Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano's Postmodern Fictions

Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art

AKANE KAWAKAMI

A Self-Conscious Art Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published 2000 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS Liverpool L69 7ZU # 2000 Akane Kawakami The right of Akane Kawakami to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this volume may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without prior written permission of the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 0–85323–526–0 (hardback) 0–85323–536–8 (paperback) Typeset in 11/13 pt Sabon by Wilmaset Ltd, Birkenhead, Wirral Printed by Bell and Bain Limited, Glasgow

to my mother and the memory of my father

Table of Contents Introduction 1 Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator

1 7

2 Disorderly Narratives: The Order of Narration

25

3 Unreal Stories: The ‘effet d’irre´el’

49

4 Being Serious: Modiano’s Use of History

69

5 Being Playful: Parody and Disappointment

89

6 Being Popular: The Modiano Novel

109

Notes

135

Bibliography

153

Index

163

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book began life as a doctoral thesis, and so my first debt is to Colin Davis, my supervisor at Oxford. I owe much to his patience and acuity. I would also like to thank the following people for their support, advice, criticism or encouragement: Wendy Bennett, Maike Bohn, Malcolm Bowie, Rosemary and Nick Boyle, Dervila Cooke, Hueston Finlay, Shiroh Kawakami, Ed Smyth, and my husband Paul.

Introduction Faute d’audience, faute de pouvoir s’adapter au rythme du monde moderne, [. . .] le roman ne peut plus, a` mon sens, de´terminer ou orienter la sensibilite´ commune, comme il pouvait encore le faire au de´but de ce sie`cle. Bouscule´ par le cine´ma et les moyens d’expression modernes, son influence est plus sournoise et re´duite qu’au temps ou` il e´tait interdit dans les pensionnats. Patrick Modiano

In 1975, after four successful novels at only just thirty, Patrick Modiano was already sufficiently famous to be asked about his reactions to celebrity: Ezine: Comment accueillez-vous la ce´le´brite´? Comme un encouragement, comme une menace? Modiano: On ne peut pas parler de ce´le´brite´ alors que l’audience des romanciers de notre ge´ne´ration se limite aux happy few. La ce´le´brite´ romanesque existait au 19e sie`cle, et si elle a allume´ encore quelques feux superbes entre les deux guerres, elle s’est de´robe´e depuis avec une constance qui force l’explication: il n’y a rien de plus anachronique aujourd’hui que le roman. C’est un art tre`s re´tro finalement . . . et qui aura paradoxalement connu sa plus forte audience quand il e´tait conside´re´ comme un genre mineur ou meˆme ‘vulgaire’.1

Modiano’s response is characteristic of him. He begins by ‘playing down’ the importance of the novel, arguing that it is a minor and anachronistic genre: how can novelists be famous, he asks, when so few people read novels? He thus shifts the focus of the question from the novelist to the novel, and avoids answering the interviewer’s question directly. En se de´robant, like so many of his fictional narrators, he leaves behind the contradiction that he has just set up: if the novel is such a minor genre in the late twentieth century, how and why is he such a famous and successful novelist? For Modiano himself is living proof that it can be done, in spite of competition from ‘le cine´ma et les moyens d’expression modernes’: Modiano the best-selling author, a household name in France. In the 1975 interview with Ezine, there is another issue from which Modiano keeps his distance, that of experimental or self-conscious writing. ‘La litte´rature pour la litte´rature, les recherches sur l’e´criture, tout ce byzantinisme pour chaires et colloques,’ he tells Ezine, ‘c¸a ne 1

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Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art

m’inte´resse pas.’ ‘Byzantinisme’ implies a futile and decadent enjoyment of obscurity, which Modiano blames on academics: ‘La litte´rature est depuis quelques anne´es aux mains des universitaires—presque tous les jeunes ‘‘romanciers’’ en sont, d’ailleurs—et je pense, contrairement a` eux, que la nettete´ classique est encore la plus apte a` exprimer notre temps’. In uncharacteristically forceful language, he repeats that he himself writes in ‘la langue franc¸aise la plus classique’. His insistence is a little forced, yet most critics have accepted this self-portrait of Modiano, and have described his novels as works which have escaped the ravages of nouveau roman-induced theorising and intellectualism. And such is the reputation which Modiano, broadly speaking, still enjoys today. In both of these areas, the novelist’s public image and the nature of his style, the impression cultivated by both the critics and Modiano himself is one of an unself-conscious novelist. Naı¨vely he wins great recognition and success in an ostensibly obsolete genre: naı¨vely he writes in what he calls a ‘classical’ prose, in spite of belonging to a generation which has witnessed the nouveau (and indeed the nouveau nouveau) roman. This professed lack of self-consciousness, both external and internal, is more than a little suspect in a successful novelist whose career now spans thirty years and eighteen novels, many of which have won the most prestigious prizes of French belles lettres. The denial of experimentation, for instance, does not stand up to even a cursory examination of his novels, which reveal his writing to be discreetly but undeniably experimental. His narrative structures are deceptively familiar at first sight, but the reassuring tropes rapidly become strange, the unheimlich appearing in the heart of the heimlich. They can hardly be the work of a novelist who has chosen to ignore and reject the experimental and theoretical developments of the post1945 novel: on the contrary, they seem to indicate a supreme selfawareness, one who is intensely aware of the postmodern condition of the present-day novel. Modiano’s statements about the state of the novel and the novelist today are also to be regarded with some suspicion: what does he really think about this ‘minor’ genre, and of those who perpetrate it? He may claim that the contemporary novel’s influence ‘est plus sournoise et re´duite qu’au temps ou` il e´tait interdit dans les pensionnats’. But his novels, which are hugely successful, seem to draw their strength from popular appeal; and in this they follow the example of an earlier age, the novel having ‘paradoxalement connu sa plus forte audience quand il

Introduction

3

e´tait conside´re´ comme un genre mineur ou meˆme ‘‘vulgaire’’ ’. The genre as a whole may have gained in respectability since, but the ‘vulgar’ novel is not a thing of the past: we have our equivalent of it today in popular fiction such as detective novels or thrillers, novelistic subgenres about which Modiano is knowledgeable and of which he is fond. I suggest that Modiano, using structural devices of a generic order, harnesses the strength of the popular novel to his own works. In so doing he shows himself to be acutely aware of the social status of his novels and their existence as commodities in a real economy, and he ‘cultivates’ his readership accordingly: a highly postmodern attitude to the business of being a novelist. The term ‘postmodern’ requires definition, although perhaps not as urgently as it did twenty years ago: it still seems not to enjoy a uniform orthography (post-modern, post-Modern, Post-Modern, postmodern),2 but now it has a much more readily accepted status in our critical vocabulary.3 It seems to me that this is due to its popularisation: like similarly diffuse but useful terms such as Romanticism or Realism, widespread usage has conferred upon it both an accepted locus and an authority. I will simply state here the areas of its meaning in which I am most interested, and which are also the most widely accepted, in art and architecture as well as in literary studies. By ‘postmodern’ I indicate an aesthetic whose characteristics display an ironical awareness of ontological uncertainty, both of themselves in the history of their production, and of the world in which they exist. It is an awareness which does not lead to resolution through logical or metaphorical explanations, but prefers to dissolve into play and parody. On the level of narrative, the postmodern manifests itself in the form of instances of self-reflexivity, parody, a questioning of the distinction between history/biography and fiction, decentring of the narrating self and disordered narrative. In this book, I will be showing that Modiano’s narratives exhibit such qualities, to support the view of him as a postmodern novelist. That this view goes against Modiano’s own statements about his work does not mean that I intend to ‘expose’ his deception. It is rather a compliment to Modiano to recognise his selfawareness as well as his talent, and to reappraise the latter in the light of the former. This new, disabused perspective on Modiano is one which will also contribute to a greater and fairer appreciation of Modiano’s novels. The majority of Modiano’s reviewers still ignore the structural complexities of his narratives, preferring to see him as a traditional kind of novelist or

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Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art

as a mode re´tro novelist, thus neglecting his importance as a narrative experimenter. As for the academic critics, the view of Modiano as the naı¨ve and non-theoretical novelist, easily readable and accessible, has led to their relative neglect of his work. Readability seems to have the effect of banishing an author from the realms of the academically interesting. There are three book-length publications on his work to date;4 otherwise there are some chapters in books, a few (excellent) articles, and many book reviews, most of which do not attempt to engage seriously with the significance of Modiano’s achievement.5 The fact that he is a best-seller has also, regrettably, detracted from his reputation. There is an unspoken assumption that best-selling authors, especially of numerous books, cannot be serious writers of good literature; a fallacious one, if we think of giants such as Balzac and Dickens, but one which continues to hold sway. The social formula which links best-sellerdom with lack of critical attention has affected Modiano studies inasmuch as the more serious research seems to be taking place outside France: for instance, the only collection of articles on Modiano published in book form is a CRIN publication (Cahiers de recherches des instituts ne´erlandais).6 However, none of these so far has aspired to offer a comprehensive view of Modiano as an important contemporary novelist, linking this fact to a detailed examination of his narrative structures. This is what I propose to do. In order to situate Modiano and his work in the context of post1960 fiction, we will first need to compensate for the current lack of formal studies of his work. For too long, critics have seen the primary interest of the novels in their themes: memory, identity and the past, set in the context of the author’s declared obsession with the period of the Occupation. By contrast, this book will start with a structural analysis of his novels, which will then be used to evaluate Modiano’s literary historical position. We will see how deeply postmodern Modiano’s basic narrative structure is, and how this is carried through to the level of his professional self-awareness and self-marketing. The first three chapters will attempt to show how Modiano’s apparently traditional, recognisable narrative structures are in fact oddly unfamiliar and experimental. The novels will be analysed narratologically, using a selection of contemporary narrative theories: Ge´rard Genette’s narratology will feature prominently, but will be tempered by psychoanalytical, historicist and post-Structuralist elements. One reason why I use Genette is that his study of Proust is particularly pertinent here, given that searches into the past for the narrator’s identity are a

Introduction

5

structural and thematic constant in Modiano. Chapter 1 will deal with Modiano’s narrator-figure, unproblematic at first sight, but who is gradually revealed to be singularly lacking in identity. Chapter 2 looks at how a naı¨ve notion of chronology is discreetly undermined in the ordering of Modiano’s narrative, and Chapter 3 examines Modiano’s parodic use of the ‘effet de re´el’, which allows him to present an apparently realistic narrative which is gradually seen to be unreal. These studies reveal Modiano to be a quietly innovative novelist, a postmodern craftsman whose seemingly simple narrative constructs are in fact deeply subversive. In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, the conclusions reached in the first three chapters are applied to issues of genre and theme, with a view to evaluating Modiano in the context of post-1960 fiction. His novels contain many intertextual references, both thematic and structural, which testify to the author’s consciousness of his own place in literary history. Chapter 4 deals with Modiano’s use of history: I question the accepted view of him as a naı¨ve teller of tales about the Occupation, and examine the serious moral issues raised by his texts for the modern French reader. Chapter 5 considers intertextualities between Modiano’s novels and detective fiction, and the way in which he pre-empts and directs the expectations of his readership. This subject is continued in Chapter 6, in which I suggest that Modiano’s postmodern tendencies extend to the creation of a particular product with a label, the ‘Modiano Novel’. Examples of this are examined in this chapter as we read Modiano’s latest works, bringing the reader up-to-date with a 1999 publication, Des inconnues. Given the very large corpus of Modiano’s work, I restrict my main analyses to the novels of the 1980s and 1990s, while making many shorter references to the earlier novels of the 1960s and 1970s. One major exception to this occurs in the chapter on history, in which I discuss the relationship between Modiano’s novels and the Occupation. As his first three novels are those which deal most obviously and consistently with the period of the Occupation (so much so that they have been dubbed the Occupation trilogy), it was inevitable that I should refer to them at great length, although I also make use of the later works in the same context. This does have the pleasing result of giving the reader an overview of the whole œuvre, even if the focus of detailed analyses are the later works, and I hope that the newcomer to Modiano will emerge from this book with a general sense of his developing themes and structures over the years.

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Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art

EXPLANATORY NOTE Modiano has always been a great lover of ellipses: it has been suggested that this may lead to some confusion over the notation used in my text. I have followed the standard practice of using ellipses within square brackets to indicate that I have omitted sections of the quoted text. All unmarked ellipses are Modiano’s own.

CHAPTER ONE

Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator J’ai pris la valise et je me suis retrouve´ dans le vestibule. A` l’oppose´ du cabinet de dentiste, un salon d’attente. J’ai tourne´ le commutateur. La lumie`re est tombe´e d’un lustre a` cristaux. [. . .] J’ai traverse´ ce salon et je suis entre´ dans une petite chambre avec un lit e´troit dont les draps e´taient de´faits. J’ai allume´ la lampe de la table de nuit. Du plus loin de l’oubli, p. 66

All of Modiano’s eighteen novels to date, except for one,1 are narrated in the first person. It is always the same kind of first person: tall, dark, reserved and slightly bumbling, he is also always engaged in a search for something in the past, either his own or someone else’s. He is the likeable if rather underconfident guide who takes the reader through the plot and on this search, which also always ends in relative failure.2 However, this Modiano narrator is as mysterious as he is familiar. In spite of speaking in the first person, he never reveals much of himself. The first-person voice is usually a personal, confidential one, quickly intimate with the reader, as we know from the confessional novel, the autobiographical novel, or the ‘deluded narrator’ novel.3 By contrast, Modiano’s narrator is reticence itself. He does not take up the narrator’s privilege and monopolise our attention, always preferring to talk about or listen to someone else. The narrative, although his own, is not coloured by his psychology: although it never sounds as impersonal as that of Camus’ L’E´tranger, Modiano’s first-person narrative is paradoxically neutral and character-free. In this chapter I propose to investigate this first-person narrator, one who seems to speak as an ‘I’ but not of it. This peculiarity is inseparable from the quest for self-identity which is the driving force behind his narratives. THEORIES OF THE NARRATOR What, or who, is the narrator? One definition is simply that the narrator is he/she who tells the story: ‘the one who narrates, as inscribed in the text’.4 Ge´rard Genette, in ‘Discours du re´cit’,5 finds this definition 7

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Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art

simplistic: he dissects the narrator into ‘point of view’ and ‘narrative voice’,6 and he claims that theorists have too often failed to notice the difference between he who sees, and he who speaks. In a first-person retrospective narrative like that of Proust’s Marcel, for instance, it is important to notice that the narrating voice is an older and wiser version of the hero, but that the narrative is presented to us from the point of view of the younger man. Genette begins by examining point of view, or focalisation as he calls it, of which there are three kinds. There is a zero degree of focalisation, which is more or less equivalent to what is usually called authorial omniscient narration, in which the narrator knows more than the characters; internal focalisation, where things are seen from one character’s point of view only; and external focalisation, where the point of view is external, thus not allowing the narrator any access to the internal processes of the hero or of any other character.7 According to this classification, Modiano’s narrator seems to be of the ‘internally focalised’ type. As for the answer to ‘who speaks?’, the narrating voice, Genette describes it as the ‘external’ utterance which gives rise to the story. He classifies the various positions from which such a voice can create the narrative. The extradiegetic narrator is one who is outside the main story (M. de Renoncourt in Manon Lescaut): the intradiegetic narrator is one who is inside the story (le Chevalier de Grieux): and the metadiegetic narrator is a narrator who tells a tale within the main story. Genette also analyses the relationship of the voice with the story itself: that is, the degree to which the narrator is involved in his story. In this classification, the heterodiegetic narrator is one who is absent from the story, whereas the homodiegetic narrator is a character in the story, either the hero or an observing character.8 So far, so good: but the drawbacks of Genette’s system, clear and precise as it is, become evident when we attempt a comparative description of Proust’s and Modiano’s narrators using these labels. Genette’s account of the Proustian narrator, in ‘Discours du re´cit’, shows him to be a figure of presence and plenitude. He is massively present in his own narrative, full of information to which he alone has access and which he chooses to dispense or not to dispense;9 he is possessed of an identity which is both the conclusion and the origin of the narrative. That is, Proust’s retrospective narrative is told by a narrator whose present identity (i.e. at the time of writing) leads us through its memories, which take on meaning only in this act of retrospection by a consciousness enlightened with an identity.

Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator

9

Modiano’s narrators are formally very similar to Proust’s narrator: to make use of Genette’s terms, they are generally extra- and homodiegetic, the narrative is internally focalised, and retrospective. In spite of this, however, they are radically different from Marcel. This is because of their strange emptiness, discussed earlier, and their comparative lack of character. Although they are omnipresent in the same way as any narrator of a retrospective narrative, being the single consciousness in which the whole narrative is situated, they do not impose a psychological hue on the narrative. Genette’s system must be seriously flawed if it is unable to describe this difference between Marcel and Modiano’s narrators. What is missing from Genette’s analysis of the narrator? Perhaps the question should be about who is missing, for it is noticeable that Genette, having divided the narrator into point of view and voice at the start of his analysis, subsequently fails to refer to the narrator as a unified person. The division leads him to neglect the narrator’s world, the space of the narrating consciousness, and it is here that the great difference between Marcel and Modiano’s narrators is to be found. This space may be full of information, as in the case of Marcel, or relatively empty, as it appears with Modiano’s narrators, but it is crucial to be aware of it as a structure in any theory of the narrator. Genette’s labels are useful when analysing the relationship between the ‘real’ world and the ‘story’ world created by the voice, but do not cater for the relationship between this ‘story’ world and the narrator’s world. The narrator’s world is the fictional world that the narrator inhabits, as distinct from the world of the story that he/she creates: it may or may not overlap with the ‘story’, but is crucial to the organisation of the narrative. Genette is not unaware of its existence: indeed he refers to it when he quotes from Auerbach, ‘l’omnitemporalite´ symbolique de la conscience re´miniscente’.10 The consciousness of such a ‘remembering’ narrator, which is able to exist on all temporal levels and establish telescopic relations between all of the moments and places involved in a single narrative (‘l’omnitemporalite´ symbolique’), could only exist in the world of the narrator. But to talk about the narrator in such terms would force Genette to bring ‘point of view’ and ‘voice’ back together, which is something that he wants to avoid as a Structuralist: to reunite these two elements would open the way towards the concept of the narrator as a person, which in turn would bring up the taboo issue of narrative origin.11

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MODIANO’S NARRATOR Modiano’s narrators do not tell us much about themselves, whereas Marcel is ‘full’ of information about himself. It is not as if Modiano’s narrators are ostensibly ‘empty’, lacking in identity, in the way of certain nouveau roman narrators; they generally have names, a past, a home address, and these are offered to the reader. The availability of such ‘standard’ information creates in the reader a sense of reassurance and familiarity. The fact that the narrators do not differ greatly from novel to novel also reinforces this impression of security: they all tend to be tall, male, with irresponsible parents (usually a travelling actress mother and a mysteriously absent father) and an address in the XVIe; they have often spent a period of their youth in Vienna, have an uncanny receptiveness to the past of other people, and write or aspire to write. But on closer inspection, this information is not particularly illuminating or helpful. The names, for instance, are not very distinctive (there are at least five Jeans: the narrators of Quartier perdu, Dimanches d’aouˆt, Vestiaire de l’enfance, Voyage de noces, Un Cirque passe), or else appear to be flimsy excuses for an autobiographical narrator (there are three Patricks: Livret de famille, De si braves garc¸ons, Fleurs de ruine).12 Behind the screen of anodyne biographical detail, the narrator’s identity remains as vague and elusive at the end of the novel as at its beginning: they leave him more anonymous than the conspicuously absent ‘narrator’ of Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie. As noted by JeanClaude Joye, the ‘je’ of Modiano’s narrators is ‘un Je e´quivoquement familier’,13 but this often goes unnoticed by the reader. The reader, given even a few of the stock features, will tend to acknowledge yet another typical ‘Modiano hero’ and carry on reading without realising that these details are devoid of any significance. Thus Modiano’s narrators are discreetly identity-less, occupying the space or world of the narrator but not filling it. They fulfil the structural requirement of supplying the narrative with an organisational base, a point of view and narrative voice, but do no more. We may perhaps name this peculiar kind of narrator the degre´ ze´ro narrator,14 which can be described as a ‘position’ for subjectivity which may remain unfilled, but whose existence is vital to the organisation of the narrative as a ‘kind of empty locus’15 which registers temporal difference. The degre´ ze´ro narrator does not, or rather cannot, impose his identity on the narrative, because he is empty. The narrative is not the result of a narrator ‘full’ of identity ‘unloading’ himself, consciously or uncon-

Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator

11

sciously. It is rather the other way round, in that the narrative is the eventual source of identity for the narrator, and this makes him doubly crucial. Not only is he indispensable to the narrative as the sole means of its articulation: he is also its raison d’eˆtre, its internal necessity, in that the narrative’s existence is only justified as the search for—or the creation of—the narrator’s identity.16 The obvious example of this is Rue des Boutiques Obscures. Guy Roland, the amnesiac narrator, needs to be filled by his own narrative. His existence is thus essential to the plot, but it is also crucial that this existence be empty, devoid of character. That this is the case is forcefully indicated in the first lines of the novel: ‘Je ne suis rien. Rien qu’une silhouette claire’ (p. 7).17 Even his physical characteristics are vague, as vague as they can be given the criteria of a realistic representation.18 We know that he is tall and dark, but he has no distinguishing features, and his age appears to be indeterminate: —Mais pourtant, vous eˆtes encore jeune . . . Jeune? Je n’avais jamais pense´ que je pouvais eˆtre jeune. Un grand miroir avec un cadre dore´ e´tait accroche´ au mur, tout pre`s de moi. J’ai regarde´ mon visage. Jeune? —Oh . . . je ne suis pas si jeune que cela . . . (p. 34)

An empty space which needs to be filled in, so to speak, by the narrative. But whose narrative? Being an amnesiac, Guy Roland has little or nothing to tell; the narrative must be provided by others. Guy Roland experiences no difficulty in eliciting information from the people he interviews on the slimmest of excuses. His passive receptiveness invites confidences and information which unfold themselves within his omnitemporal but empty consciousness. Indeed, at times, Guy Roland’s consciousness becomes a kind of communal meeting place for the vestiges of other identities, his amnesiac mind offering no resistance to the influx of ownerless ‘memories’: Je crois qu’on entend encore dans les entre´es d’immeubles l’e´cho des pas de ceux qui avaient l’habitude de les traverser et qui, depuis, ont disparu. Quelque chose continue de vibrer apre`s leur passage, des ondes de plus en plus faibles, mais que l’on capte si l’on est attentif. Au fond, je n’avais peuteˆtre jamais e´te´ ce Pedro McEvoy, je n’e´tais rien, mais des ondes me traversaient, tantoˆt lointaines, tantoˆt plus fortes et tous ces e´chos e´pars qui flottaient dans l’air se cristallisaient et c’e´tait moi. (p. 105)

The space supplied but left empty by Guy Roland is filled with memories and words belonging to other people, in the form of dialogues between him and his interviewees and letters from his detective friends, both of which are subsequently narrated by Guy Roland himself. This is the

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pattern followed during the period of his amnesia; once his memory begins to supply him with more than the odd flicker, the narrative becomes a recognisably retrospective one. The character’s amnesia is in direct proportion to his emptiness as a narrator. As the one begins to be filled, so too does the other, and at the end of the novel Guy Roland is much more of a conventional first-person narrator, although he never reaches the same level of confidence and authority as Marcel in La Recherche. This situation of a narrator figure who delineates a space for subjectivity without filling it is described from a slightly different perspective by Franck Salau¨n: Modiano de´crit des situations de´gage´es des jugements moraux, de la bonne ou de la mauvaise conscience, mais il y distille les indices de solidifications possibles de l’individualite´, il y laisse vacante la place du sentiment et du jugement de valeur, en fournissant une arche´ologie impersonnelle, pre´individuelle. L’identite´ personnelle suppose que ces espaces soient remplis de fac¸on cohe´rente, par quelqu’un.19

This description of the ‘situations’ in Modiano’s narratives as being morally neutral constitutes, by default, a description of the narrator’s emptiness. Many other narrators of Modiano’s novels are ‘empty’ in a similar way, although none as definitively so as Guy Roland at the start of Rue des Boutiques Obscures. In Quartier perdu and Vestiaire de l’enfance, the narrators have deliberately refused to connect their present to their past; a state which we can perhaps dub ‘voluntary amnesia’, which results in a corresponding emptiness of voice. In other works,20 such as De si braves garc¸ons, Livret de famille and Fleurs de ruine, the narrators are neither voluntary nor involuntary amnesiacs, but their voices still exhibit this impersonality which characterises the degre´ ze´ro narrator. At first sight, De si braves garc¸ons (1982) appears to have a straightforward narrative framework; a first-person narrator tells us about his schooldays at the Colle`ge Valvert, and about subsequent encounters with his former schoolmates at later stages in his life. A closer look, however, reveals a more complex narrative situation: the unassuming, deceptively simple narrating voice has a multiple origin. Although most of the story is told by the main narrator, called Patrick, three whole chapters are related by Edmond Claude, one of Patrick’s classmates, and the greater part of Chapter V (the story of Petite Bijou) by an old boy of the Colle`ge. This fissure of the narrative voice is indiscernible solely on the basis of its tone or style, as the voice remains markedly anonymous throughout. Indeed the reader only realises that

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13

Chapter XII was told by Edmond Claude when he identifies himself by name in the following chapter. Not only is the first-person voice split in De si braves garc¸ons; it occasionally lapses into a third-person voice, a form of free indirect speech. In sections VI and IX, the narrator (Patrick) starts with an evocation of a particular character at the Colle`ge, moves on to an encounter with him in later life (unnoticed by the character in question), then slips into the third person and the character’s consciousness: J’e´prouvais de l’inquie´tude et de la tristesse chaque fois que l’un de nous subissait cette e´preuve [the expelling of a pupil; in this case, that of Philippe Yotlande]. [. . .] Bien des anne´es plus tard, le soir, vers sept heures, [. . .] j’observais Philippe Yotlande de loin, sans oser l’aborder. [. . .] Je devinais ses e´tats d’aˆme . . . [. . .] Quoi faire de cette soire´e d’e´te´? Chaque jour, de`s le matin, il [Yotlande] e´tait au bord de la piscine. (pp. 78–80)

Starting in unproblematic first-person narration (‘J’e´prouvais . . . j’observais’), the sympathetic ‘Je devinais ses e´tats d’aˆme’, cushioned by the vagueness of two sets of suspension points, slips the narrative gently into free indirect speech, the classic third-person form which allows the reader to accede to the character’s inner thoughts and emotions.21 De si braves garc¸ons thus shows itself to be a complex tissue of narrations. It also moves between different diegetic levels, the story of Petite Bijou being told by a metadiegetic narrator, a ‘tale within a tale’. Edmond Claude’s contributions are difficult to classify, as they appear to be on an equal footing with those of the main narrator; they are not edited or re-narrated in any way by the latter. The most confusing voice, however, is that of the narrator himself, chiefly because he is called Patrick. Is it Modiano’s own voice? Or is it meant to be a ‘coincidence’? Like Proust’s ‘Marcel’, this narrator baits the reader into assumptions about the origin of the narrative which cannot be verified. The use of the name ‘Patrick’ for the narrator can have two opposing effects on the reader. On the one hand, the reader may assume that the work is autobiographical; she may be encouraged to collapse the extradiegetic narrator into the Author. Alternatively, the reader of Patrick Modiano may read ‘Patrick’ as the ultimately ‘identity-free’ name, as a result of the literary convention of the author’s non-interference in his creations. That is, Modiano’s use of the name ‘Patrick’ can be said to take advantage of the fact that the reader expects the author to remain outside his work. It is the ideal name for an empty, degre´ ze´ro narrator.

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The narrator of De si braves garc¸ons is not the only Modiano narrator to bear his creator’s first name; the resultant confusion of diegetic levels occurs in at least three of the works. The reader who has assumed that these are straightforward autobiographies may receive a gentle shock in the last chapter of Livret de famille. This work is the one which is most readily readable as autobiography, given its structure consisting of fifteen chapters which seem to mirror the fifteen pages of a real ‘livret de famille’,22 and the descriptions of the narrator’s parents and family, some of which appear to match Patrick Modiano’s autobiographical details. But the last chapter punctures such a naı¨ve trust in a candid authorial narrative. Our narrator ‘Patrick’ gets into a taxi with his wife and child, a taxi bearing an extra passenger (a friend of the driver) who turns out to be called Patrick: Ainsi, ce brun a` teˆte de be´lier portait le meˆme pre´nom que moi, ce pre´nom qui avait connu une grande vogue en 1945, peut-eˆtre a` cause des soldats anglosaxons, des jeeps et des premiers bars ame´ricains qui s’ouvraient. L’anne´e 1945 e´tait tout entie`re dans les deux syllabes de ‘Patrick’.23

Our confidence in the narratorial voice is immediately undermined by the doubling, then the proliferation of Patricks. No reader would assume, of course, that the taxi driver’s friend had been the narrator all along, but the sudden appearance of alternative Patricks alerts her to the fact that ‘Patrick’ is a name like any other name, an extremely common one of a certain generation, and therefore that it does not necessarily refer to Modiano. The confusion and diffusion of the narrative voice and its origin grows even wider as the narrator, unidentifiable except as the narrator because of his lack of character, floats between various modes and diegetic levels, and even in the area between the fictional work and the ‘real’ author. Such transgressions of diegetic levels and the fissuring of the narratorial voice cast a shadow of ambiguity and uncertainty on to the very notion of an unproblematic identity and its manifestation in narrative.

THE IDENTITY OF JIMMY SARANO Jimmy Sarano, the narrator of Vestiaire de l’enfance, is psychologically anonymous in a very discreet way, unlike the unidentified but conspicuously characterised ‘narrator’ of Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie. We have a selection of details on the identity of Modiano’s hero, enough to create a sense of reassurance in us. This feeling of knowledge, however,

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is in fact illusory: we may know his name(s), his address, his job, his life-style and his small circle of acquaintances, but in spite of these details he remains vague and difficult to characterise. This lack of definition has much to do with the quality of the narrative voice that is Sarano. It is a curiously non-reflecting voice, remarkably reticent with respect to feelings or indeed thoughts. At times this internally focalised narrative, as Genette would call a firstperson narrative, almost reads like an externally focalised narrative, that is to say a narrative in which the voice has no access to the internal processes of any of the people it describes.24 Sarano’s style becomes impersonal to a degree reminiscent of the ‘chosiste’ RobbeGrillet when, in his observation of the interview next door, he describes their coffee as ‘un liquide noir’ (p. 70).25 This pseudoscientific description indicates how impersonal this voice is, how external it is to the consciousnesses of human beings who drink coffee (although it also functions as an effective characterisation of the drinker of the coffee, Sarano’s cold and unfeeling neighbour). The same impersonality of the narrator’s voice occurs in Rue des Boutiques Obscures, in which the lack of a ‘lien entre la subjectivite´ du he´ros et le monde ambiant’26 results in an ‘alienated’ description of external objects and people similar to our example from Vestiaire de l’enfance. In the first pages of the novel, we are explicitly prepared for a narratorial voice which is not used to analysing and articulating his thoughts and feelings: we are told that the narrator is not a man given to reflection. Reflection is ‘chose dont je n’ai pas l’habitude’ (p. 10). This can perhaps be considered a rare situation, as most literary narrators tend towards the opposite extreme. It has often been pointed out that such narrators are often forced to be unrealistically articulate and psychologically sophisticated in order to satisfy the requirements of their narratives. But Jimmy Sarano is reticent almost to the point of taciturnity, which on the level of character appears as a coldness, a disconcerting lack of emotional response. One striking example of this lack of feeling is the passage which describes Marie coming to Sarano’s house after their evening at the cafe´ Lusignan. She stays with him that night, but the description of the event is highly elliptical, contained within a mere three paragraphs. There is not a shred of overt feeling on either side, and the third paragraph slides without transition into the eternal, iterative present of Sarano’s everyday life:

16

Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art Elle ne m’a pas re´pondu. Et puis ce visage s’est rapproche´. [. . .] Elle e´tait allonge´e sur le lit. Sa robe faisait une tache claire sur le parquet. Elle se serrait contre moi. [. . .] Elle est partie tre`s toˆt, le matin. Je la regardais par la feneˆtre marcher dans le soleil. [. . .] Je ne savais meˆme pas si je la reverrais. Et maintenant, la brise oce´ane efface la chaleur de la journe´e. [. . .] Le seul de´sagre´ment, c’est l’insecte en maillot de bain rouge dont la vue me cause un malaise. (pp. 65– 66)

When analysed as a character (rather than as a voice), Sarano is revealed as possessing certain psychological qualities, but almost all of these are negative: that is, they denote the absence of a quality. He is reserved, refraining from addressing Marie until their third encounter, and from making friends at Radio-Mundial, although this is also in deference to the unwritten tradition there (p. 46). He is detached and indifferent (‘Je me sens de´tache´ de tout’), but not to an extent which would make this an interesting or dominant characteristic: his indifference is cleverly watered down by several signs of sympathy for his fellows, and these banalise both the detachment and the kindness. In other words, he is kind enough, for example vis-a`-vis the chauffeur, for us to sympathise mildly with him, and not cold and indifferent enough to stir the reader’s interest or animosity. He is also very timid, experiencing a compulsive desire to escape the company of others: j’e´prouvais la meˆme envie de fausser compagnie aux gens. Par timidite´, je restais a` leurs coˆte´s en cherchant vainement un mot pour prendre conge´. Ou bien a` la premie`re seconde d’inattention de leur part, je disparaissais au tournant d’une rue. Sans leur donner d’explications. (p. 56)

This passage could almost be seen as a mise en abyme for the elusive and ever-retreating figure of this narrator. Passivity is another characteristic of his which is slightly more intriguing, because it appears to have a connection with his past, and with the reason why he has come to settle in this polyglot city as a hack writer. ‘Il vaut mieux rester immobile . . . Ici je suis arrive´ au bout du monde et le temps s’est arreˆte´’ (p. 22), he tells us at the start of the novel, and appears content to live motionlessly and anonymously in a ‘pre´sent e´ternel’ (p. 37). Sarano is also given to bouts of a feeling of emptiness, a feeling which is given a shape in the emptiness of siesta time, during which the town is of course deserted. It is a regular occurrence with him: ‘la sensation de vide m’a envahi, encore plus violente que d’habitude. Elle m’e´tait familie`re’ (p. 95). The remedy he has invented is to repeat his name and address to himself, over and over again, suggesting that this is an emptiness which runs counter to the notion of identity.

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This consciousness of ‘vide’ is reminiscent of Camus’ L’E´tranger, and indeed both Sarano and Marie are given to making remarks such as ‘Tout cela n’avait aucune importance. Rien n’avait d’importance’ (p. 20).27 The choice of the name Marie may be a further reference to the earlier work. Sarano’s past crime, that of having abandoned a fellow passenger to drown in a sinking car, is also suggestive: is Sarano a taciturn Clamence? These intertextualities, however, are not pursued, and do not continue on to the philosophical and ideological level, as this consciousness of emptiness does not lead to any statement of existentialist faith.28 We thus have in Sarano a ‘non’-character of sorts: a place for subjectivity which is not filled in the conventional way. He fulfils his basic obligations as a narrator, so to speak, in that he supplies the narrative with his voice, point of view, articulation and ‘world’: but he refuses to fill in the psychological aspect of his presence, unlike more conventional first-person narrators. This lack of identity can be seen, I suggest, as an effect of Sarano’s conscious resolve to live in a timeless present. Identity must be based on a sense of continuity through time, continuity between the selves of the past and of the present: it is difficult to establish this link if the narrator persists in confining himself to his present. The encounter with Marie starts up the process of reconnecting the present to the past, and the narrative thus becomes a means of retrieving Sarano’s identity, almost in spite of himself. Sarano’s efforts to identify Marie’s ‘visage d’ange’ (p. 39), which he thinks he recognises from an earlier period of his life, force him to open up the gates of memory which he has kept locked ever since his arrival in the city. His reminiscences begin about half-way through the novel, when the ‘insecte’ is being interviewed for his reminiscences by the journalist from Paris. Unlike the mechanical and metallic delivery of the insecte’s past, Sarano’s memories are not chronologically presented, and return to him while he is in a state between waking and sleeping. Memories of the young Marie intermingle with even earlier memories of his schooldays, when he used to wait for his actress mother in the same arrondissement of Paris. This first long section of reminiscences (pp. 69–79) shows Sarano hesitating on the brink of the past, not yet sure of his own attitude towards his younger self. There is still little in the way of expression of feeling, and a clear distance between the present and the past: conventional phrases of retrospection such as ‘Aujourd’hui je com-

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prends que . . .’ and ‘J’e´tais tre`s jeune . . .’ introduce seemingly objective evaluations of the past self by the present self. These may be said to create ‘un rapport confidentiel entre le lecteur et le narrateur meˆme s’ils ne fonctionnent que comme des indices frustres d’appel a` la sympathie, l’e´motion n’e´tant pas justifie´e par un narrateur introspectif’.29 However, retrospection of this kind cannot yet lead to an identification of the past self with the present: ‘il me semble que c’e´tait quelqu’un d’autre que moi’. In other words, the past self is still most definitely an Other, foreign to him. As he continues to describe past events, however, Sarano does arrive at a grammatical form which brings the narrating self and the experiencing self closer together. This form has been described as free indirect speech in the first person, or self-narrated monologue: ‘the relationship of the narrating to the experiencing self in these selfnarrated monologues corresponds exactly to the relationship of a narrator to his character in a figural third-person novel: the narrator momentarily identifies with his past self, giving up his temporally distanced vantage point and cognitive privilege for his past time-bound bewilderments and vacillations’.30 In Vestiaire de l’enfance, this form occurs, for example, when the young narrator is imagining a scene in Rose-Marie’s bedroom, and its consequences for him: ‘Celui qu’elle avait entraıˆ ne´ la`-haut occuperait le fauteuil de cuir de´fonce´ ou` je m’asseyais d’habitude. Je ne la reverrais plus’ (p. 79). This could be rewritten as self-quoted direct discourse: ‘Je pensai: je ne la reverrai plus’. It thus denotes a moment of identification of the past and present selves of the narrator, as the present self should and does know that he did see Rose-Marie again after this particular evening. Back in the present after the reminiscing section, however, the narrator continues to deny his past self, to see it as an Other: ‘Vous faites erreur. Vous me prenez pour un autre. Moi, je m’appelle Jimmy Sarano’ (p. 81). There is also the comical scene of his confrontation with the journalist (pp. 91–94), throughout which he denies steadfastly that he is Jean Moreno, and after which he comments: ‘j’avais la sensation de briser le dernier lien qui me rattachait encore a` moi-meˆme’ (p. 94). His exercises in retrospection have shown him (and us, the readers) the way in which his emptiness could be filled, but we do not see him acting on this knowledge. We leave him at the end of the novel in a typically passive state, that of waiting, although we should perhaps give him some credit for having made the effort to go and wait for Marie at her hotel. Thus we leave the narrator, a shadowy figure still,

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waiting for some form of assistance from Marie, or for a continuation of the retrospective narrative which will finally bestow an identity on him by fusing Jean Moreno and Jimmy Sarano. Ironically, the only experience which ties the past to the present in his consciousness is the ‘sensation du vide’: ‘Elle m’e´tait familie`re. [. . .] Cela avait commence´ a` Paris, lorsque j’avais environ trente ans’ (p. 95). This state of living in the present which saps Sarano’s sense of personal identity occurs under a different guise in other Modiano novels: the experience of living in Switzerland. Switzerland functions as a symbol of a state of forgetfulness, a corresponding lack of responsibility and a sense of existing in an eternal present: J’e´tais heureux. Je n’avais plus de me´moire. Mon amne´sie s’e´paissirait de jour en jour comme une peau qui se durcit. Plus de passe´. Plus d’avenir. Le temps s’arreˆterait et tout finirait par se confondre dans la brume bleue du Le´man. J’avais atteint cet e´tat que j’appelais: La Suisse du coeur.31

Modiano’s ‘Suisse du coeur’ corresponds to a state of mind which leads to a weak sense of personal identity, as memory is essential for a continued sense of self: ‘c’est elle [memory] qui donne son e´paisseur a` l’individu’,32 subjective and unreliable though it may be. The same mechanism clearly applies to Sarano, who has created a similar state of oblivious existence in the present for himself by disowning his past, and for which he pays the price of losing his sense of self. The nature of personal identity is a matter for detailed philosophical discussion, but for Modiano it appears to be a complex entity made up of both the past and present of the person concerned: ‘si une identite´ personelle existe c’est donc en tant que permanence d’une affectivite´, transparence a` soimeˆme d’un passe´, fide´lite´ a` l’e´trangete´ et a` la fragilite´ des sentiments’.33 Accessibility to past allegiances and emotions is therefore especially important, and when this access is blocked, the person’s sense of identity begins to fade. Living in the present—or in ‘la Suisse du coeur’—is an artificial state which cannot be maintained indefinitely: as the narrator of Villa Triste comes to realise retrospectively, ‘Je ne savais pas encore que la Suisse n’existe pas.’34

WRITING AND IDENTITY Sarano is thus essentially a negative figure, a figure almost devoid of ‘character’. He does, however, have one positive, active aspect, one which can take him out of the eternal present: his writing. Although

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fictive, and of little literary value,35 Sarano’s serial has as its theme the retrievability of the past: ‘C’est le the`me de la survie des personnes disparues, l’espoir de retrouver un jour ceux qu’on a perdus dans le passe´’ (p. 10). His ‘Appels dans la nuit’ are also based on the belief that objects and people of the past can be found. At the start of the novel he is sceptical about these ‘Appels’, telling us that ‘il est trop tard pour prendre les paris. Certaines questions sont demeure´es en suspens, on ignore ce que sont devenues certaines personnes’ (pp. 49–50). But by the end of the novel he has changed enough to send a message of his own, which triggers off a response; not from Marie, to whom it is directed, but from Mercadie´, another self-exiled Frenchman who has come to the city to forget his past: ‘Oui, Jimmy, je comprends votre de´marche, et je l’approuve. C’est la meˆme de´marche qui vous fait e´crire Les aventures de Louis XVII. Vous avez raison, il faut essayer de retrouver les personnes et les objets perdus—ne serait-ce qu’une corbeille de fruits confits’ (pp. 123–24). The morning following his ‘appel’, Sarano has a very early breakfast with the chauffeur and marvels at the beauty of the new day: ‘Pour la premie`re fois, depuis longtemps, j’assistais au de´but de quelque chose’ (p. 132). This experience of a beginning can be seen as the symbolic moment of his escape from the eternal present in which he had imprisoned himself, and of his decision to find the past and himself through writing: he buys an old map of Paris, sets himself up at his bridge table, and writes from the early morning until half past seven in the evening. What he writes is an account of his last day as Jean Moreno, with the child Marie: ‘Elle marque une cassure dans ma vie, cette journe´e passe´e pour la dernie`re fois avec Rose-Marie et la petite . . . Apre`s, je suis entre´ dans ce qu’il faut bien appeler l’aˆge adulte’ (p. 134). He thus hopes not only to reach the past, but to join his youth to his maturity, to fuse Jean Moreno with Jimmy Sarano, in the same way as the narrator of Quartier perdu attempts to fuse Jean Dekker and Ambrose Guise. And writing is the tool for this fusion: ‘c’est par l’e´criture que les deux parties de la vie du protagoniste se rejoignent’.36 The style of this retrospective passage is very different from the previous one analysed, in that it is a highly self-conscious narration. The narrator is constantly aware of the fact that he is in the present attempting to reconstruct the past. He punctuates his outpourings of memory with comments which indicate his awareness of the instance of articulation, such as ‘Comment s’est de´roule´ cet apre`s-midi-la`?’ (p. 134) or ‘Etait-ce au retour des studios de Saint-Maurice? Je suppose qu’il

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nous a tous emmene´s’ (p. 135, my emphasis). He is also constantly evaluating himself as a remembering subject, questioning why he should remember one thing and not another (‘Pourquoi ai-je retenu cette phrase anodine plutoˆt qu’une autre?’), or his reliability (‘je crains que les souvenirs ne se superposent et se meˆlent dans mon esprit’). Finally, in this passage he is at last aware of the fact that he is the organiser of the narrative, that it is ordered according to his preferences. Thus he allows himself the liberty of spending some time over a preferred subject: ‘Je ne peux m’empeˆcher de m’attarder un instant sur Beauchamp’ (p. 135). This kind of personal comment regarding the narrative is new to the voice of Sarano, and gives a character to the hitherto transparent voice of the degre´ ze´ro narrator. And this viewpoint, which has invisibly guided the flow of the narrative throughout, now indulges in a visibly personal view of this same Beauchamp: ‘Il me fait penser a` mon pe`re . . . C’est mon pe`re que je vois de loin, [. . .] devant sa fine a` l’eau [this is in fact what Beauchamp has been drinking].’ The confusion of Beauchamp and his father is followed by numerous confusions of a similar kind; it is as if this writing exercise, which as we know constitutes the first stage of Sarano’s search for his past and his sense of identity, has opened the floodgates of the past and resulted in a rich and tumultuous influx of resemblances as well as memories. When he ‘returns’ to the present, having just written down how he pretended that he needed to buy some cigarettes in order to disappear from Marie’s life, he cannot remember whether he smokes now or not. Everything is doubled and blurred in a surreal fashion. Marie’s room in the Hoˆtel Alvear is on the third floor and to the right, as was the apartment in front of which the youthful narrator abandoned the little Marie: it is also very similar to Rose-Marie’s room in the Moncey Hotel (‘Meˆme lit aux barreaux de cuivre, meˆme table de chevet de bois clair’). Even the light is the same: ‘C’e´tait la meˆme lumie`re de fin de jour, en e´te´, lorsque je surveillais, de la feneˆtre de chez sa me`re, la petite qui faisait rebondir son ballon sur le trottoir de l’avenue Junot’ (p. 144). This strange and enriched state of reality is echoed by the town’s celebration of the ‘feˆte de Saint-Javier’, which is a rather confused event: La Saint-Javier; ainsi appelait-on la feˆte de la ville, mais d’apre`s ce que j’avais compris, cela n’avait aucun rapport avec le saint de ce nom. Je crois que l’on honorait plutoˆt cette nuit-la` Javier Cruz-Valer dont on fleurissait la statue. [. . .] Personne n’avait pu m’expliquer la ve´ritable origine de cette feˆte. (p. 141)

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Saint Javier or Javier Cruz-Valer? It does not seem to matter, no more than what language one uses in this polyglot town to wish the inhabitants ‘Bonne feˆte de Saint-Javier’. These confusions caused by transparency—‘La transparence du temps’ (p. 145)—would appear to constitute the first stage in Sarano’s attempt to come to terms with his past and his identity. The novel does not record the subsequent search, and we cannot be sure that Sarano will pursue it, but it would appear that he is now ready to do so, and to renounce his existence in a ‘pre´sent e´ternel’. It is important to realise that this search is not a search for ‘Truth’, or for the narrator’s real identity: there are too many flaws in his search, much like the search of Guy Roland in Rue des Boutiques Obscures. There are many gaps in his memory; the coincidences (the hotel room, the light) are, in the last instance, nothing but coincidences. Most crucially, Marie of the Hoˆtel Alvear may not actually be Rose-Marie’s daughter: as we are told, her age is not quite right. However, these uncertainties do not constitute a problem, in that the significance of the search is not its end but the process itself. The point of the narrative is to demonstrate the possibility of such a search, conducted through writing, which after all is Modiano’s own story and quest.37 By making the act of writing Sarano’s only positive aspect, Modiano makes him into the paradigmatic narrator, in the sense that the essential activity of the narrator is to narrate/write. Sarano’s life can be collapsed into that of the Narrator, and it is from the act of narrating that he will obtain his identity. It is interesting to compare the narrators of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Vestiaire de l’enfance and Quartier perdu with respect to the issue of writing and identity. Guy Roland, as we have noted, is the most ‘empty’ of the three, depending entirely on the narratives of others to supply him with an identity. It is significant that his search for his past self is not, in the end, completely successful. Perhaps only a ‘full’ narrator is able to conduct a truly retrospective narrative, one which can come round in full circle, a` la Proust: the sense of nostalgia in this novel may be seen as the manifestation of ‘the desire for the unity and coherence of a circular narrative that will constitute an identity by conferring a past on the narrator’.38 By contrast, the narrators of Vestiaire de l’enfance and Quartier perdu are already in possession of the information required to reconstruct their past selves, not being amnesiacs: they have simply decided to forget, or to disown their memories. The price that they pay for this, however, is their sense of identity and reality. They only regain this sense when they decide to

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reconnect their present to their past through the act of writing. Their task is more successful than that of Guy Roland, for the reasons mentioned above, but less so than that of Marcel. Unlike the narrator of A` la Recherche du temps perdu, Sarano and Ambrose Guise are not telling their stories in order to arrive at the Truth about Self, the Past and Art, truths of which Marcel is in possession at the time of writing. Marcel cannot lose, as it were, because he knows where he is heading; Modiano’s narrators are never quite sure of their goal or of success. Starting off as perfect examples of the formal ‘je’ which holds the narrative together on the structural level without adding a psychological or personal dimension to the narrative, they strive to gain—or to regain—a basic but essential sense of their own transient identities; a task less grand but perhaps more fundamental than that of Marcel. Modiano seems to remind us very gently that these identities are, in the last instance, scriptural. That is, Sarano’s existence is a product of the practice of writing, nothing more than a set of traces on a page. Alain Bony makes much of the parallelism between form and theme in his analysis of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, drawing our attention to the echoes between ‘page’ and ‘plage’, ‘blancs’ and ‘bancs’: l’homme des plages, ou l’homme des pages, s’il est vrai qu’une existence se rame`ne a` une suite de traces scripturaires, comme ces chapitres de Rue des Boutiques Obscures, parfois re´duits a` la dimension et aux formules d’une fiche policie`re, a` une adresse releve´e dans le Bottin, dans une construction e´clate´e, fragmentaire qui re´produit dans l’e´criture meˆme le tissu lacunaire d’une existence en ‘lambeaux’.39

We are thus playfully reminded of the fictionality of these searches, existences and identities: the text which creates the identity simultaneously undermines the status of this identity, drawing our attention to the physical aspects of the writing which is responsible for the illusion. I have tried to show how the concept of the degre´ ze´ro narrator can be used to describe and explain Modiano’s ‘empty’ narrators, with their unique combination of structural necessity and psychological neutrality. The singular nature of the degre´ ze´ro narrator’s voice is directly related to his lack of personal identity, which in turn is a result of having disowned his memories and his past. This relationship of narrative voice, identity and memory is thematically and structurally fundamental to Modiano’s novels, as we shall continue to see in the course of this book. I suggest that Modiano’s approach to his narrator, and to the concept of identity which results from it, is a typically postmodern one.

