ events from invented ones even within the textual world is played on in Vestiaire de l’enfance and Quartier perdu, and to an extent also in Rue des Boutiques obscures. As David Gascoigne puts it: ‘the prevailing chiaroscuro of [Modiano’s] writing blurs the boundary between historical and fictional, between memory and imagination, and casts a veil of unreliability over much of the diegesis.’159 It also stresses the reality of the life of the mind. In all four texts there is a sense that mental life is as real to the narrators as are actual events, at least for the duration of the imagining process. Though Rue des Boutiques obscures and La Place de l’étoile chronologically precede Quartier perdu and Vestiaire de l’enfance, they are analysed last, as both texts provoke reflection on the notion of becoming other people through identification, and so lead into the discussion of fusion of self with other in Chapters Five, Six, and Seven. These texts are also linked by their narrators’ overt search for an identity and the presence of multiple external perspectives on that identity. It is apposite that the discussion of Rue des Boutiques obscures should be directly preceded by that of Vestiaire de l’enfance, as both of these texts present a secretive and emotionally injured narrator who merely hints at the causes for his pain. Furthermore, both Rue des Boutiques obscures and Vestiaire de l’enfance use invention as a type of wishful thinking. Vestiaire de l’enfance also has much in common with Quartier perdu, but for different reasons. Both texts focus on the fact that their narrators have split personas, while suggesting a certain unity between past and present selves. Importantly, both also involve a decision to write about the past. In both it is suggested that the narrative of events preceding this decision may already be a blend of invention and fact. However, Quartier perdu differs from Vestiaire de l’enfance in that the narrator of Quartier perdu seems by the end to have divulged the secret unity behind his impulse to write about the past, while there is a much stronger sense of the untold in Vestiaire de l’enfance. Let us now turn to a discussion of the texts.

159

Review of Alan Morris’s 1996 Patrick Modiano, pp. 237-238.

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4(i) Quartier perdu (1984): a Dreamlike Unity Quartier perdu is an extremely dreamlike text, and is highly humorous and overtly artificial, while nonetheless allowing painful feelings to be forcefully conveyed. Ultimately, the text is relatively open about the main reasons for its narrator’s emotional trauma, although it does play on detective novel conventions in respect of autobiographical divulgation, forcing readers to become detectives themselves. Intertextual references to Proust spotlight the selfconscious nature of this remembering process, especially Rocroy’s address of 45, rue de Courcelles, which was one of Proust’s addresses (and which previously appeared in Livret de famille).160 On an authorial level, the suggestion that Guise’s narrative may itself be the ninth Jarvis text, just as Quartier perdu is Modiano’s ninth major work, hints to biographically attuned readers that they are dealing with another ‘detective novel’ in terms of the author’s biographical details. As with Guise, the reasons for Modiano’s own personal pain can be relatively fully decoded, although this admittedly requires some effort. Guise the detective novelist suggests that his next novel will be an autobiography (22), which ends up being the text he provides for his readers. This ‘autobiographical’ text lacks nothing in detective atmosphere, with its crime, its hints of murder surrounding Blin and Maillot’s deaths, Hurel’s aura of restrained menace, the ‘mystérieux chuchotements’ (120), Guise’s sunglasses with their ‘verres à miroir’, and general suggestions of dark doings. However, as Marja Warehime has pointed out, the crime which should be at the centre of the detective plot is hardly mysterious – the shooting of Ludo Fouquet – as the narrator knows who perpetrated it and why.161 The real centre of the plot is the loss of Carmen and Rocroy, and the reader must work hard to establish this secret unity. The names Guise and Dekker are symbolically resonant of versions, disguises, and coverings, the latter being no doubt a reference to the German word decken/dekken, meaning ‘to cover’ or ‘cover up’, as well as a reference to the Baron Deyckecaire of Les Boulevards de ceinture, an Albert Modiano representative. The latter resonance suggests, once again, the importance of Modiano senior in the writer’s life, as well as the notion of dual identity, the son having 160

Morris 1996, p. 124, note 7. ‘Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Rue des Boutiques obscures, Quartier perdu, Dimanches d’août, and Fleurs de ruine’, p. 42. 161

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appropriated part of the father’s identity for fictional and autobiographical ends.162 As Guyot-Bender has pointed out, the group of friends in this text are connected to the notorious ‘Bande de la Pompe’.163 It is typical of Modiano to provide such connections for a story in which his first-person narrator endeavours to produce an autobiographical text. In doing so, he is not only indirectly reminding readers of unpalatable historical events with which he feels connected, but is also stressing, as in so many of his texts, the links between his own hazy sense of identity and the mysterious and ambiguous past of his father. It is significant in this respect that the narrator produces what can ultimately be seen as a written fiction about his past, as this is all that Modiano can provide in relation to Albert Modiano’s activities and the ‘années noires’ in general. There is also a sense that much personal pain is being alluded to. Death figures strongly, in the form of both suicide and murder. We will be mainly focusing here on the notion of pain relating to personal grief, as this is the strongest emotional force in the text. Despite the darkness in the background of this text, Modiano manages to infuse it with his brand of ironic humour. Initially, when Dekker-alias-Guise first mentions the idea of autobiography, and the possibility that the ninth Jarvis novel may be ‘un livre de souvenirs’, he appears to be light-hearted about the idea. ‘Il s’agirait d’une sorte de portrait de l’artiste par lui-même,’ he says, ‘en tâchant de garder [s]on sérieux’ (22). The text is ridden with absurdities such as Tintin Carpentieri’s nightly chase of the ghost of Georges Maillot around Paris, Hurel’s ridiculous concern for ‘Madame’’s precious sleep, and small, preposterous details such as the stuffed giraffe in Carmen’s apartment ‘qui se dressait solitaire au milieu de l’ancienne salle à manger’ (109). The names Tintin Carpentieri and Yoko Tatsuké are highly improbable (even for the multiple-text reader, who is aware of Modiano’s penchant for historical figures with colourful names). In addition to such humorous touches, the text is highly ludic in its play on the reader’s attempt to disentangle dream and imagination from fictional ‘reality’ and to establish clear time-levels. 162

The allusive reference to Baroness Emmuska Orczy, whose villa Guise has bought and whom he calls ‘ma marraine littéraire en quelque sorte’ (28), subtly links the notion of identity with detective novel conventions. Orczy not only wrote the Scarlet Pimpernel novels, whose themes hinge on dual identity and disguise, but also exploited the detective novel genre in Lady Molly of Scotland Yard. 163 ‘Making Sense of Narrative Ambiguity’, p. 19.

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A sense that this humour may be an hysterical one on the narrator’s part stems from the emotions concerning the loss of the narrator’s past friends, specifically Carmen and Rocroy, both of whom seem to be connected with Modiano’s parents. The text is at one point presented as a letter to Rocroy (128), who is on several occasions described as a father figure (127, 153). His death may commemorate that of Albert Modiano, who died in 1978. The death of Carmen can also be seen to commemorate that of Modiano’s father, as she died five years before the narrator starts his autobiographical project (161), and this text was published in 1984, approximately five years after Albert’s death. Carmen may also be a substitute mother figure, given the fifteen-year age gap between her and the narrator. (Luisa Colpeyn does, however, seem to be still alive, according to the 2003 Paris phonebook). To complete the family references, the motif of the split self conjures up the death of Rudy. Dekker/Guise calls his French self his twin brother (181), and his hint of past ‘crimes’, also brings Rudy to mind, recalling Modiano’s feelings of survivor guilt. (However, if Dekker is viewed as a father-brother amalgamation, these ‘crimes’ also evoke, once more, a view of the parent generation as having been at fault in the ‘années noires’.). Even for the reader unaware of the biographical resonances there is a strong undercurrent of sadness, forcefully reasserted at the end of the text by the narrator’s statement that ‘à partir d’aujourd’hui, je veux ne plus me souvenir de rien’ (184). Early in the text it is suggested that Dekker/Guise has repressed the fact of Rocroy’s suicide, and by extension also that of Carmen’s death. Towards the beginning he states: ‘La mort de Rocroy m’avait laissé indifférent. Et maintenant, avec cinq ans de retard, elle me causait une douleur et un regret comme de quelque chose qui n’avait pas trouvé de réponse’, suggesting that this pain and regret were always there, but needed time to worry themselves out in expression (33). Guise’s return to Paris in order to try to elucidate ‘toutes les questions qui sont demeurées en suspens’ seems to symbolize the autobiographical impulse to re-examine hidden feelings and to work through them (29). It seems, however, that the narrator must replicate the conditions of a dream in order to allow the fact of Carmen’s death and his response to the loss of Rocroy to surface, as we shall see. We shall also see that the dream sometimes has aspects of nightmare, in its power to reawaken painful feelings thought to be dead. The title of the text is, as so often with Modiano’s texts, intriguingly polysemic. It evokes the quart d’année perdu, the three

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months of the Carmen period that were ‘lost’ in the narrator’s memory, and as such resonates with the most frequent usage of the term: ‘un quartier perdu de Paris’, which can be translated as ‘a remote or outlying area’, almost a ‘forgotten’ one. These connotations are both ironic and laden with ethical imperatives, given that the 17th arrondissement (with its associations with Modiano’s father) where much of the action takes place was the centre of so much ambiguous French and German behaviour during the Occupation, and that these deeds are generally forgotten, including those of the ‘bande de la Pompe’. However, in typically Modianesque fashion, these references are far from obvious, rather forming part of the clues to be worked out from this ‘detective novel’. The title also carries resonances of the idea of something positive that is now lost, since to have ‘quartier libre’ means to have a respite, usually in the sense of permission to absent oneself from the army, and ‘donner quartier à quelqu’un’ means to spare someone’s life. If these connotations are taken into account it would seem that liberation can be achieved by focusing on memory, but that it can only ever be temporary. However, true to the ironic undecidability typical of Modiano, there is also a sense that liberation can be achieved by repressing memory, though this too cannot last. While Guise obtains a sense of release by confronting his past, symbolized, as in Vestiaire de l’enfance, by the abating of uncomfortable heat, he ends his text, as mentioned, with a wish for amnesia. However, it is unclear whether he will be able to indulge his wish, especially given the fact that the text may well be an entirely retrospective narrative, as we shall see. Perhaps the most important element in the ‘perdu’ of the title, is the idea of the unattainability of what was once experienced, so that whatever truth is propounded or accessed can only ever be an imagined one. As the narrator states early on: ‘On ne revient jamais au point de départ’ (13). Loss and change are also emphasized in the narrator’s frequent reflections on the split between his Guise and Dekker personas, underlining the lack of unity of the self. His ‘je’ is not singular in the sense of unified, but is singular in the sense of strange. This is a gesture to Modiano’s own sense of having lost part of himself, while also feeling oddly inhabited by other selves, especially that of his father, due to his imaginative identification with him. In relation to Guise’s lost past self, elements of it survive, as indicated in the narrator’s choice of assumed name – he is still Dekker, but in another Guise. This implies that something of the past may be accessed. Let us now look at how this accessing of the past is

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presented in the ‘mélange ironique et douloureux d’imprécision calculée’ of Quartier perdu.164

Dreamlikeness and ‘the Emotional Reality Effect’ Much of the text is suffused with what Jean-Claude Joye calls ‘une atmosphère d’irréalité farfelue’.165 On the very first page, Guise refers to his British passport as ‘vert pâle, orné de deux lions d’or’, although this should, of course, be a lion and a unicorn on a dark navy or wine background. Guise talks of feeling a ‘sentiment d’irréalité’ on his arrival in Paris (11).166 His vision of ‘une ombre en costume de Peter Pan’ – a nod to the Peter Pans in Poupée Blonde – and the surreal young men in the Tuileries gardens, who all have the same short hair and moustaches, adds to this sense of strange happenings (11). Critics have been quick to point out other improbabilities and apparent errors in the text, such as the Klosters telephone number with a wildly incorrect local code, or the fact that the narrator apparently buys a newspaper with no money (111-112). The ‘Flaminio’ pizzas eaten by Tatsuké and Guise merge in surreal fashion with the white Lancia, which is a Flaminia.167 At times the narrator explicitly suggests he is creating characters and events, as when he wonders: ‘Tintin existait-il vraiment?, or whether the music he hears from his hotel room in Paris is not perhaps ‘simplement dans [s]a tête’ (65, 125). When Tintin cannot inform him as to what happened to Carmen, he says he does not need anyone’s help and will find out on his own, and thus perhaps by recourse to imagination: ‘je pouvais trouver par moi-même ce qu’était devenue Carmen. Non, je n’avais pas besoin de ce vague comparse pour me renseigner’ (my emphasis: 76). The overt references to magic in Guise’s narrative likewise suggest that this world is to a large extent in the control of the guiding consciousness of the narrator. These references include the hotel porter’s statement to the narrator that ‘n’importe lequel de vos désirs peut être exaucé’ (45), and the ‘coup de baguette magique’ which seems to have transformed 164

‘Typicité modianienne de Quartier perdu’, p. 89. Ibid, p. 104. 166 Prince has talked of an ‘unreality effect’ in connection with Modiano’s novels, and Kawakami speaks of an ‘effet d’irréel’. ‘Re-Membering Modiano: Or, Something Happened’, p. 43, and A Self-Conscious Art, especially pp. 52-56. 167 See also Colin Davis, ‘Disenchanted Places: Patrick Modiano’s Quartier perdu and Recent French Fiction’, pp. 667-676. Also see Kawakami (pp. 49-59) for a brief application of the ‘effet d’irréel’ to Quartier perdu. 165

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the child film-star of Guise’s youth, who seems to be a version of ‘la Petite Bijou’ (57, 62). A sense that the narrator is the metteur en scène in his dreamlike scenario, and that the secondary characters are the actors, is encouraged by the cinematic imagery in the text, hinting that the characters are playing roles that have been mapped out for them. Tintin is twice mentioned as a bit-part (64, 76), and Hayward’s apartment on the night the narrator met ‘la fille brune’ resembles ‘un plateau de cinéma’ (168). (As Morris has pointed out, lighting effects in Modiano’s novels are often cinematic, and this novel is no exception).168 A suggestion of ghostliness is attached to all of the characters in the text, apparently indicating that they are imagined. The dead Georges Maillot’s nightly appearance in his white Lancia is highly improbable, and the photograph Tintin takes of him registers only his coat, as befits a ghost.169 Tintin himself also seems to be a ghost, as the telephone number Guise finds for him is no longer in use, suggesting that he appeared only in imagination (86). When Ghita emerges from the dark with a suspicious scarf around her neck ‘qui semblait cacher une blessure’, the reader is led to wonder the same thing of her (38). The narrator’s vision of ‘la fille brune’ at the end also has many spectral aspects. Though the woman claims she has just come back from holidays in the South, her face is pale, and like Ghita, she bears a scar. (This ‘cicatrice’ is one of several scars, recalling that of Perec, to appear in Modiano’s texts, usually on women’s faces).170 Guise calls this ‘la marque du temps, peut-être’, but it could by extension symbolize the wound of death. The final paragraph commencing ‘Elle revient de plus loin encore’ seems to suggest that this ‘plus loin encore’ is in fact the depths of memory whence she is recreated in imagination, foreshadowing the title of Du plus loin de l’oubli of twelve years later. The narrator also likens himself to a ghost early on in the narrative, wondering: ‘Et si le fantôme c’était moi?’ (11). In true ghostly fashion he fears the light – at least until he has confronted his past. He is in fact triply ghost-like. Guise is the ghost of Dekker, even though Dekker is not completely dead. Like the author, the narrator is 168

Morris 2000, p. 98. See also Franck Salaün, ‘La Suisse du coeur’, p. 31. Alain Bony, in ‘Suite en blanc’, has made an exhaustive inventory of the motifs of light and darkness in Quartier perdu, Rue des Boutiques obscures, and De si braves garçons. 169 Maillot’s very name seems to have been taken from one of the entrances into the 17th arrondissement, the Porte Maillot. 170 See also Quartier perdu, Fleurs de ruine, and La Petite Bijou.

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also an imagined ghost to the reader – the ghost behind the creation of these other ghostly figures, and he also appears to have created a ghostly self for himself in imagination and memory. He is also, of course, haunted by the ghost of Albert Modiano, and by the past in general. As noted by Prince, it is often impossible to determine the number of narrating instances (and especially the different times of narration) in Modiano’s work.171 Time certainly becomes virtually impossible to delineate in this text. Though the narrator often talks of diving into the well of the past, or of travelling back in time, it is often unclear which past is being discussed – the past (imagined or real) of the events of the return to Paris, or the past of the Carmen era. It seems most logical to see the narrative as entirely retrospective, but this becomes clear only after an initial reading, once the existence of a retrospectively imposed unity can be established. ‘Et si le passé et le présent se mêlaient?’, asks Guise when he decides to write about his memories of Carmen and her group (87), summing up the reader’s confusion concerning temporality. One possible indication that the narrative is a retrospective one occurs at the very start, when the narrator’s arrival in Paris takes place ‘un dimanche, à deux heures de l’après-midi’ (9). Likewise, his commencement of his autobiographical narrative occurs ‘ce matin-là’, also seeming to indicate a certain distance from the events described (87). However, these events are also accompanied by statements in the present tense: ‘c’est étrange d’entendre parler français’, and ‘Je sais ce qu’il me reste à faire’ (9, 87). The lovemaking with ‘la fille brune’ in la Varenne, and the train journey that brings the narrator to Paris to meet Carmen also seem to have occurred in the past yet are narrated in the present tense (173-174, 101). This use of the present tense to describe apparently past events points out the persistent nature of the past, in line with the phrase ‘Présence du passé’ the narrator finds in a list of the day’s events in Paris (14). The latter phrase also gestures to the performative nature of memory – the fact that remembering always takes place in the present. Furthermore, the blurring of time levels heightens the impression that, for Guise, the life of the mind is not clearly distinguishable from external reality. This is clearest when the narrator seems to be 171

See Prince’s ‘Re-Membering Modiano: Or, Something Happened’. Prince singles out Livret de famille, Rue des Boutiques obscures, and De si braves garçons, but this text, Vestiaire de l’enfance and La Petite Bijou are just as problematic.

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simultaneously inhabiting the apartment in the rue de Courcelles, his room in the hôtel Triumph twenty years previously, and his room in Hammersmith (86-87). All of this reinforces the reader’s sense that the visit to Paris may not have taken place anywhere other than in the narrator’s mind. The dreamlike nature of the text plays a large part in asserting the validity of imagination. While references to ‘waking up’ give the illusion of the ability to distinguish reality from dream, the existence of dreams within dreams actually makes it impossible to tell waking life from imagined experience, just as it is impossible to tell past from present. Matters are further complicated by the fact that the Carmen period seemed dreamlike at the time (177). It is thus impossible to speak of reality clearly framing a dream in this text. There seems rather to be one long dream with various time levels, even though this ‘dream’ is at times a hyper-realistic one, given the precise nature of the remembered details from the Rocroy dossier and the general topographical exactitude. The reader is effectively encouraged to give up, and to accept that the life of the mind is as valid for Guise as external reality, and to accept the impossibility of distinguishing between the two. The most important ‘reality effect’ is that of emotional reality, both for Guise and the reader. Despite the playfulness and selfconsciousness of the text, the reader is given ample opportunity to connect with the characters. The internal focalization of the narrator produces an effect of intimacy and adds to his human presence. An emotional force is created by the emphasis on the drama of ageing, losing one’s friends and sensing one’s mortality, which is touched on delicately throughout the text and summed up forcefully, though obliquely, in small bursts. Tatsuké’s nostalgia for his past love is also dealt with delicately. There is a strong sense that Guise desperately desires to reconnect with former friends, many of whose lives have been touched by tragedy. Rocroy commits suicide. Maillot seems ‘rongé de l’intérieur’ (150). The narrator sees Carmen as a lost little girl (136). The reader is ultimately led to see that the truth of what has been recounted is an affective one, underlain by a deep sadness. For the biographically attuned reader, who can decode the Rocroy/Carmen/lost ‘twin’ brother references, this bolsters a sense of Modiano’s own trauma relating to loss of loved ones, and his desire to forge new family connections in fiction, as well as his sadness about the broader events of the past.

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Leading, Being Led, and the ‘unité secrète’ Despite the sense described above of the narrator as controller, it is equally clear that the narrator is himself controlled by guiding forces, and by the very figures he has conjured up in memory and imagination. Rocroy and many of the other characters seem to know what he will ultimately do. Ghita contributes to his confronting the heat of the past, as it is she who tells him to leave the lights on and the windows open in the apartment, and the ensuing heat, though unpleasant at first, is ultimately purifying (85). True, Guise reads her thoughts on one occasion (40), but her own awareness of Guise’s thoughts also seems clear towards the end of the novel when she advises him to look up the phone book, seeming to know that he wants to contact ‘la fille brune’ (182). There, after twenty years, he finds the number of ‘la fille brune’ as if by magic. The hotel porter seems to push Guise towards Hayward, who informs him of Carmen’s death, by repeatedly giving him Hayward’s card with a knowing smile. It is thus clear that the narrator too is an actor in this scenario he has created for himself (partly unconsciously and partly consciously), and that all of these characters by their actions and words are aiding him to face and work through these deaths. In the light of the ‘unité secrète’ (87) of this narrative – Guise’s obsession with Carmen and Rocroy and with their deaths – it is significant that all of the characters seem to be pervaded by elements of the narrator’s two older friends, both of whom seem to lead ‘plusieurs vies en même temps’ (40). The narrator’s memory of Carmen seems to have been conflated with his imaginings concerning Ghita, in whom she lives on. Both are blonde and are described in white bathrobes (38, 116), and both are involved in apparently erotic encounters with the narrator followed by suggestive blanks in the narrative (44, 120). Carmen also survives in the narrator’s picture of ‘la fille brune’, as both women ask the narrator whether he is a student (96, 169), and ask their taxi drivers for pen and paper (97, 171). The black and white tiling and the secret area in Rocroy’s apartment, from where the narrator presents himself as writing, echo the tiling and the ‘couloir secret’ in Carmen’s apartment (49, 105, 107). Rocroy, with his ‘quelque chose de japonais’ seems to be reincarnated in Tatsuké, whose impassiveness and way of smoking he shares (15, 40). He even seems to merge with Ghita, as the nameplate ‘de Rocroy-Wattier’ suggests (37). The mysterious pagoda that keeps appearing may also be a manifestation of Rocroy, since he frequently used to receive

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clients posing in the doorway of the round room of the rue de Courcelles, against the background of this building (41). Significantly, Guise’s realization that he must confront his past by writing about it is preceded by a view of this pagoda (87). Multiple-text readers can extend the narrator’s problems and manner of proceeding to those of the author himself. That the author is teasing the reader in this respect is made clear by Rocroy’s ‘autobiographical’ mode of reading of Guise’s detective novels, and his comment that: ‘J’ai l’impression que vous vous êtes servi de votre propre expérience pour décrire le monde interlope où navigue votre héros’ (31). The narrator’s mother, like Modiano’s at one time, was a chorus girl, and while she is presented as English, not Flemish, her home town is referred to in capital letters in the tour bus logo: ‘DE GROTE REISEN ANTWERPEN’. Like Modiano, Dekker/Guise was born in July 1945 in Boulogne Billancourt (though on the 25th, not the 30th), spent his childhood on the ‘rive gauche’, attended a ‘collège’ in Haute Savoie, and was a drifting, homeless twenty-year old whom everyone presumed was a student. Also like his creator, Dekker/Guise is ‘de haute taille’, timid, and prone to vague fears (85, 94). His wife is a ‘délicieuse femme brune’ (30), like Modiano’s wife Dominique. The more subtle and pervasive of the autobiographical references have already been described. Taken as a whole, these references underline, for biographically attuned readers, the strong presence of Modiano’s family in the text. Such readers can better decode the feelings of loss and split selves in connection with parental distance and the deaths of both Rudy and his father, and the hint that the narrator’s romantic love for Carmen may be a fictionalized yearning for maternal affection. Multiple-text readers will also be aware that Modiano seems, in this text, to be rehabilitating his neglectful parents in fiction, since the substitute parent figures of Carmen and Rocroy are kind-hearted and caring ones. The detail of the autobiographical markers in the text is ultimately far less important than the pain that is worked through. True, the author seems to be mocking his own psychoses through this Modianesque (dis)Guise, using it to laugh at his own anguish about the past, his nostalgia for lost loved ones, and his problems of identity. Even when the narrator is at ease he can feel ‘un léger – oh, bien léger – sentiment d’angoisse’, in an ironic comment by the author on himself and on his over-anxious narrators (109). However, although Modiano mocks these psychoses, he also deals with them, to an extent, in fiction. For biographically aware readers, the Rendez-vous

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de juillet film (a film within the ‘film’ of Quartier perdu) refers to Modiano’s birth month. (Epitextually informed readers will also be aware that Modiano’s mother figured in a 1949 film of this name by Jacques Becker). As such, the writing process and the imaginary characters conjured up by writing may be leading both Guise and Modiano towards a ‘rebirth’ in fiction, just as the characters guide Guise towards greater self-knowledge. While it is true that the blurring of ‘present’ and ‘past’ events is difficult for the narrator (albeit sometimes momentarily comforting) – a difficulty summed up in his statement that: ‘C’est avec ma sueur que j’écris’ (123) – his dreaming does seem to afford some release, symbolized by the abating of the intense heat. And while the apparently retrospective nature of the narrative means that painful memory has not disappeared, it has been partially worked through. Fiction becomes autobiography and autobiography becomes fiction, and the text as a whole leads the reader to reflect on the affective clarity produced by imagination. This is as true for the author as it is for the narrator. Modiano has touched on his own traumas relating to death and loss in fictional form (which means that this narrative is now part of Modiano’s self), and the narrator’s story is true for him in the light of his present consciousness. The emotions felt and conveyed may in any case be the only accessible truth.

4(ii) Vestiaire de l’enfance (1989): Silent Fireworks As an autobiographer-narrator, the narrator of Vestiaire de l’enfance raises issues concerning the conflation of memory and imagination (both deliberate and unwitting, and, on an historical level, inescapable), and demonstrates the power of retention of information held by those who write about their lives. This discussion of the text focuses on three main issues: the fictionalization of self that occurs in the restructuring of memory to form narratives shaped by one’s own desires (including the desire to avoid certain matters), the ultimately nefarious effects of the repression of memory, and the secretiveness of the narrator, all of which apply to Modiano’s own autobiographical practice. Like Dekker/Guise in Quartier perdu, this Jean Moreno,172 in his new identity as Jimmy Sarano, is led to reflect on elements of his 172

Moreno’s name is partly a ‘crime novel’ touch, conjuring up Dario Moreno (see entry number 228 in Perec’s Je me souviens), who in typically Modianesque fashion mixed with gangsters and died in mysterious circumstances.

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past after many years of repression of memory, yet he remains, along with Guy Roland of Rue des Boutiques obscures, the emptiest of Modiano’s narrators.173 The typically Modianesque ‘sensation de vide’ he experiences seems here mainly explicable as the price he must pay for repressing the past. When Sarano comes to try fill the ‘vide’ by opening up to the past, deciding to make it part of his present life on meeting Marie, he constructs a reality that may be completely unfounded. Like Modiano himself, he connects with people lost in the past by means of imagination. In his hypothesis concerning Marie he momentarily cancels the ‘cassure’ in his life caused by his parting from ‘la petite’ and her mother, both of whom seem equally important in his life, the latter appearing to be an Oedipal substitute for Sarano’s own actressmother. As such, he is challenging the swimming pool attendant’s mournful declaration that ‘les choses ne recommencent jamais’ (89). Yet his narrative steers clear of dwelling on the issues that, through subtle textual clues, seem to haunt him. Pressing questions remain unsolved in this text, concerning the nature of the car accident, Sarano’s reasons for leaving Rose-Marie and ‘la petite’, and the importance of his childhood in his psychological make-up. The latter issue is merely hinted at, romantic love and desire being most overtly in focus, but seems highly significant given Sarano’s identification with ‘la petite’ in later life, and the foregrounding of childhood in the title. However, most of these issues remain on the level of suggestion in this dreamlike narrative. Sarano is well aware of his own obsession with ‘le thème de la survie des personnes disparues’ (12), symbolized by the ‘interminable feuilleton radiophonique’ entitled ‘Les Aventures de Louis XVII’ in which he imagines potential lives for the missing heir to the throne. In creating a narrative linking Marie with his past, he is creating a survival strategy and a hypothetical life for ‘la petite’ and for RoseMarie (of whom the young woman seems to be an amalgam, as her associations with imagery of childhood and her very name indicate), just as he does for the Dauphin. The link with Rudy Modiano as one of the real-life models for ‘la petite’ is clear (the other main model being Modiano himself, as has been underlined by his recent 173

Kawakami speaks of Modiano’s ‘degré zéro narrators’ in her discussion of Vestiaire de l’enfance (A Self-Conscious Art, pp. 14-24). See also Mitchell and Côté, ‘Writing and Vacuity: Vestiaire de l’enfance’, in Shaping the Novel: Textual Interplay in the Fiction of Malraux, Hébert and Modiano, pp. 178-189.

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identification with a similar ‘petite’ in La Petite Bijou). This text comes directly after Remise de peine which contains Modiano’s most direct autobiographical revelations so far, especially in relation to the death of Rudy. Vestiaire de l’enfance is, by contrast, an almost parodic return to the Modiano model of a highly fictional format where family traumas survive only in trace form and oblique references. Only the multiple-text or biographically informed reader can piece together the autobiographical clues provided by the presence of childhood, the ‘impression de vide’, traumatic maternal figures, the text’s insistent doubling motifs, Sarano’s split self, and his hauntedness by guilt-feelings. Part of the reader’s sense that something is being hidden in respect to the narrator’s childhood and adolescence arises from the term ‘vestiaire’ (suggesting a dressing room) along with the word ‘enfance’ in the title. In context, this calls up the two actress-mothers in the text, and the pain caused to their children by neglect. For the autobiographically aware reader, this of course hints at the maternal abandonment perceived by Modiano himself, as the actress RoseMarie is a glamourous, older woman, like Modiano’s own actressmother, as well as highlighting the general importance of childhood. Like Sarano/Moreno, the term ‘vestiaire’ itself is split, evoking both cloak-rooms and changing-rooms, which call up, respectively, a sense of divesting oneself of something (whether the burden of unexplored memory or clearer memories) but also of putting something on (the cloak of fiction). The associations with the idea of theatre-going suggest the narrator/author is attending a performance of issues in his own life, albeit one that skirts its main events. This rich allusiveness stresses the narrator’s oblique approach to self-narration, and his tendency to see things in terms of multiple, intertwined strands, while also highlighting his secretiveness. Here, the temporary escape from oppression by the past afforded by the remembrance/imagining of experiences is mitigated by the fact that so many things seem to be being avoided and deflected by the creation of the Marie fiction. It ultimately seems that Sarano’s fictionalization of his experiences, though it does allow a certain release, is less liberation than self-deception.

Imagining Memories For the attentive reader, a sense that Sarano is most probably reconstructing memory in the light of the present grows as the narrative progresses. As with the reader’s sense of fictionalization in

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Livret de famille, this has to do with improbability. The fact that details of the Rosal bar and the Alvear hotel of the town in which he lives echo so exactly the café Gavarni and the Moncey Hôtel of his childhood suggests fictionalization. Sarano states as much towards the end of his narrative, admitting that his memory of the Moncey Hôtel may not be faithful, and may be informed by his fantasy about Marie’s hotel room (119). Here we see the present restructuring the past, just as Sarano’s past informs the present. Many of the most important images in the text may well be imagined rather than remembered. The key image of the ‘corbeille de fruits’ abandoned on the seat of a bus is given great symbolic importance by Sarano, to the extent that he makes sure it is mentioned on the ‘Appels dans la nuit’ radio programme. However, even this image seems likely to be an imaginative construction, as Sarano’s affirmation of this ‘retrieved memory’ comes a few lines after his admission of the role of imagination in his memory of the Moncey hotel room. That his memory is defective does not help his credibility – he has only recently admitted that ‘mes souvenirs se brouillent’ (117, 113). He presents his memory of ‘la petite’ asleep on the seat of the bus as having imprinted itself clearly on his brain, though it took twenty years to develop: ‘en vingt ans cette image s’est imposée à moi et brouille maintenant par son éclat tout ce qui l’entourait […] Je la vois si bien, ses cheveux châtain clair contre le cuir rouge’ (119). The reader is entitled, and indeed subtly encouraged, to wonder whether this ‘seeing’ stems from memory or imagination. Even if these images are not imagined, they may be superimposed memories, like the memories of his own childhood the narrator fears he may be conflating with his picture of himself accompanying ‘la petite’ to the Saint-Maurice cinema studios (141). Sarano’s memory of Beauchamp also becomes merged with that of his father (142), a man physically similar to Albert Modiano, with his slicked-back dark hair. This merging of various figures, along with the narrator’s uncertainty as to chronology and feelings of ‘intemporalité’ (140, 17), reflects the reader’s own impression of a constant blurring of past and present, and creates a sense of what Joyce Carleton, in a discussion of Livret de Famille, calls the ‘tenuous, unsubstantial, even dreamlike quality of persons and things’.174 This dreamlikeness is reinforced by the many references to cinema, especially the 174

‘Livret de famille’, p. 673.

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structuring motif of the ‘film muet’, a clever choice of symbol, as dreams often appear to be silent films.175 Just as the narrator suggests that he may by conflating his childhood memories with his memories of ‘la petite’, hence intensifying the reader’s impression that the little girl is a means by which he can explore his own experience of maternal abandonment by proxy, conflation may also be occurring between Sarano, Marie, Rudy, and Patrick Modiano, all of whom are in different respects ‘lost children’. The many references to Marie as a child-woman support this hypothesis. The conflation between Marie and Rudy – or at least between Rudy and ‘la petite’ – is particularly strong for readers mindful of the above reference to a twenty-year period and aware of the twenty years that separate Modiano’s first attempts to write about Rudy in fiction and this 1989 text. One of the reasons the author has focused on this love for a child-figure (albeit one distanced in many respects, including through gender) may thus be in order to cancel his feelings of loss concerning Rudy. Interestingly, the narrator on one occasion describes himself as a ‘grand frère’ with respect to the ‘petite’ (82). The fact that Sarano in his Moreno days was a writer of fiction, having published ‘quelques romans à Paris’, should in theory be enough to put readers on their guard concerning the narrator’s propensity for invention (21). The very existence of this RadioMundial peopled with phantoms who have turned their backs on their past is improbable. As Sirvent puts it near the end of the novel: ‘On finit par douter de l’existence de Radio-Mundial’ (133). Likewise, the fact that its geographical location is clearly an amalgamation of Tangiers, Gibraltar and other Mediterranean locations, coupled with intertextual references to L’Étranger – an ‘empty’ narrator, the heat, the beach, the name Marie – imply not only a self-conscious author but also a narrator aware of his debts to other fictions.176 However despite these clues and the more direct indications that Sarano may be imagining things, that his memory is fallible, and that the present is reshaping the past, readers tend to suspend their disbelief and share the narrator’s fantasy that Marie was ‘la petite’. 175

See also the references to the studios Saint-Maurice (141, 143). I am indebted to Kawakami for these insights into the Camus links. Kawakami also points out the link to Camus’s La Chute, and stresses the postmodern emptiness of Sarano, who is filled up with narrative. The use of the name Marie may also indicate a desire by Modiano to include his second daughter, also called Marie, in his works. 176

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Textual clues concerning fictionalization by the narrator impose themselves only gradually. The reader is even led to forget the doubt expressed at the start as to whether Marie is in fact Rose-Marie’s daughter. Actual discordances between ‘la petite’ and Marie are introduced into the narrative in an off-hand manner, and only the most attentive of readers will notice that ‘la petite’ had light-brown hair and that Marie is blonde (119, 92). The discrepancy in age is not mentioned until close to the end of the narrative, where Sarano seems to feel the need to reaffirm the hypothetical nature of the story he has constructed, stating: ‘Cette fille de l’hôtel Alvear était-elle l’enfant que j’avais connu rue Fontaine? En dépit du front et du regard, l’âge ne correspondait pas exactement et la coïncidence aurait été trop romanesque…’ (128). Here he is underlining both the unreliability of his narrative and his own desire to believe his own fiction (while also reminding readers of the ability of story-tellers to instil at least temporary belief in their tales). The force of this reminder lies in the fact that it comes at the end of the story, where the hypothesis concerning Marie is at its strongest because the narrator’s belief in it seems to have survived so long. Yet even Sarano’s fictional constructs contain clues to the past, and to past and present emotion.

Emotion and its Repression The figure of the geriatric ‘insecte’, a retired writer repeatedly referred to as the narrator’s ‘confrère’, seems to be a vector for much selfdisgust on Sarano’s part concerning the eternal present in which he and the other inhabitants of this dream town live. Early in the novel, the narrator’s contempt for the aura of automation attached to this ‘insecte’ is linked to contempt for his own present existence: ‘Les mêmes gestes, les mêmes trajets de mon domicile à Radio-Mundial, deux ou trois chapitres ajoutés aux Aventures de Louis XVII sans qu’ils modifient le cours du feuilleton, les mouvements de yoga de mon confrère sur la terrasse, son déclic du bras pour porter la fourchette à sa bouche…’ (35). The narrator’s ‘confrère’ revolts him most for his greedy espousal of a routine, his composure and his apparent lack of emotion: ‘l’absence totale d’un organe qui se fatigue très vite: le cœur’ (98). Sarano too has done his best to allow his heart – a seat of confusing and painful emotions – to wither. In the eternal present of Radio-Mundial, Sarano no longer feels emotion, not even the vague feeling of guilt felt for a while after the ‘accident’ that led him to leave France. It is only an external impetus – Marie’s resemblance to ‘la petite’ – that allows memory and emotion

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to be stirred up. The ‘non-assistance à personne en danger’ that his crime seems to have entailed (98) is an echo of his lack of solidarity with ‘la petite’, which, in his re-found ability to feel emotion, he deplores. As he himself was also ‘en danger’ at one point, himself ‘un enfant perdu’ (112), it also underlines the sense of personal emotional injury caused by others’ neglect of himself, while also evoking the loss of Rudy for biographically attuned readers, just as his ‘crime’ may reflect his feelings of being forced to stand by helplessly as his brother died from leukemia. His actress-mother has a strange relationship with him, and her lack of time for him and the hostility of her approach surface in the few pages where he talks about her hysterical concern that he should not lose his ‘blouson de daim’ (7678). However the emotions behind the idea of the ‘enfant perdu’ are mainly displaced into anger at the treatment of ‘la petite’ and into desire for Marie. Sarano is even more secretive than the narrator of Quartier perdu. In barely hinting at past injuries, he is, like Sirvent, ‘fuyant’ (49) – fleeing something in his past which he never quite explains. Whether the narrator’s deepest hurt comes from his sense of guilt at whatever happened in the car accident, from having been neglected as a child, or from the ‘cassure’ with Rose-Marie and ‘la petite,’ there is a strong sense of the nefarious nature of emotional emptiness in the text. A Meursalt-like lack of emotion is presented as stifling and ultimately damaging. Although considerable irony is manifested about pouring out one’s ‘souvenirs personnels’, even Sirvent and Mercadié are oppressed by the emptiness of their lives. The latter seems to find a brief release in an emotional outpouring, before returning to his former reserved state (125, 129). Importantly, Sarano’s willing espousal of emptiness seems to have damaged his memories of the past, as they are less than complete, and come back to him in inadequate fragments, their source often no longer identifiable. ‘J’espère vous voir bientôt’ is a particularly weighty example (127), expressing a desire for reunion with those who have disappeared. It even seems as though the present has become less real through repression of memory. Significantly, the red seats of the Rosal in this strange town where Sarano is writing are in imitation leather (‘en moleskine’), as if his existence there is somehow fake, whereas the red seats of the bus where the ‘petite’ held her basket of candied fruit are in real leather, which stresses the reality of that emotionally forceful memory despite its imaginative reworking.

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Emptiness induces a sort of existential panic in Sarano, which assails him when he is most alone. It is at siesta-time, when the streets are at their emptiest, that fear grips him and he must repeat his name, address and occupation to himself, like so many Modiano narrators. Like the empty base of the Cruz-Valer statue, Moreno sometimes seems to have vanished along with memory, leaving a terrifying gap. However, just as the statue’s base remains, the remains of the narrator’s past self are weighty, often frighteningly so. While conscious remembering does provide a kind of liberation, symbolized by the abating of the heat once Sarano decides to tell his story, the difficulty of confronting his past is also brought across very strongly. The difficulty is symbolized by the discomfort produced by the baking heat, as is most clear in the beach scene where the narrator denies to the journalist that he is Jean Moreno. Despite fearing emptiness, Sarano is also drawn towards it, as is clear from his wish at one point to embrace a certain kind of blankness, by breaking free of the past and becoming a tramp (135). Imagination seems ultimately less painful than memory for Sarano. However, even fiction, such as that of the Marie hypothesis, brings its share of pain, as it contains traces of the past self. The fact that Sarano abandoned fiction-writing when he left his past life behind, and his aim simply to ‘recopier’ other people’s texts in future (a nod perhaps to Modiano’s own practice of intertextuality), suggest that any writing imbued with subjectivity may be painful to him. One of the phrases that come back to him from his past is his friend Gérard’s admonishment to him as a young man not to become a writer: ‘Mais mon vieux, tu vas te ruiner la santé’ (88). Remembering helps to keep wounds open. In W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Perec states that the writing of this autobiographical text reasserted his link with his parents but also reasserted their absence.177 Sarano’s narration of self is equally painful, as it forces him to remember the feelings of loss and guilt from which his instinct is to flee. Despite efforts to forget the past, or to screen it by fictional constructions, Sarano cannot escape from memory. As in Quartier perdu, he may be narrating his story entirely retrospectively, as the time frame in the first few pages suggests. With typically Modianesque ambiguity, the narrator appears in those pages to have 177

‘J’écris parce qu’ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile et que la trace en est l’écriture: leur souvenir est mort à l’écriture; l’écriture est le souvenir de leur mort et l’affirmation de ma vie’. W ou le souvenir d’enfance, pp. 63-64.

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chosen to return to his eternal present, while also being driven to relive his experiences in narration. Within the space of his narrative, Sarano thus seems to swing from forgetfulness to memory to forgetfulness, and constantly back to memory. Like so many Modiano narrators, he is unable to find what Franck Salaün calls ‘un équilibre entre l’oubli et l’obsession’.178 The text seems at times to be a deliberate comment by Modiano on his own reservedness and his own repetitiveness. Though ‘empty’, Sarano is filled out by the multiple-text reader. Like the chauffeur who sometimes knows in advance what the narrator will do, and whose ‘filature’ never results in much exciting revelation, the reader can preempt, or at least recognize, typically Modianesque elements in the narrative, while never wholly receiving the longed-for opening-up by the author. Modiano seems especially strongly aware in this text that fiction is not entirely satisfactory for the reader, who here feels that, although a story is told that links past with present, it is highly unreliable (and may even have been invented in its entirety), and has apparently been told at the expense of other, even more painful, stories. For his narrator, imagination (the spinning of the Marie story) is not completely satisfactory either, since neither Rose-Marie nor the lost ‘petite’ can be resurrected by fictional linkages. The narrator’s realization of this is clear not only from the melancholy that surrounds him in the first few pages, which seem to be narrated from a standpoint retrospective to the Marie incident, but also from the return of his ‘sentiment familier de vide’ while he is waiting for her in the hôtel Alvear in the final scene (151).

Parents, History, and Personal Pain Seasoned Modianistes used to encountering a plethora of problematic father figures may well wonder where Albert Modiano surfaces in this text, whose narrator, apart from his two references to ‘mon père’ (115, 142), seems particularly fatherless. Yet it is possible to see Sarano himself as an incarnation of Albert (or more exactly, yet another merging between father and son), especially given that he describes himself as a father figure for both Marie and ‘la petite’, albeit one appropriately tinged with inadequacy (14, 82). Fathers here are distanced and ambiguous, and it is significant in this respect that Sarano becomes Marie’s ‘oncle’ (a type of indirect father), just as Yvon-Jean-Jacques (nodding to Rousseau) fills that role for ‘la petite’, 178

‘La Suisse du cœur’, p. 22.

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foreshadowing Jean Bori in La Petite Bijou. The multiple-text reader can even interpret Sarano’s guilt-feelings at having abandoned ‘la petite’ and his ‘non-assistance à personne en danger’ as wishful thinking on Modiano’s part that his father (and indeed his mother) might have felt a similar sense of guilt at having abandoning him. On an historical level, the narrator at times seems to stand for the collective will to forget painful aspects of the past, just as his ‘nonassistance à personne en danger’ can be seen as applying to the passive collusion of many French citizens of the parent generation in the deportation of the Jews, while also perhaps being an oblique accusation of Albert for having survived when millions of other Jews died. The location of the text in an indeterminate country, which is in any case a type of ‘non-France’, and whose emigré residents all bear ‘les traces d’une faute’ (50), is, in typically Modianesque mode, symbolic of the vagueness and emptiness into which memory of the War years has slipped. This is highlighted both via the neglected suitcase full of old newspapers, and through the archives – apparently from the nineteen forties if the time of publication is taken as being approximately the time of narration – that provide the material for Sarano’s ‘Appels dans la nuit’ (42, 51). References to Perec’s W also figure through the reference to the ‘fort’, the ‘souvenir d’enfance’, the ‘V’ of victory, the suggestion that the ‘confrère’ may hail from either Switzerland, Germany, or Luxembourg, and perhaps even the ‘paillotes polynésiennes’ (114, 117, 17, 95). However, their presence in this text is respectfully subtle. This text underscores the fact that memories of the past Modiano has not experienced can only ever be fictional for him, while also showing, yet again, that memory of the ‘années noires’ has become flimsy and dreamlike through deliberate repression in France, as well as through temporal distance. Modiano is here again stressing his feelings of being forced to resort to fiction, and to return to that country of the mind over and over, in his relationship with the past that haunts him. Yet on a personal level, with respect to events the author has himself experienced, fiction is less a necessity than a deliberate choice. Through his use of a highly reserved narrator and the extremely allusive nature of his references to personal pain in this fiction, Modiano seems, like Sarano, to be merely adding a few episodes to a metaphorical ‘Aventures de Louis XVII’, allowing traces of himself and his family to ‘survive’ in fiction like Sarano’s Dauphin without markedly altering the course of the ‘feuilleton’ of his writing. While feelings of guilt, loss, and abandonment figure strongly, the

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reader is left with a feeling of having been kept at bay as concerns the narrator’s ‘crime’, his childhood, and the reasons for his own abandonment of ‘la petite’ and Rose-Marie. The image of silent fireworks with which the text ends points to further repressed emotion and memory, while also symbolizing the silence or mystery surrounding the real story of ‘la petite’ and all that has been lost in the past.

4(iii) Rue des Boutiques obscures (1978): Bumping into Possible Selves Rue des Boutiques obscures is perhaps Modiano’s richest text, both in connection with the notion of selfhood and for its historical and biographical concerns. In typically Modianesque fashion the title picks up on a reference in Modiano’s directly previous text Livret de famille, to the street in Rome where the narrator and ‘le Gros’ eat sandwiches. Again typically for Modiano, the title is semantically full. Dreams and dreaming are inscribed in it, as it clearly echoes Georges Perec’s La Boutique obscure (1973), in which Perec transcribed a series of dreams. Though the narrator of Modiano’s text is never clearly identified as Jewish, the theme of problematic Jewish identity is connoted by that link, just as Perec’s text is marked by this concept. Jewishness is also evoked by the very term ‘boutiques obscures’. André Harris and Alain de Sédouy speak of the small clothes shops owned by Jews in the Sentier district of Paris as ‘les boutiques obscures des soldeurs des années trente’.179 The title also carries echoes of the chambre obscure, which is appropriate given the many references in the text to photographs as catalysts for imaginative ‘dreaming’ and self-invention. The fact that the real Via Botteghe Oscure in Rome is the seat of the communist party there seems to be a red herring, appropriately for the ‘anti-policier’ tone of the text. Likewise, although this street is situated relatively near the Jewish quarter (about twenty minutes’ walk from it), there is no neat symbolism in that link either. What may be more symbolic is the notion of commerce and exchange in ‘boutique’: Guy Roland seems to be ‘shopping around’ for an identity, although he seems never to find one with which he is entirely satisfied. He remains an empty self, trying to fill himself with various narratives. While the fullness of the title might seem to contrast with 179

Juifs et Français, p. 93.

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Roland’s emptiness of self, the title also embodies obscurity and incorporates a ‘black hole,’ as the reader never learns whether the narrator found proof of his past self in his former address, the ‘rue des Boutiques Obscures, 2’ of the third last paragraph of the text. These words gesture back to the title, in a symbolic lack of closure. We shall first look at the text as a reflection on the selfinvention inherent in telling one’s life-story, and then as an example of narrative manipulation. Though the word ‘boutique’ suggests intimacy, conjuring up a familiar small shop, we shall see that what intimacy readers feel they have with Guy Roland is mainly illusory (although certain emotions are highlighted), since, like all of Modiano’s narrators, he is adept in the art of spinning one story to distract the reader’s attention from another, one at which he barely hints but which seems vital to the understanding of his psyche. This text focuses on an almost hysterical narratorial search for identity, as does La Place de l’étoile. Unlike Raphaël Schlemilovitch however, Roland also tries to understand the past in doing so, and thus, though he is not technically a life-writer, his narrative is arguably a closer replica of the autobiographical process, having to do with memory and repression. Narrative fills him as it does Schlemilovitch: he becomes what he narrates. As Alain Bony puts it: ‘Les papiers d’identité, ce sont les pages du livre, avec la trace laissée par l’écriture, noir sur blanc’.180 However, even when he has found out who he is, he still desperately wants to fill the empty shell of his name, and the text seems to exhort the reader to re-read it to satiate that desire. Nettelbeck and Hueston speak of identity in this text as ‘sans cesse perdue mais aussi sans cesse renouvelable – de façon fragile certes et éphémère – par le pouvoir de l’imagination’.181 To this could be added ‘et par le pouvoir de la lecture aussi’. Imagination and reading, though powerful, cannot permanently fill the narrator’s emptiness. From the point of view of the reader, the opening ‘je ne suis rien’ (‘I am nothing’ but also ‘I am following nothing’) is endlessly true – even though Roland has found out (or imagined) that he is Jimmy Stern, alias Pedro McEvoy, he is only ever actualized in the reading process. However the text is open to infinite possibilities. Like the ‘auto-tamponneuses’ played on by Denise’s godchild, narrator and text collide with each other, setting off ‘dans tous les sens’ (in both senses of the word) at every reading or re180 181

‘Suite en blanc’, p. 665. Pièces d’identité, p. 104.

