By West Camel.
I.
The Nobel committee is famous for its lack of transparency; and, as a result, its decision-making attracts wide-ranging and colourful interpretations.
The committee’s reason for awarding this year’s Prize for Literature to Patrick Modiano – ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation’ – manages to be simultaneously convoluted and gnomic. But what does seem clear is that, by awarding the prize not just to a French writer, but to this particular French writer, the committee is somehow nodding towards the concerns contemporary France has about itself and about its history.
France’s current malaise – which, it should be noted, it shares in many ways with the rest of the developed world – has a name, l’immobilisme: a social and political holding pattern that has persisted for the past thirty years, since the end of the period known as Les Trentes Glorieuses: the preceding thirty years of economic and social boom, when France repaired the enormous damage wrought by two world wars, and made its population some of the most affluent in the world.
But the post-war social-democratic certainties are being undermined and the establishment seems to have no remedy for the resulting ‘insecurit é‘. Francois Hollande is the most unpopular French President in recent history. His predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, was the previous holder of that title – and is now widely tipped to be the next president, purely on the grounds that the alternative would be the far-right Front National. It is as if France, transfixed by the ghost of its war-time experience, is unable to progress in any new direction.
In his Nobel acceptance speech, Patrick Modiano seems to acknowledge the reasons for this immobility, but at the same time offers a small flame of hope:
Those who lived in that Paris [of the Nazi Occupation] wanted to forget it very quickly or at least only remember the day-to-day details, the ones which presented the illusion that everyday life was after all not so very different from the life they led in normal times. It was all a bad dream, with vague remorse for having been in some sense survivors. Later on, when their children asked them questions about that period and that Paris, their answers were evasive. Or else they remained silent as if they wanted to rub out those dark years from their memory and keep something hidden from us. But faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves.
Born in Paris in 1945, Modiano’s life and work encompass both periods – Les Trentes Glorieuses and the years of l’immobilisme. Any author writing about contemporary experience in their own country can be seen as providing some kind of historical record. Modiano, however, goes further. His oeuvre – upward of twenty novels, plus poetry, plays and children’s fiction – acts as commentary and analysis of the French post-war experience. Interviewed about his Nobel win, he says: ‘I have the impression of writing the same book for forty-five years’. That book could be said to be a study of the disruption of the Nazi Occupation and its effects on identity in France, and an investigation into – as the Nobel Committee hints – the construction of memory and, indeed, of fiction itself.
Suspended Sentences (translated by Mark Polozzotti, Yale University Press, 2014) – the most recent English-language publication of Modiano work – collects three novellas: Afterimage (‘Chien de printemps’, Éditions du Seuil, 1993); Suspended Sentences (‘Remise de peine’, Éditions du Seuil, 1988) and Flowers of Ruin (‘Fleurs de ruine’ Éditions du Seuil, 1991); a trio that highlights the concerns and techniques that dominated Modiano’s work over the previous decades.
Afterimage renders the entropy of middle age through an investigation into a memory. It is the memory of a photographer, Francis Jansen, a man who, by the narrator’s account, was never completely present, even when he was a part of the narrator’s young life. For Jansen is a photographer who aims for silence in his work, and is interested in the narrator’s writing because he’s intrigued by the idea of ‘managing to create silence with words’.
If he has been writing the same book for over forty-five years, it seems that Modiano is on a similar quest: attempting to shape silence out of the clamour that occurred before his birth. Or perhaps it is the other way round: Modiano is questioning how a bang could have rendered a nation mute – how such a deafening noise could have led to a silence – and is trying to fill that taciturnity with words. This dichotomy, combined with the date of his birth, seem key to Modiano’s work. Again, in his Nobel acceptance speech, he says:
…for me, the Paris of the occupation was always a kind of primordial darkness. Without it I would never have been born. That Paris never stopped haunting me, and my books are sometimes bathed in its veiled light.
Flowers of Ruin articulates this dynamic in a way typical of Modiano: through an investigation into a crime. The detective novel formula obsesses Modiano – but not to the extent that he follows it to its logical conclusion. The big question in Flowers of Ruin seems to be: why did a young couple commit a murder/suicide? This event occurs in the 1930s and the investigation takes place in the present day. Key elements of the puzzle are provided, but with the narrator side-tracked by his own memories and experiences, they are never pieced together. We are ever further from the solution; and the silence at the heart of the crime seems ever louder. This creates space for the imagination.
The novella Suspended Sentences goes to the heart of Modiano’s technique, his way of setting up a structural skeleton, then allowing imagination (and imaginative uncertainty) not only to fill in the blanks, but to overlay a new, sometimes alternative narrative on that structure: to create words out of silence and, perhaps, a silence out of words.
Drawing on Modiano’s own childhood, the narrator, Patoche, reminisces about an unsettled period in his life. With father and mother away, he and his brother are sent to a small town outside Paris, to stay with a group of his parents’ friends. This dislocation is multiplied when Patoche and his brother are moved to a neighbours’ house for a number of days; and again when Patoche is expelled from his new school, because, significantly, his carer lies about being his mother. This group of friends do in fact form an ersatz family for the boys, but the relationships and fidelities within the group are unclear. There is no current of pain here; no sense of abandonment; no intimation that the boys feel neglected. Instead there is the overriding sense that, offstage, a whole different story is playing out – a story of gangs, crime, and things marked as ‘serious’. These activities are rooted firmly in the black market days of the Occupation and are the bonds that hold this group together.