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The degre´ ze´ro narrator may be described as a decentred narrator because he fails to occupy the central position of meaning-provider in the narrative: on the contrary, it is the narrator himself who requires input of meaning. Also, the repeated searches for an identity always seem to end in failure or at least ambiguity, which throws doubt on the possibility of attaining an identity at all. The proliferation of Patricks at the end of Livret de famille, the implied reduction of Guy Roland’s existence and identity to mere traces on a page, the ambiguous ending of Vestiaire de l’enfance: all of these work to undermine, or perhaps to ironise, the search for identity which has been the driving force behind so many Modernist narratives, not least Proust’s massive enterprise. In contrast with the Proustian project, where time, recaptured, relived and re-enacted, is configured through narrative into an explanation of itself and of its source, ‘Modiano mime et mine, en virtuose de la subversion, les deux grands ‘‘formes’’ du re´cit proustien que sont le ‘‘temps’’ et le ‘‘je’’.’40 It is the power of the first-person retrospective narrative to clarify the past that is challenged and denied by the kind of narrative practised by Modiano. Narratives of the search for the self and its explanation have been a major feature of French literature since at least the time of Rousseau, one of the ‘grand[s] re´cit[s], comme la dialectique de l’Esprit, l’herme´neutique du sens, l’emancipation du sujet raisonnable . . .’41 This is the tradition which Modiano’s narratives undermine subtly, rather than reject violently, creating a postmodern, ‘ironic dialogue’42 with past instances of such self-seeking/creating narratives. The final irony is perhaps that the search for identity, which is ironically treated and defeated in Modiano’s novels, is still what drives the narrative on, and the reader to read on. We will see how other aspects of Modiano’s narratives operate on the same paradoxical compromise of irony and necessity held together by self-consciousness, pursuing an ideal which has been discredited but not replaced. All this goes on within the apparently familiar, conventional framework of a first-person narrative. It is only a slight sense of unease at the characterlessness of the narrator which may prompt us to enquire further, which has led us to Modiano’s discreet subversion of this particular narrative form.

CHAPTER TWO

Disorderly Narratives: The Order of Narration . . . il e´tait ne´ en 1920 a` Anvers, et il avait a` peine connu son pe`re . . . Apre`s quelques anne´es d’e´tudes a` Bruxelles, il quitta la Belgique pour Paris en 1938 . . . Il fit la connaissance de Robert Capa. Celui-ci l’entraıˆ na, en janvier 1939, a` Barcelone . . . Chien de printemps, p. 25

Modiano’s novels are full of dates. The narrators seem to take much pleasure in specifying precisely when certain events took place, whether in their own lives or in someone else’s. Chapters and paragraphs frequently start with a date reference: ‘Hier, 1er octobre de dix-neuf cent quatre-vingt quatorze, je suis revenu chez moi, de la place d’Italie, par le me´tro.’1 Or: ‘J’ai connu Francis Jansen quand j’avais dix-neuf ans, au printemps de 1964 . . .’2 These are especially useful given that Modiano’s novels all deal with explorations into the past, various levels of the past, made accessible through long flashbacks. The typical Modiano narrative generally works on three or more of these ‘levels’: the narrative of Fleurs de ruine, for instance, moves back and forth between a pre-war period (1933), the narrator’s post-war childhood, and the tale of his late adolescence in the early 1960s. Yet a reading of a Modiano novel leaves the reader with the overall impression that chronology, although definitely there, is curiously redundant. In Voyage de noces, for example, 1942 presents itself to the reader as a past no further away than the more recent level of 1968; it does not feel more distant. It is as if the different chronological levels are situated on a single plane, on which they enjoy an unhierarchical and interdependent existence. This impression of redundant chronology is not an obvious one, unlike the experimental subversion of conventional time that occurs in certain nouveaux romans. The subversion, if that is what it is, is far more discreet, as it occurs within the framework of a conventional dating system. How can we account for this unusual representation of time, simultaneously absent and present, in Modiano’s novels? 25

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NARRATIVE ORDER The order in which events are told in a narrative is clearly crucial to the sense of time which governs it, but this is dependent on what kind of narrative is under discussion. Various narrative theorists have pointed out that two, or even three very different objects coexist within a single narrative. There is the actual written text, the collection of signifiers on the page: the Russian Formalists, for instance, called this the sjuzhet, and in Genette’s scheme this is called the re´cit. Then there is the story behind the text, the collection of ‘real’ signifieds of which the text is an arrangement: the Russian Formalist’s fabula, which Genette refers to as histoire. Finally, there is the enunciation of the narrative by the narrator of the text, baptised narration by Genette. The events related in these three kinds of narrative, re´cit, histoire and narration, are ordered differently. The order of the histoire is, quite simply, the chronological order of events in the ‘real’ world: the order of the re´cit is the order in which these things are told: the order of the narration is the order in which the events appear to the narrator’s consciousness. For example, the order of histoire in Oedipus Rex would be as follows: the oracle prophesying Oedipus’ tragic destiny, followed by the birth of Oedipus, his abandonment, his rescue, his childhood in Corinth, and so on up to his adulthood. In the actual narrative of the play, however, the events are presented in a different order, the order of re´cit: it starts with the fully-grown Oedipus, demanding an end to the miseries of Thebes, followed by a flashback to the killing of Laius, a return to the present and the interrogation of the shepherd, a flashback to the oracle, and so on. It is important to note that the order of histoire is not the Real; it is an order which is reconstructed from the re´cit, which is the only order that we can actually see (on the page).3 The histoire is itself a figuration of selected, significant events.4 If we do not recognise this, we are implicitly acknowledging the existence of a single, absolute reality which becomes the mimetic model for all possible narratives of it. Such a view would destroy the possibility of alternative histories, and would lead to an understanding of the histoire as referent rather than as signified. The order of re´cit, by contrast, is the order in which events are presented in the actual narrative, be it oral or written. It is governed by rules independent of those which determine the order of histoire. For instance, considerations of dramatic effect may come into play (Balzac advised novelists to begin novels in medias res to maximise drama).

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Another key factor in the ordering of the re´cit is what is sometimes called ‘the logic of the narrative’. Every narrative genre has a logic peculiar to itself in accordance with its purposes: for example, the logic of the narrative in a detective story is significantly different from that of a parable. Such patterns also affect the order of the re´cit. The third kind of narrative order is not an immediately obvious one. The order of narration is the order in which the narrated events are experienced by the narrator at the moment of his narration; it is the sequence of the events as they appear to the narrator’s consciousness. For example, an event which took place ten years previous to the time of narration (in terms of the order of histoire) may be placed at the beginning of the narrative for dramatic effect (in terms of the order of re´cit), but may feel like an ever-constant present to the narrator at the time of its narration (in terms of the order of narration)—the memory of an undetected crime, for instance. And this would be discernible in the choice of tense used; instead of the appropriate past tense, it might be related in the present tense,5 signalling its relation to the consciousness of the narrator. It is possible to see the order of narration as a disorder in its idiosyncrasy. Perhaps subjective orders are always disorders, as Sartre suggests when describing his childhood understanding of the coherence of the world: he calls it ‘un de´sordre qui devint mon ordre particulier’.6 These three kinds of order can be identified in any narrative, as they are the result of the fact that a narrative is the relating by a narrator of a series of events taking place in time. Different narratives, however, will foreground different orders: a historical narrative will generally favour its order of histoire, whereas novels relying heavily on plot and intrigue will draw the reader’s attention to its order of re´cit. It appears to me that Modiano’s novels, given their first-person narrators, the curiously flat and seemingly redundant chronology, and the relative insignificance of the present time-sphere, should be read as narratives which follow the order of narration. It is also the order of narration which best accounts for the peculiarities of Modiano’s presentation of time in his narratives. Modiano’s Fleurs de ruine may be described as being governed by the (dis)order of narration. Structurally speaking it is a promenade through Paris, loosely justified as a tracing of the route followed by a young couple, Gise`le and Urbain T., on the night of their suicide in 1933. The narrative takes us through certain areas of Paris which played a significant part in the narrator’s own childhood and youth, oscillating rapidly between the tale of the suicide, the tale of the narrator’s

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childhood (post-war), and the tale of his life with Jacqueline (early 1960s). The ‘enigma’ posed at the start of the novel, the mysterious double suicide of Urbain and Gise`le T., is never given a solution or even a conclusion; but musings on the subject give rise to numerous sidetracks in which the narrator indulges almost playfully. Indeed, at times he hardly conceals the fact that he is not actually very interested in discovering the truth about the suicide. It is interesting to compare his stance with that of the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, who maintains a more serious attitude to his search, inconclusive though it turns out to be. The narrator of Fleurs de ruine ‘entend de´courager toute tentative de reconstituer une quelconque cohe´rence narrative’.7 We will see that a narrative coherence does in fact exist, but it is certainly not one which follows the order of re´cit. An example of the oscillation between time levels is to be found in the fourth section of the novel (pp. 28–31):8 from speculating on how the couple returned to Paris from Perreux, the narrative wanders to the subject of the trains which used to join Paris and Perreux, and from there to the avenue Daumesnil which runs alongside the line and a list of the shops which used to line this avenue in the narrator’s youth. One of these is the Cafe´ Bosc, where, we are informed (for no particular reason), the narrator spent an evening before his departure for Vienna in the 1960s. We then return to the subject of the young couple, but the narrator does not conceal that his ‘reconstruction’ of their tragedy is mostly speculation and invention rather than description: De la gare de Nogent, il leur avait fallu remonter a` pied toute la Grande-Rue jusqu’au Perreux. A moins que les deux hommes ne soient venus les chercher en voiture. J’ai plutoˆt l’impression qu’en sortant du Cafe´ de la Marine9 avec les deux inconnues ils ont descendu les escaliers de la station Raspail. (p. 30)

This narrative order is such that it could legitimately be described as complete chaos, or at least as a serious disorder from the point of view of the orders of histoire and re´cit. It appears highly random, as has been said of the ordering of Quartier perdu: ‘les e´ve´nements du passe´ sont pre´sente´s simultane´ment a` divers moments du pre´sent et semblent surgir par association’.10 The principle of association, however, is clearly governed in both Quartier perdu and Fleurs de ruine by an order of narration which has much to do with geographical location. All of these events are associated in the consciousness of the narrator because of their coincidence in the same areas of Paris. Geographical coherence takes the place of chronological order in the consciousness of the

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narrator.11 This could be explained as a direct result of the narrator’s experience: that is, at the time of narrating, the narrator experiences the events spatially rather than temporally. Indeed the narrator’s description of the Champs-Elyse´es in Fleurs de ruine may be applied to the whole of this novel: Les Champs-Elyse´es . . . Ils sont comme l’e´tang qu’e´voque une romancie`re anglaise et au fond duquel se de´posent, par couches successives, les e´chos des voix de tous les promeneurs qui ont reˆve´ sur ses bords. L’eau moire´e conserve pour toujours ces e´chos et, par les nuits silencieuses, ils se meˆlent les uns aux autres . . . (p. 103)

The narrative order of Fleurs de ruine is governed by geographical associations, which have no objective coherence but obey the narrator’s internal order. One critic, who refers somewhat imaginatively to the different tales in this novel as the ‘fleurs’ of the title, notes how ‘ces fleurs ne surgissent pas au hasard: elles sont oriente´es par et vers la conscience du narrateur, et tributaires de sa seule et solaire lucidite´’.12 The order of narration is indeed the product of the narrator’s consciousness: of the narrator’s consciousness at the time of narrating. Such a highly idiosyncratic order of narration makes particular demands on, and poses specific dangers for, the reader of the narrative. Readers will read in accordance with their skills and expectations, and these latter are partially predetermined by the genre, or by what the reader takes to be the genre. The reader’s sophistication is put to the test by a work such as Fleurs de ruine, as it is disguised, albeit more thinly than Rue des Boutiques Obscures for instance, as a detective novel. Given a preliminary ‘mystery’, the reader will at least begin her reading with what we may call aetiological or hermeneutic expectations.13 The temptation to swallow this ‘bait’ may be further enhanced by the hesitant character of the narrative voice: the typical Modiano narrator’s lack of assurance may provoke her into reconstructing the story more energetically than when reading a narrative told by an authoritative voice. Indeed, the reader will be driven by the desire to do what we have just done: she will be tempted to re-order it, to impose coherence and meaning on to it. Such attempts, however, are doomed in a Modiano novel, as the text eventually frustrates the search for a primal cause or origin of the problem: ‘la curiosite´ du lecteur ne sera jamais satisfaite’.14 There is no final closure, no triumphant detective, but an anti-climactic fade-out or a displacement effect. The Pacheco case in Fleurs de ruine, for example, stands as a warning against aetiological readings/writings, both to the narrator and

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to the reader. The narrator of this novel meets Pacheco at the Cite´ Universitaire, where he and Jacqueline eat regularly (using false student cards). Pacheco also appears to be a false student (he claims to, but does not, live in the pavillon des Provinces franc¸aises): but more seriously, the narrator discovers that Pacheco is none other than a certain Philippe de Bellune, an ex-collaborator who was never brought to justice. The narrator engages in some detective work and finds old addresses and a list of other collaborators who are similarly on the run. He even goes as far as asking Pacheco about his dark and hidden past; Pacheco credits him with ‘beaucoup d’imagination’ but denies his allegations. Full of precise details, the narrator’s account of his ‘investigation’ is compelling and convincing, satisfying the reader’s desire for the discovery of secrets (any secret will do; by now we may have forgotten about the young couple who committed suicide). This makes the ending of the ‘Pacheco story’ all the more of a shock. The man disappears, entrusting his suitcase to the narrator, who opens it after a while to discover that the man was not Pacheco/Philippe de Bellune after all, but a certain Lombard who stole de Bellune’s papers many years earlier. There is a further twist in that Lombard was the waiter in the restaurant who saw the young couple on the night of their suicide: a tantalising twist, but one which leads us nowhere. The unexpected outcome of the narrator’s investigations is a warning to both himself and the reader against hermeneutic curiosity: ‘Pourquoi m’avait-il laisse´ sa valise? Voulait-il me donner une lec¸on en me montrant que la re´alite´ e´tait plus fuyante que je ne le pensais?’ (p. 83). Even this ‘lesson’, of course, is only conjectural. It is an instance of the narrator—and through him, the author—playing ‘avec l’identite´ sous pre´texte de la faire de´couvrir’.15 We could perhaps more generally name these feints by Modiano, be they concerned with identities or mysteries, ‘aetiological flirtations’: baiting, then disappointing the reader in her hermeneutic desire. There are many other examples in Modiano of such aetiological flirtations where all the hints and clues within the novel appear to point to a solution which, at the last moment, is withheld or proven to be illusory. In Les Boulevards de ceinture (1972) the mystery of the malaise between father and son appears to reside in what the narrator refers to ceremoniously as ‘l’e´pisode douleureux du me´tro George-V’ (in a clever parody of the fait-divers style). The reader turns to the narrative of this episode expecting it to satisfy her curiosity, but is faced instead with another—if this time decisive—manifestation of the problem, as opposed to an explanation. The father pushing his son off the me´tro

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platform is a symptom of the malaise, rather than the primal cause. Repetition, rather than solution, lies at the heart of the mystery: the movement into the past simply repeats the question in a slightly different form rather than giving us the answer in the way that a traditional aetiological narrative would do. At other times the reader may hardly notice that her hermeneutic desire has not in fact been satisfied, owing to the subtlety of Modiano’s narrative feints. For example, one error common to a cursory reading of Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978) is to assume that Guy Roland’s amnesia dates from his fatal attempt to cross the border into Switzerland, the day of his separation from Denise.16 This is an easy assumption to make, given that the mystery of his identity seems to reach total clarification at that stage, and his loss of consciousness in the snow seems to be a plausible reason for subsequent amnesia. However, an unobtrusive sentence at the beginning of the novel has informed us that the amnesia only dates back ten years: ‘voila` dix ans, quand j’avais brusquement e´te´ frappe´ d’amne´sie’.17 The narratorial present in this novel is 1965, judging from the dates on Bernardy’s letters,18 so the amnesia can only have started in 1955: the Mege`ve incident takes place in February 1943.19 This leaves the reader with twelve years of unexplained past, and means that Rue des Boutiques Obscures is not the completed narrative that it may have seemed to be, as parts of the mystery remain unsolved, and the narrator’s identity is not wholly elucidated. The novel ends with the narrator motioning us to the street of the title, thus shifting the focus of our hermeneutic reading to a different time in a different country and city, and to another identity for the narrator: his post-Pedro McEvoy, pre-Guy Roland identity, to be located during the twelve mysteriously blank years. The hermeneutic desire of the reader has been deflected yet again. But this desire, never satisfied, is nevertheless essential to narrative; it is the desire which engenders narrative. The narrator of Modiano’s text is aware of this: J’e´chafaudais toutes les hypothe`ses concernant Philippe de Pacheco dont je ne connaissais meˆme pas le visage. Je prenais des notes. Sans en avoir clairement conscience, je commenc¸ais mon premier livre. Ce n’e´tait pas ni une vocation ni un don particuliers qui me poussaient a` e´crire, mais tout simplement l’e´nigme que me posait un homme que je n’avais aucune chance de retrouver, et toutes ces questions qui n’auraient jamais de re´ponse. (p. 86)

It is interesting to note that the ‘non-answers’ arrived at tend to be fictions. The ‘solution’ to Pacheco’s mystery resides in a fictional

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identity. In Voyage de noces the story of the honeymoon, which as its title event could be considered legitimately to hold the ‘key’ to the novel, turns out to be fictional in three ways. First, its ontological status is suspect; it is probably imagined, being the narrator’s free reconstruction of events which took place before he was born. Secondly, even if it were ‘true’, we know that its telling constitutes a ‘displaced’ solution to the narrator’s own problems, which throws further doubt on its reliability. Finally, the voyage is not a honeymoon, as Ingrid and Rigaud are not married. It is tempting to draw an analogy here with Freud’s case of the Wolf Man as analysed by Peter Brooks. In Freud’s case, the primal scene which lies at the origin of the case history turns out to have been fictional, a primal phantasy rather than a real event. But Freud decides, significantly, that this does not invalidate the ensuing narrative. This is daring—and extremely Modernist—of Freud: A narrative explanation that surely foresaw that much of its celebrity would come from its recovery of so spectacular a moment of origin doubles back on itself to question that origin and indeed to displace the whole question of origins, to suggest another kind of referentiality, in that all tales may lead back not so much to events as to other tales, to man as a structure of the fictions he tells about himself.20

This view would seem to justify Modiano’s use of aetiological desire as the driving force behind a proliferation of fictional narratives, in the legitimate if never-fulfilled hope of explaining the self, or simply of tracing ‘le cours d’une vie’. The desire to know, to find an answer, is at the root of all narratives, inconclusive as they may and must be. And perhaps, in a novel such as Fleurs de ruine, the original source of narrative desire (the mystery of the suicide) is not very important, as long as it sparks off a proliferation of narratives in accordance with the order of narration, involving the reader in the ceaseless activity of sense-making. TENSE I will now take a closer look at the order of narration, to which tense is the key. That the preterite in the novel is not so much a figure of temporal significance as a sign of fictionality was noted by Barthes in Le Degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture. ‘Re´tire´ du franc¸ais parle´, le passe´ simple, pierre d’angle du Re´cit, signale toujours un art; il fait partie d’un rituel des Belles-Lettres. Il n’est plus charge´ d’exprimer un temps.’21 The preterite is not alone in its liberation, within a fictional narrative, from purely

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temporal significance. In his survey of studies of tense in Temps et Re´cit, Paul Ricœur concludes that the tense system in fiction is independent of, although related to, the temporal scheme in the outside world.22 It appears that different novels display different levels of reliance on the ‘external’ system of tenses: as Roy Pascal points out, ‘we do not use the same criteria for all novels, but the novel itself tells us what criteria are relevant’.23 Some novels rely on the reader accepting the order of histoire, which is that of the ‘external’ temporal system. Others, like Modiano’s novels, use tenses within the realm of fiction in order to convey the narrator’s vision, the order of narration. In these novels, the different tenses used to describe a past event can be seen as expressions of the narrator’s attitude towards the event, a function of the narrator’s subjective experience of time, rather than as indices of temporality. In Modiano, tense seems to be used in this way to characterise the emotional distance between the narrator and the event described; this may account for the impression it gives, noted earlier, of a redundant chronology. That is, chronology is present in the narrative in the form of scrupulously recorded dates, but is at the same time redundant as it does not create a temporal hierarchy in which the more distant past is felt to be further away than a more recent one. Voyage de noces affords us an example of this at work. Voyage de noces is (like many a Modiano novel) a first-person narrative in which the narrator tells the story of his past through frequent flashbacks which take the narrative back to past ‘levels’. By levels I mean specifically dated time-spheres within which the narrative can unfold.24 The term ‘level’ seems appropriate as they are discrete, not continuous; a shift from level to level by the narrative is usually a sudden movement, not a gradual one. There are a great number of these in Voyage de noces. It contains at least five levels of time between which the narrative moves: the present, 1989; eighteen years previously, when Ingrid committed suicide in Milan; 1968, when the narrator met Ingrid for the last time; 1965, the year of the narrator’s first encounter with the Rigauds in the south of France; and 1941–42, the epoch of Rigaud and Ingrid’s meeting and their subsequent flight to Juan-Les-Pins. The narration on these five levels makes it difficult to keep track of the narrative: ‘parfois les renvois aux dates obligent le lecteur a` faire une ve´ritable gymnastique mentale’.25 The reader becomes engaged in an activity of reconstruction, of re-ordering the story chronologically as she reads, and this leads to a disturbing discovery. It is not just the

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complexity of the levels which makes the reconstruction a difficult task: it is also the total lack of temporal hierarchy in this narrative, the complete absence of a dominant time level. That is, there is little sense that the level corresponding to the present is the rightful site of the narrative, from which the narrative’s flashbacks, for example, should be measured. This is the reason for the apparent effortlessness with which the chronological shifts appear to take place in a Modiano novel, and the resulting feeling that chronological order, although present in the text, is curiously redundant. The different levels command the same degree of narrative interest; action, narrative development and the accumulation of information appear to take place on all of the levels to an equal degree, thus dispersing the focus and homogenising them. What is the part played by tense usage in creating this impression of temporal anarchy? A cursory look at the tense usage in Voyage de noces is enough to show that it does not follow the chronological system of everyday usage. On every level Modiano’s narrator uses a range of tenses which would not be acceptable within the conventional system, except on the ‘present’ level, where he uses the present, perfect, and occasionally the future tense. On all of the other levels he uses a variety of past tenses— perfect, preterite, pluperfect—as well as the present tense, which means that it is not possible to differentiate between the levels by looking at the tenses. Although clearly dated, the levels begin to merge into one another, being on the same plane of the narratorial consciousness; chronology becomes redundant as the tenses subvert the order of histoire which the dates are there to impose.26 This subversion of chronology is most strikingly evidenced in the case of the earliest chronological level, that of 1941–42. The description of Ingrid’s first encounter with Rigaud in the winter of 1941 begins with a combination of the imperfect and the pluperfect, as befits an event which occurred so many decades ago: ‘C’e´tait un des derniers jours de novembre. Elle avait quitte´, comme d’habitude, le cours de l’e´cole de danse’ (p. 124, my italics).27 However, this is followed several paragraphs later by the sudden appearance of the perfect: ‘Elle n’est pas descendue a` Simplon comme d’habitude, mais a` Barbe`s-Rochechouart.’ Then the tense switches briefly into the preterite (‘Elle eut le pressentiment que’), followed immediately and surprisingly by the present: ‘Elle suit le boulevard de Rochechouart [. . .] De temps en temps, elle jette un regard sur le trottoir [. . .] ou` il fait plus sombre bien que l’heure ne soit pas encore sonne´’ (p. 126, my italics).

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The use of the present here has several effects. One is the heightening of dramatic tension, which is appropriate, given that it is the description of a crucial moment. This is a perfectly conventional technique in fiction, and one which results from considerations belonging to the order of re´cit. However, it also has the effect of bringing this remote incident in the past into the narrator’s present, and giving it a primary position in the narratorial consciousness and in the order of narration. This is disproportionate and achronological from the point of view of histoire, but it is a function of the bizarre intimacy and sympathy which Modiano’s narrators habitually enjoy with the experiences of other minds. For it is easy to forget, when reading this passage or others which describe the experiences of Ingrid and Rigaud, that these experiences do not actually belong to the narrator; indeed they pre-date his existence, occurring in 1941–42, that is before he was born. They are related for the most part in free indirect speech, a technique which allows him to slip into the consciousnesses of Ingrid and Rigaud. The narrator confuses the issue further for the reader by introducing, for example, his narrative of the Rigauds’ stay in Juan-Les-Pins in the following way: ‘Je n’ai pas besoin de consulter mes notes, ce soir, dans la chambre de l’hoˆtel Dodds. Je me souviens de tout comme si c’e´tait hier . . . Ils e´taient arrive´s sur la Coˆte d’Azur, au printemps de 1942’ (p. 55, my italics). Can it be that he somehow ‘remembers’ (but how?) the actual experience, or does he remember being told about the experience? Or is it the memory of his imaginary experience? The italicised sentence introduces possibilities of doubt which may not be resolved in the reader, even if she decides to give the passage a realist reading, and confusion regarding the ontological status of the ‘memory’ will remain. The narrator introduces his account of Ingrid and Rigaud’s first meeting with a similarly ambiguous passage: Les eaux des fontaines scintillent sous le soleil, et je n’e´prouve aucune difficulte´ a` me transporter, de ce paisible apre`s-midi de juillet ou` je suis en ce moment, jusqu’a` l’hiver lointain ou` Ingrid a rencontre´ Rigaud pour la premie`re fois. Il n’existe plus de frontie`re entre les saisons, entre le passe´ et le pre´sent. (p. 124)

It would appear that there are no frontiers between the past and present of individual people, either, if Jean can accede in this way to the memories of Ingrid and Rigaud. A first-person narrator, he seems to have far too much information about the inner feelings of the other characters in this novel, even if Ingrid has been highly communicative

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with him: ‘je lui [Ingrid] ai pose´ des questions et je me demande encore pourquoi elle y a re´pondu avec tant de de´tails’ (p. 117). Collective memory? Or is he an ‘empty’ narrator whose consciousness is the meeting place for the memories and feelings of other consciousnesses, as in the case of the amnesiac narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures? Perhaps it is simply that the narrator of Voyage de noces is not aspiring to write an objective account of the past, nor attempting to recreate the order of histoire, but restricting himself to the writing of a subjective, imaginary past, an evocation of the order of narration, his order. Unlike a historical narrative, this narrative is not the objective record of a series of events whose nature and order would appear the same to any observer, but an emotional and sympathetic re-creation.28 That this is a creation is emphasised by the fact that Jean, the narrator, is also actually writing a book. This book is the biography of Ingrid which he has been planning to write for some time (p. 49), but, at the same time, his Memoirs: —Vous e´crivez vos Me´moires? Je voyais bien qu’il ne me croyait pas. Et pourtant je disais la ve´rite´. ‘Pas vraiment des Me´moires, lui ai-je dit. Mais presque.’ (p. 150)

‘Pas vraiment des Me´moires. Mais presque.’ It is an odd description, but one which nevertheless aptly captures the nature of Jean’s endeavour, which is both rememoration and creation. Jean’s writing follows the order of narration, in which chronology, order and identity ultimately align themselves in exclusive relation to the narratorial consciousness. Writing is the act of remembering which creates the past, configures it anew for the narrator, even when that past belongs to someone else. And this sympathetic appropriation is justified when we see how writing about the past of Ingrid and Rigaud is Jean’s way of writing about himself and Annette. Jean is constantly ‘fitting’ his life on to that of the Rigauds in his narrative; for example, he mentions several times how, like them, he has a recurrent desire to hide, to escape, to disappear. Indeed he has made it a way of life, together with Annette: ‘Depuis vingt ans, elle avait e´te´ a` bonne e´cole avec moi pour apprendre l’art de se cacher, d’e´viter les importuns, ou de fausser compagnie aux gens. [. . .] Et tous ces voyages lointains que j’avais entrepris non pour satisfaire une curiosite´ ou une vocation d’explorateur, mais pour fuir. Ma vie n’a e´te´ qu’une fuite’ (pp. 94–95). The Rigauds learned to ‘faire semblant d’eˆtre morts’ (p. 84) during the Occupation, words repeated

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by Ingrid 23 years later when she refers to their method for avoiding their boisterous neighbours: ‘Alors, dans ce cas, nous ferons semblant d’eˆtre morts’ (p. 41). These words so impress the young narrator that they stay with him into middle age, when he decides to act on them, faking his own death in a disappearance. And one wonders whether his doubling of Ingrid’s life will stretch to its ending, in suicide: ‘Mais il [ce sentiment de vide et de remords] finit par revenir en force et elle [Ingrid] ne pouvait pas s’en de´barrasser. Moi non plus’ (p. 157).

FABULA AND SJUZHET What exactly is the relationship between the story of Jean and Annette and that of the Rigauds? I suggest that it may be the one which holds between fabula and sjuzhet, and will take a moment to sketch out definitions of these two terms. These terms, coined by the Russian Formalists, have been valued for their precision, which has been deemed greater than that of the comparable ‘histoire-re´cit’ or ‘story-plot’ distinctions. Fabula and sjuzhet may be defined respectively as ‘a distinction between the events on the one hand and the construction on the other’:29 between what is narrated and the way in which it is narrated. The terms fabula and sjuzhet are generally applied to the whole of a literary work; that is, the whole text is seen as the sjuzhet from which the fabula may be derived. This is the way in which Ge´rard Genette uses the distinction (although he prefers the terms histoire and re´cit), as we have seen; in his readings of Proust or of Manon Lescaut, he examines the difference between the order of events of the histoire, and the order in which they are presented in the re´cit. In cases like these, it is understood that the text—that is, what we see on the page—is the sjuzhet, from which the fabula may be reconstructed; the sjuzhet is the embodied form of the fabula. There are texts, however, in which the fabula can be said to be physically present in the text: for example, in the detective story. The detective story has been described as the ‘narrative of narratives’ because its text contains both crime and enquiry.30 That is, what we read is the process of the structuration of the fabula (the crime) by the sjuzhet (the enquiry). The construction of the sjuzhet from the raw material of the fabula is dramatised by and within the narrative itself. As Peter Brooks describes it, the sjuzhet is the activity which interprets

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and ‘unpacks’ the fabula, presented as the mystery, the unreadable metaphor.31 Thus the fabula can be usefully thought of as a physically present part of the text. Rather than regard the whole of the text as the sjuzhet of a disembodied fabula, it is possible to think of fabula and sjuzhet— even fabulas and sjuzhets—as coexisting and interacting within the written work. Brooks has his own examples of this in Reading for the Plot. His analysis of Freud’s account of the Wolf Man’s case history shows how Freud’s method involves the telling and explaining of the fabulas and sjuzhets which constitute the Wolf Man’s psyche. ‘He must manage to tell, both ‘‘at once’’ and ‘‘in order’’, the story of a person, the story of an illness, the story of an investigation, the story of an explanation; and ‘‘meaning’’ must ultimately lie in the effective interrelationship of all of these.’32 We can take a similar approach to Modiano’s Voyage de noces, looking at it not as a single sjuzhet of one fabula, but as containing a collection of fabulas and sjuzhets which interact within the novel. There are indeed many ‘candidates’ for both (I shall refer to them loosely as ‘tales’) in Voyage de noces, ‘des re´cits a` l’inte´rieur du re´cit’:33 the tale of the Occupation, the tale of the Rigauds’ youth, the tale of the narrator’s youth, the tale of Annette’s infidelity. Some of these remain unnarrated fabulas, others are narrated and made sjuzhets, but they are not fixed in their roles as one or the other. For example, the tale of the present narrator who is telling/writing the story can be seen as a continuous collapsing of sjuzhet into fabula, in so far as the telling of the story becomes the story itself. This happens frequently in Modiano’s novels: in Quartier perdu, for instance, we learn half-way through the novel that the account that we have been reading, about the narrator’s arrival in Paris after a long absence, is being written in Paris during this very visit. In other words, the conditions which make the text possible are located within the text: structuration becomes part of the structured story, as with many nouveaux romans. The fabula–sjuzhet relationship can also hold between two tales (as opposed to a single tale collapsing from sjuzhet to fabula status). Unnarrated fabulas can be read ‘between the lines’ of a narrated sjuzhet: for example, the untold tale of the Occupation can be seen as the fabula of the narrated tale of the young Rigaud and Ingrid, in which it is given shape and structure. Another possible fabula for the same sjuzhet (viz., the story of the Rigauds) is the tale of Jean and Annette, of which details are scattered throughout the novel but which is never

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properly narrated. Such a relationship would explain the bizarre sympathy and complicity which exist between the narrator and the Rigauds, as well as the similarities in their lives. Indeed Jean and Annette’s story can be seen as a narrative displaced by the story of the Rigauds. Through telling the tale of the older couple in an era preceding his own existence, the narrator simultaneously satisfies his need to narrate and achieves a kind of cathartic transference effect. As we have already seen, there are numerous parallels between the detailed narrative of the Rigauds as told by Jean, and the tale of Jean and Annette which we can piece together from his occasional revelations. The novel begins with Jean recalling the coincidence of being served the same drink in the same Milanese hotel as was Ingrid several days prior to his arrival. Reminded of this episode, Jean sets out on a belated search (Ingrid has already been dead for some years) for her story. We quickly discover, however, that this search is a double one: it is as much a search for Jean’s own story, an attempt to narrate and give meaning to his own life, to make sense of his career, his relationship with his wife and his friends. Jean realises and acknowledges this when, returning to Paris in order to retrace Ingrid’s steps, he visits the zoo where he first dreamt of becoming an explorer: ‘Me voici revenu au point de de´part’ (p. 19): that is, his point of departure, not hers. We soon find that Jean has had a tendency throughout his life to use the Rigauds as an embodiment of his own doubts and unacknowledged desires, by seeing parallels between his life and theirs. All three are orphans, they share a desire to avoid people, and each is prone to a ‘sentiment de vide’. These characteristics, even when they may be classifed as factual coincidences, are significant similarities mainly because Jean decides to see them as such: it is in their narrating, their narrative ordering, that they become significant parallels. For example, immediately after mentioning the article on Ingrid’s suicide in the Corriere della sera, Jean evokes—almost longingly—the article which he hopes will appear on his own disappearance. Jean’s desire to identify with and effect a transference on to the Rigauds is what orders and organises this narrative. The most interesting case of what we may call transference, or displacement of narrative desire, occurs at a key moment of narration. Jean tells us that ten years prior to the narrating present, he arrived at a crisis point in his life: C’e´tait le mois de septembre, a` Paris, et pour la premie`re fois, j’avais e´prouve´ un doute concernant ma vie et mon me´tier. De´sormais, je devais partager

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These two paragraphs would appear to be a preparation for further details on the narrator’s state of mind, perhaps for a confession. The reader is thus slightly taken aback by the next paragraph, which switches without warning, and with an extreme naturalness, to the subject of Ingrid: ‘Le souvenir d’Ingrid m’occupait l’esprit de manie`re lancinante, et j’avais passe´ les journe´es pre´ce´dant mon de´part a` noter tout ce que je savais d’elle’ (p. 50). Why the sudden change from a discussion of his own life to that of Ingrid? Faced with the tale of his career, and of his wife’s infidelity, Jean abruptly transfers his attention on to another tale, a tale more bearable to tell perhaps; tracing Ingrid’s life is his escape from having to order and make sense of his own. We must note that this displacement of Jean’s main narrative-to-be by that of Ingrid occurs twice. The first is at the time being described (i.e. ten years previous to the time of narration, when he started having doubts about his career, etc.): clearly Jean never returned to the internal narration of his own problems and transferred his energies to the collection of notes on Ingrid’s life. The second displacement occurs at the present time of narration. For the narrative does not return to a description of his former crisis: from a discussion of the notes he collected for the writing of Ingrid’s biography, we proceed to musings on the nature and possibility of biography, ending on a characteristically ‘downbeat’ note: ‘J’ai fini par m’endormir en remuant dans ma teˆte toutes ces graves questions’ (p. 53). It is significant that the displacement occurs in the context of narration, and supports the view that Jean’s writing of Ingrid’s biography is his way of writing about himself, a view that is borne out by the exchange with Ben Smidane (quoted above) concerning Jean’s Memoirs. Because of his difficulties with writing about himself and Annette, Jean gives this fabula a sjuzhet based on someone else’s life, which he narrates as a replacement for his own. Perhaps this is a case of Freudian transference, of the kind described by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot.