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reading. And as with the lone bumper car discussed in Remise de peine, this text also conveys a sense of the narrator and Modiano as solitary memorialists of France’s ‘années noires’. Selfhood is presented as lacking in essence, being merely the place of intersection of many voices, as in the following much-quoted assertion by Roland: ‘Au fond […] je n’étais rien […] mais tous ces échos épars qui flottaient dans l’air se cristallisaient et c’était moi’ (124). Roland becomes what he internalizes through narration, but is just as lacking in consistency and apt to evaporate as the people whose stories he researches. Like them he is ‘de ceux qui ne laissent sur leur passage qu’une buée vite dissipée’ and it is not for nothing that he believes himself at one point to be ‘l’homme des plages’ whose footsteps vanish in the sand (72). There is a strong sense that, though Roland/Stern/McEvoy might have found out his official identity, he still lacks a clear sense of self on an existential level. However, he continues to want to believe in an essence, a unified front, just as the reader needs to have a sense of him. The tense of ‘Je crois vraiment que c’était moi’ (44), when Guy identifies with the man in Stioppa’s photographs, is an extremely important indication that his identity is not yet certain, even in retrospect, despite what ultimately appears to be a corroboration of his story. This uncertainty is reinforced by the doubts concerning Roland’s likeness to the man in the photograph. Stioppa does not think the man in the photograph looks like him, neither Blunt nor Howard are sure either, and it is ‘sans conviction’ that Bob Brune says: ‘Oui… pourquoi pas?’ (45, 69, 79, 91). The many cul de sacs and unsolved mysteries (the dead end of the Collège de Luiza et d’Albany, the about-turn near Megève, and the failure of the Bora Bora episode, to name but a few) also prohibit closure. Just as the last lines gesture back to the title, the photograph of Gay Orlow, with which the text closes, leads back into the initial description of it (45). Roland starts his quest in the rue Anatole-de-la-Forge and a child named Pedro (not the narrator) dribbles his football in the same street (243). Full of possibilities, yet endlessly gesturing back to its beginnings, the text is a circular narrative, chasing its tail/tale. Roland’s autobiographical project is mocked, not only through the lack of resolution that foils all attempts to establish unity, but through his exaggerated eagerness to believe in a series of possible identities. The ironic use of Proustian imagery, such as the reference to ‘des moments privilégiés de notre jeunesse’ (191) heightens this sense of mockery, as does the general ludism of the text. (As Charlotte

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Wardi has pointed out, Rue des Boutiques obscures is a parody of the nouveau roman à la Robbe-Grillet, with its anonymous hero walking around, its labyrinth, and its detective type plot).182 Roland’s emptiness is a clear self-directed jibe at Modiano’s own ‘sensation de vide’ and his compulsion to fictionalize. Two of the most quoted phrases by Modiano are the assertion of ‘j’écris pour savoir qui je suis, pour me trouver une identité’ and his wish to ‘[se] créer un passé et une mémoire avec le passé et la mémoire des autres’.183 Roland is perhaps the clearest example of a fictional character doing just that, in an ironic comment on Modiano’s urge to create alter egos for himself by identifying with other people, both fictional and real. Like the autobiographer, who is his own interpreter, and seeks to gain a sense of self through narration, the reader is in search of a sense of Roland. In the detective plot of this text readers must work extremely hard at obtaining this, needing to reconstruct events and chronology from a series of very subtle clues. In such a context, it is not surprising that Roland mentions detective novels and autobiography in the same sentence – ‘je lisais quelque livre de Mémoires ou l’un de ces roman policiers de la collection du Masque, qu’elle aimait tant’ – and that one of those novels is called Lettres anonymes (212, 117). In his Narrative as Theme, Prince has helpfully reconstructed the narrative as far as this is possible: Jimmy Pedro Stern is born on September 30, 1912, in Salonica (also known as Thessalonika) in Greece, but attended the Collège de Luiza et d’Albany, an exclusive French private school, making friends there with Freddie Howard de Luz. In the 1930s he had an address in Rome (rue des Boutiques Obscures, 2, given in French in the text), but worked in Paris as a broker, consorting with the idle rich, including exiled Russian aristocrats, one of whom was Gay Orlow. In 1939, he married Denise Coudreuse and disappeared in 1940 to reappear as Pedro McEvoy, a Dominican subject employed by his country’s legislation in occupied Paris, and lived as a foreigner with false identity papers. He left as a fugitive for Megève in 1942, with Denise, Freddie, Gay, and the English jockey André Wildmer. On February 15 1943, he and his wife tried to cross the border into Switzerland but he was abandoned by his supposed helpers in the snow in the middle of the mountains and he

182 183

‘Mémoire et écriture dans l’œuvre de Modiano’, pp. 46-47. Emmanuel Berl, Interrogatoire, p. 9.

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lost touch with Denise.184 This is painstaking work, due to the delaying tactics of the detective genre and the gaps that persist. One of the issues left unsolved is the fundamental one of the possibility that the identity of ‘Stern’ may itself be an assumed one, as the Salonica Town Hall that held his birth certificate was burned down with all its documents. There is also a doubt over whether Pedro McEvoy (who shares the same initials as Patrick Modiano) actually is Stern. Given that ‘Stern’ means ‘star’ in German, and that Modiano’s first text was called La Place de l’étoile, the author may be hinting, once again, that he both is, and at the same time is not, the character portrayed (and perhaps also hinting that his Jewish links, though very real to him, are only indirect due to his non-matrilinear descent). The dominant colour in this text is white, and the possibilities inherent in whiteness (a mix of all colours), as well as the blankness it connotes, underline the sense of gaps and potentiality in the text. The ‘literary’ construction of the narrative hints that the narrator may have arranged his narrative in an attempt to provide a symbolic unity. Though of course the literarity can also be attributed to the author, here it is very plausible that it may also stem from the narrator, given the retrospective nature of the narrative. The ‘déclics’ come exactly mid-way through the novel (in a typically Modianesque touch), and as Nettelbeck and Hueston note, the part preceding Roland’s ‘discovery’ that he is Jimmy Stern has longer chapters and is weighed down by images of slowness (snow, fog and heaviness), while the second section contains many more chapters and a lot of rushing around.185 Of course this itself does not mean that Roland has invented events, merely that he is deliberately arranging his narrative and thus a certain internal coherence. However, the preponderant sense of improbable coincidence does suggest an inventing narrator. Though Roland and Heurteur stress that ‘il y a parfois de mystérieuses coïncidences’ (189, 26), there are a few too many of these in this narrative for it to be plausible. Gay and Freddie got married in Nice in the same church as Hutte described in his letter, Scouffi lived in the same block as Denise, Roland meets Wildmer providentially, Pedro McEvoy lived on a street the narrator goes down when following Stioppa, Blunt lived in the area of the Garage de la Comète with its link to Oleg de Wrédé, and Freddie goes missing just two weeks before Roland’s 184 185

Narrative as Theme, pp. 121-125. Pièces d’identité, p. 99.

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arrival. The reader is left with the impression of an unreliable narrator who may have orchestrated at least some of these many coincidences, counterbalancing the holes in his story with a superficial ‘literary’ unity as well as inventing some coherence of content. While events do seem to corroborate his account, in particular Hélène Pilgram’s recognition of him and the information gleaned from ‘external’ sources in chapters XXVI, XXXII, XXXIV, and XLIII, the fact that Roland is prone to imaginative speculation throws doubt over much of the diegesis, especially given the retrospective nature of his narrative. His propensity to imagine is stressed from the very start, when he enters into the hypothesis put forward by Sonachitzé and Heurteur, and especially in his delirious belief that he is Freddie in the Valbreuse labyrinth. The open door bathed in yellow light depicted in Pierre Le-Tan’s illustration for the Folio edition is symbolic in this respect, echoing the sense of infinite possibility the narrator feels in Stioppa’s apartment at the start of his quest: ‘J’avais collé mon front à la vitre. En bas, chaque entrée d’immeuble était éclairée d’une lumière jaune qui brillerait toute la nuit’ (46). In the final pages of his account, Roland again gestures to the unreliability of his narrative, saying: ‘Je regardais une à une les photos de nous tous, de Denise, de Freddie, de Gay Orlow, et ils perdaient peu à peu de leur réalité à mesure que le bateau poursuivait son périple. Avaient-ils jamais existé?’ (244). Not even photographs, normally seen as the ultimate proof of the past, with their Barthesian ‘ça a été là’, can here guarantee the past, prompting the conjecture that Roland has invented them too.186 This is very possible, given Roland’s propensity to imagine and to build stories around things. Part of the fun of the text is of course the reader’s collusion with both Roland and Modiano’s wry self-mockery of their tendency to speculate. All this crying wolf means that when, in chapter XXXVII, he comes to say: ‘Maintenant, il suffit de fermer les yeux’ (208) and proceeds to describe the lead-up to the flight to Megève in great detail, doubts must be raised as to the veracity of what he is recounting. This is especially true given the resonance of this phrase with the narrator’s attempt to connect with Denise through imagination: ‘Si je fermais les yeux, pensais-je, si je me concentrais en appuyant les doigts de mes mains contre mon front, peut-être parviendrais-je à entendre, de très loin, le claquement de ses sandales dans l’escalier’ (133). In this light, the memories in chapters XVIII, XXI and XXIV all smack of 186

See Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, pp. 120-121 and p. 17.

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imagination, and when Roland states of the apartment at 97 rue de Rome that: ‘La rampe n’est pas celle qui brille de son cuivre dans mon souvenir’, the word ‘souvenir’ is invested with a particular ambiguity (163). However, the reader retains a certain willingness to sympathize with Roland, precisely because he cannot imagine everything, and is subject to the whims of memory. He cannot imagine his father coming to collect him at school, he fails to recognise his wife in the photographs, and he has no remembrance of the interior of the apartments in number 10 bis, rue de Cambacérès or in number 97, rue de Rome. His désarroi at not being able to control memory seems genuine.

Hints and Secrets Narrative ‘manipulation’ thus occurs in the creation of doubts as to what is memory and what imagination, and by the narrator’s general secretiveness (he must know what he found at his old address in Rome, but never informs the reader). It also occurs on a more fundamental level, concerning questions of memory and amnesia that revolve around a narrative secret that was pointed out in 1986 by Nettelbeck and Hueston, but which critics continue to overlook. Roland recounts how, following up an unexplained ‘piste’, he sets off on the trail of his own identity, having lost his memory ten years previously. Dates in the narrative are kept deliberately vague. Initially, all that is declared is that Roland has been in the employment of Constantin von Hutte for eight years and that he was an amnesiac when Hutte took him in to his detective agency. Denise’s diary is mentioned three times but bears no reference to the year in which it was kept (118, 162, 165). And while it can ultimately be established from the date of 1965 on Mme Kahan’s letter that Roland lost his memory in 1955, this information is implied rather than stated, and comes very late in the text (205). The reader’s attention is displaced onto the date of 1943, and more specifically onto Roland’s attempted crossing into Switzerland from Megève that year. The focusing of attention on this event is helped by the passage depicting Roland losing consciousness in the snow. He states: ‘J’ai marché pendant des heures et des heures. Et puis, j’ai fini par me coucher dans la neige. Tout autour de moi, il n’y avait plus que du blanc’ (231). As Nettelbeck and Hueston were the first to point out, the period of twelve years between 1943 and 1955 is quite simply not accounted

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for. It is also never made clear what caused Roland to lose his memory in 1955.187 The facts that many critics do not pick up on this point, and that no critic saw it before Nettelbeck and Hueston, indicate the skill with which attention is deflected from those twelve years, even though clues are left behind for the painstaking reader. The fact that readers are informed very early on (15) that Roland’s loss of memory occurred ten years previous to his inquiry adds to the likelihood of their forgetting this all-important fact, and of their taking 1943 to be the only key date. However, the importance of dates is slyly hinted at in the last few pages, when chapter XLIV ends with the crossing of ‘la Ligne’ (245) – more commonly known as ‘la ligne de changement de date’... For the careful reader or re-reader, the rhetoric surrounding Roland’s blanking-out in Megève indicates an initial voluntary embracing of amnesia. Before the account of his apparent loss of consciousness in the snow, Roland, who seems to be on the run from something, is attracted by the anonymity of the white landscapes around Megève: ‘Le train glissait à travers un paysage blanc de neige. Comme il était doux, ce paysage, et amical. J’éprouvais une ivresse et une confiance que je n’avais jamais ressenties jusque-là à voir ces maisons endormies’ (216). On the next page he continues: ‘je me disais que personne ne viendrait nous chercher ici. Nous ne risquions rien. Nous devenions peu à peu invisibles’ (217). And though the image of fog is used to denote the fleetingness of life in other contexts in the narrative, here the fugitives are likened to the ‘buée tenace’ that covers the windows, obscuring vision, and which ‘on ne parvenait pas à effacer avec la main’, as if they themselves are agents of obscurity (218). Thus, it seems more than likely that an initial desire for blankness and a voluntary disappearance in Megève in 1943 may have predated Roland’s loss of memory in 1955. In this light, it is highly significant that the narrator does not believe that Freddie drowned, rather that he has deliberately gone missing. His statement that ‘Je pensais à Freddie. Non, il n’avait certainement pas disparu en mer. Il avait décidé, sans doute, de couper les dernières amarres et devait se cacher dans un atoll. Je finirais bien par le trouver’ betokens a certain identification with Freddie’s state of mind (251). The power of concealment and manipulation invested in the storyteller (especially 187

Pièces d’identité, p. 131, note 87.

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the teller of complicated detective stories) is thus clear. Roland is in fact a slippery customer, and it is no accident that he and Denise knew all the buildings in Paris with ‘doubles issues’ (210). As is typical of Modiano, the idea of memory as something that can be painful and that one might want to repress is reiterated on several occasions. Of Blunt, the narrator states: ‘Avais-je le droit de le tirer brusquement de cette torpeur, et de réveiller chez lui quelque chose de douloureux?’ (57). Stioppa clearly feels the burden of memory as he is relieved to pass on his photographs to Roland as the new keeper of the flame (48), and Mme Kahan in Nice has ‘de mauvais souvenirs’ of Oleg de Wrédé ‘qu’elle préférerait rayer de sa mémoire’ (176). Sonachitzé claims, of himself and Heurteur, that ‘Nous sommes brouillés avec les dates’ (26) and that ‘Il faut vivre au présent’ (27), while Hutte tells Roland that he wonders if his quest ‘en vaut vraiment la peine’ (15) – though admittedly he does change his mind when he finds he enjoys meeting ghosts from his past in Nice (in an example of a Modiano-like tension between a desire to live in the present and to reconnect with the past). The general rejection of the past by these characters is highly significant, given the suggestion that Roland himself does not always welcome memory unequivocally.

History in the Text and Autobiography on Modiano’s Part Two vital questions remain. Why did Roland lose his memory in 1955, and what happened between 1943 and that date? VanderWolk sees Roland’s amnesia as corresponding to the French national amnesia concerning the Occupation and the Holocaust.188 Given the context of the novel (it is, as Denise Cima points out, Modiano’s fourth Occupation novel), this is a convincing reading of the narrative secret of the text.189 Roland’s initial twelve-year long amnesia does roughly correspond to what Henry Rousso calls France’s period of unfinished mourning from 1945 to about 1954, itself a type of repression. Furthermore, the period of repression that followed on from 1954 until the mid-1960s, more or less fits with Roland’s later

188

Rewriting the Past: Memory, History, and Narration in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, p. 64. 189 Cima notes that, although Modiano’s first three novels tend to be referred to as ‘the Occupation trilogy’, Rue des Boutiques obscures forms the last in what is actually a four-part series, with the blip of Villa triste in between. Étude sur Patrick Modiano: La Ronde de nuit, p. 13.

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loss of memory from 1955 to 1965.190 However, Rousso’s second period (1954 to the mid-1960s) is one of active repression, and Roland’s second period of loss of memory does seem more involuntary than conscious. The language of the phrase ‘brusquement frappé d’amnésie’ encourages this sense (15), as does his apparent sincerity in wishing to retrieve memory ten years later. It may be that this text is making the same point as Vestiaire de l’enfance: that an involuntary loss of memory and sense of emptiness can be the price one pays for refusing to remember the past. Other reasons for an externally imposed lack of memory/information and for feelings of emptiness can be imagined from autobiographical details concerning Modiano himself. (Interestingly, Rue des Boutiques obscures is the only text apart from Livret de famille to give some biographical details for the author in the original Gallimard edition). The notion of a period of emptiness spanning several years may be partly explained by Modiano’s own familial experience. Rudy died in 1957 and Modiano started writing seriously in 1967, perhaps to fill the void left by his brother’s death. There was another large pocket of emptiness in Modiano’s life, when Albert Modiano disappeared in 1968, showing no sign of life until near his death in 1978, the year of publication of Rue des Boutiques obscures. It is no doubt significant that it is in this text that Albert Modiano is mentioned in the dedication for the first time (as ‘mon père), figuring along with the hitherto more usual reference to Rudy. It is thus possible to read the text as both a comment on history and historiography and a personal exploration of emptiness and loss. Interestingly, the idea of a twelve-year disappearance crops up again in La Petite Bijou, where it is twelve years since Thérèse’s mother left for Morocco, and twelve years since she has blocked out memories of her. The fact that Modiano was twelve when Rudy died is no doubt one of the keys to the enigma. Another possible interpretation of this recurrence of twelve-year-long periods is the fact that Patrick and Albert Modiano had a serious falling out in 1966, two years before Albert’s last lengthy disappearance, and twelve years

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Though Rousso sees this period as lasting until 1971, this date is disputable, as the return of the repressed in the mid-1960s was partly the cause of the uprisings of May 1968 and Modiano’s own iconoclasm in La Place de l’étoile in that year. Rousso sees 1971-1974 (‘The Broken mirror’) as a time of contestation of the repressive period, and sees 1974 to the present as a period of obsession with the past.

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before his death in 1978.191 However, only the biographically informed reader can hazard such interpretations, as this text, like the others, is oblique on the apparently important autobiographical issue that lies at the heart of the lost twelve years. One need merely be a multiple-text reader in order to realize that at least part of what the author is doing is identifying with his father, as in the first three novels, in an attempt to create a ‘memory’ of the ‘années noires’, while retaining aspects of himself. Of the life Roland has constructed as Stern/McEvoy, he wonders: ‘Est-ce qu’il s’agit vraiment de la mienne? Ou de celle d’un autre dans laquelle je me suis glissé?’ (238), and the reader shares his sense of uncertainty. Roland seems to be a typical Modiano representative, as fear and angst are at the basis of his personality, surviving even during loss of memory (feelings of fear indeed being what allow him to reconnect with his past self in the two déclics). Like Patrick Modiano, he is dark-haired and shy, and very tall. He seems to have been born in 1912, the same year as Albert Modiano, and shares his pseudonym of Guy (echoing Guy Jaaspard in Livret de famille). The Megève blankout of February 1943 takes place in the same month and year of the raid in which Albert Modiano appears to have been arrested, and in Livret de famille Modiano’s parents are said to have married in Megève. Heurteur and Sonachitzé cannot tell what age he is, and Stioppa describes him as ‘jeune’ but Roland is not wholly at ease with this idea (22, 41). This indeterminacy of age is one more nod to the merging between father and son. This merging in itself throws more light on Roland’s desire to disappear and to forget, as both desires would also have been felt by Albert Modiano. Doubling is one of the text’s most insistent motifs – whether with Jimmy and Pedro, Guy and Freddie, Modiano and Modiano senior, or indeed Patrick and Rudy. The fact that Jimmy’s old address in rue des Boutiques Obscures was situated at number 2 is itself significant.192 Just as Modiano seems to have distributed aspects of both himself and his father into the character of Roland, he has also scattered personal attributes amongst many other characters. The fact that Hutte, Stioppa and Freddie are all very tall is one indication of 191

I am basing my claim here on Laurent’s assertion (p. 87) that this falling out happened in 1966. Laurent attributes it to Albert Modiano’s attempts to enrol his son in the army. 192 See Stephen Steele’s ‘MODIANOBIS’ for an interesting study of the ‘principe du bis’ in Modiano’s work, upon which Morris has expanded in his 2000 publication.

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this.193 Freddie shares the day and month of Modiano’s birth and the year of the father’s (236). As in many other Modiano texts, this is a doubling that is not clearly delineated, and one that is more like a connection between many different lives. The multiple-text reader may see this as part of the desire for connection and family that is apparent in all of Modiano’s texts, as well as part of an authorial tendency to stress resemblances between his ‘primary representatives’ (the first-person narrators) and the secondary characters. Equally, the doubling motif combines with the suggestion of loss of part of one’s self to conjure up the ghost of Rudy. Since Roland’s lack of memory and his imagined memories reflect Modiano’s own lack of ‘memory’ or information as to his father’s doings during the Occupation, and his personal investment in understanding them, they again form a type of postmemory that involves all members of the postwar generation, especially the survivors of Jewish parents. The striking number of references to childhood in the text can thus be looked at both historically and personally. Postmemory springs from an inadequately understood past, not one that is entirely unknown, as demonstrated by the statements in Remise de peine about children who have seen things, and who have a shadowy idea of events.194 A remark in Emmanuel Berl, Interrogatoire (1976), published two years previous to Rue des Boutiques obscures, is also significant. There Modiano likens Berl to the knowing child in Rembrandt’s painting of La Ronde de nuit watching the soldiers on their nightly round: ‘Il en a vu, des gens et des choses. Il en sait long…’.195 Importantly, the narrator of La Ronde de nuit likens himself to a dizzy, lost child on several occasions. The childhood references in Rue des Boutiques obscures seem to serve a similar function. As with Livret de famille, the considerable number of historical elements of Rue des Boutiques obscures means that it fits just as neatly into the category of ‘mémoires’, or indeed ‘prémémoires’ (or 193

Other redistributions of personal attributes include the following: Scouffi is ‘un Grec d’Alexandrie’ (Modiano’s family came from Modena, via Trieste, Salonica, and Alexandria) and is also plump, like the father of Les Boulevards de ceinture. Denise’s godchild used to live in the rue du Docteur-Kurzenne in Jouy-en-Josas, and Denise’s mother is from Antwerp. Freddie’s grandmother is American, like that of the Modiano of Livret de famille. 194 See Morris 1996, pp. 43 and 62, for remarks by Modiano concerning the fascination that half-understood events exerted upon him. 195 Emmanuel Berl, Interrogatoire, p. 10.

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‘postmémoires’) as that of more personally-focused self-narration. Roland’s slightest remarks are charged with an historical import, even where he does not explicitly state the connection, so that the image of passing ‘de l’autre côté de la Ligne’ (245) necessarily echoes the passing of the ‘ligne de démarcation’ between Occupied France and the Vichy State, as well as the international date line. Even on a non-historical level, a strong sense of a collective story is produced by the stress on the links between lives and on unknown, momentary connections, summed up by the structuring image of life as a game of pinball: ‘Itinéraires qui se croisent, parmi ceux que suivent des milliers et des milliers de gens à travers Paris, comme mille et mille petites boules d’un gigantesque billard éléctrique, qui se cognent parfois l’une à l’autre’ (147). This image begs the question of who exactly is in charge of this great game of pinball, and the answer must lie in the narratorial or authorial psyches. Like so many other Modiano narrators, Roland’s drive is to make contact with as many lives as possible (in pinball what counts is how many balls one hits). While there are numerous references to ‘billard’ in the text, it is not always clear whether ‘billard éléctrique’ (pinball) or billiards proper is being referred to, for example when Hutte talks of a table in the library in the Russian church in Nice ‘qui ressemble à une table de billard’ (174). The word ‘billard’ is mentioned for the first time in connection with the game Denise played at Valbreuse (93), and then, apparently in its meaning of ‘pinball’, in connection with the game she played as a young girl in the café at 19, quai d’Austerlitz (126, 129), and again as one of the games the narrator played with his group of friends in a bar in Megève (223). In any case, in billiards, as in pinball, balls bump into one another, in an echo of the other structuring motif of bumper-cars. All three metaphors – those of pinball, billiards, and bumper-cars – indicate a relatively random, and, importantly, brief connection of lives. The narrator himself is like a ball: propelled, but also propelling himself, from one informant to the other. The briefness of the connections also indicates the allusiveness with which Modiano approaches history in his textual bumper car. The personal and the historical are not only linked in the idea of postmemory, but also in the general idea of the fragility of innocence. The multiple references to the innocence of childhood seem meant as a contrast to the horror of war, but the reader aware of the shock produced by Rudy’s death will also read them as a personal comment. Children in this text play in sandpits, on slides, with balls, on beaches,

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are taken on outings to row on lakes, eat ice-cream and drive bumper cars. Chapter XXVII is a letter from Hutte to Roland telling him how much he is enjoying Nice, as ‘chaque coin de rue me rappelle mon enfance’ (174). However, whereas Nettelbeck and Hueston claim that in Rue des Boutiques obscures Modiano wants the reader to ‘se laisser absorber par un esprit d’enfance selon lequel tout paraît possible’,196 I feel that the idea of loss of innocence is vital. Stioppa and Roland do not fit into child-size rooms, after all, though they might wish to turn back the clock. Furthermore, while this text is undeniably ludic, its content is sinister. Some critics have stressed the ludism of this text, and it is true that the final image is of Gay Orlow as a child, crying ‘pour rien, parce qu’elle aurait voulu continuer de jouer’ (251).197 However the very last lines of the text are powerfully charged: ‘Elle s’éloigne. Elle a déjà tourné le coin de la rue, et nos vies ne sont-elles pas aussi rapides à se dissiper dans le soir que ce chagrin d’enfant?’. Though the little girl’s tears will soon dry, the reader’s knowledge that Gay killed herself in adulthood makes things rather more sinister. The text thus ends on a tone of false insouciance: the tail/tale is barbed. The slightly hysterical ludism of the text in fact resembles the fugitives’ ‘fou rire nerveux’ in the train to Megève, also finding expression in the police atmosphere of what should be a game: the ‘bruit de mitrailleuse du flipper’ (128). The historical scope of these images is most clear in chapter XXXIV, where the menacing atmosphere in Vichy is reinforced by the description of the hotel grounds full of people in desperate circumstances as ‘un gigantesque préau d’école’ and of the description of Denise sleeping ‘d’un sommeil d’enfant’ (199, 200). Though images of tropical islands and beach holidays seem to form a hopeful contrast to the ‘hiver lugubre’ of Paris in 1943 (172-173), tropicality is tinged with sinister aspects in the Vichy chapter with its pall of intense humidity and ‘une pluie de mousson’ (200), and there are as many references to fog and snow as to Mediterranean whiteness and the nonchalance of seaside towns. A note personal to the narrator and perhaps to the author seems to underlie the strong sense of sadness surrounding the passing of time and the lack of fulfilment of youthful hopes. The sleepy, drunk bride of chapter II seems to be a symbol of the dissatisfaction and 196

Pièces d’identité, p. 96. Nettelbeck and Hueston, for example, accord a central role to the text’s ludism, in Pièces d’identité, p. 96. See also Morris 1996, p. 85. 197

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disappointment that led Gay Orlow to kill herself. Waldo Blunt is also let down by life (nobody takes any notice of his piano playing, and his wife sleeps around), and the ‘petit homme brun au visage bouffi’ mentioned on the first page is also betrayed. Claude Howard complains that ‘Au fond […] nous n’aurions jamais dû quitter l’Ile Maurice’ (81). The nicely alliterative ‘bel et blond baron balte Constantin von Hutte’ has changed beyond recognition (16). The spectacle of the horses killing themselves on the fences at the Auteuil race-course and being replaced by other horses, is a symbol of the waste and uselessness of existence, and the narrator presumes Gay would have seen this from her window (191-192). The emphasis on the passage of time is reiterated in the final pages, with the ‘merles des Moluques’ that ‘rongeaient tout, le papier, le bois, les murs même des maisons’ (250). This text shows the connection between lack of a clear sense of identity and lack of memory, whether this be one’s own memory, or the memory of a past one feels is crucial to one’s psychological makeup but which one does not understand. A frightening emptiness of self is demonstrated, and there is a certain hysteria surrounding the need of all human beings to tell stories about themselves and other people, and to listen to/read stories: what Ricoeur calls the ‘demande de récit’. For biographically and historically informed readers, Rue des Boutiques obscures says much about the repression of Modiano’s own memories, and the fictionalization of some of them. The fact that Roland seems to be a secretive autobiographer implies Modiano’s awareness of his own lack of willingess to confront certain matters directly, as when Roland wonders: ‘Pourquoi suis-je si timide et si craintif au moment d’aborder des sujets qui me tiennent au cœur?’ (116). On an historical level, his need for fictionalization betokens the lack of solidity of the picture of the France of the ‘années noires’ due to French national amnesia, while also gesturing to Modiano’s own need to create a type of second-hand memory through imagination.

4(iv) La Place de l’étoile (1968): the Artifice of Identity La Place de l’étoile shows the invented nature of the self even more clearly, if less subtly, than Rue des Boutiques obscures. Raphaël Schlemilovitch’s narrative shares Roland’s stress on the frightening emptiness of a self needing to be filled by narrative, but also has an even more basic objective, being an attempt to declare the very

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existence of his self. The text also loudly proclaims the links between self and other, on an individual and collective level (a notion discussed in detail in Chapters Five, Six and Seven of this book). The following section examines the ideas of self-invention and the emptiness of the self in La Place de l’étoile, as well as issues of historical and political importance. This first text of Modiano’s is a special case amongst the four texts dealing with invented narratives of self, being considerably more ‘bavard’ than anything since Les Boulevards de ceinture, and being overtly concerned with Jewish identity. As this issue has been given in-depth treatment in the past in relation to this text, I propose to discuss some of the ostensibly Jewish questions in relation to the idea of narrating the self on a more general level.198 La Place de l’étoile also differs from everything since Les Boulevards de ceinture in its lack of any kind of build-up of a referential illusion. Though Schlemilovitch presents what he is writing as a memoir, an autobiography of sorts, and indeed at one point a biography (126), the text, as Bersani puts it, ‘ne cesse de se dénoncer, méthodiquement, hystériquement, comme fiction’.199 There is thus very little of the suspension of disbelief created by the three narratives just examined, as the reader is unable to believe much of what Schlemilovitch recounts. Most of Modiano’s other texts treat the notion of selfinvention in writing with subtlety, but Schlemilovitch’s narrative is both exhibitionist and hammed up. Like the ‘Jewish’ phraseology he attributes to Céline, it is ‘un peu raccrocheuse, un tantinet cabotine’ (16). As he frequently insinuates, Schlemilovitch is writing his memoirs in order to gain a sense of existence, not merely to understand himself. He clearly feels the need to shout loudly. The text also demonstrates human powers of self-invention, as well as the human need to believe in an identity. I am interested in Schlemilovitch’s emptiness on a general level, and in the foregrounding of writing in the attempt to construct a sense of self. It is useful to remember Lejeune’s formula in relation to autobiography: ‘Écrire son histoire, c’est essayer de se construire, bien plus qu’essayer de se connaître’.200 However, autobiography is also about understanding oneself, which in this text poses a problem for the 198

See for example, Samuel Khalifa, ‘The Mirror of Memory: Patrick Modiano’s La Place de l’étoile and Dora Bruder’, or Pierre Daprini, ‘Patrick Modiano: le Temps de l’Occupation’. 199 ‘Patrick Modiano, agent double’, p. 81. 200 L’Autobiographie en France, p. 84.

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narrator (and the reader), due to the extreme otherness of the narrated self. In Schlemilovitch’s case, others’ opinions are vital to his sense of self, and indeed can be said to constitute him. He demonstrates the dangers of an empty self, not in this case through repression of memory, but through his exaggerated willingness to take on other people’s perceptions of himself, and in this respect the text is extremely political. Jean-Marie Magnan has spoken of ‘la pression de l’autre imaginaire’ in relation to the narrator of La Ronde de nuit, but it is a phrase that can be applied to almost all of Modiano’s narrators, and especially to Raphaël Schlemilovitch.201 Whereas Swing Troubadour/Lamballe literally becomes this ‘autre imaginaire’, Schlemilovitch ‘enacts’ alternative identities created by himself in writing. That his account is a written piece rather than an interior monologue is clear from his statement that: ‘Je gribouille encore cinquante pages’ (118). Imagery of art and artifice underlines the consistently false nature of identity in the narrative. Schlemilovitch melts into the Paris he so much resembles, that ‘fleur artificielle au milieu de la France’ (65). He usurps the identity of Jean-François Des Essarts, a nod to the artifice-obsessed Des Esseintes of Huysmans. He is both actor and playwright, writing ‘une tragi-comédie’ (48), where the father and son perform a parody of a police interrogation, with the son in the role of ‘bourreau’ and the father as ‘victime’, and his mother as a hysterical ‘putain juive’ (50) – prefiguring the hysterical mothers in Vestiaire de l’enfance and in Du plus loin de l’oubli. Not only is the son a writer and an actor; he is also a clown (72, 73), like his father (who is also described as a tightrope-walker: 52). Significantly, one of the books the Israeli general advises this partplaying narrator to read is entitled Le Beau jeu de ma vie (187). The metaphor of film, with its ability to cut from character to character and from place to place, is also an appropriate one for this text, given its temporal and spatial dislocation. As such, the text fits the expression of ‘Tant de trucs, de métamorphoses’, sung by Charles Trenet about the cinema (179). The multiple tense changes (most evident in the temporal disorder at the château de FougeiresJusquiames (118-139), create the impression that the narrator is both inventing a role for himself and reliving a scene from the past that often visits him, as when he uses the future tense in the passage commencing ‘je serai surpris’ (133) followed by the phrase ‘je revois 201

‘Un apatride nommé Modiano’, p. 123.

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encore’ (135). However, this narrative is less retrospective than performative, with events taking place as the narrator writes. The frequent use of the present tense shows that his self – or selves – are literally built up as he narrates. Schlemilovitch is both creator and created – the operator of a kaleidoscope and the image therein: ‘Un visage humain composé de mille facettes lumineuses et qui change sans arrêt de forme’ (152).

Re-Imagining History One of the most important points of La Place de l’étoile is the embeddedness of human experience in history. Schlemilovitch is certainly not empty of memory, whether personal or collective. Like Albert Dehousse in Jacques Audiard’s recent film Un héros très discret (1996), he is possessed of a memory gleaned from books and the words and actions of others. (Interestingly, Audiard has specifically cited La Place de l’étoile as an exemplary approach to the portrayal of history in fiction).202 Schlemilovitch is not only possessed of history, he is possessed by history. In Raoul Ruiz’s 1996 film Généalogies d’un crime, in which Modiano had a bit-part, a character states that ‘les hommes croient posséder les histoires. En vérité c’est les histoires qui les possèdent’. Schlemilovitch is aware of this, speaking of his attachment to his ‘chers fantômes’(162). Yet history is also reinvented with him. As Daniel Madelénat points out, the novel can function as the guilty conscience of history: ‘mauvaise conscience de l’histoire, il en exhibe les failles, conteste l’empesé, l’officiel et l’autorisé’.203 Schlemilovitch’s decision to make his own final death take place at the hands of Bloch, a fascist Israeli general who is also a member of the ‘bande de la rue Lauriston’, the notorious French Gestapo group, shows that he does not balk from the challenge of contesting ‘l’empesé’ of history. Nothing is black-and-white for Schlemilovitch. Merging bourreau and victime in his irreverent creation of alternative histories, Schlemilovitch mocks all – ‘gauchistes’, fascists, nationalists and militarists alike, whether Israeli, French or Germanic. This postmodern narrator is open about his influences, explicitly listing some of those he is pastiching – Proust, Céline, 202

See Audiard’s remarks in ‘L’Éloge de l’imposture’. Audiard’s Dehousse is of a different ilk to Schlemilovitch, however, being far more focused. He decides to transform himself from a nobody into a Resistance Hero, and manages to do so by learning by heart and absorbing accounts of events by other people. 203 ‘Biographie et roman: je t’aime, je te hais’, p. 236.

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Kafka, among others, but also Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin (164). Yet there is a deadly serious side to this clowning around: the need to discuss what is never talked about, and to be provocative. The description of the funfairs in Vienna with their ‘glaces déformantes’ and imagery of death camps, massacres and mass graves (155-157) is deliberately shocking, a wake-up call for the anaesthetized public of 1968.

The Emptiness of the Self: Dangers and Possibilities Emptiness of self is one of Schlemilovitch’s most salient features, and while here the empty self is specifically linked with Jewishness, it can also be understood on a general level, as an assertion of the postmodern emphasis on relationality, and the reluctance to assign an essence to any one thing. This often seems to be a distressing notion for Schlemilovitch, who, like Roland, seems to be on a frantic quest for some kind of an identity to believe in (though he often finds the identities he comes up with oppressive). What exactly that identity is seems to be less important than the fact that they afford, momentarily, a consoling sense of definition, so that Schlemilovitch can find relief in a fantasy of provincial Frenchness (112, for example), but also a relative ‘soulagement’ in the statement that he is ‘JUIF’ (169). The text is also a recognition of human openness to influence by others. Initially Modiano seems to be mocking Sartre’s claim, rephrased by Schlemilovitch, that: ‘le juif n’existerait pas si les goyes ne daignaient lui prêter attention’ (66), a sentiment repeated throughout the narrative (73, 75), and vehemently reiterated by Freud at the end (209). While Schlemilovitch’s exhibitionist thrust is on one level a mockery of this way of thinking, the pernicious truth in Sartre’s idea is also vindicated by Raphaël’s clear self-disgust.204 There is irony but also real self-hatred in the statement that: ‘une langue aussi délicate se putréfie sous ma plume’ (118), as shown by the fact that his narrative is a death-wish as well as a statement of existence. He pushes his mother and Tania towards suicide, imagines at least nine different deaths for himself, one of which is in Jerusalem, in what could be construed as an ironic anti-Zionist comment on Modiano’s part. The racist reasons why ‘Jacob X apprend avec effroi qu’il est juif’ are only too clear from this inherited self-contempt (26).

204

Modiano has since openly admitted the truth in Sartre’s claim that Jewishness was imposed from without. See the Assouline Lire dossier, p. 42.

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However, although there is a sense that we are subject to the perceptions of others and to history, the text makes clear that we can, at the same time, be the agents of our own creation. It is hinted that multiplicity of self can be a positive thing. Israel Rosenfeld holds that normal people have an infinite number of selves and are not straitjacketed by restricted perceptions. According to Rosenfeld, people with multiple personalities have ‘too few selves’, not too many.205 In a way, Schlemilovitch is claiming the right to multiplicity of self. One positive aspect of the malleability of selfhood is that it can allow for an opening up of the self in an attempt to understand other people. The biographically informed reader will be aware that selfinvention allows Modiano to empathize and attempt to understand his father, taking upon himself the hurt and confusion Albert Modiano must have suffered in having Jewishness thrust upon him. Though Schlemilovitch’s narrative shows the restricted nature of his own thought, swinging from self-disgust to hate of others, there is also a sense that he could, in theory, become who he wants (a right Modiano also claims for his father). While Schlemilovitch is ‘cabotin’, exaggerating other people’s ideas of Jewishness, he is also capable of the ‘litote’ he feels the French have appropriated as a national attribute (21). This is most poetically brought across in the terse, verbless, phrase ‘cinquante millions de juifs’ following the description of the liberation from Spandau prison of Baldur von Schirach (144). The political nature of this text is also underlined by its reference to Julien Benda, an opponent of ‘littérature engagée’. The narrator scorns Benda, calling him one of the ‘archanges de la géométrie’ (39). Raphaël (also an archangel), shuns abstraction, preferring to concretize issues by enacting them in writing and refusing to ‘jouer les juifs invisibles’ (39). Angels are often messengers and soldiers – Gabriel and Michael spring to mind – and both Schlemilovitch and Modiano himself are messengers and fighters in this text. The messages in the fight are: Become what you want, Do not forget history, and Do not be afraid to challenge totalizing representations. While Schlemilovitch’s emptiness of the self is potentially dangerous, and certainly frightening, it is also a challenge and an opportunity. His ability to invent selves in writing echoes the multiplicity of selfhood evident in Modiano’s writing as a whole. While it is here restricted by a perniciously dualistic way of thinking, 205

The Strange, Familiar and Forgotten: An Anatomy of Consciousness, p. 121.

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this only serves to assert the right to self-invention even more forcefully. In this chapter, autobiography has been discussed in relation both to the narrators of the texts under consideration and to the author. These four texts, all of whose narrators are involved in autobiographical projects that do not textually tag their author as autobiographer, seem to liberate Modiano in some way to examine emotional issues, perhaps because his name is not mentioned in them, just as extreme fictionalization and other distancing techniques have the same function in De si braves garçons and La Petite Bijou, the more emotional of the autofictions. It could even be argued that less of a distance is set between the narrating ‘je’ and the reader in these four texts than is set in the autofictions, especially when the reactions of the multiple-text reader are taken into account. This is a typically Modianesque paradox, given that the autofictions also make more overt claims to being autobiographical. In Quartier perdu, Vestiaire de l’enfance, Rue des Boutiques obscures, and La Place de l’étoile, where the author’s name is not mentioned, there is both confirmation and expansion of certain ideas that the multiple-text reader has built up about the Modiano that has been hesitantly revealed in the autofictions and about the homogeneous authorial consciousness that appears to lie behind all of the texts. Readers are thus led to extend to the author both the emotional issues and the more abstract ones concerning selfhood that are discussed in these four texts. Using their knowledge of autobiographical clues gleaned from the other texts, they can decode the references to a certain extent, especially as concerns the author’s relationship with his father. However, they must work hard to do this, notably concerning Modiano’s transposition of his feelings about the loss of Rudy. Even as concerns Modiano senior, references are often subtle. Thierry Laurent, who devotes a whole chapter to the notion of the father in Modiano’s work and who spends two pages outlining the importance of Albert Modiano in each of the texts up to Du plus loin de l'oubli, misses the crucial importance of Modiano’s father in Rue des Boutiques obscures, stating that ‘à part le fait qu’au début Hutte semble un valeureux père de substitution pour le pauvre amnésique, il n’y a pas dans le roman de véritable rapport avec notre sujet [celui du

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père]’.206 This is evidence of the ease with which crucial autobiographical references can be missed, and of the need for constant vigilance if the reader is seeking out autobiographical references, due to the indirectness with which Modiano approaches autobiography. Of these four texts, Quartier perdu and La Place de l’étoile are the most openly emotional. The reader becomes aware in Quartier perdu of an ambivalence concerning memory, and a distress caused by the death of people to whom the narrator was close as a homeless, drifting twenty-year-old, and who, at least from the point of view of age difference (and with Rocroy also due to paternal overtones in the description of him) could be seen as mother and father substitutes. In La Place de l’étoile, although readers may feel distanced by the selfconscious artificiality of the narrative and the barrage of often unexplained references to other works and historical events, they will also be aware that the narrator seems to be psychologically damaged by the imposition of a caricatural identity that does not fit, and that he is hysterical with feelings of instability and lack of origins. Careful readers will also note the references to childhood pain (Schlemilovitch explicitly refuses to explore this in detail but the mere mention of it is enough to make him want to throw himself into the Danube: 164), and the importance of the fact that the narrator’s father is a stranger. They will also register Schlemilovitch’s strong self-hatred, suicidal feelings, and tendency towards self-mockery. The narrators of Vestiaire de l’enfance and Rue des Boutiques obscures are more emotionally reserved. In fact, in both Vestiaire de l’enfance and Rue des Boutiques obscures there is a sense that what intimacy the reader has with the narrator/author is a highly incomplete one, especially in Rue des Boutiques obscures, with its suggestion that a withheld secret is the crux of the narrative. However, even in these more reserved texts the reader gleans an appreciation of emotional issues. In Vestiaire de l’enfance, these include the damage caused to the narrator by neglect as a child, his feelings of loss, his wish to forget his past life, and his yearning for love. In Rue des Boutiques obscures, emotional force is caused by a strong sense of lost innocence that seems to have something to do with childhood, and by the fear that appears to be at the base of Roland’s personality. Thus, even for the reader who is not aware of the exact details of Modiano’s life, and despite the sense of secretive narrators and a tendency to 206

L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano, p. 83.

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distance difficult issues through humour, these four texts convey a sense of emotionality. These four works are the Modiano texts where narratorial feelings of strangeness and of instability of identity are the most marked, along with La Ronde de nuit (which I have not discussed here, as Swing Troubadour does not engage in an autobiographical project). Indeed, panic at feelings of existential emptiness sometimes seems to be the main cause of distress in Vestiaire de l’enfance, Rue des Boutiques obscures and La Place de l’étoile. Rue des Boutiques obscures shows the connection between lack of a clear sense of identity and lack of a past one can call one’s own. From an historical perspective, the frantic searching for memory and identity, which is especially clear in Rue des Boutiques obscures, sums up the trauma of the post-war generation, who want to know about the past and whose elders refuse to talk about it. It is also symptomatic of a postmodern distress at lack of origins and roots. In fact, Schlemilovitch in La Place de l’étoile seems to fall back on pastiche of French literature as a way of creating origins for himself, to compensate for the fact that his father is a stranger to him. A sense that identity is not based on essence but on artifice is also conveyed, especially in La Place de l’étoile and Rue des Boutiques obscures. The false identities common in Modiano’s texts abound in these narratives, suggesting that identity is always ‘false’, in the sense of ‘assumed’, whether or not it be false in the sense of ‘designed to mislead’. While this is sometimes distressing for the narrators, there is also a sense of the limitless possibilities of selfcreation that this emptiness of self affords, especially in Rue des Boutiques obscures, and of the human capacity for self-invention, while La Place de l’étoile shows how a dualistic way of thinking can restrict those possibilities. While demonstrating the multiplicity of selfhood, all of these texts show a drive to find a certain coherence of identity. Despite the lack of conclusiveness in Rue des Boutiques obscures and the absence of any attempt to be coherent on a narrative level in La Place de l’étoile, Roland and Schlemilovitch still seem to yearn for an identity they can cling to, and Dekker and Sarano also feel the need to link disparate images of themselves through narrative. However selfhood is strange, and at times unfathomable. In his essay on autobiography in the third person, Lejeune makes the point that the self is composed

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of a trinity of I, you and he/she.207 Schlemilovitch is a prime example of this, flitting as he does from ‘je’ to ‘tu’, to ‘il’, and at one point becoming a frank ‘nous’ (141-144). (It is interesting to note, in this respect, that Modiano sometimes speaks of himself as ‘on’ in interviews).208 The self in La Place de l’étoile is seen from outside (that is to say, the narrating self attempts to take on the view of various outside observers), so that the strangeness of the externally imposed self is highlighted. So too is the strangeness of the narrated self in general. Schlemilovitch’s je/jeu is indeed a singular firstperson, and all the narrated selves are singular in the sense of strange, as is clear from Guise’s and Sarano’s feelings of being cut off from past selves. A ‘demande de récit’ pushes these narrators towards the creation of a certain unity of self in narrative, and in writing in particular. However, the many unanswered questions show that even narrative ‘unity’ is illusory, as the narrators’ stories are ridden with holes, and infinite tangents are opened up despite the brevity of the texts. All of this strangeness and inconclusiveness leads to lack of comprehension of the self, and creates a situation where readers, especially multiple-text readers, may feel they have a stronger sense of narratorial and/or authorial identity than the holders of those identities. Memory and imagination are vital issues in these four texts, especially the blurring between them. There is a strong ambivalence concerning memory, along with a recognition of the impossibility of escaping the ghosts of the past. The first three texts discussed show the nefarious effects of the repression of memory. While it is suggested that imagination may be almost as valid as memory in selfnarration, especially when used in order to allow emotional issues to work themselves through, it also seems that imagination can be more counter-productive than liberating when it is used to avoid memories of underlying pain, as occurs on a personal level in Vestiaire de l’enfance. Imagination is also shown to be a necessary component in any writing of self, and the drive to interpret is shown to be always bound up with imaginative forces. The fact that Modiano often situates his narrators in what appear to be dreamworlds (although he deliberately avoids making this wholly clear), suggests that he, like his narrators, 207

‘L’Autobiographie à la troisième personne’, especially pp. 34-38. See for example the television interview with Patrick Poivre d’Arvor (‘Destins’, Ex-Libris, TF1, 18 January 1996). 208

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needs the liberation of dreaming (which in Modiano’s case can be interpreted as ‘inventing’), in order to work through emotional issues. The fact that these worlds are at the same time purported to be real challenges our own assumptions about reality, and points to the role of the imagination in our own interpretations of lived experience. It is clear from all of these texts that there is always a distance between any narrated self and the narrating self. In the chapters that follow, we shall be exploring questions of distance in the context of the gap between the narrating selves and the other people they narrate in biographical writing. The question of fusion – that is to say, the merging of the narrators with the figures they narrate, and their drive for connection with them – is another important issue. While the texts discussed in this chapter produce a sense of the self as other in the sense of strange, the biographical projects sometimes suggest that the self can become the other person, and that the narrated other can become part of the self. This clearly has important ethical implications, much more so than the focus on the personal relevance of imagination in Quartier perdu, Vestiaire de l’enfance, Rue des Boutiques obscures, and La Place de l’étoile. However, there is also a sense that biography can be used as a sort of autobiography by proxy. This is the case both for the narrators and the author, so that Modiano’s autobiographical details are often even more displaced in the biographical works than in the other texts, but at the same time often more emphasized, through the frequent doubling between the biographer-narrators and the subject of their reflections. Let us now turn to a discussion of Modiano and biographical writing.