BIOGRAPHERS, HISTORIANS We have seen how in Voyage de noces, Modiano is not attempting to write about an objective past, but remembering and recreating, through

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the act of writing, a subjective past which is governed by the order of narration rather than those of histoire or of re´cit. This suggests that Modiano is pessimistic about the possibility of writing an ‘objective’ history at all: indeed a brief glance at his novels seems to reveal an attitude towards history (or biography, the history of an individual) as an ideal, but unattainable, form of narrative. His narrators are often failed or aspiring historians/biographers. Jean has been trying to write a biography of Ingrid for some time, Jimmy Sarano wants to write a history of his polyglot town, the young narrator of Livret de famille attempts a biography of Harry Dressel (failing which he decides to become a novelist!), and so on.34 In Voyage de noces, the narrator muses over how he should write his biography of Ingrid, and more specifically about the selection of facts which must take place: un biographe a-t-il le droit de supprimer certains de´tails, sous pre´texte qu’il les juge superflus? Ou bien ont-ils tous leur importance et faut-il les rassembler a` la file sans se permettre de privile´gier l’un au de´triment de l’autre, de sorte que pas un seul ne doit manquer, comme dans l’inventaire d’une saisie? (p. 52)

At the one extreme, the biographer could record, scrupulously and mechanically, all the details which come into his possession (always bearing in mind that this will not be a complete collection anyway); Modiano seems to practise this himself when he indulges in his lists of addresses, telephone numbers, and the names of people, hotels and cafe´s. But his comparison of this with a ‘saisie’ creates a negative impression. At the other extreme, we have the biographer who uses his judgement in the selection and arrangement of the facts at his disposal; the emphasis laid on arrangement strongly suggests an affinity with the activity of the novelist. Peter Brooks offers some thoughts on the nature of biography in the aforementioned analysis of the Wolf Man, his examination of the case history as ‘a form of exemplary biography’.35 Having demonstrated the complexity of the interrelationships between narratives and their origins and the interchangeable nature of fabulas and sjuzhets in such a narrative, Brooks concludes that ‘the shape of the individual and his biography becomes uncontrollable: their etiology and evolution are assigned to an unspecifiable network of event, fiction and interpretation’.36 The case history, which would appear to be the closest one could get to a scientific and ‘truthful’ account of a human existence, is thus irrevocably flawed through the very nature of its tool, the

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narrative. The biography would not appear to stand much of a chance in its tracing of ‘quelques-uns de ces de´tails disparates, relie´s par un fil invisible qui menace de se rompre et que l’on appelle le cours d’une vie’ (p. 118); or at the least it must accept its quasi-fictional status and align itself on the side of the novelists. This rapprochement with fiction, however, must not lead us to underestimate the importance of the biographer’s task for Modiano. Indeed, his preoccupation with the recording of ephemeral existences is one of the most fundamental themes of his œuvre. It has been suggested that it may be a device for the portrayal of the great events of history, for which purpose a focus on the lives of peripheral characters (most notably in works such as Livret de famille, De si braves garc¸ons, Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Voyage de noces, and others) can be effective.37 Certainly it is true that Modiano’s narrators are driven by a compulsive desire, almost a sense of duty, to record the details of ephemeral lives and milieux, the existences of the ‘hommes des plages’ of this world: De ceux qui ne laissent sur leur passage qu’une bue´e vite dissipe´e. [. . .] [l’homme des plages] figure en maillot de bain au milieu de groupes joyeux mais personne ne pourrait dire son nom. [. . .] Et personne ne remarqua qu’un jour il avait disparu des photographies.38

The narrator of one of Modiano’s most recent novels, Chien de printemps, is another young man engaged voluntarily in a biographer’s task: he is working through three suitcasefuls of photographs, taken by a photographer by the name of Jansen, and carrying out the thankless task of recording and classifying them in chronological order. The narrator’s reordering of the mass of these photographs amounts to a systematic attempt to reconstruct Jansen’s past, both professional and private, and he is thus identifiable as Modiano’s recurrent historian/ biographer figure. His motivation is the same as that of Modiano’s other heroes: ‘si je m’e´tais engage´ en ce travail, c’est que je refusais que les gens et les choses disparaissent sans laisser de trace’.39 Jansen is a silent, solitary and elusive figure, not given to confidences and with a ‘manie . . . de faire le mort’40 reminiscent of the characters in Voyage de noces. The activity of rearranging, ordering and recording these silent objects (Jansen is known also for his love of silence and his contempt for words) echoes that of the narration of facts, the attempt to organise fragments of the ‘real’ into a narrative history. And by choosing to classify the photographs in chronological order, the young narrator is

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subscribing to the order of histoire, relying on chronology for the creation of a coherent narrative. What is novel and interesting in Chien de printemps is the use of photographs as a metaphor for the raw material of narrative. Photography has traditionally been a symbol of exact representation, the sworn enemy of High Art, and the Other of writing. The later Barthes,41 for example, believed the photograph to be our closest and least mediated encounter with the Real, being a direct emanation from the Real inasmuch as an actual physical transference takes place through the conjunction of chemistry and light: ‘la photo est litte´ralement une e´manation du re´fe´rent’.42 Modiano, by contrast, is ambivalent about the status of the photograph and its relationship to writing and reality; he does not seem to consider it as unmediated a record of reality as Barthes did.43 In this novel, however, Jansen’s photographs are treated as fragments of reality, of empirical fact and historical data which it is the narrator’s task to arrange into narrative. How successful is the narrator of Chien de printemps in his task as historian and biographer, in his ordering of the narrative? Unlike the other biographers in Modiano’s novels, he actually finishes his ‘history’, that is the catalogue, both in its alphabetical and chronological order. However, the narrator’s achievement is undermined by a symbolic gesture on Jansen’s part which not only invalidates the completeness of the narrator’s catalogue, but also shows him and the reader the possibility of an alternative ordering. Jansen disappears suddenly, leaving no messages nor forwarding address, nothing but a roll of newly used film. The narrator develops the film to discover a set of photos taken by Jansen during a stroll with him through Paris; a promenade during which Jansen visited his personal ‘lieux de me´moire’. The roll of film constitutes a silent pilgrimage to the haunts of Jansen’s youth, very similar to the walk which structures Fleurs de ruine, and can be seen as Jansen’s own narrative of his past, one which follows the order of narration rather than those of histoire or of re´cit. It is important to note here that the order of narration, which by implication is superior to that of chronological histoire, is indicated to the writer by the photographer; that is, the photographer directs the narrative through his ‘regard’ and we benefit, literally, from his point of view. This is indeed a novelty in the history of literature and photography. Even Barthes, who accorded photography an unprecedented superiority in the literature–photography rivalry, never considered the photographer as subject; he contented himself with extolling

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the virtues of the photograph as an object which came into immediate contact with the real, which he (and we) were to appreciate subsequently in our capacity as viewing subjects.44 Modiano, by contrast, offers us the photographer’s eye as the silent but all-powerful organising principle of the narrative, both in the roll of film and in Jansen’s only published collection of photographs, Neige et soleil. The motivation behind the collection is the same as that of the writer—‘il avait pris ces photos pour que soit au moins fixe´ sur une pellicule le lieu ou` avaient habite´ son camarade et ses proches’45—but the narrator implies that Jansen’s effort is superior to his own. Furthermore, his description of the photographer as conceived by Jansen is strangely similar to our description of Modiano’s empty but essential narrator: ‘Il pensait qu’un photographe n’est rien, qu’il doit se fondre dans le de´cor et devenir invisible pour mieux travailler’.46 Invisible, but absolutely crucial to the narrative to provide the point of view without which it could not exist. In Chien de printemps, we thus have the order of narration clearly privileged over that of histoire, and the photographer—an eschewer of words—privileged over the writer. Modiano’s views on the nature of biography can be extrapolated into a certain view of the nature of history, and of the activity of historians. There do not seem to be any successful historians in his novels, and the recording of historical, chronological facts is often not organised in a narrative form but tends to take the form of lists, as we have seen. One memorable attempt at creating an objective record in a Modiano novel is the comical effort of the chauffeur in Vestiaire de l’enfance: bound by the will of the rich old American woman (almost a symbol in herself of futile whims), the chauffeur spends his waking hours following Jimmy Sarano in his eventless meanderings and making a faithful record of his meaningless life. Although this is a comical situation, it can also be seen as a serious indictment of our ability to write a meaningful narrative of our past. Perhaps our subjective relationship with the past—be it ours or anyone else’s—is the only one which is allowed us, given that events are human, as is the historian. Interpretation is both our weakness and our strength: and it is only a weakness if we consider ourselves to be in pursuit of a single historical Truth. But given that even the order of histoire is an interpretation, as was discussed earlier on in this chapter, perhaps we need not be too disappointed by our lack of certainty with regard to history. Perhaps we can agree with the hero of Quartier perdu, who tells us that he would rather not be told all the facts, because ‘c¸a fait

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travailler l’imagination’.47 This, in a sense, is the situation of Modiano himself, born in 1945, writing about the period of the Occupation. Indeed the situation of Jean writing empathetically about Rigaud and Ingrid is a perfect mise en abyme of Patrick Modiano’s own situation d’e´criture. Alternatively, it is possible to see Modiano’s attitude towards the writing of history not as a pessimistic one, but as a playful attitude which enjoys the process of narrating various alternative histories without attempting to write a definitive version, in the knowledge that such a version is impossible to attain. In Livret de famille, the Modiano work which is most easily read as straight autobiography,48 the original concept of a single biography (assuming we had expected one in the first place) is gradually replaced by ‘the multiple strands of the actual recounting process’.49 There is certainly no note of anguish in the passages where the impossibility of writing a single, perfect autobiography is being discussed, in Livret de famille or indeed in any of the other works: the serious tone is only used when describing the necessity and difficulty of recording histories and biographies in the first place.50 In this chapter I hope to have shown how the order of narration is essential to an understanding of the organisation of Modiano’s novels. The orders of histoire and re´cit are also indispensable, but their dichotomy breaks down in the face of the (dis)order of narration which creates an idiosyncratic patterning of events: our examination has had the effect of deconstructing the binary opposition of histoire/ signified and re´cit/signifier, introducing the third element of the articulation of narrative. I have also suggested that tense is the linguistic feature which holds the key to the order of narration, being a system of temporality which may be taken out of the context of everyday chronology and fashioned to the contours of the narrator’s subjective vision. That this possibility exists goes to show the extent to which human beings are able to shape their past and present, their being in time, and thus truly be a product of their own fictions. At the extreme end of this path lies madness; perhaps none of us is as far from it as we would like to believe, unprotected as we are by the reassurance of an objective chronology untainted by our own perceptions. The (dis)order of narration and Modiano’s non-solutions to his ‘mysteries’ can frustrate the hermeneutic expectations of a reader accustomed to aetiological narratives, narratives which satisfy her desire for an original cause and closure to narrative. This desire for an end to narrative is, paradoxically, the driving force of narrative

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itself: ‘the paradox of narrative plot as the reader consumes it: diminishing as it realizes itself, leading to an end that is the consummation (as well as the consumption) of its sense-making . . . narrative desire is ultimately, inexorably, desire for the end’.51 In the case of Modiano, the desire for an end results in a proliferation of narratives—both untold fabulas and told sjuzhets—which ultimately dwindle into a bewildering and hermeneutically unsatisfactory end, defying closure with a postmodern playfulness. And within such a text the ‘truth’ may simply be what comes last;52 it may be a function or a result of the retrospective narrative which constitutes Modiano’s novels. Chronological precedence has little to do with narrative explanation. Similarly, teleology is not related to narrative progression, as the end of the story does not offer a satisfactory solution to or explanation of what has gone before. Here we have a narrative model which undermines, through its very structure, the explanatory function of narrative. Our examination of narrative order in Modiano has shown that he is clearly conscious of the experiments to which his art has been subjected in the course of literary history, for instance by the nouveau romancier Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet’s later novels subvert chronological order completely, relying on repetition, circularity and logically impossible sequences (see for example La Maison de rendez-vous, where death does not exclude the reappearance of Lady Ava). Modiano is never so overtly playful, but his postmodern subversion of order, discreet though it may be, is arguably more fundamental in that it situates itself within a deceptively familiar temporal structure. In fact Modiano’s narratives appear to be based on an understanding of time which is neither linear nor teleological. The model of time which emerges from these narratives is not the familiar one of the path, in which events occur one after another in progression towards a meaningful conclusion, but that of a web. By a web I mean a structure in which the various elements are interdependent regardless of chronological hierarchy, and where causality is bidirectional; that is, the present is as capable of influencing and changing the past as the other way around.53 It is a structure which eschews depth, in spite of the many levels of the past in Modiano’s narrative. By acknowledging order through the use of specifically dated levels, but making them ultimately redundant through an idiosyncratic use of tenses and an allegiance to the order of narration, Modiano’s subversion of chronological order is similar in nature to his treatment of the

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narrator’s voice. Order and voice are both there and not there in Modiano: voice is ‘empty’, order is redundant, and Modiano’s art is built by, and around, its own self-consciousness.

CHAPTER THREE

Unreal Stories: The ‘effet d’irre´el’ Il y a une quinzaine d’anne´es, je feuilletais le cahier rouge et, de´couvrant entre les pages la carte de visite du docteur de Meyendorff, je composai son nume´ro de te´le´phone, mais celui-ci n’e´tait ‘plus attribue´’. Le docteur n’e´tait pas mentionne´ dans l’annuaire de cette anne´e-la`. Pour en avoir le cœur net, j’allai au 12 rue Ribe´ra et la concierge me dit qu’elle ne connaissait personne de ce nom-la` dans l’immeuble. Chien de printemps, p. 79

It is often assumed that Modiano is a ‘realist’. One reason for this is that his prose is representational, full of small and precise details in the manner of the Barthesian ‘effet de re´el’. Many of these facts, moreover, have been discovered to be real; they are precise locations in Paris, or a particular brand of cigarette commonly smoked in France. Their authenticity has convinced some readers that the narrative which contains them must be a mimetic one. Another commonly held reason for considering Modiano a ‘realist’ is the combination of readability and alleged non-experimentation which characterises his novels; in this equation, accessibility is unaccountably linked to realism.1 However, critics and reviewers have also been known to remark frequently on the atmosphere of unreality which pervades Modiano’s novels. Bersani writes that although a first reading may be a simple ‘lecture re´aliste’, it leaves the reader with so many discreetly unanswered questions and thwarted expectations that it is not satisfactory: a second reading becomes necessary, which reveals ‘invraisemblances’ and paradoxes in the narrative that make a realist reading impossible.2 CœnenMennemeier, too, argues against the classification of Modiano as a writer of a verisimilar prose, maintaining that ‘[M]algre´ la lisibilite´ de ses re´cits, Modiano n’est pas un auteur re´aliste’.3 Clearly the manner in which facts are represented in Modiano’s novels is not as straightforward as it may seem, and calls for a closer examination. NARRATIVE MOOD The issue of representation in narrative is examined by Genette under the heading of narrative mood, based on the analogy with the 49

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grammatical category.4 The term on the level of narrative may be used to refer to the manner in which information is presented to the reader: ‘cette re´gulation de l’information narrative qu’est le mode’.5 If we consider how the same narrative information can be represented in greatly different ways, such as realistic, historical, dreamlike or hypothetical, we see how the moods of affirmation possible on the level of grammar are replicated on the level of narrative by differences in the mood of representation. Genette’s analysis of the mechanics of representation6 is based on the classic distinction between mimesis and diegesis, or mimetic writing and diegetic writing. Mimesis can be described as a prose in which description is dominant, and diegesis as the kind in which narration takes over. Genette starts his analysis by reminding us that mimesis in narrative is almost always illusory, given that language, consisting of words, must always signify rather than imitate. That is, mimesis in words can only ever be a mimesis of words: . . . la notion . . . d’imitation ou de repre´sentation narrative est parfaitement illusoire: contrairement a` la repre´sentation dramatique, aucun re´cit ne peut ‘montrer’ ou ‘imiter’ l’histoire qu’il raconte. Il ne peut que . . . donner . . . l’illusion de mime´sis qui est la seule mime´sis narrative, pour cette raison unique et suffisante que la narration, orale ou e´crite, est un fait de langage, et que le langage signifie sans imiter.7

An exception to this rule is reported speech: the narrated object being linguistic in this instance, language is able to imitate rather than signify. For this very reason, however, Genette regards reported speech, which he calls a ‘re´cit de paroles’ (as opposed to a ‘re´cit d’e´ve´nements’), as a sort of anti-re´cit: ‘le narrateur ne raconte pas la phrase du he´ros: [. . .] il la re´copie, et en ce sens on ne peut parler ici de re´cit’.8 ‘Le re´cit d’e´ve´nements’, by contrast, ‘est toujours re´cit, c’est-a`-dire transcription du (suppose´) non-verbal en verbal.’9 This analysis of the mimetic illusion is concise, authoritative and highly persuasive, but the argument contains two potential problems. The first arises from the tone of the passage, especially the line ‘aucun re´cit ne peut ‘‘montrer’’ ou ‘‘imiter’’ l’histoire qu’il raconte’. This creates the strong impression that all narratives always seek to imitate, even if they do not succeed, and rules out the consideration of narratives that do not have imitation as their goal. The result, whether accidental or intended, is that Genette’s analysis ends up ignoring narratives of non-mimetic intent. The second problem is that Genette proves the illusory nature of

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mimesis in narrative by appealing to the semiotician’s axiom that ‘le langage signifie sans imiter’. Even if we accept this as Saussurian wisdom, what remains debatable is the slide from the level of words— ‘langage’—to the level of groups of words, or narrative. The axiom about words signifying rather than imitating cannot be directly transferred to the level of narrative representation and still retain its validity. Although the words used in a description are not able to imitate, their arrangement and purpose may be more imitative than not: confusing the two levels makes Genette overlook the fact that description, as a narrative practice (as opposed to analysis, exposition, narration, etc.), is the most imitative—or mimetic—activity of them all. The failure of language to imitate reality directly, to have a referential relation to reality, has never prevented description from flourishing as a narrative practice. Barthes identifies a specific period in the history of literature during which description paid no tribute to the referential function: dans la ne´o-rhe´torique alexandrine . . . il y eut un engouement pour l’ekphrasis . . . qui avait pour objet de de´crire des lieux, des temps, des personnes ou des œuvres d’art, tradition qui s’est maintenue a` travers le Moyen Age. A cette e´poque . . . la description n’est assujettie a` aucun re´alisme; peu importe sa ve´rite´ (ou meˆme sa vraisemblance); il n’y a aucune geˆne a` placer des lions ou des oliviers dans un pays nordique; seule compte la contrainte du genre descriptif; le vraisemblable n’est pas ici re´fe´rentiel, mais ouvertement discursif: ce sont les re`gles ge´ne´riques du discours qui font la loi.10

Genette’s theory of mood, therefore, suffers from two flaws. He leaves no room in his system for narratives of non-mimetic intent, and he fails to distinguish between mimesis in words and mimesis in narrative. Plato and Barthes are Genette’s main sources for his distinction between mimetic and diegetic writing. Having asked how, in a mimetic text, ‘l’objet narratif . . . ‘‘se raconte lui-meˆme’’ sans que personne ait a` parler pour lui?’,11 he turns to Plato’s rewriting of a passage from Homer for answers. In Plato’s diegetic version, the narrator is much more present than in Homer’s mimetic writing. Also, there is much information in Homer’s text which Plato deems contingent to the narrative proper, and which Genette identifies as instances of Barthesian ‘effet de re´el’: Cette gre`ve ou` bruit la mer, de´tail fonctionnellement inutile dans l’histoire, c’est assez typiquement . . . ce que Barthes appelle un effet de re´el. La gre`ve bruissante ne sert a` rien, qu’a` faire entendre que le re´cit la mentionne seulement parce qu’elle est la` . . . De´tail inutile et contingent, c’est le me´dium par excellence de l’illusion re´fe´rentielle, et donc de l’effet mime´tique: c’est un connotateur de mime´sis.12

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Genette concludes from this analysis that the features of the mimetic text, as opposed to the diegetic text, must be abundant contingent information and minimum narratorial presence. Thus, in a predominantly mimetic narrative the narrator’s presence is kept to a minimum and there is much extraneous detail, whereas in a predominantly diegetic narrative the narrator’s presence is obvious and there is little information which is not vital to the plot. These two factors have been identified by theorists other than Genette (Wayne Booth), as well as by practitioners (Henry James), as being the key to this distinction, otherwise known as ‘showing’ as opposed to ‘telling’. As Genette puts it, ‘ ‘‘[M]ontrer’’, ce ne peut eˆtre qu’une fac¸on de raconter, et cette fac¸on consiste a` la fois a` en dire le plus possible, et ce plus, a` le dire le moins possible . . . c’est-a`-dire, faire oublier que c’est le narrateur qui raconte’.13 AN ‘EFFET D’IRRE´EL’? When we apply the criteria of information and narratorial presence to a Modiano novel, it appears at first sight to fit the requirements of a mimetic, verisimilar text. The narrator is always unobtrusive, and there is much detailed information which is not crucial to the plot. His novels are especially rich in geographical detail, which seem to be instances of the ‘effet de re´el’. But a closer look reveals that these requisite proportions of information and narrator do not result in an atmosphere of reality. On the contrary, the general effect is one of unreality, in spite of the precision and reality of the facts. Or perhaps it is because of the facts. The accumulation of detail in Modiano’s novels seems to parody the kind of mimetic narrative dependent on the ‘effet de re´el’, achieving, through the same means, something which we might call an ‘effet d’irre´el’: an unreal or surreal atmosphere resulting from the proliferation of detail. This is not, strictly speaking, the counterpart of the ‘effet de re´el’. The opposite of the ‘effet de re´el’ would be diegetic narrative, traditional or modern,14 in which a tale is told as a tale. In such a narrative, the reader would be aware of the narrator (i.e. the tale would cease to ‘tell itself’), but with regard to the tale qua tale, the traditional ‘suspension of disbelief’ would still hold. In other words, diegetic writing tells a soi-disant true tale, whereas what we have called an ‘effet d’irre´el’ is an overall distancing of the tale itself from verisimilitude: ‘the tale which tells

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itself’ becomes less and less ‘vraisemblable’ as we read on, and we are left with the consciousness of fictionality within the narrative. What about the contingent detail whose abundance in a narrative is said to create the ‘effet de re´el’? In Genette’s (and Barthes’) theory, the detail in question is a common noun: ‘le barome`tre de Flaubert, la petite porte de Michelet’.15 The effect also works in the case of proper nouns or names. The presence of street names in a novel, for example, can strengthen the referential illusion by conferring individuality and specificity on to the events and characters; one can even look them up in a map of the city, and find them to be ‘correct’, real, non-fictional, a reassuring backdrop to the plot of the novel. But at the same time, such detail is also a literary convention, what is expected of a certain kind of fiction: the kind in which the readers expect to be given a specific address for the birthplace of the narrator, a name for the street in which the criminal was arrested by the hero. The reassurance which the reader may derive from the presence in the text of real street names is the ‘reality effect’, because they are the details which make up the ‘fictional reality’ the reader expects of a city described in a novel. Thus proper names can achieve an ‘effet de re´el’ in the same way that common nouns do, and in Modiano, both the common and proper nouns appear at first sight to achieve the reality effect.16 In his earlier novels, Modiano indulges at times in a large quantity of extravagantly bizarre names: ‘Lionel de Zieff, [. . .] Pols de Helder, [. . .] le comte Baruzzi [. . .] Costaschesco danse avec Jean-Farouk de Me´thode, Gae´tan de Lussatz avec Odicharvi, Simone Bouquereau avec Ire`ne de Tranze´ . . .’17 The effect of this accumulation is incantatory and creates a hallucinatory, unrealistic atmosphere. It has been argued that the Occupation, during which false names and identities were part of the normal course of things, may be described as a period when the relationship between sign and referent was an uncertain one: a period of malaise, nightmarish and unreal.18 I suggest that a similar state of unreality and malaise is achieved in such texts of Modiano as a result of the imbalance of sign and referent, the signs proliferating beyond all reasonable referential bounds. In his later novels, however, the abundance of proper names only gradually achieves an unreal ambiance, the ‘effet d’irre´el’. Upon a first reading, Quartier perdu (1984), for instance, appears to be a straightforward verisimilar novel. The reader can assume the ‘backdrop’ function of the proper names, which are mainly geographical precisions, and if they seem to be more abundant than usual, this does not

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stop her from thinking of them as part of the overall reality effect: ‘le lecteur, dans son besoin fondamental de cohe´rence, a tendance a` ne pas les remarquer’.19 Slowly, however, they begin to impinge on the reader’s consciousness: their insistent precision begins to approach the level of parody. The narrator, who has returned to Paris after an absence of twenty years, is no doubt more struck by various geographical details as he attempts to recognise and reclaim the city as his own; but is it necessary to note the name of every street, every monument, every building which comes his way during the course of a walk? . . . au moment ou` je traversais le boulevard Haussman de´sert, un cycliste m’a de´passe´ et a continue´ de descendre en roue libre la pente de la rue de Courcelles. [. . .] Au Rond-Point des Champs-Elyse´ es, je me suis arreˆte´ un instant devant la fontaine. [. . .] J’ai pe´ne´tre´ dans les jardins et au passage j’ai leve´ la teˆte vers le Cupidon de bronze, au sommet de la tourelle du Pavillon de l’Elyse´e. [. . .] J’e´tais arrive´ a` la lisie`re de la Concorde. [. . .] A` droite, des ombres glissaient sur la balustrade des Tuileries . . . (pp. 44–45)20

One ‘realist’ or psychological explanation for this insistent catalogue of names is that this is a result of the narrator’s attempt to overcome ‘le sentiment d’irre´alite´ que j’e´prouvais au milieu de cette ville fantoˆme’ (p. 11). It is his sense that the city is unreal which makes him want to note every detail, and this results in a manic collection of proper names: the result is an ‘unreal’ representation. One could argue that in thus recording the movements of his consciousness, which is clutching at every detail in an attempt to hang on to reality, the narratorial voice is being realistic (or true to itself) while recreating (and transmitting to the reader) its own sense of unreality. The ‘realist’ alibi of a confused narration cannot, however, hold throughout the novel, chiefly because the ghostly, unreal atmosphere of Paris gradually reveals itself to be the reality of Jean Dekker, the narrator’s former self. The man who arrived in Paris as Ambrose Guise, a successful detective story writer, may have found Paris unreal: but once he has decided to pick up the traces of his former self (through writing), the city crystallises around him and he finds himself in his element: ‘j’e´tais comme un voyageur qui vient d’arriver a` destination’ (p. 80). After this point in the novel, the narrator’s psychological state can no longer excuse a representational mood which results in the ‘effet d’irre´el’. Yet we continue to be assailed by a catalogue of proper names, for example in the following passage: J’ai remonte´ et puis j’ai descendu a` pas lents l’avenue des Champs-Elyse´es. J’ai flaˆne´ le long des arcades du Lido et je suis entre´ chez Simphonia. [. . .] La premie`re [averse m’a surpris] dans les jardins des Champs-Elyse´ es, pre`s du

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restaurant Le Doyen et j’ai eu le temps de m’abriter sous le vieux kiosque a` musique. La seconde, a` la hauteur du cine´ma Biarritz [. . .] Je me trouvais sous les arbres du Rond-Point quand j’ai senti les premie`res gouttes de pluie, mais j’ai poursuivi ma marche en rasant les immeubles de l’avenue Montaigne. [. . .] Place de l’Alma, l’averse a redouble´ de violence et je me suis assis a` l’une des rares tables libres de la terrasse vitre´e de Chez Francis. (p. 109)

The precise and proliferating geographical details in Quartier perdu begin to sound like a parody of the ‘effet de re´el’, and the overall atmosphere becomes one of surreality or unreality. Perhaps this sense of unreality, the feeling that in spite of all these details nothing in fact is being described, is a direct result of the nature of proper names. Amongst contemporary modal logicians it is generally accepted that proper names are denotative, not connotative.21 That is, a name does not describe an object through qualities or properties belonging to it. They do not describe it at all, but refer or point to it, performing a deictic function: proper names posit an identity for the object. This is why, according to the philosopher, a reader will be able to make sense of a name even if she is not acquainted with its referent. For example, a reader will not be ‘thrown’ by the appearance of a Parisian proper name (‘rue Vavin’) in a narrative, even if she is entirely unacquainted with Paris; she will make sense of it as a point of reference within the universe of the text. When the name is read, what occurs is deixis as opposed to description.22 Thus the geographical proper names which accumulate in Modiano’s novels are more deictic than descriptive in function, and the overall effect is that of a non-verisimilar, nonmimetic narrative in spite of the abundance of detail. The localising function of the geographical names collapses into ‘une simple nomenclature’, naming rather than describing, as ‘les lieux sont . . . rendus a` peine visibles’:23 a feature of ‘une topographie typiquement postmoderne’.24 Van Montfrans also notes that the repetition of these place names leads the reader to question their role in the text, and subsequently to deny them ‘leur fonction e´vidente de de´signation du re´el pour dessiner dans le texte des zones d’inde´termination, des zones d’ombre’.25 He too believes that they are not descriptive, and therefore not constitutive of an ‘effet de re´el’. However, he then goes on to argue that these place names, although not descriptive, have a connotative and evocative function; that they are shorthand designations for certain key atmospheres, ambiances and themes dear to Modiano. Now this is true of certain proper names when considered singly (certain geographical

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locations which function as privileged points of access to the past, which will be discussed below), but this fact must not be confused with statements about the ‘effet d’irre´el’. The overall effect of the proliferation of proper names in the narrative is denotative, not connotative of either reality or of atmosphere. At times the accumulated detail in Modiano’s novels is not incorporated into the narrative; that is, he makes use of lists. This form of representation can have several contradictory effects. It may give the illusion of, or even achieve, a kind of referentiality. Alternatively, lists may function as ellipses: ‘ces listes interrompent la narration premie`re, y faisant fonction d’ajout, mais y cre´ant en meˆme temps un trou’. They are simultaneously additions, ellipses and also indications of potential narrative proliferation: Ce´le´bre´ par ce me´canisme e´nume´ratif est le foisonnement kale´idoscopique de possibilite´s narratives qu’il ouvre . . . Ces listes sont autant de repre´sentations me´taphoriques du processus narratif de Modiano, processus ou` le temps de la fiction ne peut se parachever qu’en se renvoyant au temps de la narration. L’anachronie du discours . . . sert . . . a` souligner l’impossibilite´ d’une reconstitution exhaustive des e´ve´nements [qui sont] foncie`rement elliptique[s].26

Such lists are best understood in the context of the order of narration, being a function of the narrator’s vision of the past and a configuration of his reconstitution of it. As non-referential representations of the narrative process itself, they too contribute to the ‘effet d’irre´el’; they are in themselves another instance of an accumulation of detail which does not have a referential effect. TEXTUAL GEOGRAPHIES We have noted that the referents in Modiano’s narratives do not have to be recognised by the reader to make sense to her. This is not to say that Modiano’s Paris, for instance in Quartier perdu, is entirely divorced from the ‘real’ Paris, much less that it is completely imaginary, but that its essence is textual rather than real: ‘les re´fe´rents rele`vent moins de la re´alite´ exte´rieure que des structures internes du re´cit’, and result in ‘un effacement tacite des apanages repre´sentatifs de la narration modianesque’.27 The geographical precisions are stable points within the textual space from which the characters, as well as the readers, can orient themselves. Such a textual space, mapped on to geographical names which are taken from ‘real life’ but which do not serve a descriptive, representa-

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tional purpose, is an ideal location for a subjective vision where temporal and spatial indices can take on the narrator’s personal significances. The creation of such a space is one way in which to impose the narrator’s particular vision on to the narrative without straying into the realms of fantasy or madness. If the textual time, represented by specific dates, is not of the linear kind exemplified by the order of histoire, and the textual space (as represented by place names) does not attempt to create a verisimilar topography through techniques such as the ‘effet de re´el’, the reader finds herself in an unreal, vacillating world governed by the particular vision of the narrator. Vacillating, because the narrative must gently accustom the reader to the move from apparent vraisemblance to unreality: ‘il s’agit de conditionner le lecteur, de l’habituer au point de vue insolite du narrateur’.28 This is what happens in the reading of a novel such as Quartier perdu, where the reader will start with the impression that she is reading a verisimilar novel, and be betrayed gradually, finding herself in an unfamiliar spatiotemporal dimension. She is moved imperceptibly from ‘une ge´ographie exte´rieure, ‘‘re´elle’’ ’ and ‘le temps ‘‘re´el’’ ’ to ‘une topographie inte´rieure, ‘‘intime’’, propre au narrateur’, governed by ‘le temps inte´rieur’.29 The textual nature of the spatio-temporal indices in Modiano’s narratives facilitates the interaction of space and time within this web of signifiers, in the interest of Modiano’s primary objective: namely, the recovery of the past. Reliance on geographical reference points is indeed one way in which many writers have attempted to recapture the past; especially in cities, where time can be said to take on a tangible, spatial existence in the continued existence of monuments, buildings, streets and other geographical features. The reader is reminded of this in a slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion in Quartier perdu when the narrator, reading through a list of cultural walks and conferences advertised in the newspaper, comes across the following entry: ‘Hoˆtels et jardins d’Auteuil. 15 h. Rendez-vous: me´tro Michel-Ange Auteuil. Dure´e 1 h 45. (Pre´sence du Passe´.)’ (p. 14, my italics). One way in which to recover past time from a given point in space is through the translation of time into spatial terms. Modiano often creates spatial metaphors for time in Quartier perdu. Towards the beginning of the novel, the narrator, a successful novelist who enjoys a calm, balanced existence (‘depuis que j’avais quitte´ Paris [. . .] tout e´tait devenu si cohe´rent, si solide, si lumineux dans ma vie’, p. 27), is to be found at the top of a tall building from which he contemplates a view of Paris. From this panoramic position he descends into his past: ‘la

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descente a` travers le temps [. . .] Reprendre pied dans le Paris d’autrefois. Visiter les ruines et tenter d’y de´couvrir une trace de soi. Essayer de re´soudre toutes les questions qui sont demeure´es en suspens’ (p. 29). Modiano also uses sloping streets—both downwards and upwards—to indicate movement towards the past.30 The taxi which bears the narrator into Paris from the airport ‘glissait de plus en plus vite comme si son moteur e´tait e´teint et que nous descendions en roue libre la pente du boulevard Malesherbes’ (p. 9): he walks up ‘la pente de la rue Courcelles’ (p. 36) to the office of Rocroy, where he will receive a file containing information on his former associates, effectively his key to the past. And at the end of the novel, reality (space) and metaphor (time) come together as the woman who embodies the last phase of his former life walks down a slope to join him, bringing with her the memory of past people, past places, which all slope down towards the point in the present where the narrator is waiting for her: ‘Et maintenant, je vois une silhouette qui descend la pente du boulevard Se´rurier. [. . .] Mirage? Elle s’approche, peu a` peu. C’est elle. [. . .] Carmen. Rocroy. La Varenne-Saint-Hilaire. Paris. Toutes ces rues en pente . . .’ (pp. 181–82). This is the point where memory ends, and from which the narrator will start a new existence: ‘a` partir d’aujourd’hui, je ne veux plus me souvenir de rien’ (p. 182). But perhaps the most striking case of space being translated into time in Quartier perdu occurs on a horizontal plane, in the form of a nocturnal drive through the streets of Paris. The narrator, Guise alias Dekker, meets a certain Robert Carpentieri, ex-chauffeur to Georges Maillot, a former acquaintance of Dekker’s. Carpentieri (who does not recognise Dekker) tells him that Maillot, contrary to popular belief, is not dead: he drives around Paris in a white Lancia every night. Carpentieri and Dekker pursue the Lancia one evening, following a meticulously described route (pp. 69–79) which is also one of Dekker’s former walks. The driver of the white Lancia may or may not be Maillot—he is never clearly identified—but Dekker is aware that such an identification is neither necessary or desirable. The drive is a ritual retracing of traces left in Paris, through which Carpentieri seeks to reattain his past self. Dekker understands this perfectly: ‘Il n’avait pas besoin de me donner d’explications. Je comprenais tout’ (p. 79). Upon getting out of the car, however, Dekker discovers that the surreal journey through Parisian space has had the effect of taking him back in time. The spatial distance covered has translated itself into a temporal one, and Dekker finds himself back in his own past: ‘J’e´tais comme un

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voyageur qui vient d’arriver a` destination’ (p. 80). Immediately after this, he makes the decision to stay in Paris and write the story of his former existence. Another narrative possibility is opened up by the existence of certain geographical locations where different things have occurred at different periods, stable points which have witnessed the passage of events and people through the course of history. Such locations function in the text as points from which the narrator can accede to the pasts of other people. The narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures professes his belief in the existence of such gateways: ‘Je crois qu’on entend encore dans les entre´es d’immeubles l’e´cho des pas de ceux qui avaient l’habitude de les traverser et qui, depuis, ont disparu. Quelque chose continue de vibrer apre`s leur passage, des ondes de plus en plus faibles, mais que l’on capte si l’on est attentif.’31 Jean, in Voyage de noces, describes the same phenomenon: ‘C’est ainsi que nous de´ambulons toujours dans les meˆmes endroits a` des moments diffe´rents et malgre´ la distance des anne´es, nous finissons par nous rencontrer’.32 And in Fleurs de ruine, the ChampsElyse´es are evoked as another geographical area charged with the power to retrieve the past, described as a pond ‘au fond duquel se de´posent, par couches successives, les e´chos des voix de tous les promeneurs qui ont reˆve´s sur ses bords. L’eau moire´e conserve pour toujours ces e´chos et, par les nuits silencieuses, ils se meˆlent les uns aux autres.’33 Such geographical locations function in the same way as the palimpsest, that well-worn spatial metaphor for time, popular because of the impression it gives of tangible layers of the past. In a recent novel, Chien de printemps, Modiano creates a twentieth-century version of the ‘palimpsest’: layers of old posters pasted on top of one another. This is used as an image for strata of time accumulated at a given geographical point, and provides an object for our attempts to recover the past: ‘il lace´rait lui-meˆme les affiches dans les rues pour qu’apparissent celles que les plus re´centes avaient recouvertes. Il de´collait leurs lambeaux couche par couche et les photographiait au fur et a` mesure avec minutie’.34 In Modiano’s postmodern topography, certain geographical precisions function as points of extraordinary access into the past, privileged areas where time translates into space and space into time. An allegiance to the belief that writing has no referent, that it cannot be directly descriptive of reality, does not entail the refusal to accept that writing attempts nonetheless to represent reality.35 Indeed, as Barthes puts it succinctly:

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Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art Depuis les temps anciens jusqu’aux tentatives de l’avant-garde, la litte´rature s’affaire a` repre´senter quelque chose. Quoi? Je dirai brutalement: le re´el. Le re´el n’est pas repre´sentable, et c’est parce que les hommes veulent sans cesse le repre´senter par des mots, qu’il y a une histoire de la litte´rature.36

Even novels of primarily non-mimetic intent acknowledge this desire to represent which propels writing, for instance through a stylistic parody, which is the case in Quartier perdu. Modiano’s writing tacitly acknowledges writing’s lack of referent, while giving the illusion of perpetuating the illusion of mimesis. MIMESIS IN PHOTOGRAPHY Writing’s attempts to represent and to refer constitute a favourite theme of literature throughout the ages, enjoying special attention in the twentieth century in numerous instances of self-reflexive fiction.37 In Modiano, parallels are drawn with photography’s attempts to do the same, often suggesting that writing is the inferior mode. Modiano’s treatment of writing and photography as two comparable modes reminds us of the traditional hierarchy which places writing above photography, and also shows an awareness of the strikingly pro-visual state of popular culture today. The relationship between literature and photography has traditionally been an antagonistic one, and is more or less as old as photography itself. Artists and writers of the nineteenth century (notably Baudelaire and Flaubert) eschewed the mechanical aspect of the invention, and saw it as a potentially fatal rival and a philistine’s alternative to true art. The issues at the heart of the rivalry were those of representation, and of the status of the artist. If photographic representations were to replace representational art, pictorial or verbal, the accuracy of the former would make the latter obsolete: also, the status of the artist would plummet from its Romantic heights to that of a mere technician. The possibility that philistines might prefer the accuracy of photographic representation to instances of subjective expression seems to have horrified most of the leading novelists and poets of the nineteenth century. This position will appear highly naı¨ve to us today in the age of digital photography and image manipulation. It has already been mentioned that Barthes, in La Chambre claire, holds this somewhat archaic opinion, believing that photography has a privileged relationship with the Real; no doubt a consequence of the intensely personal

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and emotional agenda which propels this work. Modiano, by contrast, is a child of his age, and is highly ambivalent about the status of the photograph and its relationship to writing and reality. This means, for instance, that he is aware of the crucial role of the photographer in the creation of the photograph. Barthes does not ever consider the photographer as subject: the subject-position is one which he reserves for himself, in his capacity as the viewer of the photograph. But Modiano accords the photographer in Chien de printemps, for example, an indisputable place as subject. In this novel, Jansen the photographer is the silent but all-powerful organiser of his photographic narrative, and by that token equal in status and importance to the novelist in the matter of narrative organisation. But in the actual creation of the photograph (as opposed to the narrative composed of photographs), is the photographer still not the mere technician despised by the Romantic artist, who does no more than set up the apparatus which allows reality to leave its imprint on the photographic plate? For Modiano, this is not the case. There are certain factors crucial to the nature of the photographic image which are wholly determined by the photographer, regarding which he or she has to make a conscious, artistic decision, which makes photography a creative process controlled by the photographer. Light is one such factor: far from being a ‘given’ in reality, it is a choice made by the photographer, in accordance with his or her personal vision of the object, place or person in question. In Dimanches d’aouˆt, the narrator, who is also a photographer, has an instructive conversation with Sylvia’s mother-in-law on the subject of his photos of La Varenne: —Ce seront des photos en noir et blanc, lui ai-je dit. —Vous avez raison de les faire en noir et blanc. J’ai e´te´ surpris par son ton cate´gorique. —Et si vous pouviez les faire tout en noir, ce serait encore mieux. [. . .] Je suis suˆre que vous eˆtes un garc¸on sensible aux atmosphe`res et que vous me comprenez . . . Faites vos photos le plus noir possible . . .38

We see how the photographer’s vision, in a broad sense, of his subject is directly responsible for the choice of a factor which determines its representation: that is, he has complete control over the representational mode. That the photographer’s vision itself is inescapably personal (i.e. that he is not an objective agent) is acknowledged by the young photographer in his timidly playful question, put to the gloomy mother-in-law: ‘Vous ne voyez pas les choses trop en noir?’39 The idiomatic use of ‘voir’, here superimposed on that of the physical

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act of ‘voir’, reminds us of the various levels of ‘seeing’ which go to constitute the photograph, and that the subject of all this seeing is none other than the photographer. Light is also seen to be the crucial aspect of the composition of photographs in Chien de printemps, which contains many references to the ‘lumie`re naturelle’ sought by the photographer Jansen. The point of interest here is that, once again, this ‘natural’ light is not a ‘given’ in nature. It is evident that the photographer’s skill and choice are involved: the narrator tells us that ‘je serais incapable de pre´ciser les papiers et les proce´de´s de tirage qu’utilisait Jansen pour obtenir la lumie`re qui baignait chacune de ses photos’.40 Jansen has even written an article on ‘la lumie`re naturelle’: ‘un article que lui avait demande´ une revue de cine´ma, car il avait servi de conseiller technique be´ne´vole a` certains jeunes metteurs en sce`ne [. . .] en leur apprenant a` utiliser les floods des ope´rateurs ame´ricains d’actualite´s pendant la guerre’.41 Thus ‘natural’ light was or can be obtained by using flood lighting, and what is natural is ultimately determined by the photographer’s vision. The photograph for Modiano is therefore clearly the creation of the photographer-as-artist, the result of a subjective vision (in spite of the name given to the ‘eye’ of the camera itself, the ‘objective’). The photograph is thus not as unmediated an object in its creation as it may have seemed to Barthes. This is also the case in its reception; the photograph is not an unquestionable, indisputable representation of the Real for its viewer. In Rue des Boutiques Obscures, the narrator, a pseudo-detective figure, attempts to make use of photographs in his quest for his own identity. He carries around two photographs which he shows to various people throughout the novel in an attempt at identification. This is standard practice in the world of detective stories, where the missing link falls into place, for example, when an eye witness recognises the criminal in the photograph.42 However, in Rue des Boutiques Obscures, this generic trope (like many others in this novel parodic of the detective story genre) fails to fulfil our expectations: the photographs cannot confer the desired identity on to the narrator.43 —Vous voyez un homme sur la photo? lui dis-je. A gauche . . . A l’extreˆme gauche . . . —Oui. —Vous le connaissez? —Non. Il e´tait penche´ sur la photo, la main en visie`re contre son front, pour prote´ger la flamme du briquet.

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—Vous ne trouvez pas qu’il me ressemble? —Je ne sais pas.44

The photograph fails to establish a link with reality, either positive or negative. If the photograph were an exact representation of reality, the answer to a question such as ‘Vous ne trouvez pas qu’il me ressemble?’ would surely be a clear ‘oui’ or ‘non’, not a vague ‘Je ne sais pas’ (especially as the supposed referent is standing next to the photograph, although admittedly in the flickering light of the lighter). Yet the man is unable to give a clear answer. This undermines the supposedly privileged relationship between photography and the referent; the photograph is no more reliable than writing in its conspicuous failure to refer instantly and unmistakably. Both photography and writing are, for Modiano, modes of representation whose degrees of success can be judged using the same criteria and within the same parameters. They are also both shown to be at some remove from the referent, but the respective distances are not the same. Photography may not be the transparent medium that it may have appeared to be in the nineteenth century, but in another sense it is still closer to the referent than writing is. This is because it is a direct consequence of the referent’s physical presence, the product of a chemical reaction. As a representation the photograph may be unreliable, subjective and inaccurate, but as a trace of the referent’s (onetime) existence, it is indisputable, and superior to writing: ‘je ne puis jamais nier que la chose a e´te´ la`’.45 Small wonder, then, that Modiano extols the photograph, and places the photographer above the writer in his capacity as historian, as a recorder of the past. Jean, in Dimanches d’aouˆt, calls snapshots ‘les traces qui demeurent plus tard d’un moment e´phe´me`re’, and therefore that ‘il ne faut jamais ne´gliger ces sentinelles, leurs appareils en bandoulie`re, preˆtes a` vous fixer dans un instantane´, tous ces gardiens de la me´moire qui patrouillent dans les rues’.46 Jean proves his own point when a photograph taken of himself and the Neals, by one of these Nice photographers who cater for passing tourists, provides him with irrefutable proof of the real identity of M. Neal; too late, alas, to prevent the kidnapping of Sylvia. From La Ronde de nuit, his second novel, to his most recent work, Modiano has never ceased to suggest that his primary motive for writing is the recording of past existences. Indeed all of his novels can be seen as attempts to record the lives of the ‘hommes des plages’ of this world, of ephemeral, unimportant characters who would otherwise be completely forgotten: the narrator’s father in Les Boulevards de

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ceinture, his classmates in De si braves garc¸ons, the various characters that people Livret de famille, the young narrator’s surrogate family in Remise de peine. But all these attempts at authentification through writing are doomed by the very nature of writing, as is tacitly acknowledged in La Ronde de nuit. In this novel, the narrator tells us about his silent and passive companions Coco Latour and Esmeralda, adding that if it were not for his description and depiction of them, no one would ever know of their existence on this earth. Yet elsewhere in the novel, doubt is cast upon this existence; are they real people, or are they figments of the lonely narrator’s imagination? Ultimately, writing can never authenticate the referent, although as we have seen it can attempt, with varying measures of success, to represent it, in which activity it can rival photography. Where proof is needed, however, the photograph appears to be superior; hence the narrator’s wistful tone in Chien de printemps when describing Jansen’s work. Like the writer, Jansen ‘avait pris ces photos pour que soit au moins fixe´ sur une pellicule le lieu ou` avaient habite´ son camarade et ses proches’:47 that is, for the purpose of preventing the unrecorded disappearance of past figures and places. Jansen’s record of past reality, however, is more reliable as proof than the writer’s. In the light of this understanding, the narrator-writer’s undertaking of the catalogue of Jansen’s photographs (the recording of records, as it were) may be seen as his acknowledgement of the superiority of photography: of a kind of latter-day Platonic hierarchy where writing, at one further remove from the King and Truth, concedes the higher place to the image. There is one point in the novel where Modiano appears to reverse this hierarchy, where writing seems to take precedence over photography in proving a past existence: Une plaque fendue et le´ge`rement effrite´e sur ses bords indiquait qu’un certain Jean Monvallier Boulogne [. . .] avait e´te´ tue´ a` cet emplacement le jour de la libe´ration de Paris. [. . .] Or, ce lundi [. . .] la plaque avait disparu, et je regrettais que Jansen [. . .] n’ait pas pris une photo du mur crible´ de balles et de cette plaque. Je l’aurais inscrit sur le re´pertoire. Mais la`, brusquement, je n’e´tais plus suˆr que ce Jean Monvallier Boulogne euˆt existe´.48

Writing, recorded by photography, recorded a second time by writing? Is Modiano resorting to layering proof in a desperate attempt to authenticate? Not so. This is a special case of authentification because the referent—the only object to which the subject has direct access—is

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writing: an inscription on a wall. A photograph of this would only serve to prove the existence of the plaque (which it would do irrefutably). On the other hand, the details of the young man’s existence are a creation of the narrator, who has dreamed them up from the resonances of the name itself: ‘J’avais retenu ce nom, a` cause de sa sonorite´ qui e´voquait une partie de canotage au Bois avec une fille blonde, un pique-nique a` la campagne au bord d’une rivie`re et d’un vallon.’49 In other words, the existence of the man, for the narrator, is entirely textual. Thus it is not the case here that writing is the proof of Jean Monvallier Boulogne’s existence, with the photograph as secondary proof: writing constitutes the existence itself, of which the photograph is, as elsewhere in this novel, primary proof, followed by writing. Thus we see how photography for Modiano is not the Other of writing, possessing (unlike writing) direct access to the referent, but a mode of representation comparable and akin to writing in its relationship to the real and its debt to its creator. At the same time it is superior to writing in that it is an irrefutable trace of the referent’s existence, being, as Barthes says, ‘une e´manation du re´el passe´’:50 unlike writing, which can vouch falsely for the existence of imaginary people, places and objects. This last point, however, should give us pause, and restrain us from concluding definitively that Modiano considers photography to be superior to writing where authentification is concerned. The photographs themselves, after all, appear in Modiano’s narrative; we only hear about them through the medium of writing, and we never actually see any of them. Had Modiano wanted to make his point, he could very easily have incorporated photographs into his narrative, as Barthes did in La Chambre claire, and Breton in Nadja. As it is, writing ‘quotes’ the photograph in the narrative, which suggests that in the last instance, it is the master mode. In addition, the photographs are themselves generally identified by writing: ‘derrie`re chacune des photos, il avait e´crit une le´gende tre`s de´taille´e qui indiquait la date a` laquelle cette photo avait e´te´ prise, le lieu, le nom de celui ou celle qui y figurait, et meˆme s’y ajoutaient certains commentaires’.51 The caption to a photograph is usually considered to be additional, inessential, a ‘supplement’: but when the photograph needs to be identified, this supplement becomes essential, and writing takes over. That this is the case in Chien de printemps, the novel which appears to argue the strongest case for photography’s superiority, is surely significant. Modiano’s stance towards photography as a mode of

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referring is perhaps as ambivalent as his stance towards it as a mode of representation. Genette’s theory deals with the mechanics of the mimetic illusion; we have seen how he focuses on narratives of mimetic intent, which has the result of impoverishing his account where narratives of non-mimetic intent are concerned. Modiano’s narrative appears at first sight to employ a verisimilar mode of representation, and indeed Genette’s theory would confirm this; however, in so doing it would miss the parodic nature of Modiano’s narrative mode, as well as the fact that his is a narrative of non-mimetic intent. I hope to have shown that these narratives, although they fulfil Genette’s criteria for a mimetic narrative, are closer to being parodies of that kind of narrative; and that his use of detail, most notably in the form of proper names, achieves what we have called an ‘effet d’irre´el’. An overall atmosphere of unreality through the accumulation of detail is a process which can be seen in other art forms—painting, for example: the works of Le Douanier Rousseau, the English painter David Hockney, or of the Hyperrealists can be said to achieve similar effects through an overdose of meticulous and precise detail. Photography has also been discussed as a mode of representation comparable to narrative, following Modiano’s understanding of photography and the photographer as a medium and agent in the same ‘business’ of representation as writing and the novelist. We discovered that as far as representation is concerned, photography and writing are comparable rather than opposing modes for Modiano. This is a result of his view of the photographer as artist, and of the photograph as a medium not as transparent as it has traditionally been considered to be. His position constitutes yet another challenge to the supremacy of the writer; the status of the Romantic artist-writer’s creations and chronicles is put into question by the hitherto lowly photographer. This tendency is perhaps an acknowledgement of the changing status of the novel in our age of film, television and the Internet, of the novelist’s condition postmoderne. Three aspects of Modiano’s narrative structure—voice, order, and representational mood—have shown a typically postmodern tendency to ironise and subvert past forms while remaining within the framework of those forms. Retaining the framework gives an outward semblance of familiarity crucial to the postmodern ‘double-coding’. In actual fact, Modiano’s narrative features have revealed themselves to be daringly experimental: a decentred narrator, a fragmented chronology

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alongside a carefully precise recording of dates, a parody of the ‘effet de re´el’. In the light of this de´voilement, let us reread this seemingly dismissive comment by Modiano on the role of the novel: Il n’y a rien de plus anachronique aujourd’hui que le roman. [. . .] Faute d’audience, faute de pouvoir s’adapter au rythme du monde moderne, [. . .] le roman ne peut plus, a` mon sens, de´terminer ou orienter la sensibilite´ commune, comme il pouvait encore le faire au de´but de ce sie`cle. Bouscule´ par le cine´ma et les moyens d’expression modernes, son influence est plus sournoise et re´duite qu’au temps ou` il e´tait interdit dans les pensionnats.52

These words are greeted with concern and bewilderment by Alan Morris in his recent book on Modiano, who asks: ‘How . . . can one of the greatest French novelists alive today have been drawn into a genre which he considers ‘‘anachronique’’? What could have possessed him, at the start of his career, to devote himself to fiction-writing, rather than to one of the numerous other, much more modern forms of artistic creation?’53 Quite apart from the fact that the non-modern nature of an art-form need not necessarily be a deterrent to aspiring artists, Morris’ reaction misses the interest of Modiano’s comment. In the interview quoted above, Modiano appears to be lamenting the lack of influence of the novel, its minor status in the world today (although any sensitive reader of his novels would realise how uncharacteristic it is of him to wish to ‘de´terminer ou orienter la sensibilite´ commune’); but his real attitude is surely revealed in his evaluation of the novel’s influence today as being ‘plus sournoise et re´duite qu’au temps ou` il e´tait interdit dans les pensionnats’ (my italics). According to him, the novel is back in its eighteenth-century role as an underhand subverter of the norm, a genre of stealth which makes the status quo uneasy. As we have seen, this is in fact what Modiano seeks to achieve in his novels, building selfconsciousness into the fabric of his apparently uncomplicated prose. As with his avowed fictions, it is dangerous to read Modiano’s comments as straightforward professional statements; he is postmodern at every level of his novelistic production.

CHAPTER FOUR

Being Serious: Modiano’s Use of History Une nuit de mars 1942, un homme de trente ans a` peine, grand, l’air d’un Ame´ricain du Sud, se trouvait au Saint-Moritz, un restaurant de la rue Marignan, presque a` l’angle de l’avenue des Champs-Elyse´es. C’e´tait mon pe`re. [. . .] Dix heures et demie du soir. Un groupe de policiers franc¸ais en civil entrent dans le restaurant et bloquent toutes les issues. [. . .] Les policiers franc¸ais les poussent dans le panier a` salade avec une dizaine d’autres personnes pour une ve´rification plus minutieuse rue Greffulhe, au sie`ge de la Police des Questions juives. Livret de famille, p. 127

Modiano is still best known for writing novels set in the Occupation. His apparent obsession, especially in his earlier works, with this dark period of French history has been the main concern of his critics and reviewers. It is certainly a controversial subject: it was probably one of the main causes for the impact that Modiano’s first novels had on the public, instantly creating a reputation for the young author.1 We may wonder, however, whether there was more to this reaction than that of simple choice of subject matter. What is the nature of Modiano’s treatment of the subject? Is it noticeably more provocative than that of other novelists? If so, how does this manifest itself on the level of narrative, and what is the effect on the reader? There is a group of novelists who concentrated their efforts on the subject of the Occupation, and with whom Modiano is sometimes classed, mistakenly:2 a post-war literary movement, that of the mode re´tro. The term mode re´tro is commonly used to describe the many works of fiction set in the Occupation which appeared after 1970,3 usually by writers of a generation too young to have experienced the War. Born in 1945, Modiano falls into this category by virtue of age and theme, and some reviewers and critics have therefore chosen to view his work solely in this light. This classification, however, results in a regrettably simplified assessment of Modiano’s work and of the relationship it bears to the facts of the Occupation, which differs significantly from that of the mode re´tro writers. In order to demonstrate this difference, we must examine Modiano’s 69

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use of historical facts in some detail, and the reasons behind it. We will need to ask the following questions: why, and in what way, does Modiano make use of the history of the Occupation, and how does this affect the reader? Readers can respond in a variety of ways to the presence of historical facts, especially recent and controversial historical facts, within what is held to be a fictional narrative. We will consider the issues of historical truth and responsibility, and corresponding questions about representation and reference. First, however, a brief account of the mode re´tro. Much has been written about the Occupation, enough to prompt the coinage of the term ‘Occupation narrative’ for the fictional accounts. These have tended to be by writers belonging to two generations; those who were adults during the Occupation, and those who were children or not yet born. Mode re´tro is the label commonly given to the writings produced after 1970, by writers such as Marie Gatard, Pascal Sevran, Marcel Ophu¨ls, and Dominique Garnier. The writings tend to be justificatory in intent, either of the author’s or the author’s parents’ actions. We are concerned with the latter kind, which are often apologiae based on very little evidence. Very little evidence, because the younger mode re´tro writers have little or no direct experience of the period, and lack first-hand information because of the relative silence of the older generation regarding the darker aspects of les anne´es noires. A typical example of a justificatory narrative by the younger generation is Mon pe`re, l’inspecteur Bonny (1975). For the historians of the Resistance, few figures could have been as obviously guilty as Pierre Bonny, head of the notorious bande de la rue Lauriston, who was tried and eventually executed after the war. His son’s attempt to justify and redeem his life is a dramatic counter-attack. Jacques Bonny looks to history for an authoritative narrative model, adopting a recognisably ‘historical’ style which sticks to chronological order, and cites from ‘primary sources’: his father’s diaries. This is ingenious, as this apparently historical convention allows him to give the collaborator a chance to explain himself in his own voice. And if the voice is confused, recreating the confusion of Pierre Bonny’s life amounts effectively to a justification and an appeal.4 Whereas Bonny relies on his readers’ respect for history to convince us that his version of his father’s life is the ‘real’ one, Pascal Jardin rejects the historian’s method out of hand. Instead he trusts in the authentic disorder of his childhood memories: ‘au diable la chronologie

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. . . je refuse la me´moire de l’historien. Ce n’est pas ainsi que je me souviens, c’est le de´sordre ou` je me trouve.’5 His conviction that his account is ‘true’ is based on a kind of psychological realism about the nature of memory. As far as the actual act of remembering is concerned, he argues, achronological order is much more ‘realistic’ than chronological order, given the nature of human memory and its tendency to reorder and restructure its elements: ‘l’ordre inte´rieur que je cherche n’a pas d’ordre chronologique. Il proce`de de l’attention, de l’espe´rance et non de la raison.’ The actual gap between his memories and what is acceptable as historical truth is forgotten by Jardin as he remains faithful to the ‘truth’ inside his mind. The emotional investment of these mode re´tro writers in their accounts, which is what makes them so powerful, detracts heavily from their value as historical truth. Unlike the mode re´tro writers described above, there is no sense in Modiano’s novels that he is trying to convince the reader of the truth of his account. His narratives are neither didactic nor justificatory. As we have seen, he has great respect for the historian, but does not seek to rival him: his novels are not given to us as alternative ‘histories’ of the period, or as contestations of the Gaullist version of the events. Why then does Modiano choose the Occupation as a setting for so many of his novels, and what, if anything, does he hope to achieve by this? In response to this question, Modiano has said in an interview that his choice of the Occupation was simply as a suitable background on which to explore his own particular interests: ‘l’e´poque ne m’inte´resse pas pour elle-meˆme. J’y ai greffe´ mes angoisses.’6 However, in other interviews he has explained his fascination with it as a means of coming to terms with his father’s past, and thence his own. This appears to be the same motive as that of the mode re´tro writers, as Alan Morris argues in the book which attempts to classify Modiano as a member of this literary movement.7 Although an author’s explanations of his own motives are always of interest, they are never disinterested. Therefore I prefer to turn to the texts for an answer to the question, and will attempt to examine how, and to what end, the historical facts are used in Modiano’s texts, as well as the effect they have on the reader.

REPRESENTATION OR REFERENCE? The accuracy of the facts in Modiano’s Occupation novels has never ceased to impress his critics. It appears to be the result of conscientious

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historical research, of reading ‘me´moires, pamphlets, romans, e´tudes historiques’,8 and interviewing witnesses.9 Modiano is a novelist who has much respect for the historian’s task as he understands it—namely, the recording of facts for posterity—and clearly attempts to replicate it in his novels. Indeed, this is one of the main forces which propel Modiano’s narratives: ‘je sais bien que le curriculum vitæ de ces ombres ne pre´sente pas un grand inte´reˆt, mais si je ne les dressais pas aujourd’hui, personne d’autre ne s’y employerait’.10 This referential aspect of historical facts is extremely important for Modiano: that is, it is vital for him that they authenticate past existences. However, Modiano also has a generally pessimistic view of the novelist’s attempts to emulate the historian. Many of his characters are failed historians or biographers, and turn to novel-writing only as a poor second option. On occasion, Modiano makes use of a non-narrative method for the representation of historical facts, as if to signal his distrust of narrative and its ability to refer. His narratives often break off to give way to a simple list: Voila` ce qu’on de´couvrait sous ses arches, a` l’ombre des platanes de l’avenue [Daumesnil]: Laboratoire de l’Armanite Le Garage des Vouˆtes Peyremorte Corrado Casadei Le Dispensaire Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes Dell’Aversano La Re´gence, fabrique de meubles Les Marbres franc¸ais Le Cafe´ Bosc Alligator, Ghesquie`re et Cie Sava-Autos Tre´filerie Daumesnil Le Cafe´ Labatie Chauffage La Radieuse Testas, me´taux non ferreux Le Cafe´-Tabac Valadier11

It is as if he does not trust the narrative form for the unadulterated recording of simple facts, and prefers to use what seems to be the most neutral, unarranged form possible. Lists bring a sense of contingency to a text because they appear to be neutral records of a ‘real’ sequence which has not been arranged by the compiler. Of course this is not actually the case, as a list is clearly a selection of material, in the same way that a historical narrative is the result of a compilation of primary sources. But the specificity of a list’s components, as well as their

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apparent unconnectedness, results in a strong sense that it has been copied off a given situation in reality. Clearly, if we subscribe to the belief in the non-referential nature of language, we must conclude that such lists cannot guarantee authentic reference; lists, being writing, are just as prone to falsehood as narrative. Historical writing attempts to fight this challenge to its truthfulness by referring to concrete objects (ruins, monuments) and through inter-textual references, in which texts support each other by confirming assertions mutually. Similarly, Modiano’s lists refer to other lists for support, such as the public and officially recognised ones in the telephone directory: Je feuillette les vieux Bottins en teˆte desquels se trouve la liste des ambassades et des le´gations, avec leurs membres. Re´publique Dominicaine Avenue de Messine, 21 (VIIIe). CARnot 10–18. N . . . Envoye´ extraordinaire et ministre ple´nipotentiaire. M. le docteur Gustavo J. Henriquez. Premier secre´taire. M. le docteur Salvador E. Paradas. Deuxie`me secre´taire (et Mme), rue d’Alsace, 41 (Xe). M. Le Docteur Bienvenido Carrasco. Attache´. R. Decamps, 45 (XVIe), te´l. TRO 42–91.12

Strictly speaking, such references to other texts should not strengthen the credibility of Modiano’s. In practice, however, his references to lists that are widely recognised and accepted objects in the public domain confer a corresponding degree of authenticity on his own text. Modiano’s use of lists may also be seen as a radical attempt to imitate reality as opposed to signifying it. His list of shop names in our first example above presumably follows the actual order of the shops lining the avenue Daumesnil, which must bear their names over the door or on the shopfront, thus constituting, effectively, a real-life analogon for Modiano’s textual list. From this one could argue against Foucault that there is, in a sense, an order of things that can be represented in an order of words.13 Independently truthful though they may appear, however, these lists, and the facts of which they are constituted, ultimately derive their meaning from the narrative in which they are embedded. However ‘concrete’ and independent of any text a ‘fact’ may be, it only takes on its significance within a narrative context. The above list from the Bottin, for example, carries on over a couple of pages as Guy Roland attempts unsuccessfully to discover his past identity amidst the plethora of names, and ends in uncertainty: ‘Les lettres dansent. Qui suis-je?’14

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The lists of facts will only begin to make sense when they are told by a narrator, in a certain order and a certain representational mood; that is, when they have been incorporated into a narrative. And its narrator must have an identity, as we are reminded by Guy Roland’s question (‘Qui suis-je?’): lacking an identity, he is not capable of narrating the information from the Bottin. The facts exist as points of reference, but their effectiveness is dictated by the organising principle that is the narrative. Lists are not an alternative to narrative, although they may seem at first to be refreshingly objective. Let us return to an analysis of Modiano’s narrative structure and the function of the facts in it. The presence of historical names and dates within a narrative raises the fundamental question of its relationship to the historical world. Is it one of representation or of reference? Nancy Freeman Regalado, in a perceptive article on Villon’s Testament, is inspired by an erroneous transcription of Barthes’ term ‘l’effet de re´el’ as ‘l’effet du re´el’ to discuss this issue. Her definitions of the two are worth quoting at some length: The effet de re´el facilitates the reader’s representation by drawing its elements from the familiar, easily imagined everyday world, but it also shortcircuits the reader’s awareness of the artful processes of representation by leading the reader to believe the text is referring directly to what is. The new term, effet du re´el, on the other hand, brings into focus entirely different questions concerning the relevant connections between the historical world and literary texts: the effect of historical events upon a text; the polemical intent of the author; the political impact of a work. The effet du re´el assumes reference and therefore seeks to verify historical facts and experience apart from the text and to analyze their expression in the text.15

We may usefully apply the term ‘effet du re´el’ to the effect sought by the novelists of the mode re´tro: their texts are a direct result of ‘historical events’, and ‘the polemical intent of the author’ is for the work to have a ‘political impact’ on the French readership. Modiano’s novels, on the other hand, do not seem to aspire to an ‘effet du re´el’. As we have seen, the mode of his narrative seems to create an ‘effet de re´el’, which upon closer examination is revealed to be a parody of it, the ‘effet d’irre´el’ (Chapter 3). In other words, his narrative is not one which encourages, structurally speaking, a referential reading. It is emphatically not the case, however, that the presence of historical names, events and dates in Modiano’s novels goes unnoticed, or that they can be regarded as being nothing more than a useful backdrop to the personal dramas of the protagonists. Within the unreal atmosphere of the ‘effet d’irre´el’ (described in Chapter 3) we are offered a selection of precise and disturbing facts whose referential power is

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undiminished by the fact that they are not embedded in an openly referential narrative. This rare combination of a historian’s accuracy of fact with the evocation of such an atmosphere is described, if not explained, by Boisdeffre: ‘il e´voque ce passe´ avec une pre´cision qui n’est pas celle de l’historien . . . non plus celle d’un te´moin, mais comme un reˆveur . . . comme un somnambule’.16 The interplay of the referential and the representational within the context of Modiano’s use of historical facts in his narratives is clearly a highly complex issue. His use of lists may appear to be disarmingly referential, but it soon becomes clear that these are as prone to nonreferentiality as narrative, and that they depend on narration in order to be made sense of. As for his narratives, while we would not classify them as aspiring towards an ‘effet du re´el’—texts whose relationship to historical events constitutes their raison d’eˆtre—they do refer; somehow, the reader is made aware of the moral and historical impact of the narrated facts. In the following sections I propose to examine why this is possible, and how these narratives succeed in having a referential relevance in spite of their non-referential mode. We will also see how this referential effect leads on to a condemnation of the reader by the text. In our consideration of the relationship between Modiano’s narratives and the historical facts which are contained in them, it is crucial to determine the nature of the narrating voice, given that in a first-person narrative it is the sole source of all the ‘facts’, of all the information which goes to set the historical scene. The information that it does not supply is also important, as such lacunae will prompt the reader, even more actively, to attempt to make sense of the narrative. Of the novels which are set during the Occupation, the relationship between the narrator and the facts that he relates can be seen to undergo a gradual development during the course of Modiano’s œuvre. In La Place de l’e´toile, Raphae¨l Schlemilovitch appears at first sight to be a flamboyant and domineering character, but is gradually revealed as an empty consciousness which takes on the guise and characteristics of famous French Jews throughout history. The voice is thus a hallucinating one, lucid but not to be trusted: some of the facts are accurate but others clearly invented by the narrator, following the method of his madness. La Ronde de nuit, by contrast, has a vague and self-effacing narrator, whose moral and narrative vacillations effectively recreate the confused reality of the period of the Occupation. His facts, again, are sometimes surprisingly accurate, but they are juxtaposed with fictitious

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ones. In his third novel, Les Boulevards de ceinture, we have for the first time an acknowledgement within the text of the fictional nature of remembrance: ‘On s’inte´resse a` un homme, disparu depuis longtemps. On voudrait interroger les personnes qui l’ont connu mais leurs traces se sont efface´es avec les siennes. [. . .] Alors il ne reste plus qu’a` imaginer.’17 In these three novels, the source of the facts is clearly the narrating voice itself: whether hallucinating, confused or openly creative, the facts are produced by the narrator. This contrasts with later novels such as Voyage de noces or Fleurs de ruine in which the facts assume a more independent status, as the narrators appropriate them from older characters who have experienced the Occupation, rather than present them as their own. In between these two kinds of voice we have that of the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, the suggestible amnesiac, whose case demonstrates narrative’s need for a narrator with an identity in order to confer meaning on the facts. His amnesiac mind can only narrate a sequence of unselected facts which are neither true nor false as long as he remains without memory. The development of the voice in the first three novels to that of the later novels may be described as a progression from the intradiegetic to the metadiegetic.18 That is, in the first three novels, the events borrowed from other people’s memories are directly related by the narrator as if they belonged to him; they are on the same ontological level as the narrator. However, in the later novels (such as Vestiaire de l’enfance and Voyage de noces) the ‘borrowed’ material is acknowledged as such. They are incorporated into the experiential sphere of the narrator-hero through the method of ‘false autobiography’: that is, the narrator extends his experiential sphere through the appropriation of other people’s memories, relating them as if he has direct experience of them. But they continue to belong to these other people, which means that they are told as events occurring within the re´cit of the narrator, in which he himself is not a character. In both cases, the narratorial voice in Modiano’s novels recreates the atmosphere of the Occupation through the narration of personal and directly experienced events. The voice, however, is the impersonal one which we have described as that of the degre´ ze´ro narrator, which refrains from commenting on the morally ambivalent situations in which the narrators frequently find themselves. This narrator is one who displays very little character and sense of identity. The reader of his narrative is thus faced with a carefully described, historically accurate situation, full of moral dilemmas but told by a dispassionate voice which

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seems to be not so much that of an individual moral being as that of ‘une arche´ologie impersonnelle, pre´-individuelle’.19 The lack of identity which characterises the narrator, which detracts from the overall coherence of the narrative, encourages the reader to take a more active part in trying to make sense of the situation. ‘Modiano de´crit des situations de´gage´es des jugements moraux, de la bonne ou de la mauvaise conscience’, leaving a vacant place in the text, ‘la place du sentiment et du jugement de valeur’.20 This blank space left in the text leads the reader into an act of imaginative sympathy, into an attempt at ‘living’ the life of the protagonist in order to be able to evaluate his actions.21 To understand the motives of the Modiano narrator, the reader is obliged to participate, by placing the events of the text within her own moral framework. She is forced to collude with him in order to understand him. Why, for instance, does the vacillating and apparently amoral hero of La Ronde de nuit end up working for both the Resistance and the French Gestapo? The confused voice of the narrator of La Ronde de nuit gives vague indications throughout the text about the reasons why he has become what he is. At times these reasons appear to be so haphazard as to make the reader wonder whether he is not simply being cynical: ‘J’aurais pre´fe´re´ me consacrer a` une cause plus noble . . . La me´dicine m’aurait plu, mais les blessures, la vue du sang m’indisposent. Par contre, je supporte tre`s bien la laideur morale.’22 This apparent cynicism, however, is belied by expressions of real fear, which supply an explanation and motivation for his allegiance to the French Gestapo: ‘Ces vicieux me font peur. Si je les me´contente, ils me liquideront. Pourquoi n’a-t-elle [la princesse de Lamballe] pas crie´: ‘‘vive la nation!’’ Moi, je le re´pe´terai autant de fois qu’ils le veulent. Je suis la plus docile des putains.’23 The most sincere explanation for his predicament, however, is neither cynicism or fear, but a lack of moral direction. His is a totally passive character, animated only by a profound sense of bewilderment: Ne me sentant aucune vocation particulie`re, j’attendais de mes aıˆ ne´s qu’ils me choisissent un emploi. [. . .] Je leur laissais l’initiative. Boy-scout? Fleuriste? Tennisman? Non: Employe´ d’une pseudo-agence de police. Maıˆ tre-chanteur, indic, racketter. Cela m’a e´tonne´ tout de meˆme.24

The passive emptiness which constitutes this character corresponds directly to a semantic blank space in the narrator which the reader must fill in order to understand the narrative. That is to say that passivity is an explanation, but not a sufficient one: it leaves room for further

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exploration of the circumstances by the reader, who is forced to appraise these and make some decisions about the point at which lack of initiative becomes a crime. Given that the protagonist of this novel, being too bewildered, passive or amoral, cannot supply us with a moral framework in which such decisions must be made, the reader is obliged to make use of her own. She must ask herself what she might have done in similar circumstances, try to imagine the influence of a period such as les anne´es noires on a weak character. This appropriation of the protagonist’s emotional and moral existence by the reader bears a striking resemblance to the way in which the narrators of Modiano’s later novels ‘appropriate’ the experiences of their elders, adopting their memories as their own and thus reliving a previous life. In both cases it is the text’s reticence, symbolised by the ‘voix blanche’ of its narrator, which forces the reader to participate in an effort to understand. Indeed this ‘hijacking’ of other people’s memories and their incorporation into a first-person, ‘retrospective’ narrative, Modiano’s method of ‘false autobiography’, can be explained and justified to a large extent as his own hermeneutical strategy. Modiano was only born in July 1945, so his claim to such ‘memories’ is completely spurious on the grounds of chronology alone. The author has at times attempted to justify his method by claiming to have a ‘me´moire pre´natale’: Ma me´moire pre´ce´dait ma naissance. J’e´tais suˆr, par exemple, d’avoir ve´cu dans le Paris de l’Occupation puisque je me souvenais de certains personnages de cette e´poque et de de´tails infimes et troublants, de ceux qu’aucun livre d’histoire ne mentionne.25

However, he more generally tends to acknowledge the fictional process involved in this adoption of memories: ‘Il [Emmanuel Berl] m’encourage dans mon dessein: me cre´er un passe´ et une me´moire avec le passe´ et la me´moire des autres.’26 How much of a deception is this exercise, this fabrication of a past with facts from other people’s lives? It can happen with great naturalness, as can be seen in the following example of an ‘assimilated memory’: ‘Ce reˆve que je fais souvent d’une traverse´e en voiture de la Rive gauche a` la Rive droite [a wartime experience of the narrator’s father], dans des circonstances troubles, je l’ai ve´cu moi aussi, quand je me suis enfui du colle`ge en janvier 1960, a` quatorze ans et demi.’27 Here the process of assimilation is clearly illustrated; the younger man, in an attempt to relive his father’s experiences, draws a parallel between an experience of his own and that of his father, and transfers his emotional

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familiarity with the former to the latter. This method has the advantage of ensuring that the emotional investment, at least, is genuine. Subsequently, some of Modiano’s narrators come to believe the borrowed memories to be their own, which means that by relating them as being their own they are being true to their erroneous belief. Such a presentation of the narrator’s re-creation as ‘autobiography’ can then be seen as a personal truth. The following quotation is most suggestive of this as a natural process of appropriation: Il y a longtemps que je baignais dans cette atmosphe`re, elle a fini par s’inte´grer a` moi . . . Ce n’est qu’a` posteriori, en re´fle´chissant a` cette e´poque, que j’ai ve´cu de manie`re hallucinatoire la pe´riode 35–45. J’en ai fait mon paysage naturel que j’ai nourri de lectures approprie´es . . .28

In the twilight world of memory, the distinction between true life and hallucinated life is not clear-cut, especially to the remembering subject. This kind of assimilation can also be seen as a function of the act of reading: a natural extension of the interpretative and appropriating act, the hermeneutic circle, that constitutes understanding. It mirrors the movement described earlier which entangles Modiano’s reader with his narrator, involving her morally and making her responsible through her effort to make sense of the narrative. Given the structurally induced complicity of the reader with Modiano’s narrators, the narrative order favoured by Modiano—the order of narration—has little trouble in situating the reader within the ambiance of les anne´es noires. The order of narration is one in which the events follow the order of the narrator’s emotional distance from them. It results in a narrative order which is not always chronological, nor indeed logical, as it is the narrator’s relationship with the events which determines their positions. Preserving such a personal order of narration is one way in which a certain atmosphere can be recreated, given that personal memories tend to linger in an affective ambiance, and can lose their significance if they are taken out of it. Modiano’s narratives, through ensuring that this order is preserved, succeed in placing the reader within this specific ambiance. Tense is the key to the order of narration, being a function of the narrator’s personal distance from the events in question rather than of their status within an ‘objective’ chronology. The crucial part played by tense in the evocation of an atmosphere and the reader’s involvement in it can be seen in the following extract from Fleurs de ruine: La neige qui se transforme en boue sur les trottoirs, les grilles des thermes de Cluny devant lesquelles se dressaient des e´talages de marchands a` la sauvette,

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Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art les arbres de´nude´s, toutes ces tonalite´s grises et noires dont je garde le souvenir me font penser a` Violette Nozie`re. Elle donnait ses rendez-vous dans un hoˆtel de la rue Victor-Cousin, pre`s de la Sorbonne, et au Palais du Cafe´, boulevard Saint-Michel. Violette e´tait une brune au teint paˆle que les journaux de l’e´poque comparaient a` une fleur ve´ne´neuse et qu’ils appelaient ‘la fille aux poissons’. Elle liait connaissance au Palais du Cafe´ avec de faux e´tudiants. [. . .] Elle leur faisait croire qu’elle attendait un he´ritage [. . .] Un peu plus bas que le Palais du Cafe´, sur le trottoir oppose´, une fille de vingt ans, Sylviane, disputait des parties de billard au premier e´tage du Cluny. [. . .] Elle ne resterait pas longtemps dans la grisaille du quartier Latin. Bientoˆt, on la verrait faubourg Montmartre, au Fantasio. [. . .] Puis elle fre´quenterait le Cercle Haussman. [. . .] Mais, en ce printemps de 1933, elle habitait encore chez sa me`re. [. . .] On la retrouve onze ans plus tard, au printemps de 1944, dans une chambre d’un petit hoˆtel du quai d’Austerlitz. Elle y attend cet Eddy Pagnon qui, depuis le mois de mai, transporte des vins en fraude, de Bordeaux a` Paris. [. . .] Elle l’attendera jusqu’a` demain soir. Il conduira le camion a` l’entrepoˆt de la Halle aux vins [. . .]29

The fluctuation of the tenses in this passage is typical of one which follows an order of narration. The passage starts by describing an act of remembering (‘toutes ces tonalite´s [. . .] me font penser a`’) which occurs in the narrator’s present, prompted by a set of memories (‘ces tonalite´s grises et noires dont je garde le souvenir’). We assume from this that these memories belong to the narrator, but he then goes on to describe people and an epoch, the Occupation, that he could not have known, although he treats the ‘memories’ as if they were his own. Clearly his knowledge of Violette is based on research in the archives, as we may deduce from his casual reference to ‘les journaux de l’e´poque’. But the narrator’s familiar tone when dealing with these facts, partly due to his choice of tense (the imperfect), situates the reader in a similarly familiar position with respect to these people and the epoch. The narrator and the reader are cast as witnesses to Violette’s falsehoods (‘Elle leur faisait croire qu’elle attendait un he´ritage’): this is an effect of the use of the imperfect within the framework of the act of ‘remembering’ set up in the first paragraph. The distance between the narrator and the events decreases further in the third paragraph of the extract, in which the fortunes of Sylviane are described. The tense used is the conditional, but because we know that these events have already occurred—being the conditional future of an anterior past, that of the Occupation—their ontological status for the reader is closer to that of the definite future rather than a

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hypothetical one. The reader, and the narrator, are thus in possession of facts about Sylviane’s future, as well as having witnessed her past in ‘le Palais du Cafe´’. This impression of experience and knowledge (of Sylviane’s past and future) is created by the skilful use of the imperfect followed by the conditional tense. The complicity between the narrator and the reader is established here by the phrase ‘Mais, en ce printemps de 1933’ (my emphasis): the precise situating of the narrating instance has the effect of placing the reader in the same temporal and psychological position as the narrator. The illusion of lessening distance as a result of the manipulation of tenses is brought to a masterful conclusion in the fourth paragraph of the extract, in which the present tense is used to describe Sylviane. The potentially shocking appearance here of the present tense is cleverly alleviated by the way in which this tense change is presented: ‘On la retrouve onze ans plus tard, au printemps de 1944’ (my emphasis). Given that 1933 has been described in the imperfect tense, the use of the present tense to describe 1944 takes on an illusory consistency for the reader who is attempting to make sense of the order of narration. Also, the introductory phrase ‘on la retrouve’ is ambiguous: it may be considered a narrative flourish, a conventional way of presenting a new fact, rather than the transportation of the narrative into the present. It cushions the surprising appearance of this tense and its continued use thereafter. The temporal indication ‘depuis le mois de mai’ firmly establishes the narration in the present of 1944. Finally, yet another change of tense in the fifth paragraph, a move into the future, takes the reader into the time-scale of Sylviane herself as she settles down to wait for Eddy Pagnon. Thus the tenses in this passage are indicative of a certain relationship between the narrator and the events described: and, given the complicity which is set up between the reader and the narrator through the nature of the narratorial voice, this relationship also begins to hold between the reader and the events described. This process is one which is widely seen in Modiano’s fiction, whether the subject matter concerns the Occupation or not. In the case of narratives dealing with the Occupation, the voice and order of his narratives combine to situate the reader within the particular atmosphere desired by Modiano, and to commit the reader morally to the narrative in her attempt to make sense of it.

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MOOD AND RESPONSIBILITY What is the effect of the mood of Modiano’s narratives on the reader? We have seen that the mood of Modiano’s narratives is one without mimetic intent, and has the effect of creating an unreal impression on the reader. In Modiano’s first three novels, the descriptions are precise but somehow lurid and unreal, the details as colourful as in a hallucination. The general atmosphere is that of a nightmare, of a surreal vision: —Voulez-vous que je vous montre mes tatouages? propose Frau Sultana. Elle de´chire son corsage. Sur chacun de ses seins, il y a une ancre marine. La baronne Lydia Stahl et Violette Morris la renversent et ache`vent de la de´shabiller. Elle se de´bat, s’arrache a` leur e´treintes et les excite en poussant de petits cris. Violette Morris la poursuit a` travers le salon ou`, dans un coin, Zieff suce une aile de poulet.30

In his later novels, an unreal atmosphere is created through the ‘effet d’irre´el’. The representational mood of Modiano’s narratives, in both his early and later novels, is thus one which creates an effect of unreality. How is it then that his novels can have a moral impact? That is, how can they make the reader aware of the historical reality of what is being described, be it the torture scenes in la rue Lauriston of La Ronde de nuit, or the deportation of the author’s father in Livret de famille? There is no question that the reader is affected by the historical facts in these works, for they have the potential to arouse much heated debate. The publication of La Place de l’e´toile in 1968 was delayed by several months to avoid the risk of further fuelling the violence of the student riots. How can the novels of Modiano, which we have shown to be without mimetic intent on the level of representational mood, have this moral effect on their readers? In order to answer this question, we must return to the distinction between the textual functions of representation and reference. Modiano’s texts may not attempt to represent, but the unreal atmosphere which pervades these texts does not impede them from referring to specific historical facts. The proliferation of proper names creates an overall effect of unreality: but these same proper names, when recognised by the reader, function as points of reference in the historical reality of the Occupation. In other words, although description, in the form of a Barthesian ‘effet de re´el’, may not occur in these texts, deixis—pointing—takes place. As well as creating a general impression of unreality, hallucinatory or otherwise, the text points to specific references in a real past, the past of the Occupation.

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This deixis cannot take place, naturally, unless the reader recognises the relevant proper names. If she has never heard of the rue de Lauriston (La Ronde de nuit), or of the star used to label Jews (La Place de l’e´toile), Modiano’s text cannot point: deixis cannot occur. When recognition does take place, however, it is shocking and unexpected, because it occurs within the pseudo-‘effet de re´el’ of Modiano’s narrative. If the facts were embedded in a narrative structure tending towards the ‘effet du re´el’, they would not come as such a surprise. As it is, the reader is lulled into reading the text as a work of fiction—which indeed it is—but subsequently shocked by the appearance of names and facts from history. The deviousness of including such referential facts within what appears to be a fictional narrative is enhanced by the presence of false facts alongside the real. This mixing of real and fictional names and facts in Modiano contributes to the reader’s uneasiness: the fictional names and facts put her off her guard, but the sudden recognition of a name from historical reality causes deixis, and the reader is forced to reevaluate her position. That this is intended to be so has been confirmed by the author: J’ai employe´ un processus de mythomanie qui permet de me´langer re´alite´ et fiction. En meˆme temps j’ai l’impression que cette interfe´rence cre´e un certain malaise qui n’aurait pas lieu si le lecteur e´tait suˆr de se trouver soit dans l’imaginaire pur, soit dans la re´alite´ historique. J’ajoute que beaucoup de mes personnages historiques cite´s rele`vent presque pour moi de la le´gende. Je les ressens comme une espe`ce de mythe.31

And when deixis does occur, the reader finds herself in an uneasy position. Prompted by the impersonal voice of the narrator and the order of narration, she has become deeply, morally involved with the narrator: she has actively collaborated with him in her attempt to understand him. When she is faced with a ‘real’ name, she is suddenly made aware of the consequences of this involvement. That is, upon recognising the name of ‘la rue Lauriston’ as the real site of atrocities committed by French collaborators during the Occupation, something happens:32 the fiction she has been reading takes on the weight of history, the text points its finger at the reader—especially if she is French—as a ‘collabo’. When the narrative suddenly places itself within the context of recent French history through the deictic effects of facts and names, the reader finds herself in precisely the same situation as the narrators themselves. Having sympathised with them in order to understand them, she has become (albeit ‘vicariously’) a political collaborator. She has also

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become a collaborating reader, as a result of the narrative structure which encourages the reader’s involvement as part of the sense-making process. The treacherously multi-faceted Raphae¨l Schlemilovitch, traitor both to the French and to Jews: the double agent hero of La Ronde de nuit: the narrator of Boulevards de ceinture who frequents the gestapiste crowd, collaborating with them (even writing articles for their anti-semitic newspapers) in order to discover more about, to understand, his father: collaborators all, like the reader herself. Even after the Occupation trilogy, for instance in the later Livret de famille, the reader is often led to identify herself with a morally ambiguous character. In Chapter IX the young narrator, too young to have known the war, recognises a voice presenting music programmes on Swiss radio as that of a former French gestapiste. The narrator has come to Switzerland in order to escape his national inheritance, the heritage of the Occupation; however, he decides to investigate, and discovers that the radio presenter appears to be the collaborator who was responsible for the deportation of his father. He arranges a meeting with the man at which he plans to accuse him of his crimes. At the last minute, however, he hesitates and loses his opportunity to confront him. He thus relinquishes his responsibility to condemn, for which he will be condemned, as will the reader for her collaboration with him. Voice, order and mood combine in Modiano’s novels to embroil the reader in the ambivalent atmosphere of the Occupation and to involve her with the morally questionable narrator, within a narrative displaying the characteristics of a fictional, non-referential representation, only to turn around and condemn the reader through the deictic device of specific names and historical facts. The bizarre combination of the unreality of his textual universe with the precision of the facts in it is what is described by Boisdeffre in his comment on La Ronde de nuit: ‘ce livre un peu irre´el . . . nous offre un document clinique sur l’Occupation, plus frappant qu’un reportage’.33 These texts constitute a powerful reminder of the historical facts of the Occupation, exploiting their fictional status; eliciting, then condemning, the collaboration of the reader.