5 Modiano and Biography The need to tell stories – Ricoeur’s ‘demande de récit’– applies not only to autobiographical projects in Modiano’s texts, but also to the biographical urge. The present chapter and Chapters Six and Seven focus on the processes and ethics of biographical writing, while also discussing the blurred boundaries between autobiography and biography in Modiano’s biographical enterprises. Much of what has been discussed so far has underlined the power invested in storytellers. The following three chapters look at that power not so much in terms of power over the aspects of oneself one wishes to communicate, or the narrator’s power of make-believe, but in terms of the power of the biographer over the biographee (as I will henceforth term the biographical subject, to avoid confusion with the more general idea of the subject matter of biography). The flip-side of this power-relationship is also explored, namely the biographee’s power over the biographer. I continue my stress on the fact that Modiano’s texts highlight the importance of recognizing that there must always be confusion, gaps, and undecidability, and that a distance between self and other always remains, even while foregrounding the interpreter’s desire to understand and unify, and to believe in/connect with another psyche. I also stress the sense of approximate connection that comes about between biographer and biographee in Modiano’s practice of real and imaginary biography. The theories propounded in this section are followed by their application to specific texts in Chapters Six and Seven. These texts, which all explicitly focus on a biographical quest, are the following: Les Boulevards de ceinture, Chien de printemps, Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder. While the autobiographer is always an interpreter of himself or herself (‘lecteur et scripteur de sa propre vie’, as Ricoeur puts it209), there is more responsibility and difficulty involved in interpreting the 209

Temps et récit, III, p. 443.

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life of another person, and the figure of the narrator-interpreter is, accordingly, strongly highlighted in Modiano’s biographicallyfocused work. Readers too are interpreters, and in biographical writing they are of vital importance – activating the text and ensuring that a sense of the biographee lives on, often acting as vectors of history and conduits for memory. In Modiano’s work, the existence of a ‘vous’ narratee, especially in the cases of Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder, often makes explicit the fact that the reader is being invited to identify with the biographee and the narrator. Being of such importance to the biographer, the reader is not played with in Modiano’s biographical enterprises as much as in the other texts. In any case, the power distance between narrator and reader is generally less great in the biographical enterprises than in those containing autobiographical quests, since in the biographical projects the reader works in tandem with the narrator to establish a sense of the biographee. In some of Modiano’s texts, there is a sense that the story may concern the narrator as much as the biographee, and that biography, though important in itself, may also be the means by which a type of autobiography by proxy can be carried out. In Les Boulevards de ceinture, Serge Alexandre undertakes his biographical quest not only out of a sense of duty to record the past but also out of personal necessity, stating: ‘C’est mon devoir, et c’est aussi, pour moi, un véritable besoin’ (66). This need for identification is very strong in many of Modiano’s texts. Schlemilovitch’s belief in ‘métempsycose’ (PE, 81) – which in his case seems more like métempsychose – sets the scene early on, while Guy Roland in Rue des Boutiques obscures is another strong example of the drive towards identification with the other, and Thérèse in La Petite Bijou is a recent example of the same urge. We shall see that while Modiano’s biographer-narrators can be seen as filling themselves with the other person, they also fill the other person with themselves by projecting themselves onto the other, a concept that has important ethical implications. The biographer’s wish for fusion with the biographee mirrors most readers’ own desire to lose, or in any case to broaden, their sense of self in the reading process by becoming the other person, or at least trying to understand him or her. The avidity with which many people read biographies is a measure of this longing to gain access to the intimate details of the other person. As Alan Buisine puts it in his preface to a 1991 issue of the Revue des sciences humaines devoted to ‘le biographique’, much of the reading public is ‘insatiablement avide de connaître la vie de l’autre dans tous ses détails et dans chacune de

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ses défaillances, d’entrer dans son intimité, de devenir son voyeur’.210 The desire for intimacy goes hand in hand with the desire to believe that one has access to an authentic human psyche. Modiano’s own need to believe that his imaginings are true is evident in his ideas of prenatal memories and of ‘voyance’, stated in an apparently authorial voice in Livret de famille and Dora Bruder respectively (LF, 96; DB, 54). ‘Peut-être – mais j’en suis sûr – s’est-elle promenée là’ states the narrator/author of Dora Bruder (36). And of his imaginings concerning his father, the narrator of Les Boulevards de ceinture states: ‘Non, ça n’est pas cela, inventer’ (148). In both of these cases there is an emotional urgency bound up with the need to believe, stemming from a strong personal association with the biographical subject. From the point of view of readers, however, emotions need not run high for them to wish to believe, at least provisionally, in the truth of what they are reading, since the desire for truth forms part of the desire to read biography (and to read in general). Importantly, Modiano’s biographical enterprises encourage a problematization of truth in biography. Though on one level the biographer-narrators seem to believe in an ‘essence’ of their biographees, which they hope to convey, they also seem to recognize that identity is not unitary and that there is no single, objective truth. Yet they possess a certain belief in imaginative truth, and question the assumption that truth can only be found in facts and figures, while also stressing the importance of verification and minute research. The imaginative truth implied in the notion of ‘voyance’ is of course a subjective one. This notion of subjective truth is a commonplace in discussions of life-writing. It is implied in Aragon’s term of ‘mentirvrai’ and in the recurrence of oppositions between two words meaning truthful, whether this be ‘vrai’ and ‘véridique’, or ‘authentique’ and ‘vrai’, or any other combination of oppositions seeking to distinguish between the idea of an (impossible) objective truth and a subjective one.211 In the following chapters, we shall be examining the extent to which Modiano’s narrators can be said to believe in imaginative truth as concerns the other person, as well as how the texts invite reflection on the ethical and ideological importance of recognizing the 210

‘Biofictions’, p. 8. See for example Boisdeffre: ‘Dans Les Boulevards de ceinture, la nuit de l’Occupation nous atteint en plein visage; elle peut n’être guère vraisemblable, mais elle est vraie, de cette vérité poétique, supérieure à la simple observation matérielle’. L’Île aux Livres: Littérature et critique, p. 243. 211

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subjectivity of the ‘truth’ one is propounding about other people. Particularly compelling is the apparent paradox of how the narrating self in Modiano’s texts can be, as claimed, empty, while at the same time filling the other person. We shall also see how, in their identification with other people, Modiano’s narrators open themselves up to the other person.

Parameters for Biography Before going any further, it is useful to establish some parameters for biography, and to provide a working definition, examining its overlap with other genres. Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone define biography as ‘le récit de la vie d’un individu raconté par un autre que lui’.212 While this is sufficient for a preliminary definition, one striking difference between this and Lejeune’s definition of autobiography needs to be examined, namely, the absence of the notion of personality. Lejeune states that the autobiographer stresses ‘l’histoire de sa propre personnalité’.213 The bareness of the Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone definition may be in recognition of the fact that some biographies focus on the personality of the biographee, in a parallel with autobiographical practice, while others opt for a broader picture, in a more fact and context-based, ‘scientific’, approach. Indeed, biography has an affiliation with both autobiography and historiography, sometimes focusing on one link and sometimes on the other. A provision of historical context is, however, the rule rather than the exception in biography, and history features strongly, whether directly or symbolically, in Modiano’s biographical texts. Biography is in any case always in a sense an historical enterprise, because of all the lives that coincided with that of the biographee, and were touched by it in turn. Let us then take as our starting point that biography is the narrative of another person’s life, where the focus is shared in varying proportions between the subject’s personality and the historical context in which he or she lived.214 The question of focus on personality is to a large degree historically determined, since interest in the individual psyches of biographees is a relatively recent phenomenon. Biography as we know it today is in part a backlash against the hagiographies that existed 212

L’Autobiographie, p. 8 Le Pacte autobiographique, p. 14. 214 For a discussion of the distinction between memoirs, autobiography, and biography, see Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’Autobiographie, p. 49. 213

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until the advent of humanism in the fifteenth century. With the Renaissance, there was a surge of interest in the lives of people as humans, rather than as ideals, and while an element of idealization still persists in biography, with a semi-religious awe often surrounding the biographical subject (Michel Surya speaks of ‘une religion du sujet’215), an interest in the human is what dominates today. Pauline Hörmann notes that it was Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage (based on an ordinary, unsuccessful, man) that spread his fame as a biographer rather than his Lives of the English Poets, a fact that suggests the beginnings of a historical shift towards a new interest in ‘ordinary’ lives.216 There will always be an appetite for biography dealing with the lives of the famous, especially for works that manage to humanize lofty figures, as with André Maurois’s series of lives of Proust, Hugo, Sand, and Balzac in the twentieth century in France or Marguerite Yourcenar’s fictionalized biography of the Roman emperor Hadrian in Mémoires d’Hadrien (1951). However, the last hundred years in France have seen a marked increase in interest in ordinary lives. Marcel Schwob’s Vies imaginaires (first published in 1896) which alternates sketches of famous figures such as Aesop and Paolo Uccello with imaginary constructions of the lives of travelling actors and working women, including prostitutes, is an early example of the modern stress on ordinary experience, even though Schwob does this in an often mythical and stylized manner. The interest in commemorating the ordinary on a human level has become even more marked in recent years, as greater democratization has led to more stress on individual experience and a heightened awareness of the value of ordinary life. Annie Ernaux’s socio-biographical explorations of her mother and father in La Place (1983) and Une Femme (1987) record and analyse a certain type of provincial working class life that is often forgotten. Pierre Michon’s Vies minuscules (1984) focuses on the drama inherent in common existence, poeticizing ‘ordinary’ lives by giving them an explicitly literary framework. Much of Gérard Macé’s Vies antérieures (1991), a set of biographical sketches whose form and title clearly play on Schwob’s earlier text, accords a similar importance to the poetry of the ordinary, combined with a sometimes mythic tonality. 215

‘La littérature doit tout dire’, p. 125. La Biographie comme genre littéraire: Mémoires d’Hadrien de Marguerite Yourcenar, especially pp. 24-44. 216

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Ordinariness also combines with the extraordinary in Modiano’s biographical enterprises. While Albert Modiano, one of the main biographees in Modiano’s work, was in many respects an ‘extraordinary’ figure, he is also representative of many ‘ordinary’ French people who colluded with the enemy on indirect levels. Jansen, Ingrid and Dora, the other Modiano biographees, are less problematic than Albert on an individual level, and hence perhaps more ‘ordinary’, yet all are connected with the extraordinarily aberrant event of the Holocaust. We shall see that Modiano uses ordinary lives to crystallize issues of historical importance, as well as to encourage empathy in the reader. Whether focusing on ordinary life or on the lives of the famous, some biographies proclaim themselves as art, recognizing, and indeed often celebrating, the role of the writer in the production of the text, viewing him or her as the vehicle through which the biographee is brought to life, though admittedly not to the same life he or she actually lived. Such biographies generally focus on the production of a sense of the biographee’s personality and indeed often seem more ‘artistic’ than those with a greater focus on historical context. As Hörmann points out, ‘la recherche de l’expression d’une personnalité est plutôt œuvre d’artiste’.217 Historically focused biography, by contrast, usually takes more care to stick with ‘the facts’ of the case. However, even historically focused biographies can be called literature, whether of a ‘scientific’ brand or not. While the Victorians packed their texts with facts and figures, and while some biographers like Annie Ernaux shy away from the label of literature for their texts, aiming to achieve a certain historical or sociological ‘truth’ rather than a literary one – what Ernaux calls ‘une signification plus générale’218 – Hayden White’s notion that all history is literature cannot be ignored, nor can Barthes’s famous enjoinder in his (auto)biography Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes that ‘Tout ceci doit être considéré comme dit par un personnage de roman – ou plutôt par plusieurs’.219 Though one should not lose sight of the fact that history is always bound to a referent, historiography should not minimize the historian’s shaping of it.220 Nor should biography minimize the 217

Ibid, p. 31. Une femme, p. 52. 219 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, p. 123. 220 For more on ‘l’entrecroisement de l’histoire et de la fiction’, see Ricoeur, Temps et Récit, III, pp. 329-348. 218

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writer’s input. Here, the question of presence of personality in biography arises once more, suggesting that the personality of the writer is often as important as that of his or her biographee in any ‘récit de vie’. Sartre’s biographer-historian Roquentin recognizes as much in La Nausée (1938), stating of his biographee Rollebon: ‘je lui prêtais ma vie’.221 This is one of the main issues underlying modern practices of what can be called ‘biofiction’, discussed below. Ironically, even those texts that do minimize the input of the artist can be read as art, and often are, especially in modern reading practices. As Buisine points out, in his preface to the Revue des Sciences Humaines dossier, ‘le biographique n’est plus l’autre de la fiction’.222 While all readers retain the desire to believe, at least momentarily, in the truth of what they are reading, most people now recognize that even without deliberate invention on the part of the writer, there is always an element of bias in the more or less coherent entity suggested by his or her selection, organization, and presentation of events. Modiano’s biographical texts, like his other works, stress the storyteller’s presence. One of the main ways in which they do this is by showing the identification of the narrator (and/or writer) with the biographee and thus leading the reader to wonder to what extent the biographee’s personality is informed by the biographer’s own personality. The latter point underlies many of the important ethical dilemmas in Modiano’s practice of biographical writing. The ‘truth’ created by this mix of autobiography and biography – artistic, scientific, or other – is one of the questions we shall be examining in the texts. One indication that Modiano is aware of the responsibility of the storyteller in relation to writing about the past and about other people is apparent in his very first text, in the striking metaphor of prostitution and proxynétisme that runs through La Place de l’étoile. Schlemilovitch describes himself as a ‘maquereau’ (he is Apollinaire’s ‘maquereau rose’: 147), while also including himself in the ‘putains qui écrivent leurs mémoires’ (51). This is appropriate enough, as in a sense he is prostituting both himself and other people (just as Modiano is literally ‘selling’ himself and others). While his iconoclastic treatment of history is necessary, Schlemilovitch seems to be aware that he is manipulating other people to fit the various pictures he wishes to create. The term ‘mémoires’ itself implies a recognition that 221 222

La Nausée, p. 138. ‘Biofictions’, p. 10.

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his narrative does not merely involve autobiography, but a wide network of interlinked lives. On one level the metaphor of prostitution and selling oneself clearly refers to the political prostitution of collaboration (the right-wing Adrien Debigorre is a ‘Gestapette’ (77), and Drieu and Brasillach are also prostitutes, as is the Marquise), but the narrator is also in a sense their pimp. Tellingly, he calls in his mother to play the role of the archetypal figure of ‘la putain juive’ (50), and in his fantasies, Hilda, the daughter of an SS officer, and Yasmine from Istanbul, both prostitute themselves (159-163). Interestingly, Ernaux also hints at a metaphor of prostitution in relation to biographical writing, though with a different emphasis, calling herself ‘un lieu de passage’, who lets her self be used by other people.223 While Ernaux’s choice of terminology implies a passive storyteller, and thus minimizes the input of the narrating consciousness, Modiano’s imagery in La Place de l’étoile is more frank. As we have seen, an openness concerning narratorial powers continues more or less throughout Modiano’s work as a whole. While, as demonstrated in the previous chapters, it is complicated by a tendency to present hypothesis as fact, either out of a desire to play with the reader or because of a belief in imaginative truth, the texts always stress the subjectivity of any ‘truth’ provided, as well as the interpreting role of the storyteller. The question of the biographer’s input into the shaping of the story of his or her biographee is of great importance for modern practices of biography, whether imaginary or based on real figures. Let us now turn to a closer examination of this matter.

Biofictions Given that all biographies contain an element of fiction, the extent to which fiction means making or making up is a vital question in any discussion of biography. If merely putting shape on a story means that it is a fiction, surely some fictions are truer than others. This conundrum has led some historians to claim that the word ‘fictional’ in an historical context should be reserved for deliberate intention to mislead.224 The bonne foi attached to storytelling is a question that will 223

Ernaux used these words in an unpublished interview with Siobhán McIlvanney, cited in note 37 to Chapter Four of her monograph Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins, p. 211. 224 See for example James Wilkinson, ‘A Choice of Fictions: Historians, Memory and Evidence’, p. 89.

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be of crucial importance in the discussion of Dora Bruder, as will the question of whether it is a fiction – or biofiction – at all. It is certainly not a deliberately misleading text. The term ‘biofiction’ deserves further analysis. It figures in Buisine’s preface to the Revue des Sciences Humaines dossier on ‘le biographique’. In Buisine’s rather vague usage (he merely uses the term as a heading), biofiction seems to be an umbrella term referring to genres as diverse as pseudo-biography, real biography, and even autobiography, including modern types of autobiography, like Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, and Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight which is a pseudo-biography as well as a (very) fictionalized (auto)biography of Nabokov himself. While this vagueness of terminology on Buisine’s part leads to an interesting blurring of boundaries, there is clearly a need for a greater theorization of the notion of biofiction. In my view, it confuses matters to use the term to discuss pseudo-biography (just as it confuses matters to use the term ‘roman autobiographique’ to discuss pseudo-autobiography). It is also salutary to avoid the kind of looseness that has led to the term ‘autofiction’ being used to mean any kind of autobiographical fiction. It is thus not wise to use biofiction for all kinds of fictionalized biography indiscriminately. As with autofiction, I argue that the label should be reserved only for texts that explore the lives of real people (whose lives are tagged as real within the text), and which clearly problematize the notion of truth in biography, stressing the subjective nature of the narrator’s input. It makes sense to reserve the term only for texts where a sustained biographical exploration occurs. Thus my concept of biofiction is to biography as my concept of autofiction is to autobiography: both are biographically based and focused, but are somehow ‘textually tagged’ as fictionalized. In Chapter Two, I argued that the label ‘autofiction’ should be reserved for texts produced during what Sarraute termed the ‘ère du soupçon’ – the modern era of readerly and writerly awareness of the subjectively shaped nature of all narrativization of experience. We saw that the description of ‘autofiction’ is usually most applicable to works from the wave of experimental autobiographical writing and theorization of autobiography that started, or at least gained critical mass, in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems sensible to reserve the label ‘biofiction’ for texts that belong to the same general historical paradigm. Like autofiction then, biofiction is part of an historical shift

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towards stressing the constructedness and/or unreliability of any textualization of life. One might initially consider that all fictionalized biographies make clear that they are in some way departing from ‘the biographical facts’, not least due to their novelistic tendency to venture into the realms of improbability by portraying the inner thoughts of their biographee.225 Thus, one might feel justified in claiming that even novelized biographies of the popular, easily digested kind should always qualify as biofiction. However, in my view, those that do not explicitly demonstrate their constructed nature must be disqualified. Even André Maurois’s fictionalized biographies often do not highlight the subjectivity of the biographer’s input. Quite the contrary is often the case, in fact, as Maurois’s considerable speculation on the inner consciousness of his biographees, combined with apparently meticulous research, can seem to be carried out in an attempt to lull the reader into an enduring sense of belief in the stories recounted. Indeed, on one occasion, in discussing his approach to biography, Maurois spoke of the importance of ‘pulling down the scaffolding’ in order to make the constructed nature of the texts less apparent to readers.226 These complexities make the case for reserving the label of ‘biofiction’ for texts from recent biographical practice that stress their mix of inventedness and fact, and that doubt the ability of biography to render the life of any biographee in anything other than a subjective manner. The problem of appropriation of the other is always present in biofictional texts, since even if the narrator stresses the speculative nature of his narrative, a residue of belief always remains in the image presented of the biographee. While it is true that an ethical duty is carried out in the pointing out of narratorial input, some biographers seem to feel this gives them a licence to invent with impunity. We shall see that an ambivalence about the biographer’s right of invention and a positing of limits in imagination inform Modiano’s practice of biography. Sartre’s Roquentin, writing in the 1930s, already felt that his construction of his biographee Rollebon was: ‘tout simplement une 225

On this ‘signpost of fictionality’ see Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction, especially pp. 109-131. Also see, what Genette calls ‘paralepse’ (implausible inside views) in his Figures, III, pp. 211, 213 and pp. 221-222. 226 ‘Biography as a Work of Art’, in Biography as High Adventure: Life-Writers Speak on their Art, p. 12

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manière d’unifier mes connaissances’ and: ‘un travail de pure imagination’.227 Significantly, Roquentin abandons his historicobiographical work in favour of fiction, declaring on the final page of his diary that he will write a novel about himself, (which is perhaps the very novel that the reader has just read). In the novel-like account he has already provided, Roquentin has explored and analysed his own problematic sense of existence in addition to providing fragments of his work on Rollebon.228 This stressing of the autobiographical process involved in biography has come to be a constant of modern biography. Many modern biographers, whether they are real authors or imaginary creations, stress the autobiographical nature of their work, as in Macé’s Vies antérieures, a text whose ‘quatrième de couverture’ bears the following statement: ‘Traduire, interpréter, rêver sa propre vie en se prenant pour un autre’, and where the voice of the narrator is the link between all the fragmentary lives recounted. The Gallimard ‘L’Un et l’autre’ collection, set up in 1988 and containing works by Macé, Michon, François Bott, and Sylvie Germain among others, is symptomatic of the current tendency to deliberately stress the presence of imagination in biography (often indeed exalting it) as well as the tendency to highlight the blurring between autobiography and biography in life-writing. On the current sleeve of the works in this collection directed by J-B Pontalis figures the following declaration: ‘Des vies, mais telles que la mémoire les invente, que notre imagination les recrée, qu’une passion les anime. Des récits subjectifs, à mille lieues de la biographie traditionnelle. L’un et l’autre : l’auteur et son héros secret, le peintre et son modèle. Entre eux, un lien intime et fort. Entre le portrait d’un autre et l’autoportrait, où placer la frontière?’. The above quotation stresses the blurring between memory and imagination, including the possibility of imagining memories for other people. It also suggests that, while biography is often autobiographical, even autobiography is always permeated by an element of biography. The latter point is particularly clear in the Doubrovsky and Angot autofictions discussed in Chapter Two. Both autofictions are biofictional in that they place a considerable stress on establishing a sense of the other person’s life, as well as problematizing the fact/fiction divide. In Le Livre brisé, the

227 228

La Nausée, p. 30. See also Victor Brombert, ‘Sartre et la biographie impossible’. La Nausée, p. 250.

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intertwining of Ilse’s life with Doubrovsky’s is reflected on at length, and in Sujet Angot Claude and Angot are tightly bound up together. Annie Ernaux is one author who seems to buck some of the above trends in biography. She is less prone to stressing openly the subjective nature of her accounts of her mother and father’s lives, claiming that her writing is a neutral type of ‘écriture plate’,229 and seeming to have considerable faith in the objectivity of her own assembling and portrayal of facts. She is also less inclined to accord the status of art to biography, having inherited from her family background a suspicion of the novel and ‘literature’ in general as bourgeois, wanting to remain ‘au-dessous de la littérature’.230 The desire to be merely a space through which other people travel (‘un lieu de passage’), and the belief that this is possible, is typical of her approach. However Ernaux does stress the intertwined nature of her own experiences and those of her parents, as well as the linguistic nature of her representation of them. The very title of Une Femme may be read as encouraging readers to see that both Ernaux and her mother are in question in that text. Ernaux’s main suspicion is that of cross-contamination between the novel form and her brand of biographical writing. In Une Place and Une Femme, she deliberately avoids unleashing her imagination, stating that she will indulge in ‘aucune poésie du souvenir’, instead patiently seeking out facts, or at least what she perceives to be ‘fact’, feeling, as Sartre’s Roquentin initially does, that imagination is to be avoided, because it seems too temptingly easy.231 However, while Ernaux often seems to be seeking an impossible neutrality, her narrators keep intervening with ‘je’, highlighting the bias of the narrating instance, and she even sometimes explicitly stresses her satisfaction at imposing a reassuring coherence on life.232 Thus, while she avoids deliberate invention, her texts do point out her shaping role as selecter, organizer, and presenter of information, which is of course a subjective role. Indeed, Ernaux’s remarks in interview often suggest her awareness of the importance of the narratorial input. She has stated for example that: ‘La Place est de l’ordre du fictionnel dans la mesure où j’ai donné un destin à mon père’(Révolution, 22 February 1985). As such, even Ernaux’s texts can be seen as biofiction of a sort. 229

La Place, p. 24. Une femme, p. 23. 231 La Place, p. 24. See also page 100. 232 See for example Une Femme, pp. 43 and 103. 230

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Biofiction is thus, like autofiction, a particularly slippery concept. It must also be remembered that just as texts can never be ‘objectively’ autofictions, they can never be objectively biofictions, as what one reader will read as ‘overt’ stress on invention or subjective input another will not perceive as such. Equally, a text may be read as biofictional even if this is not the author’s intention. Despite this, and always assuming a reader with symbolic and literal literary competence, it is harder to fail to read some texts as biofictions than others. In Chapter Six and Seven, we shall be focusing on how textual indications highlight biofictionality in Modiano’s texts.

Modiano and Biofiction At first sight, the relevance of the ‘biofiction’ debate to Modiano’s work might seem minimal. Most of the figures who are fictionalized in Modiano’s work are not tagged as real. Despite the fact that Les Boulevards de ceinture, Voyage de noces, and Dora Bruder all focus on a biographical quest and concern real figures, Dora Bruder is in fact the only biographical text in which the biographee is highly likely to seem real to the yardstick reader. Even in this text the author reduces this possibility to some extent by not naming himself as the narrator. The complex question of whether elements of Dora Bruder can be said to be fictionalized will be dealt with in Chapter Seven, but suffice it to say here that it seems closest to the yardstick criteria for biofiction, despite minimal fictionality. The reader of Voyage de noces is not informed that Ingrid is a fictionalization of Dora. Neither is it pointed out in Les Boulevards de ceinture that Chalva Deyckekaire is a fictionalization of Modiano’s father, and in fact in some editions a note preceding the text informs the reader that the opposite is the case – claiming that the characters have ‘aucun rapport avec la réalité’ (though this could admittedly be seen as a preliminary hint to some readers of the mix of fact and fiction in this text). As stated, in Fleurs de ruine, the father and brother figures are called Albert and Rudy, but the narrator is unnamed, and thus the non-paratextually informed single-text reader has no way of knowing that this father and brother refer to Albert and Rudy Modiano. Fleurs de ruine is in any case not a direct biographical quest of either of these figures and as such has arguably much less claim to the label of biofiction even when such paratextual knowledge is available. However, like many of the other texts, it does, from the paratextually informed reader’s point of view, have biofictional elements, as the narrator’s ruminations and imaginative speculation

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concerning both Pacheco and Pagnon ultimately link in with his image of his father, and as such it could in some respects be seen as an indirect biographical quest relating to Modiano’s father. Both Livret de famille and De si braves garçons, which do tag their characters as both real and fictional for the yardstick reader, have biofictional elements but are not primarily biofictions, and there is no extended biographical reflection on a real person. In the case of Livret de famille, the fictionalized biographical analysis of real people concerns Patrick’s parents, and the focus on biographical invention in the Dressel chapter gives the sections concerning these figures an added biofictional force. In De si braves garçons, it concerns the ‘braves garçons’ depicted, although this type of biofiction is particularly diffuse, since the characters described are a mix of many different real figures, including Modiano’s schoolmates. Remise de peine is so sparing in its treatment of Rudy, giving him no individual characteristics other than a predilection for the colour ‘vert pâle’ (86), that it can hardly qualify for the label. The concept of biofiction for Modiano’s work is nonetheless important. While few of the texts have biofictional elements for the yardstick reader, it is perhaps best to allow, as with autofiction, that a biofiction effect can occur when the reader has biographical knowledge. In this light, Les Boulevards de ceinture can be read as a biofiction, even though, as mentioned, it denies its objectively biographical qualities in the peritext. Similarly, Voyage de noces, which is presented as a fictionalized biographical quest of Ingrid Teyrsen on a diegetic level, is biofictional for the reader who knows that it is a fictionalized biographical account of the real-life figure Dora Bruder. We shall be looking at the ramifications of this fact in Chapter Seven. Even La Place de l’étoile, which is in part a fictionalization of Modiano’s father’s experiences, could conceivably be seen as a (very indirect) biofiction for the reader aware of this fact, even though it is not tagged as such. La Ronde de nuit also has biofictional elements relating to Albert Modiano. More importantly for the purposes of the discussion, there is a considerable amount of fictitious biofiction – much fictionalization within invented biographical quests. Les Boulevards de ceinture and Voyage de noces are the best examples of this. This stress on imaginary biofiction reflects the current preoccupation with what can be called ‘the imaginary nature of memory’, as evidenced by much of the content in the ‘L’Un et l’autre’ Gallimard collection.

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Of the texts that focus on biographical quests, two – Dora Bruder, and also Chien de printemps – are mainly documentary in tone (Chien de printemps less so for the multiple-text reader).233 However, Les Boulevards de ceinture and Voyage de noces often seem to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction deliberately, as do so many of the texts. Why then this strong blurring of ontological boundaries in Les Boulevards de ceinture and Voyage de noces? One answer lies in the fact that the possibility the narrator is inventing material draws much attention to the inventing psyche. In Modiano’s work, this generally occurs partly to show that the text is ultimately an expression of the narrator’s personality. However, the emphasis on invention frequently also serves to point out that the narrator is an artist, and as such is capable of creating a certain artistic biographical truth.

Modiano’s Biographers as (Historical) Artists The texts discussed so far show that imaginative restructuring cannot be escaped, as memory is always faulty and archives are never complete. Yet they also show that imagination has a certain validity. In the biographical projects, there is a similar sense that imagination can be legitimate and even necessary. They stress that a respectful and sincere attempt at genuine representation, even if it is inadequate, and of necessity imbued with the writer’s subjectivity – and even if it is deliberately imaginatively reworked – is always better than silence, once the storyteller’s input is pointed out. The new life that Dora is given in both Dora Bruder and Voyage de noces, patchy and paltry though it may be, could not exist without storytelling. Writing bears witness on behalf of those who cannot speak, providing what Pierre Lepape terms ‘le début d’une présence’.234 Importantly, the subjective truth Modiano’s narrators aim for is not merely imagined ‘de toutes pièces’, but is based on what facts are known, and often on painstaking research, and always involves much perusal of what traces there are. The narrators seem to feel that this authorizes a certain amount of speculation. Modiano himself insists on scrupulous scholarship as an essential stage of preparation for his

233

See the section devoted to Chien de printemps in Chapter Six for a distinction between the reality effect for single-text readers and multiple-text readers in that text. 234 ‘La disparition’, p. 2.

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fictions. This factual basis allows the narrators and the author to feel they are summoning up the ghosts of their subject.235 Imagination, especially when based on precise research, may be more than something with which one must ‘make do’. The artist has the power to create a sense of personality and human presence around biographical figures. Modiano’s texts embody a desire for human input in the archiving of facts. As Kawakami has pointed out, the unstructured list of events created by the chauffeur’s trail of Sarano in Vestiaire de l’enfance is so meaningless as to be ridiculous.236 However, this record of reality might well have proved fascinating reading had it been shaped into a skilful narrative creating a sense of the subject being trailed. As with Modiano’s other texts, the biographical enterprises often borrow the vocabulary of police investigations or the atmosphere of police questioning. As Pierre Assouline states of Modiano, ‘Il a du flic en lui’.237 Traces of the past are presented as evidence and clues from which to extrapolate. Modiano has said: ‘Il me faut partir d’éléments d’une précision quasi anthropométrique pour que la rêverie romanesque puisse s’échapper et prendre forme’.238 (This use of the term ‘anthropométrique’ is intriguing, suggesting that Modiano is involved in police investigation, while also ironically gesturing to the fact that the marginalized figures for whom he creates fragmentary biographies are often, as Modiano describes his father in Dora Bruder, des ‘hors-la-loi’: 119). In itself, the above quotation sums up the artistic-cum-historical tone of Modiano’s texts, as his narrators also indulge in a kind of ‘rêverie romanesque’ based on actual documents and témoignage. Modianesque reconstructions revolve around the doubts and speculations caused by the fact that many people leave little or no concrete trace of their passage through life, surviving merely in the memories of certain individuals whose paths investigators may never cross (and disappearing with these people’s deaths). In Rue des Boutiques obscures, the detective Bernardy can find no trace of Oleg de Wrédé, though the latter remains as a trace in the memory of Mme Kahan. Gay Orlow’s marriage to Freddie has no written trace either, 235

On the idea of the authority stemming from speculation based on research, see Ina Schabert, ‘Fictional Biography, Factual Biography, and their Contaminations’, especially p. 3. 236 A Self-Conscious Art, p. 44. 237 ‘Modiano, lieux de mémoire’, p. 46. 238 Ibid, p. 46.

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although Wildmer luckily remembers it (189). Traces can also disappear entirely – the archives at Roland’s old school have been destroyed by fire, as have those of the city hall in Salonica. When traces disappear, they nonetheless remain as ‘vibrations’ or reverberations (RB, 124; DB, 133). However, these vibrations are apparent only to those who make the effort to open their ears to the echoes of past lives and to piece together stories, and it is only through narrative that the facts and ‘vibrations’ of the past can be conveyed. The narrator’s responsibility is to do this in as vivid a manner as possible. This is a question of skill. As the twentieth-century British biographer Lytton Strachey put it: ‘It is perhaps as difficult to write a good life as to live one’.239 While bare lists of addresses and documents attesting disappeared and unknown lives are common in Modiano’s texts, as manifestations of the desire to record traces, their force is created by the emotional context of the narratives in which they appear – evidence of the power of the artist to create a sense of life based on precise historical detail.

An Authority without Tyranny? Despite Modiano’s narrators’ apparent belief in the possibility of imaginative truth based on historical research, the texts are marked by an ambiguity as to the authority of imagination. In Voyage de noces, the narrator wonders if it is best merely to gather facts and present them one by one, avoiding invention or speculation as much as possible, or, it is implied, to weave a story around the facts, in order to create a sense of the biographee’s personality as he is about to do. The biographical texts are divided on this issue. While none of the texts resort to the bare enumeration of facts briefly proposed in Voyage de noces as a possible model for biography, the narrators of Chien de printemps and Dora Bruder do restrain themselves from inventing, while identifying totally with their subjects. By contrast, Les Boulevards de ceinture and Voyage de noces do not seem ashamed of their tone of imaginative reconstruction. The fact that the same person is concerned in both Voyage de noces, with its stress on imagination, and Dora Bruder with its documentary tone, highlights the ambivalence apparently felt by Modiano on this point. This ambivalence is further highlighted by the fact that, while on one level Dora Bruder seems to represent a move towards an attempt not to invent, the female narration of Des inconnues and La Petite Bijou can 239

Strachey, cited in Hörmann, p. 31.

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be seen as a means by which Modiano can remain imaginatively connected with Dora. The concept of imaginative truth can also be unsettling for the reader. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, a text whose very title implies versionality, the narrator, ‘V’, calls fictionalized biography ‘by far the worst kind of literature yet invented’, in a reference to its disturbing nature (and to the uncertain status of Nabokov’s text itself).240 As well as being made sporadically aware of the possible fictionality of what they are reading, Modiano’s readers may also be unsettled by the fact that, while the biographer-narrators clearly invest a lot of energy in establishing as many facts as they can about their biographees, their belief in imaginative truth sometimes leads to their neglecting to indicate the sources of all the material gathered, which can have the effect of undermining the reliability of the material gathered. And, as stated above, while it is undoubtedly more ethical to present a text as partly imagined than to present it as unproblematically ‘true’, it is also undeniable that any sort of presentation of another person has an effect on readers and imprints itself in some way in their minds. Readers’ memories are as faulty as those of narrators – and readers may consequently have difficulty remembering what was presented as fact and what as fiction in what they read. This is the nub of modern ethical hesitations underlying biofictional highlighting of the unreliability of narratorial input. Most modern readers will also be conscious that literary character always ‘belongs’ to them to a certain extent. In the aforementioned 1990 Assouline interview, Modiano showed that he himself is aware of this, claiming that by not naming Rudy in Remise de peine, or giving him a separate existence, he managed not to betray him. He spoke of the need not to give Rudy ‘une existence réelle’, albeit a literary one, apparently afraid of somehow losing him to the reader.241 Clearly, the issue of presenting other people in biographical writing is laden with responsibility. Yet Modiano’s texts attempt to minimize the ‘betrayal’ involved.

240

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, p. 16. ‘Nabokov a bien expliqué que quand on mettait un personnage de la vie réelle dans la fiction, il se confondait avec le tissu romanesque et c’était une trahison. Mais je n’ai pas eu ce sentiment avec Rudy. Parce que je ne lui ai pas donné d’existence réelle. Pas de prénom. C’était toujours “mon frère et moi”. Je ne l’ai pas trahi’. ‘Modiano, lieux de mémoire’, p. 36. 241

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Silence and Distance Although their presentation of their biographees cannot avoid some bias, even in the least imagined of the lives, Modiano’s biographernarrators seek to respect the dignity of their biographees. In the texts that do not constitute extended biographical projects but that contain pockets of biofictional detail relating to Modiano’s parents this is not unconditionally true, however. As we have seen, ridicule and downright hostility are often allowed concerning the parent figures in those texts. In the extended biographical projects however, there seems to be a heightened awareness of the need for an element of silence and mystery when representing the other. The biographees in Modiano’s texts are markedly silent, providing little dialogue for potential interpretation by either narrator or reader. The father in Les Boulevards de ceinture and Jansen in Chien de printemps are both remarkably taciturn, and the dialogue attributed to Ingrid in Voyage de noces is minimal. Another sign of respect is the fact that the biographer-narrators generally leave the thoughts of the biographee inviolate, by avoiding inside views. In Voyage de noces, where this is not always the case, Rigaud and Ingrid, whose thoughts are inhabited to a considerable extent, seem by this token to be more of an extension of the narrator than does Dora in Dora Bruder, whose individual thoughts are portrayed in merely one line of that text (DB, 49).242 In Voyage de noces, these inside views add to the sense that the text is ultimately more autobiographical than biographical, as we shall see. However, it must also be remembered that Modiano’s narrators sometimes merge with other people out of solidarity, and an attempt to understand them. This has already been seen in the inside views of the Philippe and Johnny episodes, and in the Bourlagoff episode in Livret de famille and in the portrayal of the narrator’s mother in that text, and also applies to the appropriation of other people’s thoughts in Voyage de noces. In general then, Modiano’s narrators are circumspect with the thoughts of their biographees, balancing the desire for commemoration and imaginative connection with the silence of respect. Modiano seems to be aware that, as Hörmann puts it, ‘le biographe doit essayer de se rapprocher de son sujet, mais il doit en même temps garder distance par rapport à lui’.243 With Modiano’s 242 243

See Chapter Seven, ‘Scene and “Character”’. La Biographie comme genre littéraire, p. 32

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biographical enterprises, it is usually impossible to enter into the type of intimacy with the other that readers of biography generally crave. The reader must be content with a relative intimacy with the narrator, a point returned to below, in the discussion of the link between autobiography and biography in Modiano’s texts.

Gaps and Incoherence The general refusal of inside views and the lack of dialogue attributed to the biographees in Modiano’s work create a silence and absence that is reinforced by the striking incompleteness of the biographical projects. The biographer-narrator of Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot makes the point that the trawling net of the biographical enterprise and, it is implied, the biographical text itself, are ‘a collection of holes tied together with string’, and in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the narrator speaks of Sebastian as ‘a dazzling succession of gaps’.244 Holes and gaps are appropriate images for discussion of Modiano’s biographical texts. In his letter to Hutte constituting chapter XL of Rue des Boutiques obscures, Roland reflects on the fragmentary nature of life: ‘Des lambeaux, des bribes de quelque chose, me revenaient brusquement au fil de mes recherches… Mais après tout, c’est peutêtre ça, une vie…’ (238). Modiano’s narrators excel in what Joye calls the art of ‘l’histoire tronquée’.245 Les Boulevards de ceinture, Chien de printemps and Dora Bruder focus on a bare few months of the biographee’s life, and while Voyage de noces presents the biographee as a young girl and a middle-aged woman, very little is known of Ingrid’s life, especially of the years leading to her suicide. Insofar as life is a collection of rags and fragments, biography should not seek to impose an artificial coherence on its frayed, disjointed nature, and the many mysteries and holes in Modiano’s texts are an application of this ethos. His work shows ‘la discontinuité et l’absence d’unité de la personne’.246 As stated in Chapter Two, fiction is often equated with the imposition of a certain coherence on events. However the ‘fictions’ of the biographical enterprises in Modiano’s texts seek to replicate the incoherence of life, as well as the opacity of the other. Just as Thérèse in La Petite Bijou and the narrator of Livret de famille (in the 244

Flaubert’s Parrot, p. 38. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, p. 27. ‘À propos de Fleurs de ruine’, p. 77. 246 Ibid, p. 75. 245

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Gerbauld episode in chapter IX) both abandon their quest to clear up the mystery of the identity and motivations of the person they are following, the biographer-narrators at times demonstrate a similar attitude towards their biographees, leaving them mystery, despite their urge to understand and identify. In Les Boulevards de ceinture, contradiction combines with mystery to replicate life’s discontinuity. A realization that events should not be ordered too neatly is also clear in the confusion of chronology in that text. As the texts do not purport to be biographies tracing life from birth to death, there is little of the build-up to the grand finale of death generally found in biography. In Les Boulevards de ceinture and Chien de printemps, death of the biographee does not in any case occur, although they can be said to be symbolically pervaded by death. And while the narratives in Dora Bruder and Voyage de noces are marked by their biographee’s death, and as such perhaps create a greater sense of what Ernaux would call fictional destiny, the reader is informed of the subject’s death at the outset of these texts. Linearity is further disrupted in all of the texts by the fact that the narratives weave in and out between the biographee’s life and the narrator’s experiences.

Briefness, Mystery, and ‘Biographèmes’ Modiano’s texts are strikingly brief – generally less than two hundred pages in length. Though subtitled ‘roman’ in all editions to date, Chien de printemps is the same length as a longish short-story. Despite this sense of incompleteness, briefness can, in its evocation of mystery, also reinforce the human presence attached to the biographee. (The aforementioned biographical texts of Macé, Michon and Ernaux also deal in glimpses and general brevity). That the ability to remember can be aided by mystery is recognized by the narrator of Modiano’s Du plus loin de l’oubli, who says that he remembers the Jacqueline episode ‘peut-être parce qu’il était demeuré en suspens’ (137). Modiano seems aware that briefness in biography need not merely encourage a sense of absence, but may also actually strengthen the presence of the biographee. It was perhaps in a recognition of the power of minimalism, as well as a reaction to the overload of detail in most biographies, that Barthes praised briefness in his Sade, Fourier, Loyola: ‘si j’étais écrivain, et mort, comme j’aimerais que ma vie se réduisît, par les soins d’un biographe amical et désinvolte, à quelques détails, à

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quelques goûts, à quelques inflexions, disons: des biographèmes’.247 Marcel Schwob placed a similar stress on a minimalistic approach in his Vies imaginaires. Schwob considered mystery to be an essential element of biography, allying it to brevity. In his preface to Vies imaginaires, he informs us that Aristotle wore a pouch filled with hot oil on his stomach and that after his death great numbers of earthenware vases were found in his house, only to change scene abruptly with the tantalizing statement: ‘Nous ne saurons jamais ce qu’Aristote faisait de toutes ces poteries. Et le mystère en est aussi agréable que les conjectures auxquelles Boswell nous abandonne sur l’usage que faisait Johnson des pelures sèches d’orange qu’il avait coutume de conserver dans ses poches’.248 In the biographical and autobiographical enterprises in Modiano’s texts, vivid and intriguing details strike their own resonant note. The mysterious dog that appears from nowhere at the end of Chien de printemps, and the enigma attached to the slightly absurd-sounding ‘métier’ consisting in being the ‘le confident de John Gilbert’ in Rue des Boutiques obscures are so many pouches of hot oil, so many handfuls of dried orange peel. The art of the striking detail seems well fitted to Modiano’s notion of the ‘travail d’imagination’ that his readers must furnish (and to the postmodern stress on readerly input in general). ‘Biographèmes’ are generally poignant things, as Régine Robin recognizes in her equation of Barthes’s notion of the stinging pain of the ‘punctum’ with the concept of the ‘biographème’. While the ‘studium’, for Robin, corresponds to the ‘parcours obligés de la vie, les grandes périodisations qui rythment les biographies’, the ‘punctum’ and the ‘biographème’ correspond to an attention to ‘non pas la linéarité apparente d’un trajet mais des détails, des inflexions, une vie trouée, irruption de signifiants inattendus’.249 The seemingly insignificant, yet strangely touching detail of the father’s taste for Ploum-Plouvier biscuits in Les Boulevards de ceinture (143) fits well with Robin’s gloss on Barthes’s notion of the ‘biographème’, as the remembrance of this detail is painful, and serves to highlight the vast areas of shadow around it, while also increasing Albert Modiano’s human presence. Modiano seems personally ambivalent about the ‘vies trouées’ he produces. While on the one hand claiming that he would ideally 247

Sade, Fourier, Loyola, p. 1045. Vies imaginaires, p. 12. 249 ‘L’Autofiction. Le sujet toujours en défaut’, p. 78. 248

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like to produce nothing but texts twenty pages in length, he also frequently bemoans the fact that there is always something missing, and that much is left undeveloped in his short texts.250 The author’s feeling that there is something absent in his texts is, he claims, what keeps him writing, and he stated ruefully in a 1982 interview with Bernard Pivot on Apostrophes that his sketches in De si braves garçons were perhaps too short. (Pivot responded by urging the author to change nothing in his approach – ‘ce ne serait plus Modiano’!).251 Notwithstanding authorial feelings of dissatisfaction, it is the absence and the ellipsis in his description of plot and character, whether as part of a biographical quest or not, that gives his texts their poetry. Contradiction also plays its part in the generation of a sense of enigmatic life surrounding the biographees in Modiano’s texts. Like Forster’s ‘round’ characters, who are capable of surprising in a convincing way, Modiano’s biographees all have a personality, while retaining a strong aura of mystery. The frequent presence of one or two elements contradicting the general picture gives them the ability to surprise, adding to their human roundness. In an interview with Montaudon, Modiano expressed his fascination with contradiction in character: ‘J’ai toujours été fasciné par les gens contradictoires, qui ne sont pas tout d’une pièce, ils deviennent alors plus émouvants’.252 As shown in Chapter One, dissonances abound in relation to character in general in Modiano’s texts. His biographees also often ‘surprise’ the reader by contradictory or inexplicable attributes, generating a strong sense of extratextual life.

Why Write Biographies? The need felt by Modiano’s narrators to document the past in the form of biography is part of the general ‘devoir de mémoire’ felt by them. His narrators feel the dissolution of human experience very strongly. The narrator of Chien de printemps states clearly that ‘je refusais que les gens et les choses disparaissent sans laisser de trace’ (35). There is also a strong sense of fascination with the mystery of other people, especially those who are not completely ‘inconnus’. Of the four biographees, three – Jansen, Deyckecaire and Ingrid – are either acquaintances or family members. The narrators thus have a strong 250

In his recent interview with Josyane Savigneau, ‘Une conversation avec Patrick Modiano’, Modiano stressed the appeal of writing short texts. 251 See Modiano’s recent comments in Gaudemar, ‘Modiano, souvenir écrin’, and ‘La qualité française’, Apostrophes, Antenne 2, 26 November 1982. 252 ‘Patrick Modiano: Le plus agréable c’est la rêverie’, p. 16.

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personal investment in trying to establish a sense of their biographees’ lives, and there is a correspondingly strong sense of their narratives as letters to the biographee, and of a wish to make contact. Chalva is addressed insistently in Les Boulevards de ceinture, from page 107 on, and Chien de printemps could be seen as a response to the postcard Jansen never sent from Cuernavaca (20). Apart from questions of duty and fascination, the biographical impulse shares something of the protective, familial impulse evident in Livret de famille. Just as Modiano becomes a father to the baby Bourlagoff in Livret de famille, and Schlemilovitch claims that Modigliani is his cousin (PE, 141), Dora Bruder also seems like a cousin, and there is strong fraternal imagery concerning Jansen in Chien de printemps. This is further indication of the apparent need felt by Modiano to create a family for himself in writing. Readers are also led to wonder more generally at Modiano’s apparent need to identify with other people, and to narrate the self diffusely. Let us now look at this point in relation to autobiography in the biographical enterprises.

(Auto)Biography In the biographical enterprises in Modiano’s texts, it is particularly difficult to disentangle the tellers from the textual figures they construct.253 As mentioned, Les Boulevards de ceinture and Voyage de noces are particularly strong examples of this point, and in general the reader has the impression that biographers and biographees blur in and out of one another, like the process in Rue des Boutiques obscures whereby Guy Roland slips in and out of other people’s identities. This blurring can only partly be explained by the fact that the biographical narratives are recounted by autodiegetic narrators who have shared experiences with the biographees, and who are thus firmly part of the stories they tell. The fact that all are marginal figures, prone to giving people the slip, is symbolic of the difficulty of establishing how much of what is presented stems from the narrator and how much from the biographee. One question is ever-present for the reader of Modiano’s work: who is on the margins of whom? Though the question of similarity between biographer and biographee is a problematic one, as biographers will tend to choose to write about people with whom they identify – or will grow to resemble the biographee as they research them – it is clear in all of 253

For discussion of these issues in relation to Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, see Eakin, Touching the World, pp. 3-23.

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Modiano’s texts that much of the biographical picture comes from the biographer’s own personality, although it is often questionable which part. Despite the feelings of emptiness professed by the biographernarrators, readers are aware that any ‘je’ must have a substance if it is to slip itself into something else. In the biographical narratives, Modiano’s narrators undoubtedly project themselves onto the screen provided by the other, while also seeking to fill themselves with the lives of other people. We shall also see that, on an authorial level, the writing self permeates the biographer-narrators, and is also mirrored, at a certain remove, in the person of the biographee. In the sense that all narrators become what they narrate, creating themselves in writing/narration, all biographers are their biographees, in any case. This issue is an inescapable and troubling one. The fact that in Chien de printemps the narrator has a dream in which he feels he is Francis Jansen (his biographee) is significant in this respect. Yet Roger Dadoun’s image of the biographer as ‘un maçon qui monterait un mur en restant à l’intérieur de la pièce à construire’ sums up the external viewpoint to which the biographer is condemned, implying that he or she is inside the room (the text), but cut off from what is outside of it (the biographee).254 With the proviso that all is filtered through the narrator’s point of view, something of the biographee can manage to penetrate this room, however, and this occurs mainly through openness to gaps and silences on the part of the biographer. While there is truth in Sarraute’s idea that, in first-person narration, secondary characters are highly dependent on an powerful ‘je’, the ‘je’ is not, as Sarraute claimed, ‘tout-puissant’. In fact, Modiano makes lack of omnipotence into one of the strengths of his ‘biographical’ writing. He shows that not only the opacity, but also the autonomy, of the biographee can be highlighted by the mysteries and gaps in the narrators’ presentation of them.255 Yet a tension between a concern to leave the other person the dignity of mystery and the strong presence of first-person narrators always leads the reader of Modiano’s texts to wonder to what extent the other person is an extension of the narrator’s self, and to what extent he or she is autonomous.