RESPONSIBILITY AND HISTORICAL DISCOURSE The fact that Modiano’s narratives reject the discourses of both history and verisimilar fiction vindicates Barthes’ analyses of historical dis-

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course and verisimilar writing. Barthes sees these as two kinds of discourse which both rely on the collusion of the referent with the signifier at the expense of the signified, thus creating the illusion of the referent’s temporal and ontological primacy. In historical discourse, according to Barthes: le fait n’a jamais qu’une existence linguistique (comme terme d’un discours), et cependant tout se passe comme si cette existence n’e´tait que la ‘copie’ pure et simple d’une autre existence, situe´e dans un champ extra-structural, le ‘re´el’.34

This is precisely what happens in verisimilar fiction also.35 Thus these two kinds of discourse, which since the nineteenth century at least have been set against each other as opposing forces,36 share a discursive trope which is not to be found in Modiano’s narratives, although these last share their use of historical facts with the one, and the status of fiction with the other. How then should we describe Modiano’s narratives with regard to the history of which it makes such effective use? What is its relation to historical writing? By refusing to use the conventional codes used to ‘understand’ history (the conventions of detached narration, chronological order, and mimetic representation) while dealing in patently ‘historical’ facts, his narratives may be said to subvert and thereby expose the codes of historical discourse: at the same time they subvert verisimilar discourse through a subtle parodying of the ‘effet de re´el’, exposing its codes also. This is where they differ fundamentally from the genre of the historical novel. The very point of a historical novel is to give verisimilar representations of events in history, to ‘bring alive’ the facts through an illustrative process in which ‘what the characters do serves to make history, what happened, more comprehensible’.37 In other words, it must pretend to be real; Modiano’s novels do not. There have been examples throughout literary history of fictional representations of the Other which expose the codes with which we are wont to understand and appropriate that Other, be it a foreign culture, an unusual character, or simply the past. Modiano’s novels are examples of such works, and in this they are deeply postmodern. They give us alternative representations of the facts which we have been accustomed to seeing in more conventional arrangements. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, Modiano’s narratives are not rival histories of the Occupation; they are fictional rearrangements of facts which have been extracted from conventional historical discourse, thereby demystifying the ‘naturalness’ of historical presentation. This

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fictional status allows Modiano, in these representations of the history of the Occupation, to dwell at some length on the broader, more philosophical issues such as commitment, responsibility and identity within the historical context. The connection between commitment and a sense of identity, which has dire consequences for the narrator of La Ronde de nuit, has already been discussed. His case also poses the problem of responsibility. Everyone is responsible in times like those of les anne´es noires, and it is not possible to be unconscious and blameless, even for a harmless, passive individual like him: Le plus curieux avec les garc¸ons de mon espe`ce: ils peuvent aussi bien finir au Panthe´on qu’au cimetie`re de Thiais, carre´ de fusille´s. On en fait des he´ros. Ou des salauds. [. . .] Ce qui importait pour eux: leur collection de timbres-poste et de rester bien tranquilles, place des Acacias, a` respirer a` petits coups pre´cis.38

The hero of Lacombe Lucien39 is similar in that he too is unable to remain blameless because of the times in which he lives. He is a more simple young man than the hero of La Ronde de nuit, more boorish and brutal also, characterised by a candid amorality displayed in the joy with which he wields the power conferred upon him by the gestapistes. His behaviour is arguably typical of any uneducated and unsophisticated eighteen-year-old; however, being an eighteen-year-old in 1944, his every action has profound consequences, especially on the Jewish family he terrorises. Responsibility cannot be avoided, although towards the end of the film we enter a dream-like sequence where history appears to have stopped, and with it the necessity of facing the consequences, described in detail in the following stage direction: A partir de la`, il n’y aura pas de suite chronologique, mais des moments, tre`s longs, comme si l’on e´piait patiemment les faits et gestes de ces trois personnages. Ils ne parleront pas, ou tre`s peu. Dans cette campagne e´crase´e de soleil, sans aucune pre´sence humaine, on aura l’impression d’eˆtre hors du temps, de l’histoire (plus aucune allusion a` la guerre), dans une sorte d’e´ternite´ ou` les activite´s les plus essentielles de la vie se re´pe`tent de manie`re monotone. Ce final, serein, me´lancolique, sera comme un point d’orgue, une note prolonge´e.40

Ten scenes of this kind follow, taking us to the end of the film in an unreal atmosphere (although there is an underlying menace in some of them, evoking the tension between the characters) which gives the impression of lasting forever;41 a timeless present, free of responsibility but also of development and identity. However, at the end of the tenth scene, a card is superimposed on the face of Lucien, bearing the following message: ‘Lucien Lacombe fut arreˆte´ le 12 octobre 1944. Juge´ par un tribunal militaire de la Re´sistance, il fut condamne´ a` mort et

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exe´cute´.’42 Although the last images allow the vision of a time of unreality, perhaps a cinematic rendition of the ‘effet d’irre´el’, the final message of responsibility is clear (clearer here than in Modiano’s written narratives); with responsibility and history comes identity also, in the cruel form of the death notice of Lacombe Lucien. Issues such as these certainly take on a heightened urgency when placed within the framework of one human individual; it is interesting to note that this clarity (of message) is to be found in the only one of Modiano’s works to feature a proper name in the title.43 These themes persist in Modiano’s later works, and memory is added to the equation as yet another responsibility. Many of Modiano’s characters do their utmost to avoid remembering; the young people in section IX of Livret de famille living in Switzerland (Switzerland, as has been noted earlier, functions as a symbol of forgetfulness and irresponsibility for Modiano), like the comte Chmara in Villa Triste, shirk the responsibility of memory and thence commitment. But this is an untenable position, which results in the gradual loss of a sense of identity, as well as of meaning: ‘il y a un seuil minimal de la me´moire en dec¸a duquel l’existence individuelle risque de perdre son sens’.44 This is the lesson—if one may use that word to describe anything in such nondidactic texts—driven home in every novel by Modiano: without memory, there is no self. This holds on the level of personal memories, as is the case with those who deny their own past (Ambrose Guise in Quartier perdu or Jimmy Sarano in Vestiaire de l’enfance). It also holds for those who refuse to ‘remember’ a collective memory, for instance the facts of history, as is the case with the group of young people living in Switzerland in Livret de famille. It is not their own past that they are denying; it is that of the preceding generation, but the consequences are the same. ‘Nous sommes le temps qui passe et donc le temps passe´.’45 We are responsible for remembering what has happened, even if we were not born at the time. And this is a message which resounds heavily in the context of French guilt over the events of the Occupation, after the distortion that they suffered under de Gaulle’s post-war policy of building up French national confidence and pride at the expense of all else.46 Modiano’s later novels move away from the Occupation, being less specifically set in that period, although it remains as the backdrop to many of them. However, the themes of guilt, identity and responsibility, and their relationships, continue to be explored through the faculty of memory. It is useful to bear in mind that these themes were first formed for Modiano (and for his readers) within the historical

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context of the Occupation, and that the reader’s responsibility, resulting from her involvement in the text which is itself provoked by the text, was—and is—a principal part of the experience of reading a Modiano novel. I hope to have shown how Modiano’s novels are structured so that reading involves the making of moral choices for the reader: they also show the consequences, through the fates of the passive characters, of not making these choices. The narrative structures which we have examined appear to be precisely designed to draw the reader into committing herself actively to the moral issues raised in the texts, and subsequently to condemn the reader when she recognises the historical reality of the events, places and people referred to in the narrative. The result is not a didactic text, at least not one in which the author ‘teaches’ the reader, but a text in which the reader gradually becomes selfconscious, and conscious of the consequences of her reading. The condemning voice is not the authorial voice, or even the narrator’s, but that of the reader herself, after she suffers the referential impact of the narrative in which she has been absorbed. From this point of view, perhaps we can (somewhat flippantly) call Modiano’s novels ‘teachyourself’ texts: their lesson, however, is far from flippant. In the context of his intentions, Modiano’s choice of the period of the Occupation is ideal in that the deictic device will have the desired effect, especially on a French readership acutely aware of the many unresolved issues of its recent history. By presenting this history to the reader in an uneasy mixture of fact and fiction, Modiano sets up an ontologically uncertain, postmodern universe, in which the playfulness is more than a little tinged with anxiety. The self-consciousness of the novelist is transferred to the reader when she becomes aware of her part in the narrative’s condemnatory project. At the same time, Modiano subverts and exposes the conventions of historical writing, through the use of accurate historical facts within a non-referential narrative. The writing of history is thus made aware of its limitations, and a postmodern historiography is sketched out in the subtle and unassuming style typical of this author.

CHAPTER FIVE

Being Playful: Parody and Disappointment Malgre´ les notes que je rassemblais, je ne parvenais pas a` combler les lacunes de cette vie. Ainsi, qu’avait fait Harry Dressel jusqu’en 1937? Je comptais bien me rendre a` Amsterdam pour mener mon enqueˆte et j’avais envoye´ a` deux journaux ne´erlandais un texte qui devait paraıˆ tre dans la rubrique des ‘Recherches’, avec la photo de Dressel. Livret de famille, p. 178

We have now seen numerous instances of Modiano at his most subversive. The apparently unremarkable first-person narrator, chronological narrative and realist representation have all turned out to be postmodern subversions of these familiar narrative tropes. So too has his use of historical facts: far from adding up to a historical novel, they result in an uneasy mixture of fact and fiction which has a morally disturbing effect on the reader. This leads us to a question of classification. Modiano’s novels are not what they seem, so we know what they are not: but what exactly are they? To what subgenre of novel, if any, do Modiano’s works belong? One way in which we can try to classify Modiano’s novels is to see whether they resemble any particular subgenre, and then to decide on the nature of the resemblance: is it parody, pastiche, or simple imitation? As several critics have noted, parody is one of the central characteristics of Modiano’s first novel, La Place de l’e´toile. Colin Nettelbeck and Penelope Hueston have shown how La Place de l’e´toile contains extensive parodies of Ce´line and Proust, as well as of ‘le picaresque voltairien’:1 Franc¸oise Dhe´nain, discussing the same work, has noted its parody ‘du style pamphle´taire ce´linien’.2 This novel is indeed full of intertextual references to other novels and authors: it contains parodies, but also pastiches, caricatures, and straightforward references. However, I will not be discussing these in this chapter for two reasons. First, this abundance of intertextual exercises is unique to La Place de l’e´toile. This suggests that rather than being a constant of his style, it is the result of a cathartic exercise typical of a first novel, and therefore not pertinent to a consideration of his œuvre as a whole. 89

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Second, the intertextualities have a realist origin in the kaleidoscopic vision of Raphae¨l Schlemilovitch, the colourful hero and narrator of La Place de l’e´toile, and are therefore best considered within the confines of this novel. Is there a novelistic subgenre that the majority of Modiano’s œuvre resembles, or to which it bears a stable relationship of some kind? JeanClaude Joye writes that ‘la forme que Modiano a le plus souvent mime´e jusqu’aujourd’hui est . . . celle du roman policier ou du roman d’espionnage’.3 Many of Modiano’s novels are moulded around the ‘basic situation’ of the detective novel. They generally involve a mystery, shrouded in the past, which the narrator attempts to solve as a detective (he is generally an amateur: only in Rue des Boutiques Obscures is the narrator a professional investigator). He interviews people, collects evidence, and tries to piece the facts together into a coherent narrative which will provide the solution to the mystery: however, this is generally in vain. We shall see how Modiano’s novels bear a playful relation to detective fiction in that they are built around the conventions of this subgenre and raise the reader’s expectations accordingly, but always fail to fulfil them. Before we begin, we must clarify whether the relationship that holds between Modiano’s texts and the detective novel is one of parody. Parody, more specifically postmodern parody, is defined by Linda Hutcheon as ‘repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity’.4 She describes parody as a bitextual synthesis, that is to say one which activates two texts in the single work, and which requires a specific reaction of the reader. It will become clear during the course of this chapter that the relationship between Modiano’s novels and detective fiction is at times parodic, but not always: sometimes it is no more than the borrowing of a background or an ambiance. Hutcheon’s theory of parody will also be useful at a later stage when we examine the self-parody that occurs in some of Modiano’s novels.

GENRE, SUBGENRE We have been using the term ‘subgenre’ to describe detective fiction, the object of Modiano’s parodies. Some critics would prefer the word ‘genre’: contemporary usage of the two terms is far from uniform and can be misleading. We will take a moment to justify our usage,

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especially as these classifications will become crucial to our understanding of Modiano’s postmodern agenda. Although it has traditionally been used to signal the distinction between poetry, drama and prose (the novel being the dominant form of this last) within the classic terminology of literary studies, ‘genre’ is a term which has been much abused, and applied to an astonishing range of both fictional and non-fictional classifying systems. Alastair Fowler, in Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes, chronicles the changes which have occurred in the different forms as well as in their appellations. His historical overview is authoritative, but its authority does not extend to establishing a reliable terminology for our use today. Nor does he analyse the confusions of contemporary usage. One of the conclusions of his book is that ‘genre is of little value in classification’:5 perhaps this is why he omits to offer us a single definition of what the term refers to, or should refer to, now. Much more important, according to him, is the role of genre as ‘a communications system, for the use of writers in writing, and readers and critics in reading and interpreting’.6 That is to say that communication between writers and readers can occur via a common understanding of the genre. Writers can use a genre as a reference point, from which their individual work will diverge, more or less: and if this is grasped, readers and critics can refer to the genre when interpreting the work, thus situating it in relation to known and already classified works. Some critics, however, who deal with contemporary literature appear to have ignored Fowler’s erudition and reservations regarding the term ‘genre’. In their critical works, the term is consistently used to describe different kinds of novel. Birns, apparently unaware of the historical usages of the term, writes thus: The very idea of ‘genre fiction’ is a peculiarly modern one. The novel had always been the quintessentially mixed genre . . . It is with the twentieth century breakdown of the conventional perimeters of the novel, the breakdown decried by Lukacs and other Marxist critics, that all the major ‘genres’—for example, the thriller, the detective story, science fiction, although ultimately Romantic in origin—achieved a formal consistency and a generic autonomy.7

Here Birns uses ‘genre’ to describe both the novel and different kinds of novel in the same breath, although he does manage to put quotation marks around the term for the latter. But Birns is clearly not ignorant of the original meaning of the word. In using it to describe what would

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have originally been called a subgenre, he is acknowledging its popular meaning, which comes from its usage in film and film studies. The choice of the term ‘genre’ to distinguish between different kinds of film—the Western, the horror movie, the film noir, science fiction, to name but a few—has firmly established the popular meaning of the word on that level of specificity, which then becomes directly applicable to texts of the corresponding level of specificity: thus the cowboy romance, the horror novel, detective fiction and works of science fiction qualify as ‘genres’. Does this mean that ‘genre’ is a term of fluid meaning, which can be used to denote any recognisable set of conventions (within reason) which stimulate certain corresponding expectations in the reader? Such fluidity would be convenient, but ultimately it would make the term useless. It is important to determine the level of literary complexity and individuality at which the term should be used (should it be used to differentiate ‘drama’ and ‘poetry’, or ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’?), in order to ensure that the distinction between the group of works and the individual work, the type and the token, does not break down. Without such a distinction, we would not be able to tell apart the fulfilment of expectations from the effects of sheer uniformity. That is, if the reader’s expectations are regularly fulfilled by a number of works situated at a very specific level, it may simply be the result of the works being very similar, and not because they conform to the patterns of the ‘genre’. Contemporary works are difficult to deal with because they may require new classification and evaluation systems, especially as they may have been conceived for the specific purpose of disrupting existing genres. Even Fowler is hesitant and inconsistent with regard to contemporary literature: in different sections of his study, he calls the detective novel both a genre8 and a subgenre.9 It is tempting to abandon the old dispensation altogether, establishing instead a separate taxonomy for contemporary literature. Giving ‘genre’ status to different kinds of novel facilitates the discussion of a period which has seen the birth of so many new kinds (all descended, if we are to believe Birns, from the Romance). However, when we consider the necessity of a distinction between fulfilment of expectation and homogeneity within a type, the advantages of situating the term ‘genre’ on the traditional level of specificity become evident. The broadness of this level ensures that we can discuss the conformity of the tokens to the type, without the risk of compromising the originality of each token. In contrast, giving ‘genre’ status to the detective novel, for instance, lessens the scope for original

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tokens of this type to emerge, as its conventions are already fairly specific. I have therefore decided to call detective fiction a subgenre, in spite of the fact that several critics to whom I will be referring call it a genre. The distinction between genre and subgenre will become crucial when we discuss the possibility of authors creating their own, new subgenres.

THE DETECTIVE NOVEL Many contemporary authors have used the conventions of popular literary subgenres as paradigms for their novels: the detective novel, in particular, has been the model for numerous works, including novels by Robbe-Grillet, Le Cle´zio, Jean-Patrick de la Manchette, Jean Echenoz and Modiano.10 Similarly, probably not coincidentally, much critical attention has been directed at the subgenre of detective fiction: studies have been made of the detective stories themselves, as well as of the writers who employ but subvert its conventions.11 This critical tendency may be a result of the recent surge of interest in popular literature as opposed to ‘High’ literature. It may also be related to the equally recent critical reappraisal of the detective novel as the paradigmatic narrative.12 The detective novel is a narrative that tells the tale which is at the origin of the telling: that is, it is the enquiry into the mystery which engendered the enquiry in the first place.13 The detective novel is exemplary as a subgenre because it is so formulaic. Its basic situation is always the same: a mystery, a detective figure and a plot which chronicles the former explaining the latter. The more peripheral conventions are also relatively stable and easily recognisable. These structural constants in the text give rise to a certain set of predictable expectations on the part of the reader. In his article on the reading of detective fiction,14 George N. Dove suggests that in addition to Wolfgang Iser’s ‘structures of indeterminacy’, that is the gaps and blanks left in any literary text which stimulate the reader’s ‘process of ideation’, the readers of a detective novel are supplied with a set of formulae which acts as a ‘regulative context’ for the transaction between the reader and the text. The experienced reader will recognise the tell-tale signs and patterns, the conventional figures and situations, and thence anticipate an outcome. Such anticipation does not ‘spoil’ the pleasure of the ending, as the knowledge is not specific, but formal: the anticipation lays down the conditions in which the questions will be

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answered. Dove further claims that the formulaic conditioning of the reader, which is crucial to this equation, results from the accumulation of precedents: that is to say that the reader must have read a number of detective novels before. This is a point to which I will return in the context of Modiano’s œuvre. What then are the conventions of the subgenre that is the detective novel? We have already described the basic situation. There are a number of accompanying conventions: the detective is generally a marginal figure, attractive in his or her intelligence, but sometimes difficult to relate to personally because of this intelligence. The resulting gap between the detective and his or her audience (which includes the reader) is bridged at times by a mediating assistant, who acts both as foil and chronicler of the detective’s exploits. Other conventions may concern the plot: the convention of the Red Herring, for instance, or that of the Obvious Suspect who turns out to be innocent or indeed one of the victims; both diversionary tactics which slow down and stimulate the hermeneutic drive of the story. Details of de´cor or of the personal appearance of the characters are usually significant, to be viewed as Clues (Red Herrings included); a perfume, a certain brand of cigarette, a nervous habit. Thematic conventions may include Passion (inseparable from Crime) and Scandal, but neither must (normally) compromise the detective. Very few detectives are allowed to fall in love, although he or she (generally a he) may be the object of respectful adoration. Such conventions form the basis of what Dove calls a ‘code of ethics’ shared by the writer and the reader of detective novels, a ‘covenant’: ‘the author pledges that the mystery will be solved, without recourse to the supernatural, improbable coincidences, and the hiding of vital evidence from the reader. The reader, in return, pledges to suspend impatience, scepticism, discrimination, and tolerate cliche´s, absurdities, stereotypes, and abandon his/her normal sense of reality.’15 Dove may appear here to be promising too much on the reader’s behalf, but it is important to acknowledge the existence of such a covenant between the reader and the writer, or indeed between the reader and the text. This is of course the case with all texts: there is a silently acknowledged contract between them and their readers. In the case of the detective novel, however, the contract is more visible than in other subgenres, which means that the movement from recognition to anticipation, during the reading process, is also more visible than usual. This movement creates the space in which subversion can occur: that is, anticipation need not be fulfilled, and indeed it may be

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frustrated, as in the case of the postmodern detective novels of Modiano. His procedure, as Jean-Claude Joye puts it, is ‘se servir d’une ou de plusieurs formes romanesques (consacre´es ou conside´re´es comme telles . . .) a` des fins qui s’e´cartent cependant radicalement des objectifs que la lecture habituelle preˆte a` cette ou a` ces formes’.16

MODIANO’S POSTMODERN DETECTIVE Jeanne Ewert, having noted that ‘the detective novel is eminently suited to postmodern manipulation because its tacit dependence on the hermeneutic code offers the possibility of disabling that code’,17 goes on to recommend Rue des Boutiques Obscures as a ‘pure antidetective novel’. Her essay is a subgenre-based analysis, in which she repeatedly shows how the conventions of the detective novel are subverted in Rue des Boutiques Obscures. In my analysis I hope to elucidate further the mechanics of this subversion through using our categories of the degre´ ze´ro narrator, the order of narration, and the ‘effet d’irre´el’. Modiano’s narratives abound in detail. His apparently realist descriptions of places, objects and people ultimately result not in verisimilitude, but in what we called an ‘effet d’irre´el’. Detective novels are also full of details, but not in the cause of realism. Indeed, in detective fiction the contract between text and reader does not contain harsh clauses about verisimilitude. The details in a detective novel perform the specific function of furnishing the reader with clues, significant facts, which will all be made sense of at the end of the novel when the mystery is solved. Some of the facts will not ‘fit in’, being Red Herrings: these are in the narrative to confuse and divert the reader. Most of the facts in a detective novel, however, will be given a meaning and solution at the end of the novel. Modiano’s narratives proffer facts and detail in a way similar to detective fiction, at suggestive junctures of the narrative, which prompts the reader to keep them in mind. But on closer examination, these facts turn out to be irrelevant to the mystery, or related but only by coincidence: cases of what a philosopher would call contingent conjunction. For example, in the first chapter of Rue des Boutiques Obscures where Hutte’s sparsely decorated office is described in detail, one of the few inessential objects mentioned is a Russian icon.18 The fact that this is noted at all suggests to the seasoned reader of detective stories that the icon, and thence Russian nationality, will be a

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potentially significant clue to the mystery. This ‘hunch’ seems to be confirmed as the reader reads on, by the appearance of Russian characters such as Stioppa and Gay Orlow. However, in the end the Russian connection leads nowhere: it turns out to have been a randomly recurring detail, a running thread which fails to weave itself into the fabric of the solution (or what passes for a solution) at the end of the novel. An even more teasing instance of reader-baiting occurs at the end of Chapter 2, when we are told that the young bride ‘avait un parfum poivre´ qui me rappelait quelque chose’.19 Immediately the hermeneutic awareness of the reader is alerted, and rightly so: for in the end it turns out to have been the perfume worn by Denise, the former companion of Guy Roland, and the reader’s perspicacity is rewarded. Or is it? The two instances are related by the perfume, but the connection is irrelevant, as the bride has nothing to do with the investigation and does not reappear during the course of the novel. Even more damning is the fact that Guy Roland’s noticing the perfume does not advance the plot in any way, inasmuch as he does not make the connection at the time, or indeed later. As Ewert puts it, ‘Clues are given that are in fact irrelevant to the mystery. Clues that may be relevant go unheeded, and ‘‘significant’’ coincidences mean nothing more than another turn in the maze.’20 The detective, after all, must fulfil a key narrative function, that of recognising relevant information and acting on the knowledge. Modiano’s detectives are never quite as reliable as Holmes or Poirot, either as detectives or as narrative functions. The lack of organisational ability on the part of the detective has a similar effect on names of people and places. Lists from telephone directories, extracts from embassy records, reports from the private investigator Jean-Pierre Bernardy: proper names abound, but they are left in the form of lists, not incorporated into a narrative which will make sense of them. As they are, there is no indication of priority or hierarchy. We do not know, any more than Guy Roland does, which of the many names is vital to the unravelling of the mystery. The narrative cannot guide us in our choice because the information is not made a part of the narrative, but is left outside it in the form of lists and statistics. The effect is precisely that of the ‘effet d’irre´el’, reality moving further and further away as the plethora of names result in bafflement and vertigo, as we see in Guy Roland’s reaction to reading a list of possible names for himself: ‘Les lettres dansent. Qui suis-je?’21 Proper names become even more confusing and vertiginous when they reoccur in different Modiano novels, as different characters. The

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name Pacheco, for example, crops up in Fleurs de ruine and Dimanches d’aouˆt, and Eddy Pagnon, in La Ronde de nuit and Fleurs de ruine, but as different people. The recurrence of proper names in more than one text by the same author can have the effect of strengthening the mimetic illusion, as the reader can then believe in the continued existence of these characters beyond the confines of a single text, which is what happens in La Come´die humaine. However, if names are recognised from other novels but are subsequently seen to belong to different characters, the effect on the reader tends to be one of unreality: not necessarily disbelief, but a postmodern sense of ontological uncertainty. Names are reliable points of reference in a stable and coherent world, so inconsistent naming will result in an ‘effet d’irre´el’. The sense of unreality is increased when we discover that even information that is presented in an organised and reliable manner can be fallacious. Jean-Claude Joye has drawn attention to the fact that the telephone number of Ambrose Guise’s holiday house in Klosters does not conform to the regulations governing Swiss area codes: . . . le nume´ro de te´le´phone du chalet que le narrateur posse`de a` Klosters, dans le canton des Grisons, en Suisse, ne peut pas eˆtre le 01 13 24: aucun nume´ro d’abonne´ prive´ ne commence par 01; le pre´fixe ou l’indicatif de Klosters est le (0)83 . . .22

This may sound like the quibbling of a Swiss reader, but an equally serious ‘error’ for British readers occurs on the very first page of Quartier perdu: ‘Je contemplais le passeport [. . .] vert paˆle, orne´ de deux lions d’or, les emble`mes de mon pays d’adoption’ (my italics).23 Ambrose Guise’s adopted country is Great Britain, but the description of the passport does not match the actual object in reality, either in terms of colour or design. Similarly, the name of Guise’s Japanese publisher—Yoko Tatsuke´—may ‘sound Japanese’ to an unsuspecting reader, but to anyone acquainted with Japanese and/or Japanese names it is not at all realistic. Yoko is a woman’s name: Tatsuke´ is an extremely unlikely surname (although of course, being a name, it is not impossible that both of these exist). In any case, if Modiano’s primary aim had been verisimilitude, he would surely have chosen a correct and fairly typical name for an unimportant character: and surely he would have avoided the first name of Yoko, which, to many a Western reader, unavoidably conjures up Yoko Ono. If it is negligence, it is negligence of some magnitude. It is almost as if Modiano is challenging his reader to call a halt to her traditional ‘suspension of disbelief’ by offering what

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appear as flagrant cases of negligence, breaches of the contract which promises to create an illusion of reality. Joye offers an alternative explanation for the bogus telephone number: ‘Certes . . . on peut penser que Modiano s’est mal documente´. Mais, paradoxalement et peut-eˆtre fortuitement, ce nume´ro de te´le´phone impossible sert le projet ultime: jeter le doute sur tous les e´le´ments qui assoient, accre´ditent une identite´.’24 We may extend this explanation to our other examples of error, and Joye’s specific conclusion that this ‘doubt’ reflects on the identity of Ambrose Guise, to an acknowledgement of the overall ambivalence of the information tendered by Modiano’s narrators. The doubt cast on the status of apparently reliable information serves to intensify the ‘effet d’irre´el’ already created by the disorganised state in which we find the other facts, those gathered during the course of the investigation (and therefore ‘legitimately’ questionable) which promise to lead us to the solution of the mystery. When we come to consider the narrative order and the narrators of Modiano’s novels, we find that the expectations raised in the mind of the reader by the initial ‘detective novel’ set-up (the mystery, the detective figure, the underworld atmosphere) are hardly fulfilled at all. In contrast with its representational mood, which appears for some time at least to follow the convention of detective fiction in being precise and meticulous, the narrative order and narrator are quickly seen to be extremely unlike their counterparts in detective fiction. In spite of this, the path taken by the reader (recognising a convention, followed by raised expectations which are subsequently fulfilled or disappointed) is still the same, and shapes the reader’s reactions to the typical Modiano novel. What is the conventional order of events in a detective novel? The detective novel is generally a retrospective narrative, told by a first- or third-person narrator, in which we start in the narrator’s present, go back to various events in the past for the purposes of the enquiry, and subsequently return to the present when the mystery has been solved and the status quo restored. The events can be said to follow an order of re´cit, as the novels tend to start in medias res, for example with the client’s arrival at the detective’s office with the ‘mystery’: if it were in chronological order, the order of histoire, the narrative would have to start with the crime. The detective starts off with a collection of facts brought to him by his client which, within the order of re´cit which governs the main narrative, can be described as following an order of narration, that of

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the client’s experience of the facts. This is always subjective, and often false. Alternatively, the client’s tale may not follow an order at all, which would indicate his inability to make sense of the facts: it may be an unordered collection of the facts which he feels incapable of narrating properly. The detective proceeds to transform the client’s disordered narration within the order of re´cit that is the novel itself, into a tale told in the order of histoire, which is the actual sequence of the events leading to the crime. That is, the detective’s solving of the mystery can be described as his achievement of the ability to retell the story in chronological order. As against the order of re´cit which governs the novel as a whole, the detective’s final narrative is told in the order of histoire, starting with the crime (or its cause) and ending in the present. The order of re´cit of a detective novel collapses into the order of histoire as the status quo is restored and the past put into its place by the climactic and totalising narrative of the detective, related to an admiring audience at the end of the novel: the present-past-present circle is completed by the narrative. Also, a symmetry is achieved within the work, with the collection of bewilderingly incoherent facts by the client at the start, and their chronological ‘re-collection’ and narration by the detective at the end. Modiano’s novels are also retrospective narratives, which start in the narrator’s present and involve an enquiry which takes the narrative back into the past: however, the narrative often fails to return securely to the present and restore the status quo. Instead it meanders around different levels of the past, often ignoring the orders of both re´cit and histoire, and the fragmented facts which we are given at the beginning of the narrative remain disparate, or are strung together in an arbitrary fashion. Modiano’s novels tend to follow an order of narration, that is one which is dictated by the sense of time peculiar to the narrator, as we saw in Chapter 3. Although they may start with the familiar pattern of a ‘mystery’ moving the narrative back into the past from the present, the narrative never reaches the stage of re-telling the tale in chronological order, and the status quo of the present is never restored. In Voyage de noces, Jean’s descent into the past renders him incapable of reassuming the life that was his previous to the exercise, as we see from his words at the very end of the novel: Peu importent les circonstances et le de´cor. Ce sentiment de vide et de remords vous submerge, un jour. Puis, comme une mare´e il se retire et disparaıˆ t. Mais il finit par revenir et elle [Ingrid, who has committed suicide] ne pouvait pas s’en de´barrasser. Moi non plus.25

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The return to the present, which could be achieved through the adoption of the order of histoire, does not occur in Modiano’s retrospective narratives: we are left at the end point of the narrator’s development, which in chronological terms may be and often is in the past rather than the present. Similarly, in Quartier perdu we are taken through an investigation of the past of Ambrose Guise (a successful writer of detective stories), but the end of the novel does not bring us back to the present, nor indeed to the Ambrose Guise with whom we started. We are left instead with Jean Dekker, Guise’s former self, whose future is not made clear to us: does he abandon his (Guise’s) current wife and children and seek out a former girlfriend as a partner, or does he return to his wife after a meeting with the former girlfriend? We are not told, and this lack of narrative closure frustrates our expectation of the restoration of the status quo that is the conventional ending to a detective novel. This absence of a reassuring closure is described by Ewert as a postmodern tendency: ‘the refusal of the antidetective novel to provide closure, and its invocation of fear instead of assurance, is a part of the postmodern reaction against a self-deceptive faith in inductive reasoning and a comforting linear/teleological universe’.26 The narrative order in Modiano’s novels does not follow the conventional order of detective fiction, although the initial situations are deceptively like those of detective fiction, whetting the reader’s appetite only to disappoint it through their thematic and structural lack of solution. The atmosphere of tension and uncertainty in Modiano’s novels, created by the presence of unresolved mysteries, vague references to a dark past (usually situated in the Occupation) and shifting identities, provides a setting strongly evocative of typical detective fiction. However, Modiano’s detective-figures do not uphold this initial impression. On the surface, as we have already noted, Modiano’s narrator functions as a detective, attempting to solve a ‘mystery’ in the past by interviewing people, collecting evidence, and trying to arrange it into a plausible explanation. Although generally not a career detective himself, he may be connected to the profession in other ways: Ambrose Guise is a successful writer of detective novels, and many of Modiano’s characters (especially the girlfriend/wife figures) are voracious readers of detective fiction (Sylvia in Dimanches d’aouˆt, Ingrid in Voyage de noces). However, Modiano’s narrator differs from the typical narrator of a detective novel in crucial ways. For instance it is unusual, although not unheard of, for the narrator of a detective novel to be the detective

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himself speaking in the first person: detective novels generally tend to be told in the third person, or by a first-person voice belonging to the detective’s assistant (Watson, Captain Hastings). There are cases where the detective tells his story in his own voice, for instance the few Holmes stories in which Holmes, deprived of Watson through inconveniences such as marriage, takes up the narrative himself: but the general tendency is for an admiring third party to tell the story of the detective’s prowess. Even more unusual is the fact that in many (although not all) of Modiano’s novels, the ‘mystery’ concerns the narrator himself. In Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Quartier perdu, and Vestiaire de l’enfance to name but a few instances, the narrator is in quest of something in his own past. How is such a quest justifiable, when a first-person narrator should surely have full access to his own past? It is certainly the case that the narrator of a retrospective narrative is entitled, and has been known, to withhold his knowledge of the events at crucial moments, to exercise his ‘cognitive privilege’:27 but this would not be an acceptable position to maintain throughout such a narrative. More importantly, why does the reader accept this narratorial stance? Surely the reader is entitled to query blatantly incredible narratorial situations, and the case of a narrator whose own past can furnish him with a detective-worthy ‘mystery’ would seem to qualify as an improbable case. One way in which to render acceptable the highly improbable situation of a narrator who simultaneously knows and does not know about his own past is to make the narrator into an amnesiac, which is of course precisely what happens in Rue des Boutiques Obscures. The typical narrative voice in Modiano’s other novels, however—that which we have identified as belonging to the degre´ ze´ro narrator28—is also perfect for getting the reader to accept the logically unacceptable: being unobtrusive and discreetly anonymous, it is a voice which can speak without announcing its identity. It is the impersonal quality of this voice which helps to sustain the precarious illusion of a first-person narrator who, although not an amnesiac, is ‘ignorant’ of his own past. Apart from amnesia, there are two other possible justifications for an incomplete knowledge of one’s own past. There is the situation of what we have elsewhere called voluntary amnesia, in which the narrator has disowned his past and attempted to forget it: examples of such narrators are Jimmy Sarano, Ambrose Guise, and to a certain extent Jean of Voyage de noces. There is also the situation in which the narrator is mistaken about himself or herself, the ‘deluded narrator’

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scenario, the narrative becoming a means of retrieving the truth of the matter. This, however, is not quite as suitable as the others for providing the source of a mystery. ‘Deluded’ narrators tend to lack, as a rule, the detachedness from the self which is necessary for a narrative presentation of a mystery qua mystery: more often than not, it is his listener—and the reader—who must discern the mysterious aspect of the narrative. Not surprisingly, Modiano does not make use of this narrative situation in his novels. Instead the detective story element in his first-person narratives, where the narrators are in pursuit of a mystery concerning their own pasts, is justified by the degre´ ze´ro narrators suffering from varying degrees of voluntary or involuntary amnesia. Even in the novels where the narrator-detective is initially seen to be on the hunt for someone else, the search gradually reveals itself to be one for his own identity. The narrator of La Ronde de nuit is a double agent, simultaneously working for the French Gestapo (as ‘Swing Troubadour’) and a clandestine Resistance group (as ‘La Princesse de Lamballe’). Having been commissioned by both organisations to obtain as much information as possible regarding the other, he gives the head of the Gestapistes his own Resistance name, Lamballe: Je lui de´clare que le chef de ce re´seau n’est pas le lieutenant, comme je le croyais. ‘Alors qui?’ . . . ‘qui?—Un certain lam-bal-le. lam-bal-le. Eh bien, nous lui mettrons la main dessus. Taˆchez de l’identifier.’29

Thus his quest effectively becomes the tracking down of himself. Perhaps we can see this as his method for bolstering his faint sense of identity (‘Mon lieutenant, je n’existe pas’),30 even at the expense of identifying himself as the enemy and endangering his own life. Similarly, the narrator of Les Boulevards de ceinture appears to be searching for his father, but it becomes clear after some time that it is his own identity that he is seeking through that of his father. Early in the novel, the narrator acknowledges his tendency to identify himself with the object of his searches: Pendant plusieurs mois, j’ai effectue´ des filatures a` titre be´ne´vole [for the police]. Je devais suivre les personnes les plus diverses et consigner leur emploi du temps. [. . .] Les derniers temps, j’ai cru devenir fou. Tous ces inconnus, je m’identifiais a` eux. C’e´tait moi que je traquais sans relaˆche.31

The search for his father, which appears at first to be genuine, reveals itself gradually to be both fictional and textual. After giving us several detailed curricula vitæ of the shady characters frequented by his father, the narrator, instead of producing a comparable account of his father,

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tells us: ‘Je ne sais presque rien de lui. Mais j’inventerai.’32 And towards the end of the novel, we are given an indication that this imaginary (or potentially imaginary: the reality of the search is dubious, but never clearly negated) search is being conducted within the covers of a book: J’ai l’impression d’e´crire un ‘mauvais roman d’aventures’, mais je n’invente rien. Non, c¸a n’est pas cela, inventer . . . Il existe certainement des preuves, une personne qui vous a connu, jadis, et qui pourrait te´moigner de toutes ces choses. Peu importe. Je suis avec vous et je le resterai jusqu’a` la fin du livre.33

The narrator has claimed earlier to be a writer (whether this is true, or a convenient cover for his activities as a detective, we are not told), and we see him being commissioned to write something which is ‘Pas carre´ment pornographique, mais leste . . . un peu cochon’.34 Here, as in Quartier perdu, Vestiaire de l’enfance and certain sections of Livret de famille, the narrator-detective is a writer of popular literature: a constantly recurring formula, although as we have seen, the detective figures vary from novel to novel. Thus Modiano’s narratives succeed, in various ways, in setting up the first-person narrator as self-seeking detective, in spite of the contradictions latent in this combination. Also, the figures of the narrator and detective are brought together in their common quest, thereby linking the two activities of detection and writing. The detective’s desire to find out about the past can translate itself directly into the desire to write, as we have seen in the cases of Ambrose Guise, Jean (of Voyage de noces) and Jimmy Sarano, who all begin to write in an attempt to re-discover their past selves. It is intriguing to note that so many of these detective-narrators are writers by profession, and of popular literature. Why should this be so? Writing about one’s past as a means of discovery of the self is not a novel concept. Modiano’s heroes are not alone in their simultaneous rediscovery of their past and their identity: this results from the premiss that the self is a product of the past, which is why discovery or acknowledgement of the one leads to that of the other. But why should this be so? And how does popular literature fit into the problem? The essays in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Literary Theory all show (in fact some of them simply assume) that the activity of detection shares many characteristics with that of writing. There is certainly much evidence for this. For instance, detection and narrative share the same hermeneutic drive. This is why the narrative of detection, that is the detective novel, has been hailed as the narrative of narratives.35 Also, both writing and detection involve

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the choice of a mode of representation, a narrative order and a certain point of view (to make use of my own categories) which collectively lead to a certain way of seeing the facts which is crucial to the solution of the mystery. This similarity between the two activities is one reason why a professional writer should be Modiano’s choice for conducting the search for his or her (or someone else’s) identity. It is, of course, also a mise en abyme of the actual activity in which the author himself is engaged. In many of the quests, as we have seen, the search is for something which the writer/searcher already knows, but which needs to be undertaken notwithstanding as an act of re-cognition. Although Jimmy Sarano is clearly well acquainted with the facts concerning his past as Jean Moreno, their re-writing and re-creation are necessary in order for him to accept them as an integral part of himself. Perhaps this is because the act of writing objectivises the past that is himself; turning his vague and uncertain memories into the separate body that is the text confers stability and permanence on to his sense of identity. This is the equivalent of what Modiano’s narrators are doing when they attempt to record the lives of various ‘hommes de plages’. When focused on the narrator instead of on an ‘homme de plage’, the narrative results in the embodiment of the self in writing, the fixing of the self in the text. Paul Ricœur tells us that all narrative is an attempt at the mimesis of our temporal existence.36 If this is so, the self-seeking narrative can be seen as a narrative consciously directed towards the mimesis of our temporal selves, towards a textual representation of a self that continues from past to present. The discovery of the self through writing is a central subject, both structurally and as a theme, in literary history, but it undergoes an interesting debasement by Modiano in his relegation of it to writers of popular literature. Jimmy Sarano, Ambrose Guise, Jean of Voyage de noces, Serge Alexandre . . . none of these characters pretends to produce high-quality writing, and indeed none is shown to succeed triumphantly in his quest, although we are given indications (always ambivalent) that they do attain some sense of their identity in the end. They are neither as important or as successful in their mission as Proust’s Marcel. Perhaps we can see this as an expression of Modiano’s postmodern lack of faith in notions such as identity, as well as in the actual activity: that is, his lack of belief in the efficacy of writing as a means of discovering identity. Through a parodic use of the detective novel framework and its conventions, Modiano offers us an updated version of the well-worn

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image of the writer as seeker, ultimately of his own identity. It is Proust’s enterprise, the writer in quest of himself through writing, but popularised and parodied through adopting the conventions of detective fiction. The detective novel framework structurally reinforces the element of the search in Modiano’s narratives. This in itself may constitute an admission by Modiano that the search for the self through writing is something of an outmoded enterprise,37 or at least one which needs justification and support: this against Proust, for whom the importance of his project was self-evident and needed no justification. Thus Modiano uses the detective novel to parody Proust, but he also parodies the detective novel.38 In his novels, he parodies its predictability and its positivist confidence in the eventual solution of all problems in a coherent universe. Not only does he parody it, but he manipulates its conventions, and the expectations that they stimulate, to his own ends. It is in this exercise that Modiano’s virtuosity, carefully concealed behind an apparently limpid prose (unlike in Place de l’e´toile, discussed earlier), becomes evident. But what are his ends? In spite of his less positive outlook when compared with Proust’s, Modiano still appears to be attempting the same project, although he knows that it is doomed: the discovery of the self through writing. Indeed, in his complex interplay of parodies, it is possible to discern a curious ambivalence in Modiano’s attitude towards this classic quest. Living in our postmodern times, Modiano feels the need to strengthen and to debase the quest through his use of the detective novel framework: but he embarks on it nonetheless, and diverts the hermeneutic momentum inherent in this subgenre to the (doomed) re-discovery of the narrator’s identity. Similar to his attempt to record the biographies of transient beings, or to capture the atmosphere of the Occupation, Modiano appears here as an artisan who persists in his craft in the full knowledge of its futility. The circumstances of the writing of Quartier perdu can capture the essence of this seemingly futile exercise. Ambrose Guise, a rich and famous author, abandons his pleasant life in England to pursue his shadowy past in Paris. The mystery involves a murder, as many detective novels will, and we appear to be on the tracks of the guilty party. The hermeneutic interest takes over, and we follow the story with enthusiasm . . . having overlooked the fact, mentioned casually at the start of the novel, that twenty years have passed since the day of the crime.39 Twenty years is the period after which the pursuit of justice must be abandoned: we have been engaged on a futile quest, or at least a

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futile quest from the point of view of retribution. Needless to say, the detective is not only in pursuit of justice, but also, more importantly, of knowledge; and from this point of view the quest proves to be slightly more productive, although only very discreetly so. Perhaps these apparently futile quests in which Modiano engages us are an expression of the postmodern preference for process and practice over accomplishment, ceaseless activity over completed creation.

AUTOFICTION Another genre which can be said to subvert the self-seeking narrative, in particular that of autobiography, is that of autofiction. Autofiction was a term coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977, on the back cover of Fils, to indicate that his work belonged to the new genre of ‘fictional autobiography’. The term has subsequently been analysed and described, perhaps most effectively by Jacques Lecarme and E´liane LecarmeTabone, whose book offers the following definition: ‘comme crite`res d’appartenance a` l’ensemble dit autofiction, on retiendra d’un coˆte´ l’alle´gation de fiction, marque´e en ge´ne´ral par le sous-titre roman, de l’autre l’unicite´ du nom propre pour auteur, narrateur, protagoniste’.40 Autofiction may thus be described as a postmodern take on autobiography, in which the author practises the art of autobiography while putting into question the central criterion of the genre, its veracity. It is an autobiography in which the author has wilfully and knowingly broken ‘le pacte autobiographique’, and its theorists willingly acknowledge the bad faith intrinsic to it: ‘c’est un genre essentiellement inde´licat, qui cherche sa voie entre la goujaterie, qui jette au visage des gens leurs noms et pre´noms, et la perfidie, qui les laisse reconnaıˆ tre a` travers des e´crans protecteurs’.41 Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone offer a selection of works which may be described as autofiction, which includes four Modiano titles, Livret de famille, De si braves garc¸ons, Remise de peine and Fleurs de ruine.42 At the time of the book’s publication, these were the four works in Modiano’s corpus which did not bear the word ‘roman’ on the original title page.43 Although this fact excludes these works from the proper definition of autofiction (given the ‘crite`res’ already proposed), their overall generic ambivalence and mixture of fact and fiction allow them to be part of the group of works which make up the ‘de´finition large’: that is, a category of autobiographical writing in which there is

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‘l’invention d’une personnalite´ et d’une existence, c’est-a`-dire . . . une type de fictionnalisation de la substance meˆme de l’expe´rience ve´cue . . . [tout en maintenant] l’identite´ re´elle de l’auteur, sous la forme de son nom propre conserve´’.44 We have already seen how Modiano’s liking for an uneasy mixture of fact and fiction in his narratives, as well as the effect of this on the reader, occurs throughout his œuvre, in both the works labelled ‘roman’ and otherwise. Similarly, the unstable identity of his narrative voices is an essential part of their postmodern nature: we have had detailed examples of this from Vestiaire de l’enfance and Voyage de noces. In his non-‘romans’, this unstable identity extends into an ontological uncertainty, that is to say that their relationship to the narrative, and indeed to the author, is left unresolved. The final fissuring of the firstperson voice in Livret de famille and De si braves garc¸ons has already been analysed:45 so too has the use of the name ‘Patrick’ in both of these works. The fact that the author, narrator and protagonist of the narrative bear the same name, which used to be one of the central requirements of an autobiography, means nothing in autofiction: ‘si le nom meˆme du signataire se fait pseudonyme . . . comment le nom propre pourrait-il garantir l’identite´ narrative?’46 There is nothing to stop ‘Patrick’ being Patrick Modiano’s pseudonym, or even, as we have seen, a completely random name. Such a ‘mise en question’ of the fundamental guarantors of truth in autobiography must mean that autofiction bears a parodic relationship to autobiography. In the case of Modiano, the parody never goes beyond the level of gentle teasing, and that within the recognisable framework of the older genre: postmodern parody of the most subtle kind. In the Genette-inspired diagrams of Lecarme and LecarmeTabone, where various relationships between A (author), N (narrator) and P (protagonist) represent different kinds of narrative, the fact that autofiction can be described as a particular combination of those elements—even while subverting their central relationship—is visible proof that it leaves the framework of autobiography intact. The author still enjoys a close involvement with the text in his or her autofiction, except that he or she reserves the right to say ‘c’est moi et ce n’est pas moi’.47 Modiano’s strategy, which is to indicate his ambivalent stance through the unexplained use of ‘Patrick’, is arguably more subtle than Ernaux’s: as with detective fiction, his parodic relationship to the master genre is self-consciously playful and ambivalent. In this chapter I have attempted to show how Modiano’s novels rely

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on the conventions of detective fiction, thus engineering the reader’s expectations only to disappoint them in the subversion of these conventions. In this way, Modiano succeeds in being both readable and experimental: the conventions which set up the reading framework are subverted in his experiments. Modiano’s parodying of autobiography, which places him alongside other contemporary authors who practise autofiction, is comparable in that he leaves the essential elements of the older genre intact, showing the parodied genre to be both vulnerable and admirable. These postmodern detective novels, and autofictions, also ‘take in’ the critic in her examination of their relationship with the parodied genres. Both Modiano’s novels and the parodied genres offer the role of detective (or biographer) to the reader or critic: but in the case of Modiano’s novels, the list of suspects includes the author himself. This is because the critic becomes engaged in an investigation aiming to prove or disprove the ‘evidence’ supplied by the text: to prove that it is a parody, or not: to prove that the ‘mistakes’ are conscious, or not. The text’s redirection of the critic’s attention towards the author, the author as a ‘subject position’ inscribed in the text, is a characteristic of parody, especially postmodern parody. In order to appreciate the full meaning of a parody, it is necessary to take the author into consideration, because his parodic intention is present in the text itself. The author can be seen as ‘a hypothetical hermeneutical construct, inferred . . . by the reader from the text’s inscription’.48 This description helps us to think about the ‘traces’ left by the author in his text in the same way as the ‘clues’ in a detective novel. It describes the situation of Modiano’s works perfectly: we are invited by the text to pursue an author-suspect who has left the traces of his intentions in his own text, in the manner of a postmodern parodist. The detective-biographer-critic pursues the author-suspect, whose texts give off ambiguous signals: are they parodic, or is it all in the critic’s mind? The self-conscious art of the novelist invites the critic to become self-conscious in her turn, at times self-conscious to the point of embarrassment. Perhaps autofiction is the embodiment of the relationship between Modiano’s works and autobiography, in the same way that the pseudodetective novel is the formal result of Modiano’s relationship with detective fiction. I suggest here, somewhat prematurely, that Modiano’s parodying of both detective fiction and autobiography is a function of his postmodern attitude towards the very concept of genre: evidence of this will be offered in the next, and final, chapter.

CHAPTER SIX

Being Popular: The Modiano Novel Je de´colle les affiches placarde´es par couches successives depuis cinquante ans pour retrouver les lambeaux des plus anciennes. (Livret de famille, p. 214) . . . il lace´rait lui-meˆme les affiches dans les rues pour qu’apparissent celles que les plus re´centes avaient recouvertes. Il de´collait leurs lambeaux couche par couche . . . (Chien de printemps, p. 36)

Modiano may be both serious and playful, but above all he is popular. His novels sell extremely well: they are always on the best-seller lists when they first appear, and even his older works display staying power on the market. What are the reasons for this popularity, structurally and ‘socially’ speaking? Is there a certain novelistic genre or structure related to popularity? What is the social status of that kind of novel? PARODYING THE ‘MODIANO NOVEL’ In our discussion of how Modiano’s novels subvert the conventions of detective fiction, we discovered that they themselves display a marked uniformity of style and theme, their own set of conventions. The three structural aspects of voice, order, and mood are consistent throughout his œuvre, as are certain favourite themes. This combination of thematic and structural convention is to be found in all of Modiano’s novels, and gives rise to the familiar narrative set-up of Modiano’s first-person narrator-detective leading us into a search for something in his own past. This basic skeleton of the Modiano narrative is fleshed out by various recurring details, ‘une se´rie de traits que l’observateur avait pu noter, a` la fois e´pars et re´currents, au fil des œuvres de´ja` nombreuses publie´es par l’auteur’.1 We have already noted the similarity between the narrator figures: they are tall, dark, shy young men with a bizarre gift for eliciting confidences, often aspiring to write, and have spent a part of their youth in Vienna. If they smoke, they have a predilection for Cravens, or other ‘cigarettes anglaises’ (Dimanches d’aouˆt, Voyage de noces): they believe Switzerland to be a haven from history and time, 109

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and Rome, the end to time (Fleurs de ruine, Quartier perdu, Un Cirque passe). The novels tend to be set in similar areas of Paris: the XVIth is a favourite, as are the city’s outskirts. The me´tro station George-V is a particularly event-laden spot (appearing in Fleurs de ruine, Boulevards de ceinture, Chien de printemps). The most remote past referred to is frequently the dark period of the Occupation. The same names are repeatedly used: we have already noted the appearance of ‘Eddy Pagnon’ and ‘Philippe de Pacheco’ in different novels. ‘La Croix du Sud’ is perhaps most memorable as the name of the diamond stolen by Sylvia and Jean in Dimanches d’aouˆt, but it is also the name of the chalet from which Denise and Pedro, in Rue des Boutiques Obscures, set off to cross the border into Switzerland. The combination of these conventions and the supporting detail create an effect comparable to that of a popular subgenre, eliciting from the reader the chain response of recognition, anticipation and subsequent fulfilment or disappointment. They guarantee the recurrence of the pattern common to all of Modiano’s novels. This results in the reassuring familiarity which some have seen as dull uniformity. Reviews of the latest ‘Modiano novel’ will invariably refer to its typical Modiano atmosphere, and the less charitable have been known to justify its existence by its label: ‘C¸a ne fait pas un roman? Si. C’est le nouveau Modiano.’2 Professional critics have also complained about the similarity and consequent predictability of Modiano’s novels.3 Judging from their popularity, it would appear that most of his readers do not find this a problem. However, this ‘sameness’ of Modiano’s novels is a legitimate object of our curiosity. It is unusual for an œuvre to be so homogeneous, both structurally and thematically. Why is there so little attempt at variety? Most authors would be embarrassed by such a reputation, yet Modiano seems positively to encourage the lack of distinction between his novels, in the detail as well as the structure. There are several possible explanations for this. One could argue that Modiano has consciously set out to create a body of work consisting of recognisably similar units, to create a subgenre of his own. The structural conventions, as well as the recurring details, have the cumulative effect of enmeshing the novels and creating resonances which echo throughout the œuvre. The result is a highly self-referential corpus, in which the intertextual references come to constitute certain motifs for the recognition of the reader. Repeated recognition of this kind will create ‘specialised’ readers, readers experienced in reading Modiano novels.4 That is, readers will pick up a new volume by

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Modiano with certain expectations which, unlike those inspired by its resemblance to detective fiction, will be satisfied. Repeated exposure to a subgenre has the effect of conditioning the reader, predisposing her to appreciate the next specimen of its kind. There does appear to be room for the hypothesis that Modiano has knowingly set up this conventionrecognition-satisfaction pattern for his readers, and for us to consider it therefore as something of a subgenre in itself.5 Indeed the very fact that the term ‘the Modiano novel’ will be useful to us in our discussions of parody supports the idea of its independent existence as a type. I suggest that this typification of his work is a deliberate policy, adopted in order to construct a readable and saleable œuvre. There is another possible explanation for the homogeneity of Modiano’s œuvre, which can be extrapolated from a comment by the author himself: ‘J’ai vraiment le sentiment d’e´crire toujours le meˆme livre, depuis le de´but.’6 Does this mean that ‘les romans de Modiano ne forment qu’un seul et meˆme livre—en de´pit des changements d’intrigue et de personnages . . .’?7 Surely Modiano’s reference is to the imaginative origin of his works, and not to the works themselves: an affective estimation of his writing experience which is highly revealing, but not a valid factor in our attempt to classify his œuvre. In any case, it is difficult to determine precisely what ‘un seul et meˆme livre’ might mean. In the simplest sense of the word, Modiano’s seventeen novels clearly cannot be considered to constitute a single ‘book’. In a postmodern context, it might make sense to treat the novels as a self-referential set of texts that are loosely strung together by intertextual echoes: even then, we could not envisage these novels as a single work. The units are too complete, in spite of their frequently ambivalent endings,8 not to be considered individual works in themselves. Perhaps it is best to read Modiano’s comment as a gesture which casts doubt on the traditionally unquestioned distinction between œuvre and ouvrage: a distinction which has come to be queried in the postmodern critical climate. We may also see the homogeneity of Modiano’s œuvre as an expression and an embodiment of the postmodern suspicion of originality: that is, of the very possibility of creating a series of original works. Postmodern criticism has much to say on re-writing rather than writing, copies rather than originals. Barthes, in S/Z, writes that: C’est que pre´cise´ment l’artiste ‘re´aliste’ ne place nullement la ‘re´alite´ ’ a` l’origine de son discours, mais seulement et toujours, si loin qu’on puisse remonter, un re´el de´ja` e´crit, un code prospectif, le long duquel on ne saisit jamais, a` perte de vue, qu’une enfilade de copies.9

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Here we see a fundamental mistrust of the possibility of writing an original text. It may be that Modiano’s works constitute, in their totality, a challenge to the reader who believes that the author is obliged to strive towards individuality and originality in each of his or her works. The writer of the radio programme in Vestiaire de l’enfance appears to prefer copying to creating something new: Tout a` l’heure, il faudra que j’e´crive un nouvel e´pisode des Aventures de Louis XVII mais cela n’est pas tre`s difficile. J’ai achete´ un lot de vieux romans d’aventures franc¸ais en solde a` la librairie de l’immeuble Edward’s Store`s10 et j’en recopie des chapitres entiers. Ainsi ai-je re´alise´ ce reˆve: ne plus e´crire, mais recopier.11

This is not to say that Modiano himself prefers copying to writing, and we know how important writing is for many of his narrators as a device for self-discovery. However, he is keenly aware of the changing status of literature and original genius (an awareness which explains, for instance, his conscious debasement of the writer’s quest through his choice of popular literature). This suspicion of originality may be what underlies the studied homogeneity of his novels. That Modiano is aware of the ‘sameness’ of his novels, and of both negative and uncritical reactions to it, is demonstrated in a brief but effective parody in Poupe´e blonde. This is both a self-parody and a parody of the reception of his works, of the critical acclaim which seems to come automatically to the successful author. Poupe´e blonde is presented as a theatre programme (with the assistance of Modiano’s favourite illustrator, Pierre Le-Tan) of a play called ‘Poupe´e blonde’. The book consists of the play itself, a list of the cast, ‘photographs’ (illustrations) of some of the actors, and even the sponsors’ advertisements. There is also an ‘introduction’ to the play by ‘Simone Paul O’Donnell, directrice du The´aˆtre des Arts’, which clearly parodies the tone of Modiano’s less analytical critics and reviewers: Lorsque j’ai vu entrer Pierre-Michel Wals [the supposed author of the play, Poupe´e blonde] dans mon bureau, par cette apre`s-midi maussade de novembre, j’ai e´te´ surprise . . . enchante´e . . . Je n’avais pas besoin de lire la pie`ce que m’apportait ce grand garc¸on timide. Sa petite musique, je l’aimais de´ja`. J’espe`re que Paris l’aimera aussi . . .12

This is an interesting mixture of self-parody and a parody of what Modiano appears to consider typical ‘Modiano criticism’ which has sprung up in response to the ‘Modiano novel’. The self-parody of ‘ce grand garc¸on timide’ is a double one: a reference to his own physique, but also to the recurring ‘tall, timid young man’ figure who so often

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plays the hero in his novels. The name of the playwright is also parodic of his own preference for slightly exotic names, typically French Christian names (Pierre-Michel) matched with a foreign surname (Wals). One is reminded of all the names of the hero’s schoolmates in De si braves garc¸ons, whose rootless condition (orphans, children of political refugees and immigrants) is symbolised by the exoticism of their names.13 The parody of the easily seduced reviewer is the dominant one, however, of the ‘critiques dont la plupart semblent de´ja` gagne´s a` la cause de l’auteur au moment meˆme de la parution d’un nouveau livre provenant de sa plume’.14 There is a savage irony in phrases such as ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de lire la pie`ce’ and ‘sa petite musique, je l’aimais de´ja`’. ‘Petite musique’, a phrase which dispenses with the need for further analysis, certainly appears frequently in reviews of his work. An even clearer indication of Modiano’s awareness that a) there is such a thing as the ‘Modiano novel’, and b) to some readers they may simply seem repetitive, is given in Chien de printemps.15 In this novel Modiano offers us a detailed structural parody of his own subgenre. At first glance, Chien de printemps is completely typical of ‘the Modiano novel’. It has a young, aspiring writer as the narrator, chronicling the past of Jansen, who is a mysterious and self-effacing father-figure. To the seasoned Modiano reader, the novel offers many obvious echoes of his other works. This overall sense of de´ja` vu is set off, however, by the presence of much that is new and unrecognisable in this novel. The contrast is such that the old material appears to be in quotation marks: from the outset, the reader suspects a tendency towards self-parody which develops as she reads on. What is immediately striking about this novel is the sustained comparison between writing and photography as representational and referential modes,16 generally to the detriment of the former. The narrator is a writer, who is attempting to record the life and work of Jansen, a photographer. Jansen’s opinions on the activity of writing interpose themselves between the reader and narrator, offering the reader an alternative point of view of the narrative. The photographer’s critical eye creates a new context for Modiano’s writing. Phrases from the earlier novels, repeated (or quoted) in this context, sound knowingly self-parodic. ‘C¸a n’avait aucune importance’ (p. 12)17 appears in both Voyage de noces and Vestiaire de l’enfance:18 ‘il fait le mort’ (p. 48) echoes ‘nous ferons semblant d’eˆtre morts’ in Voyage de noces,19 both as a phrase and as a theme: ‘un phe´nome`ne de surimpression’ (p. 18), describing the different layers of time, occurs in Vestiaire de l’enfance,20

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and in slightly different forms in Voyage de noces21 and Fleurs de ruine. ‘Les personnes susceptibles de me donner le plus de renseignements’ (p. 78) is clearly reminiscent of a similar phrase in Vestiaire de l’enfance: ‘Toute personne susceptible de nous donner d’autres de´tails . . .’22 The novel also contains a number of Modiano’s stock themes, which function parodically because of their transcontextualisation into a text surveyed critically by the photographer’s eye. The theme of amnesia being preferable to the burden of memory (p. 25) is present, as it is in Fleurs de ruine, Quartier perdu and Vestiaire de l’enfance: the narrator’s transference of his identity to that of another (p. 92: also in Voyage de noces, Fleurs de ruine, etc.): his desire to slip away from his friends without being noticed (p. 117: Vestiaire de l’enfance, Voyage de noces, etc.), and his strong desire to record the ephemeral lives of historically insignificant figures (p. 35: in all of the novels). The familiar plot movements are also there: the resurgence of a forgotten memory after an unexplained blank period, which triggers off the search/writing exercise (p. 17: Voyage de noces, Quartier perdu): writing about someone the writer never really had a chance to get to know (p. 18: Fleurs de ruine, Voyage de noces; all the father figures, for example in Boulevards de ceinture): and the resolution of the plot with the narrator’s identity merging with that of the remembered, but now dead, person (p. 119: Fleurs de ruine, Voyage de noces). All of these references to his earlier works, ‘relocated’ in the new context of the photographer’s vision which is superior to the novelist’s, make Chien de printemps a perfect parody of the ‘Modiano novel’. The fact that the new context is created by the photographer’s opinions on the writer’s task fits Hutcheon’s definition of self-parody as ‘a way of creating a form out of the questioning of the very act of aesthetic production’. In Chien de printemps, the value of writing, as well as of photography, is put into question: whenever the young writer tries to convince the photographer that writing is worth its while, he receives for his pains cryptic comments such as that writing is ‘la quadrature du cercle’. The self-parody therefore occurs on two levels. First, it occurs on the level of the characters, who discuss the act of aesthetic production and put the actual narrative into question. Second, it occurs on the structural level, where quotations from Modiano’s previous novels are repeated in the new context, which draws attention to their fictionality and to the process of their production. Ultimately, however, this self-parodic novel succeeds in consolidating the position of Modiano’s ‘subgenre’. This is because the fact that

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the conventions of the ‘Modiano novel’ are sufficiently well defined to be parodied proves how established it is. The apparent undermining by Modiano of his own ‘subgenre’ functions as an affirmation of its uniqueness, as well as being a gesture of ironic self-consciousness which creates a complicity between author and reader, between the producer and consumer of the object that is the ‘Modiano novel’.

AFFIRMING THE ‘MODIANO NOVEL’ Following an uncharacteristically long silence after Seuil’s publication of the self-parodic Chien de printemps,23 Modiano returned to Gallimard with Du plus loin de l’oubli (1996).24 This work appears to be a typical ‘Modiano novel’, without even the self-parodic element of Chien de printemps to redeem it. The reassuringly familiar trademarks are all there, but at least one reviewer felt that this time Modiano has played the same trick once too often. ‘On se lasse de revoir son he´ros favori enfourcher pour la e´nie`me fois son cheval, sa moto ou simplement la nostalgie. On voudrait qu’il nous e´tonne, qu’il nous malme`ne, qu’il nous e´blouisse. On veut bien qu’il soit toujours e´gal a` lui-meˆme, mais on voudrait qu’il n’oublie pas d’eˆtre a` chaque fois diffe´rent.’25 Structurally speaking, Du plus loin de l’oubli does seem to be unforgivably familiar. The narrator is the familiar first-person one, the proliferation of detail is in the form of proper names, the detective novel frame surfaces from time to time. The novel contains many of his stock characters and themes: the narrator is the shy young man we have come to know and love, selling old or rare books (as in Les Boulevards de ceinture, Un Cirque passe) for a living; Jacqueline is the attractive, mysterious and faithless woman we have met in many of the other novels. Familiar themes abound, such as the link between a kind of amnesia and identity loss (Chien de printemps, Vestiaire de l’enfance), the desire to flee (Voyage de noces, Chien de printemps), the evocation of certain ‘lieux de me´moire’ (Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Fleurs de ruine). Also, there are a number of small details which function as echoes of earlier novels. The ‘plages fluviales’ frequented by the young couple in England are reminiscent of those in Dimanches d’aouˆt. The narrator, like Jean of Voyage de noces, chooses for preference a hotel ‘e´loigne´ du centre’ of Paris (p. 136). Linda Jacobsen, with ‘les cheveux longs, des pommettes hautes et des yeux bleus le´ge`rement bride´s’ (p. 91),

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strongly resembles at least two previous female figures, both called Denise: the former companion of the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, and Denise Dressel of Livret de famille. The plot of the novel is also vintage Modiano. A fifty-year-old man looks back at his youth, and tells the story of his relationship with a young woman called Jacqueline. He first met her and her then partner in Paris, when he was twenty years old: Van Bever, who earned his living cheating in provincial casinos, and Jacqueline, his beautiful and enigmatic companion. The narrator falls in love with Jacqueline. Having stolen some money from one of Jacqueline’s older lovers, the two run away together to London, where they fall in with a young and not very respectable crowd. Several months later Jacqueline disappears, leaving the youthful narrator with memories to last a lifetime, and a newly found vocation to write. The narrative then records two subsequent meetings between the narrator and Jacqueline, at ages fifty and thirty-five, both on a summer’s day in Paris. Finally, it returns to the present with the narrator travelling through the Parisian suburbs in an evocative train journey through time and space. The similarities of theme, detail and structure, however, do not conceal what is new in this most recent specimen of the ‘Modiano novel’. One major novelty is that most of it is set in London. Modiano’s heroes have been known to venture into England before; the hero and heroine of Une Jeunesse spend some time in Bournemouth. However, the detailed descriptions of London in the summer, its streets, cafe´s, and bars, depict the city at a degree of involvement which Modiano has previously reserved strictly for Paris.26 Another noticeable difference is the simplicity of plot structure. The three time zones are each fifteen years apart, the narrator being twenty, thirty-five and fifty at the respective stages, but the narrative does not move back and forth between them as it does in the novels of the 1980s and early 1990s. The narrative begins in the present, but immediately moves back to the earliest time zone, where it stays for the next 132 pages and during which the events are told more or less chronologically. It then returns to the present, Paris in 1994, for a few pages: then it moves back to the level at which the narrator and Jacqueline were both thirty-five. The end of the narrative brings us back to the present time level. The simplicity of this structure is in stark contrast to the time schemes of Vestiaire de l’enfance or Voyage de noces, to name but two works to which Du plus loin de l’oubli bears many resemblances of theme and detail.

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There are other fundamental novelties in Du plus loin de l’oubli which are significant in the context of Modiano’s development. One of these is a new use of the list. At first sight, the appearance of lists in a Modiano narrative is more likely to result in recognition rather than surprise in the reader; Modiano’s lists are famous, and his readers have come to expect them. We have already analysed their import27 as indications of Modiano’s distrust of narrative’s ability to state the facts. His lists of names, addresses and telephone numbers, ‘objective’ records of an unnarrated reality, stood within his narrative as points of contrast to the narrative itself. However, the following list in Du plus loin de l’oubli is of a different nature, and the section deserves to be quoted at length: J’ai eu envie de de´couper une feuille de papier en petits carre´s. Et sur chacun des carre´s, j’aurais e´crit un nom et un lieu: Jacqueline Van Bever Cartaud Docteur Robbes 160 boulevard Haussman, 2e e´tage Hoˆtel de la Tournelle, 65 quai de la Tournelle Hoˆtel de Lima, 46 boulevard Saint-Germain Le Cujas, 22 rue Cujas Cafe´ Dante Forges-les-Eaux, Dieppe, Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, Enghien, Luc-sur-mer, Langrune Le Havre . . . J’aurais brasse´ les papiers, comme un jeu de cartes, et je les aurais e´tale´s sur la table. C’e´tait donc c¸a, ma vie pre´sente? Tout se limitait pour moi, en ce moment, a` une vingtaine de noms et d’adresses disparates dont je n’e´tais que le seul lien? Et pourquoi ceux-la` plutoˆt que d’autres? Qu’est-ce que j’avais de commun, moi, avec ces noms et ces lieux? J’e´tais dans un reˆve ou` l’on sait que l’on peut d’un moment a` l’autre se re´veiller, quand des dangers vous menacent. Si je le de´cidais, je quittais cette table et tout se de´liait, tout disparaissait dans le ne´ant. Il ne resterait plus qu’une valise de fer-blanc et quelques bouts de papier ou` e´taient griffone´s des noms et des lieux qui n’aurait plus aucun sens pour personne.28

Unlike the lists in previous novels, copied off telephone directories, this list is clearly not one which exists in a reality outside the text, and therefore cannot strengthen the credibility of the narrative which contains it. It is a collection of names which exists as a list only in the narrator’s consciousness. The narrator is very explicit about the fact that he is their sole author and organiser (‘une vingtaine de noms et d’adresses disparates dont je n’e´tais que le seul lien’). It is also made clear that he can take or leave this role; that is, he has chosen to organise

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these facts into a list, but he is free to undo this (‘Si je le de´cidais, je quittais cette table et tout se de´liait, tout disparaissait dans le ne´ant’). This explicit self-consciousness of the narrator is new in Modiano. So too is its relevance to the writing of the actual novel. That is, we can apply the narrator’s reflexions to the writing activity which has produced, or is producing, the book we are reading. We have always known, of course, that Modiano (as the author) found the facts and organised them into lists. But in this novel this truth is voiced within the actual narrative for the first time, and by none other than the narrator. By making the narrator discuss openly the writer’s power to create, or decide not to create, Modiano is being more explicit about his own method and more self-reflexive within his writing than he has ever been before.29 This structural explicitness in Du plus loin de l’oubli seems to override all other considerations. This can be seen in a new approach to the narrator’s journeys back into the past, a feature of so many of the other novels. These are always journeys which move through both time and space, and which are accompanied by a sense of freedom and weightlessness. Geographical references have always been used as metaphors for temporal states in Modiano: walking down a slope, for instance, usually indicates a ‘descent’ into the past.30 The same pattern seems to hold in Du plus loin de l’oubli: Alors, j’ai l’impression d’eˆtre entre ciel et terre et d’e´chapper a` ma vie pre´sente. Rien ne me rattache plus a` rien. Tout a` l’heure [. . .] ce sera comme si je me glissais par une bre`che du temps et je disparaıˆ trai une bonne fois pour toutes. Je descendrai la pente de la rue et j’aurai peut-eˆtre une chance de la [Jacqueline] rencontrer. Elle doit habiter quelque part dans ce quartier. (pp. 134–35)

As in previous novels, the geographical figure of the slope is used here to describe a movement in time. What is different, however, is that the relationship between space and time is made explicit: ‘ce sera comme si je glissais par une bre`che du temps’. Comparison, then, not fusion. The confusion of temporal and geographical states does occur briefly in ‘[J]e descendrai la pente de la rue et j’aurai peut-eˆtre une chance de la [Jacqueline] rencontrer’: it is not clear whether ‘rencontrer’ is meant literally or metaphorically. However, the next sentence settles the ambiguity by inviting us to read it literally; ‘[E]lle doit habiter quelque part dans ce quartier’ makes a geographical, physical meeting possible and even probable. This ‘literalising’ of the spatio-temporal metaphor in Du plus loin

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de l’oubli directly precedes a narrative shift to another time zone. The effect is one of metaphor yielding to narrative imperative. It seems that the tendency in this novel is to privilege the narrative strand of the text above other considerations. It happens again in this illustration of the link between a voluntary forgetfulness of the past and the loss of identity: Cela aurait e´te´ vraiment dommage de finir sur ce banc dans une sorte d’amne´sie et de perte progressive d’identite´ et de ne pas pouvoir indiquer aux passants mon domicile . . . Heureusement j’avais dans ma poche cet extrait d’acte de naissance, comme les chiens qui se sont perdus dans Paris mais qui portent sur leur collier l’adresse et le nume´ro de te´le´phone de leur maıˆ tre . . . (p. 136)

As we saw in Chapter 1, in Vestiaire de l’enfance the state of forgetfulness in which we find the narrator—the state which we called ‘voluntary amnesia’—is only gradually revealed as the reason for the loss of his sense of identity. Here, however, the link between forgetting and identity loss is made immediately, and the reasons for it pursued further. ‘Et j’essayais de m’expliquer le flottement que je ressentais. Je n’avais vu personne depuis quelques semaines . . . Et puis j’avais eu tort de choisir un hoˆtel e´loigne´ du centre’ (p. 136). These are rather sensible, down-to-earth explanations for the ‘flottement’ which has sparked off so many of his other narratives. So too is the depressingly simple conclusion: ‘j’e´tais sans doute arrive´ a` la fin d’une pe´riode de ma vie’ (p. 137). However, these simplifications are again preludes to a narrative shift. The complex metaphor is sacrificed to the narrative, which is about to move fifteen years backwards. The old themes based around this metaphor are given a new narrative function, that of preparing the way for a change of direction in the narrative. The loss of the past and the consequent loss of identity is thus treated less as a theme and more as a structural device in Du plus loin de l’oubli. It is also noteworthy that the effect of this loss on the narrator is unexpectedly positive. It is with a certain optimism and relief that the past is lost, for instance in this passage which describes an evening in London in 1964: Au moment ou` le taxi s’engageait dans le Mall et que s’ouvrait devant moi cette avenue ombrage´e d’arbres, les vingt premie`res anne´es de ma vie sont tombe´es en poussie`re, comme un poids, comme des menottes ou un harnais dont je n’avais pas cru qu’un jour je pourrais me de´barrasser. Eh bien voila`, il ne restait plus rien de toutes ces anne´es. Et si le bonheur c’e´tait l’ivresse passage`re que j’e´prouvais ce soir-la`, alors, pour la premie`re fois de mon existence, j’e´tais heureux. (p. 145)

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And again, this time at thirty-five years of age: moi aussi, j’avais a` peu pre`s oublie´ tout de ma vie, au fur et a` mesure, et chaque fois que des pans entiers de celle-ci e´taient tombe´s en poussie`re, j’e´prouvais une sensation agre´able de le´ge`rete´. (p. 156)

The past and its recollection have always been seen as a burden in Modiano; in Livret de famille, the narrator confesses that ‘j’aimerais n’avoir plus de me´moire’, a wish echoed by the narrator of Quartier perdu (‘a` partir d’aujourd’hui, je ne veux plus me souvenir de rien’).31 Many of his narrators have attempted to discard great swathes of their pasts and begin afresh. But these attempts have always failed, leaving the narrator without the anchor in the past which corresponds to a sense of identity in the present. In Du plus loin de l’oubli, however, it appears that it is possible to ‘repartir de ze´ro’ (p. 137) without the penalty of identity loss, to forget the past without falling into the apathetic, irresponsible state of ‘la Suisse du cœur’ encountered in the other novels. It is an interesting departure for the novelist of remembrance to write so optimistically of the possibility of forgetting healthily. In this as in the other aspects that I have mentioned, Du plus loin de l’oubli appears as a novel which displays much consciousness of the whole œuvre, of the themes and structures of the preceding novels, and which attempts to transcend them through an explicit selfconsciousness. Chien de printemps was also a very self-conscious work, Modiano’s first full work of self-parody.32 Du plus loin de l’oubli is more a novel of self-affirmation; Modiano coming to terms with the ‘Modiano novel’ and reaffirming its validity. This self-awareness can even be seen in the external trappings of the novel. The title, for instance, is a quotation from Stefan George, as well as being markedly more abstract and philosophical than Modiano’s previous titles.33 The dedication, too, is unusual for Modiano: it is not to a member of his family but to a fellow novelist, Peter Handke. Both of these details appear to indicate a fresh awareness in Modiano of his literary colleagues, perhaps related to an affirmation of his place in contemporary literary history, and the significance of his novels in that context. As we saw earlier in this chapter, Modiano is an author who has consciously created his own readership, becoming famous for a distinctive kind of novel. It is difficult for such an author to embark afresh, ‘repartir de ze´ro’; this difficulty is literally ‘embodied’ in a bright red banner which is wrapped around the book, bearing the name ‘modiano’ in letters two inches high which dwarf the title. In Du plus

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loin de l’oubli, however, Modiano has shown his readers—this time professionally—that it is possible to continue in spite of the past, and in so doing has both continued and refreshed what I have called the ‘Modiano novel’. NEW DEVELOPMENTS: DORA BRUDER AND DES INCONNUES Modiano’s most recent work but one, Dora Bruder (1997), is not a novel. His publisher, Gallimard, seems to have been at pains to conceal this fact: the format of the book is exactly the same as the novels, although there is no sous-titre of ‘roman’ beneath the title. The ‘plot’, too, is the recognisable one of a search into the past by a first-person narrator. There is a palpable difference in tone, however, and it slowly becomes evident that Dora Bruder, which is an enquiry into the past of the eponymous heroine, is more of a biography than a novel. Modiano has always been obsessed with biography. The plots of his novels frequently involve the recording of ephemeral existences, the lives of his ‘hommes des plages’. The biographical enterprise is a crucial driving force in Modiano’s narratives, but its difficulty is also repeatedly emphasised.34 Hitherto, Modiano’s novels have been driven by the importance of the biographical, but they have also always acknowledged its ultimate impossibility, with fiction being practised by the narrators as a second-best alternative. In this work, however, Modiano’s attitude towards biography appears to have changed. It is not that he has become more optimistic about the possibility of success, but Dora Bruder approaches its biographical material—the same biographical material as that of Voyage de noces (1990)—in a completely different mode. A comparative analysis of the two works will show how the differences between Modiano’s two attitudes towards the biographical seem to be evidence of a shift in priority from fiction to te´moignage. In Dora Bruder, the narrator sketches out the reason why he wrote Voyage de noces seven years previously with a disarming simplicity: En de´cembre 1988, apre`s avoir lu l’avis de recherche de Dora Bruder, dans le Paris-Soir de de´cembre 1941, je n’ai cesse´ d’y penser durant des mois et des mois. [. . .] Alors le manque que j’e´prouvais m’a pousse´ a` l’e´criture d’un roman, Voyage de noces, un moyen comme un autre pour continuer a` concentrer mon attention sur Dora Bruder, et peut-eˆtre, me disais-je, pour e´lucider ou deviner quelque chose d’elle, un lieu ou` elle e´tait passe´e, un de´tail de sa vie.35

I will not re-enact our previous discussion of Voyage de noces, but briefly remind the reader that the novel is told by a first-person

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narrator, Jean, who is writing a biography of a woman called Ingrid. We saw how Jean’s biography of Ingrid was his act of deferring the narration of his own life, his way of telling his own story through hers. Although biographical, Voyage de noces is not biography, but the narrator’s fiction. Faced with the absence of Ingrid, and lacking details of her existence, the novelist fabulates: he fills the empty space with her story as he imagines it, fuelled by his desire to tell his story. Such ambiguities, such transferrals and deferrals of narrative desire, have no place in Dora Bruder. The difference in tone is notable: the tense usage in this work conforms much more to real time, the facts about Dora being narrated in the preterite and the actions of the investigating narrator (Modiano himself) in the present and passe´ compose´. Thus, instead of a first-person narrator who gradually appropriates the biography of another person, the narrator of Dora Bruder is constantly emphasising the distance between biographer and subject, between Modiano and Dora. Modiano wrote Voyage de noces to fill the void created by the absence of Dora with an artificial creation, but in Dora Bruder he refuses to be comforted by fiction: ‘On se dit qu’au moins les lieux gardent une le´ge`re empreinte des personnes qui les ont habite´s. Empreinte: marque en creux ou en relief. Pour Ernest et Ce´cile Bruder, pour Dora, je dirai: en creux. J’ai ressenti une impression d’absence et de vide, chaque fois que je me suis trouve´ dans un endroit ou` ils avaient ve´cu’ (p. 30). Of course, emotional links between Modiano and Dora do exist; the typically ‘modianesque’ topographical coincidences, for instance, still occur. Remembering his long waits in the cafe´s of the Ornano district, which unbeknownst to him at the time was Dora’s part of town, he writes: ‘Peut-eˆtre, sans que j’en e´prouve encore une claire conscience, e´tais-je sur la trace de Dora Bruder et de ses parents. Ils e´taient la`, de´ja`, en filigrane’ (p. 12). However, at times he also dismisses such connections as merely fanciful. In the Chapelle area, again intimately connected with both Dora and Modiano, Modiano recalls that ‘j’e´prouvais une droˆle de sensation en longeant le mur de l’hoˆpital Lariboisie`re [. . .] comme si j’avais pe´ne´tre´ dans la zone la plus obscure de Paris’ (p. 30). This is a place which held dark memories for Dora, where she was once more or less imprisoned. But then he goes on to demystify the emotional coincidence: ‘Mais c’e´tait simplement le contraste entre les lumie`res trop vives du boulevard de Clichy et le mur noir’ (pp. 30–31). As if to compensate for the lack of connections and coincidences, Dora Bruder is full of historical documents: birth certificates, Vichy

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police records, letters both official and personal. Of its twenty-six unnumbered chapters, at least seven start with a document, the rest of the chapter consisting of a commentary and explanation. These are roughly chronological, allowing us to follow, from a coldly official distance, the progress of Dora from young runaway Parisienne to Auschwitz victim. Starting with the ‘recherche’ ad in Paris-Soir of December 1941, we are led through her father’s deportation to the concentration camp at Drancy in March 1942, the police record of Dora’s return to her ‘domicile maternel’ in April, her deportation to the concentration camp at Tourelles in June, and to Drancy in August. From Drancy all three Bruders are sent to Auschwitz. All of this is reported through an enumeration of the facts, with only very cautious imaginary reconstructions of the thoughts and feelings of Dora and her parents. The emotional input is supplied in Dora Bruder not through grand reconstructions involving the principal characters but indirectly, at one remove. This happens through the insertion of historical documents, contemporary to Dora but not related to her, which provide more emotively charged material. For instance, a whole chapter is made up of letters sent by distressed French Jews to the Pre´fecture de Police enquiring after disappeared relatives: they all stress the French nationality of the victims, in a legitimate but vain attempt to signal the equality before French law of Jewish and non-Jewish French men and women. In another chapter, Modiano simply tells the stories of writers, of those who exercised ‘le meˆme me´tier que moi’ (p. 94), who became victims of the Vichy re´gime: ‘beaucoup d’amis que je n’ai pas connus out disparu en 1945, l’anne´e de ma naissance’ (p. 100). They are all writers whose lives crossed Modiano’s in some way: a shared address or title of a literary work (Desnos published a collection of poems entitled La Place de l’e´toile), or simply a similar predilection for recording the ephemera of human existence. By referring to them as ‘amis’, Modiano creates a ghostly community of sympathising souls, an emotional web which covers the area between himself and Dora, allowing the reader to cross imaginatively the distance between the biographer and his subject. As biographer, Modiano is attempting to fill this distance, not through fiction this time but through research. Dora Bruder gives us many details of Modiano’s painstaking and time-consuming investigations: J’ai mis quatre ans avant de de´couvrir la date exacte de sa [Dora’s] naissance: le 25 fe´vrier 1926. Et deux ans ont encore e´te´ ne´cessaires pour connaıˆ tre le lieu

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In this sense Dora Bruder is a chronicle of Modiano’s writing process, of his time as a writer and biographer, rather than of his life (which would make it autofiction) or of hers (which would make it a biography). What part does the biographical play in Dora Bruder? It is clearly not autofiction;36 nor is it a novel. Is it a failed biography? The clue to its nature lies, I believe, in the nature of its first-person narrator. In Dora Bruder we are told that the narrator’s voice is Modiano’s. The biographical details we are given about the narrator correspond to those of Modiano, much more explicitly than ever before.37 However, the presence of such details does not make Dora Bruder an autobiographical work. Because it clearly records the writing of a biography, emphasising its project which is to research and record the life of the eponymous heroine, the importance of the narrating voice is acknowledged, but then diminished. It is important because we want a reliable biographer, but it is diminished because a biographer is less important than his subject. The relative failure of the biography strengthens this hierarchy further; it is the ultimately elusive Dora who haunts us, while for once Patrick Modiano is a relatively unambiguous figure who fulfils his role as witness, as researcher, as recorder. In this work, the biographical resurges to give priority to te´moignage over fiction and the narrator-biographer takes an important but secondary role. He is a character sous rature, as it were, because he is Modiano, and because of the importance of biography. Following his self-imposed regime of research and non-fiction in Dora Bruder, Des inconnues (1999) is a return to fictional first-person narrative: not, however, a comforting and comfortable return to the Modiano of old. As the collective title indicates, the first-person voices in the three novellas of Des inconnues are female, and given that they are the narrators of their own stories, the problem of insufficient knowledge which haunted the chronicler of Dora Bruder does not arise. It is as if the frustration of Dora’s biographer has prompted him to fantasise in fiction, to create an ideal situation in which these surrogate Doras are allowed to speak for themselves. The idealism is restricted to the narrative situation, however: these are some of the bleakest tales told by Modiano, and the structural resemblance with Simone de Beauvoir’s La femme rompue38 is echoed in their quiet despair, as well as in some existentialist references. Their saving grace is that the women are all young, roughly the age of Modiano’s youthful male

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narrators,39 and seem to have survived the experiences they narrate: that is, the narratives are partially and structurally redeemed by their retrospective stance. All three women (being ‘inconnues’, they have, of course, no names) are young, beautiful and of extremely modest backgrounds. They are all orphans of a sort, at least within the framework of their own narratives: the first woman leaves her parents’ home in Lyon to spend the rest of the tale in Paris, the second has lost her father and is virtually abandoned by her mother, and the third makes only one passing reference to her mother in the whole of her narrative. Their situations most closely resemble those of Quartier perdu, Vestiaire de l’enfance and Voyage de noces; these are also the novels which supply Des inconnues with the most recognisable linguistic echoes. The narrator of the first tale sets off to Paris with ‘l’impression de faire une fugue’,40 and feels like an intruder in her friend’s Paris apartment, as if ‘Nous vivions en fraude’, much like Ingrid in Voyage de noces (and numerous other Modiano characters); like Jimmy Sarano of Vestiaire de l’enfance, she likes to slip away from her friends ‘sans attirer l’attention de personne’, and wonders whether her life ‘serait une fuite sans fin’ (p. 25). These echoes, however, do not crowd the narrative, and unlike Chien de printemps they do not create a collective effect of self-parody. Structurally speaking, the tales of Des inconnues are not as complex as their predecessors, chiefly because of their brevity. Their mood is convincingly realistic, rather than ‘effet d’irre´el’-like: the narrative order is more or less chronological, and there is little or none of the shifting between time levels which characterised the novels, particularly those of the 1980s and early 1990s. The simplicity of the order calls for a simple use of tenses, and accordingly the stories are told mostly in a combination of the passe´ compose´ and imperfect. There is just one instance of unusual tense usage, in the first narrative, where Modiano uses tenses to indicate the emotional distance between the narrator and event.41 The narrator, who is looking for a job, describes retrospectively her state of mind prior to an interview: Les jours suivants, j’ai fini par me persuader que je devais faire ce me´tier de mannequin, moi qui n’y avais jamais songe´ auparavant. Ainsi aurais-je peuteˆtre une bonne raison de quitter Lyon pour Paris. [. . .] Ma vie se jouerait a` pile ou face. Je me disais que si je n’e´tais pas engage´e, il ne se pre´senterait plus d’autre occasion comme celle-la`. (p. 12)

Breaking from her narrative in the passe´ compose´ and imperfect (‘j’ai fini . . . que je devais faire . . .’), the narrator changes into the conditional

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(‘Ma vie se jouerait a` pile ou face . . . il ne se pre´senterait . . .’). This shift indicates the adoption of a narratorial stance known as self-narrated monologue,42 which may be described as free indirect speech in the first person: the narrator temporarily identifies so fully with her past self that she speaks in the voice of the younger woman who does not know whether she will get this job or not. This ignorance is of course illusory, as she does know the outcome of her interview, but the tense usage allows us to experience directly the younger narrator’s state of mind, from anticipation through to failure. When her retrospective narrative reaches the point of describing her failure, the narrator chooses a different past tense, one which is mimetic of her emotional distance from the event: Je me suis leve´e. Il m’a serre´ la main [. . .] et m’a guide´e jusqu’a` la porte. [. . .] Dans la rue, je me suis aperc¸ue que j’avais oublie´ le parapluie, mais cela n’avait plus aucune importance. Je traversai le pont. Je marchai sur le quai, le long de la Saoˆne. (p. 15)

The sudden change in past tense, from passe´ compose´ to preterite in the middle of a paragraph, effectively indicates the narrator’s emotional falling away from the event, her state of mind in the narrating present as she pushes away the scene that took place ‘le long de la Saoˆne’ into the distant past of the passe´ simple. Such manipulations of the tenses, however, are rare in Des inconnues, where much has been sacrificed to the compactness of the prose style. These novellas are perhaps the closest that Modiano has come to the purity of the classical ‘re´cit’, a quality for which he was praised at the start of his career.43 No lists or quotations from documents interrupt the lines of the narrative, contrary to his former practice. Both representational mood and narrative order have been kept unremarkable in these stories, perhaps with a view to concentrating on the stark emptiness of the narratorial voice. Modiano’s degre´ ze´ro narrator, who attempts unsuccessfully to find an identity for himself during the course of his narrative, is very much in evidence in all three stories of Des inconnues. All three young women are at the stage where an adolescent reaches tentatively for an adult identity, but in each case they are disappointed in this first attempt, remaining ‘inconnues’. The narrator of the first story, following her failed interview, melts into the background of her surroundings, literally losing herself: ‘On n’aurait pas pu me distinguer de ce mur. Il me recouvrait de son ombre et je prenais la meˆme couleur que lui’ (p. 15).44 She attempts to flee this fate by escaping to Paris, where she has a