254

‘Qui biographie?’, p. 56. See the quotation by Sarraute in the rubric ‘Intertwined Lives: Biography in the Texts’ in Chapter One. 255

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‘Possession’ One can be obsessed by other people to the point of not knowing who one is anymore. Although the biographer lends his or her ideas and his soul to the ‘dead’ spirit of the biographee – ‘lui prête ses idées, son sang, son âme même’, as Madelénat puts it – the biographer is also ‘vampirisé(e)’, possessed by the spirit of the dead.256 The ghosts that are so prevalent in Modiano’s work symbolize not merely the impalpability of other people and the oblivion into which so many fall, but also the tenacious grip other people seem to have on his narrators’ memories. While the narrators ‘possess’ their biographees to some extent, or at least possess the power to narrate them as they wish, they are also possessed by them. Dadoun talks of a ‘conflit permanent’ between the biographer and his subject, and points out that, though in French one talks of ‘posséder son sujet’, the biographical subject also has a hold on the biographer.257 This two-way process also exists from the reader’s point of view. Though readers can be said to possess characters to the extent that they activate them from the text and construct a personal sense of them in imagination, they are also possessed by them. As Suleiman and Crosman put it, ‘if a reader may be “in” a text as a character is in a novel, he or she is certainly also in it as in a train of thought – both possessing it and possessed by it’.258 While the desire for possession of the other is at the heart of biography (Madelénat talks of the longing for ‘une transparence idéale’259), the narrators of Modiano’s texts seem to recognize that this is impossible. Just as the self resists capture, so does the other.260 It is not for nothing that the characters in his texts are often compared to ephemeral insects inhabiting the night. The striking image in Les Boulevards de ceinture of the narrator and his father seated on their ‘housses glissantes’ in the house Deyckecaire has appropriated sums up the slippery nature of the biographees in the texts. Fundamentally, there is a realization that the self and the other person can never be pinned down. As shown in Rue des Boutiques obscures, there is also a certain sense that the self and the other are merely the intersection of many voices. There is also an insistence on the variability of 256

‘Biographie et roman: je t’aime, je te hais’, p. 244. ‘Qui biographie?’, p. 52. 258 The Reader in the Text, p. VII. 259 ‘Biographie et roman: je t’aime, je te hais’, p. 247. 260 See Sheringham, Devices and Desires, pp. 7-8. 257

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interpretation and on the fact that the narrator’s stories are just one ‘way of telling’, as we shall see. Despite this, a need to believe in the concept of essence – described above as ‘une religion du sujet’ – is apparent in all of Modiano’s work. Even Schlemilovitch, whose highly fragmentary narrative demonstrates the multiplicity of the self and his ability to reinvent himself, is pushed on by his need to believe in the concept of an inner core of identity. This need is echoed by Modiano’s readers’ own quest for a sense of the author, the narrator, the biographee and the other characters – their own ‘religion du sujet’. Let us now look at the production of a sense of all these figures in Modiano’s biographical texts.

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6 Biographical Creation in Les Boulevards de ceinture and Chien de printemps From a narratorial point of view, these two texts provide good examples of different-yet-similar approaches to representing other people, and to issues of the validity or lack of validity of imagination in biographical writing. The narrator of the first text unabashedly uses imaginative speculation to create a sense of his biographee, while the narrator of the later one restricts himself to the few facts he knows, avoiding imaginative construction of the biographee, though still managing to produce a strong sense of him through the skilful manipulation of enigma and of faint tracing. Both texts stress the distance between biographer and biographee, heightened by the silent and reserved nature of the biographees, especially in the case of Chalva Deyckecaire. As the latter seems to represent Albert Modiano more closely than does Francis Jansen, this can again be seen as expressing Modiano’s feelings of being cut off from a past that is vital to his sense of self, as well as underlining, on a general level, the distance separating the father and son through lack of communication. Both texts also show that the biographee is used for purposes of filling the self with the imagined presence of the other, so that the boundaries between biography and autobiography become blurred in both. This is especially the case in Les Boulevards de ceinture, where the narrator’s desire to empathize with his father leads him to construct an elaborately imagined world in which he puts himself in a position similar to the father and takes upon himself some of the fear and negative emotion he may have experienced. This happens on an authorial level in Chien de printemps, as Jansen is, in the main, an amalgam of Modiano and Modiano senior. As such, while imaginative speculation is largely shunned within the diegesis of Chien de printemps, it is clearly of importance on an external, authorial level.

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6(i) Les Boulevards de ceinture (1972): un ‘lieu de passage’ Les Boulevards de ceinture is a fictionalized biographical quest for Modiano’s father, where the narrator does not identify himself as Modiano, and where the father in the text is not named in a way that would identify him as Albert Modiano for the yardstick reader. Thus, the text is biofictional merely for the paratextually informed reader. However, many ethical issues concerning biographical representation are raised even for the yardstick reader, especially as concerns the questions of any storyteller’s right of invention, the uncertainty of the ‘facts’, and the variability of interpretation. Here, as in the previous texts, we must examine the question of how to differentiate the teller from the told. The biographer is his biographee, in the sense that the words used to create a sense of the biographee come from the biographer. Les Boulevards de ceinture makes this explicit, and also highlights the identification of the biographer with his subject. However, there is also a strong sense of the autonomy of the figures described. The opacity of other people is stressed, since although the narrator has an urgent need to believe in the truth of what he is recounting, he knows barely more than the reader, on whose level he often places himself. The inadequacy of his speculations is clear, and the imaginative ‘voyance’ (103) they allow is limited and momentary. As in all the Modiano texts focusing on biographical quests, the reader is depended upon to give life to the biographee and to all the text’s creatures. However, there is an awareness in Les Boulevards de ceinture of the variability of reading, since even the narrator’s own impressions are liable to change, as shown by the repetition with difference in the last lines of the text. It is also one of the most historically focused of the biographical quests, and can be seen as a comment on representation of the past, advocating an inconclusive approach to writing about history. Like La Place de l’étoile and Rue des Boutiques obscures, it stresses the ‘devoir de mémoire’ as well as constituting a clearly personal appropriation of other people’s pasts through imagined memory. Its inconclusive nature combines with its mix of an artificial atmosphere and historical basis to form what Martine Guyot-Bender sees as ‘alternative narrative devices that give the reader more responsibility in understanding the past’.261 261

‘Making Sense of Narrative Ambiguity’, p. 29, and pp. 28-35.

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This is the most uncertain of all Modiano’s biographical narratives. The text is full of oppositions, where things are never quite one thing nor the other. The tone is set from the very first line: ‘Le plus gros des trois, c’est mon père, lui pourtant si svelte à l’époque’. What can this apparent contradiction mean? How can the father be both ‘gros’ and ‘svelte’ at the same time? Unresolved opposition leads to a host of possible interpretations. Is ‘gros’ meant on a purely symbolic level, as in ‘le plus important’? Is the sentence meant to highlight the narrator’s deficient memory? Does it merely mean that the father is slim, and that all the others are even slimmer? We soon learn that this last interpretation is unlikely, as the father is described as ‘un homme corpulent de type oriental’ by the villagers (28) and is called ‘le gros’ by his colleagues (45). This puzzling incipit is a fitting opening for the text’s emphasis on the fact that the vague pointers one possesses about other people are often contradictory, and on the mysteries of human consciousness in general.262 A sense of contradiction is developed in the contrast between the ‘affaissement’ of the father and ‘les yeux, presque exorbités’ (13), the ‘joyeuse expression de franchise’ in Murraille’s eyes contrasting with ‘la mollesse des lèvres’ (17), and between Marcheret’s working class accent and the fact that he claims to be the ‘comte de Marcheret d’Eu’. An emphasis on contradiction is of course particularly appropriate in the case of the biographee, Chalva Deyckecaire, who is both a Jew and a member of the group of collaborationist ‘vendus’ (117). In any case, contradiction is a necessary condition of biography, as the narrator reflects towards the end of the text: ‘Je pense en ce moment à la vanité de mon entreprise. On s’intéresse à un homme, disparu depuis longtemps. On voudrait interroger les personnes qui l’ont connu mais leurs traces se sont effacées avec les siennes. Sur ce qu’a été sa vie, on ne possède que de très vagues indications souvent contradictoires, deux ou trois points de repère. Pièces à conviction? un timbre-poste et une fausse légion d’honneur. Alors il ne reste plus qu’à imaginer’ (my emphasis: 136).

262

It should, however, be pointed out that the ‘svelte’ clause does not exist in the Folio edition number 24607 (dépot légal, 4ème trimestre 1978). Is this an editorial error, or did Modiano perhaps feel that his opening sentence was all too selfcontradictory? One is entitled to wonder whether the variance between editions was in fact a calculated one, in order to perplex the reader further.

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An External Internality The theme of contradiction is developed in the structural opposition between externality and internality in the text. From the start an uneasiness is created by the sense that the narrator is both inside and outside. The uncertainty starts in the combination of the initial ‘on’ in ‘on ne saurait préciser’ (associating the narrator with the reader’s more distant standpoint) with references to ‘mon père’, which continue in rather dislocated fashion without any associated ‘je’ until page 38. Even then, the narrator is both outside and inside the photograph. He finds himself looking at ‘un jeune homme dont on ne distingue plus les traits’ but associates himself immediately with this character in his next statement: ‘J’ai levé la tête’ (38). Though he describes himself as a ‘romancier’, he also at one point has the impression of being a character in one of his own stories, as of course he is (40, 128). And while on one level he is a police investigator, he is also allied to the group under investigation. The tone of scientific examination in the observation of the photograph with which the text commences – ‘à noter le regard vif de Murraille’; ‘n’oublions pas la cigarette’; ‘on distingue’ (my emphasis: 13-14) – and the reader’s knowledge that photographs are often used as a device for police identification intensifies the sense of the narrator as an investigator, as does the above-mentioned reference to ‘pièces à conviction’. However, by infiltrating Murraille’s group, the narrator is also internal to the group of suspects under investigation. Consequently, he too must suffer the ‘chape de plomb’ (115) caused by the heat of the projection lamp of the interrogatoire he is himself conducting, and like Murraille, he must exist in anticipation of apocalypse. He is also a subject of investigation in seeking to create an identity for himself, as described in the section entitled ‘Familial Emotions and the (Auto)biographical Urge’ below. In biographical terms, externality is what dominates, since the narrator must remain external to Chalva. A sense of barriers and distance is in any case suggested by the exterior standpoint of firstperson narration, since the narrator cannot access the thoughts of the characters he is following. This sense is reinforced by the very name of Jean Murraille. Even the description of the village is made from the point of view of outsiders to this group – once from the point of view of the villagers, and once from what could be a tourist guidebook. The narrator cannot always understand the indistinct ‘borborygmes’ of his characters, nor even hear what they are saying (19, 54). Sound and

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light fade in and out. Externality is underlined by the resolute silence of Deyckecaire, and by the narrator’s feelings of being held back from approaching him. However, the narrator can access a certain level of internality through identification. He in fact embodies the urge for identification to an extreme, literally seeking to become his father, in an attempt to understand him. He claims he is Serge Alexandre, appropriating one of the pseudonyms of Sacha Stavisky, the 1930s industrialist swindler, who like the narrator’s father, was Jewish. By usurping Stavisky’s identity, the narrator appears, like Modiano himself, to be saying: ‘mon père, c’est moi’, given that his father engages in the kind of illegal dealings in fake stocks and shares carried out by Stavisky, and, it has been hinted, perhaps by Albert Modiano also. The multiple-text reader’s sense of this is encouraged by the fact that the father in La Place de l’étoile is likened to Stavisky as well as to Maurice Sachs (PE, 56). Interestingly, Stavisky was, like Modiano, haunted by the separation from a father from whom he was alienated, as is made clear in Alain Resnais’s 1974 film Stavisky. Stavisky senior’s desire for his son to be a respectable Frenchman (a thwarted desire – he committed suicide in horror at his son’s illegal activities) echoes the importance Deyckecaire attaches to his son’s ‘baccalauréat’. The principal manner in which the narrator identifies with his father, however, is by forcing himself to imagine these ‘vendus’ with whom his father consorted, and to take upon himself the fear that the father must have felt as a Jew in the company of these collaborators (and even to sympathize with some of them, as with Murraille). In doing so, he manages to approach a tentative sense of the father’s identity. Imagination thus allows a certain internality. The narrator claims in relation to Inspector Sieffer’s intuitive understanding of him that: ‘Certains policiers possèdent le don de la voyance’ (103). His own police-work is associated with a type of sporadic imaginative truth, similar to the occasional ‘voyance’ the narrator of Dora Bruder attributes to novelists (DB, 54). He is at times convinced of the truth of what he is imagining: ‘J’ai l’impression d’écrire un “mauvais roman d’aventures”, mais je n’invente rien. Non, je n’invente rien. Ça n’est pas cela, inventer… Il existe certainement des preuves, une personne qui vous a connu, jadis, et qui pourrait témoigner de toutes ces choses’ (148). Despite this belief in ‘voyance’, however, there is also a sense that the imaginative truth it allows cannot pass certain boundaries. When the father seems to be opening up to the narrator by

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inviting him back to Le Prieuré, the narrator seems aware that this is overstepping the potentiality of imagination to reach truth, stating: ‘à partir de ce moment je sais que je rêve’ (141). Imagination must remain within the bounds of likelihood. It also only has a limited power – despite all the son’s intense ‘efforts d’imagination’, the father is still ‘une silhouette devinée sous la veilleuse’ (154, 182). Imaginative truth is short-lived as well as limited. The text is full of imagery of fleetingness, which, while stressing the oblivion into which so much lived experience falls, also highlights the momentary nature of the truth of imagined worlds. The narrative is enclosed by imagery of the ephemeral – by the reference to the ‘éphéméride’ in the first pages and the appearance of an orchid in the last lines. To the narrator’s ‘chasseur de papillons’, Deyckecaire is ‘un gros papillon’ (momentarily) ‘pris au piège’, and a ‘mirage de pacotille’ that fades with upsetting speed (139, 80, 127). Appropriately, the fictional context the narrator imagines for his father is merely one of the ‘lieux de passage’ he used to favour (my emphasis: 94). The fact that the biographee comes from inside the biographer, while remaining distant and inaccessible, is one of the main points of the blurring of the boundaries between internality and externality in this text. ‘Que seriez-vous sans moi?’ asks the narrator of his father, gesturing to the fact that he has drawn him out of oblivion (120). The father and all of the characters depend on the narrator – and also on the reader – for their life. Without imaginative input the father would be nothing but a suggestion, or indeed a pile of old overcoats, as the narrator indicates in wondering of his father: ‘S’agissait-il d’un être humain ou d’une pile de pardessus?’ (173). While these coats, as in so many Modiano texts, suggest opacity and coverings, and as such are an appropriate accessory for the secretive father figure, the image of the coat also evokes the notion of slipping into a self as one would put on an outer garment. On two occasions, the father and son are portrayed as sitting together in the Prieuré enveloped in ‘immenses pardessus’ belonging to the owners of the house (142, 144). Chalva Deyckecaire and Albert Modiano are especially capable of putting on new selves in inventing new identities for themselves, but so are their sons, who ‘become’ their fathers through identification and who slip into this narrative, filling it out with themselves. Imagery of spying and haunting is omnipresent in this text. On one level, this evokes the fact that the narrator’s subjectivity is ever-

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present. Like the ghost of the author, the narrator seems to be haunting these characters he has conjured up. He himself is aware of this, describing himself as prowling around them (46). Just as when he worked in the vice squad with Sieffer he did not make a good spy, he cannot avoid making his presence felt to the reader (43). But of course the characters he portrays are also spying on him, and haunting him. Like Marcheret, who as a boy felt that the photograph of Lyautey in his house was staring down on him (70), the narrator feels that Murraille may have been watching him, waiting for a favourable moment to intervene (43). This does not seem improbable, given the narrator’s feeling that the biographee and the other characters, though controlled by him to a certain extent, also exist independently of him. He has a strong sense of the autonomy of the characters he describes, and of his inability to fathom them. In a way, he is subject to their whims. It is significant in this respect that Murraille takes the first step towards him (42-43). A sense of autonomy and mystery also surrounds the most important character in the text, Chalva Deyckecaire. Though the narrator can say ‘Que seriez-vous sans moi?’, his father clearly has power over him, and there is a suggestion that he is merely pretending not to recognize him, just as he used to pretend to be asleep. Deyckecaire’s silence seems to be a deliberate one, in line with the ‘force d’inertie’ he employed to avoid speaking of ‘l’épisode douloureux du métro George-V’ (98, 108). The narrator is also ‘controlled’ or obsessed by his lack of knowledge of these characters and by their mystery, and often seems to be in the grip of an obsessively recurring hallucination. Murraille looks at him ‘avec une instance curieuse’, and says to him: ‘Vous avez tout votre temps’, as if time will never get rid of his ghost (58), and the very fact that the narrative appears to end back at its starting point strongly supports the idea of obsession. In brief, though the narrator is shaping this narrative he must remain outside the people he narrates; though he ‘haunts’ these characters through narration by suffusing them with his presence he is also haunted by them; and though he is a creator of images, imagination is feverish, a nightmare not wholly within his control.

Recording the Past with an Ethos of Ambiguity While the most logical explanation for the genesis of this narrative seems to be that it is a product of the narrator’s fevered imagination, there is also a strong sense that the events portrayed have a basis in

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extradiegetic life and in historical happenings, not least because of the reference to the grotesque game of ‘tennis juif’. For the informed reader, a view of the narrator’s account as based on actual happenings is encouraged by the historical detail in the text. As Nettelbeck and Hueston point out, the ‘joli village’ near the forêt de Fontainebleau is clearly modelled on Barbizon, Jean Murraille is based on Jean Luchaire, Marcheret on Guy de Voisins, Lestandi and Gerbère on Brasillach and Bardèche, etc. Darquier, Montandon and Constantini, all real-life figures, are all mentioned by their real names.263 Yet the narrator gestures frequently to the artificiality of the universe he is portraying, as if to stress that the interpretation of historical events calls for a certain responsibility on both narratorial and readerly levels. While it is perfectly valid to mix fact with imagination on a personal level, one cannot, ethically speaking, do this with impunity if one wishes to transmit one’s perception of other people and historical events. Like the narrator, readers feel a ‘malaise’ as to the ‘flou’ and ‘irréel’ of what he is recounting (54). They are frequently reminded that the narrator is merely breathing life into an old photograph, at times explicitly so (14, 128), and at others through association with the ‘brouillard jaune’ – the light of a yellowed photograph – in which several of the scenes are bathed (128, 140). Falseness is emphasized through the text’s false names, counterfeit stamps, engineered dedications, and fake objets d’art.264 The words ‘individu’ and ‘personnage’ are heavy with authorial presence and are uttered with symbolic weight (129, 48, 53), in a nod to the fact that readers are unable to give themselves over to believing in the characters for any length of time, as they are so often reminded that the figures are imaginary. This sense of artificiality combines with the markers of historical basis to encourage readers to try to establish for themselves the historical facts surrounding the models for characters portrayed. Whether or not they choose to accept responsibility by verifying the historical or biographical details provided, they retain a sense that the narrator is manipulating the past to some extent. These techniques of overtly blurring fact with fiction are thus ethical decisions, as well as 263

Pièces d’identité, p. 45, and p. 127, note 38. False names include his own pseudonym of Serge Alexandre, Chalva’s/Henri’s various pseudonyms, Murraille’s borrowing of Chalva’s perhaps already fake name. Equally, Annie may not be a ‘Murraille’ at all. 264

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pointers to the validity of imagination on a personal level. The fact that this is a clearly subjective appropriation of past events reminds readers of their responsibility to question the story told, and to recognize that all portrayals of the past have some subjective bias. Both historiography and biography, inextricably linked in this text, have at their basis a desire to record the past, which is sometimes felt as a duty. The narrator’s sense of his duty as archivist is an historical as well as a personal one, encompassing both Chalva and the minor historical figures with which he associated. As he puts it: ‘Je sais bien que le curriculum vitae de ces ombres ne présente pas un grand intérêt, mais si je ne le dressais pas aujourd’hui, personne d’autre ne s’y emploierait. C’est mon devoir, à moi qui les ai connus, de les sortir – ne fût-ce qu’un instant – de la nuit’ (66). Collective memory has failed to remember these figures, and the narrator’s own memory is also faulty, as is pointed out at the start, in the unreliability of his memory of his father as ‘svelte’, and the fact that he cannot remember much about the years after losing touch with his father (151). This deficiency of memory, along with the necessary subjective bias of all narrative, means that narration cannot be an unproblematic resuscitation of the past. However, while Sartre’s Roquentin, the historiographer-biographer of Rollebon in La Nausée, abandons his project due to the impossibility of being exact, this narrator clearly feels that imagination has its own validity, once its subjective nature is pointed out.265 As such, Les Boulevards de ceinture makes clear in both biographical and historical terms that it is a type of appropriation of the past, while apparently aware that another one will occur in the reader’s interpretation of the text. Readers, though controlled to a certain extent, are also recognized as autonomous entities, free to make what they will of the narrator’s utterances. Initially, the narrator almost seems to be ordering his readers around, as when he states that ‘à bien observer ces trois hommes et la silhouette floue de Maud Gallas, on pensera que cette scène se déroule très loin dans le passé’ (14), or when he seems to be pre-empting their reactions: ‘Cette remarque éclaire d’un jour nouveau la personnalité de Marcheret’ (16), as if conscious that he is creating a narrative that is some way controls them. However, the contradictions and incoherence of the text mean that very little is actually controllable. Readers must work hard to establish meaning, and the meaning they do establish is not 265

See La Nausée, especially pp. 90 and 139.

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fixed. As Guyot-Bender points out, Modiano’s texts seem to be deliberately untidy, apparently making a point of not giving the reader a neat picture of the past, in contrast to the more ordered pictures of the past provided in history books. This notion works particularly well in Les Boulevards de ceinture. It is possible that at least part of the reason for the confused chronology in this text may be to replicate many people’s difficulty in keeping historical dates straight, and to stress the difficulty of keeping a clear sense of what happened. Temporality is in any case self-consciously blurred. Time is unclear from the very first pages, when the narrator is unable to read the date on the calendar in the photograph. He is later unable to tell which president’s photograph is on the wall of the police office when he is arrested (104). Though the action, symbolically, takes place in the author’s birth month of July (suggesting another rebirth in narrative for Modiano as well as the importance in his psyche of the historical era concerned), the year is not clear, and, can only be tentatively established by the passing reference to Forfaiture, a play put on at l’Ambigu in 1944, as Nettelbeck and Hueston have pointed out.266 Murraille’s reference to the application of ‘l’article 75’ (174), referring to the death sentences of the épuration, suggests the year might be 1945, but this is problematic, as Lestandi still seems to view a rounding up of Jews from the Côte d’Azur as possible. The fact that the narrator’s age is indeterminate – a typically Modianesque suggestion that the author and Albert Modiano have blurred on an autobiographical level – adds to the general temporal incoherence and uncertainty of the text. There is much oscillation between the passé composé and the present tense. Initially, the fact that the narration starts in the present and swings to the passé composé when the narrator appears to go back in time seems appropriate enough, and the narration logically returns to a present tense once he is ‘back’ in the Marcheret era (page 107 onward). However, much of the oscillation between tenses is in fact unpredictable and illogical, the most striking example of this being the many changes between pages 119 and 120 of the Folio edition. Here, as with all of the above indicators of what the narrator of Vestiaire de l’enfance calls ‘intemporalité’, temporal incoherence serves to stress the presentness of the past, while also reinforcing a climate of incertitude. 266

Pièces d’identité, p. 127, note 40.

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Inconclusiveness is as much a denial of neat pictures of the past as is incoherent chronology. There is a proliferation of unexplained detail in the text, most of which concerns Chalva Deyckecaire. ‘Je vous expliquerai’ is one of the father’s favourite phrases, yet the promised explanation never comes. The ‘épisode douloureux du métro George-V’ is perhaps the most intriguing example of lack of explanation. Why does the father push his son onto the tracks, if in fact it was he? Was it related to his wish to restore the Petite Ceinture, and what was the reason for those feelings? Was it an accident or a deliberate action? Was the father the person who saved the son just as he was about to fall? The lack of answers to this host of questions reflects the inconclusiveness of life, as well as underlining the opacity of other people’s motives. This inconclusiveness extends to the other characters, for whom the biographical information is patchy at best. Of Maud Gallas the narrator states: ‘Sur elle, je ne possède pas beaucoup de renseignements’ (72). He is not sure if Annie Murraille really is Murraille’s niece (73). Significantly, Remy’s song is called ‘Je n’en connais pas la fin’ (164). In Murraille’s case it is contradictory attributes that lead to inconclusiveness, as the narrator is bemused by him, wondering how such an elegant and materially generous man could be ‘à ce point dénué de scrupules’ (69). Both the effect of distorted chronology and this proliferation of unexplained details convey a sense that life resists coherent narration.

The Suggestion of Photographs Qu’elle [la photographie] sauve de l’oubli les ruines pendantes, les livres, les estampes et les manuscrits que le temps dévore, les choses précieuses dont la forme va disparaître et qui demandent une place dans les archives de notre mémoire, elle sera remerciée et applaudie. Mais s’il lui est permis d’empiéter sur le domaine de l’impalpable et de l’imaginaire, sur tout ce qui ne vaut que parce que l’homme y ajoute de son âme, alors malheur à nous! (Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le public moderne et la photographie’, Critique d’art).

Modiano’s choice of an absent photograph around which to build his narrative in Les Boulevards de ceinture is powerfully symbolic. The above quotation from Baudelaire shows the latter’s fear that photography would render subjectivity and imagination obsolete, both in the photographer and in the viewer. While it is true that photographs do seem to be privileged tools for representation, experience has proved Baudelaire’s fears unfounded (like any pictorial

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art, photographs can suggest stories, but far more depends on what humans read into them – the considerable extent to which ‘l’homme y ajoute de son âme’). In Les Boulevards de ceinture, Modiano plays on the idea that photographs constitute a Barthesian ‘ça a été’, as well as highlighting the viewer’s prerogative of invention. The photograph described at the start seems to have undergone a subtle change by the end, suggesting that meaning lies less in the photograph itself, and more in the gaze of the person deciphering it, and that interpretation depends on what that person desires to see. The circular structure of the novel initially encourages the assumption that ‘the same’ photograph is involved at the start and at the end, since the description of the village at the beginning of the novel recurs just before the photograph described in the final pages, suggesting that the initial time of narration is being returned to. However, there are elements lacking in the second description of the photograph that were present in the first, and vice-versa, just as with the description of the village. Granted, the same three men are present in both photographs, and strike similar poses. Yet Murraille and Deyckecaire are said in the first description to be holding drinks and are smoking cigarettes, and there is also the vague silhouette of Maud Gallas in the background. These details are not present, or at least not mentioned, in the second description. Of more importance, perhaps, are the facts that in the second description an orchid seems to have materialized between Marcheret’s thumb and forefinger and that in the first description, Marcheret is described as having his hands on his lapels. The incompatibility of these latter details – it seems unlikely that one could comfortably hold an orchid between thumb and forefinger while at the same time holding one’s lapels – seems to hint that the narrator may have invented this orchid. The symbolism of ephemerality attached to this flower reinforces the sense that it may be an invented addition on the narrator’s part, given the emphasis on fleetingness in the text. In showing these differences, the narrator thus seems to be stating his prerogative of inventing. Yet he may also be hinting that interpretations change with time. This suggests that storytellers can choose not to mention things, and also that interpreters can miss – or pick up on – different elements of a story with different readings. And this text, like many other Modiano texts, especially perhaps De si braves garçons, Rue des Boutiques obscures, and La Petite Bijou, demands to be re-read. This is not only in order to give renewed textual life to the narrator and this ‘petit groupe’, but also in order to

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allow the reader to perceive its important historical references more strongly. However, each rereading also reasserts the incertitude of the ‘facts’ perceived. The absent but described photograph avoids the relative fixation normally inherent in photographic depictions of reality. It allows certain contradictions to co-exist, as well as allowing the narrator to invent details that are not objectively there (which is perfectly acceptable, if one feels, like the narrator of Duras’s L’Amant, that the subject is never really there either, and especially appropriate in the case of Albert Modiano). Given the emphasis on invention in the text, the reader wonders uneasily whether this photograph is diegetically ‘real’ at all, or whether the narrative is in fact built on a figment of the narrator’s imagination. The notion that the very impetus for invention may have been invented is particularly unsettling, driving home the reader’s sense of the power of invention invested in narrators, and a confusion as to what is fact and what is fiction. As such, the novel seems to be playing on the common assumption that photographs are a slice of the Real, while also suggesting that imagination may itself be as ‘real’. Yet while imagination allows the narrator to imbue the photograph with life, and with a certain truth, it is suggested that this truth is both subjective and variable.

Familial Emotions and the (Auto)Biographical Urge The text as a whole is obsessed with fathers and with origins, symbolically returning to those origins in the repetition of the description of the village and of the photograph. Marcheret fetichizes his family tree, and like the narrator he barely knew his father but imitated him by joining the Foreign Legion ‘peut-être pour retrouver la trace de son père’ (132, 71). Sylviane Quimphe’s father is also described as absent. Substitute fathers include Murraille, who takes the narrator under his wing and uses Chalva’s name in business dealings, and the inspector Sieffer with his ‘sollicitude paternelle’ (130, 152). In the last lines, the barman, Grève, exhorts the narrator to think of the future rather than the past, echoing the sentiments of the narrator’s father (85), so that the father is not only inscribed in the very last words, but also in the words of other characters. The narrator complains that: ‘Nous voilà condamnés, orphelins que nous sommes, à poursuivre un fantôme en reconnaissance de paternité’ (154), and Chalva is indeed a ghost: impalpable but haunting the text. The narrative in general is an urgent attempt at the ‘prise de contact’ the narrator has wanted for so long, an apostrophe, or even a

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letter, to the father (140). This sense is heightened by the fact that the text seems to be a way of telling the father things about the narrator that the father would not otherwise have known, as is especially clear in the narrator’s account of parts of his own life-story (144; 150-153). He addresses his father as ‘vous’ or ‘“papa”’ insistently, from page 107 onward, almost ordering him to remember the time spent together in the narrator’s youth: ‘Souvenez-vous’ (143). While these apostrophes can also be read as addressed to Modiano’s readers, calling on them to remember France’s ‘années noires’, this narrator is clearly seeking to make contact with his origins. Despite this, and despite the fact that the text obsessively returns to its own origins, the only source that imposes itself with any certainty is that constituted by the narrator’s own consciousness. The emotions the narrator feels towards his father are, appropriately for the general tone of the text, contradictory ones. They echo the oscillation between feelings of protection, pity and hate for the father figure in La Place de l’étoile (to whom Chalva bears a striking resemblance). On one level the narrator is trying to protect his father, with a ‘vigilance de saint-bernard’ (120). Deyckecaire evokes Du Caire, Dekker, but also ‘Take Care’.267 However the son also realizes that it is impossible to pull his father from this cesspit (136, 178). Here, feelings of frustration surface: ‘Vous planter là, voilà ce que vous méritez’ (120). Disgust at his father’s obsequiousness – his ‘flagornerie’ (120) – leads to self-disgust due to his own need to identify with him: ‘Dans mes cauchemars, je rampe inlassablement pour retrouver ma colonne vertébrale (151)’. This confusion of emotion seems to stem, at least in part, from the son’s perception of his father’s own ambivalence towards him. In La Place de l’étoile and La Ronde de nuit, Schlemilovitch and Swing Troubadour, both of whom are hybrid father-son figures, feel the urge to push their loved ones under a train, in a clear parallel with the métro incident in Les Boulevards de ceinture. In La Place de l’étoile, Schlemilovitch declares: ‘moi, les gens que j’aime, je les tue’ (PE, 145). In Les Boulevards de ceinture, as in the two earlier texts, there is a Wildean sense that the narrator is killing the thing he loves, and that the father is doing something similar. The conflicting emotions felt by the narrator make his project a difficult one. The fear in the text may reflect the difficulty of facing 267

On the Dekker/Deyckecaire/Du Caire associations see also the rubric ‘A Dreamlike Unity’ in Chapter Four.

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the negative emotions involved, while, of course, being a reconstruction of the fear his father (and Albert Modiano) must have felt in such a compromising situation. The uncomfortable heat resembles that of the autobiographical self-confrontation in Quartier perdu and Vestiaire de l’enfance. As in La Place de l’étoile, there are hints of terrible sadness in the narrator’s own story, on which he refuses to expand. As usual, there is a type of autobiographical halfexposé on both the narrator’s part and that of Modiano. The narrator makes only one tightlipped mention of the emotional pain of the afternoons spent with the Pessac family, to whose charge his father had effectively abandoned him (79). The element of ridicule in his portrayal of his father as ‘le gros’ seems to stem from a desire to use his storytelling power for a ‘réglement de comptes’ relating to the father’s abandonment of the son. The text is also an attempt at reconciliation, however, whereby the son seeks to empathize with the father by putting himself in a similar situation to him. It is also a type of inverted wish-fulfilment: behind the narrator’s seeking out of his father lies the desire that his father would seek him out. Modiano’s father was still alive at the time of publication of the text, and the biographically informed reader might read an authorial hope for reconciliation into the text. Biography has much to do with self-identification here. Indeed, through the narrator’s emphasis on his personal need to invent a context for his father, this text becomes as ‘autobiographical’ as it is ‘biographical’. By creating a father for himself, the narrator seeks to create a stronger sense of who he is. Despite his knowledge that he is the creating subject giving life to the characters, his sense of identity is shaky. His father’s ambiguous identity has chipped away at his own, and the ‘véritable besoin’ he feels to establish a clearer picture of his father seems to stem from a need to consolidate his own sense of self. As has been shown again and again, part of Modiano’s personal drama stems from the fact that he is forced to identify with such a contradictory and incomplete paternal image, and it is true that he would prefer something more solid.268 The father’s lack of solidity is inscribed in the statement in the peritext of all editions thus far that these characters have ‘aucun rapport avec la réalité’ as well as in the epigraph from Rimbaud: ‘Si j’avais des antécédents à un point quelconque de l’histoire de France! Mais non, rien.’ The three 268

On this drama of the incomplete and contradictory father figure, see especially Nathalie Rachlin: ‘The Modiano Syndrome: 1968-1997’, p. 131.

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occasions on which the narrator shouts ‘C’EST MON PÈRE’ are thus not merely demonstrations of loyalty but also part of an almost hysterical need for a stronger sense of his father, and thence of himself.269 Seeking a role-model, the son creates himself in the image of the father, both by becoming a petty crook like him, and by imitating his actions in the imagined infiltration of the Muraille group. Just as he attempts to find his father through his colleagues (‘Je me penche sur ces déclassés, ces marginaux, pour retrouver, à travers eux, l’image fuyante de mon père’: 77), he seems to be using his father in order to find himself, in what Dominique Viart calls a ‘détour d’autrui’.270 He says in relation to his ‘filatures’ in the brigade mondaine that: ‘C’était moi que je traquais sans relâche’ (153), and this is true of the narrative in general. By imagining the experiences of his father, the narrator seeks to reinforce his own sense of identity. However, as seen, the identities he takes on – both that of his father and the narrative identity he creates through telling his story – are highly unstable ones.

Holes, Postmemory, ‘Biographèmes’, and Interpretation It is partly the silence of the biographee that leads to the narrator’s (auto)biographical urge. Yet the father’s silence is not total, and it is the half-understood bits and pieces that haunt the narrator most of all. The very incomplete témoignage of his father encourages imaginative speculation: ‘Je vous entendais mal, comme si vous me parliez au téléphone. Un filet de voix étouffé par la distance et les années. De temps en temps je captais quelques bribes: ‘Partir’…,‘Passage des frontières’…, ‘Or et devises’… Et cela me suffisait pour reconstituer votre histoire’ (147). However, as we have seen, these ‘bribes’ are not sufficient for the narrator – Chalva remains ‘une silhouette devinée sous la veilleuse’ (182). The ‘postmemories’ or flimsy imaginary memories the narrator creates cannot ultimately satisfy him. While the narrator’s pointing to imagination in this text on one level betokens a wish to remind readers that he is not providing a 269

Firstly at the Pessac’s house (79), secondly when he kills Lestandi (170), and thirdly when the father is arrested (181). 270 Viart uses this term in ‘Filiations littéraires’, where he speaks of the need of the contemporary subject to comprehend that from which it has sprung. The anxiety that accompanies not knowing leads to a need for identification with one’s precursors and in particular with familial members of the previous generation. See especially pp. 123-124.

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wholly historically trustworthy narrative, the emphasis on artificiality also shows that imagination is in fact all that is available to Modiano. It also stresses that the past is very real to the author, even though it can only be imagined. Whether the events actually happened to the narrator or not, he is imagining memories for himself, and the events ‘remembered’ can thus be said to ‘happen’, though only within his mind. At times the narrator denies invention, while at others he makes abundantly clear that he is imagining things, declaring of Murraille and his group that ‘Ce n’est pas de gaieté de cœur que je donne leur pedigree. Ni par souci du romanesque, n’ayant aucune imagination’, while almost immediately affirming of his father that: ‘Je ne sais presque rien de lui. Mais j’inventerai’ (77). At some points he almost succeeds in convincing himself of the truth of his account, feeling able to call his imaginings memories, stating ‘Je me souviens, si je ferme les yeux’ and ‘Est-ce ma faute si je reste prisonnier de mes souvenirs?’ (49, 166). Like other Modiano narrators haunted by postmemory, he must appropriate memory for himself through imagination. Fragments of history coexist with fragments of personal biographical detail, or ‘biographèmes’. The ‘biographèmes’ attached to the father encompass his tastes (his liking for Ploum-Plouvier biscuits, his adoration of the framed baccalauréat and his mysterious attachment to the Petite Ceinture) but also the incompletely understood fragments of his past. Both ‘biographèmes’ and postmemory gain their meaning from the idea of suggestion without actual total comprehension or firm possession by the reader/rememberer. This feeling of fleeting suggestion is one of the strongest senses created by Les Boulevards de ceinture. It is significant that the narrator’s speculation on his father is based on imaginings around a photograph, since photographs encourage an impression of possession in their beholder, while also showing that this possession is illusory. Though on one level photography appears to ‘turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed’, the photographed subject always remains at a distance.271 Barthes was aware of this in his description of his own urge to ‘possess’ the photographed figure of his mother in La Chambre claire: ‘Devant la photo du Jardin d’Hiver, je suis un mauvais rêveur qui tend vainement les bras vers la possession de 271

On the notion of possession in photography, see Sontag, On Photography, p. 14.

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l’image’ (my emphasis).272 The police-work of the narrator’s imagination, and the desire to possess that is inherent in it, cannot overcome the gaps and incoherence relating to the ‘biographèmes’ in this text. This narrative is a slippery dustsheet – like the ‘housses glissantes’ down which the narrator and his father glide in Le Prieuré (142, 155). While many elements suggest that the text is primarily an expression of the narrator’s self, the expression of that self is as problematic as the narrator’s biographical project, and the unstable nature of both narrated self and other is highlighted by the constant contradictions and merging of oppositions. Fictionality merges with reality; externality blurs with internality; the narrator controls his characters but is also controlled by them. The malaise induced in the narrator by the fact that Annie Murraille wears a fur coat in the middle of July sums up the reader’s own feelings of disconcertion at the studied incoherence and frequent self-contradiction of this (auto)biographical narrative. With regard to the ethics of representation, Les Boulevards de ceinture sets the scene for all of Modiano’s biographically-focused output. It does this by stressing the varied nature of interpretation, refusing to categorize its biographee as one thing or the other, and by highlighting the impossibility of disentangling the biographee from his teller. Just as importantly, perhaps, the text demonstrates the problems posed by the fact that this biographical project is of necessity imaginary, given that so little trace of its subject exists. It also stresses the considerable emotional involvement of the biographer in his project.

6(ii) Chien de printemps (1993): le peu de choses que l’on sait Many of the themes raised in relation to biography in Les Boulevards de ceinture also surface in Chien de printemps, among the most important of which are the notions of haunting (this is an extremely spectral text), the identification of the biographer with the biographee, the dependence of these two entities on one another, and the impossibility of an objective truth. Both texts convey the same sense of slipperiness attached to the biographical subject, but use different techniques. Unlike Les Boulevards de ceinture, this text does not 272

La Chambre Claire, p. 156.

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emphasize contradiction, and its chronology is far clearer. As in Dora Bruder, the tone here is mainly factual (at least for the single-text reader), and there is no imaginative reconstruction on a narratorial level, except in a passage clearly marked as dream (90-92). Its style is almost minimalistically spare like all of the post-Les Boulevards de ceinture texts. It seems plausible that Modiano progressively realized, like Jansen, that literature could be too ‘bavard’ (109). The spareness of Chien de printemps carries much weight and eloquence, and a strong human presence is created around Jansen as a result. Equally, a sense of history is perhaps as present in the artfully covered bones of this text as in the more wordy and fanciful Les Boulevards de ceinture where historical detail is far more overt. The text has not been given adequate attention to date, no doubt due to the effect of Modiano’s ‘écriture faussement transparente’.273 The denseness of the text on biographical, historical, and autobiographical levels only becomes apparent with careful reading. Another part of its fascination lies in the fact that it produces very different effects on the single-text reader and the multiple-text reader. However, both single-text and multiple-text readers will see that the text comments on biographical writing in a manner that suggests the entanglement of autobiography with biography. The single-text reader, if careful, may also pick up on the historical references. The multiple-text reader will, however, have a far greater sense of the resonances with Modiano’s own reality, and will have a different perception of the role of imagination in the biographical enterprise, as we shall see. This discussion accords considerable importance to the interaction between the text’s sustained photographic metaphor and its biographical theme. The black-and-white nature of the printed text, mirroring Jansen’s black-and-white photographs, combines with the typographical blanks that cut the text up into short sequences to give, as Grojnowski puts it, ‘l’impression qu’on feuillette un album’,274 providing bits and pieces of Jansen’s life, and of his and the narrator’s common experience. Modiano has stated in interview with Montaudon 273

See footnote 4. Hugo Marsan’s review article ‘Appels à témoins’ is perceptive, however. There are, to my knowledge, four other studies of note on the text: Morris’s ‘A Photographic Memory: Ambiguity in Chien de printemps’; two sections of Kawakami’s A Self-Conscious Art (pp. 42-44 and pp. 60-66); a section in Grojnowski’s Photographie et langage, pp. 84-90; and Cooke: ‘“Créer le silence avec des mots”: Writing silence in Chien de printemps by Patrick Modiano’. 274 Photographie et langage, p. 86.

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that photography and writing are, for him, ‘la même chose’, in an apparent nod to the recording urge inherent in both media, as well as to the artistic manipulation that both often demand.275 The generally factual tone creates the impression that the reader is being provided with what Annie Ernaux calls ‘des instantanés de la mémoire’, while also commenting on the artistic nature of both photography and biographical writing.276 Whereas Les Boulevards de ceinture is based on the fact that, as Susan Sontag put it, ‘photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy’, this text plays more strongly on the fact that even narrated photographs, when described in a documentary tone, will encourage, at least for the single-text reader, ‘the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness’.277 A documentary atmosphere is fostered by the inclusion of footnotes, references to Capa, Sartre, the Magnum agency and the Drancy holding camp and is further encouraged by the bareness of the narrator’s portrayal of Jansen, suggesting, at least for the single-text reader, a rigorous adherence to facts. Yet this documentary tone coexists with a recognition of the power of imaginative speculation. Part of the reality effect of Francis Jansen and of the described photographs stems from their suggestive power. Both the man and the photographs are merely sketched out, so that the reader must engage in an imaginative reconstruction of events. Interestingly, the actual photographs beside which Modiano writes in Paris Tendresse (1990), published three years earlier than Chien de printemps, also encourage imaginative speculation. This is primarily due to the fact that, like the photographs in Breton’s Nadja, they are generally not placed directly beside the text in which they are mentioned, which not only minimizes redundancy of description but also allows the reader a large degree of interpretative autonomy.278 In Chien de printemps it is especially clear that Modiano is aware of the importance of the ‘travail d’imagination’ allotted to the reader. The affective clarity with which mental images can be invested is shown in the ‘reality’ of the remembered photograph of Capa and 275

‘Patrick Modiano : le plus agréable c’est la rêverie’, p. 16. La Place, p. 95. 277 On Photography, p. 23 and p. 6. 278 See Cooke, ‘Paris Tendresse by Modiano (with Photographs by Brassaï): a Photobiographical Creation’ (forthcoming). 276

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Jansen for the narrator, when he states: ‘Les années ont passé. Loin de brouiller l’image de Capa et de Jansen, elles ont eu l’effet inverse: cette image est beaucoup plus nette dans ma mémoire qu’elle ne l’était ce printemps-là’ (14). This calls to mind one of the founding images of Guibert’s L’Image fantôme, that of a photograph of his mother that was never taken because he had misloaded the camera, and which remains only in memory, more powerful to him because of its absence.279 In Chien de printemps, the narrator’s descriptions of Jansen’s images are des images fantômes, existing only in the mind but with a strong aura of reality, like the reader’s image of the biographee himself. As such, this ‘factual’ text subtly suggests that imagined things have their own kind of ‘reality’, and that this reality is in fact a powerful one. Recent history permeates this text en filigrane, in the references to the Spanish civil war, the bombing of Berlin, deportations in France and Italy, curfews, and police raids in metro tunnels. Apart from these overt references, the narrator uses his art in order to suggest the persistence of history in a discreet fashion. This is clear in the outwardly banal description of the blonde woman cutting the grass in Fossombrone, a description which on closer inspection is weighed down by history. To the attentive reader, the ‘tondeuse’, her statement that ‘je fais le guet’ and the ‘grillage’ surrounding the adjoining house evoke both the épuration and the concentration camps (83-85). The narrator’s art lies in the subtlety with which he does this. Like Jansen uncovering what lies beneath in his laceration of layers of old posters (36), the narrator’s documentary yet artistic approach encourages the reader to look for the faint traces of the words and events of history in the palimpsest of this text. For multiple-text readers, the dog of the title is an indicator of Modiano’s historiographic approach to biography and autobiography. This dog both opens the text (via the title, the epigraph, and the expression ‘chien de printemps’ that is Jansen’s first utterance in the text: 12) and closes it, in the image of the ‘chien fantôme’ with which both the narrator and Jansen disappear in their separate quests to leave the past behind. Dogs are a constant of Modiano’s work and often function as doubles of some sort, suggesting some aspect of the narrating self, or figuring as protectors or guides. Guy Neumann, in pointing this out, has also made the fascinating connection with the ‘six millions de chiens’ symbolizing the murdered Jews in the author’s 279

L’Image fantôme, pp. 11-18.

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first text La Place de l’étoile.280 In Chien de printemps, the ghost dog is primarily a symbol of the impossibility of shrugging off memory. While suggesting a general haunting by other people, it also suggests something lost that remains as a haunting presence. As the adjective ‘fantôme’ can also be used in connection with a phantom limb, still painfully felt in the place from which it was amputated, this is a powerful suggestion of Modiano’s feelings concerning his loss of brother and father, as well as the continuing presence of the Holocaust in his memory and in his writing.281 As such, this ghost dog – a symbolically named ‘pointer’ – is clearly related to the black poodle abandoned in the ‘forest’ of the narrator’s unconscious in La Petite Bijou, as well as to the dogs that figure in the closing lines of both Fleurs de ruine and Paris Tendresse, both contemporaneous with Chien de printemps. For biographically attuned readers, the figure of the biographee Jansen is an amalgam of the ghosts of Rudy and Albert Modiano and of Modiano himself, with a touch of Luisa Colpeyn. Born in Antwerp like the latter, he seems like the ‘frère cadet’ of Capa (14), hardly knew his father, is of Italian descent, was sent to Drancy, took refuge in Haute Savoie, was caught in a police raid at the métro Georges-V (66), and went to live in Mexico. (At one stage of his life, Albert Modiano planned to take his family to live in Mexico, according to the recent ‘Éphéméride’: 6). Clearly, Albert and Patrick are the two main influences on the figure of the nomadic, melancholy, silent Jansen, who is marked by the spectre of Drancy, and by his escape from deportation. Symbolically, Jansen feels old enough to be the father of Nicole (64). This imaginary biographical enterprise is, then, in part, another attempt by Modiano to understand Albert by identifying with him imaginatively in the creation of a figure burdened down by memory and unable to talk about the past. However, in some respects Modiano is also creating his father in his own image. His awareness of this fact comes across in the pervasive imagery of doubling and of merging of identity in this text. The confusion of identity in this fragmentary biographical exploration of an imagined figure also seems to be a 280

See also the rubric ‘Autobiographical Allusiveness, History, and Secrecy’ in the section on Livret de famille in Chapter Three. 281 Paul Gellings in his Poésie et mythe dans l’oeuvre de Patrick Modiano: le fardeau du nomade (p. 133) sees the ghost dog in Chien de printemps as calling up the Mayan dogs native to Mexico who accompany the souls of the dead on their journey.

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manner in which Modiano can once again express feelings of being haunted by his dead brother and by the Holocaust (it should be noted that Dora Bruder is also commemorated via the figure of Colette Laurent).282 These issues are explored in the rubric ‘Identification and Identity’ below. For the multiple-text reader then, Chien de printemps is mainly a fictionalization of the experiences of both Patrick and Albert Modiano, where much liberty is taken with the facts, and where Jansen is symbolic of the pain of loss, solitude, and the burden of memory for both father and son. Jansen may also contain aspects of the Hungarian-born photographer Georges Brassaï. Paris Tendresse, the book of Brassaï’s photographs accompanied by a narrative by Modiano, was published in 1990, just three years before Chien de printemps, and in that text Modiano states that he met Brassaï fleetingly on one occasion. He may also contain aspects of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who, like Jansen, merged so totally and so stealthily with his surroundings while taking his photographs.283 Yet for the single-text reader, the text is an imaginary biographical quest that ostensibly shuns invention, even while gesturing to the importance of the ‘travail d’imagination’ the reader must effect around Jansen and the narrator. Before looking at the text as a comment on the processes and ethics of biographical writing from the single-text reader’s point of view, it should first be noted that the text does not present itself unproblematically as biography. Early on, the narrator states: ‘Un autre que moi écrira un livre sur lui, illustré par les photos qu’il trouvera’ (18), and later reminds the reader that this is not ‘un livre sur Jansen’ (78). While these remarks can be interpreted as stating that the narrator’s account is merely a suggestion of Jansen’s presence rather than a conventional biography (especially given that the narrator possesses only scanty facts about Jansen), they also suggest that the text is strongly infused with the narrator’s presence (and, as the biographically aware reader knows, also with that of the author). Yet the narrator does provide a series of fragmentary biographical reflections focused on Jansen, and a strong sense of the photographer

282

See the rubric ‘Scene and “Character”’ in the section on Dora Bruder in Chapter Seven. 283 On this, see Assouline, Henri Cartier-Bresson. L’Œil du siècle, especially pp. 108109.