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relationship with Guy Vincent, a stock Modiano character who appears not to be on the right side of the law.45 Her relationship with this ‘inconnu qui se cachait sous l’identite´ d’un autre’ (p. 37) ends abruptly when he disappears without warning, pursued by the police. His friends advise her to leave before the police notice her: ‘—Partez vite. Ils ne savent pas encore qui vous eˆtes. Pour le moment, vous n’eˆtes qu’une jeune fille blonde non identifie´e’ (pp. 48–49). This use of the police jargon becomes symbolic of her lack of identity, as she suggests at the end of her narrative: ‘j’e´tais encore une blonde non identifie´e. Des filles que l’on a repeˆche´es dans les eaux de la Saoˆne ou de la Seine, on dit souvent qu’elles e´taient inconnues ou non identifie´es. Moi, j’espe`re bien le rester pour toujours’ (p. 50). The result of this experience is that the present narrator, the older narrator who is telling this tale of her youth, exhibits that combination, typical in Modiano, of lack of identity and lack of memory. She resembles those narrators who have chosen to forget their past,46 like Jimmy Sarano in Vestiaire de l’enfance, and to live in an eternal present with a weak sense of identity. Heat, and the sun, conditions she has obtained for herself by choosing to live (like Sarano) in a Mediterranean port, contribute to her sense of time standing still: ‘Un petit port de la Me´diterrane´e ou` le temps s’est arreˆte´ pour moi. Chaque jour, du soleil, jusqu’a` ma mort’ (p. 20). The anonymous female voice remains anonymous in spite of her attempt to re-create herself through her narrative, because she can only tell a story of a failed attempt at achieving an identity. Similarly, the third tale of Des inconnues is a failed exercise in selfcreation, the failure of a first-person voice to achieve an identity through a retrospective narrative. Another passive, melancholic voix blanche, we meet this young woman after she has moved to Paris from London following the end of a relationship. Reminiscing about London, she recounts how a street photographer, ‘un grand type avec un Rollefleix’ (p. 122), took a photograph of her and her lover, Rene´, in London. After Rene´ leaves her, the young woman decides to collect the photograph, but when she arrives at the shop in Hammersmith the unhelpful shop assistant tells her that her photograph is not there. The importance of the street photographer, and the photographing of two young lovers, are strikingly reminiscent of similar situations in Dimanches d’aouˆt47 and Chien de printemps48 respectively, in which the photograph was superior to writing as a mode of reference.49 In this work, however, Modiano’s former faith in the photograph as referent if not as representation—as the proof of an existence, albeit perhaps an

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unreliable description of one—is dealt a fatal blow by the fact that the photo in question cannot be found. Accordingly, the narrator refers to the photograph as a virtual object of evidence, using the conditional tense to describe it: Sur la photo, on aurait vu, a` gauche, l’entre´e de l’ancienne e´cole ou` Rene´ avait achete´ quelques livres d’occasion. Peut-eˆtre, tout au fond, la silhouette d’un passant et le croisement de la rue avec Chepstow Villas, et la descente vers les magasins d’antiquite´s. Et la preuve pour l’avenir qu’un samedi d’e´te´, a` Londres, au de´but de l’apre`s-midi, nous passions par cette rue-la`, Rene´, le chien et moi. (p. 127, my emphasis)

Unfortunately there is no photograph, and the narrator is unable to prove her past. This incapacitates her for the present, depriving her of a strong sense of self, and of the ability to embark on a new life and identity in Paris. The unstable and uncertain nature of her existence in Paris is symbolised by the fact that she is living in a borrowed flat, in an area unfamiliar to her. Eventually, she becomes involved with an occult sect: initiated into their philosophy, she attends one of their meetings and is introduced to Genevie`ve Peraud. Like Mireille Maximoff in the first story, Genevie`ve Peraud is a mentor-like character who clearly represents the lost mother-figure while also exerting a mental and physical attraction on the younger woman. The tale ends with the young woman alone with this benign seductress, powerless to resist: Maintenant, nous e´tions dans la demi-pe´nombre, elle assise a` coˆte´ de moi, sur le divan. Elle me massait doucement le front, le dessus des sourcils, les paupie`res, les tempes. J’avais peur de m’endormir et de lui confier dans mon sommeil ce que je gardais pour moi depuis si longtemps: Rene´, le chien, la photo perdue. (p. 155)

It is not clear whether the narrator will surrender her memories (and thence her past, and her identity) to the woman: it is not even clear whether this will be a good thing or a bad thing, as Genevie`ve Peraud is portrayed as powerful but benevolent. The ambivalent ending is reminiscent of the endings of novels such as Quartier perdu, Vestiaire de l’enfance or Voyage de noces, where we are left with the narrator hesitating between two identities, or between an identity and the lack of it. What is different, and potentially positive, about the narrator of this story in Des inconnues is her youth. In the sole reference to the narrative present of the story, we are given an indication that she survives these experiences relatively unscathed: ‘Les anne´es suivantes et jusqu’a` maintenant, je n’ai plus jamais eu l’occasion de revenir dans ce quartier. [. . .] Il doit rester encore la fourrie`re, le de´poˆt des objets trouve´s et l’e´glise Saint-Antoine de Padoue’ (pp. 149–50). This is another hopeful

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sign, as this tale, like Vestiaire de l’enfance, has running through it the theme of finding lost objects: ‘Vous savez ce que l’on vient demander a` saint Antoine de Padoue? De retrouver les objets perdus’ (p. 131). The narrator’s salvation is thus hinted at during the course of the narrative: although the ending, as we have seen, is typically ambivalent, there is a sense that her loss—most importantly, the loss of her identity—is only temporary. The narrator of the second tale is most like the Dora that we know from her portrayal in Dora Bruder, and Ingrid in Voyage de noces: she is more spirited and rebellious than the other two voices, and in the final scene displays an ability to take action unusual in the characters of Modiano. The circumstances of Dora’s ‘fugue’ and its consequences, as imagined for Ingrid in Voyage de noces, are also to be found in this narrative. The narrator misses her coach back to her convent boarding school (Dora, as we know, was in hiding in several such ‘pensionnats’) in the unpremeditated and casual way that Ingrid misses the curfew, and both end up in a cafe´ in a state of dizziness and panic. In each case a man notices, and asks how they are (‘Vous n’avez pas l’air de vous sentir tre`s bien . . .’,50 ‘Vous vous sentez mal?’, p. 77): in Ingrid’s case this turns out to be Rigaud, an honourable man, but in Des inconnues it is Orsini, an irresponsible seducer. Both women are aided by kindly concierges, but again Ingrid and Rigaud have the better luck: they survive the Occupation thanks to the concierge’s efforts, but the wellintentioned concierge in the later work introduces the narrator to the man who tries to abuse her sexually. This narrator lives in Annecy, just over the border with Switzerland, which retains its negative connotations for Modiano: Switzerland is again described as a place ‘ou` le temps s’e´tait arreˆte´’ (p. 90). The paralysing proximity of Switzerland seems to entrap the narrator in an eternal present which does not help bolster her sense of identity. She complains several times that ‘Rien ne changerait jamais. Tout se re´pe´tait aux meˆmes heures, dans le meˆme de´cor. [. . .] depuis des anne´es je tournais en rond, sans pouvoir sortir du cercle . . .’ (p. 97). While she longs to go to Paris, like her friend Sylvie, it is to Geneva that she travels in the final scene, which perhaps accounts for the tragic consequences. Her reaction to being trapped, however, is not to remain passive but to take action, to attempt to break the circle in order to acquire an identity perforce. Unfortunately, this positive tendency results in her seduction by Orsini: ‘a` cet instant-la` [of her seduction], j’ai eu l’illusion que ma vie prendrait un cours nouveau. C’e´tait fini pour

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moi, la pe´riode ou` tout est encore en suspens, [. . .] un peu comme dans une salle d’attente’ (p. 84). The final tragedy is also a result of her choosing violent action over the possibility of sameness: ‘J’ai charge´ le revolver. De toute fac¸on, ce serait toujours les meˆmes gestes. Les meˆmes saisons. Les meˆmes lacs. Les meˆmes cars du dimanche soir. [. . .] Les meˆmes jours. Les meˆmes gens. Aux meˆmes heures’ (p. 103). Such a strong desire to change, even at the risk of self-destruction, is unusual in a Modiano character: the style is almost that of an existentialist heroine, resorting to free herself of a restrictive milieu. I suggest that Dora Bruder and Des inconnues constitute together the natural flowering of Modiano’s long-term obsession with the person of the historical Dora Bruder. It is in December 1988 that he first reads ‘l’avis de recherche’ for the missing girl, from the Paris-Soir of December 1941. His obsession with her results in the 1990 novel, Voyage de noces, after which he writes four novels (published 1991, 1992, 1993, 1996) before the publication of his biographical work, Dora Bruder (1997). Des inconnues is published two years later, and is his first attempt at a female first-person voice: or rather, at three female first-person voices. The plural attempt gives a strong impression that Modiano is trying out this new device. Furthermore, the fact that two of these voices (those of the first and third narratives) are strongly reminiscent of Modiano’s familiar male first-person voice, but that the second is more rebellious, aggressive and spirited, suggests that these experiments have different sources of inspiration. I suggested earlier that these tales may have been born of the frustration experienced by the biographer starved of information on his subject, but this suggestion may be most accurate if focused on the second narrative. A comparison of the opening lines of each of the three narratives is revealing: I Cette anne´e-la`, l’automne est venu plus toˆt que d’habitude, avec la pluie, les feuilles mortes, la brume sur les quais de la Saoˆne. J’habitais encore chez mes parents, au de´but de la colline de Fourvie`re. (p. 11) II Je suis ne´e a` Annecy. Mon pe`re est mort quand j’avais trois ans et ma me`re est partie vivre avec un boucher des environs. Je ne suis pas reste´e en bons termes avec elle. (p. 53) III J’ai oublie´ sans doute beaucoup de de´tails, mais quand je pense a` ce temps-la`, j’entends encoire le bruit des sabots. (p. 107)

Even at first glance, the distinction of the second quotation is striking. While the others evoke the atmosphere of the past, in the tone of remembrance which recognises the importance of small details (the

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dead leaves, the sound of hooves), the narrator of the second tale plunges straight into her narrative with the stark biographical facts. Devoid of the twilight of memory in whose depiction Modiano excels, the prose is that of an interviewee: the interviewee of a biographer, a biographer who is keen to elicit the facts which will prove an existence, verifiable and indisputable. After seventeen successful novels, Modiano seems to have reacted both generically and structurally to a new source of inspiration in the concrete person of Dora: following the biography, Des inconnues is Modiano’s return to the fictional form, but armed with a new impetus and device. Modiano’s consummate skill in the use of the first-person voice has been injected with a new energy, derived not simply from the change in sex but from the novelty of the situation. While remaining empty and lacking an identity, Modiano’s degre´ ze´ro narrator has begun a quiet but fundamental transformation, in this most recent of his works.

BEING UNWITTINGLY POPULAR? Self-parodist, and creator of his own subgenre which generates a constant popular demand: Modiano is clearly a novelist who is highly conscious of his place in the literary world today, a postmodern novelist. This is evident on the level of his narrative structure as well as on that of his themes and generic choices. The degre´ ze´ro narrator, the narrative order which is an order of narration, the ‘effet d’irre´el’: these structural aspects of his prose permeate the whole of his œuvre, and underlie Modiano’s postmodern attitude to historical writing, as well as to the whole issue of genre. Modiano’s ‘borrowing’ from parodied genres leads us to the notion of the ‘Modiano novel’ discussed in this chapter. This ‘subgenre’ is Modiano’s ultimate achievement as a self-conscious, postmodern novelist. Through various kinds of self-parody, Modiano signals that he is aware of how much he resembles himself, only to re-present this to us as what he was always offering in the first place. Our prejudices concerning originality and diversity are challenged by this author who forces us to recognise that we enjoy sameness in ‘High’ as well as in ‘popular’ literature, buy it, and read it. We appreciate the recognisable. In the last instance, perhaps we appreciate Modiano’s faux-naı¨vete´ on this subject. Thus the studied homogeneity of Modiano’s œuvre can be seen as expressing the postmodern suspicion of originality and

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creativity. It represents a challenge to the belief that every individual ‘ouvrage’ should aspire to novelty and singularity. Perhaps this also takes into account the difficulty or impossibility of being original in the knowledge of all that has gone before. ‘The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.’51 Modiano’s work would appear to be guided by this postmodern ethos. Everything about Modiano’s narratives constantly puts the reader to the test. Characteristics such as generic parody, tension between the historically real and the fictional, aetiological flirtations and nonchronological order, depend to a large extent on the perspicacity of the reader for recognition and appreciation. Indeed this comment regarding the use of postmodern irony applies equally to Modiano’s discreet experimentations: with the modern, anyone who does not understand the game can only reject it, but with the postmodern, it is possible not to understand the game and yet to take it seriously. Which is, after all, the quality (the risk) of irony. There is always someone who takes irony seriously.52

Eco here describes every critic’s professional nightmare; to ‘miss’ the irony, or a reference, or a theoretical clin d’œil contained within a postmodern work. Indeed this fear may become something of an obsession for critics working on a self-declared postmodernist: the danger then would be to see a postmodern joke behind every other sentence. In the case of Modiano, however, the primary danger is the one described by Eco. Many a critic or reviewer has fallen into the trap of reading Modiano as just another conventional writer, and to have taken his irony ‘seriously’.53 My main purpose in this volume has been to show that such an approach risks ‘missing’ the postmodern play of Modiano’s novels, and to offer an alternative reading which is more in tune with the true nature of the narratives, in which self-consciousness is the dominant art-form. If Modiano is postmodern in that he is gently and ironically experimental, he is even more firmly postmodern in his preference for the popular. He has certainly always eschewed academic researchers or journals, preferring to give his interviews to popular magazines such as Elle. A cynic might assume that it is simply to do with the buying power of the popular readership—the nouveau romanciers were never known for sizeable royalties—but Modiano’s allegiance to the popular seems also to be a matter of principle. It may be that his rejection of the

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hierarchy of High versus popular art leads him to class his own works in the latter category. We have witnessed over and over in his novels a tendency to sympathise with the less canonical genres of literature: perhaps the same tendency applies to his estimation of his own work, which he self-consciously debases and celebrates at the same time. There have been recent indications that Modiano wishes himself, and his work, to be associated with the more dominant media of his generation. One of his earlier encounters with television was famously disastrous: his appearances on Apostrophes (three to date) have been notable for his painfully inarticulate performance. His relationship with cinema had been more fruitful from the start: he wrote the acclaimed scenario of Louis Malle’s film, Lacombe Lucien, and co-wrote, with Pascal Aubier, the script of Le Fils de Gascogne. He was not involved in, but pleased with the adaptation of, Villa Triste by Patrice Leconte into Le Parfum d’Yvonne. More recently he has personally taken part in two film-related projects. The first was a cameo appearance in Raoul Ruiz’s Ge´ne´alogie d’un crime, as the estranged ex-husband of the Catherine Deneuve character:54 the second, his participation as a member of the jury at this year’s Cannes film festival. As always, Modiano’s motives are difficult to discern. This brief account of his cinematic activities gives a sense of how he is clearly on the way to becoming something of a personality, if not a celebrity, in the French popular consciousness: is this his goal? The status of the popular author today involves exposure to other media, and his choices in that field seems to indicate that Modiano wants to establish himself as a visible part of contemporary popular culture. If this is the case, Modiano would appear to be bowing to the postmodern age’s view that the printed word is less efficacious than the moving image, while taking back the status gained through his exposure to enhance the celebrity of his writing. Modiano is a writer who appreciates the e´tat pre´sent of the French novel, its readership and social status, and he shapes his output—literary and otherwise—in full consciousness of these paraliterary considerations. Fifty-five in the year 2000, he continues to publish: the collection of novellas that is Des inconnues is his most recent work to date, but it will be fascinating to watch, and analyse, the genre of writing he will embark on next.

Notes to Introduction pp. 1–6 1 All of Modiano’s statements in this Introduction are taken from Jean-Louis Ezine, ‘Sur la sellette: Patrick Modiano ou le passe´ ante´rieur’, Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, 6–12 October 1975, p. 5. 2 I have adopted ‘postmodern’ for use in this book, following Linda Hutcheon, because I have come to feel that the emphasis placed on the ‘post’ (either by the capitalisation of ‘modern’, or the use of the hyphen) detracts from the balance of the term, highlighting the temporal aspect of the term at the expense of the theoretical. This issue will be discussed below. 3 This is not the place for a history of the term, or for a justification of its status: for both of these I refer the reader to Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon, A Postmodern Reader, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1993. This volume gives a good sense of the way in which characteristics of the postmodern—doublecoding, self-reflexivity, and ontological uncertainty—have been derived from an analysis of individual works, resulting in a descriptive, ‘cluster’ definition. One criticism frequently levelled at postmodernism asks whether such a ‘cluster’ definition, when also tied to a specific historical period, is a valid one: ironic, selfreflexive texts are not a monopoly of the late twentieth century. But it is a historical fact that these characteristics, ‘old’ though they may be, occurred as a collective phenomenon in a number of texts written after Modernism. This coincidence of the theoretical (the characteristics) and the historical (the period in which they occur) makes the term both precise and relevant as a grouping. If the term is subsequently used to describe a work of another period, it is being used to characterise, not to define, and the user should be aware of the anachronism. 4 Patrick Modiano: pie`ces d’identite´, Paris, lettres modernes, 1986, co-authored by Penelope Hueston and Colin Nettelbeck, two Australian academics; Patrick Modiano, Oxford, Berg, 1996, by Alan Morris at the University of Strathclyde; and L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano: une autofiction, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1997, by Thierry Laurent. There is also Ora Avni, D’un Passe´ l’autre: aux portes de l’histoire avec Patrick Modiano, Paris, L’Harmattan, 1997, but as this is a semi-personal, semihistorical exploration of the history of Jews in France, using Modiano’s novels as inspiration, I have not classified it as a work on Modiano. 5 For a complete list of these, see my Bibliography. 6 Patrick Modiano, ed. Jules Bedner, Amsterdam, Rodopi, CRIN 26, 1993.

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Notes to Chapter One pp. 7–24 1 The exception is Une Jeunesse, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1981, which is narrated in the third person. 2 See, for example, Manet Van Montfrans’ essay ‘Reˆveries d’un riverain’, in Jules Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, CRIN 26, 1993, pp. 85–101 (p. 86): ‘La re´currence d’une seule et meˆme trame narrative dans les romans de Patrick Modiano est un phe´nome`ne que tous ses critiques ont signale´. Un narrateur, a` l’identite´ proble´matique, essaie de de´gager un passe´ enfoui sous les sables de l’oubli ou du mensonge . . . malgre´ la te´nacite´ avec laquelle elle est mene´e, cette queˆte aboutit invariablement a` un e´chec.’ 3 See the re´cits of Andre´ Gide, for example L’Immoraliste, La Porte e´troite, La Symphonie pastorale. 4 Gerald Prince, A Dictionary of Narratology, Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1987, p. 65. 5 To be found in Ge´rard Genette, Figures III, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1972. All references in this book to Genette’s narratology will refer to this work, and not to the later Nouveau discours du re´cit, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1984, in which Genette develops and changes his system. 6 Genette, Figures III, pp. 203–24. 7 Genette, Figures III, pp. 206–07. 8 On the whole, Genette seems to avoid discussion of the narrator’s activities within the narrative, except in a section on the fonctions du narrateur. This includes a subsection on the narrator’s directing function, which discusses the narrator’s references to his/her own text and its internal organisation. Here Genette shows himself to be aware of the narrator’s organisational role in the narrative (which he could hardly fail to be as a reader of Proust). However, he does not develop this into the major structure that one would expect it to be, especially in the case of a first-person narrator as dominant as Marcel. 9 See Genette’s analysis of alte´rations, Figures III, pp. 211–13. 10 Genette, Figures III, p. 108. 11 As noted by Ricœur, whose hermeneuticist stance perhaps forces him into viewing Genette’s analysis as pertinent but incomplete. See Paul Ricœur, Temps et Re´cit, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1983–85, Vol. 2, Part III, Chapter 3. 12 The name ‘Jean’ is actually both common and personal: it is Modiano’s second forename. 13 Jean-Claude Joye, ‘A propos de Fleurs de ruine’, in Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, pp. 73–84 (p. 77), my emphasis. 14 I have borrowed ‘degre´ ze´ro’ from Barthes’ phrase ‘le degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture’, used by him to designate the Camusian ‘voix blanche’, thus hoping to convey the sense

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of a basic but essential function. Unfortunately, ‘degre´ ze´ro’ is also used by Genette in his discussion of focalisation, where it signifies something completely different: this coincidence should be ignored with respect to my use of the term. 15 Thomas Docherty, Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a Theory of Characterization in Fiction, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, p. 210. 16 ‘un je narratif dont l’existence de´pend de la cre´ation qui suivra, cre´ation ancre´e dans la reme´moration.’ Paul Raymond Coˆte´, on Rue des Boutiques Obscures, in ‘Aux Rives du Le´the´: mne´mosyne et la queˆte des origines chez Patrick Modiano’, Symposium (Spring 1991), pp. 315–28 (p. 317). 17 Henceforth all page numbers will refer to Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1978, unless otherwise stated. 18 The ‘realism’ or otherwise of Modiano’s novels will be discussed in Chapter 3. 19 Franck Salau¨n, ‘La Suisse du cœur’, in Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, pp. 15–42 (p. 18). 20 I refer to these as ‘works’ because there is some scope for debate regarding their genre: a full discussion of this issue will take place in Chapter 5. 21 Coˆte´ also draws our attention to this very passage, but reaches a different conclusion regarding the narrative stance: ‘le lecteur s’e´tonne de voir comment le narrateur a appris les faits qu’il relate . . . Ces points de suspension [i.e. the ones following ‘ses e´tats d’aˆme’] signalent le de´but d’une narration omnisciente, construite autour de pense´es de´passant de loin les connaissances d’un te´moin oculaire’ (‘Aux Rives du Le´the´’, p. 325). While Coˆte´’s statements regarding the levels of knowledge of the narrator (Genette’s ‘polymodality’) are completely justified, the narrative here appears to me to be free indirect speech, not omniscient narration. 22 Noted in Penelope Hueston and Colin Nettelbeck, Patrick Modiano: pie`ces d’identite´, Paris, lettres modernes, 1986, p. 79. 23 Livret de famille, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1977, p. 178. 24 See Miche`le Breut’s contribution to the Bedner collection. She describes the lack of introspection in the voice of the narrator of Fleurs de ruine, and suggests that the dog—belonging to the narrator’s girlfriend—functions as the ‘ve´ritable substitut de la focalisation interne’ (‘Un tour de passe-passe romanesque’, in Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, p. 114). It is interesting to note that Colin Davis has suggested a similar function for the dog in his lectures on Lacombe Lucien. 25 Henceforth all page numbers will refer to Vestiaire de l’enfance, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1989, unless otherwise stated. 26 Charlotte Wardi, ‘Me´moire et e´criture dans l’œuvre de Modiano’, Les Nouveaux Cahiers, Vol. 80 (Spring 1985), pp. 40–48 (p. 48). 27 Cf. L’Etranger: ‘Rien, rien n’avait d’importance et je savais bien pourquoi.’ Albert Camus, The´aˆtre, Re´cits, Nouvelles, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothe`que de la Ple´iade, 1962, p. 1210. 28 That the ‘sentiment de l’absurde’ exists in Modiano, however, has been noted: ‘A la lecture des romans de Modiano, on est saisi d’un immense sentiment de vide, symptomatique de l’inutilite´ de l’existence. Aussi, devant ce sentiment de contingence, le narrateur modianesque veut-il trouver ou retrouver ce qui aurait la possibilite´ de rendre la vie un peu moins absurde’ (Coˆte´, ‘Aux Rives du Le´the´’, p. 321). 29 Breut, ‘Un tour de passe-passe romanesque’, p. 113 (my emphasis), in her

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analysis of similar phrases in Un Cirque passe. Note that she too describes Modiano’s narrator as lacking in powers of introspection. 30 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 167. 31 Livret de famille, p. 118. 32 Salau¨n, ‘La Suisse du cœur’, p. 25. 33 Salau¨n, ‘La Suisse du cœur’, p. 30. 34 Villa Triste, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1975, p. 15. 35 Another Modiano character who is a writer of pulp fiction is Ambroise Guise in Quartier perdu, who, like Jimmy Sarano, is possessed of an earlier past and identity of a dubious nature based in Paris. 36 As noted by Lina Ferrara about another novel by Modiano, in ‘Quartier Perdu’, The French Review, Vol. LIX (1985/1986), pp. 489–90 (p. 490). 37 As Coˆte´ notes with regard to Rue de Boutiques Obscures: ‘le foyer d’inte´reˆt se de´place de la re´cupe´ration d’une identite´ . . . pour se fixer sur la queˆte elle-meˆme. . .’ (‘Aux Rives du Le´the´’, p. 326). 38 Marja Warehime, ‘Originality and Narrative Nostalgia: Shadows in Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques Obscures’, French Forum, Vol. XII (1987), pp. 335–45 (p. 344). 39 Alain Bony, ‘Suite en Blanc’, Critique, Vol. XLII (1986), pp. 653–67 (p. 665). 40 Jacques Bersani, ‘Patrick Modiano, agent double’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, No. 298 (1 November 1977), pp. 78–84 (p. 82). 41 Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Paris, Les E´ditions de Minuit, 1979, p. 7. 42 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, New York/London, Routledge, 1988, p. 4.

Notes to Chapter Two pp. 25–47 1 Du plus loin de l’oubli, Paris, Gallimard, 1996, p. 133. 2 Chien de printemps, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1993, p. 11. This is the first sentence of the novel. 3 Ge´rard Genette, Figures III, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1972, pp. 78–79. 4 Otherwise why, for instance, should the abandoning of the baby Oedipus be given precedence over that of any other baby in Thebes? 5 Genette himself mentions several aspects of Proust’s novel which would appear to belong to the realm of narration; aspects which result from the narrator’s view of the events. The iterative mode, for example, is central to Proust’s work in so far as it is the very condition of involuntary memory. Based as it is on repetition and the merging of instants from diverse temporal levels, it defies chronological order, and can only be justified in relation to the narrator’s consciousness, his unique view of the past; in other words, it follows the order of narration. 6 Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mots, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1964, p. 201. 7 Jean-Claude Joye, ‘A propos de Fleurs de ruine’, in Jules Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, CRIN 26, 1993, p. 75. 8 Henceforth, all page numbers will refer to Fleurs de ruine, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1991, unless otherwise stated. 9 ‘en sortant du Cafe´ de la Marine’. This is presented as if it were a fact, but is actually the result of complete speculation on the part of the narrator, which occurred some pages earlier: ‘J’ai le sentiment que ce fut au Cafe´ de la Marine’ (p. 20). 10 Lina Ferrara, ‘Quartier Perdu’, The French Review, Vol. LIX (1985/1986), p. 489. 11 This is not unusual; Genette has noted that at times Proust prefers to order his narrative in accordance with geography rather than chronology. See Genette, Figures III, p. 120. 12 Joye, ‘A propos de Fleurs de ruine’, p. 75. 13 The same point is made by Colin Davis about Quartier perdu in ‘Disenchanted Places: Patrick Modiano’s Quartier perdu and Recent French Fiction’, Il senso del nonsenso: Scritti in memoria di Lynn Salkin Sbiroli, ed. M. S. Moretti, M. R. Cappelletti and O. Martinez, Naples, Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995, pp. 663–76 (p. 667). 14 Joye, ‘A propos de Fleurs de ruine’, p. 78. 15 Joye, ‘A propos de Fleurs de ruine’, p. 79. 16 This is noted in Penelope Hueston and Colin Nettelbeck, Patrick Modiano: pie`ces d’identite´, Paris, lettres modernes, 1986, p. 95. 17 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 11. 18 See, for example, p. 133.

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19 As we are told on p. 151. 20 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, p. 277. 21 Roland Barthes, Le Degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1953, p. 25. 22 In Temps et Re´cit, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1983–85, Vol. 2, Chapter 3, p. 94. 23 Roy Pascal, ‘Tense and Novel’, Modern Language Review, Vol. LVII (1962), p. 5. 24 Penelope Hueston and Colin Nettelbeck, in ‘Anthology as Art: Patrick Modiano’s Livret de famille’, Australian Journal of French Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (1984), pp. 213–23, use the term ‘temporal layers’ (p. 216). 25 Jurate D. Kaminskas, ‘Queˆte/enqueˆte—a` la recherche du genre: Voyage de noces de Patrick Modiano’, The French Review, Vol. LXVI, No. 6 (May 1993), pp. 932– 40 (p. 936). 26 Jeanne Ewert, in her account of the tense system in Rue des Boutiques Obscures, discovers that the tenses in this novel do not follow a ‘real’ chronology, in our terms the order of histoire. She notes that ‘at one point the confusion [of tense usage] is such that the tense changes nine times in three pages’, summarising thus: ‘[H]e [the narrator, Guy Roland] narrates his story with a confusing blend of present and past tenses that prevent the reader from being able to determine the exact time of narration’ (Jeanne C. Ewert, ‘Lost in the Hermeneutic Funhouse: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Detective’, in The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. Ronald Walker and June Frazer, Macomb, IL, Western Illinois University, ‘Essays in Literature’, 1990, p. 170). Even when he is in one tense, for example in the present tense, it is difficult to pin him down to one single time level, as the tense is sometimes used in order to create a sense of immediacy when describing an event in the past, and at other times indicative of the present of the narration. ‘For example, Roland describes an outing [in the present tense] with Denise and a little girl and asks, ‘‘Who was she?’’, but thirty pages later identifies her in the same present tense as Denise’s goddaughter’ (p. 170). From these discrepancies between the use of tenses in the novel and a tense system which follows a linear chronology, Ewert concludes that time as well as identity in Modiano follows the non-logic of the postmodern ‘funhouse’. While I am in agreement with her conclusion that Modiano’s attitude towards narrative order is of a postmodern nature, I will attempt to characterise more precisely the function of tense as the key to the impression of a redundant chronological order in Modiano’s novels. 27 Henceforth, all page numbers will refer to Voyage de noces, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1990, unless otherwise stated. 28 Paul Raymond Coˆte´, in a perceptive article, has also noted how strange it is for Jean to be ‘remembering’ details of another person’s life: his conclusion is that these are purely narrative ploys for the further production of narrative, ‘ces tentatives pour rede´couvrir, par le souvenir-fabulation, ce qui e´tait autrefois (situation illusoire puisque ce passe´ n’est qu’un expe´dient narratif)’ (Paul Raymond Coˆte´, ‘Ellipse et Re´duplication: l’Obsession du vide chez Patrick Modiano’, Romanic Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 [January 1994], p. 155). Although the creative nature of Jean’s ‘memories’ is an important aspect of the phenomenon of ‘pre-natal memory’, I feel that reducing it to the status of a simple narrative tool undermines the importance of the psychological exercise for Jean and similar narrators.

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29 Ann Jefferson and David Robey, eds, Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction, London, Batsford, 2nd edn, 1986, p. 39. 30 This is noted in Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’, to be found, among other places, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge, London, Longman, pp. 157–65 (pp. 159–61). 31 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 26. 32 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 273. 33 Coˆte´, ‘Ellipse et Re´duplication’, p. 152. 34 Interestingly, Roquentin is also a failed biographer who turns to novel-writing at the end of La Nause´e. There are a number of echoes of existential heroes in Modiano’s novels: see for example possible connections between the heroes of Vestiaire de l’enfance and both l’Etranger and La Chute. Generally speaking, Modiano’s heroes are ‘downmarket’ versions of the existential models, being less drastic and more selfironising. This is a postmodern tendency in Modiano which will be discussed subsequently in more detail. 35 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 284. 36 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 278. 37 Hueston and Nettelbeck, Patrick Modiano: pie`ces d’identite´, p. 99. 38 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 60. 39 Chien de printemps, p. 35. 40 Chien de printemps, p. 49. 41 For an interesting and informative discussion of Barthes’ evolving relationship with photography, see Ann Jefferson, ‘Roland Barthes: Photography and the Other of Writing’, The Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, Vol. I (1992), pp. 293–307. 42 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, p. 126. 43 I will be discussing this in detail in Chapter 3. 44 Jefferson, ‘Roland Barthes’, pp. 306–07. 45 Chien de printemps, p. 110. 46 Chien de printemps, p. 113. 47 Quartier perdu, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1984, p. 85. 48 The original cover of the first Gallimard edition (Folio series) shows a photograph of Modiano, half covered by a desk on which there are photographs and documents: a graphic reference, perhaps, to the teasing nature of this novel with regard to its authenticity. 49 Hueston and Nettelbeck, ‘Anthology as Art’, p. 215. 50 Modiano’s attitude towards history will be explored at greater length in Chapter 4. 51 Brooks, Reading for the Plot, p. 52. 52 Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980, pp. 11–14. 53 As we discover repeatedly in, for instance, the enquiry of Guy Roland in Rue des Boutiques Obscures.

Notes to Chapter Three pp. 49–67 1 See note 3. 2 Jacques Bersani, ‘Patrick Modiano, agent double’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, No. 298 (1 November 1977), pp. 78–84 (p. 78). 3 Brigitta Cœnen-Mennemeier, ‘Le philtre magique’, in Jules Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, CRIN 26, 1993, pp. 55–71 (p. 68). Note how she unquestioningly accepts the link between readability and realism, although her point in this particular case is to refute it. 4 The transposition from the grammatical to the narrative is not without problems, as Genette himself admits: ‘[la cate´gorie] du mode peut ici sembler a priori de´pourvue de pertinence . . . a` moins de tirer un peu plus qu’il ne convient sur la me´taphore linguistique’ (Ge´rard Genette, Figures III, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1972, p. 183). It it also slightly misleading, as in a grammatical context ‘mood’ is inseparable from the verb, whereas in this chapter Genette is less concerned with the process (analogous to the verb) of representation than with its object. This can be seen in his definition of representation as ‘l’information narrative’. 5 Genette, Figures III, p. 184. 6 Genette, Figures III, pp. 183–224. 7 Genette, Figures III, p. 185. 8 Genette, Figures III, p. 190. 9 Genette, Figures III, p. 186. 10 Roland Barthes, ‘L’Effet de re´el’, in Le Bruissement de la langue, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1984, p. 182. 11 Genette, Figures III, p. 185. 12 Genette, Figures III, p. 186. 13 Genette, Figures III, p. 187. In the rest of this chapter I will be dealing exclusively with the criterion of detailed information. 14 David Lodge has noted that postmodern narratives, at least in English literature, have tended to react against the mimetic extremes of the Modernist narrative and turn back towards the diegetic. 15 Barthes, ‘L’Effet de re´el’, p. 186. 16 Cœnen-Mennemeier argues that Modiano’s enumeration of musical proper names creates an ‘effet de re´el’: ‘[D]ans le domaine de la musique, ce qui fait paradoxalement reˆver, c’est ‘‘l’effet de re´el’’ garanti par l’e´vocation de chansons, de chanteurs, de compositeurs, d’instruments de musique, de lieux de performance’ (CœnenMennemeier, ‘Le philtre magique’, p. 56). But why then is it conducive to ‘paradoxalement reˆver’? It would appear that Cœnen-Mennemeier is aware, in spite of her argument, of the unreality of this kind of descriptive prose, the ‘effet d’irre´el’ as we have called it.

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17 La Ronde de nuit, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1969, p. 14. 18 Marja Warehime, ‘Originality and Narrative Nostalgia: Shadows in Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques Obscures’, French Forum, Vol. XII (1987), pp. 335–45 (p. 338). 19 Manet Van Montfrans, ‘Reˆveries d’un riverain’, in Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, p. 85. 20 Henceforth, all page numbers will refer to Quartier perdu unless otherwise stated. 21 See especially Saul Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds, Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1972, on this subject. Of course, philosophers have not always agreed on the epistemological status of proper names. 22 Proper names in literature have been shown to contradict the standard rule that names denote rather than connote; names such as le Pe`re Goriot, Madame Bovary or Don Juan have become synonymous with their identifying characteristics. (For a description of this phenomenon see Chapter 2 of Ann Jefferson’s book The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980.) But Modiano’s use of names violates this norm. 23 Jacques Guicharnaud, ‘De la Rive gauche a` l’au-dela` de la Concorde: Remarques sur la topographie parisienne de Patrick Modiano’, in Catherine Lafarge, ed., Dilemmes du roman: Essays in Honor of Georges May, Saratoga, CA, Anma Libri, 1990, p. 350. 24 Guicharnaud, ‘De la Rive gauche’, p. 350. 25 Van Montfrans, ‘Reˆveries d’un riverain’, p. 85. 26 Paul Raymond Coˆte´, ‘Ellipse et Re´duplication: l’Obsession du vide chez Patrick Modiano’, Romanic Review, Vol. 85, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 148–49. 27 Coˆte´, ‘Ellipse et Re´duplication’, p. 150. 28 Jean-Claude Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate: cinq e´tudes sur Jeanne Bourin, Julien Green, Patrick Modiano, Yves Navarre, Franc¸oise Sagan, Bern, Peter Lang, 1989, p. 95. 29 Joye, ‘A propos de Fleurs de ruine’, in Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, p. 76. 30 Alan Morris also notes ‘the image of the descent’ (Patrick Modiano, Oxford, Berg, 1996, p. 122) which is prevalent throughout Quartier perdu. However, he considers it to be a metaphor for the social descent of Ambrose Guise from his prosperity in England to his relative poverty in Paris. As this is a side effect of Guise’s move back into his own past, I believe that it is more useful to see the metaphor as a spatial one for time, as indeed Paul Raymond Coˆte´ does in his readings of Rue des Boutiques Obscures and De si braves garc¸ons (Coˆte´, ‘Aux Rives du Le´the´: mne´mosyne et la queˆte des origines chez Patrick Modiano’, Symposium [Spring 1991], pp. 315–28 [p. 322]). 31 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 105, my emphasis. 32 Voyage de noces, p. 115. 33 Fleurs de ruine, p. 103. 34 Chien de printemps, p. 36. The relevance of photography here as a means of recording the past will be discussed in detail in the next section of this chapter. 35 Neither does it entail the refusal to believe, ontologically speaking, in a nontextual universe: a frequent misunderstanding. 36 Roland Barthes, Lec¸on, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1978, pp. 21–22. 37 See, for instance, Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs; or the novels of Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet, Michel Tournier . . .

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38 Dimanches d’aouˆt, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1986, pp. 152–53. 39 Dimanches d’aouˆt, p. 153. 40 Chien de printemps, p. 11. 41 Chien de printemps, p. 36. 42 The links between Modiano’s novels and the detective novel genre will receive detailed discussion in Chapter 5. 43 Warehime, ‘Originality and Narrative Nostalgia’, p. 338. 44 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 57. 45 Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, p. 120. Of course, trick photography (photographs of UFOs) might seem to refute this. But the point being made here is that the photograph will always prove the existence of the actual object photographed (a plate): what it is said to have portrayed, afterwards, is an entirely different (and problematic) matter. 46 Dimanches d’aouˆt, p. 80, my italics. 47 Chien de printemps, p. 110. 48 Chien de printemps, pp. 114–15. 49 Chien de printemps, p. 114. 50 Barthes, La Chambre claire, p. 138. 51 Chien de printemps, p. 25. 52 Jean-Louis Ezine, ‘Sur la sellette: Patrick Modiano ou le passe´ ante´rieur’, Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, 6–12 October 1975, p. 5. 53 Morris, Patrick Modiano, p. 6.

Notes to Chapter Four pp. 69–88 1 Cf. Coˆte´: ‘une forte nostalgie, devenue maintenant la marque de cet auteur trop rapidement assimile´ au courant d’une certaine mode re´tro qui a suˆrement contribue´ a` son succe`s aupre`s du public’ (Paul Raymond Coˆte´, ‘Aux Rives du Le´the´: mne´mosyne et la queˆte des origines chez Patrick Modiano’, Symposium (Spring 1991), pp. 315–28 [p. 315]). 2 See, for instance, Alan Morris’ chapter on Modiano, in his book Collaboration and Resistance Revisited: The Mode re´tro in post-Gaullist France, Oxford, Berg, 1992. 3 The year of de Gaulle’s death. 4 A similar point is made in Morris, Collaboration and Resistance, p. 61. 5 Pascal Jardin, Le Nain Jaune, Paris, Julliard, 1978, p. 27, my italics. This is an attitude akin to Modiano’s refusal of what we have called the ordre de l’histoire, and Sartre’s earlier thoughts on personal order (see Chapter 2). 6 Dominique Jamet, ‘Patrick Modiano s’explique’, Lire, Vol. 1 (October 1975), pp. 23–36 (p. 36). 7 See note 1. 8 Jean Montalbetti, ‘La Haine des professeurs: instantane´ Patrick Modiano’, Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, 13 June 1968, p. 2. 9 See Emmanuel Berl, ‘Interrogatoire par Patrick Modiano’ suivi de ‘il fait beau, allons au cimetie`re’, Paris, Gallimard, 1976. Emmanuel Berl (1892–1976) was a French Jew, originally from Munich, who jointly founded Les Derniers Jours with Drieu La Rochelle in 1927; a close friend of Malraux, he was also editor of the weekly Marianne and Le Pave´ de Paris. 10 Les Boulevards de ceinture, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1972, pp. 68–69. 11 Fleurs de ruine, p. 29. 12 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 88. 13 For a discussion of Foucault’s position on this issue, see Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978, p. 232 (page reference is to the paperback edition, 1985). 14 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 89. 15 Nancy Freeman Regalado, ‘Effet de re´el, Effet du re´el: Representation and Reference in Villon’s Testament’, Yale French Studies, Vol. 70 (1986), pp. 63–77 (p. 64). 16 Pierre de Boisdeffre, L’Ile aux livres: Litte´rature et critique, Paris, Seghers, 1980, p. 243. 17 Les Boulevards de ceinture, p. 148. 18 Ge´rard Genette, Figures III, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1972, pp. 238–39. 19 Franck Salau¨n, ‘La Suisse du cœur’, in Jules Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, CRIN 26, 1993, pp. 15–42 (p. 18). 20 Salau¨n, ‘La Suisse du cœur’.