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is undeniably produced. Let us now look at the manner in which the narrator presents what little he knows of Jansen’s life.

Commemoration with Minimal Betrayal A strong urge to record life is a fundamental aspect of this narrator’s personality, as is clear from his opening statement: ‘J’ai connu Francis Jansen quand j’avais dix-neuf ans, au printemps de 1964, et je veux dire aujourd’hui le peu de choses que je sais de lui.’ (11). Even at nineteen he was obsessed with cataloguing Jansen’s lifetime of discarded photographs, in order to mark the traces of the passage of ‘les gens et les choses’ (35). Thirty years on, despite having come to resemble Jansen in that he sometimes wishes to escape memory, the narrator is still drawn to record the past. The mystery surrounding Jansen spurs him on, as well as the fact that the spring of 1964 is bound up with his own life. Yet the narrator has now moved from the dry classificatory work of cataloguing to the art of biographical and autobiographical portrayal. In recording what little he knows of Jansen’s life, the narrator is aware that he is not respecting Jansen’s wish for oblivion – ‘un oubli dont il est responsable et qu’il a recherché délibérément’ – but is nonetheless glad that his narrative will drag him from obscurity: ‘si ces pages le sortent de l’oubli, j’en serai très heureux’ (18). He feels an uneasiness in talking about Jansen, expecting to receive a postcard from Cuernavaca with the admonishment ‘TAISEZ-VOUS’, as if conscious that he is betraying him in some way (20).284 However, the narrator avoids ‘explaining away’ his biographee, leaving him the life that stems from mystery. Shunning the reductiveness that would arise from an overly coherent and simplistic biographical narrative, this one provides the reader with material for speculation around the holes in knowledge, so that Jansen is not just the sum of the ‘peu de choses’ that the narrator knows of him. Though what the narrator is doing may be a betrayal of sorts, it seems at most a semi-betrayal, similar to that involved in allowing Nicole to enter Jansen’s apartment without actually telling her where Jansen was. Like Nicole, the reader may come so far and no further. The frame that the narrator puts on experience is a frame full of 284

This reference to postcards itself tags Jansen as an Albert Modiano representative (or at least a parental one). In Fleurs de ruine, Pacheco, another Albert Modiano representative, sends postcards from Morocco, and parents also send postcards from exotic places in Remise de peine and La Petite Bijou.

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absence that seems faithful to ‘la sensation d’absence et de vide’ surrounding Jansen, and to the absence that emanates from his photography (15, 105, 110). The narrator’s own provision of frames full of absence is discreet, yet ubiquitous in this text. The frame of the bowling ground in the narrator’s encounter with what may be the ghost of Lemoine in the Luxembourg Gardens and the window that acts as a frame for the painting of Mme de Meyendorff at Fossombrone both suggest the absence of death. Also of note is the frame of the railings of the Luxembourg Gardens out of which the narrator dreams of floating when his sense of self dissolves (117).285 In drawing frames full of absence around reality, and in the frame of his narrative as a whole, the narrator seems to be attempting to reproduce in words the quality of a Jansen photo with Jansen and the narrator for its elusive subjects, taking up Jansen’s challenge to ‘créer le silence avec des mots’ (21).

Incompleteness and Uncertainty The narrator’s statement that he is recounting ‘le peu de choses que je sais’ is an early recognition of the incompleteness of his account of Jansen. The typographical blanks and the brevity of the text themselves highlight the holes in knowledge. What concrete details of dates and events are known, apart from the experiences in spring 1964, cover a bare two pages (notes on birth, family connections, and a rough sketch of the photographer’s life: 18-19). Aside from these factual details, the narrator’s accounts of situations and his descriptions of Jansen’s photographs provide little more than biographical clues. Yet the power of suggestion is strong. In the narrator’s hesitant account, some details stand out as worthy of the name ‘biographèmes’, such as Jansen’s taste for photographing his shoes (an image which, like that of his suitcases, is indicative of his nomadic tendencies), his intense anxiety at discovering that there was another Francis Jansen, and the brief and enigmatic appearance of the dog that follows him into his apartment (114, 120, 101-105). The descriptions of photographs taken by Jansen, and which are so impregnated with his ‘regard’, also function as ‘biographèmes’, that is to say, suggestive biographical details.286 These photographs demonstrate Jansen’s 285

For a discussion of framing techniques in this text see Cooke, ‘“Créer le silence avec des mots”’. 286 See the rubric ‘Briefness, Mystery, and Biographèmes’ in Chapter Five.

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fascination with Parisian streetscapes, but do not explain that fascination, just as the reasons for the sadness in Jansen’s gaze in the photograph of himself and Robert Capa are not elucidated. While the lack of full explanation creates a powerful sense of absence, there is also a presence in these absences, which can be equated with the suspension points that are Jansen’s favorite typographical characters (21). For example, while the important detail of the precise role of Colette Laurent in the photographer’s life is never clear, the suggestion of a strong attachment between them adds to the human presence of both characters. Real and metaphorical suspension points occur frequently in this text, reinforcing a sense of unexplained depth. This, then, is a biographical commemoration that relies heavily on the reader’s imaginative input. The uncertainty surrounding this biographical project is highlighted by several touches indicating that nothing can be reduced to an objective and unchanging truth. This is implied at the very start of the text in the narrator’s remark about the impetus for his account – the photograph he has recently come across that Jansen took of him in 1964 with his girlfriend of the time: ‘J’ai gardé l’une des photographies. Nous sommes assis sur le banc, mon amie et moi. J’ai l’impression qu’il s’agit d’autres personnes que nous, à cause du temps qui s’est écoulé ou bien de ce qu’avait vu Jansen dans son objectif et que nous n’aurions pas vu à cette époque si nous nous étions plantés devant un miroir : deux adolescents anonymes et perdus dans Paris.’ (13). In this brief but crucial description, strategically placed at the start of the narrative, Modiano manages to suggest many things: that one’s own perception of one’s self shifts over time, that memory alters things, and that each individual brings his or her own perception to events. The very fact that Jansen suggests alternative ways of ordering the catalogue of his photographs – alphabetical and chronological – also undermines the notion of a single, right ‘way of telling’. Indeed, as Kawakami has pointed out, Jansen himself provides the basis for a potential alternative biographical narrative by leaving a roll of film from the last walk he took with the narrator with pictures of the places associated with him in Paris’.287 The unreliability of memory is explicitly stated on several occasions, its fragility being contrasted with photographs, which are proofs of the past. The narrator realizes with pain that memory cannot 287

A Self-Conscious Art, p. 43.

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offer solid proof of existence when a plaque disappears from the facade of the École des Mines, which had commemorated the death there of a certain Jean Monvallier Boulogne. He is suddenly unsure that the plaque ever existed: ‘Or, ce lundi, à ma grande surprise, la plaque avait disparu, et je regrettais que Jansen, l’après-midi où nous étions ensemble au même endroit, n’ait pas pris une photo du mur criblé de balles et de cette plaque. Je l’aurais inscrit sur le répertoire. Mais là, brusquement, je n’étais plus sûr que ce Jean Monvallier Boulogne eût existé, et, d’ailleurs, je n’étais plus sûr de rien.’ (114115). And in attempting to remember Jansen’s farewell party he states: ‘Au souvenir de cette soirée, j’éprouve le besoin de retenir des silhouettes qui m’échappent et de les fixer comme sur une photographie. Mais, après un si grand nombre d’années, les contours s’estompent, un doute de plus en plus insidieux corrode les visages. Trente ans suffisent pour que disparaissent les preuves et les témoins.’ (70). In brief, while the narrator seems to feel the need to record a sense of Jansen that is faithful to the photographer’s underlying qualities, in particular his melancholy obsession with absence, he also demonstrates an awareness that his vision of him is subjective, inadequate, and based on his present interpretation of him.

An Artful Shaping It is clear that just as Jansen transmits ‘son regard à lui’ in the photographs he takes (35), the narrator also imprints his personality on his narrative. While this has implications for questions of bias and selectivity, as well as for questions of autobiography, the storyteller is shown to be important both as a vehicle for transmission of a sense of Jansen and for his artistic skill in doing this. It is suggested that representations of reality that are infused with their author’s presence can have more worth and power than a mechanistic approach. Though photography is often seen as a mere recording of reality, as shown in Baudelaire’s perception of it as lacking in soul, Jansen aims to achieve what he calls ‘la lumière naturelle’ (36), signifying, not mere sunlight, but a light he considers appropriate to the subject. This must be worked on and shaped and not merely ‘captured’, as the narrator implies by his use of the verb ‘travailler’ along with ‘capter’ in this respect (113). The narrator also aspires to this ‘lumière naturelle’, and, with all the provisos of partiality mentioned above, creates a textual ‘photograph’ of Jansen that is appropriate to the absence at the heart of his perception of Jansen. Like Jansen, he imprints his subjective vision on his art, what in relation to Jansen he calls ‘son regard à lui’

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(35), while aiming to respect the ‘essence’ of the subject matter as far as possible. Neither the narrator nor Jansen create mechanistic reproductions of reality. In this they differ from le Mime Gil, who acts as a kind of nasty alter ego or foil for them both. Like both of them, he is associated with the ideas of nomadism and prosthesis, with his suitcase and tape-recorder. (Jansen has three suitcases, with a camera for a prosthesis, while the prosthesis of the narrator is his pen). Yet le Mime Gil’s ‘art’ is ‘mécanique’, and ‘métallique’ (two adjectives that in Modiano’s work are always negatively charged: 65), an example of art with almost the minimum of human input. Though his numéro miming along to a tape-recording of poetry involves a physical human presence, it is almost maximally depersonalized as he relies on other people’s words, and often does not even use his own voice for the recordings. Symbolically, the pool of fake moonlight in which he performs his mechanistic art forms a contrast to the ‘lumière naturelle’ to which Jansen and the narrator aspire. In relation to both photography and storytelling, the ‘lumière naturelle’ involves, despite its name, a highly individual moulding of reality. Both arts allow their practitioner to impose his individuality – his own ‘regard’ – on experience. In the narrator’s case, his art and individuality stem from a skilful manipulation of suggestive details in a sketchy framework that allows scope for imaginative connection between the reader and the figures described. Absence, then, can be ‘full’ of something else. Several elements in the text provoke reflection on the fact that the narrator is not only structuring the gaps in his portrayal of Jansen, but may even be filling them with his presence. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the narrator ‘V’ reflects that ‘You cannot ape a gap, because you are bound to fill it in somehow or other and blot it out in the process’.288

288

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, p. 27. There are clear thematic and structural links between The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Chien de printemps. In both texts, the narrator, who is an artist, identifies to such an extent with his biographee, who is also an artist, that he comes to believe he is that person. The motifs of the double and the brother are essential to both works. Both narrators end up informing the reader as much, if not more, about their own lives as about those of their biographees. Equally, the art of both narrator-biographers echoes that of the biographee, in form as well as in content. Both show that the biographee is somehow filled in by the biographer. Imagery of photography, light and dark, and of ghosts is important in both texts, as is the notion of the survivor syndrome. Though Modiano

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While this remark may be a little sweeping, it is undeniable that the reader’s understanding of Jansen is shaped by the narrator. Let us now turn to the implications of this on an autobiographical level, from the point of view of the narrator as well as concerning Modiano himself.

Identification and Identity It should first be pointed out that at least part of the narrator’s fascination with Jansen stems from the psychological affinities that exist between many biographers and their biographees. These affinities are underlined by the imagery of brotherhood in the text, strategically placed at the start and end of the narrative (14, 121). While these references to brotherhood are, of course, an indication of the importance of Rudy’s death in Modiano’s work, they can also be read as comments on the fraternal nature of the relationship between all biographers and biographees. The narrator is drawn to Jansen from the start, instinctively knowing that he does not want to be alone, a fact that suggests underlying psychological affinities (13). It is also pointed out that biographical writing involves an identification process between biographer and subject, as biographers grow to resemble their biographees as they write. ‘À mesure que je me rappelle tous ces détails, je prends le point de vue de Jansen’, claims the narrator, suggesting that the effort of remembering and of understanding leads to identification and even to absorption of part of the other’s identity (69). However, the similarities between the two men are striking enough to encourage a sense that the text may be as much about the narrator as about the biographee. The fact that the narrator has a double of the key to Jansen’s workshop underlines the links between the two figures. Both are artists who produce black and white ‘images’, whether textual or photographic. Both work with light and shadow.289 Both feel the burden of memory (symbolized in Jansen’s case by his suitcases). Both are marginal figures unsure of their identities. Jansen is foreign, and the narrator is uncertain of his nationality (117). Both seek to express absence. Both also have nomadic tendencies, and seem to have a certain fear of enclosure and delineation. Jansen runs from ‘le dernier carré’ he perceives as closing has cited Nabokov as one of his influences (see Savigneau: ‘Une conversation avec Modiano’, p. 32), he has not to my knowledge mentioned this specific text. 289 Morris’s ‘A Photographic Memory’ provides a good inventory of the light/dark motif in Chien de printemps, as well as discussing the motif of doubleness.

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in on him (26), and the narrator’s avoidance of enclosure is subtly suggested in his reluctance to cross the ‘frame’ of the Place du Panthéon (59), or to step into the frames of the bowling ground where Lemoine is playing (39), and in the remarkable scene portraying his joy at the prospect of drifting out of the frame of the Luxembourg Gardens, leaving only his rolled up raincoat – the shell of a subject – behind him on a bench (117-118). The imagery of open doors in the text also fosters the sense of a wish to run away, applicable to the two men, summed up by the reference in the epigraph to ‘portes ouvertes, rage de disparaître’. While this is on one level a gesture to the elusive nature of all biographical subjects, the biographically informed reader may speculate that it also stems from the trauma handed down by Modiano’s Jewish links, an inherited fear of apprehension that also underlies the merging between Albert and Patrick in this text. On occasion, these similarities tempt the reader to wonder whether the narrative is not primarily an autobiographical account of the narrator, albeit of a covert sort. Like so many Modiano narrators, this one gives the impression of confiding in his narratee, while remaining, like Jansen, a figure with unexplained depth. The narrator admits only that he suffers from melancholy ‘trous noirs’ (96, 106) stemming from feelings of lack of coherence in his life, lack of certainty of his nationality, a desire to escape memory as well as to record the past, and feelings of confused identity. His oppression by the latter feelings is highlighted in the incident in the ‘Café de la paix’ (96-97) and in the bench scene in the Luxembourg Gardens, where he is almost relieved to feel he is dissolving into his surroundings and undergoing a ‘perte progressive d’identité’ (117). The aforementioned similarities with Jansen suggest that it is also useful for the narrator in some way to melt into another identity, feeling at liberty to tell part of his own story while ostensibly focusing on another one. The narrator’s emphasis on Jansen’s feelings of loss at the death of his friends (27) may thus be a gesture to similar feelings of loss on his own part. Death is omnipresent in this text. Jansen’s studio borders the Montparnasse cemetery, on the rue Froidevaux, and he is described by Nicole as liking to ‘faire le mort’, in other words to hide, lie low, or play dead (49). While both the photographer and the narrator would like to ‘faire parler les morts’, the narrator recognizes that this is impossible (77). On an authorial level, the fact that Albert Modiano was dead by the time of writing may explain the narrator’s strong feelings of being unable to reach ‘les morts’ (who are also of course the dead of history on a more general level), and may also

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account for the fact that Jansen’s silence and distance seems even greater than those of Chalva Deyckecaire in Les Boulevards de ceinture). The sense of autobiography by proxy is much stronger for the multiple-text reader, as readers familiar with Modiano’s work will be immediately struck by the fact that the narrator, like Jansen, is secretive about a past he seeks to forget. The reader aware of Vestiaire de l’enfance and Rue des Boutiques obscures is familiar with this sense of untold secrets, and is led to speculate on the reasons for the narrator’s feelings of affinity with this lonely, homeless, artist-figure with foreign and apparently Jewish roots (19), who is drawn to record the past but who also seems to be oppressed by memory and feelings of disappearance. For the biographically informed reader, the ironytinged imagery of waiting (59, 71), and the narrator’s realization that what he is waiting for will never happen (104), gesture to the impossibility of the return of Rudy and Modiano senior, as well as Modiano’s statement in interviews that, in writing his books, he has the feeling of waiting for a catharsis that never quite comes.290 The final image of the text, with its references to death and blurring of identity, is perhaps the main ‘key’ to Modiano’s own ‘workshop’. It describes Jansen’s shock at discovering the existence of another Francis Jansen who was presumed to have died in a concentration camp during the war and whose papers had become mixed with his: ‘Il ne savait plus quel homme il était. Il m’a dit qu’au bout d’un certain nombre d’années nous acceptons une vérité que nous pressentions mais que nous nous cachions à nous-même par insouciance ou lâcheté : un frère, un double est mort à notre place à une date et dans un lieu inconnus et son ombre finit par se confondre avec nous’ (121). Here the dead brother conjures up Rudy Modiano and the suggestion of Jewishness and the death in an unknown time and place evokes Modiano senior, as well as all the mudered Jews of the Holocaust. Modiano’ feelings of confusion of identity are indeed a complex psychic burden. As shown, they involve guilt-feelings at having survived when others died (Rudy and the murdered Jews), with equally strong feelings of having lost part of oneself, along with a frequent impression of having become the dead person. Again, all of this coexists with a sense of being cut off from a past that cannot be 290

III.

See for example, Modiano’s remarks in Gaudemar, ‘Modiano, souvenir écrin’, p.

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accessed, either because it is too painful, or, more radically, because it was not directly experienced, as in the case of the Holocaust, not only for Modiano, but also for his narrators, Albert Modiano, and, in Chien de printemps, Francis Jansen. The fact that Albert Modiano’s identity was so problematic only compounds the difficulties. The prolific imagery of doubleness in the text contributes to the sense of uncertainty around identity, as well as generating constant mergings. As shown above, the narrator ‘becomes’ Jansen through writing about him. The narrator also ‘becomes’ Capa through identifying with him (feeling that he, like Capa, is Jansen’s brother). He merges with Colette Laurent through identification with her (30), and she ‘is’ the other Colette in the narrator’s dream, while also being reincarnated in Nicole.291 Identity in this text is reflected back and forth from figure to figure, like a flash of light ricocheting between several mirrors for as long as the reading process lasts.

Single-Text Readers and Multiple-Text Readers While the drive to imagine is clearly an important part of Modiano’s psyche, his narrator in Chien de printemps seems much less prone to imaginative construction. For the single-text reader, the footnotes, emphasis on facts, and the very bareness of the text all contribute to a documentary tone. Even the references to dreaming and to a ‘sentiment d’irréalité’ generated by feelings of being cut off by the past while waiting for the ‘micheline’ to Fossombrone (80) are likely to be taken quite literally by the single-text reader, although in texts like Quartier perdu and Vestiaire de l’enfance such references would immediately betoken fictionality. Admittedly, even the single-text reader may pick up on some allusive hints that the names and events in the text may have been invented for symbolic purposes. These subtle ‘clues’ encompass the nod to François Jeanson, a biographer of Sartre and of Beauvoir (Sartre is mentioned by name in a footnote as the author of Les Mouches: 72), and the fact that Jansen’s book of photographs is edited by Editions de la Colombière in Geneva, which may be a reference to the photograph of the pigeon house in Breton’s Nadja (the text is linked to the famous Qui suis-je?’ metaphor in Nadja). Further, despite the narrator’s indication to the contrary, there is no more than one ‘changement’ to be made between Raspail and Opéra, and this 291

Colette is twenty-five years old in the photograph in Jansen’s workshop, and Nicole is the same age when the narrator is nineteen.

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will alert some readers to the less than total reliability of what they are reading, as may the reference to the ‘garage de la rue Janssen’ (37) [sic]. However, for the single-text reader, the generally documentary tone prevails, so that a sense of an only slightly fictionalized account of real happenings is produced. For multiple-text readers on the other hand, Chien de printemps is not only a fictionalization of Modiano’s family experience, but is pervaded by a host of other details assimilated from other fictional contexts. Readers aware of other Modiano texts may see the film called Dédé d’Anvers in one of the footnotes as a Modiano invention, given his attachment to characters called Dédé and his mother’s home town of Antwerp. They may see Dekker and Deyckecaire behind Eugène Deckers. They may also read a Modianesque symbolism into the fact that Meyendorff’s book was published by the Éditions du Sablier. Jansen may remind them of Albert Horn in Lacombe Lucien, as the foreignness of both is accentuated by their use of idiomatic expressions with a foreign accent. His name echoes that of Georges Jansenne, Dressel’s ghost-like impresario in chapter XII of Livret de famille, just as the house of the Meyendorffs at Fossombrone echoes Valbreuse in Rue des Boutiques obscures. Thus, while the narrator’s statement that he is writing in the spring of 1992, the year before the publication of the novel, encourages all types of reader to assimilate him with the author (17), it marks the author largely as documenter for the single-text reader and as imaginer for the multiple-text reader. This seems to be an indication of Modiano’s ambivalence concerning the use of imagination in biographical reconstruction, since only the multipletext reader will be aware that Jansen is an imaginative creation that allows Modiano to connect with his father. For the single-text reader, the narrator remains largely external to Jansen (never acceding to inside views of him, as he does momentarily with Colette Laurent), despite the suggestion that the narrator may be projecting part of his consciousness onto Jansen and attributing some of his own motives to him. It is tempting to hazard an autobiographical explanation for the creation of a largely documentary tone for the single-text reader, as this is, after all, a strong contributory factor in the human presence and reality effect of Jansen. The complicated emotions of anger and the desire to provoke an answer from Albert Modiano that underlie Modiano’s creation of Chalva Deyckecaire in Les Boulevards de ceinture may have abated with his father’s death in 1978. In their

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place may have grown a desire to respect the silence and distance of this father figure. Jansen’s enigmatic aura in Chien de printemps is thus perhaps an expression of Modiano’s desire to connect with his mysterious father via the creation of a more dignified mysterious figure than the Chalva of Les Boulevards de ceinture.

Open Doors and Textual Whispers The title of this text is symbolic of the mystery of consciousness, since it will never be known what exactly prompted Jansen to utter those words in such a black mood in the spring of the narrator’s meeting with him. The title is also representative of the dense and polysemic nature of the narrator’s account. As shown by the references to the ‘tondeuse’ and the ‘grillage’, even outwardly simple and banal language is dense, heavy, and full of possible meanings. Meaning shifts with context, so that the ‘Chien de printemps’ is a ‘real’ dog – the ‘pointer’ of page 101 – but also an expression of pain, as well as a metaphor for the persistence of memory and what in Dora Bruder Modiano terms ‘les esprits qui nous accompagnent’.292 Accompanying the fluidity of meaning in this text is a fluidity of identity, where ghost dogs blend into one another and self merges with other. While the text is in the main focused on Jansen, there is a strong hint of a painful, untold story concerning the narrator, but the storyteller exerts his prerogatives of selectivity and secretiveness in this text as in all the others. Like the whisper of air as the reader turns the pages of the book, Francis Jansen is ‘un véritable courant d’air’, as is the narrator himself (58). The series of frames in this text seem to contain a set of open doors (the ‘portes ouvertes’ of the epigraph) through which the ‘courants d’air’ of identity and meaning travel back and forth. Jansen calls writing ‘la quadrature du cercle’ (21) – an expression that implies something extremely difficult – and this is highly appropriate to the narrator’s attempt to capture the biographical subject by framing it in narrative. (Interestingly, Barthes uses the same expression in La Chambre claire in relation to the difficulty of creating a faithful sense of the subject in photography).293 Chien de 292

See the rubric ‘Coinciding Lives’ in the section on Dora Bruder in Chapter Seven. Barthes’s usage seems to imply that photography cannot be said to encapsulate ‘essence’, though it can be attributed one by interpretation, as is clear in the Jardin d’Hiver photograph that symbolizes the essence of his mother for him. La Chambre claire, p. 26. 293

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printemps shows that some capture of the biographical subject can be accomplished through a judicious use of silence. Though the narrator feels it necessary to ‘rompre le silence’ of the past in order to commemorate Jansen (81), it is also evident that, like Jansen, he considers the ability to ‘garder le silence’ a precious one (20). While biography, like autobiography, stems from both the desire to record and to put a certain coherence on life (and the narrator does seeks some coherence), silence and an enigmatic sense of incoherence are just as important in this text, for both single-text reader and multipletext reader. Alongside the narrator’s desire to put form on life, lies a recognition of the importance of leaving mystery, so that an imaginative cohesion takes place rather than the cut-and-dried catalogues of his initial projects. Biographical and autobiographical reconstruction are not linear here, the narrator having moved on from chronological classification, but are all the more powerful for it. This discussion of Les Boulevards de ceinture and Chien de printemps has shown the texts to be examples of differing approaches to writing about other people, while also suggesting many similarities between the two texts. Both texts provoke reflection on the subjective, incomplete, and temporally unstable nature of interpretation. Taken together, they also demonstrate the ambivalence Modiano apparently feels about the idea of using imagination to speculate on other people’s experiences. Both texts stress the opacity of the other person. The narrator of Les Boulevards de ceinture favours imaginative speculation, though without going as far as accessing the thoughts of the biographee, who is presented as a figure beyond the control of the narrator, and who has power over him through the very fact of remaining eternally enigmatic. The narrator of Chien de printemps, who is much more circumspect about speculating on the events in his biographee’s life, also seems to feel that his biographee’s right to mystery should be respected. Both texts show an awareness that they are shaping the reader’s perception of the biographee, and that the truth they are proposing is a subjective one. This is particularly clear in Les Boulevards de ceinture, which is arguably governed by even greater ethical imperatives than Chien de printemps because it seeks to portray actual historical events in some detail. Just as biography is shown to be bound up with history, especially in Modiano’s case, questions of autobiography are also present in the texts. One reason for the use of imagination in Les

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Boulevards de ceinture may be the narrator’s own strong need to imagine, in order to understand his father and thus to produce an identity for himself, so that here the fictionalized biographical narrative produced by him becomes a type of autobiography. The emphasis on the inventing psyche of the narrator centres the reader’s attention on the narrator, in any case. (Though his narrative at times appears to be addressed to himself, and at others to his father, it could also be seen as calling out to the reader for an analysis and comprehension that may be beyond the capabilities of the narrator himself.) Chien de printemps, while ostensibly much more externally focused, also suggests that biography can be used by the biographer in order to express autobiographical experience, all the while creating a strong sense of reality and autonomy around the biographee. Both texts use a photographic metaphor for the process of representation, but with different effects. Chien de printemps mainly exploits the reality effect attached to description of photographs – the sense that they are guarantors of the Real, even if that is only a diegetic reality – presenting photographs as documents rather than as tools for imagination. Yet the text also uses described photographs to create a sense of presence-through-absence and an aura of mystery around the biographee, relying on the fact that, as Sontag put it, ‘a photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence’, and that described photographs create a sense of absence to an even greater extent, while also suggesting a presence.294 Readers are implicitly invited to imagine that presence for themselves. Les Boulevards de ceinture is more explicit about the idea that photographs are catalysts for imagination, as the narrator openly invents a world around a photograph. Perhaps the most important issue linking the photographic metaphor to the issue of biography is that of interpretation. Les Boulevards de ceinture uses variation in the description of the same photograph to provoke reflection on the variability of interpretation, while Chien de printemps shows that both photographs and biography are shaped by the subjectivity of the artist. Photography is a spectral art, in that photographs are haunting reminders of the past, and as such it is an appropriate metaphor for these texts, where the narrators are haunted by memories of their biographees (and in Les Boulevards de 294

On Photography, p. 16.

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ceinture also by lack of memory). However each narrator also haunts the figures he portrays.

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7 Fusion and Distance: Biography in Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder These two texts are strongly linked, as Modiano commemorates the real-life Dora Bruder in both, first through fictionalization as Ingrid Teyrsen and then in a minimally fictionalized presentation of part of her life in Dora Bruder. The multiple-text reader’s picture of Dora in Dora Bruder is thus coloured by the fictionalization in Voyage de noces, and knowledge of Dora will also colour the reader’s image of Ingrid. Both of these texts, on a single-text level and as separate units, further demonstrate the ambivalence apparently felt by the author on the question of imaginative truth and the ‘voyance’ of fiction. The discussion of Dora Bruder looks at the memorial constituted by that bare, fact-driven, though poetic narrative, and examines the elements of slight fictionalization that are nonetheless present in that text. In Dora Bruder, the narrator marks his distance from the biographee very clearly, and the details he provides about himself take the place of biography mainly for commemorative reasons. Biographer and biographee merge inextricably in Voyage de noces, however, in a strong example of autobiography by proxy. Although this text is ostensibly biographically focused and does raise many issues of clear biographical importance, it ultimately seems to concern the narrator as much if not more than the biographee.295

7(i) Voyage de noces (1990) As its title implies, Voyage de noces is concerned with union. The fusion of the ‘noces’ of the title involves many figures drawn from life, as well as the fusion of Ingrid and Rigaud with the narrator. Ingrid merges with and commemorates not only Dora Bruder and all the Jewish victims of the Occupation in France but also Modiano’s 295

See also Mitchell and Côté, p. 190 and 195, and Kawakami, pp. 36-40, for a discussion of the text as a displaced writing of self.

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parents, and even Georges Perec. As Roland Brasseur was the first to point out, Ingrid at one stage lived at 19, rue de l’Atlas, the street in which Georges Perec was born (VN, 105, 156).296 Ingrid is involved in dancing, as Modiano’s mother was when she was a chorus girl, and Jean’s love for his fashion-model wife Annette may be another transposition of Modiano’s own desire to connect with his mother in imagination, as the motif of the model is often associated with Luisa Colpeyn representatives in the fictions. Rigaud can be seen in part as an incarnation of Albert Modiano, due to the associations with the latter’s wartime hideout of Megève, the general notion of being on the run, and the links with a black-market office on the avenue Hoche (echoing those of Modiano senior in Dora Bruder and Roland in Rue des Boutiques Obscures) and with Pacheco, who despoils the apartment in the rue Tilsitt of its valuables. In the light of Modiano’s own diffuse autobiographical revelation in his texts, it is significant that Rigaud shares his initial, his dark hair, and that he lived in an apartment on the Place de l’Étoile. On a purely textual level, it is mainly a ‘mariage à trois’, however, and the narrator’s imaginative connection with Rigaud is perhaps as important to the narrator’s psyche as is his connection with Ingrid, though the latter is more explicit. It is important to note that of the thirty pages devoted to the couple’s experiences in Juan-les-Pins during the Occupation (55-84), nineteen are told specifically from Rigaud’s point of view (61-80), while the rest concern the outlook of both figures equally. The narrator, Jean B. (Jean-Patrick Modiano bis, perhaps), takes on the point of view of Ingrid, the subject of his biographical reflections, in approximately twenty pages also (124-145 and 153-154). These pages are those of most interest for comparison with Dora Bruder, as they concern Ingrid’s running away from home. Let us first look at the reflections on biographical writing and on the commemoration of the collective past, before focusing on questions of autobiography par transposition.

‘Les blancs, les silences et les points d’orgue’ There is an ambivalence in this text concerning the notion of imaginative truth, reflecting Modiano’s own ambivalence on this matter. Despite his use of novelistic procedures, Jean displays a lack of willingness to overtly endorse a novelistic approach in his 296

Intactes et Minuscules, p. 130. See also David Bellos, Georges Perec, une vie dans les mots, p. 55.

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construction of a sense of his biographee, prefiguring the similar reticence on an authorial level in the later Chien de printemps. The reader aware of the tragic circumstances of Dora Bruder’s life will appreciate the reasons for the ambivalence in Voyage de noces, given that speculation on Dora’s experiences is of necessity laden with responsibility. Initially the narrator muses on the ‘graves questions’ of the processes and ethics of representing Ingrid in biography (49-53). He speaks of the dilemma faced by the biographer in selecting details to focus on, and moots the possibility of assembling facts one by one: ‘les rassembler à la file sans se permettre de privilégier l’un au détriment de l’autre, de sorte que pas un seul ne doit manquer, comme dans l’inventaire d’une saisie’ (52). While these remarks suggest that he is in some way aware of the selectivity and subjectivity of his own narrative, and though he is momentarily ambivalent about fictionalization, he ultimately opts for a novelistic approach, as can be deduced from the narrative he in fact produces. He does not admit this openly, however. He initially dismisses the idea of meditating on photographs and cuttings to suggest ‘atmosphère’, and criticizes the use of details that are ‘romanesques’ (using the term here in the sense of ‘striking’ or ‘romantic’ but also evoking the sense of ‘novelistic’), calling them ‘inutiles et décoratifs’ (51, 53). However, although he dismisses ‘atmosphère’, he is nonetheless adept in creating it, as all the scenes he draws attest – the sleigh ride, the flight from the ‘tache sombre’, and Ingrid’s awe at the ‘lit à baldaquin’, to name but a few. Ingrid’s actions are at times presented in the present tense, apparently in a concern to provide a dramatic sense of events. Such scene-drawing conveys a sense of Ingrid and Rigaud’s experiences and provides a valuable insight into the atmosphere of Juan-les-Pins and of occupied Paris. Ultimately, despite his ethical hesitations, Jean does seem to be confident that he can access the ‘essence’ of the biographee and that he has chosen the best way of representing her. He has a strong faith in his choice of focus, getting rid of some of the evidence of Ingrid’s past – ‘les années d’Amérique’ and her life in Paris in the 1950s, which he now feels were peripheral to her real life-story – with only a ‘vague remords’ (52). However, his narrative works against his own confidence in possessing the definitive Ingrid story. Simply by mentioning and dismissing these traces, he provokes reflection on the fact that these parts of her life have now gone missing, parts which the

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reader is free to feel may be as important as the Occupation experiences, and implies that there are other potential stories of Ingrid. Jean also suggests that each life may ‘s’épure d’elle-même’, leaving only ‘l’essentiel: les blancs, les silences et les points d’orgue’ (my emphasis: 53), and talks of himself as a ‘greffier incorrigible’ at one point (96), seeming to stress the transcription of facts over invention. In such statements, he is minimizing his own role in mediating the events described. His statement concerning the ‘points d’orgue’ is highly self-contradictory, however, largely because of the very term used. While, in figurative terms, ‘un point d’orgue’ signifies an ‘interruption dont la durée semble très longue, très pesante’ (Le Petit Larousse), and as such seems to apply to the gaps in the narrator’s knowledge of Ingrid, in musical terminology it is a pause sign, which permits the player to accentuate a note or a silence as he or she wishes, so stressing the expressive input of the player (as defined in Le Grand Robert). Thus, despite the narrator’s apparent belief in an ‘essence’ of this biographee’s life (‘l’essentiel’), the subjectivity implied in the musical sense of the term subtly underlines the fact that no life can do anything ‘d’elle-même’, as every life depends on its interpreters for its meaning. Jean’s confidence that he has direct access to Ingrid is in any case thrown into question by his own narrative. While he presents his account of the experience of Ingrid and Rigaud (at which he was not present) as memory, stating: ‘je me souviens de tout comme si c’était hier’ (55), the implausibility of his accessing of their thoughts, coupled with the fact that these events took place before his birth, serve, as Mitchell and Côté have pointed out, to ‘advertise the fictionality’ of that embedded narrative.297 Later, when asked if he is writing his memoirs, Jean states: ‘Pas vraiment des Mémoires’, qualifying this with ‘Mais presque’ (150), so that it does seem as if he is admitting the distance between his own consciousness and theirs. There is thus a complex tension between doubts as to the ethics and possibilities of the ‘romanesque’ and an implied belief in the narrator’s selection and arrangement of events to provide a sense of the biographee. Jean seems ultimately very confident that he knows best, however. This may be in part because the narrative concerns him as much as it concerns Ingrid, as we shall see. Yet Ingrid is undeniably 297

Shaping the Novel, p. 195.

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one of the main focal points of the text. Let us now concentrate on how the narrator produces a sense of her.

A Sense of Ingrid Despite the narrator’s imaginings about Ingrid, many mysteries remain concerning her. The most intriguing of these are the questions of what happened to her between the narrator’s meeting with her and Rigaud on the Côte d’Azur and their meeting in Paris three years later, and her experiences in the years between that meeting and her suicide. Silence also surrounds the reasons for her separation from Rigaud and the nature of their relationship. It is also allied to the rhetoric of absence Jean uses in recounting her experiences and his own, presumably in order to express the ever-present ‘sentiment de vide’ he sees as vital to both of their psyches (157). Appropriately, imagery of emptiness and desertedness figures strongly. However, as Bruno Tritsmans points out, the narrator does bridge part of the gap between the two ‘entrefilets’ – the ‘avis de recherche’ and the article reporting her death298 – and provides a sense of a person, in contrast to the terse details they provide, allowing some ‘notes’ or ‘chords’ to resonate. Ingrid is unique among Modiano’s biographees in being described quite extensively at two periods of her life – both as a young girl and as a woman on the verge of middle-age. It is in her adult years that she is the most intriguing. Her ironical way of speaking, which survives even in her broken-down years, is perhaps the aspect that individualizes her the most. In the Saint-Tropez episode, this penchant for irony coexists with a motherly concern for the narrator, and a hint of emotional turmoil in her practice of ‘faire le mort’, lying silently in the dark beside Rigaud in an attempt to ward off potential visitors. Like other Modiano biographees, she possesses contradictory attributes. When Jean meets her as a broken woman in Paris, she combines a surprising authoritativeness with a childlike need to ask permission to drink beer (115-116). A sense of personality is built up around these disparate touches, albeit an enigmatic one, given the many gaps described above. In the description of Ingrid as a runaway in occupied Paris, her individuality is less strong. This may seem paradoxical, given that Jean accedes to an inside view of her at that point, yet it is appropriate to the paralyzing fear she must have felt at that time. He portrays her as attempting to ‘faire le moins possible de gestes’ because of this fear 298

‘Fait divers et poétique du secret dans Voyage de noces de P. Modiano’, p. 92.

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(136), and her emotions seem to be held in check for this reason. Her feelings are confined to this fear and a sense of an almost centrifugal force keeping her from returning to the 18th arrondissement on the evening of her ‘fugue’ (126-127), and then a pull between the black hole of that area and the attraction of relative safety and freedom with Rigaud (138). It seems as if this paralyzing fear, and perhaps a survival instinct, may have delayed the ‘sentiment de vide et de remords’ that later appears to have submerged her (157). In the Juan-les-Pins episode, there is little hint of what she is thinking, as she is depicted swimming and sleeping for the most part, and seems to be going through a denial period (symbolically, her face is hidden by a hat: 74), although the force of her repressed emotion is powerfully suggested by her crying fits every time she and Rigaud walk through the silent pinewood (60). Other than these hints of strong emotion, the main sense of her in the description of the war years is of someone in need of protection. Indeed, one reason why the narrator takes on the persona of Rigaud in the Juan-les-Pins episode may be in order to attempt to protect Ingrid, and the final image of her from the Occupation years is as ‘blottie’ against her older friend (145).

Biography and History Although Jean creates a relatively strong sense of Ingrid as an individual, he has not forgotten the other victims she represents. The reader too is asked to ‘remember’ the past, in being called to identify with Ingrid and Rigaud, and, by extension, with the other victims. As with all Modiano’s texts, this is as much an historical project as a biographical one. This is clearest for the reader who is aware that Voyage de noces is Modiano’s first extended commemoration of Dora (DB, 54), but even the single-text reader will be aware that Ingrid has affected Jean because of her experience in the ‘années noires’. The era of the Occupation has a particular hold on him. Despite the fact that he has not lived through the fear and sadness of Ingrid’s war experiences, there are veiled references to the death camps in his dream in the hôtel Dodds that suggest that he has internalized the horror of the Second World War. Just as the Juan-les-Pins ‘honeymoon’ mixes a superficial aura of insouciance with tremendous menace, his dream (98-99) blends a summery atmosphere with references to a stadium (recalling not only the Vél d’Hiv but also Perec’s ghoulish stadiums in W), to ‘entrepôts’ (near those of the ‘Quai de la gare’, an annex of the Drancy holding camp, where Albert Modiano may have been held: RP, 116 ; FR, 98), and to railway tracks, calling up the deportation

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trains. The protracted reference to Walter Scott in Rigaud’s memories of playing in the garden of the American woman’s villa adds to the impression that this is a highly historicized narrative – as well as subtly underlining the novelistic aspect of Jean’s account, since the Walter Scott reference calls up the ideas of the historical and the novelistic in equal doses (78, 80).299 Jean’s imaginings concerning the Occupation have become a type of memory for him, and his suggestion in his statement to Smidane that what he is writing could almost be called his ‘Mémoires’ echoes the narrator’s feeling of second-hand memory in Livret de famille and the notion of the ‘vie antérieure’ that is so common in the work. This narrator’s ‘memories’ of the war years feed into, and aggravate, his personal ‘sentiment de vide et de remords’ (157). The suggestion of misdeeds by the narrator in the word ‘remords’ is never elucidated, and in fact it is Annette who seems to be the guilty party in their love problems. However the biographically aware reader can attempt to explain these feelings in the light of Modiano’s own survivor syndrome, whereby the deaths of the murdered Jews in the Holocaust have become part of his own memory, along with that of Rudy, eternally haunting him. In contrast to the detachment Jean feels about his usual work making documentary films about ethnologically orientated quests in remote countries, the history of this particular past is both relevant and close to him (50, 86). He seems to be led by the guiding force of that past, as is suggested by the fact that Ingrid is in the driving seat when he first meets her, her ‘geste autoritaire’ when he meets her in the 7th arrondissement, and the fact that she sometimes seems to be leading him along in the street (25, 115, 118). She gives him her ‘avis de recherche’ as if she knew he would one day set off in quest of her (152). In a symbolic emphasis on the historical thrust of the text, the ‘impulsion mystérieuse’ near the end of Jean’s account that carries him to the site of the cinema at Ornano 43 is close to where Ingrid’s deported father used to live with her (156). However, Jean’s personal problems are also reinstated in these last lines. Let us now look at this text as one of the strongest examples in Modiano’s work, along with the recent La Petite Bijou, of a narrator working through personal problems via description of other people. The narrator follows Ingrid

299

For a discussion of Walter Scott and the historical novel see Jean Molino, ‘Histoire, roman, formes intermédiaires’, especially pp. 59-63.

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and Rigaud’s footsteps, not only in order to commemorate the past, but in order to project his own feelings onto them.

Fusion and Diffusion of Experience in Self-Narration As shown above, Ingrid seems to be the main guiding force of Jean’s narrative. Jean seems obsessed with her. The one thing he goes back to look for in the Cité Véron is his file on her (45-48), and he plans on carrying these notes with him from hotel to hotel (88). It becomes progressively clear that not all of this obsession is with biographical or historical commemoration, but may also have roots in personal trauma that may be leading him to the brink of suicide. In the first few pages, Jean depicts himself as reflecting on the suicide of an unknown woman at some length, before becoming aware that she is Ingrid. Tritsmans has pointed out the funereal imagery of the first pages: the tomb-like marble of the hotel; the murderous rays of the sun; and the hint that the barman may be one of the dogs of Hades.300 Jean describes and imagines associations between the dead woman and himself – her choice of the same grenadine and orange drink, and the possibility that she, like him, may have gone to the bookshop in the Victor-Emmanuel Gallery (9-13). The reasons for this identification ultimately seem to lie in his own suicidal leanings. For the multiple-text reader the notion is in any case present in banal things such as the ‘lames Gillette extra bleues’ that Jean asks Ingrid to buy for him (37), which figure so prominently as a tool for suicide in La Place de l’étoile. Yet even the single-text reader will pick up on the presence of the threat. Jean’s present state seems highly disturbed. His dramatic opening statement concerning his memory of Milan at the time of the suicide conveys a strong sense of depression: ‘Les jours d’été reviendront encore mais la chaleur ne sera plus jamais aussi lourde ni les rues aussi vides qu’à Milan, ce mardi-là’ (9). However, he quickly admits that his reactions at the time were not so strong, suggesting that he is projecting present pain onto what are initially presented as ‘remembered’ feelings. Sentiments to this effect reoccur (9, 12, 24). He soon openly admits present mental upset, claiming he felt a similar distress in diluted form on attempting to get in touch with Rigaud, three years after Ingrid’s suicide: a strong ‘sensation d’étrangeté et de solitude’ (22). However, an enigma is built up around the reasons for this, and it is part of the reader’s role to work through the mysteries 300

‘Fait divers et poétique du secret’, p. 91.

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posed. Tritsmans has spoken of ‘une poétique du secret’ in connection with the portrayal of Ingrid’s life, and this is a phrase also highly appropriate to the narrator. Jean’s identification with Rigaud is part of the key for the reader’s understanding of his problems. We shall first look at the problems that are hinted at, and then at Jean’s feelings of similarity with both Ingrid and Rigaud. From an historical perspective, it is logical that Ingrid rather than Rigaud should be portrayed as the guiding force of Jean’s narrative, as she was so much more affected by the events of the war than Rigaud was. However, from an emotional standpoint, Rigaud is perhaps as important as Ingrid, and the narrator uses both figures for transposition of his own experiences. The description of the Juan-les-Pins episode is an apt transposition of Jean’s present state of mind – outwardly insouciant, but full of fear and foreboding. Despite Jean’s disillusionment and suicidal tendencies, there is much lightness of touch in the text, which at several points uses a detective-novel register, coming complete with secret stairways, suspicious loiterers and even ‘une dent en or’ (45, 27, 67).301 However, Jean’s attempts to minimize his problems are generally preceded or followed by expressions of sorrow (18, 22, 48). The structure of the embedded narrative mirrors that of the embedding one, as it commences with a hint that something is wrong, and builds up to a sense of real crisis, without fully explaining matters. The ‘angoisse furtive’ (57) on the faces of the other ‘holidaymakers’ sets the tone, and, amidst the sunbathing and the swimming, the ‘tache sombre’ (61, 65) gradually spreads over the whole tableau. As mentioned above, Ingrid seems to be holding back strongly negative emotions. While a satisfactory explanation is suggested for what drove Ingrid to suicide (the remorse she must have felt at having effectively abandoned her father to his death), the reasons for Jean’s suicidal tendencies remain at the level of clues. Jean is adept in deflecting the focus away from himself and his own pain. Kawakami points out that just before he embarks on his imaginative reconstruction of Ingrid and Rigaud’s ‘voyage de noces’ he reflects on the ‘jours de doute et de cafard’ that followed his realization of Annette’s defection to Cavanaugh’s bed and his general feelings of disillusionment with his profession, but changes the subject suspiciously abruptly to focus on 301

On the detective aspect, see Kaminskas, ‘Quête/ enquête – à la recherche du genre: Voyage de noces de Patrick Modiano’.

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Ingrid and Rigaud (50).302 However, some clues are left for the reader, just as Jean leaves behind clues as to his whereabouts on visiting the Cité Véron apartment, seemingly wishing to be found. It ultimately seems clear that oppressive second-hand memories of the ‘années noires’ vie for importance with Jean’s lost personal happiness in romantic love and his traumatic childhood experiences. Love is of course inscribed in the title of the text, and indeed Jean seems to have been half in love with Ingrid, which may explain part of the pain caused by her death. However, his main feelings of love concern his wife (38, 43). Though his experiences with Annette seem very different to those of Ingrid and Rigaud, the structure and vocabulary of his narrative demonstrate that his marital difficulties are somehow linked in his mind with that couple’s ‘voyage de noces’. Jean feels Annette and Cavanaugh will have a ‘lune de miel’ while he is absent, and remembers that Annette always wore the ‘robe de mariée’ during her time as a model (18, 96). Though he feigns indifference to Annette’s betrayal of him, he is clearly obsessed with her, as shown by his urgent wish that she should telephone him. His thoughts wander to his wife’s past visits to Cavanaugh’s love-nest in the 7th arrondissement while he is remembering his chance meeting with Ingrid in that district (114). In describing Ingrid’s crucial first hesitation before deciding not to return to her father, he imagines it taking place at the place Blanche, which happens to lie directly beside the Cité Véron, where he lived with Annette, though this geographical proximity is not stated in the text.303 He wants Annette to come to the apartment on the boulevard Soult, perhaps in order to mimic the experience of Ingrid and Rigaud and to attempt to relive past happiness (147). The final, dense, pages strongly link Ingrid’s past with that of the narrator and Annette. Both couples experienced extremely cold winters, and, as stated, the site of the cinema of Ornano 43, which he chooses to visit (instead of the hotel where he once stayed with Annette in the rue Championnet – perhaps because he cannot bear the memories), is connected with Ingrid and her deported father, but also with Annette and himself, as they used to watch films together

302

A Self-Conscious Art, p. 40. The importance of the Place Blanche in La Petite Bijou supports the hypothesis that the narrator there is an extension of Ingrid, and thus of the fictionalized Dora. 303

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there.304 The fact that the cinema has disappeared, or, more precisely, has been transformed into a shop, is thus symbolic both of Ingrid’s disappearance and of Jean’s loss of happiness with Annette.305 Jean is not oppressed by love problems or by memories of history alone, however. Childhood traumas also emerge as possibly contributory to his urge to flee his present life and lie low or play dead (expressed symbolically, as in Chien de printemps, as ‘faire le mort’), and, presumably, to his suicidal feelings. Though he tells his wife’s new lover, the handsome young Ben Smidane, that ‘C’est très simple. J’éprouve une certaine lassitude de ma vie et de mon métier’ (92), things are not so simple, and there are various strands to his problems. His wife’s new lover has a youthful optimism that reminds Jean of the loss of his own insouciance, which he briefly possessed at one point in his early twenties. Though he had a certain faith in the future at that time, a period which, like parts of his childhood, was marked by the spirit of exploration, he now seems to be suffering the effects of having been effectively abandoned as a child, like Modiano, by his ‘drôles de parents qui avaient toujours cherché un pensionnat ou une maison de correction pour se débarasser de [lui]’ (38). This statement is followed by a description of his feelings of being protected by Ingrid. Desire for protection also seems clear in the fact that it is directly after speaking of his loss of his wife and her ‘douceur protectrice’ that he expresses a desire to find Ingrid’s traces in Paris (16-17). While on the one hand he seems to become Rigaud in order to protect Ingrid in his imagination, he also needs to be protected by her. It seems likely that Jean has always oscillated between the ‘besoin de fuir’ (17) – present already in childhood, in his dreams of ‘pays lontains’ and of ‘expéditions sans retour’ (18) – and the need for stability and protection. Thus, while he claims that it was only ten years previously that he first felt doubts about his life, when he started thinking about writing a biography of Ingrid, this claim does not ring true (49). He has chosen to hide out in the outlying districts of Paris because of the ‘lignes de fuite’ leading out from them, but also talks of the place as ‘un refuge’ and this term is also present in the first lines of the text (95, 9).306 Equally, though he once had a wish to feel 304

See also the extremely cold winter of 1942 in Dora Bruder (12). Intriguingly, Modiano says in that text that a female friend lived in the rue Championnet (10). 305 See also Dora Bruder, p. 13. 306 ‘Lignes de fuite’ also occur in Fleurs de ruine, p. 142, and Dora Bruder, p. 31.

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eternally ‘en croisière’ (46), and frequently describes himself as ‘en transit’, there is a hint that this constant moving around is oppressive, as when he states in the boulevard Soult apartment: ‘Mon Dieu, où et comment passerais-je l’hiver?’ (148). This constant movement reflects Rigaud’s own nightmare about having to flee from room to room in the Juan-les-Pins hotel. Ultimately, Jean’s urge to move away and to escape never seems to lead anywhere, except, perhaps, to the brink of suicide. Annette fears he will lead her into an ‘aventure sans issue’ as he has before (150), and indeed he does not carry his plan through in this ‘adventure’, leaving the Boulevard Soult apartment only a short time after starting to occupy it. The narrative ‘voyage’ of the text is merely one of the journeys undertaken by Jean, and it too has no clear endpoint, as the reader can only speculate on whether Jean, like Ingrid, will commit suicide. A sense grows that Jean has put much of himself into Rigaud. As Mitchell and Côté put it: ‘Jean B., […] and P. Rigaud […] seem at times complementary halves of one and the same person’.307 The close links between Jean and Rigaud are strongly symbolized by the fact that Jean manages to open the drawer of the bedside table in Rigaud’s apartment with a key from the cité Véron (106), prefiguring the possession of the same key by Jansen and the narrator in Chien de printemps. Like Rigaud in the Juan-les-Pins episode, he seems to be hiding an injury, an emotional one in his case. His presentation of most of the episode solely from Rigaud’s point of view is a sign of his identification with him. Given Jean’s present problems with Annette, it is not surprising that he identifies with Rigaud, a man in love with a woman, especially as Jean knows that Rigaud later lost that love. In relation to Rigaud’s childhood, much of what Jean is recounting must stem from imagination based on personal experience, as it is unlikely that Ingrid, the narrator’s informant about the period, would have known or focused on details of Rigaud’s state of mind or of his relationship with his neglectful mother. As Jean, like Rigaud, was abandoned as a child, it seems probable that he empathizes with Rigaud’s great fear of ‘la rentrée des classes dans le dortoir du collège’ (79). Rigaud wants to hide out in the ‘cour de récréation’ and Jean wants to fulfil his childhood dream of being locked in to the zoo (73, 49). After the Juan-les-Pins reconstruction, Rigaud’s importance for the narrator is stressed by his statement that he spent days thinking 307

Shaping the Novel, p. 195.

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about Rigaud on each of the three occasions he felt the urge to telephone him (99). The first two occasions concern a need to find out more about Ingrid’s suicide, perhaps because the narrator himself was contemplating such an action (21-22). Ingrid and Rigaud are also linked to each other as well as to the narrator. Interestingly, Ingrid’s name is an anagram of Rigaud if ‘au’ is substituted for ‘in’, supporting the hypothesis that the narrator has put much of himself into both of them. All three figures are marked by fear, lack of parents, loss of happiness, and by experience of running away. The latter aspect is perhaps the strongest link between them all. As the narrator admits: ‘Ma vie n’avait été qu’une fuite’ (95). Tellingly, in Dora Bruder, Modiano calls running away ‘une forme de suicide’ (DB, 80). Although what Ingrid runs away from differs from the emotional problems that cause Jean to flee, both she and he flee with the illusion that things will turn out for the best. He feels temporarily liberated by having ‘escaped’ his present marital situation, and she has a hope of a better life, in deciding not to return to her father in the 18th arrondissement. However, both are quickly deprived of their illusions of liberty. In many ways, this text, like Quartier perdu and Vestiaire de l’enfance, seems to be a dream, or rather a ‘cauchemar’ (97), in which Jean works through hidden feelings he does not seem to fully understand, in this case the reasons for faking his death and running away. Just as Jean imagines the Juan-les-Pins episode, it often seems that he may be imagining ‘present’ events. His experiences in the hôtel Dodds seem like a dream to him (96-97), and the coincidence that he should be staying so close to Ingrid and Rigaud’s old address is also dreamlike. The apartment block seems like ‘un mirage’ (101), and he does not need to pedal while travelling uphill (156). The concierge who knows his way in the dark seems like a typically Modianesque imagined ghost (110). Jean is a ‘ghost’ because of his pretended ‘death’ (45-46), but may also be a ghostly character in his own dream. As in Quartier perdu and Vestiaire de l’enfance, it is even possible to see all the events described as fictionalizations of events in Jean’s own life. There is a fundamental uncertainty surrounding many of the events, even those at which the narrator was present. Ingrid does not blanch at the mention of Vienna, which leads the narrator and the reader to wonder whether she really has any connection with that city (35). Ingrid herself wonders whether Rigaud really lives in the apartment on the rue de Tilsitt (134). Rigaud’s limp comes and goes

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(28, 31) like that of Koromindé in Livret de famille. The Polynesian beach scene in Jean’s ‘memory’ of St-Tropez is described as dreamlike (42), and even Ingrid’s appearance in the 7th arrondissement, and thus also the details she told him, may be hallucinations, as the number he calls does not answer (119). Furthermore, though Ingrid and Rigaud are presented as living in Juan-les-Pins during the war, the narrator claims to remember Ingrid pointing out the cliff-side villa in which they lived in what seems to be in fact St-Tropez (37; 85-86). While Jean is perhaps working through his past by creating a dream narrative, the reader also acts as an analyst who works through these imaginings on his behalf.308 Multiple-text readers will also, of course, extend Jean’s problems to the author, helped by the autobiographical markers mentioned above. Like Jean’s problems, the author’s own traumas seem to reside as much in historical events as in personal injury based on experience of loss and parental abandonment. In Voyage de noces, these are accompanied by a stress on romantic love, which may of course be autobiographical, but may also be a transposition of the loss of fraternal intimacy with Rudy. It is also a further manifestation of postmemory – an attempt to understand and appropriate half-understood fragments of other people’s pasts – as seems clear from the narrator’s statement that ‘souvent, l’on rêve aux lieux et aux situations dont quelqu’un vous a parlé et s’y ajoutent d’autres détails’ (107).

Biographical ‘Truth’ Voyage de noces differs from the two texts previously discussed in that the narrator’s belief in his own power to present the truth of Ingrid is exaggerated and is tempered by little open recognition by him concerning his own bias and lack of knowledge. He seems convinced that he can possess a biographical ‘truth’. However, his narrative as a whole shows that this truth can only be a highly subjective one, as do some of his own statements, and although his own sense of Ingrid is powerfully communicated, the biased nature of what he is recounting is very clear. Though disappearance and emptiness figure strongly in this text, he himself cannot disappear from the narrative. This is yet another text where fictionalization allows the narrator – and also the author – to work through personal problems. 308

Mitchell and Côté (p. 190) speak of a ‘textual unconscious’, a term borrowed from Jean Bellemin-Noël, Vers l’inconscient du texte.

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As shown, some of those personal problems seem to be tied up with France’s Occupation past. Given such an important historical subtext, the reader familiar with Modiano’s techniques might expect the author to point out the subjective nature of the portrayal by highlighting the element of imaginative description in his account. He does do this, through overt fictionalization in the Juan-les-Pins episode and by incorporating many references to dreaming into his text. These markers of fictionality counteract the narrator’s exaggerated certainty that everything he imagines happened, and suggest that the main place where they ‘happened’ is in his imagination. This is not to suggest that the events themselves are invented, but that they have been shaped and embroidered by him. We have seen that Voyage de noces produces a very strong sense that the narrator is working out personal problems through his narrative. In this light, Jean B.’s claims of ‘memory’ and of access to ‘l’essentiel’ are indisputable. However this strong sense of a personal focus also means that, although he has carried out an imaginative journey into fusion with the other for commemorative as well as therapeutic reasons, it is particularly difficult to dissociate the personality created for the biographee from that of the biographer. As we shall now see, Modiano’s later text, Dora Bruder, published seven years after Voyage de noces, and which commemorates the same biographical subject, is an example of a much more cautious form of biography, and one in which the narrator is painfully conscious of his own subjectivity in representing the other person.

7(ii) Dora Bruder (1997)309 There is no ludism of gold-toothed shady characters or secret stairways in Dora Bruder. Nor is the reader set challenges of disentangling self from other. The fusion between biographer and biographee is slight, and a sense of distance between these two figures predominates. Dora is set apart by the very title. Though autobiography is highlighted as coexisting with biography in this text, as in Voyage de noces and Les Boulevards de ceinture and, to a lesser extent, in Chien de printemps, the reasons for this in Dora Bruder are, in the main, very different to those in the previous texts. Where autobiographical experience is drawn on in this text, it is mainly to 309

This text appears in slightly adapted form as ‘Hollow Imprints: History, Literature, and the Biographical in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder’ in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies.

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take the place of biography in some areas, given that so little trace of Dora exists. On another level, autobiographical experience is the lynchpin of the emphasis on the links between lives that is such a feature of this narrative, whereby the narrator’s life serves to connect a whole network of other lives. What the author is doing here is a ‘je-narration’ of history, proclaiming his subjectivity, while functioning as facilitator for this memorial, the fruit of eight years of research and reflection. While the narrating ‘je’ plays a vital role in bolstering the sense of the personal in this text and serving as the guiding consciousness, it is also of huge importance in mediating the past. The voice of the narrating ‘je’ is very conscious of the responsibility invested in it, and of the fact that it is functioning as a delegate for voices that have been silenced. Where possible, and where precise traces of other voices remain, these are introduced in a concern to open the commemoration of the Holocaust to as many figures as possible. As shown, Jean in Voyage de noces raises the dilemma of whether simply to record without conjecture all facts known, or to give one’s biographee a personality through ‘romanesque’ techniques of scene-drawing, access to inner thoughts, and use of dialogue. While Jean opts for the creation of a fictional world (albeit one with gaps and silences), Dora Bruder is a much barer text, often assembling facts without comment. In its bareness, it is much more an expression of a lack – the ‘manque’ that led Modiano to write Voyage de noces (DB, 54). Dora’s thoughts are only very cautiously speculated upon, in contrast to the (admittedly restrained) creation of a point of view for Ingrid in Voyage de noces. However, even the 1997 text at times uses techniques that could be called novelistic, in order to create a sense of Dora and of the other people commemorated. The second section of this discussion focuses on these processes. Firstly, however, we need to ask ourselves why the idea of a ‘mentir-vrai’ is largely absent from this text. Why does Modiano, whose narrators seem on the whole to believe in imaginative truth, seem to be wary of fictionalization here? The answer no doubt lies in the notion that some things should perhaps not be fictionalized, including, and perhaps especially, the ‘indicible’ of the Holocaust. Claude Lanzmann, the director of the acclaimed documentary Shoah, is a particular enemy of fictionalization of the Holocaust. He rails against films like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (and no doubt he would include the recent Benigni film La Vita è Bella in this category), not only because they deal with handsome, clean, well-fed

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people and have relatively happy endings, but mainly because they allow identification, and thus provide elements of consolation by the possibility of catharsis and purgation.310 (It should not be forgotten, however, that such films, sanitized as they are, do play a role in the perpetuation of the memory of the event of the Holocaust, for the ‘générations oublieuses’). Modiano seems much less opposed to the notion of identification, and indeed encourages the reader to become involved in the suffering of the victims he portrays, but he also seems to realize that to do this is only to skim the surfaces of these sufferings. He appears to feel that the horror of what was experienced should be recognized in an ethos of faint tracings, as well as through terse statement of factual details. In Dora Bruder, Modiano always remains at the level of suggestion – what happened after the boarding of trains for the East is never described, the conjecture as to the experiences of the roundedup victims before that stage in their terrible journey is very cautious, and their feelings are not entered into. In Voyage de noces, apparently recognizing the problem of using real details pertaining to the Holocaust in a patently fictional context, the author seems to have felt the need to change the details of the actual ‘avis de recherche’ and the Bruder family’s address. Though he retains reservations about fictionalizing this subject matter, his belief that writers and novelists can have brief intuitions (DB, 54) allows the fictionalization of Voyage de noces and the slight fictionalization in Dora Bruder. The ‘je’ of the narrator is always self-consciously present, however. Before looking at the fact/fiction problematic in Dora Bruder, let us look at the relationship between the narrator and his biographee, as well as the general idea of linked lives.

Coinciding Lives Two main questions arise in reflecting on the biographical process in this text: firstly, the question of why Modiano writes this biography, and secondly, that of why he interlaces it with autobiographical reflections. The answers to the first question are perhaps clearest. As with Les Boulevards de ceinture, there is a statement of need in the idea of the ‘manque’ that led Modiano to write about Dora, as well as a strong sense of the duty to rescue her life, and those of many others, from oblivion. A protective impulse is especially clear in the author’s 310

See Richard Kearney’s summary of Lanzmann’s ideas in: ‘Narrative and the Ethics of Remembrance’, especially pp. 28-30.

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musing on the photographs of Dora and her family: ‘Des photos comme il en existe dans toutes les familles. Le temps de la photo, ils étaient protégés quelques secondes et ces secondes sont devenues une éternité’ (94). Part of the biographical element in this text serves to commemorate Modiano’s father, whose youth overlapped with that of Dora, and who, like Dora, was an ‘hors-la-loi’ whose disappearance has marked him (51, 119). Albert appears in roughly one third of the sections. Modiano likewise uses part of his father’s life to speculate on Dora’s, suggesting that she may have been caught, like his father, in February 1942 (64). As we shall see, these biographical elements also seem to allow Modiano to become reconciled to a degree with his father through statements of comprehension and forgiveness. It is no doubt significant in the latter respect that Albert Modiano occupies a place in the physical centre of this text. Perhaps most importantly, it gradually emerges that the presence of so much autobiographical detail is also due to what could be perceived as Modiano’s wish to offer Dora part of his life in some way, in the face of the gaping lack of information about her. It is this lack, one senses, that causes description of photographs of the Bruder family to be resorted to early on in the text (32-34), though the lack of background information merely serves to further emphasize the blatant lack of a story around Dora. Something must fill the gap, and Modiano chooses to fill it with part of himself. As Lepape puts it: ‘Pour combler les trous, Modiano offre à Dora Bruder des fragments de sa propre jeunesse, en mesurant la distance infinie qui les sépare’.311 One main reason for the mixing of autobiography with biographical reflection is to underline what Roland in Rue des Boutiques obscures sees as the pinball game or billiard table of life, with lives coinciding briefly at many points. In this, Modiano seems to share the aspiration of his fellow writer, Friedo Lampe, to show the linking of lives (95). Place is the main nexus that connects disparate lives, if only briefly. It figures prominently in the first two sections, where the reader is encouraged to take an imaginary journey through the streets of the 18th arrondissement. Importantly, most events in these sections are situated at points of intersection – on the ‘carrefour du boulevard Ornano et de la rue Championnet’, ‘au bout du boulevard Ornano’, ‘au coin du boulevard Ney’, ‘au carrefour Ornano311

‘La disparition’, p. 2.

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Championnet’, ‘à l’angle de la rue Duhesme’ (10-11). Many of the links between lives centre on intersections due to physical place (such as the ‘Quai de conti’ apartment, or the Clignancourt area: 101; 137). Links of physical place between Modiano and Dora include his frequentation of ‘her’ areas of the Puces Saint-Ouen and the cafés and Ornano cinema of the 18th arrondissement, his attraction in boyhood to the la Plaine area where she may have walked, his mishap near her boarding school in the 12th arrondissement etc. However, these connections are merely the tip of the iceberg, as many links are never realized, a point made clear early on by the fact that Modiano spent three years in the cafés of the Ornano district and never noticed the building where Dora had lived (11). Lives intersect only fleetingly, usually leaving no visible trace, as in the description of the area of ‘la Chapelle’ as ‘un carrefour où chacun partait de son côté’ (31). It is left to Modiano’s text, then, to provide a way in which a vast network of links can be woven between lives. The ‘brocanteur’ of the second last section (134-139) is a particularly symbolic point of connection between Dora, Albert Modiano and Modiano himself, in his Jewishness and his links with Clignancourt and especially the ‘la Plaine’ area. The reader is also invited to make links between the ‘juif polonais’ who sold suitcases in the Clignancourt ‘puces’ and this junk salesman, who is also of Polish Jewish stock and once had a stand at that market (135-137). This ‘brocanteur’, who puts the used and the forgotten to new use, and who deals in bits and pieces, is a symbol of Modiano’s own approach in the recording of fragments of lives. Ultimately, Dora, while appearing to be singled out by the title, is really a point of intersection of many such fragments. It also becomes clear in this text, as in all of the others, that writing allows Modiano to describe and work through his own experiences of loss and abandonment. The Salpêtrière episode, while underlining Dora’s disappearance and the idea of searching in vain over a vast area and through mazes of officialdom, is mainly focused on his father (19-20). Modiano’s need to understand this man is foregrounded in the thirteenth section – which, as stated, is strategically placed, in typical Modiano fashion, at the exact centre of the text (70-74). This section is entirely devoted to his father, and to what seems like an attempt to forgive him for his past gruffness and hostility. The tone is sympathetic, despite the awful nature of the experience described, where Modiano senior calls the police on his son and accompanies him to the station in a police van. Although the

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section ends on another reminiscence of hostile behaviour on the part of his father (the latter’s attempts to have his son forcibly admitted to the army barracks at Reuilly), the description of Albert’s bemused attempt to comprehend anti-Semitic material is a tender one. Just as Modiano attempted to comprehend his father by writing La Place de l’étoile in order to take ‘à son compte’ the confusion and pain he must have felt during the war (DB, 72), he also tries to understand Dora. The ‘habitude de comprendre tout’ of the character Moreau-Badmaev, alias Patoche, in La Petite Bijou (130) is also true of the author here. His desire to empathize leads him to take on feelings she must have had, so that he feels he is entering a prison, or perhaps a concentration camp, when he is summarily searched in the Palais de Justice (18-19). Of course, these feelings remain on the scale of ‘petits chagrins’, compared to the horror of the experiences of the war victims (101). However, it can also be argued that, to a certain extent, he also works through his own pain by lending feelings to Dora that he himself experienced. The emotional links between them, relating to solitude, feelings of imprisonment, and their common experience of running away, exist alongside connections of place. The distance and fusion between her ‘character’ and that of Modiano is examined more closely in the section entitled ‘Scene and “Character”’.

Questions of Fictionality This text bears no label, Dora’s name alone sufficing to introduce the text. What then should we call it? Danièle Brison, who feels strongly that the text ‘n’est pas un roman’, proposes ‘une enquête inachevée, un appel, la tentative de reconstituer l’histoire singulière d’une adolescente juive française ordinaire au destin extraordinaire’.312 Lepape calls it ‘le récit d’une enquête’. Samuel Khalifa calls it ‘a book of commemoration which transcends personal memories’.313 While all of these proposals have their validity, Dora Bruder is perhaps also a biofiction, though one that seems to contain relatively little conjecture, and minimal incursion into the thoughts of the biographee. In containing far fewer self-consciously invented elements than do Les Boulevards de ceinture, Voyage de noces, or even Chien de printemps, it seems to recognize that there is a politics of style and that these need to be respected in this delicate subject matter. However, elements of 312 313

‘Histoire d’une disparition’, p. 76. ‘La disparition’, p. 2. ‘The Mirror of Memory’, p. 161.

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fictional style do exist, as we shall see, and it is not unusual to hear the text referred to as a ‘novel’, including by some critics, including Khalifa. Ultimately, as long as the main historical events of the text are accepted as true, it is not all that important what the text is entitled, or even whether it is read as an historical novel or the account of a real biographical quest. It is perhaps for this reason that Modiano seems unconcerned about setting an unambiguously historical tone immediately, not even feeling the need to name himself. His statement of authorship of Voyage de noces (54) marks him as the author only for the multiple-text reader (and for those single-text readers who have read the peritextual list of further works by this author). It is not until the third section of the text that he attests the meticulous nature of his research in all its force. Yet even at that, the author does not state all sources of information according as that information is given (25, 28, 29), or even at all (41, 42, 62, 92, 116). There is much use of expressions such as ‘d’après ce qu’on m’a dit’ (41), ‘j’ai appris que’ (62) or ‘un ami a trouvé’ (103) as if Modiano assumes his reader will trust him. Apparently confident of his reader’s trust, Modiano uses elements of fictional style, recognizing the efficacy of novelistic techniques to create empathy, although the historical basis of the text always takes precedence. His incorporation of a description and transcription of part of Victor Hugo’s Misérables into the text may even suggest that his own text is in a way an historical ‘novel’ (5253). As if conscious of the fact that the text alternates between documentary and fictional styles, the Japanese introduced photographs of Dora into their edition of the text, presumably in order to make things seem more ‘real’.314 Given that this text has been read as a novel, it seems necessary to attempt to isolate the elements that encourage such a reading as well as those that encourage a documentary one, remembering always that, as Jean Molino puts it: ‘L’intrigue elle-meme, le muthos [his emphasis] comme agencement des actions humaines, est neutre par rapport à l’opposition du réel et de la fiction. La même phrase, le meme récit peuvent, selon les cas, être perçus comme historiques ou comme non historiques’.315 I should, however, point out that, although 314

See http://home.inter.net/berlol/graalmfj.htm#modian for a selection of these photographs. Accessed 28 June 04. 315 ‘Histoire, roman, formes intermédiaires’, p. 73.

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some of the events described seem to encourage suspicions of slight fictionalization, especially for the multiple-text reader, there has not, to my knowledge, been any epitextual statement of fictionalization by Modiano as to this particular text. It is thus impossible to establish whether the text is deliberately fictionalized, and I confine myself in what follows to the idea of the biofiction effect. The biofiction effect, slight though it is, is strongest for multiple-text readers, due to the echoes that exist for them between this text and those of Modiano’s texts that are either labelled ‘roman’ or seem highly fictionalized. The litany of street names, the topographical description, the references to the exact time of writing (54, 123), and the allusions to historical figures and institutions (Schweblin, The Yivo Institutute in New York, etc) have less ‘reality effect’ on this type of reader than on the yardstick reader, since the multiple-text reader is accustomed to this type of precision in Modiano’s more fictionalized texts (Chien de printemps being a case in point). In section two, the cinema of the Ornano 43 is said to resemble ‘un paquebot’, like dozens of other buildings in Modiano’s fictions (13). Ernest Bruder cannot be present at the registration of his child’s name at the mairie (21), just as Albert Modiano cannot attend his grandchild’s registration in Livret de famille. The narrator’s statement that: ‘Je peux attendre des heures sous la pluie’ (16) echoes back to Zarah Leander in La Place de l’étoile (149), and to Beauchamp in Vestiaire de l’enfance (116), and the ‘vieux con’ who waits in the rain for ‘Jacqueline de l’avenue Rodin’ in Fleurs de ruine (138). The light that stifles sound (DB, 82) is originally found in Les Boulevards de ceinture. The use of Sundays (DB, 46, 57, 130) as a structuring motif also occurs in Quartier perdu, Chien de printemps, and, especially, in Fleurs de ruine. The itinerant photographer (10) echoes those in Dimanches d’août and Chien de printemps, and prefigures that of Des inconnues. As such, the text is permeated by images and motifs from fictional contexts. With this type of intratextuality, Modiano is not only ‘putting his mark’ on the narrative, but is also linking it to his fictions (which of course adds to the blurring between fact and fiction in the œuvre as a whole). For the yardstick reader, the tone initially tends towards the documentary, but cannot be seen as emphatically ‘historical’. It is not until the third section that a sense that this is a real quest and a historical work carried out by Modiano becomes firmly established. That section is full of details thrown up by the narrator’s research and transcribed almost, as the narrator of Voyage de noces might put it,

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‘comme dans l’inventaire d’une saisie’ (VN, 52). There are intricate details concerning the layout of the apartment where Dora lived with her parents, and details of the schools the narrator contacted. The narrator, who by now is coming to seem more and more like the author, points out that he took four years to find out her exact date of birth, and two to find out her place of birth, evoking a laborious process that seems to have little to do with invention. The document of request for a birth certificate for Dora is reproduced in the entirety of its ‘official-speak’, in a statement of the bureaucracy surrounding the narrator’s quest (17). Elaborate details about the address to which the narrator is sent on his quest for Dora’s birth certificate are also given, apparently in a similar spirit (18). From the third section on, many more documents are introduced into the text, and indeed many of the sections start with a meditation on a document. The inclusion of such details seems to be partly due to a need to fill space with something, in order to compensate in some way for the absence of Dora, and, more importantly, to make the reader feel that absence more acutely. It can also be seen as an attempt not to ‘emplot’ life but merely to represent it, which Guyot-Bender claims is one of the main points of Modiano’s inclusion of transcriptions of documents.316 Admittedly, suspicions of invention may be raised by the narrator’s claim to have stayed in the Taubstummengasse in Vienna (23), which seems almost ‘too good to be true’, given its neat connotations of deafness and dumbness and thus of barriers to communication, underlining the obstruction of access to the past caused by the ‘sentinelles de l’oubli’ (18). The street also figures in Fleurs de ruine, as does the Parisian ‘Institut des sourd-muets’ (a real institution in the fifth arrondissement) in the opening lines of that text (FR, 123, 11). In Dora Bruder, its connotations of deafness and dumbness also symbolize the idea of official hypocrisy, such as that of the invention and perpetuation of the term ‘Hébergement. Centre de séjour surveillé’ for Les Tourelles, while it was in fact merely a transit point for future deportees (117). The name is, however, primarily a reference to Perec’s deaf-and-dumb alter ego in W ou le souvenir d’enfance, Gaspard Winckler, who has suffered ‘un traumatisme enfantin’ that calls to mind both Perec and Modiano’s childhood- and Holocaust-related traumas.317 While Winckler is a fictional character, 316 317

‘Making Sense of Narrative Ambiguity’, p. 30. W ou le souvenir d’enfance, p. 40.

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this does not of itself encourage serious questioning of the factual basis of the text. However, it does serve as powerful poetic symbolism. Touches of symbolism continue from the fourth section onward, though most of it is plausible and merely poetic, such as the symbolism of the pages dealing with writers who either died or suffered grave catastrophes in 1945, the year of Modiano’s birth, underlining the fact that he too is a war casualty (94-102). The ‘effrayantes religieuses’ of the ‘Dépôt’ echo those of Dora’s school (113, 39). The seventeenth section ends on a line containing the name of the arrested Jewish child Paulette Gothelf, and readers familiar with German will see the irony of the allusion to divine help (88). Symbolism of name continues in the route Modiano takes towards Les Tourelles – rue des Archives, rue de Bretagne, rue des Filles-duCalvaire (my emphasis: 132). The ‘DUREMORD’ sign of the last section calls for remorse but also states the ‘dure mort’ of the victims, and the fact that the memory of this will ‘remordre’ (144). All of this symbolism merely serves to emphasize certain elements of the narrative, and suggest the links perceived by the author between events, underlining his presence as organizer. Given the phrase ‘six millions de chiens’ referring to the murdered Jews in La Place de l’étoile (158), and given the author’s widespread use of the motif of the dog in general, the ‘impasse des Chiens’ at the end of the fifth section and the reference to the ‘chiens écrasés’ are particularly symbolic for the multiple-text reader, who may also suspect that the name may be invented (36, 79). However, this is impossible to verify. The street no longer exists on contemporary maps of Paris, having been part of the zone that was razed to the ground near the ‘La Plaine’ area. Even if this is invention on Modiano’s part, however, its use serves less to emphasize possible fictionalization in the text than to highlight the disappearance of traces of the past. The main element of fictional style, which becomes ever more present from the fourth section on, is the quite extensive use of scene – one of Cohn’s ‘signposts of fictionality’ – to create atmosphere. The scenes are not conventionally novelistic, however. Rather than being built on a particular event attached to a particular consciousness, they portray occurrences (generally repeated ones) liable to have been experienced by many people, and all are based on probability (and most on attested historical research). However, they do create a sense of empathy with the figures described, and in this they approach

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fiction. Fictionality is also sporadically present in the snippets of portrayal of inner thought attributable to the biographee. Yet Modiano does not claim omniscience in the ‘fiction’ in this text. Before looking at the scenes and portrayal of thought in the text, it is important to reflect on the manner in which he asserts his lack of knowledge.

Rejecting Omniscience There are very many question marks in this text, both metaphorical and actual. The text is divided up into twenty-six sections, identifiable mainly by the fact that each section starts at the same level on the page, about one third of the way down. Eleven of the twenty-six sections end on a note of inquiry, disappearance, emptiness or lack of knowledge, and ten start on such a note. While approximately one third of these sections start with a fact, a trace, or the reproduction of a document, questions and hypotheses quickly follow. When the text turns strongly to biographical speculation in the fourth section of the text, Modiano stresses that his suppositions may be wrong. He admits that Ernest Bruder might have been from a more prosperous family than he imagines. However, in the absence of proof (‘comment le savoir?’: 24), he relies on the probability that a Jew who felt he had to join the Foreign Legion was probably a poor one. His narrative is, despite its occasional declarations of certitude, merely a tentative reconstruction based on such probabilities. Modiano stresses that it is impossible to know what went on in Dora’s head, just as the Mother Superior at the Saint-Cœur-de-Marie boarding-school ‘n’a certainement pas deviné ce qui se passait dans la tête de Dora Bruder’ (44). The last lines form an emphatic statement of lack of knowledge of the circumstance of Dora’s ‘fugue’: ‘C’est là son secret. Un pauvre et précieux secret que les bourreaux, les ordonnances, les autorités dites d’occupation, le Dépôt, les casernes, les camps, l’Histoire, le temps – tout ce qui vous souille et vous détruit – n’auront pas pu lui voler’ (147). A refusal of the definite and of the defined is also evident in Modiano’s rejection of categories. Like Schlemilovitch in La Place de l’étoile, Ernest Bruder has Jewishness imposed upon him, and his unquestioning acceptance of this categorization cuts off all chance of escape. ‘Il avait l’habitude que l’administration le classe dans différentes catégories, et il l’acceptait, sans discuter. Manœuvre. ExAutrichien. Légionnaire français. Non-suspect. Mutilé 100%. Prestataire étranger. Juif’ (49). It is likely that this recoiling from categorization is the main reason why there is no label on the text.

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Even the typographical arrangement of the text works against rigid boundaries. The lack of numbering or headings means it is not immediately clear that the text is divided into sections, and the structure of these sections serves to stress rupture, discontinuity, and fragmentation. Information is sometimes truncated, and continued in subsequent sections, as occurs between the first and second section and the third and the fourth, reinforcing the fragmentation symbolized by the typographical blanks in the text. This is not to say that the text is not powerfully cohesive on an emotional level. General links of theme and motif include those of disappearance, imprisonment, and writing. Even in the second last section, which is particularly full of small fragments on diverse themes (134-139), elements in it link back to the ideas of street change, exile, the Clignancourt area, to Modiano’s father, and to the general idea of the linking of lives. Significant phrases are repeated between sections, including those of ‘d’hier à d’aujourd’hui’ (9, 12) and ‘date et motif de sortie: 14 décember 1941. Suite de fugue’ (37, 57). These, as well as the ‘run-on’ between sections, sometimes function as a type of poetic ‘enjambement’. Within this fragmentary structure the author presents events with a clarity that encourages their remembrance. A desire for a certain order is evident, since the sequence of Dora’s journey from school, to ‘fugue’, to police station, to Les Tourelles, Drancy and Auschwitz is more or less respected. Notwithstanding attempts to clarify and to order, however, and despite poetic and emotional linking, the net effect is one of absence, appropriate to the hollow ‘empreintes’ left by the Bruder family (30). The writer does, however, feel that he has the right to some certainty, both due to his painstaking research and because of the ‘brèves intuitions’ and ‘voyance’ afforded by ‘les efforts d’imagination nécessaires à ce métier, le besoin de fixer son esprit sur des points de détail’ (54). Yet while intuitions can occur, they are only fleeting, and Modiano stresses that only once in the two hundred pages of Voyage de noces was he able to access a tiny part of Dora – the ‘vague reflet de la réalité’ (55) of the sleigh ride that took Rigaud and Ingrid through the back-streets of the 12th arrondissement near Dora’s old school (VN, 144-145). Imagination is here a means for the storyteller to connect mentally with Dora but it is recognized that her personal truth cannot be accessed.

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Scene and ‘Character’ While stressing his lack of knowledge, Modiano is also confident enough in the knowledge he possesses to create a considerable number of scenes, and these sporadically create a slight fiction effect. All appear to be based on historical research or probability based on universalities, as is the case in Modiano’s hypothesis on what Ernest Bruder must have seen in his daily life as a boy in Vienna (24). However, a sense of conjecture persists in many of them. For example, in the depiction of the scene in Les Tourelles of the rounding-up of the sixty-six women who were to be sent to Drancy, when Modiano states ‘trois officiers allemands étaient présents’, or talks of the women being locked into a room, the reader is entitled to wonder where the author obtained such detailed information (116). Such passages create a biofiction effect, although the general stress on historical research (this event took place ‘jeudi, 19 juin’) is greater than the element of apparent invention. The vast majority of the scenes call for empathy around a participating consciousness or consciousnesses, and these occasions momentarily ally the text to the novel form. In the reconstruction of Ernest Bruder’s Foreign Legion experiences in the African wars (2527) an appeal to the reader’s empathy occurs in the midst of dense historical detail, in the moment where the reactions of the soldiers to their bonus is described. ‘Vite, ils glissent l’argent dans leur poche, comme si on allait le leur reprendre’ (25). Here the fiction effect caused by the depiction of feeling is reinforced by the use of the dramatic present. The fiction effect of the scene of life in the square Clignancourt, where Dora must have played, stems mainly from the creation of a consciousness – which could be Dora’s or could belong to any of the children of the neighbourhood – in the phrase: ‘la mousse vous faisait une moustache blanche’ (35). It should be remembered that Ernest and Cécile Bruder’s thoughts are also cautiously speculated on, and that a suggestion of unexplored feelings can be as powerful as those mentioned, as when it is simply stated that Cécile met her husband, whom she had not seen for months, for a few days in Drancy before being provisionally ‘liberated’ and deprived of contact with him, only to be deported five months later (145-146). Ernest lived through ‘treize longues journées’ before he decided to take the risk of reporting Dora as missing, and Cécile was ‘en désespoir de cause’ when she took the risk of contacting the UGIF for news of Dora (78, 109).

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Given that Dora is involved by her presence, or by association, in scenes that seem novelistic, can we then call her a character? For the multiple-text reader, the question is slightly different, as Dora will be seen as a mixture of Ingrid Teyrsen and the narrators of Des inconnues and La Petite Bijou, who all share her propensity for running away, and who are also, like her, highly vulnerable and lost, and whose narratives stress an atmosphere of imprisonment, deadening routine, and exploitation. Colette Laurent of Chien de printemps (1993), of whom the narrator says ‘J’ai connu cette femme dans une autre vie’ (CdP, 43), also seems to prefigure Dora, in that she died ‘dans des circonstances troubles, au cours d’un voyage à l’étranger’ (CdP, 29), is photographed by the ‘hameau du Danube’, and provokes ‘une sensation douloureuse’ in the narrator (43). A refugee couple from Austria is also mentioned in that text (94). In those more evidently fictionalized texts, Modiano seems to feel at liberty to connect with Dora through his imagined creations, while here he seems more concerned with marking a respectful distance. Despite the resonances that undoubtedly arise for the multipletext reader, Dora is certainly not a character for the yardstick reader in the same way Ingrid is. However, Dora is as least as ‘filled-out’ as any of the minor characters in Modiano’s novels, and she is certainly more of a character than the names on Modiano’s fictitious lists. (The latter are not characters, merely indications of lives, since in order to qualify for the epithet of character, the fictional being must be filled out by description or action of some sort). A sense of consciousness is created around her, and, given the novelistic tinges to the text, it seems acceptable to call her a ‘character’ (retaining the quotation marks, in order to indicate the incompletely fictional nature of the figure created). If Dora is a ‘character’, she is a minimally individualized one. Modiano does not permit himself to particularize her any further than the ‘expression de douceur triste et de défi’ that he sees in the last photograph he has of her (92-93). (In this, he is, like his biographernarrators, provoking reflection on the intriguingly contradictory attributes of his biographee). There is only one occasion in the text where an echo of what seems to be her voice – as opposed to one that applies to other people in the same situation – seems to filter through. This one instance of thought specific to Dora is almost hidden, tucked into a reflection of how her father must have felt on registering as a Jew, but marked as not belonging to Ernest Bruder by the declaration in the subsequent statement that he never questioned why he should

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accept other people’s categories. This single phrase apparently specific to Dora is a simple but highly charged one: ‘Au fond, qu’estce qu’ils entendaient exactement par le mot “juif”?’ (49). All of the other instances of direct presentation of thought, usually involving an appeal for identification on the reader’s part by use of the pronoun ‘vous’, could apply to many other consciousnesses apart from Dora’s. On page 42, for example, the phrase: ‘Ces endroits, où l’on vous enfermait sans que vous sachiez très bien si vous en sortiriez un jour’ (42) applies to Dora, but also to all the children shut up in boarding-schools and orphanages. The scene at the ‘Dépôt’ also appeals for a global empathy (112-113). Through this technique, Modiano manages not only to encompass other people in Dora’s situation, but also puts the reader in an uncomfortable situation, as in the scene of daily routine in Les Tourelles, where ‘on’ is used in the sense of ‘nous’ (141), or the use of ‘vous’ in the brief scene where the reader is called to share the inmates’ last dinner before transportation to Drancy (143). When Dora’s feelings on having to return to boarding-school or on running away are imagined, it is clear that these are descriptions of Modiano’s own experiences, and are merely offerings of empathy. It is arguable that Modiano ‘lends’ Dora his personality while using her context and that of his father. What personality she has is mainly a vague, generic one of a young ‘rebelle’, who, like Modiano, may have felt a terrible sense of solitude and the wish to assert herself. The scenes of Dora coming back to the prison of the boarding-school (‘C’était comme de retourner en prison’: 47) merge with Modiano’s own feelings of solitude and imprisonment as a boy (79, 131-132). Dora, then, is a ‘character’, but one close to all the victims commemorated in the text, and to the reader’s picture of Modiano. She is a kind of universal rebel and a representative of all the victims remembered in the text. And while Modiano manages to make the text a human one clearly marked by his own consciousness, the main sense of Dora as an individual arises from what can be gleaned from the description of the photographs that leads the reader to wonder what lay behind her ‘expression de douceur triste et de défi’ (93).

Mediating the Past One of the reasons for Lanzmann’s hostility to feature films of the Holocaust is because such films tend to create a false atmosphere of communication – even the Jewish victims communicate with their Nazi persecutors in Schindler’s List – whereas Auschwitz was the lack

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of communication par excellence.318 It is perhaps in a similar concern, remembering that Dora has been deprived of the right to communicate, that Modiano allows thoughts specific to her to reach us only in one sentence. However, there are very few survivors of the Holocaust left to bear witness, and Modiano is conscious that he must speak on other people’s behalf. The challenge in Dora Bruder is to create a sense of lack of communication while incorporating as much first-hand témoignage as possible. Modiano does this by using extracts from letters wherever possible, but also stressing barriers to communication in the bleakly impersonal official ‘voices’ of the documents transcribed. The first-hand accounts are poignant: those of Robert Tartakovsky awaiting deportation from Drancy, to whom Modiano devotes a whole section (123-129); those addressed to the ‘Préfet de Police’ by the relatives of arrested Jews (86-88); that of Ida Levine, who threw a letter from a train on her way to Auschwitz (119), and the words of Claude Bloch, the only survivor of the women deported a few days after Dora’s arrival in Les Tourelles (118). Modiano also makes a point of citing the words of writers who died as a result of the war (96-97). However, other voices, including those of the ‘dénonciateurs’, also resonate, in the circular relating to the ‘ordres d’envoi spéciaux et individuels’ (106-107) and in the letter from the Gestapo officer concerning Jean Jausion and his police record (120121). The voice of the ‘note pour Mme Salomon’ is also ambiguous, given the support given to the UGIF by the Germans (103, 109). It is important that all these voices be heard. All of these documents would be dead letters, without the recording work carried out by Modiano. The author is very conscious of this, feeling that he is ‘tout seul à faire le lien entre le Paris de ce temps-là et celui d’aujourd’hui, le seul à me souvenir de tous ces détails’ (51). Of the ‘jeune fille’ who was picked up with his father in the ‘panier à salade’ he states that there would be no trace of her ‘si je n’étais pas là pour l’écrire’ (67). The reader too is vital to the provision of life to these letters and to perpetuating memory in general. Modiano seems to recognize this in his frequent inclusion of readers in an encompassing ‘nous’. Readers are encouraged to put themselves in Dora’s position (‘Qu’est-ce qui nous décide à faire une fugue?’: 59), while also being recognized as partners in Modiano’s exercise of mourning and archiving. He speaks of the months from 318

See Kearney, ‘Narrative and the Ethics of Remembrance’, p. 28.

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December 1941 to April 1942 as ‘ces quatre mois d’absence qui restent pour nous un blanc dans sa vie’ (91), and of the letters to the ‘Préfet de police’ he states: ‘C’est nous, qui n’étions pas encore nés à cette époque, qui en sommes les destinataires et les gardiens’ (86). At one point there is a slippage between ‘nous’ and ‘je’ that seems to be more than just a convention of writing, as it also contains an appeal for solidarity against forgetting, as well as a hint of blame: ‘Elle nous apparaît [la Préfécture de police], au moment où nous évoquons le passé, un peu comme la maison Usher. Et aujourd’hui, nous avons peine à croire que ce bâtiment dont nous longeons les façades n’a pas changé depuis les années quarante. Nous nous persuadons que ce ne sont pas les mêmes pierres, les mêmes couloirs’ (85). The reference to Poe’s short story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a weighty one. It suggests something unpleasant that crumbles to dust with a hint of apocalypse, while continuing to haunt those who are left to remember. Further, the narrator of Poe’s story tries to look at the house from a different angle (viewing its reflection in the tarn) but cannot escape its power, suggesting that whatever way one looks at the events of the past, one cannot deny they happened. It should also be remembered that Madeline and Roderick Usher were twins, a fact that is perhaps significant, given the doubling in the text between Dora and Modiano, and Modiano’s feelings of doubling with Rudy. In Poe’s strange story, Roderick Usher suffers terrible guilt from having put his sister in her coffin too early, and she exacts revenge by rising from the dead and dragging him down to the floor with her, pressing the life out of him. Rudy is just one of the ghosts called up by this reference. This text transcends not only personal memories, but also Dora’s life. Thoughts of her lead Modiano to reflect on Anne B., and Bella D., on the young rebels of the ‘Affiche Rouge’, and on the ‘jeune fille inconnue’, who may or may not have escaped (55, 81, 67). As mentioned, the text is also a commemoration of his father, and Rudy also figures allusively. The lives and occupations of Ernest and Cécile are described in as much detail as information permits. The section commencing on page 89 commemorates not only Dora and all the Parisians of the winter and spring of 1942, but goes on to include the writers whose lives have touched Modiano and who died or suffered catastrophe in 1945. The nineteenth section (103 onward) honours other adolescents who were ‘en infraction’, and the five girls who were taken to Les Tourelles on the same day as Dora are not forgotten (114-115). Dora’s arrival at Les Tourelles is described along

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with the atmosphere of the departure of the sixty-six women who were sent from Les Tourelles to Drancy on that day, and details are provided for as many of them as possible (116-122). Modiano makes a point of noting the arrest of nine unnamed children near the SaintCœur-de-Marie (130). The last section is a commemorative crescendo, marking the disappearance of all the children who, ‘comme Dora Bruder […] parlaient tous avec l’accent de Paris’ (141), of the ‘amies de juifs’ (142), and of the thousands brought to Drancy on goods trains, among them four thousand children, most unnamed (145). Given the sporadic fiction effect of Dora Bruder, it seems valid to say that the text produces a slight biofiction effect for the yardstick reader, and that this biofiction effect is driven by the use of slightly novelistic scenes and cautious speculation on the consciousnesses of other people, as well as by references to fictional texts by other authors. For multiple-text readers, the sense is heightened by their awareness of references to more evidently fictional works by Modiano himself. However, the general effect is of a presentation of historical event based on precise research. Even the considerable number of coincidences in this text have a predominantly documentary force due to the eerie sense of real coincidence. (Why should Modiano have made Ingrid and Rigaud in Voyage de noces miss their stop and get off the metro at Nation, near the site of Dora’s school, after all?) For the multiple-text reader, intratextual fictional echoes seem, as stated, to deliberately link Dora Bruder to Modiano’s imaginative works. In Dora Bruder, this linking does not appear to stem from a desire on Modiano’s part to throw doubt on the factuality of the events described. Instead, the resonances combine with the text’s emphasis on historical research to suggest that it does not matter if this text is read as a mix of actual event and some imaginative embellishment, once the basic tragic happenings are accepted as true. The cautiousness of the more clearly invented passages involving scenedrawing or speculation in any case shows the narrator’s hesitation at allowing his imagination free rein with such delicate subject matter. In this text, a type of biographical representation takes place that demonstrates that authority can exist without tyranny, since the narrator takes pains to state that his account may be wrong, while supporting his hypotheses with scrupulous research. The ‘devoir de mémoire’ seems paramount, and the linking between Dora Bruder and Modiano’s novels actually has the effect of increasing the historical

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force of those other texts once these are re-read in the light of the associations thrown up by Dora Bruder. Dora Bruder is a highly literary text, both in its many references to other authors and in its very style. Because it seems to be a predominantly factual text, its literary style seems to be making the claim that even historiography can be ‘literary’, and that poetic symbolism (which does not always have an invented basis) can be enlisted in the cause of the ‘devoir de mémoire’, to make events even more poignant than would a drier, more ‘neutral’ style. The atmosphere of imaginative texts by other authors is evoked to invest events with an added force gleaned from the reader’s memories of those texts, whether the references are lengthy (as in the case of Les Misérables), or extremely elliptical (‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Perec’s W). Thus, it is possible to argue that Dora Bruder is making an argument in favour of ‘literature’, while not coming down clearly on the side either of strictly factual writing or of invention. This is literature that can come very close to documentary work, however, as is clear from the transcriptions of official documents that punctuate the narrative. It is perhaps the starkness of these official traces that makes Modiano concerned to create a sense of consciousness, using his own in default of Dora’s where this is necessary, in order to counter in some small way the dehumanization of the Holocaust. Despite the identification and empathy demanded, this is not a text that could be said to ‘comfort’ through catharsis, however. All the reader is given of Dora is, as Lepape puts it, ‘le début d’une présence’.319 In fact the sense of lack produced by its bareness has led some readers to want a ‘novel’ about Dora, presumably about her feelings and life.320 Whereas Voyage de noces stresses fusion between biographer and biographee, Dora Bruder stresses distance, and the fusion in Dora Bruder is mainly confined to the fusion between Dora and all the other victims she represents. From the point of view of biographical representation, there initially seems to be much separating Dora Bruder from Voyage de noces. Whereas it is clear in Dora Bruder that the narrator is cut off from Dora’s memories and that the best he can do is to offer his own memories of adolescence in their place, there is a strong claim to memory in Voyage de noces, where Jean B. calls his account of Ingrid and Rigaud’s experiences ‘Pas des Mémoires […] Mais presque’. 319 320

‘La disparition’, p. 2 For example, Brison, p. 77.

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Voyage de noces is the only one of the four biographical texts where the narrator does not emphasize the opacity of the other person, and even goes so far as to ‘usurp’ the thoughts of his biographee(s). This has the effect of focusing the reader’s attention on the imaginer. It becomes clear that the text is in fact calling out to the reader to analyse the clues about the narrator’s own problems that are woven into the narrative. Indeed, the extent of the parallels between him and his biographees makes it seem as if the text is more autobiography on Jean B.’s part than biography. Voyage de noces distorts the manner of Dora’s death to such an extent (how can Ingrid’s suicide compare with Dora’s death in Auschwitz?) that it hardly seems fair to call the text a fictionalization of Dora’s life. Yet the passages concerning Ingrid’s running away from home are based on Dora’s actual ‘fugue’, and as such the text does commemorate Dora, and is a tentative novelization of her experiences. As discussed, Ingrid’s feelings are treated with reserve, and those that are shown are mainly minimally-individualized ones of fear and the need for protection, the bulk of the emotions belonging either to Rigaud or to the narrator himself. Modiano seems therefore to be respecting Dora’s right to mystery even in this text. These four texts together demonstrate the ambivalence Modiano apparently feels about the idea of using imagination to speculate on other people’s experiences. Chien de printemps and Dora Bruder are examples of the bare-bones approach to life-writing, using a poetically spare style and suggestive literary symbolism. Both involve minimal speculation on the biographee’s experiences, and little or none on their thoughts. This stresses that the biographee is a distinct being, and, along with the narrator’s fascination with the person described and the poetry with which he conveys that fascination, allows the biographee a strong individual presence, albeit a highly mysterious one. Les Boulevards de ceinture and Voyage de noces allow a much freer rein to imagination. This centres attention on the inventing psyche, especially in Voyage de noces, where there is conjecture on the thoughts of the biographee. However, even in these texts, Chalva and Ingrid are portrayed as mysterious beings, about whom the narrators know little, so that even there the biographees possess much autonomy. Although all four biographical narratives take pains to point out that they are merely presenting versions of reality (this happens even in the case of the narrator in Voyage de noces, as his text works against his confidence of possessing the ultimate Ingrid story), they all

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portray their biographees in certain ways, and any reader aware that the figures described are drawn from real life will have problems distinguishing fact from fiction once the books are closed. However, there is a sense that some silences must be broken, and that a sincere attempt at representation is always better than silence, even if this is mainly a depiction of one’s own feelings, as in Les Boulevards de ceinture and Voyage de noces.