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21 This pattern of a narrative lack provoking the reader’s participation is one which is to be found in all aspects of Modiano’s narrative: as we saw in Chapter 2, for instance, the discretion of Modiano’s narrator leads the reader to actively reconstruct the narrative order of the novels, perhaps more energetically than she would do when reading a narrative told by an authoritative narrative voice. 22 La Ronde de nuit, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1969, p. 88. 23 La Ronde de nuit, p. 64. 24 La Ronde de nuit, p. 93. 25 Livret de famille, p. 96. 26 Berl, ‘Interrogatoire’, p. 9. 27 Fleurs de ruine, p. 114. 28 Montalbetti, ‘La Haine des professeurs’, p. 2. 29 Fleurs de ruine, pp. 44–47. 30 La Ronde de nuit, p. 28. 31 Jean Montalbetti, ‘Patrick Modiano ou l’esprit de fuite’, Magazine litte´raire, Vol. 34 (November 1969), p. 43. 32 To echo the title of Gerald Prince’s article, ‘Re-Membering Modiano: Or, Something Happened’, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism, Vol. 15 (1986), pp. 35–43. 33 Boisdeffre, L’Ile aux livres, pp. 242–43. 34 Roland Barthes, ‘Le Discours de l’histoire’, in Le Bruissement de la langue, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1984, p. 175. 35 Some historians and historiographers have also pointed out the similarities of historical discourse and certain kinds of fictional writing, a result of the tool common to both discourses, viz. narrative. We have already seen how the arrangement of facts, crucial to the truth or otherwise of an account, is the work of narrative. Hayden White further emphasises the interdependence of ‘facts’ and their arrangement: In most discussions of historical discourse, the two levels conventionally distinguished are those of the facts (data or information) on the one side and the interpretation (explanation or story told about the facts) on the other. What this conventional distinction obscures is the difficulty of discrimination within the discourse between these two levels. It is not the case that a fact is one thing and its interpretation another. The fact is presented where and how it is in the discourse in order to sanction the interpretation to which it is meant to contribute. And the interpretation derives its force of plausibility from the order and manner in which the facts are presented in the discourse. The discourse itself is the actual combination of facts and meaning which gives to it the aspect of a specific structure of meaning that permits us to identify it as a product of one kind of historical consciousness rather than another. (Tropics of Discourse, p. 107) 36 The ‘fact versus fiction’ dichotomy is a historically relative one, as both Barthes (in ‘L’effet de re´el’, Le Bruissement de la langue) and White (in Tropics of Discourse) remind us. White points us to the fact that the divide between truth and fiction has not always been as wide as it is now. Before the nineteenth century, historians were accustomed to think of history as rhetorical, and this did not detract from their belief in its truth. Nineteenth-century positivism, however, identified truth with fact, aligning rhetoric with fiction, which has resulted in our current tendency to set fiction and

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anything which smacks of narrative arrangement against what we see as being fact and truth; which detracts, according to White, from our understanding of the true nature of history and its ‘facts’. See Tropics of Discourse, pp. 123–24. 37 Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, London, Secker and Warburg, 1989, p. 75. 38 La Ronde de nuit, pp. 93–94. 39 Modiano was responsible for the script of Louis Malle’s film (1974). 40 Louis Malle and Patrick Modiano, Lacombe Lucien, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1974, p. 139. 41 For a more detailed analysis of this penultimate section of the film, in general agreement with my own, see Penelope Hueston and Colin Nettelbeck, Patrick Modiano: pie`ces d’identite´, Paris, lettres modernes, 1986, p. 62. 42 Malle and Modiano, Lacombe Lucien, p. 144. 43 With the exception of his most recent work but one, Dora Bruder; this, however, is not a fictional work, and it will be discussed in Chapter 6. 44 Salau¨n, ‘La Suisse du cœur’, p. 23. 45 Salau¨n, ‘La Suisse du cœur’, p. 19. 46 Morris’ book Collaboration and Resistance, although highly misleading in its account of Modiano as primarily a mode re´tro writer, gives a thorough and useful account of French responses (political and literary) to the history of the Occupation: see especially Chapters 1–3.

Notes to Chapter Five pp. 89–108 1 Penelope Hueston and Colin Nettelbeck, Patrick Modiano: pie`ces d’identite´, Paris, lettres modernes, 1986, p. 21. 2 Franc¸oise Dhe´nain, ‘Identite´ et e´criture dans l’œuvre de Patrick Modiano’, in Jules Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, CRIN 26, 1993, p. 10. 3 Jean-Claude Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate: cinq e´tudes sur Jeanne Bourin, Julien Green, Patrick Modiano, Yves Navarre, Franc¸oise Sagan, Bern, Peter Lang, 1989, p. 90. 4 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, New York, Methuen, 1985, p. 7. 5 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, p. 256. 6 Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 256. 7 In The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, ed. June Frazer and Ronald Walker, Macomb, IL, Western Illinois University, ‘Essays in Literature’, 1990, p. 124. 8 Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 132. 9 Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 159. 10 See, for example, Les Gommes by Robbe-Grillet; Le Proce`s-verbal by Le Cle´zio; Le Petit Bleu de la coˆte Ouest by Manchette; Lac by Echenoz. 11 The essays published in Frazer and Walker, eds, The Cunning Craft give a good indication of and introduction to the scope of the research conducted in this area. Tzvetan Todorov’s essay, ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ (to be found, among other places, in David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London, Longman, 1988, pp. 157–65), and large sections of Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984 are extremely interesting and helpful also. 12 As suggested by both Todorov and Brooks. 13 This aspect of the detective novel has been discussed in detail in Chapter 2. 14 George N. Dove, ‘The Detection Formula and Reading’, in Frazer and Walker, eds, The Cunning Craft, pp. 25–37. 15 Dove, ‘The Detection Formula’, p. 36. 16 Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate, pp. 89–90. 17 Jeanne C. Ewert, ‘Lost in the Hermeneutic Funhouse: Patrick Modiano’s Postmodern Detective’, in Frazer and Walker, eds, The Cunning Craft, p. 167. 18 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 8. 19 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 21. 20 Ewert, ‘Lost in the Hermeneutic Funhouse’, pp. 168–69. 21 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, p. 89. 22 Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate, p. 95. 23 Quartier perdu, p. 9.

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24 Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate, p. 95. 25 Voyage de noces, p. 157. 26 Ewert, ‘Lost in the Hermeneutic Funhouse’, pp. 171–72. 27 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 167. 28 See Chapter 1. 29 La Ronde de nuit, pp. 110–11. 30 La Ronde de nuit, p. 119. 31 Les Boulevards de ceinture, p. 166. 32 Les Boulevards de ceinture, p. 82. 33 Les Boulevards de ceinture, pp. 161–62. 34 Les Boulevards de ceinture, p. 127. 35 See Chapter 2 for a discussion of this issue. 36 One of the principal themes of his eclectic three-volume masterpiece, Temps et Re´cit. 37 This is the case in the postmodern context where belief in identity and similar essentialist entities has all but disintegrated (in some quarters, at any rate). 38 Charlotte Wardi thinks that he even goes so far as to parody the ‘Nouveau Roman ‘‘policier’’ des anne´es cinquante . . . les techniques du Nouveau Roman e´sote´rique’. Charlotte Wardi, ‘Me´moire et e´criture dans l’œuvre de Modiano’, Les Nouveaux Cahiers, Vol. 80 (Spring 1985), pp. 40–48 (p. 47). 39 This crucial fact is noted in Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate, p. 96. 40 Jacques Lecarme and E´liane Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, Paris, Armand Colin, 1997, p. 275. 41 Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, p. 279. 42 A number of distinguished critics have seen fit to categorise Modiano in this way: for instance, Thierry Laurent, whose recent book on Modiano is called L’Œuvre de Patrick Modiano: une autofiction, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1997. 43 Now we would have to add Dora Bruder (1997) and Des inconnues (1999). 44 Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, p. 269. Other works placed in this category are Camus’ Le Premier Homme, Duras’ La Douleur, and Robbe-Grillet’s autobiographical trilogy. 45 See Chapter 1. 46 Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, p. 271. 47 Annie Ernaux’s response to a question about the narrator of Passion simple (1992): cited in Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, p. 271. 48 Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, p. 88.

Notes to Chapter Six pp. 109–133 1 Jean-Claude Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate: cinq e´tudes sur Jeanne Bourin, Julien Green, Patrick Modiano, Yves Navarre, Franc¸oise Sagan, Bern, Peter Lang, 1989, p. 89. 2 Anonymous review of Vestiaire de l’enfance in Les Echos, 23 February 1989. 3 See, for example, the opening of Miche`le Breut, ‘Un tour de passe-passe romanesque’, in Jules Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, CRIN 26, 1993, p. 103. 4 Joye, for instance, in his discussion of Quartier perdu, posits—without any attempt at justification—the existence of ‘le lecteur familier de Modiano’. See Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate, p. 92. 5 Miche`le Breut confers the term ‘genre’ on to the ‘Modiano novel’ with no explanation or justification in her article on Un Cirque passe, which begins by considering the recurring themes and images of Modiano’s many novels. 6 Quoted in Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate, p. 114. 7 Joye, Litte´rature imme´diate, p. 114. 8 The view that Modiano’s novels constitute a single book explains, according to Joye, ‘le refus de de´nouement qui les caracte´rise’ (Litte´rature imme´diate, p. 114); I disagree, for the reasons given above. 9 Roland Barthes, S/Z, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1970, p. 173. 10 This apparent typographical mistake is a consistent one through the novel: possibly a genuine mistake, but more probably a deliberate error destined to sap the reader’s belief in the ‘reality’ created by the novel (see my analysis, Chapter 5, section on ‘Modiano’s postmodern detective’). Or is it a pun on ‘stories’, given that it is the name of a bookshop, and the source of Sarano’s ‘stories’? 11 Vestiaire de l’enfance, p. 67. 12 Poupe´e blonde [with Pierre Le-Tan], Paris, POL, 1983, p. 9. 13 Modiano’s predilection for such names, in the novel in question, is noted by Jules Bedner in ‘Patrick Modiano: visages de l’e´tranger’, in Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, pp. 43–54 (p. 43). 14 Brigitta Cœnen-Mennemeier, ‘Le philtre magique’, in Bedner, ed., Patrick Modiano, pp. 55–71 (p. 68). 15 The self-parody to be found in Poupe´e blonde, discussed earlier on in this chapter, is more ‘external’ (see, for instance, the reference to the author’s own physique in Poupe´e blonde) than that to be found in Chien de printemps. I will be arguing that this later work, by contrast, constitutes a full-blown parody of the Modiano novel in that the parody occurs internally, both on the thematic and structural level. 16 See Chapter 3, ‘Mimesis in photography’. 17 Henceforth all page numbers in parentheses will refer to Chien de printemps unless otherwise indicated.

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18 Vestiaire de l’enfance, pp. 18, 25, 31. 19 Voyage de noces, p. 41. 20 Vestiaire de l’enfance, p. 144. 21 Voyage de noces, p. 25: ‘cette surimpression e´trange du passe´ sur le pre´sent’. 22 Vestiaire de l’enfance, p. 49. 23 A ‘long’ silence of three years: this would be a ridiculous qualification, if it were not for the fact that since 1975 (Villa Triste), Modiano’s novels have come out annually or every two years at the most, an amazing record of consistent quantity and quality. 24 Modiano broke his monogamous relationship with Gallimard after almost twenty years of strict fidelity, publishing Remise de peine (1988) with Seuil. He alternated between the two for the next few years: Gallimard published Vestiaire de l’enfance (1989) and Voyage de noces (1990), Seuil took Fleurs de ruine (1991) but Gallimard claimed Un Cirque passe (1992). Chien de printemps (1993) was published by Seuil. 25 Miche`le Gazier, ‘Le Charme est rompu’, Te´le´rama, No. 2399 (3 January 1996), p. 24. 26 Indeed, his former portraits of places foreign have always been characterised by a certain disregard for detail, as if to signal the author’s ignorance and insouciance visa`-vis territory not familiar to him. Previous to this work, Nice, in Dimanches d’aouˆt, came closest to Paris as a detailed description of a city. 27 In Chapter 4. 28 Du plus loin de l’oubli, Paris, Gallimard, 1996, pp. 72–73. Henceforth, all page numbers in parentheses will refer to this work unless otherwise indicated. 29 The importance of this passage has not gone unnoticed by Modiano’s editors at Gallimard, who have used it as the ‘blurb’ passage on the back cover. 30 This is perhaps most markedly the case in Quartier perdu, but see also Dimanches d’aouˆt, Vestiaire d’enfance, Voyage de noces. 31 Quartier perdu, p. 182. 32 This has been discussed in Chapter 5. 33 A comparison with the five titles previous to this one will confirm this impression: Chien de printemps (1993), Un Cirque passe (1992), Fleurs de ruine (1991), Voyage de noces (1990), and Vestiaire de l’enfance (1989). 34 See Chapter 2, ‘Biographers, historians’. 35 Dora Bruder, Paris, Gallimard, 1997, pp. 54–55. Henceforth all page numbers in parentheses will refer to this work unless otherwise indicated. 36 As coined by Serge Doubrovsky (in Fils, 1977). For a detailed discussion of the term, see Jacques Lecarme and E´liane Lecarme-Tabone, L’autobiographie, Paris, Armand Colin, 1997, Part 4, Chapter 6. 37 Compare this narrator with those of his previous works classified in Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone as autofictions: viz., Livret de famille, De si braves garc¸ons, Remise de peine, Fleurs de ruine. 38 Simone de Beauvoir, La femme rompue, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, is made up of three novellas told in the first person: ‘L’aˆge de discre´tion’, ‘Monologue’ and ‘La femme rompue’. 39 Eighteen or nineteen, i.e. the age at which many of them go to Vienna, or meet father- or mother- figures: Jean of Voyage de noces, for instance, meets the Rigauds at that age.

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40 Des inconnues, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 17. Henceforth all page numbers in parentheses, unless otherwise indicated, will refer to this work. 41 This function of tense has been discussed in detail in Chapter 2. 42 See Chapter 1, note 28. 43 ‘Le charme discret du parfait re´cit a` la franc¸aise, mode`le 1920, marque NRF’: Jacques Bersani, ‘Patrick Modiano, agent double’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, No. 298 (November 1977), pp. 78–84 (p. 78). See also my Introduction, note 4. 44 The passive woman’s identification with, and subsequent disappearance into, her surroundings is reminiscent of Monique’s situation in ‘La femme rompue’, where it could be described (in existentialist terms) as an instance of the ‘pour-soi’ longing for, and identifying with, the ‘en-soi’. 45 ‘Il ne laissait jamais rien traıˆ ner sur la table de nuit’ which might identify him, and ‘Guy Vincent’ is a pseudonym. 46 This state has been described as ‘voluntary amnesia’ in Chapter 1. 47 ‘j’ai reconnu le photographe a` veste de velours et visage de rapin qui patrouillait devant le Palais de la Me´diterrane´e et avait pris une photo des Neal, de Sylvia et de moi’ (Dimanches d’aouˆt, p. 134). 48 ‘Je m’y trouvais en compagnie d’une amie de mon aˆge, et Jansen [. . .] nous observait en souriant. Puis il a sorti d’un sac [. . .] un Rolleiflex’ (Chien de printemps, p. 11). 49 See note 15. 50 Voyage de noces, p. 131. 51 Umberto Eco, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, London, Secker and Warburg, 1989, p. 67. 52 Eco, Reflections, p. 68. 53 However, the playfulness of Modiano’s narrative structure must not divert us from the essential seriousness of his themes; memory, identity, responsibility, and the specific subject of the Occupation. His playfulness and postmodern resignation concern the possibility of achieving his goals through writing, not the importance of those goals. 54 He is a friend of the actress, with whom he co-wrote Elle s’appelait Franc¸oise, a book about Deneuve’s dead sister.

Bibliography Primary Sources 1 Works by Modiano Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication in all cases in this section is Paris. (i) Novels and Longer Works La Place de l’e´toile, Gallimard, 1968. La Ronde de nuit, Gallimard, 1969. Les Boulevards de ceinture, Gallimard, 1972. Villa Triste, Gallimard, 1975. Livret de famille, Gallimard, 1977. Rue des Boutiques Obscures, Gallimard, 1978. Une Jeunesse, Gallimard, 1981. De si braves garc¸ons, Gallimard, 1982. Quartier perdu, Gallimard, 1984. Dimanches d’aoˆut, Gallimard, 1986. Remise de peine, E´ditions du Seuil, 1988. Vestiaire de l’enfance, Gallimard, 1989. Voyage de noces, Gallimard, 1990. Fleurs de ruine, E´ditions du Seuil, 1991. Un Cirque passe, Gallimard, 1992. Chien de printemps, E´ditions du Seuil, 1993. Du plus loin de l’oubli, Gallimard, 1996. Dora Bruder, Gallimard, 1997. Des inconnues, Gallimard, 1999. (ii) Shorter Fiction Lacombe Lucien [filmscript with Louis Malle], Gallimard, 1974. ‘Courrier du cœur’, Les Cahiers du chemin, No. 20 (January 1974), pp. 35–40. Berl, Emmanuel, ‘Interrogatoire par Patrick Modiano’ suivi de ‘il fait beau, allons au cimetie`re’, Gallimard, 1976. ‘Johnny’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, No. 307 (1 August 1978), pp. 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 Dimanche, 16 September 1979, p. xx. ‘Memory Lane’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, No. 334 (1 November 1980), pp. 1–30. ‘La Seine’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, No. 341 (1 June 1981), pp. 1–17. Memory Lane [with drawings by Pierre Le-Tan], POL/Hachette, 1981. Poupe´e blonde [with Pierre Le-Tan], POL, 1983.

153

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‘Mes vingt ans’, Vogue, No. 642 (December 1983), pp. 188–93. Le Fils de Gascogne [script for te´le´film, with Pascal Aubier], first shown 25 May 1995 (France 2). (iii) Children’s Books Une Aventure pour Choura, Gallimard, 1986. Une Fiance´e pour Choura, Gallimard, 1987. Cathe´rine Certitude [with Sempe´], Gallimard, 1988. (iv) Articles, Prefaces ‘Je me sens proche de lui’, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, 1 January 1970, p. 7. ‘Herve´ Bazin vu par Patrick Modiano’, Magazine litte´raire, No. 40 (May 1970), pp. 21– 22. ‘L’Anti-Frank’, Contrepoint, No. 2 (October 1970), pp. 178–80. ‘Un roman sur Paris en e´te´ . . .’ and ‘Patrick Modiano re´pond au questionnaire Marcel Proust’, in Patrick Modiano, La Ronde de nuit, Tallandier (Cercle du nouveau livre), 1970, postface, pp. 3–5 and 24–26. ‘Un Martyr des lettres’, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, 11 June 1971, p. 13. ‘Vingt ans apre`s’, Le Figaro litte´raire, 18 November 1972, pp. 13, 17. ‘Les Ecrivains de la nuit, de Pierre de Boisdeffre’, La Nouvelle Revue des Deux Mondes, October–December 1973, pp. 350–52. ‘Au temps de Lacombe Lucien’, Elle, 11 February 1974, pp. 6–7. ‘Les Livres de Julien Gracq . . .’ in Qui vive? autour de Julien Gracq, 1980, pp. 165–67. Rilke, Rainer Maria, Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge (preface), 1980. Cocteau, Jean, Le Livre blanc (preface), 1983. Le-Tan, Pierre, Paris de ma jeunesse (preface), 1988. (v) Other Works Morel, Jean-Pierre, ‘Une Dissertation de Modiano’, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, 18 November 1982, pp. 37–38. Paris, Fixot, 1987. Paris Tendresse [photographs by Brassaı¨], Hoe¨beke, 1990. ‘Polar a` huit mains: L’Angle Mort: Chapitre 3’, L’Eve´nement du jeudi, 18–24 July 1991, pp. 84–86. Elle s’appelait Franc¸oise . . . [with Catherine Deneuve], Albin Michel, 1996. (vi) Interviews ‘A bout portant . . . Patrick Modiano’, Paris-Match, 13 March 1981, pp. 28–29. Bosselet, Dominique, ‘Patrick Modiano: ‘‘J’ai un petit talent d’amateur’’ ’, France-Soir, 12 September 1975, p. 17. Brunn, Julien, ‘Patrick Modiano: Exile´ de quelque chose’, Libe´ration, 22 September 1975, p. 10. Cau, Jean, ‘Patrick Modiano marie´, un enfant et un livret de famille de 180 pages’, Paris-Match, 12 August 1977, p. 13. Chalon, Jean, ‘Patrick Modiano: Le Dernier promeneur solitaire’, in Patrick Modiano, La Ronde de nuit, Tallandier (Cercle du nouveau livre), 1970, postface, pp. 6–23.

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Chapsal, Madeleine, ‘10 ans apre`s: Patrick Modiano’, Lire, No. 120 (September 1985), pp. 56–58, 61–62. D[ucout], F[ranc¸oise], ‘Patrick Modiano: on est toujours prisonnier de son temps’, Elle, 22 September 1986, p. 47. Duranteau, Josane, ‘L’Obsession de l’anti-he´ros’, Le Monde, 11 November 1972, p. 13. Ezine, Jean-Louis, ‘Sur la sellette: Patrick Modiano ou le passe´ ante´rieur’, Les Nouvelles Litte´raires, 6–12 October 1975, p. 5. Jamet, Dominique, ‘Patrick Modiano s’explique’, Lire, No. 1 (October 1975), pp. 23– 36. Jaudel, Franc¸oise, ‘Queˆte d’identite´’, L’Arche, October–November 1972, p. 61. Josselin, Jean-Franc¸ois, ‘Mondo Modiano’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 8–14 January 1988, pp. 59–61. Lecle`re, Marie-Franc¸oise, ‘Il a vingt-deux ans et il me´ritait 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 pie´taille’, Presse Nouvelle Hebdo, 8 March 1974, pp. 3, 9. M., J.-C., ‘Patrick Modiano: ‘‘Non, je ne suis pas un auteur re´tro’’ ’, Le Journal de Dimanche, 26 May 1974, p. 11. Malka, Victor, ‘Patrick Modiano: un homme sur du sable mouvant’, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, 30 October–5 November 1972, p. 2. Maury, Pierre, ‘Patrick Modiano: travaux de de´blaiement’, Magazine litte´raire, September 1992, pp. 100–04. Modiano, Patrick, ‘Patrick Modiano’, Paris-Match, 1 December 1978, p. 79. Montalbetti, Jean, ‘La Haine des professeurs: instantane´ Patrick Modiano’, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, 13 June 1968, p. 2. ‘Patrick Modiano ou l’esprit de fuite’, Magazine litte´raire, No. 34 (November 1969), pp. 42–43. Montaudon, Dominique, ‘Patrick Modiano: le plus agre´able c’est la reˆverie’, Quoi Lire Magazine, No. 8 (March 1989), pp. 15–18. Pivot, Bernard, ‘Demi-juif, Patrick Modiano affirme: ‘‘Ce´line e´tait un ve´ritable e´crivain juif’’ ’, Le Figaro litte´raire, 29 April 1968, p. 16. Pudlowski, Gilles, ‘Modiano le magnifique’, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, 12–19 February 1981, p. 28. Rolin, Gabrielle, ‘Patrick Modiano: le dernier enfant du sie`cle’, Le Point, 3–9 January 1983, pp. 63–64. Rondeau, Daniel, ‘Des Sixties au Goncourt’, Libe´ration, 30 September 1982, p. 23. Savigneau, Josyane, ‘Les Chemins de leur carrie`re’, Le Monde, 4 January 1985, pp. 11– 13. Texier, Jean-C., ‘Rencontre avec un jeune romancier: Patrick Modiano’, La Croix, 9– 10 November 1969, p. 8. Vidal, Laurence, ‘Modiano: le passe´ recompose´’, Le Figaro litte´raire, 4 January 1996, p. 3. 2 Critical Works on Modiano Alhau, Max, ‘Patrick Modiano: Vestiaire de l’enfance’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, No. 437 (June 1989), pp. 102–03.

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Almira, Jacques, ‘Toute vie pourrait eˆtre sujet de roman’, Revue des deux mondes (June 1991), pp. 153–57. Anex, Georges, ‘Chronique du roman. Le de´sir de vivre’, Journal de Gene`ve, Samedi litte´raire (September 1975), pp. 20–21. Assouline, Pierre, ‘Modiano, lieux de me´moire’, Lire, No. 176 (May 1990), pp. 34–46. Aubenas, Jacqueline, ‘Villa Triste ou le voyeur d’ombres’, La Revue Nouvelle, No. LXII (July–December 1975), pp. 597–99. Audiard, Michel, ‘Le Bal des anciens’, Le Figaro, 19 October 1982, p. 29. Audouard, Antoine, ‘Modiano: Il n’y a pas beaucoup d’e´crivains de sa hauteur . . .’, Le Figaro Magazine, 20 September 1986, pp. 52–53. Avni, Ora, ‘Narrative subject, historic subject. Shoah and La Place de l’e´toile’, Poetics Today, Vol. XII(3), (Fall 1991), pp. 495–516. D’un Passe´ l’autre. Aux portes de l’histoire avec Patrick Modiano, Paris, E´ditions l’Harmattan, 1997. Barbour, Sarah and Victoria Bridges, ‘Patrick Modiano: Quartier perdu’, Yale French Studies (1988), v. supp., pp. 259–83. Baroche, Christiane, ‘Un Ballet cruel et joyeux, les Boulevards de ceinture’, La Quinzaine litte´raire, No. 151 (1 November 1972), pp. 6–7. ‘La Braise sous la cendre’, La Quinzaine litte´raire, No. 256 (16 May 1977), p. 12. Bedner, Jules, ‘Modiano ou l’identite´ introuvable’, Rapports: Het Franse Boek, Amsterdam, Vol. 2 (1988), pp. 49–67. ed., Patrick Modiano, Amsterdam, Rodopi, CRIN 26, 1993. Bersani, Jacques, ‘Patrick Modiano, agent double’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, No. 298 (1 November 1977), pp. 78–84. Besson, Ferny, ‘Les Boulevards de ceinture, par Patrick Modiano’, L’Echo de la Bourse, Brussels (8, 9, 10 December 1972), p. 17. Blot, Jean, ‘Villa Triste’, Nouvelle Revue Franc¸ais, No. 297 (December 1975), pp. 100– 02. Boisdeffre, Pierre de, ‘Les Boulevards de ceinture’, La Revue des deux mondes (October–December 1972), pp. 666–68. ‘Villa Triste’, La Nouvelle Revue des deux mondes (October–December 1975), pp. 413–16. L’Ile aux livres: Litte´rature et critique, Paris, Seghers, 1980, pp. 241–47. Bologne, Jean-Claude, ‘Le nouveau pie`ge de Modiano’, Magazine litte´raire, No. 264 (April 1989), p. 102. Bona, Dominique, ‘Ge´ographie du passe´’, Le Figaro litte´raire, 8 April 1990, p. 4. Bonnefoy, Claude, ‘Un lieu et des racines’, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, No. 2497 (8 September 1975), p. 5. ‘Rue des Boutiques Obscures’, Les Nouvelles litte´raires, No. 2657 (20 October 1978), p. 23. Bony, Alain, ‘Suite en Blanc’, Critique, Vol. XLII (1986), pp. 653–67. Brenner, Jacques, Histoire de la litte´rature franc¸aise de 1940 a` nos jours, Paris, Fayard, 1978, pp. 537–43. Brouwer, Anneke, ‘L’Emploi des temps verbaux chez Patrick Modiano’, Rapports: Het Franse Boek, Amsterdam, Vol. 2 (1988), pp. 68–73. Buss, Robin, ‘Fresh, familiar trail’, Times Literary Supplement, 9–15 November 1990, p. 1215

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Warehime, Marja, ‘Originality and Narrative Nostalgia. Shadows in Modiano’s Rue des Boutiques Obscures’, French Forum, Vol. XII (1987), pp. 335–45. 3 Selection of Other Works Consulted Attridge, Derek, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, eds, Post-structuralism and the Question of History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987. Bal, Mieke, Narratologie, Paris, E´ditions Klincksieck, 1977. ‘Notes on Narrative Embedding’, Poetics Today, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 1981), pp. 41– 59. ‘The Laughing Mice, or: On Focalization’, Poetics Today, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 1981), pp. 202–10. Banfield, Ann, ‘Reflective and Non-Reflective Consciousness in the Language of Fiction’, Poetics Today, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Winter 1981), pp. 61–76. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. Barthes, Roland, Le Degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Pierres vives’, 1953. Mythologies, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Pierres vives’, 1957. Sur Racine, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Pierres vives’, 1963. Essais critiques, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1964. Critique et ve´rite´, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1966. Syste`me de la mode, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1967. S/Z, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1970. L’Empire des signes, Geneva, Skira, 1970. Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1971. Nouveaux essais critiques, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1972. Le Plaisir du texte, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1973. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘E´crivains de toujours’, 1975. Lec¸on, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1978. La Chambre claire, Paris, Gallimard/Seuil, 1980. Le Grain de la voix: entretiens 1962–1980, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1981. Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1982. Le Bruissement de la langue, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1984. L’Aventure se´miologique, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1985. Incidents, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1987. Bonny, Jacques, Mon pe`re, l’inspecteur Bonny, Paris, Laffont, 1975. Bronzwaer, W. J. M., Tense in the Novel: An Investigation of Some Potentialities of Linguistic Criticism, Groningen, Wolters-Noordhoff Publishing, 1970. Brooks, Peter, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984. Camus, Albert, L’Etranger, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1942. La Peste, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1947. La Chute, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1956. Cohn, Dorrit, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1978.

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Comment, Bernard, Roland Barthes: vers le neutre, Paris, C. Bourgeois, 1991. Culler, Jonathan, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty, London, P. Elek, 1974. The Pursuit of Signs, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Barthes, London, Fontana, ‘Fontana Modern Masters’, 1983. Derrida, Jacques, L’Ecriture et la diffe´rence, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Points Essais’, 1967. De la grammatologie, Paris, Les E´ditions de Minuit, 1967. Dilthey, Wilhelm, Selected Writings: Edited, Translated and Introduced by H. Rickman, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976. Docherty, Thomas, Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a Theory of Characterization in Fiction, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983. Echenoz, Jean, Lac, Paris, Les E´ditions de Minuit, 1989. Eco, Umberto, Reflections on the Name of the Rose, London, Secker and Warburg, 1989. Foucault, Michel, Les Mots et les Choses: une arche´ologie des sciences humaines, Paris, Gallimard, 1966. Fowler, Alastair, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982. Frazer, June and Ronald Walker, eds, The Cunning Craft: Original Essays on Detective Fiction and Contemporary Literary Theory, Macomb, IL, Western Illinois University, ‘Essays in Literature’, 1990. Garnier, Dominique, Nice, pour me´moire, Paris, Seuil, 1980. Gatard, Marie, La Guerre, mon pe`re, Paris, Mercure de France, 1978. Genette, Ge´rard, Figures I, Paris, Les E´ditions du Seuil, 1966. Figures II, Paris, Les E´ditions du Seuil, 1969. Figures III, Paris, Les E´ditions du Seuil, 1972. Nouveau Discours du re´cit, Paris, Les E´ditions du Seuil, 1984. Hamburger, Ka¨te, Die Logik der Dichtung, Stuttgart, Ernst Klett Verlag, 1957. Hutcheon, Linda, A Theory of Parody, New York, Methuen, 1985. A Poetics of Postmodernism, New York, Routledge, 1988. The Politics of Postmodernism, London, Routledge, 1989. Hutcheon, Linda and Joseph Natoli, A Postmodern Reader, Albany, NY, State University of New York Press, 1993. Jardin, Pascal, La Guerre a` neuf ans, Paris, Grasset, 1975. Le Nain Jaune, Paris, Julliard, 1978. Jefferson, Ann, ‘Imagery versus Description: The Problematics of Representation in the Novels of Nathalie Sarraute’, Modern Languages Review, Vol. 73, No. 3 (July 1978), pp. 513–24. The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980. ‘Roland Barthes: Photography and the Other of Writing’, The Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, Vol. I (1992), pp. 293–307. Jefferson, Ann and David Robey, eds, Modern Literary Theory: A Comparative Introduction, London, Batsford, 2nd edn, 1986. Jencks, Charles, What is Post-Modernism?, London, Academy Editions, 1986. Kripke, Saul, ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds, Semantics of Natural Language, Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1972.

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Kristeva, Julia, Etrangers a` nous-meˆmes, Paris, Fayard, 1988. Lavers, Annette, Roland Barthes: Structuralism and After, London, Methuen, 1982. Le Cle´zio, Jean-Marie, Le Proce`s-verbal, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1963. Le Garrec, Evelyne, La Rive allemande de ma me´moire, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1980. Leiris, Michel, L’Age d’homme, Paris, Gallimard, 1939. Le´vinas, Emmanuel, En de´couvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, Paris, Vrin, 1982. Lodge, David, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, London, Longman, 1988. Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir, Paris, Les E´ditions de Minuit, 1979. Manchette, Jean-Patrick, Le Petit Bleu de la coˆte Ouest, Paris, Gallimard, ‘folio’, 1976. McHale, Brian, Postmodern Fiction, New York, Methuen, 1987. Mumford, Lewis, The City in History, London, Secker and Warburg, 1961. Ophu¨ls, Marcel, Le Chagrin et la pitie´ (filmscript), Paris, Moreau, 1980. Pascal, Roy, ‘Tense and Novel’, Modern Languages Review, Vol. LVII (1962), pp. 1–11. Prendergast, Christopher, The Order of Mimesis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986. Paris and the Nineteenth Century, Oxford, Blackwell, 1992. Prince, Gerald, A Dictionary of Narratology, Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1987. Proust, Marcel, A la Recherche du temps perdu, Paris, Gallimard, E´ditions de la Ple´iade, 1956. Regalado, Nancy Freeman, ‘Effet de re´el, Effet du re´el: Representation and Reference in Villon’s Testament’, Yale French Studies, Vol. 70 (1986), pp. 63–77. Ricardou, Jean, Pour une the´orie du Nouveau Roman, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, ‘Tel Quel’, 1971. Ricœur, Paul, Temps et Re´cit, Vols I–III, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1983–85. Rimmon-Kenan, Schlomith, ‘A Comprehensive Theory of Narrative’, PTL, Vol. 1 (1976), pp. 33–62. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London, Methuen, 1983. Ronen, Ruth, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Sevran, Pascal, Le Passe´ supple´mentaire, Paris, Orban, 1979. Stone, Laurence, ‘The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History’, Past and Present, Vol. 85 (1979), pp. 3–24. Todorov, Tzvetan, Nous et les autres, Paris, E´ditions du Seuil, 1989. White, Hayden, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, Baltimore, MD, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Young, Robert, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, London, Routledge, 1990.

Index aetiological, 29–30, 32, 45 ambiguity, 14, 24, 35, 122 amnesia/amnesiac, 11, 12, 22, 31, 76, 101, 114 voluntary, 12, 101, 119 anne´es noires, 78, 79, 86 Auerbach, Eric, 9 autobiographical/autobiography, 13, 14, 45, 106, 124 false, 76, 78–79 autofiction, 106–08, 124 Balzac, Honore´ de, 26 Barthes, Roland, 32, 43, 49, 51, 53, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 84–85, 111 Baudelaire, Charles, 60 Beauvoir, Simone de, 124 best-seller/best-selling, 1, 4, 109 biography, 3, 36, 40–45, 121, 122, 123–24, 130–31 Boisdeffre, Pierre de, 75, 84 Bonny, Jacques, 70 Bonny, Pierre, 70 Booth, Wayne, 52 Breton, Andre´, 65 Brooks, Peter, 32, 37–38, 41 celebrity, 1, 133 Ce´line, Louis-Ferdinand, 89 Chambre claire (La), 60 chronology, 25, 27, 33, 34, 36, 45, 66, 79, 99 cities, 57 closure, 29, 100 Cœnen-Mennemeier, Brigitta, 49 ‘cognitive privilege’, 18, 101 collaborator (see also reader, collaborating), 30, 83 condemnation, 75 connotation/connotative, 55, 56

consciousness, 9, 11, 27–29, 34, 36, 53, 54, 75, 117, 120, 133 contemporary novel, 2 contingent conjunction, 95 detail, 53 convention/conventional, 85, 88, 93, 94, 98, 100, 108, 109, 110, 115 Coˆte d’Azur, 35 Cunning Craft (The), 103 decentred/decentring, 3, 24, 66 deictic/deixis, 55, 82, 83, 88 denotation/denotative, 55, 56 Desnos, Robert, 123 detective fiction/novel/story, 37, 90, 93– 105, 108, 109, 111, 115 description, 50–51, 55, 82 desire, 22, 30, 32, 42, 122 Dhe´nain, Franc¸oise, 89 diegesis/diegetic, 13, 50–51, 52 displacement, 39–40 ‘Discours du re´cit’, 7 disorder/disordered, 3, 27, 28, 45 Douanier Rousseau (Le), 66 Doubrovsky, Serge, 106 Dove, George N., 93–94 Echenoz, Jean, 93 effet de re´el, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 57, 67, 74, 82, 83, 85 effet d’irre´el, 52, 53, 56, 66, 74, 87, 95, 96, 97, 98, 125, 131 effet du re´el, 74, 83 ellipses, 56 Ernaux, Annie, 107 E´tranger (L’), 7, 17 Ewert, Jeanne, 95, 96, 100 existential/existentialist, 17, 124, 130 experimental, 1, 2, 4

163

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fabula, 26, 37–41, 46 father(-figure), 21, 113 faux-naı¨vete´, 131 Femme rompue (La), 124 fiction, 3, 31, 32, 42, 45, 53, 67, 69, 83, 121, 122, 123, 124 fictional/fictionality, 9, 23, 53 Fils, 106 first-person, 7, 8, 12–13, 15, 17, 18, 24, 27, 33, 35, 75, 78, 89, 98, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109, 115, 121, 122, 124, 126, 127, 130, 131 Flaubert, Gustave, 60 focalisation, 8, 15 Foucault, Michel, 73 Fowler, Alastair, 91 free indirect speech, 13, 18, 126 Freud, Sigmund, 32, 38 Garnier, Dominique, 70 Gatard, Marie, 70 gateways (lieux de me´moire), 43, 59, 115 Genette, Ge´rard, 4, 7–9, 15, 26, 37, 50–52, 53, 66, 107 genre, 2, 5, 29, 90–93, 106–08 geographical, 28–29, 52–55, 56–59, 118 George, Stefan, 120 guilt/guilty, 70, 87, 105 Handke, Peter, 120 hermeneutic, 31, 79, 103, 105, 108 hijacking, 78 histoire, 26–28, 35, 36, 37, 41, 43, 44, 45, 98, 99 historical/history, 3, 4, 41–45, 50, 69, 70, 72, 86 documents, 122, 123 facts, 70, 71, 82, 88, 89 novel, 85, 89 writing, 85, 88, 131 Hockney, David, 66 homogeneity/homogeneous (see also sameness), 92, 110, 111 Hueston, Penelope, 89 Hutcheon, Linda, 90, 114 Hyperrealists, 66

identity, 4, 5, 8, 10–11, 14–24, 31, 36, 55, 62, 74, 86, 87, 102, 104, 105, 107, 114, 120, 126, 127 impersonal/impersonality, 7, 12, 15, 76, 83, 101 intertextual/intertextuality, 89, 90, 111 ironical/irony, 3, 24, 66, 115 Iser, Wolfgang, 93 Jalousie (La), 10, 14 James, Henry, 52 Jardin, Pascal, 70–71 Joye, Jean-Claude, 10, 90, 95, 97, 98 Le Cle´zio, Jean-Marie Gustave, 93 Le Tan, Pierre, 112 Lecarme, Pierre, 106–07 Lecarme-Tabone, E´liane, 106–07 list, 56, 72–74, 96, 117–18, 126 London, 116, 119, 129 Lukacs, Georg, 91 Maison de rendez-vous (La), 46 Manchette, Jean-Patrick, 93 Manon Lescaut, 8, 37 Marcel, 8, 9, 13, 23, 104 Marxist, 91 memory/memories, 11, 17, 19, 21–23, 35, 58, 71, 76, 78, 80, 87, 114, 127 assimilated, 78 borrowed, 79 collective, 36, 87 metaphor/metaphorical, 3, 38, 118, 119 mimesis/mimetic, 49, 50–51, 52, 60, 66, 126 mise en abyme, 16, 104 mode retro, 4, 69–71, 74 Modernist, 24 Modiano, Patrick. Works of Boulevards de ceinture (Les), 64, 76, 84, 102, 110, 114, 115 Chien de printemps, 25, 42–44, 49, 59, 61, 62, 64–65, 109, 110, 113–14, 115, 120, 125, 127 Cirque passe (un), 10, 110, 115 De si braves garc¸ons, 10, 12–14, 42, 64, 106, 107, 113 Des inconnues, 5, 121, 124–131, 133

Index Dimanches d’aouˆt, 10, 61, 63, 97, 100, 109, 110, 115, 127 Dora Bruder, 121–24, 129, 130 Du plus loin de l’oubli, 7, 115–121 Fleurs de ruine, 10, 12, 25, 27–32, 43, 59, 76, 79, 97, 106, 110, 114, 115 Lacombe Lucien, 86–87, 133 Livret de famille, 10, 12, 14, 24, 42, 45, 64, 69, 82, 84, 87, 89, 103, 106, 109, 116, 120 Place de l’e´toile (La), 75, 82, 83, 89–90, 123 Poupe´e blonde, 112 Quartier perdu, 10, 12, 22, 28, 38, 53– 60, 87, 97, 100, 101, 103, 105, 110, 114, 120, 125, 128 Remise de peine, 64, 106 Ronde de nuit (La), 63, 64, 75, 77, 82, 83, 84, 86, 97, 102 Rue des Boutiques Obscures, 11–12, 15, 22, 28, 29, 42, 59, 62, 76, 90, 95– 96, 101, 110, 115, 116 Villa Triste, 19, 87, 133 Vestiaire de l’enfance, 10, 12, 14–22, 44, 76, 87, 101, 103, 107, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 125, 128, 129 Voyage de noces, 10, 33–41, 42, 59, 76, 99, 100, 101, 104, 107, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 121, 125, 128, 129, 130 Modiano Novel, the, 5, 109–121 Modiano studies, 4 mood, 49–52, 66, 82, 84 Morris, Alan, 67, 71 moral/morality, 82, 88 mother(-figure), 128 Nadja, 65 narration, 26–32, 36, 40–41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 56, 79–81, 95, 98, 99, 131 narrative of narratives, 37, 103 narrator degre´ ze´ro, 10, 12–13, 21, 23, 24, 76, 95, 101, 102, 126, 131 ‘deluded’, 7, 101, 102 ‘empty’, 10, 16, 36 extradiegetic, 8, 13 heterodiegetic, 8

165

homodiegetic, 8 intradiegetic, 8, 76 metadiegetic, 13, 76 Modiano’s, 10–14, 29 paradigmatic, 22 theories of, 7–9 world of, 9 Nettelbeck, Colin, 89 nouveau roman, 2, 10, 25, 38, 46, 132 Occupation, 4, 5, 36, 38, 45, 53, 69, 70, 71, 75, 76, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 100, 110 Œdipus, 26 ontological uncertainty, 3 Ophu¨ls, Marcel, 70 order, 26–36, 79, 84 origin, 8, 9, 12, 14 originality, 111, 112, 131 Other, 18, 43, 65, 85 palimpsest, 59 parody, 3, 52, 54, 66, 85, 89, 90, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 114, 132 past, 4, 17, 18, 20, 21, 34, 36, 42, 58, 99, 127 layers/levels of, 25, 33, 46, 59 recovery of, 57 retrievability of, 20 photographer/photography, 42–44, 60– 66, 113, 114, 127–28 Plato, 51, 64 play, 3, 88 point of view (see also focalisation), 7, 10, 17, 44, 113 popular fiction/literature/novel, 3, 93, 103–04, 112, 131 post-1960 fiction, 4, 5 postmodern/postmodernism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 23–24, 46, 55, 59, 66–67, 85, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 97, 100, 104, 106, 107, 108, 111, 131–32 present, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 34–35, 86, 99, 127 preterite, 32, 34, 122 proof, 64, 65, 127 proper names, 53, 54, 55, 56, 66, 82, 87, 96, 115

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Patrick Modiano: A Self-Conscious Art

Proust, Marcel, 4, 8–9, 13, 22, 24, 37, 89, 104, 105 readability, 4, 49 reader anticipation of, 93 condemnation of, 75, 88 embarassment of, 108 expectations of, 90, 92, 98, 108 realism, 3, 71, 95 realist/realistic, 11, 49, 54, 125 re´cit, 26–28, 37, 41, 43, 45, 76, 98, 99 recognition, 83 reference, 74, 82, 127 referent, 59, 63, 64, 65, 85, 127 Regalado, Nancy Freeman, 74 repetition, 31 representation, 60, 82, 127 mechanics of, 50 modes of, 53, 65, 66 non-referential, 56 responsibility, 19, 70, 84, 86, 87, 88 retrospective, 8, 12, 17–19, 46, 101, 126, 127 Ricœur, Paul, 33 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 10, 14, 15, 46, 93 Romantic, 60, 61, 66, 91 Rome, 110 Russian Formalists, 26, 37 sameness (see also homogeneity), 110, 112, 130, 131 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 27 self-conscious/self-consciousness, 1, 2, 24, 47, 67, 88, 108, 115, 118, 120, 131, 132, 133 ‘self-narrated monologue’, 18, 126

self-parody, 90, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 131 self-referential, 110, 111 Sevran, Pascal, 70 sjuzhet, 26, 37–41, 46 spatio-temporal, 57, 118 subgenre, 89, 90–93, 110, 111, 113, 114, 115, 131 subversion/subversive, 89, 94, 108 ‘suspension of disbelief, 52, 98 Suisse/Switzerland, 19, 84, 87, 109, 110, 120, 129 S/Z, 111 teleological/teleology, 46, 100 te´moignage, 121, 124 tense, 27, 32–37, 45, 79–81, 122, 125, 126 textual, 56, 57, 65 third-person, 13, 18, 98, 101 time anarchy, 34 subjective experience of, 33 token/type, 92–93 traces, 23, 54, 58, 63, 65, 108 transparency, 22 unreality, 49, 52, 53, 54, 55, 66, 82, 97 verisimilitude/vraisemblance, 52, 66, 85, 97 voice, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 17, 66, 75, 84 voix blanche, 78, 127 web, 46, 57, 123 writing, 19–24, 36, 40, 54, 59, 60, 63–65, 73, 103, 104, 113, 114