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Conclusion It would be inappropriate here to impose a forced unity on this discussion of Patrick Modiano’s work. This is especially true given the numerous tensions in the author’s work, many of which tap into tensions liable to be felt by readers of the present age. Some of those that can be extended to both author and reader are an ironic awareness of the artificiality of the textual world versus a sense of its emotional validity, the desire for a coherent sense or ‘essence’ of identity versus a realization of the dispersion and multiplicity of selfhood (and on the author’s part sometimes a desire for this), and belief in the validity of imagination versus a sense of its inadequacy. The tension between desire for memory and the longing to forget can be understood on both societal and personal levels, while the pull between the desire for autobiographical revelation and an autobiographical reservedness is more personal to Modiano. Despite a reluctance to totalize, I shall attempt to create a network of significance around these questions in the next few pages. The main impetus for this book was a fascination with the playoff in the texts between a ludic approach to storytelling (at times approaching power games) and a sense of human limitation and distress surrounding the storytelling figures, both author and narrators. Style was another intriguing issue, as Modiano’s use of fictional and factual style varies both from text to text and within texts, and seem to play on the notion of accepted styles, questioning readers’ tendency to believe that a factual style necessarily refers to objectively verifiable events and that a fictional style is necessarily less true. Also fascinating was the fact that the homogeneity of the imagined author from text to text creates a strong sense of a consciousness attached to the creator of these narratives, both as a writer playing on readers’ expectations, on the restrictions of language and on his own obsessions, and as a psyche seeking a humanistic understanding of self and other. The use of a semi-confessional first-person narration seemed to me to be one of the main factors in the texts’ power to create empathy along with enigma. In analysing Modiano’s texts with the guiding thread of fictionalization in life-writing, and especially authorial self-fictionalization, I found it was impossible to separate this from questions of fictionality and subjective truth in general. The

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issue of imagination was a particularly fascinating one in Modiano’s case. Not all of the texts foreground the storyteller as imaginer (as opposed to ‘documenter’), and even where they do, imagination is not always viewed as something unproblematically positive, rather in some cases as something with which one must ‘make do’ and sometimes even something to which one is condemned, although it also has liberating qualities. Many of the remarks in this book have concerned speculation on the personal reasons for the ambiguities in Modiano’s output. This is due to the considerable stress laid on the notion of diffuse autobiography. In doing this, I have nonetheless sought to discuss the wider issues attached to identity, whether one’s own or that of other people, mainly in terms of the strangeness of the self, interdependence between self and other, and the powers and limitations inherent in the creation of selves in narration. In speaking of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory – the need for imaginative connection with a past cut off through generational distance, here specifically the past of the ‘années noires’ in France – I have also shown Modiano’s place in a particular socio-historic condition. We have seen that the strong, if sometimes indirect, emphasis on traumatic childhood and on negligent, silent, and even ‘criminal’ parents often applies on a metaphorical level to the parent generation in France. Yet Modiano’s brand of postmemory has to do not only with a sense of being cut off from the ‘années noires’, but also, more traumatically, from the experience of the murdered Jews, and is exacerbated by his personal circumstances: the childhood loss of his brother (his only sibling), relative abandonment by his parents, and by the confusion created by the contradictory nature of a father-figure linked to both ‘bourreaux’ and ‘victimes’, and with whom Modiano feels the need to identify. We have seen that a salient aspect of the texts is the sense of connectedness they generate. When such connectedness is understood in terms of linguistic connection, this sometimes seems to mean the impossibility of being original. However, while the texts are informed by a ‘postmodern’ awareness of the second-hand nature of language, they are not stultified by this, so that Modiano’s writing cannot be said to be unproblematically ‘disenchanted’ or riven with ennui. These elements can admittedly be said to surface to a certain extent, though mainly in Modiano’s own feeling of being imprisoned in his own personal obsessions and complexes. The negative connotations attached to ‘le mécanique’ in his work often betoken a frustration at his compulsion to repeat himself, and sometimes, as in Vestiaire de

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l’enfance, at his own autobiographical reservedness and lack of whole-hearted emotionality. Stress on the mechanical as negative also reinforces the idea that the personal touch is what he longs for and considers most important, and this is borne out in what I have called ‘une religion du sujet’, borrowing a term Michel Surya uses in relation to biography. It is the consciousness of the storyteller that commemorates Dora Bruder after all. It is important to remember that repetition does not necessarily mean sterility, as even the texts that are the most recycled can have a strong emotional impact due to accumulation of associations, as is clear in touches such as the passing mention in Voyage de noces of the Gillette razor, linked to the notion of suicide since La Place de l’étoile. In terms of intertextual gesturing to texts outside of the Modiano corpus, indebtedness to previous texts is also enriching, and can even be said to be ‘enchanting’ rather than ‘disenchanting’, and suggests that part of Modiano’s true family lies in literary precursors. The latter can be seen, not as weighty albatrosses, but rather as companions: ‘les esprits qui nous accompagnent’ (DB, 53).

The Wider Intertext The reader of Modiano’s work quickly becomes aware that his texts borrow themes, imagery, and sometimes structure and technique from highly diverse writers. Those to whom I have referred in this book form merely a small selection of the influences and ‘companions’ of this most cultivated of writers. While La Place de l’étoile was a sort of intertextual tour de force, demonstrating the twenty-three year old author’s already prodigious knowledge of French writers, including a considerable number of forgotten ones, references to other writers are much less ostentatious in the subsequent works. However, they are still strongly present. Those I have stressed include Perec, Proust, Nabokov, Sarraute, Sartre, Duras, Camus, and Balzac (the latter for the character of ‘la Petite Bijou’ and the associations attached to her, and for the device of recurring character). Appropriately, many are autobiographers, as befits the main focus of Modiano’s work. Such linking is not plagiarism, but rather seems to be a recognition that many of the images in classic texts have passed into the collective reading consciousness, and thus that language and images are not the property of the author who textualizes them – though he or she may manipulate them with particular skill. Such overt intertextuality is also a statement of the universal relevance of these images. Above all, it is clear that these images are only the basis

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of a re-imagining that is enriched by the associations they carry. The spareness of the texts is also a suggestiveness, so that the ‘minuscule’ (a term often used to describe fragmentation and truncation and sometimes also a bareness of style) suggests the ‘majuscule autour’. It is difficult to class Modiano with any group of writers, not least because of his forging of a highly distinctive way of writing. However, thematically and linguistically, he does have various points in common with other recent and contemporary writers. His preoccupation with memory and recording is shared (albeit in a less obsessive manner), by the autobiographers and biographers mentioned in the preceding chapters (of whom Perec is perhaps the most important for Modiano’s work). Many of these, like him, merge their archiving of the past with what Modiano calls ‘rêverie romanesque’. His use of detective novel conventions to record the past is shared by writers like Didier Daeninckx (for example in Meurtres pour mémoire: 1983). Linguistically, the links are much more superficial. His simplicity and ‘minimalism’ of vocabulary and syntax (and also the general brevity of his texts) link him to Jean-Philippe Toussaint and Jean Echenoz, and also to Annie Ernaux. However, he is far less sociologically focused than Ernaux, and despite his playing with emptiness and dispersion of textual identity, ultimately less ironic than Toussaint and Echenoz, and is closer to a traditional view of identity as a continuity of personality than any of these writers.

Belief and Suspicion We have seen Modiano’s connection with, and distance from, several other contemporary writers on the question of autofiction, and have explored self-fictionalization in general in the texts. Looking at the return of the author in the 1970s and 1980s, which was part of a renewed attempt to render experience through narratives of emotional directness, we saw how this ‘retour du sujet’ was accompanied by a realization that autobiography was closer to fiction than had previously been granted. Modiano’s Livret de famille, with its mixture of ‘souvenirs imaginaires’ and ‘l’autobiographie la plus précise’, recognized that all memories are, to an extent, ‘imaginaires’, and that memory is constantly reconfigured by imagination. Terms like ‘fictional autobiography’ came to be viewed as almost tautological, as autobiography itself came to be viewed as fictional. That is to say, an awareness sprang up of the difficulty of distinguishing autobiography from what was and is usually considered under the label of fiction, in general terms the novel, with its predilection for invention, literary

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symbolism and its shaping of more or less coherent stories. In his work as a whole, by using novelistic frameworks to rewrite the same sketchy autobiographical story, Modiano seems to be stressing that autobiography can be ‘fictional’, both in the sense of written in the accepted style of fiction, and in the sense of containing elements of invention, questioning the assumption that autobiography must be written in a conventionally autobiographical style. In isolating and discussing the eight texts that most pointedly thematize autobiography, this book does however, argue for distinctions between the works. While Modiano does appear to be writing predominantly for the multiple-text reader, it is best to assume a single-text non-paratextually informed, ‘yardstick’ reader when attempting to establish how clearly a text plays on autobiographical conventions. We have seen that in the texts that can be called autofictions, the reader must often work harder to understand the author than, paradoxically, in the less overtly autobiographical texts that nonetheless thematize self-narration for self-understanding. This can be explained by Modiano’s urge for self-revelation combined with his characteristic secrecy and playfulness, and by the liberation afforded him by the distance of more unambiguously ‘fictional’ texts. For the multiple-text reader, the texts make clear that imagined material need not be presented in a fictional tone or style, as shown by the hints that factual tone may mask an invented basis, for example in Chien de printemps or in Fleurs de ruine. One of the effects of the fact/fiction problematic in Modiano’s work is to show that many readers often choose to trust ‘untrustworthy’ narrators, especially when their accounts are couched in a factual style. However, and perhaps paradoxically again, the texts, while encouraging critical reading, also encourage readers to accept invented material as a purveyor of (approximate) truth. The dreamlikeness of some of Modiano’s work seems to be a deliberate strategy to make it impossible to distinguish ontological boundaries, and to leave the reader no option but to analyse the fiction for an emotional truth. I have discussed the awareness of the distance between language and experience that lay at the heart of much of the experimental autobiographical writing whose main groundswell started in the 1970s. Even apparently sincere and introspective autobiographical writing like Sarraute’s Enfance or that of Doubrovsky’s autofictions (and it is useful to remember that his Fils was published in the same year as Livret de famille), stress that distance. Narrators, by the very act of translating experience into

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language, are intrinsically untrustworthy. Even emotional truth cannot be expressed, and will always be a ‘lie’ as soon as it is shaped in words. However, due to common experience of language, as well as common experience of the inadequacy of language, something of these emotions can be communicated. Modiano seems to recognize that the best way to do this is through imaginative symbolism. Although the reader often has a sense that the author is deliberately inventing, and although the narrators and other characters often seem to be actors playing parts consciously written for them by the author, it is also clear that the author does not himself have full control of language. Indeed, both the intertextuality that extends beyond the Modiano universe, and the obsessions and complexes that mark his writing, gesture to the fact that language and internalized images control the writer as much as he controls them in manipulating them into new forms. While his work does not draw attention to the role of the unconscious in the explicit way of Doubrovsky’s autofictions or Sarraute’s Enfance, the texts cry out to be analysed for emotional or psychological truth. The early texts of La Place de l’étoile and La Ronde de nuit portray narrators who seem to be blatantly fantasizing. Other narrators engage in dreamlike or nightmarish reconstructions of events, and yet others pointedly withhold secrets at which they hint. Through hints that autobiographical secrets may have filtered through the narrative in some form, and led on by repetition of variations of key traumatic events, the reader is encouraged to become the narrator’s analyst and, through the existence of a homogenous imagined author, also that of Modiano. Structure and themes, even if those themes are ostensibly mainly externally focused as in Livret de famille, become important indicators of autobiographical issues, and what is left out becomes as important as what is present. This means that, although on the face of things there is much nomadism of identity in the texts, a strong sense of the author is conveyed, a not-so-secret unity. De si braves garçons is a good example of a Modiano text which, while stressing fictionalization and elusiveness of identity (even incorporating the latter into its narrative structure), nonetheless allows for an appreciation of an underlying personality. On these points, it can be seen as a miniature version of what happens in the œuvre as a whole, just as the strong resemblance between the narrators and the other characters echoes the dispersion of autobiographical details into secondary characters and the interchangeability of narrators in the work in general. Here, imagination can be seen as

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something that allows the author to give the reader an insight into his psyche, in an indirect yet strangely powerful way. However, there is also a sense that imagination can be unsatisfactory, and sometimes even distressing, as when in ‘Éphéméride’ the narrator suggests that dispersion of memory in fiction can cause it to be eroded. Yet, on an historical level, Modiano is condemned to this condition, being only ever able to recreate fragmentary fictional ‘memories’ of a past he has not experienced. On a more personal level, while the distance of fiction is helpful and liberating for Modiano, in the production of what could be called an ‘autobiography of imagination’, he does seem, like Roland in Rue des Boutiques obscures and the Sarano of Vestiaire de l’enfance, to be frustrated by his own hesitation to deal directly with the subjects closest to his heart. And although readers are reminded by Rocroy in Quartier perdu that it should be enough merely to read an author’s texts, they too are often left with a sense of unfinished business. Vestiaire de l’enfance and Rue des Boutiques obscures hint that a deliberate favouring of imagination over memory can be negative, when associated with repression of memory and self-deception, and that it sometimes only serves to bring a greater sense of emptiness. However, despite all of these problems, the ‘demande de récit’ prevails. This is due to the desire to provide a relatively unified picture of one’s self and the other person, as well as the desire to keep the past alive for readers, and to allow Modiano to achieve a momentary connection with it in fiction.

Garbo’s Eyelashes and the ‘petite musique’ Modiano’s practice of biography, whether real or fictional, has its roots in his fascination with the mystery posed by other people, and his personal obsession with disappearance and need to mark the passage of other people through life, and the trace left behind. Almost as important a reason for the strong presence of biographical writing is the use of writing about the other person to allow a displaced writing of self. The second-hand experience acquired through the biographical enterprise can act as a substitute for personal memory, and recording other people’s experiences sometimes seems to take the place of selfremembering by author and narrator. In the context of the fictionalization of self undertaken by Modiano, the narrators’ reflections on the fleeting nature of existence by focusing on imagined or in some way distant characters, with whom they identify and who themselves have suffered loss, seems to be a way of expressing at

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several removes the personal grief hinted at in the texts. However, writing about the other person also constitutes an end in itself, and the narrators’ fascination with their biographees, and the skilfully manipulated brevity with which they present them, creates a strong sense of reality and autonomy around them. Though there are ethical problems concerning the validity of imagination in narrating the other person (and in narrating the past in general), for want of an objective truth Modiano’s work proffers a subjective one, while stressing the limitations of this subjectivity. It is suggested that any kind of vision can have a certain truth, provided it is recognized as a subjective one, and provided the role of imagination is accepted. In interview Modiano has spoken of the human willingness to be entranced by imagination, even when one is aware of the falseness of what one is allowing oneself to believe. Invoking the image of Greta Garbo, like Barthes in his ‘Lettres nouvelles’, he makes the point that, though Greta Garbo’s real eyelashes were short, those of her film persona were exaggeratedly long, and, consequently that ‘sa vérité était d’avoir de longs cils’.321 The photograph in Modiano’s Paris Tendresse of a poster of Marlene Dietrich with perfectly smooth skin and exaggeratedly long eyelashes seems to symbolize the enchanting powers of artificiality (PT, 19). As with images of Garbo and Dietrich, once readers retain an awareness of falseness in representation it becomes acceptable for them to believe. In pointing out the shaping role of the consciousness of his narrators, Modiano makes clear that, once autobiography and biography are accepted as subjective and ultimately ‘false’ visions, the use of imagination becomes less of an ethical problem. Though factuality may sometimes be irrelevant, history is not. Thus, although it is not clear from the text of De si braves garçons whether Johnny ever really existed, or was ever deported to the death camps, and, although his referential existence is not important per se, he plays an important role in calling up real and brutally extinguished lives. The collective linking in the texts is part of the connective thrust of the work. The narrators and the author seem to be playing games of pinball (to borrow the metaphor of the ‘billard éléctrique’ from Rue 321

Jean-Louis de Rambures, ‘Apprendre à mentir’, p. 130. Barthes says something similar in his ‘Le visage de Garbo’, Lettres nouvelles, April 1955, cited in Roland Barthes, Le Texte et l’image (p. 28). Barthes says that, for the public imagination, Garbo had to have a perfect beauty, even though it was clear that it was artificial, speaking of a kind of Platonic essence of Garbo that the pictures of her ‘visage-objet’/ ‘visage plâtré’ brought across.

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des Boutiques obscures), aiming to make contact with as many lives as possible. The Modiano lists, with their elliptical and concise references to disappeared lives, are emblematic of this desire. Though there is game-playing on the reader’s desire for factuality, perhaps most blatantly in Livret de famille, this ludism coexists with a sense that history, especially that of the Occupation, must not be forgotten. A ‘devoir de mémoire’ is asserted, whether through subtly etched reminders, or through overt blurring of the boundaries between fact and imagination, as in Les Boulevards de ceinture, where readers are reminded of their responsibility to inform themselves Though some readers dismiss Modiano as some sort of pleasant ‘petite musique’, failing to read between the lines for historical and intertextual resonances, this superficial approach to reading his texts is mocked by the author in his Poupée Blonde (1983). That short piece is presented in the form of a theatre programme containing the lines of the play itself. In the ‘dedication’ on the flyleaf of the programme, one Simone Paul-O’Donnell praises the young dramatist, whose initials happens to be PM. She lauds the script this shy young man brought to her desk one day, claiming she has no need even to read it, and gushes: ‘Sa petite musique, je l’aimais déjà’. This reference to ‘sa petite musique’ plays word for word on a cliché that has become attached to Modiano. (The formula was coined by one critic, pleased others, and has become a standard means of describing any new Modiano text, as shown recently in the blurb for ‘Éphéméride’, which speaks of a ‘petite musique envoûtante’). This reference could be viewed as extreme self-parody but it is also a sly attack on one type of Modiano reader. While Modiano’s texts do have a musical quality, and in any case a rhythmical one, variations on the same autobiographical themes running – or perhaps more precisely, ‘running away’ – like a musical ‘fugue’ through his work, those who read his texts expecting to find a light melody of pleasurable nostalgia, are, like Simone Paul-O’Donnell, not reading the texts. Once the allusive autobiographical and historical references are decoded, the ‘petite musique’ becomes rather more complicated, and often sinister.

Photography, Ghosts, Silence, and Interpretation The three thematic motifs that best sum up Modiano’s texts are those of photographs, ghosts and silence. Photographs are a favourite Modiano motif, and are used to show the strangeness of the self and the other person, the changeability of interpretation, and often to emphasize disappeared lives and the lack of a story around them. In

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relation to the ‘religion du sujet’ in the texts, there is a certain fetishism surrounding photographs, summed up in the statement by Victor Chmara in Villa triste that ‘il faut toujours avoir sur soi les photographies de ceux qu’on aime’ (208). As Sontag notes, photography ‘turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed’.322 While Modiano’s texts make clear that this symbolic possession is an illusory one, they also stress that an imaginative connection can nonetheless take place. Another reason for the use of described photographs in the texts is that they are more faithful to memories of experience than actual ones, in their ability to change and to contain contradictions. They can also be used to create a reality effect, as in Chien de printemps, and, in suggesting a certain mystery and autonomy around the figures they portray, they add to the human presence of the characters. They are also reassuring proofs of the past, traces of the disappeared. However, they cannot tell stories, and one of the most vital functions of photographs in these texts is to occasion narrative. In calling out for narration, or by provoking reflection on absence, they often form the basis for Modiano’s narratives of imaginative connection and commemoration. All Modianistes will be aware of the plethora of ghostly imagery in the texts. This serves widely diverse purposes. It is frequently used to highlight the impalpability and inconsistency of the other person, as well as the hauntedness of the narrators’ memories. It can also be an indicator of the oblivion into which so many of the figures described fall, or would fall, were it not for the Modiano narrators. Photographs are themselves ghostly, in their strangeness, their flimsiness and their connection with the past. Ghosts also figure in a ludic manner in Modiano’s texts, both as markers of the imagined nature of the characters involved and in the resuscitation of characters from text to text. In typically Modianesque fashion, this resuscitation, while playful, also creates a sense of mysterious connection between characters, and of their extratextual life. It also generates an almost uncanny sense of déjà vu. In his La Mémoire aime chasser dans le noir, Gérard Macé notes the crowds of anonymous ‘figurants’ that sometimes people our dreams. He notes their ‘inquiétante étrangeté’.323 (This is of course one of the French translations of Freud’s notion of ‘the Uncanny’ – ‘das Unheimliche’). Modiano’s characters often have something of this uncanny quality, appropriately 322 323

On Photography, p. 14. La Mémoire aime chasser dans le noir, p. 67.

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for the dreamlike nature of his narratives. Joye has described his ‘je’ figures as ‘équivoquement familiers’ (a term strikingly close to the idea of the uncanny), and this is a description that could be applied to his texts in general.324 Just as the ghosts of works from outside the Modiano universe haunt the texts, there is also an internal haunting, leading to a constant reworking of imagination and accumulation of association for both writer and reader. There are many types of silence in Modiano’s work: the barrier of silence that causes postmemory; the silence of biographical respect; the sometimes sinister silence of actions that have been deliberately hidden or whitewashed, such as that of the construction of ‘résistancialisme’ in France; the silent fireworks of repressed memory; the all-pervading silence of death. Another vital aspect of silence in the texts is the silence of gaps that allow the reader to fill in the blanks with imagination. As has been shown, the interpreting – or ‘reading’ – function is foregrounded through the stress on first-person narrators elucidating various mysteries, and it is symbolic that these first-person narrators never fully clarify the mysteries they investigate, and that silence prevails on many issues. Gaps always remain, often concerning apparently fundamental questions (such as the questionmark in Rue des Boutiques obscures over whether Jimmy Stern and Pedro McEvoy are the same person, and thus over the validity of Roland’s speculations, or, in Les Boulevards de ceinture, the impossibility of knowing whether Chalva Deyckecaire did deliberately attempt to push his son onto the metro track, or whether he recognizes him in the Fontainebleau village). Though the various series of events and of cause and effect ultimately pieced together by the narrators do provide a relative unity, it is made clear that these accounts merely constitute versions of events based on hypotheses. In other words, they are merely interpretations, and readers are free to make other interpretations themselves. This is cerebral but also emotional work, as readers are encouraged to connect imaginatively with the characters described, and – to an extent – also with the author himself on an autobiographical level.

An Ironic Yet ‘Connective’ Humanism It is initially tempting to describe Modiano’s work as having moved from a phase of confusion through to a concern with compassion. However, on closer analysis this idea is too neatly polarized. Firstly, 324

‘À propos de Fleurs de ruine’, p. 77.

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compassion has been present in Modiano’s work from the start (La Place de l’étoile was, after all, an attempt to take on and understand the perplexity and hurt Modiano presumed his father must have felt as a Jew in wartime France). Secondly, a tendency towards confusion – whether on the level of ontological boundaries (Voyage de noces, La Petite Bijou) or of plot (Fleurs de ruine) – marks many of the more recent texts, though admittedly to nothing like the extent of the first two texts. Thirdly, although it is true that the most recent texts (Dora Bruder, Des inconnues, La Petite Bijou) are particularly strongly marked by a sense of authorial compassion towards the narrated figures, all of the texts call for readerly compassion on behalf of the narrators and author, the reader being drawn into the affective aspect of even the most self-consciously ludic texts. Though Modiano’s work raises the question of the untrustworthy narrator, these narrators are also used as vehicles for empathy. Illogicalities, implausibilities, and the creation of a sense of secretiveness around the narrators all encourage the reader to question their trustworthiness /openness /point of view, but human touches such as holes in memory, lack of information, and narratorial désarroi faced with the opacity of the other all encourage sympathy. Readers are thus encouraged to feel a psychological connection with both the narrators and the imagined author behind the texts. The latter, especially in his composite form, ultimately appears more as an inventing consciousness than an inventing instance. This is a consciousness that plays on readers’ expectations but that also stresses its own humanness. On an autobiographical level, while it seems clear that Modiano enjoys playing with the reader’s desire for a clear picture of the author, his autobiographical games are not mere power games but also point out that memory is not constative but performative, and that all accounts shape events differently, whether through deficiency of memory or merely because consciousness does not stay still. The human condition incorporates certain limitations but also certain powers, and a celebration of the expressiveness inherent in an artistic approach to storytelling is clear. It is this, and not the invention of material, that makes it possible to call Dora Bruder a ‘redemptive’ text, as it, like Chien de printemps, cancels some of the horrors of injustice and loss through a type of spare poetry. Connectedness and the desire for even greater connection are vital notions in relation to Modiano’s work, and it is appropriate to end on this concept. It is clear that both Modiano’s life and those of his narrators are linked with those of many others. There is a sense

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that the author and narrators would like to be able to tell the multiplicity of potential stories that surround the stories actually told, and to involve as many ‘inconnus’ as possible. In making clear that the links they choose to concentrate on are arbitrary, and could be reorganized in many different ways, the narrators not only stress their prerogative as organizers but also the fact that they, as storytellers, are precious links between the lives recorded. In the Modiano universe, connectedness is often associated with mystery, and much of the sense of enigmatic connections stems from the technique of recurring character, not least that of the Modiano narrator. Connectedness is also of importance in the frequent blurring of boundaries in the texts. There is much dissolving of boundaries and what could be seen as ‘ghostly’ crossing over in Modiano’s work, often between the narrators and the ‘external’ figures they narrate, and between the narrators and the author. Genre boundaries are themselves questioned, whether those between autobiography and the novel (Livret de famille), drama and the novel (De si braves garçons), the novel and historiography (Dora Bruder, Les Boulevards de ceinture) the novel and the short story (Livret de famille, De si braves garçons, Des inconnues, and shorter texts like Chien de printemps), biography and the novel (Les Boulevards de ceinture, Dora Bruder), and perhaps even, as Paul Gellings has suggested in his 2000 book, between the novel and poetry. Most importantly, fact and fiction also blur, as do ontological divisions, and the sometimes film-like nature of the texts, while sometimes used to highlight artificiality, forms part of their imaginative appeal, as a sort of cinematic fade-in and fade-out between memory and imagination often appears to takes place. Given the importance of Modiano’s readers’ sense of (approximate) connection between themselves and the authorial consciousness behind the texts, and between themselves and the other figures they imagine through actualizing the texts and through identification, it is perhaps appropriate to end on the figure of the reader. With Modiano’s work, postmodern readers are led to reflect on the role of imagination in structure and artifice and intertextual borrowing but also in the production of empathy, of compassion, and of a fascinating sense of mystery. While being led to reflect on the distance between self and other, as well as on the gap between language and experience, and on the uncertain nature of identity, they are also involved in the drive towards connection that exists in the works. And although it is made clear that loose ends can never be fully tied up, that unities are subjective, and that other people’s

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consciousnesses cannot be accessed, they, like the narrators, do experience a sense of imaginative connection with the narrated other. This imaginative speculation and linking combines with the mysteries and playfulness that pervade the Modiano universe to provide a sometimes redemptive sort of reenchantment for the postmodern reader.

Bibliography 1: Works by Modiano Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication in all cases in parts (i)-(v) of this section is Paris. In part (i), the first date refers to the Gallimard Édition “Blanche” or the original Seuil edition. Where a Folio or Points Roman edition was used, its collection number is indicated in square brackets followed by the date of printing.

(i) Major Prose La Place de l’étoile (Gallimard, 1968) [Folio 698, 1994] La Ronde de nuit (Gallimard, 1969) [Folio 835, 1996] Les Boulevards de ceinture (Gallimard, 1972) [Folio 1033, 1996] Lacombe Lucien (Gallimard, 1974) [filmscript with Louis Malle] Villa triste (Gallimard, 1975) [Folio 953, 1989] Emmanuel Berl, Interrogatoire (Gallimard, 1976) Livret de famille (Gallimard, 1977) Rue des Boutiques obscures (Gallimard, 1978) [Folio 1358, 1996] Une jeunesse (Gallimard, 1981) [Folio 1629, 1997] De si braves garçons (Gallimard, 1982) [Folio 1811, 1996] Quartier perdu (Gallimard, 1984) [Folio 1942, 1988] Dimanches d’aôut (Gallimard, 1986) [Folio 2042, 1996] Remise de peine (Seuil, 1988) [Points Roman 367, 1989] Vestiaire de l’enfance (Gallimard, 1989) [Folio 2253, 1992] Voyage de noces (Gallimard, 1990) Fleurs de ruine (Seuil, 1991) [Points Roman 546, 1992] Un cirque passe (Gallimard, 1992) [Folio 2628, 1994] Chien de printemps (Seuil, 1993) Du plus loin de l’oubli (Gallimard, 1996) Dora Bruder (Gallimard, 1997) Des inconnues (Gallimard, 1999) La Petite Bijou (Gallimard, 2001) Accident Nocturne (Gallimard, 2003)

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(ii) Shorter Prose ‘Courrier du cœur’, Les Cahiers du chemin, No. 20 (January 1974), 35-40 ‘Johnny’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 307 (August 1978), 1-5 ‘Soir de Paris’, Le Figaro, 21 November 1978, p. 32 ‘Lettre d’amour’, Paris-Match, 1 December 1978, pp. 78-81 ‘1, rue Lord-Byron’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 23 December 1978, pp. 56-57 ‘Docteur Weiszt’, Le Monde, 16 September 1979, p. 20 ‘Memory Lane’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 334 (November 1980), 1-30 ‘La Seine’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 341 (June 1981), 1-17 Memory Lane, with illustrations by Pierre Le-Tan (P.O.L./Hachette, 1981) Poupée Blonde, with illustrations by Pierre Le-Tan (P.O.L., 1983) ‘Mes vingt ans’, Vogue, December 1983, pp. 188-193 ‘Polar à huit mains: ‘“L’Angle mort” : Chapitre 3’, L’Événement du jeudi, 18-24 July 1991, pp. 84-86 ‘Villes du Sommeil’, in Pierre Le-Tan, Épaves et débris sur la plage, non. pag. (Le Promeneur, 1993) ‘Éphéméride’, supplement with Le Monde, 30 June 2001

(iii) Children’s Books Une aventure de Choura, with illustrations by Dominique Zehrfuss (Gallimard, 1986) Une fiancée pour Choura with illustrations by Dominique Zehrfuss (Gallimard, 1987) Catherine Certitude with illustrations by Jean-Jacques Sempé (Gallimard, 1988) Les Chiens de la rue du soleil, with Zina Modiano (Hachette, 1994)

(iv) Prefaces and Postfaces Rilke, Rainer Maria, Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge (Seuil, 1980) Cocteau, Jean, Le Livre blanc (Messine, 1983) Aymé, Marcel, Le Nain (Gallimard, 1988) Karina, Anna, Jusqu’au bout du hasard (Grasset, 1998) Roth, Joseph, Automne à Berlin (Louis Vuitton, coll. Quinzaine littéraire, 2000)

Bibliography

321

(v) Articles and Other Works ‘Je me sens proche de lui’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 1 January 1970, p. 7 ‘Hervé Bazin vu par Michel Bataille, Jean Blanzat, René Fallet, Patrick Modiano, Françoise Parturier, Christiane Rochefort et Claude Simon’, Magazine littéraire, May 1970, pp. 21-22 ‘L’Anti-Frank’, Contrepoint, No. 2 (October 1970), 178-180 ‘Un martyr des lettres’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 11 June 1971, p. 3 ‘Vingt ans après’, Le Figaro littéraire, 18 November 1972, pp. 13, 17 ‘Les Écrivains de la nuit, de Pierre de Boisdeffre’, La Nouvelle Revue des deux mondes, October-December 1973, pp. 350-352 ‘Au temps de Lacombe Lucien’, Elle, 11 February 1974, pp. 6-7 Morel, Jean-Pierre, ‘Une dissertation de Modiano’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 18 November 1982, pp. 37-38 Paris (Fixot, 1987) ‘Les livres de Julien Gracq…’ in Qui vive? Autour de Julien Gracq (Corti, 1989), pp. 165-167 Le Fils de Gascogne [film for television with Pascal Aubier], France 2, 25 May 1995 Paris Tendresse [photographs by Brassaï, text by Modiano] (Éditions Hoëbeke, 1990) Elle s’appelait Françoise, with Catherine Deneuve (Canal Plus, 1996) Extract from Dora Bruder in Lire, May 1997, pp. 86-89 ‘La Caméra légère’, Libération, 13 March 1999, available http://www.liberation.fr Accessed 28 June 2004

(vi) Interviews Anon., ‘Le Club Grand Livre du Mois reçoit Patrick Modiano’, available http://www.grandlivredumois.com Accessed 28 June 2004 Anon., ‘Rencontre avec Patrick Modiano à l’occasion de la parution de La Petite Bijou’, available http://www.gallimard.fr Accessed 28 June 2004 Bonnaud, Frédéric, ‘Entretien Catherine Deneuve et Patrick Modiano’, available http://www.ecrannoir.fr/deneuve/inrock.htm Accessed 28 June 2004 Bosselet, Dominique, ‘Patrick Modiano: “J’ai un petit talent d’amateur”’, France-Soir, 12 September 1975, p. 7 Brunn, Julien, ‘Patrick Modiano: Exilé de quelque chose’, Libération, 22 September 1975, p. 10

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Cau, Jean, ‘Patrick Modiano marié, un enfant et un livret de famille de 180 pages’, Paris-Match, 12 August 1977, p. 13 Chapsal, Madeleine, ‘10 ans après: Patrick Modiano’, Lire, September 1985, pp. 56-58, 61-62 Ducout, Françoise, ‘Patrick Modiano: on est toujours prisonnier de son temps’, Elle, 22 September 1986, p. 47 Duranteau, Josane, ‘L’Obsession de l’anti-héros’, Le Monde, 11 November 1972, p. 13 Ézine, Jean-Louis, ‘Sur la sellette: Patrick Modiano ou le passé antérieur’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 6-12 October 1975, p. 5 Garcin, Jérôme, ‘Une jeunesse’, Le Nouvel observateur, 28 January 1999, available http://www. nouvelobs.com Accessed 28 June 2004 Gaudemar, Antoine de, ‘Modiano, souvenir écrin’, Libération, 26 April 2001, pp. i-iii Geille, Annick, ‘Patrick Modiano m’intimide!’, Playboy, May 1991, pp. 64-66, 127-128, 130 Jamet, Dominique, ‘Patrick Modiano s’explique’, Lire, October 1975, pp. 23-36 Jaudel, Françoise, ‘Quête d’identité’, L’Arche, October-November 1972, p. 61 Josselin, Jean-François, ‘Mondo Modiano’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 8-14 January 1988, pp. 87-88 ‘Patrick tel qu’en Patoche’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 8-14 January 1988, p. 89 Leclère, Marie-Françoise, ‘Il a vingt-deux ans et il méritait le Goncourt’, Elle, 8 December 1969, p. 139 Libermann, Jean, ‘Patrick Modiano: Lacombe Lucien n’est pas le portrait du fascisme mais celui de sa piétaille’, Presse Nouvelle Hebdo, 8 March 1974, pp. 3, 9 Louis, Judith, ‘Entretien avec Patrick Modiano’, Synopsis, NovemberDecember 2000, available http://www.6nop6.com/revue/ecriture /modiano.php3 Accessed 28 June 2004 M., J.-C., ‘Patrick Modiano: ‘“Non, je ne suis pas un auteur rétro”’, Le Journal du dimanche, 26 May 1974, p. 11 Malka, Victor, ‘Patrick Modiano: un homme sur du sable mouvant’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 30 October-5 November 1972, p. 2 Maury, Pierre, ‘Patrick Modiano: travaux de déblaiement’, Magazine littéraire, September 1992, pp. 100-104 Montalbetti, Jean, ‘La Haine des professeurs: instantané Patrick Modiano’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 13 June 1968, p. 2

Bibliography

323

‘Patrick Modiano ou l’esprit de fuite’, Magazine littéraire, November 1969, pp. 42-43 Montaudon, Dominique, ‘Patrick Modiano: le plus agréable c’est la rêverie’, Quoi lire?, March 1989, pp. 15-18 Pivot, Bernard, ‘Demi-juif, Patrick Modiano affirme: “Céline était un véritable écrivain juif”’, Le Figaro littéraire, 29 April 1968, p. 16 Pudlowski, Gilles, ‘Modiano le magnifique’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 12-19 February 1981, p. 28 Rambures, Jean-Louis de, ‘Apprendre à mentir’, in Comment travaillent les écrivains (Paris: Flammarion, 1978), pp. 126-131 Rolin, Gabrielle, ‘Patrick Modiano: le dernier enfant du siècle’, Le Point, 3-9 January 1983, pp. 63-64 Rondeau, Daniel, ‘Des Sixties au Goncourt’, Libération, 30 September 1982, p. 23 Savigneau, Josyane, ‘Les chemins de leur carrière’, Le Monde, 4 January 1985, pp. 11, 13 ‘Une conversation avec Patrick Modiano’, Le Monde, 30 June 2001, p. 32 Texier, Jean-C., ‘Rencontre avec un jeune romancier: Patrick Modiano’, La Croix, 9-10 November 1969, p. 8 Vidal, Laurence, ‘Modiano: le passé recomposé’, Le Figaro littéraire, 4 January 1996, p. 3

(vii) Television Appearances Cited ‘François Mitterand et ses invités’, Apostrophes, Antenne 2, 15 September 1978 ‘La qualité française’, Apostrophes, Antenne 2, 26 November 1982 ‘Destins’, Ex-Libris, TF1, 18 January 1996 ‘Actualité littéraire’, Le cercle de minuit, France 2, 23 January 1996 ‘Patrick Modiano’, Un siècle d’écrivains, France 3, 7 February 1996 ‘Les incontournables’, Le cercle de minuit, France 2, 24 February 1999

2: Critical Works on Modiano Adam, Jean-Michel, ‘Mémoire et fiction dans Remise de peine de Modiano’, in Autofictions et Cie, ed. by Serge Doubrovsky, Jacques Lecarme and Philippe Lejeune, RITM, 6 (1993), pp. 43-57 Alhau, Max, ‘Patrick Modiano: Vestiaire de l’enfance’, La Nouvelle Revue Française (June 1989), 102-103

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Almira, Jacques, ‘Toute vie pourrait être sujet de roman’, La Revue des deux mondes (June 1991), 153-157 Amette, Jacques-Pierre, ‘Voyage de noces’, Le Point, 23-29 April 1990, pp. 20-21 Assouline, Pierre, ‘Modiano, lieux de mémoire’, Lire, May 1990, pp. 34-46 Audiard, Michel, ‘Le Bal des anciens’, Le Figaro, 19 October 1982, p. 29 Audouard, Antoine, ‘Modiano: Il n’y a pas beaucoup d’écrivains de sa hauteur…’, Le Figaro Magazine, 20 September 1986, pp. 52-53 Avni, Ora, ‘Narrative subject, historic subject: ‘Shoah’ and La Place de l’étoile’, Poetics Today, 12, 3 (Fall 1991), 495-516 D’un passé l’autre: aux portes de l’histoire avec Patrick Modiano (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1997) Bach, Raymond, ‘Recurring Characters in Modiano’s Œuvre’, in Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/Stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, ed. by Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 165-179 Barbour, Sarah, ‘Quartier perdu’, in After the Age of Suspicion: the French Novel Today, ed. by Charles A. Porter, Yale French Studies [special edition] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 264-283 Baroche, Christiane, ‘La Braise sous la cendre’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 16 May 1977, p. 2 ‘Un Ballet cruel et joyeux, Les Boulevards de ceinture’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1 November 1972, pp. 6-7 Barrot, Ollivier, Pages pour Modiano (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 1999) Bedner, Jules (ed.), Patrick Modiano (Amsterdam/Atanta: Rodopi, 1993) ‘Modiano ou l’identité introuvable’, Rapports: Het Franse Boek, 2 (1988), 49-67 ‘Enfants du hasard et de nulle part: Sur les narrateurs de Patrick Modiano’, in Fathers and Mothers in Literature, ed. by Henk Hillenaar and Walter Schonau (Amsterdam/Atlanta, Rodopi, 1994), pp. 247-258 Berl, Emmanuel, ‘Modiano et la ronde des elfes. La Ronde de nuit’, Contrepoint, 2 (October 1970), 175-177 Bersani, Jacques, ‘Patrick Modiano, agent double’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 298 (November 1977), 78-84 Bertrand, Didier, ‘Patrick Modiano, d’hier et d’aujourd’hui’, Romance Notes, 37, 2 (Winter 1997), 217-226

Bibliography

325

Blot, Jean, ‘Villa triste’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 297 (December 1975), 100-102 Boisdeffre, Pierre de, ‘Les Boulevards de ceinture’, La Revue des deux mondes (October-December 1972), 666-668 ‘Villa triste’, La Nouvelle Revue des deux mondes (October-December 1975), 413-416 L’Île aux Livres: Littérature et critique (Paris: Seghers, 1980), pp. 241-247 Bologne, Jean-Claude ‘Le nouveau piège de Modiano’, Magazine littéraire, April 1989, p. 102 Bonnefoy, Claude, ‘Un lieu et des racines’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 8 September 1975, p. 5 ‘Rue des Boutiques obscures’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 20 October 1978, p. 23 Bony, Alain, ‘Suite en blanc’, Critique, 42 (1986), 653-667 Bourniquel, Camille, ‘La Ronde de nuit: Modiano’, Esprit, 37, 12 (December 1969), 930-931 ‘Les Boulevards de ceinture’, Esprit, 40, 12 (December 1972), 972973 Boussard, Françoise, ‘Villa triste de Modiano: Un roman de la nostalgie pure’, L’École des Lettres, Revue pédagogique du second cycle (April 1987), 39-44 Boyarin, Jonathan, ‘Europe’s Indian, America’s Jew: Modiano and Vizenor’, Boundary, II, 19, 3 (Fall 1992), 197-222 Braudeau, Michel, ‘La magie Modiano’, Le Monde des Livres, 20 April 1990, p. 18 ‘Le piéton de Paris’, Le Monde des Livres, 5 April 1991, p. 16 ‘Avantage Nimier’, Le Monde des Livres, 11 September 1992, p. 24 Brenner, Jacques, Histoire de la littérature française de 1940 à nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1978), pp. 537-543 ‘Patrick Modiano’, in Mon histoire de la littérature française contemporaine (Paris: Grasset, 1987), pp. 280-281 Bridges, Victoria, ‘Modiano, Quartier perdu’, in After the Age of Suspicion: the French Novel Today, ed. by Charles A. Porter, Yale French Studies [special edition] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 259-263 Brincourt, André, ‘Du plus loin de l’oubli’, Le Figaro littéraire, 4 January 1996, p. 3 Brison, Danièle, ‘Histoire d’une disparition’, Magazine littéraire, May 1997, pp. 76-77

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Brouwer, Anneke, ‘L’Emploi des temps verbaux chez Patrick Modiano’, Rapports: Het Franse Boek, 2 (1988), 68-73 Burgelin, Claude, ‘Voyages en arrière-pays: littérature et mémoire aujourd’hui’, L’Inactuel, No. 1 (Autumn 1998), 60-61 Buss, Robin, ‘Fresh, familiar trail’, Times Literary Supplement, 9-15 November 1990, p. 1215 Carleton, Joyce, ‘Livret de famille’, French Review, 52 (1978/1979), 673 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine, Pour une psychanalyse de l’art et de la créativité (Paris: Payot, 1971), pp. 217-255 Chernetsky, Vitaly, ‘Travels through Heterotopia: The Textual Realms of Patrick Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques obscures and Mikhail Kuraev’s Kapitan Dikshtein’, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 22, 2 (Summer 1998), 253-271 Cima, Denise, Étude sur Patrick Modiano: La Ronde de nuit (Paris: Ellipses, 2000) Clerval, Alain, ‘Patrick Modiano: Dimanches d’août’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 407 (December 1986), 89-90 Cooke, Dervila, ‘“Créer le silence avec des mots”: Writing silence in Chien de printemps by Patrick Modiano’, PAGES, 5 (1998), 43-51 [In-house publication, University College Dublin] ‘Hollow Imprints: History, Literature, and the Biographical in Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 3, 2 (2004), 131-145 ‘Paris Tendresse by Modiano (with Photographs by Brassaï): a Photobiographical Creation’, Australian Journal of French Studies (forthcoming 2005) Coppermann, Annie, ‘Plus Modiano que jamais’, Les Échos sur CDRom, 4 January 1996 ‘Promenade nostalgique au cinéma’, Les Échos sur CD-Rom, 13 May 1996 ‘Trois fantômes, discrets et émouvants’, Les Échos sur CD-Rom, 8 February 1999 ‘Une adolescente d’outre-nuit et brouillard’, Les Échos sur CD-Rom, 4 April 1997 Côté, Paul Raymond, ‘Aux Rives du Lethé: mnémosyne et la quête des origines chez Patrick Modiano’, Symposium (Spring 1991), 315328 ‘Ellipse et réduplication: l’obsession du vide chez Patrick Modiano’, Romanic Review, 85, 1 (January 1994), 143-156

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Cournot, Michel, ‘Les passés du futur’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 1 September 1975, p. 55 Coward, David, ‘What might have been’, Times Literary Supplement, 5-11 May 1989, p. 482 Czarny, Norbert, ‘Un livre pour rien’, Les Nouveaux Cahiers, 64 (Spring 1981), 60-62 ‘Patrick Modiano: Dimanches d’août’, Les Nouveaux Cahiers, 86 (Autumn 1986), 76-77 ‘Memory Lane, de Patrick Modiano’, L’Ecole des Lettres II, 7 (January 1990), 13-20 ‘La trace douloureuse: l’Occupation dans Les Boulevards de ceinture, Livret de famille et Remise de peine, de Modiano’, L’École des Lettres II, 14 (July 1991), 171-178 Dandrieu, Laurent, ‘Du plus loin de l’oubli, de Patrick Modiano’, Spectacle du Monde, February 1996, p. 16 Danon-Boileau, Laurent, ‘Quartier perdu’, Lu, February 1986, p. 64 Daprini, Pierre, ‘Patrick Modiano: le temps de l’Occupation’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 26, 2 (May-August 1989), 194205 Davis, Colin, ‘Disenchanted Places: Patrick Modiano’s Quartier perdu and Recent French Fiction’, in Il senso del nonsenso, Scritti in memoria di Lynn Salkin Sbiroli, ed. by M.S. Moretti, M.R.Cappelletti and O. Martinez (Naples: Edizione Scientifiche Italiane, 1995), pp. 667-676 Delbourg, Patrice, ‘Dans le saint des cintres’, Les Nouvelles, 8-14 December 1983, p. 36 Denoël, Francis, ‘Patrick Modiano, Du plus loin de l’oubli’, Études, 385, 3 (September 1996), 267 Dickstein, Juliette, ‘Inventing French-Jewish Memory. The Legacy of the Occupation in the Works of Patrick Modiano’, in Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/Stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, ed. by Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 145-163 Dis, Claude, ‘Quartier perdu’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 387 (April 1985), 82-84 Dormann, Geneviève, ‘Modiano apprivoisé’, Le Point, 16 October 1972, p. 100 Doucey, Bruno, La Ronde de nuit: Modiano (Paris: Hatier, 1992) Duchêne, Anne, ‘A sleek threnody’, Times Literary Supplement, 2 August 1985, p. 856

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Duhamel, Betty, ‘Les Boulevards de ceinture’, Magazine littéraire, January 1973, pp. 36-37 ‘Villa triste’, Magazine littéraire, October 1975, p. 47 Dupont, Jean-François, ‘Patrick Modiano: de l’incertain’, Le Français dans le monde (January 1997), 35-42 Duranteau, Josane, ‘Un début exceptionnel: La Place de l’étoile de Patrick Modiano’, Le Monde, 11 May 1968, p. ii Étienne, Marie, ‘Les bords de Marne: Dimanches d’août’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 16 September 1986, p. 8 Ewert, Jeanne C., ‘Lost in the Hermeneutic Funhouse: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Detective’, in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. by Ronald G. Walker and June M. Frazer (Macomb: Western Illinois Press, 1990), pp. 166-173 Ézine, Jean-Louis, ‘Modiano fils de personne’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 28 April 1977, p. 5 ‘Modiano: Les rues meurent aussi’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 20 October 1978, p. 5 ‘Un contemporain capital’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 12 February 1981, p. 29 ‘De si braves garçons’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 7 October 1982, pp. 27-28 ‘La Légende Modiano’, Le Nouvel Observateur [international edition], 4-10 April 1991, pp. 65-67 ‘Patrick Modiano : l’homme du cadastre’, Magazine littéraire, May 1995, pp. 63-65 Fauconnier, Bernard, ‘Des inconnues’, Magazine littéraire, April 1999, pp. 76-77 Ferrara, Lina, ‘Quartier perdu’, French Review, 59 (1985/1986), 489-490 Flower, John, ‘A Novelist for the Millenium? Patrick Modiano and Des inconnues’, French Cultural Studies, 11, 2 (June 2000), 269-282 Fornasiero, F.J., ‘From Paris to the Orient: the Nervalian Concept of Itinerary in the Works of Patrick Modiano’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 31, 2 (1994), 215-227 Galey, Matthieu, ‘Les Boulevards de ceinture’, Réalités, November 1972, p. 17 ‘Roman: Modiano, l’Hoffman des villes’, L’Express, 7 February 1981, pp. 30-31 Garcin, Jérôme, ‘Souvenirs de jeunesse’, L’Express, 11-17 January 1996, p. 58

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‘Un roman de Patrick Modiano: “La Petite Bijou, c’est moi…”’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 26 April-2 May 2001, p. 132 Gascoigne, David, Review of Alan Morris’s 1996 Patrick Modiano, French Studies, 52 (1998), 237-238 Gaudemar, Antoine de, ‘Une inépuisable nostalgie’, Magazine littéraire, February 1983, p. 65 ‘Modiano le prisonnier’, Libération, 7 January 1988, p. 34 ‘Modiano, suite anglaise’, Libération, 11 January 1996, p. 4 Gellings, Paul, ‘Souvenirs de Nerval’, Rapports: Het Franse Boek, 61 (1991), 173-174 Poésie et mythe dans l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano: le fardeau du nomade (Paris/Caen: Minard, 2000) Golsan, Joseph, ‘Collaboration, Alienation, and the Crisis of Identity in the Film and Fiction of Patrick Modiano’, in Film and Literature: A Comparative Approach to Adaptation, ed. by Wendell Aycock and Michael Schoenecke (Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 1988), pp. 107-121 ‘Author, Identity and the Voice of History in Patrick Modiano’s La Ronde de nuit and Les Boulevards de ceinture’, Romance Notes, 31, 3 (Spring 1991), 187-196 Gorrara, Claire, ‘Tracking Down the Past: The Detective as Historian in Texts by Patrick Modiano and Didier Daeninckx’, in Crime Scenes: Detective Narratives in European Culture since 1945, ed. by Anne Mullen and Emer O’ Beirne (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 281-290 Goury, Gérard Humbert, ‘Livret de famille’, Magazine littéraire, July-August 1977, p. 50 Grainville, Patrick, ‘Trois petits fours et puis s’en vont’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 23 November 1978, pp. 3-4 ‘Patrick Modiano: retour aux sources’, Le Figaro littéraire, 1 February 1988, p. 7 Guicharnaud, Jacques, ‘De la rive gauche à l’au-delà de la Concorde: Remarques sur la topographie parisienne de Patrick Modiano’, in Dilemmes du roman: Essays in Honor of Georges May, ed. by Catherine Lafarge (Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1990), pp. 341-352 Guillot, Gérard, ‘Modiano, le jeune Vermeer du roman’, Le Figaro, 21 November 1978, p. 32 Guyot-Bender, Martine, ‘Making Sense of Narrative Ambiguity,’ in Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/Stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, ed. by Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 17-36

330

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Mémoire en dérive: Poétique et politique de l’ambiguïté chez Patrick Modiano (Paris/Caen: Minard, coll. Archives des lettres modernes, 1999) Hester, Ralph M., ‘Les Boulevards de ceinture’, French Review, 47 (1973/1974), 668-669 Irving, Nicole, ‘Ghosts written’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 October 1986, pp. 11-12 Josselin, Jean-François, ‘Méfiez-vous du Modiano qui dort’, Le Nouvel Observateur [international edition], 22-28 August 1986, pp. 56-57 ‘Patrick tel qu’en Patoche’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 8-14 January 1988, p. 89 ‘Modiano Cantabile’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 4-10 January 1996, p. 56 Joye, Jean-Claude, ‘Typicité modianienne de Quartier Perdu’, in Littérature immédiate: cinq études sur Jeanne Bourin, Julien Green, Patrick Modiano, Yves Navarre, Françoise Sagan (Bern: Peter Lang, 1989), pp. 89-116 ‘À propos de Fleurs de ruine’, in Patrick Modiano, ed. by Jules Bedner (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 73-84 Kaminskas, Jurate D., ‘L’univers trouble de Patrick Modiano et de Paul Auster: une étude de Vestiaire de l’enfance et de La Musique du hasard’, Tangence, 38 (December 1992), 42-54 ‘Les structures de l’échange dans Fleurs de ruine de Patrick Modiano’, Romance Notes, 33, 3 (Spring 1993), 239-248 ‘Quête/enquête – à la recherche du genre: Voyage de noces de Patrick Modiano’, French Review, 66, 6 (May 1993), 932-940 ‘Modiano’s Female Trilogy: Voyage de noces, Fleurs de ruine, Un cirque passe’, in Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/Stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, ed. by Martine GuyotBender and William VanderWolk (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 89-101 Kanters, Robert, ‘Le passé de Modiano’, Le Figaro littéraire, 13 September 1975, pp. 13-14 ‘Des hommes aux semelles de vent’, Le Figaro littéraire, 7 May 1977, p. 22 Kawakami, Akané, A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000) Khalifa, Samuel, ‘The Mirror of Memory: Patrick Modiano’s La Place de l’étoile and Dora Bruder’, The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, ed. by Andrew Leak and George Paizis

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(Houndmills, England/New York: Macmillan-St. Martins, 2000), pp. 159-173 Labre, Chantal, ‘Livret de famille’, Esprit, n.s., 1, 7-8 (July-August 1977), 115-117 Lacoche, Philippe, ‘Voyage au bout d’un remords’, Magazine littéraire, July-August 1990, p. 76 ‘Modiano, le detective meurtri’, Magazine littéraire, May 1991, pp. 78-79 Lambron, Marc, ‘Modiano et la mélancolie française’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 340 (May 1981), 90-94 Laurent, Thierry, L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano: une autofiction (Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1997) Lavoignat, Jean-Pierre, ‘Patrice Leconte, Patrick Modiano’, Studio Magazine, April 1994, pp. 114-117 Lebrun, Jean-Claude, ‘Au fil des pages: le mariage du flou et du net’, L’Humanité, 17 May 2001, available http://www.humanite. fr Accessed 28 June 2004 Lecarme, Jacques, ‘L’Orient perdu ou les variations sur une origine’, in Littératures des immigrations 1: Un espace littéraire émergent ed. by Charles Bonn (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1995), pp. 191-197 Lecaudé, Jean-Marc, ‘Angoisse et recherche d’identité chez Patrick Modiano’, New Zealand Journal of French Studies, 16, 1 (May 1995), 30-45 Lepape, Pierre, ‘La disparition’, Le Monde des Livres, 4 April 1997, p. 2 ‘Un petit pan de manteau jaune’, Le Monde des Livres, 4 May 2001, p. 2 Lesnnes, Corine, ‘La mémoire en fuite’, Le Monde des Livres, 24 June 1995, p. 7 Leuwers, Daniel, ‘Villa triste’, Europe (January-February 1976), 255256 Lévi-Valensi, Jacqueline and Madeleine Valette-Fondo, ‘Le romanesque de l’absurde en France après 1960 – essai de définition à partir de quelques exemples’, in L’Intersiècle 1: Absurde et renouveaux romanesques 1960-1980, ed. by Jean Bessière (Paris: Minard, 1986), pp. 55-106 Long, Joseph, ‘Patrick Modiano, Rue des Boutiques obscures’, in Écritures autobiographiques et romanesques, ed. by Catherine Henry (Caen/ Dublin/St. Andrews: 1992), pp. 47-63 [in-house University College Dublin publication]

332

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Magnan, Jean-Marie, ‘Ténèbres maléfiques’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1 November 1969, pp. 6-7 ‘Un apatride nommé Modiano’, Sud, 19 (1976), 120-131 ‘Les Revenants de nulle part’, Sud, 28/29 (1979), 181-186 Mambrino, Jean, ‘Rue des Boutiques obscures’, Études, 349 (JulyDecember 1978), 697 Marrisel, André, ‘Rue des Boutiques obscures’, Esprit, 23/24 (November-December 1978), 310-311 Marsan, Hugo, ‘Appel à témoins’, Le Monde des Livres, 26 November 1993, p. 1 Martin, Isabelle, ‘Retour au pays natal’, Le Temps, 5 May 2001, available http://www.letemps.ch Accessed 28 June 2004 Martinoir, Francine Ninane de, ‘Rue des Boutiques obscures’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, 310 (November 1978), 105-108 ‘Modiano, Villa triste’, L’École des Lettres, Revue pédagogique du second cycle, 76, 1 (September 1984), 7-18 ‘Modiano, Villa triste (II)’, L’École des Lettres, Revue pédagogique du second cycle, 76, 2 (October 1984), 3-13 ‘Sur le cadastre de la fiction’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1 February 1985, p. 5 Maulpoix, J.M., ‘Sous une lumière nostalgique et voilée’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1 March 1981, p. 5 Maury, Pierre, ‘Patrick Modiano: Du plus loin de l’oubli’, Magazine littéraire, January 1996, p. 61 McKenna, Andrew J., ‘Rue des Boutiques obscures’, French Review, 53 (1979/1980), 317-318 Meyer, Nathalie, ‘La Petite Bijou’, available http://axelibre.org /litterature.php?var=modiano Accessed 28 June 2004 Michael, Colette, ‘Dora Bruder’, French Review, 72, 6 (May 1999), 1153-1154 Mitchell, Constantina Thalia, and Paul Raymond Côté, Shaping the Novel: Textual Interplay in the Fiction of Malraux, Hébert and Modiano (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996) Montaudon, Dominique, ‘Patrick Modiano: Le plus agréable c’est la rêverie’, Quoi Lire, March 1989, pp. 15-18 Montfrans, Manet van, ‘Rêveries d’un riverain: la topographie parisienne de Patrick Modiano’, in Patrick Modiano, ed. by Jules Bedner (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 85-101 Morris, Alan, ‘Patrick Modiano’ in Beyond the Nouveau Roman: Essays on the Contemporary French Novel, ed. by Michael Tilby (New York: Berg, 1990), pp. 177-200

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Collaboration and Resistance Reviewed: Writers and the ‘mode rétro’ in post-Gaullist France (New York/Oxford: Berg, 1992) Patrick Modiano (Oxford: Berg, 1996) ‘A Photographic Memory: Ambiguity in Chien de printemps’, in Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/Stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, ed. by Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 73-87 ‘A Child in Time: Patrick Modiano and the Memory of the Occupation’, in European Memories of the Second World War, ed. by Helmut Peitsch, Charles Burdett, and Claire Gorrara (New York: Berghahn, 1999) pp. 230-237 Patrick Modiano (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000) Nathaniel, Philippe, ‘Remise de peine’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 424 (May 1988), 99-100 Naudin, Marie, ‘Vestiaire de l’enfance’, French Review, 63 (1989/1990), 581-582 ‘Le Paris de Patrick Modiano’, Revue Francophone de Louisiane, 4, 1 (Spring 1989), 24-29 Nettelbeck, Colin and Penelope Hueston, [attributed to ‘Patrick O’Modian’], ‘Un soir ou un autre’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 21, 2 (1984), 224 ‘Anthology as Art: Patrick Modiano’s Livret de famille’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 21, 2 (1984), 213-223 Patrick Modiano: pièces d’identité. Écrire l’entretemps (Paris: Minard, coll. Archives des lettres modernes, 1986) Neumann, Guy, ‘Patrick Modiano: La Ronde de nuit, ou le naufrage de l’histoire’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 26, 3 (1989), 289298 ‘“Aux carrefours de la vie”: Le chien dans les romans de Patrick Modiano’, Australian Journal of French Studies, 36, 2 (May-August 1999), 246-264 Noguez, Dominique, ‘La Ronde de nuit’, La Nouvelle Revue Française, No. 35 (1970), 294-295 Nourissier, François, ‘Modiano: souvenir d’en France, souvenir d’enfance’, Le Point, 11 January 1988, pp. 72-73 O’Keefe, Charles, ‘Patrick Modiano, La Place de l’étoile: Why Name a Narrator Raphaël Schlemilovitch?’, Literary Onomastic Studies, 15 (1988), pp. 67-74 Ollivier, Eric, ‘Livret de famille’, Réalités, July 1977, p. 8 Otchakovsky-Laurens, Paul, ‘Des personnages sans rôle’, La Quinzaine littéraire, 1 October 1975, pp. 3-5

334

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Parrochia, Daniel, Ontologie fantôme: essai sur l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano (Fougères: Encre Marine, 1996) Payot, Marianne, ‘Chien de printemps’, Lire, October 1993, p. 130 Pécheur, Jacques, ‘De si braves garçons’, Le Français dans le monde, No. 175 (February-March 1983), 9 ‘A la recherche de... Patrick Modiano: Dimanches d’août’, Le Français dans le monde, No. 205 (November-December 1986), 18 ‘Patrick Modiano: Du plus loin de l’oubli’, Le Français dans le monde, No. 280 (April 1996), 10 Perramond, Daniel B., ‘Livret de famille (1977) de Patrick Modiano: grandeur et misère de la mémoire’, French Review, 66, 1 (1992), 6976 Petit, Jacques, ‘Villa triste’, Le Français dans le monde, No. 119 (February-March 1976), 55-57 ‘Rue des Boutiques obscures’, Le Français dans le monde, No. 142 (January 1979), 58-59 Petit, Susan, ‘Remise de peine’, French Review, 63, 2 (December 1989), 408-409 Pire, Michel, ‘Les Boulevards de ceinture’, La Revue nouvelle, 56 (1972), 511-514 Poirot-Delpech, Bertrand, ‘Un diamant gros comme le Négresco’, Le Monde, 29 August 1986, pp. 11, 14 ‘Remise de peine de Patrick Modiano, L’Invitation de Claude Simon: deux façons d’envoûter’, Le Monde des Livres, 15 January 1988, p. 13 ‘Charmes de l’imprécision’, Le Monde des Livres, 10 February 1989, p. 15 Porter, Charles, ‘Dimanches d’août’, French Review, 60 (19861987), 910-911 Poulet, Robert, ‘Une jeunesse’, Réalités, April 1981, pp. 96-97 ‘De si braves garçons’, Réalités, December 1982, p. 105 Prince, Gerald, ‘Re-Membering Modiano: Or, Something Happened’, SubStance, 15 (1986), 35-43 Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), pp. 121-132, 147-148 Pudlowski, Gilles, ‘Tout Modiano en 60 pages’, Nouvelles littéraires, 19 November 1981, p. 48 Rachlin, Nathalie, ‘The Modiano Syndrome: 1968-1997’, in Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/Stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, ed. by Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk (New York: Peter Lang, 1998) pp. 121-136

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Rouart, Jean-Marie, ‘Occupation’, Le Figaro littéraire, 4 January 1996, p. 1 Roux, Baptiste, Figures de l’Occupation dans l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano (Paris: l’Harmattan, 1999) Salaün, Franck, ‘La Suisse du cœur’, in Patrick Modiano, ed. by Jules Bedner (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993), pp. 15-42 Salgues, Yves, ‘Patrick Modiano, magicien de la mémoire’, Jours de France, 13 March 1989, pp. 36-37 Savigneau, Josyane, ‘ “Je” est une inconnue’, Le Monde des Livres, 12 February 1999, p. 1 Scherman, Timothy H., ‘Translating from Memory: Patrick Modiano in Postmodern Context’, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, 16, 2 (Summer 1992), 289-303 Sénart, Philippe, ‘La Polka’, La Nouvelle Revue des deux mondes (July-September 1974), 180-181 Smadja, Robert, ‘La Solitude dans Livret de famille de Modiano et l’Invention de la solitude d’Auster’, in Solitudes: Ecritures et Représentation, ed. by André Siganos (Grenoble: ELLUG, 1995), pp. 137-143 Steele, Stephen, ‘MODIANOBIS’, French Studies Bulletin, 54 (Spring 1992), 12-14 Stil, André, ‘La Ronde de nuit’, L’Humanité, 16 October 1969, p. 8 Sturrock, John, ‘Past Possibilities’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 May 1981, p. 506 Telford, Kevin, ‘Identity is a Verb: Re-Righting the Self in the Novels of Patrick Modiano’, French Forum, 19, 3 (September 1994), 347-356 Thiher, Allen, ‘De si braves garçons’, French Review, 57 (19831984), 737-738 Tritsmans, Bruno, ‘Fait divers et poétique du secret dans Voyage de noces de P. Modiano’, in Écrire l’insignifiant: dix études sur le fait divers dans le roman contemporain’, ed. by Paul Pelckmans and Bruno Tritsmans (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 89-100 VanderWolk, William, Rewriting the Past: Memory, History, and Narration in the Novels of Patrick Modiano (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 1997) Vercaemer, Philippe, ‘Ville et mémoire chez Modiano: Quartier perdu’, Eidôlon, 27 (February 1986), 209-222 Vercier, Bruno and Jacques Lecarme, La Littérature en France depuis 1968 (Paris: Bordas, 1982), pp. 293-299

336

Present Pasts

Vial, Charles, ‘Modiano trahi’, Le Monde des Livres, 27 July 1987, p. 15 Wardi, Charlotte, ‘Mémoire et écriture dans l’œuvre de Modiano’, Les Nouveaux Cahiers, 80 (Spring 1985), 40-48 Warehime, Marja, ‘Originality and Narrative Nostalgia: Shadows in Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques obscures’, French Forum, 12 (1987), 335-345 ‘Returning to the Scene of the Crime: Rue des Boutiques obscures, Quartier perdu, Dimanches d’août, and Fleurs de ruine’, in Paradigms of Memory: The Occupation and Other Hi/Stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, ed. by Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk (New York: Peter Lang, 1998), pp. 37-53 ‘Paris and the Autobiography of a Flâneur: Patrick Modiano and Annie Ernaux’, French Forum, 25, 1 (January 2000), 97-113 Wolfromm, Jean-Didier, ‘Le temps retrouvé’, Magazine littéraire, February 1985, pp. 68-69 Wright, Katheryn, ‘Patrick Modiano’, in The Contemporary Novel in France, ed. by William Thompson, (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), pp. 264-278

3: Other Critical Texts and Literary Comparators Angot, Christine, Sujet Angot (Paris: Fayard, coll. Pocket, 2000) [first published 1998] Aragon, Louis, Le Mentir-vrai (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1980) [title story published 1964] Audiard, Jacques, ‘L’Éloge de l’imposture’, available www.soirillustre.be/kasso.html Accessed 10 December 2001 Auster, Paul, The New York Trilogy (London/Boston: Faber, 1987) Assouline, Pierre, Henri Cartier-Bresson. L’Œil du siècle (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1999) Azéma, Jean-Pierre, De Munich à la Libération: 1938-44 (Paris: Seuil, 1979) Balzac, Honoré, La Cousine Bette (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, no. 138, 1972) [first published 1847] Barnes, Julian, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Picador, 1984) Barthes, Roland, Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1973) Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, coll. Écrivains de toujours, 1975) La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie (Paris: Seuil, 1980)

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‘La mort de l’auteur’ in Essais critiques IV: le bruissement de la langue (Paris: Seuil, 1984), pp. 61-67. Le Texte et l’image (Paris: Paris Musées, 1986) Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Œuvres Complètes, II, ed. by Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 1994) Baudelaire, Charles, ‘Le public moderne et la photographie’, Salon de 1859, Critique d’art, suivi de Critique musicale, ed. by Claude Pichois and Claire Brunet (Paris, Gallimard, coll. Folio, 1992), pp. 274-279 Bellemin-Noël, Jean, Vers l’inconscient du texte (Paris: PUF, 1979) Bellos, David, Georges Perec, une vie dans les mots (Paris: Seuil, 1994) Booth, Wayne, Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1961) Bree, Germaine, Narcissus Absconditus: The Problemaic Art of Autobiography in Contemporary France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) Brasseur, Roland, Intactes et minuscules: notes pour ‘Je me souviens’ de Georges Perec [self-published in January 1998] Je me souviens de ‘Je me souviens’ (Paris: Le Castor Astral, 1998) Brombert, Victor, ‘Sartre et la biographie impossible’, Cahiers de l’Association Internationale des Études Françaises, 19 (1967), pp. 155-166 Bruss, Elizabeth W., ‘L’Autobiographie considérée comme acte littéraire’, Poétique, No. 17 (1974), pp. 14-26 Buisine, Alain (ed.), Le Biographique, Revue des Sciences Humaines, No. 224 (October-December 1991) ‘Biofictions’, in Le Biographique, Revue des Sciences Humaines, No. 224 (October-December 1991) pp. 7-13 Burke, Séan, The Death and Return of the Author: Criticism and Subjectivity in Barthes, Derrida and Foucault (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992) Authorship: from Plato to the Postmodern. A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995) Byatt, A.S., Possession: A Romance (London: Chatto and Windus, 1990) Camus, Albert, L’Étranger (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio Plus, no. 10, 1996) [first published 1942] Carr, David, ‘Ricoeur on Narrative’, in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. by David Wood (London/New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 160-174

338

Present Pasts

Chambers, Ross, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1978) ‘Signposts of Fictionality: a Narratological Perspective’, Poetics Today, 11, 4 (1990), 775-804 The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) Colonna, Vincent, Essai sur la fictionnalisation de soi en littérature (unpublished doctoral dissertation, E.H.E.S.S, 1989) Culler, Jonathan, ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Reading’, in The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation, ed. by Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980) pp. 46-66 Dadoun, Roger, ‘Qui biographie?’, in Entretiens sur la biographie, ed. by Francis Marmande and Éric Marty (Paris: Séguier, 2000) pp. 43-63 Darrieussecq, Marie, ‘L’Autofiction, un genre pas sérieux’, Poétique, No. 107 (September 1996), 369-380 Defrasne, Jean, Histoire de la collaboration (Paris: PUF, 1982) Delarue, Jacques, Trafics et crimes sous l’Occupation (Paris: Fayard, 1968) Dewulf-Allène, Geneviève (ed.), Expériences du présent: témoignages et réflexions (Paris: Ellipses, 1998) Doubrovsky, Serge, Fils (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1977) Un amour de soi (Paris: Hachette, 1982) Autobiographiques: De Corneille à Sartre (Paris: PUF, 1988) Le Livre brisé (Paris: Grasset, 1989) Duras, Marguerite, L’Amant (Paris: Minuit, 1984) Dvorak, Marta (ed.), Biographical Creation/La Création biographique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1997) Eakin, Paul John, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (New Jersey/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1985) Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (New Jersey/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1992) Ernaux, Annie, La Place (Paris: Gallimard, 1983) Une femme (Paris: Gallimard, coll. Folio, no. 2121, 1989) [first published 1987]

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342

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344

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345

Index Abandonment, 58, 63, 92, 108, 114, 123, 134, 146, 170, 177, 245, 287 Accidents, 60, 114, 129, 139, 147, 151, 169, 173, 174, 241 Acting/actors, 32, 63, 92, 100, 101, 126, 141, 150, 154, 166, 170, 174, 194, 131, 310, 313 Allusiveness, 24, 60-1, 103, 104, 108, 118ff, 125, 129, 133, 153, 159, 170, 190, 199, 251, 284, 313 Adam, Jean-Michel, 132 Amnesia (see also memory: wish to forget), 107-8, 146, 161, 177, 184ff Anger, 114, 120, 125, 129, 145-6, 263 Angot, Christine, 12, 85-6 88, 213-4 Années noires, 11, 12, 23-5, 59, 69, 73, 92, 135-9, 140, 145-7, 159, 160, 177, 186-8, 191-2, 244, 274-6, 278, 306 Aragon, Louis, 16, 49, 205 Art, 13, 96, 100, 194, 208-9, 217-9, 251, 257-8, 316 Artifice, 13, 14, 15, 18, 31-2, 34, 38-9, 51, 55, 64, 70, 83, 98, 101-2, 116ff, 158, 192ff, 200, 212, 238, 305, 312, 317 Assouline, Pierre, 14, 60, 128, 132, 196, 218, 220, 253 Audiard, Jacques, 195 Authority, 13, 218, 219-20,

300 Autobiography, 11-13, 14, 28, 44, 49-89, 108, 142, 167, 168, 176, 181, 193, 308, 309, 316 autobiography effect, 19, 55-7 canon, 70-5 in biography, 204, 213, 226-7, 231, 265, 269-70, 282, 283, 286, 287 pseudo-, 155, 156 Autofiction, 11, 12, 13, 14, 50-4, 75-82, 110, 112, 126, 130, 133, 141, 160, 211, 308, 309 autofiction effect, 76-7 key practitioners, 82-89 stand-alone, 91-154 Bach, Raymond, 35, 36, 40, 41 Balzac, Honoré de, 41, 207, 307 Barnes, Julian, 222 Barthes, Roland, 12, 28, 71, 82-6, 183, 208, 211, 223, 224, 226, 242, 247, 264, 312 Baudelaire, Charles, 241, 257 Bellemin-Noël, Jean, 282 Bellos, David, 270 Bersani, Jacques, 14, 193 Billiards (see also pinball), 190, 286 Biofiction, 11, 13, 54, 209, 210ff, 232, 288, 290, 295

346

Present Pasts

biofiction effect, 216, 290, 295, 300 Biographèmes, 22, 223, 224, 246, 255 Biography, 11, 12, 13, 14, 96, 203-229, 253 in autobiography, 213 pseudo-, 211 Blondes, 19, 39, 41, 166, 173, 251 Boisdeffre, Pierre de, 205 Bony, Alain, 163, 179 Booth, Wayne, 13, 29-30 Brassaï, Georges, 253 Brasseur, Roland, 24, 270 Bree, Germaine, 83 Breton, André, 22, 74, 148, 250, 262 Brevity, 16-17, 38, 71, 190, 201, 223-5, 255, 308, 312 Brison, Danièle, 288, 301 Brombert, Victor, 213 Brothers (see also Modiano, Rudy), 17, 20, 57, 59-61, 64, 91, 93, 104, 114, 129, 134, 137, 139, 152, 160, 174, 187, 252, 253, 258, 259, 261, 262, 306 Bruss, Elizabeth, 53 Buisine, Alain, 204, 209 Bumper cars, 135-8, 179-80, 190, 191 Burke, Séan, 28 Butterflies/moths, 87, 236 Camus, Albert, 172, 307 Carleton, Joyce, 171

Carr, David, 86 Cars (see also bumper cars), 36, 38, 41, 45, 106, 124, 130, 132, 135-6, 162, 163, 169, 174 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 253 Chambers, Ross, 36 Character/characterization, 36-42, 44, 78, 165, 218, 223-5, 249, 256, 263, 295ff, 302 de-individualization, 38, 44, 64, 98 effet-personne/personnel, 37 female, 39-40, 172 recurring, 30-5, 40-2, 317 stock, 39, 43, 109 Childhood, 56, 59-61, 71, 73, 92, 104, 120, 125, 129, 131, 142, 148-9, 169-70, 172, 189, 190-1, 199, 279, 280, 306 Chronology, 73, 94, 117, 128, 130, 132, 142, 143, 159, 164 171, 184, 223, 240, 249 Cima, Denise, 186 Cinema, 19, 96, 100-1, 104, 119, 125, 126, 171-2, 194, 263, 275, 317 Circularity, 45, 111, 121, 179, 180, 242 Closure (lack of), 17, 34-5, 42, 150, 153, 179-80 Coats, 40, 56, 105, 115, 145, 163, 236, 248, 260 Cohn, Dorrit, 54, 212, 292 Coincidence, 33, 64, 96, 101,

Index

109, 141, 182-3, 300 Collaboration, 58, 140, 151, 210 Colonna, Vincent, 80, 81, 87 Colpeyn, Luisa, 63-4, 79, 137, 160, 167, 252, 270 Compassion, 115, 135, 151, 152, 287, 315 Confusion, 62, 66, 86, 112, 120, 145, 146, 151, 164, 203, 240, 315-6 Connections, 14, 24, 25, 31, 35, 169, 180, 190, 193, 201, 203, 284, 287, 306, 312, 316ff Consciousness, authorial/narratorial, 29, 42, 43, 66, 73, 78, 112, 117, 122, 143, 305, 316 other people’s (see also inside views), 15, 16, 117, 264, 295 Cooke, Dervila, 249, 250, 255 Côté, Paul Raymond (see Mitchell and Côté) Crosman, Inge, 228 Dadoun, Roger, 227, 228 Daprini, Pierre, 193 Darrieussecq, Marie, 78, 87 Davis, Colin, 162 Death, 17, 58, 59, 64, 108-9, 113, 114, 129, 152, 159, 160, 196, 255, 260, 261, 276 Demande de récit, 86, 102, 192, 201, 203, 311 Density, 13, 43, 63, 95, 122, 138, 146, 249, 264, 278, 307,

347

313 Detectives/detective novel, 13, 18, 27, 34, 35, 53, 95, 112, 140, 158, 159, 178, 181, 278, 308 Dickstein, Juliette, 12, 129, 130 Dissonance/contradictions (see also versionality), 40, 60, 64, 65-70, 102, 131, 173, 223, 225, 233, 273, 296, 314 Documents, 60, 218, 254, 291, 293, 298, 301 Dogs, 57, 107-8, 110, 124, 143, 150, 152, 153, 224, 251-2, 255, 264, 276, 292 Doubrovsky, Serge, 12, 72, 74, 76, 77-81, 86, 87, 88, 112, 213, 214, 309, 310 Dream/dreamlikeness, 15, 34, 114, 116, 117, 132, 133, 141, 142, 158ff, 169, 171, 178, 201, 236, 274, 280, 281-2, 309 Drowning, 113, 125, 147 Ducout, Françoise, 45 Duras, Marguerite, 74, 81, 243, 307 Eakin, Paul John, 83, 87 Emotion, 14, 16, 36, 42, 43, 65, 92, 101-2, 118-21, 156-7, 165, 173ff, 243-5, 274, 307 Empathy, 23, 101, 197, 206, 288, 289, 292, 298, 316 Emptiness, 18, 20, 22, 60, 104, 118-9, 169, 172ff, 178-9, 187, 192, 196-8, 206, 273,

348

Present Pasts

293 Epitext, 26, 44, 65, 290 Ernaux, Annie, 13, 207, 208, 210, 214, 223, 250, 308 Erwartungshorizont, 26 Escape (attempts at: see also fugues, prisons), 20, 21, 161, 168, 170, 185, 260, 279 Ethics, 14, 15, 134, 202-4, 220, 238, 248, 265, 271, 312 Ewert, Jeanne C., 18 Ézine, Jean-Louis, 50, 69 Factuality (see also style/tone), 13, 16, 25, 32-4, 54, 76, 79, 217, 232, 251, 255, 269, 284, 292, 300, 312, 313 Fairytale (see also magic), 83, 131, 135, Family, 20, 44, 49, 59, 97, 134 substitute, 22, 59, 92, 103, 115, 167 wife/children, 61, 94, 123, 167, 172 Fathers (see also Modiano, Albert), 20, 61-3, 104-7, 114, 115, 131, 134, 176, 235, 243-6 Female narration, 44, 45, 50, 64, 69, 141, 150 Fiction, 11-13, 25, 54, 77ff, 140, 146ff, 155-7, 159, 167-8, 175, 177, 193, 210, 222, 269, 270, 288, 308 fictionalization, 13, 14, 25, 64, 65-70, 92-3, 181, 269-71, 284-5, 302 fiction effect, 18, 32, 55,

95, 116ff, 272, 295, 300 in biography, 209 sublimation in, 17, 49, 73 First-person narration, 12, 16, 22, 29, 42, 53, 91, 111, 112, 227, 305, 315 Foreigners/foreignness, 21, 100, 105, 116, 123, 124, 146-7, 243, 259, 263, 293, 295 Forster, E.M., 38, 225 Fragmentation, 16-17, 20, 49-50, 58, 62, 69, 74, 89, 113, 128, 137, 174, 246, 287, 294, 308 Frames/framing, 254-5, 260, 264 Freud, Sigmund, 71, 72, 74, 129, 196, 314 Fugues/running away, 118, 134, 273, 281, 296, 297, 302, 313 Gaps, 13, 15, 16, 18-19, 35, 93, 96, 175, 182, 201, 203, 222, 255, 272, 315 Garages, 129, 130, 135-7, 182 Garcin, Jérôme, 51, 143 Gary, Romain, 30 Gascoigne, David, 157 Gaudemar, Antoine de, 38, 50, 51, 65, 149, 150, 152, 225, 261 Gellings, Paul, 252, 317 Genette, Gérard, 13, 26, 122, 212 Genre (see also labels), 52, 103, 130, 206, 223, 288, 317

Index

German language, 158, 182, 292 Germans/Germany, 145, 161, 177, 195, 298 Ghosts, 109-10, 113, 150, 163, 172, 195, 218, 236, 248, 251-2, 255, 266, 281, 314-5, 317 authorial/narratorial, 29, 163-4, 267 Gratton, Johnnie, 54 Grojnowski, Daniel, 249 Guibert, Hervé, 251 Guilt/guilt-feelings (see also survivor syndrome), 12, 20, 57-8, 114-5, 146, 152, 160, 170, 174, 177, 299 Guyot-Bender, Martine, 25, 95, 107, 155, 159, 232, 240, 291 Guyot-Bender, Martine and William VanderWolk, 12, 17, 30, 55 Harris, André, 178 Hill, Leslie, 74 Hirsch, Marianne, 58, 103, 137, 306 Historiography, 15, 187, 206, 208, 251, 301 History, 13, 14, 22, 23-5, 92, 251, 265, 313 Holocaust, 12, 17, 24, 49, 59, 73, 85, 95, 107-8, 109, 113, 114, 116, 119, 129, 130, 137, 139, 145, 147-8, 151-3, 177, 186, 206, 251-3, 261, 274-5, 284-5, 291, 297-8, 301

349

Hörmann, Pauline A.H., 207, 208, 221 Horses/horsewomen, 56, 118, 147, 151, 192 Hueston, Penelope (see Nettelbeck and Hueston) Identification, 22-3, 42, 62, 64, 106, 119, 145, 152, 154, 157, 158, 161, 181, 188, 204, 245, 246, 248, 252, 274, 284, 306 in biography, 204, 226, 232, 235, 259ff, 277, 311 Identity, 11, 12, 17, 20-2, 59, 82ff, 93-4, 99, 110, 126-7, 129, 144-6, 155-7, 178ff, 182, 192ff, 259ff, 264, 305, 306 disjointed, 16, 20, 50, 70, 74, 82, 114, 222 multiple, 69, 74, 82, 98, 102, 116, 155, 197 strangeness of, 20, 155, 161, 201, 313 textual, 16, 22, 78, 82-3, 91, 308 uncertain, 95, 108, 112, 113, 121-2, 141, 155, 180, 192ff, 245-6, 261 Imagination/invention, 11-13, 14, 15, 18, 25, 32-4, 36, 62, 72, 91, 124, 140, 143, 155, 156-7, 162ff, 171-3, 176, 178ff, 183-4, 198, 201, 238, 301, 306, 311, 317 in biography, 213, 218, 263, 265

350

Present Pasts

need for, 15, 49, 58, 102-3, 116, 201 Imagined author, 28-30, 46-7 Implied author, 30 Inconclusiveness, 17, 20, 24, 31, 35, 136, 180, 232, 241 Inside views, 212, 221, 222, 263, 270, 293 Intertextuality, 12, 73, 91, 113, 114, 141, 147-50, 158, 175, 180, 195, 291, 301, 307, 310 Modiano universe, 109-10, 124-5, 150, 178, 290, 300, 307 Interpreters/interpretation (see also readers), 13, 15, 18, 26, 34, 155, 181, 203-4, 232, 242, 256, 257, 265, 313ff Irony, 32, 36, 92, 159, 161, 167, 174, 180, 196 Jamet, Dominique, 49 Jauss, Hans Robert, 26 Jeanson, François, 262 Jews/Jewishness (see also Holocaust), 12, 20, 21, 57, 59, 62, 69, 73, 106-8, 114, 116, 129, 137, 139, 140, 145, 151, 177, 178, 182, 189, 193, 195-7, 235, 238, 240, 260, 261, 269, 293, 296-7 (Non)matrilinear descent, 151, 182, 194 Josselin, Jean-François, 49, 60, 127, 128, 135 Jouve, Vincent, 37 Joye, Jean-Claude, 162, 222, 315

Kafka, Franz, 58, 196 Kaminskas, Jurate D., 38, 39, 277 Karina, Anna, 123 Kawakami, Akané, 11, 18, 31, 99, 118, 162, 169, 172, 218, 249, 256, 269, 277-8 Kearney, Richard, 285, 298 Khalifa, Samuel, 193, 288, 289 Labels (see also genre), 52, 56, 75, 77, 79, 81, 87, 208, 288, 293, 308 Language, 21, 71, 79, 81-2, 92, 101, 146, 153, 164, 264, 305, 307, 309-10 Lanzmann, Claude, 284, 285, 297 Laurent, Thierry, 11, 60, 62, 76, 79, 80, 87, 120, 188, 198 Lecarme, Jacques and Éliane Lecarme-Tabone, 52, 53, 70, 88, 103, 128, 206 Le Clézio, J.M.G., 111 Lectant, 37 Lejeune, Philippe, 12, 52, 53, 55, 69, 70, 71, 77, 78, 81, 85, 143, 156, 193, 200, 206 Leonelli, Ludovic, 79 Lepape, Pierre, 147, 217, 286, 288, 301 Life-writing, 11, 80, 102, 111, 179 Light/dark, 27, 31, 56, 163, 234, 235, 257, 258, 259, 290 Lisant, 37 Lists, 60, 218, 296

Index

Love (romantic), 56, 63, 102, 119, 165, 172, 270, 278 Lu, 37 Ludism (see also irony, parody), 13, 17-18, 35, 36, 53, 65ff, 79, 95, 154, 159, 180, 283, 305, 316 lack of, 191, 204 Macé, Gérard, 207, 213, 223, 315 Madelénat, Daniel, 196, 229 Magnan, Jean-Marie, 194 Magic (see also fairytale), 162-3, 166 Marginality, 31, 58-9, 116, 144, 146-7, 218, 226, 246, 259 Marsan, Hugo, 249 Maurois, André, 13, 207, 212 Maury, Pierre, 45 McIlvanney, Siobhán, 210 Memory (see also amnesia, history, past), 11, 12, 17, 58-9, 155, 181, 256, 305, 308 collective, 12, 13, 17, 58-9, 107-8, 138-9, 146, 177, 195 personal, 17, 59-65, 103ff, 107, 125, 134, 147, 174, 177, 276, 306, 311 postmemory, 12, 17, 58-9, 103, 11, 137, 154, 189, 246, 282, 306 repression of, 15, 17, 49, 58-9, 68, 70ff, 160, 161, 168, 177-8, 186-7 screen, 75, 129, 139 unfinished, 17, 130, 150,

351

152, 154, 175, 187, 264 wish to forget, 17, 24, 107, 123, 139, 153, 156-7, 160, 161, 175, 177, 184-6, 188, 199, 261, 301 Mentir-vrai, 16, 49, 205, 284 Minogue, Valerie, 84 Mitchell, Constantina Thalia and Paul Raymond Côté, 169, 269, 272, 280, 282 Mode rétro, 23 Modiano, Albert (see also fathers), 20, 36, 39, 58, 61-3, 104-7, 114, 115, 139, 150, 158, 176, 187, 188-9, 198, 208, 231, 245, 252, 260, 261, 263-4, 270, 274, 286 presumed arrest of, 67-8 Modiano, Marie, 172 Modiano narrator, 42-5, 56-70 Modiano novel effect, 30-2, 42, 182 Modiano, Patrick (works cited without allocated sections) Accident nocturne, 17, 45 Des inconnues, 21, 40, 41, 44, 45, 52, 60, 62, 63, 69, 74, 139, 150, 151, 219, 290, 296, 316, 317 Dimanches d’août, 34, 35, 38, 41, 124, 290 ‘Dr. Weiszt’, 124 Du plus loin de l’oubli, 27, 35, 38, 56, 63, 65, 66, 163, 194, 198, 223 Emmanuel Berl, Interrogatoire, 181, 189 ‘Éphéméride’, 39, 41, 52, 56,

352

Present Pasts

57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 64, 69, 70, 131, 140, 252, 311, 313 Fleurs de ruine, 31, 32, 33, 38, 39, 40, 52, 55, 57, 58, 61, 62, 66, 68, 76, 91, 123, 124, 163, 215, 252, 254, 279, 290, 291, 309 ‘Johnny’, 124 Lacombe Lucien, 263 La Ronde de nuit, 21, 25, 27, 44, 45, 59, 60, 61, 62, 66, 186, 189, 194, 200, 216, 244, 310 ‘La Seine’, 124 Memory Lane, 41, 124 ‘Mes Vingt ans’, 40 Paris Tendresse, 61, 68, 250, 252, 253, 312 Poupée Blonde, 19, 162, 313 Une jeunesse, 39, 40, 41, 42, 60, 61, 63, 69, 78 Villa Triste, 27, 31, 34, 44, 45, 57, 60, 63, 65, 109, 139, 186, 314 Modiano, Rudy (see also brothers), 17, 20, 49, 57, 59-61, 104, 108-9, 114, 127ff, 152, 160, 169, 174, 187, 188-9, 190, 220, 252, 259, 261, 275, 299 Modiano, Zénaïde, 94 Molino, Jean, 275, 289 Montalbetti, Jean, 20, 22 Montaudon, Dominique, 19, 32, 225, 249 Moreno, Dario, 168 Morris, Alan, 11, 32, 73, 87, 107, 117, 124, 131, 137, 155,

157, 158, 163, 188, 189, 191, 249, 259 Mothers (see also Colpeyn, Luisa), 62, 63-4, 134 bad, 63, 114, 120, 170 birth, 149 good, 17, 63, 149, 160, 167, 273 intertextual, 148, 149-50 mother country, 149 oedipal relationship, 39, 63, 115, 119, 169, 170 Mystery/mysteries, 13, 20, 35-6, 42, 62, 108, 125, 129, 137, 140, 151, 169, 180, 223, 224, 254, 264 Nabokov, Vladimir, 69, 211, 220, 222, 258-9, 307 Names absence of Modiano’s, 198 assumed/pseudonyms, 21, 45, 65, 100, 144, 182 in autofiction, 79-81, 94, 97, 99, 112, 116, 121, 122, 127, 130, 141, 142, 144 similar, 40 strange, 33, 96, 159 Nettelbeck, Colin and Penelope Hueston, 11, 30, 65, 96, 97, 105, 117, 126, 179, 182, 184, 185, 191, 238, 240 Neumann, Guy, 108, 251 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 72 Nouveau roman, 181 Number twelve, 152-3, 184-8 O’Beirne, Emer, 84

Index

Occupation (see also années noires, collaboration), 17, 23-5, 62, 69, 73, 106, 137, 159, 161, 186, 189, 269-70 black market, 20, 58, 112, 116, 123, 136, 139, 145, 270 Gestapo, 20, 106, 127, 136, 195 Omniscience (lack of), 16, 23, 227, 293ff Ophüls, Marcel, 24 Orient, 62, 105, 106, 115, 233 Orczy, Emma, 159 Pacte fantasmatique, 56, 143 Pagnon, Louis ‘Eddy’, 40, 68, 115, 123, 124, 127, 132, 136, 137, 216 Paratext, 13, 26, 75 Parent generation, 58-9, 99, 120, 135, 145, 160, 306 Parents, 44, 58-9, 61-4, 97, 103-4, 114, 134, 160, 279, 306 merging of, 115, 150-1 Parody, 95, 180, 183 by others, 30 self-parody, 170, 180-1 Past (see also history, memory), burden of, 17, 107, 146, 186, 259 devoir de mémoire, 24, 25, 59, 107, 138, 153, 225, 232, 239, 284, 298, 300, 313 haunting, 24, 45, 57, 93,

353

113, 125, 130, 146, 152, 164, 195 lack of access, 17, 20, 36, 52, 58-9, 68, 71, 130, 146, 189, 192, 200, 234 Peirce, C.S., 34 Perec, Georges, 12, 24, 58, 71, 73, 84-6, 107, 113-4, 147-50, 163, 170, 175, 177, 178, 270, 274, 291, 301, 307, 308 Perfume, 39, 100, 115, 118 Personality, 19, 50, 71, 111, 128, 188 in biography, 206-9, 217, 273, 297, 308 Photographs, 20, 60, 61, 100, 145, 171, 178, 180, 183, 186, 234, 237, 238, 241-3, 247, 249, 250, 251, 256, 257, 266, 271, 286, 288, 297, 313ff Photographers/photographic act, 253, 257, 259, 264, 290 Picard, Michel, 37 Pillu, Pierre, 78 Pinball, 190, 286, 312 Pivot, Bernard, 19, 225 Place, 94, 128, 130, 133, 142, 143, 146, 147, 148, 149, 161, 163, 172, 177, 179, 194, 286-7, 290, 291, 292, 299 Poe, Edgar Allan, 299, 301 Poivre d’Arvor, Patrick, 201 Postmodernism, 17, 18, 20, 32, 50, 70, 111, 195, 196, 200, 224, 306, 317 Prince, Gerald, 30, 41, 53, 162, 164, 181 Prisons, 44-5, 51-2, 111, 129,

354

Present Pasts

140, 150, 154, 175, 247, 297, 306 Prostitutes/prostitution, 140, 194, 207, 209-10 ‘loose women’, 39 Proust, Marcel, 12, 73, 80, 95, 96, 135, 136, 158, 180, 195, 207, 307 Puppets/puppeteering, 18, 36, 131, 135 Quests, 21, 59-60, 118, 125, 144, 157, 179, 196, 275, 290 Rachlin, Nathalie, 12, 245 Rambures, Jean-Louis de, 312 Reading/readers (see also interpretation), 13, 25-8, 34-6, 88, 204, 317-8 analytical/imaginative input, 15, 18-19, 74-5, 85, 126, 130, 136, 147, 179, 181, 224, 250, 253, 266 as detective, 18, 34, 49, 112, 130, 158, 181 multiple-text, 13, 27-9, 43, 69, 87, 122, 141, 154, 249, 253, 262ff, 269, 290 single-text, 13, 27, 75, 262ff yardstick, 13, 75-6, 82, 87, 91, 108, 111, 116, 121, 129, 141, 155, 232, 290, 300, 309 Reality (see also dreamlikeness, truth), 16, 32-4, 96, 148, 156-7, 243, 257, 316

emotional, 66, 148, 165 reality effect, 18, 217, 266 lack of, 138, 147, 152, 162, 171, 238 Récit d’enfance, 128 Renais, Alain, 235 Renza, Louis A., 72 Repetition, 30-2, 40, 44, 56, 64, 66, 74, 110, 111, 173, 176, 177, 306, 307 Resemblance, 100, 118-22, 154, 189, 226, 259-60 Respect, 23, 64, 134, 217, 221-2, 254, 288, 296 Rêverie romanesque, 32, 133, 218, 308 Ricoeur, Paul, 86, 192, 203, 208 Riffaterre, Michel, 54 Rimbaud, Arthur, 245 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 181 Robin, Armand, 144, 151 Robin, Régine, 224 Rosenfeld, Israel, 197 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 71-4, 83, 176 Rousso, Henry, 25, 186, 187 Roux, Baptiste, 24 Ruiz, Raoul, 195 Sachs, Maurice, 107, 235 Salaün, Franck, 163, 176 Sarraute, Nathalie, 12, 16, 22, 42, 71, 74, 84, 86, 88, 148, 211, 227, 307 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12, 71, 83-4, 85, 86, 87, 148, 196, 209, 212-4, 239, 250, 262, 307

Index

Savigneau, Josyane, 52, 225, 259 Scene, 271, 292, 295ff Schabert, Ina, 218 Schools, 27, 58, 113ff, 119, 134, 139, 181, 184, 216, 287, 292, 297 Schwob, Marcel, 13, 207, 224 Scott, Walter, 275 Secrets/secretiveness, 18, 21, 24, 36, 44, 53, 60, 61, 111, 125, 134, 137, 157, 178, 184-6, 264, 277, 293, 310 Sédouy, Alain de, 178 Sheringham, Michael, 84, 85 Silence, 19, 58, 62, 128, 135, 178, 221-2, 237, 246, 255, 265, 303 Smoking, 66-7 Solitude/loneliness, 19, 44, 59, 120, 134, 276, 298 Sontag, Susan, 247, 250, 266, 314 Souvenirs imaginaires 12, 68, 79, 84-5, 93, 96, 106, 114, 133, 184, 216, 232, 275, 308 Stavisky, Sacha, 235 Steele, Stephen, 188 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 133 Storytellers, 15, 17-19 power of manipulation, 15, 18, 32, 36, 79, 97, 173, 179, 184-5, 203, 238 Strachey, Lytton, 219 Style/tone, 81, 288, 305 autobiographical, 78, 81, 309

355

documentary, 81, 98, 131, 249-50, 262ff, 288ff, 303, 309 fictional, 81, 97, 112, 117, 127, 288ff, 303, 309 literary, 81, 95, 98, 182, 288ff, 301 Subjective bias, 14, 16, 54, 206, 209, 212, 214, 239, 271, 282 Subjective vision, 14, 95, 97, 257-8, 272, 312 Suicide, 17, 43, 60, 149, 151, 162, 191, 196, 273, 276 Suleiman, Susan, 228 Sundays, 57, 168, 290 Surreal/surrealism (see also Breton), 136, 138, 148, 162 Survivor syndrome, 12, 20, 57-8, 73, 152, 160, 169-70, 177, 261, 275 Switzerland/Swiss, 95, 177, 181, 184 Surya, Michel, 207, 307 Symmetry, 32, 97, 106, 117, 143, 166, 171, 259 Tense, 132, 180, 194-5, 240 Third-person narration, 69, 200-1 Trains, 57, 66, 85, 114, 117, 147, 164, 185, 191, 244, 274-5, 285, 300 Translation, 13, 63, 142, 146, 147, 309 Trenet, Charles, 194 Tritsmans, Bruno, 273, 276, 277

356

Present Pasts

Truth (problematization of), 13, 14, 15, 16, 21, 25, 32, 51, 54, 65, 72, 76, 91, 205, 256, 282-3 imaginative, 13, 14, 49, 51, 68, 102, 148, 156-7, 161, 168, 205, 220, 235, 289, 309 Uncanny, 314 Uncertainty, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 26, 64, 95, 112, 121, 130ff, 142, 233, 240, 257, 272 Unconscious, 13, 70ff, 78-9, 86, 92, 101, 143, 148, 155, 160, 166, 310 Van Ostaijen, Paul van, 141, 149 VanderWolk, William (see also Guyot-Bender and VanderWolk), 186 Vél d’Hiv, 69, 274 Versionality (see also dissonance), 13, 20, 21, 27, 40-2, 50, 53, 64, 65-70, 74, 102, 105, 158, 315 Viart, Dominique, 246 Voyance, 205, 232, 235, 269, 294 Wardi, Charlotte, 181 Warehime, Marja, 18, 158 Walking, 57, 181 Web (see also connections), 41, 42 White, Hayden, 54, 208 Wilkinson, James, 210

314 Writing/writers, 31, 61, 62, 100, 102, 128, 133, 140, 148, 155, 156, 157, 159, 175, 179, 181, 193, 197, 264, 284, 290 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 207 Youth, 103, 106, 123, 191, 279, 286 Zanone, Damien, 128 Zehrfuss, Dominique, 61, 167