Patoche has little information with which to build the real story of the criminal fraternity upon which he and his brother have been billeted; and as a reminiscing adult he does not have much more: just a few newspaper articles and chance meetings. What the children do is imagine; they build fictions around the comings and goings of the glamourous and enigmatic characters who visit the house.
The boys employ this imagination elsewhere too – to the town’s small, abandoned chateau. Their father claims to know the owner, a marquis, and the boys’ favourite game is to imagine his lifestyle at the wrecked mansion. Crucial here is the way Modiano presents these flights of fantasy. Clearly denoting them as acts of imagination – stories the boys tell each other in bed at night – the register he uses presents them as fact, constructing a logical whole from scraps of information:
We were both convinced of the same thing: on those nights, Eliot Salter, the marquis de Caussade, stayed in the great hall of the chateau. […]
The marquis was sitting in a velvet armchair in front of the massive fireplace where Grosclaude had lit a fire. Behind him, the table was set: silver candelabras, lace, and crystal. We entered the great hall, my brother and I. The only light was from the fire in the fireplace and the flame of the candles.
Patoche and his brother have created a mature fiction.
This technique – combining received data with imaginative effort – does more than comment on how fiction works. It also suggests how France has processed the trauma of the Occupation. In all his books, Modiano uses records and registers, certificates and official reports to fix identities and events. Already a highly developed bureaucracy, World War II and the Nazi Occupation introduced a new dynamic to French officialdom. On the instigation of the Nazi occupiers, the Vichy Government enforced German law, specifically regarding Jews. Jewish registers were instituted, as were new rules about movement, work and travel.
Modiano tracks these phenomena, not just during the Occupation, but subsequently – through to the present day. As well as war records, he presents directories of telephone numbers, addresses and professions. These receptacles of human information represent anchors for identity; anchors that are inevitably slipped. The war, Modiano seems to intimate, disrupted identity – not just that of the French nation, but of individuals; and long after the war, identities remain fluid and in various states of uncertainty.
II.
Modiano’s books are intensely autobiographical – in terms of setting and incident, but also in terms of this description of identity as something almost protean. Modiano’s mother was a Belgian Flemish actress, and, while he lived and was schooled in France, in his early life her parents were Modiano’s principal carers, so his first language was Flemish rather than French. Modiano’s father was Jewish on his father’s side – descended from a Sephardic Jewish family based in Salonica in modern-day Greece. During the Occupation, German law demanded that Modiano Senior register and wear a yellow star. He refused to do so, and spent the rest of the Occupation running the risk of being rounded up and deported to the death camps.
Classification as a tool of violence, and something that can and should be resisted, is a theme Modiano returns to again and again. In Honeymoon (‘Voyages de noces’, 1993 translated by Barbara Wright), the narrator, Jean B., is obsessed with accounting for the suicide of Ingrid Rigaud, one member of a couple he met as teenager in the 1960s. The honeymoon of the title is the holiday the couple take to Provence during the Occupation, when Ingrid is only sixteen. The couple
crossed the demarcation line [from the ‘Occupied Zone’ into the ‘Free Zone’] illegally. Ingrid had a false identity card in the name of Ingrid Teyrsen, married name Rigaud, which aged her by three years.
At the opening of the novel, Jean discovers Ingrid’s suicide by reading a paragraph in a newspaper in Milan; significantly,
They called her by her maiden name, though she was still married to Rigaud. But who was to know that, apart from Rigaud, me, and a bureaucrat or two? Could they really be blamed for such as mistake, and after all wasn’t it more reasonable to give her a maiden name, the one she had gone by for the first twenty years of her life?
Jean explores these questions, not only by tracing the lives of Ingrid and her husband from notes he has taken, not only using Modiano’s typical method of imaginative construction – building out of a few facts a fiction that becomes a truth in its fictional universe – but also in his own actions. An explorer leaving on a trip to Brazil, Jean dupes his friends and his wife by not getting onto the plane at Orly. Returning to Paris, he wanders the outskirts, tracking down hotels he has lived in, and finally the apartment Ingrid and Rigaud occupied as a young couple.
Jean goes so far as to inhabit Rigaud’s mid-century identity and imagines his paranoia on ‘honeymoon’ in wartime Provence, fearing discovery by the authorities. Having witnessed an agent, referred to as ‘the dark patch’, investigating the register at the hotel, Jean/Rigaud dreams that men ‘guided by the dark patch’ are checking the whole, empty building. But Rigaud has a master key:
As soon as he heard them open the door to the room next to theirs he would wake Ingrid and they’d slip into the room on the other side. And this game of cat and mouse would continue through all the rooms on the floor. The men really hadn’t the slightest chance of finding them, because they’d both be hidden in the depths of the shadows of the Provencal.
As he digs deeper into the story of Ingrid and Rigaud, Jean’s own, modern-day identity seems to become ever more unstable. He imagines the moment of Ingrid’s first disappearance – the time when Rigaud helped to change her identity and escape into the Free Zone, as easily as walking into the next room of a hotel. But Jean also recalls the last time he met Ingrid, depressed and alone in modern Paris, ‘in the depths of that silence which I still had no experience of at the time, but which is so familiar to me today.’
This recalls the silence referred to at the beginning of Afterimage, suggesting Modiano’s attempts to carve out a silence with words. Modiano’s parents met during the Occupation. He was born in the last year of the war. ‘Before Modiano’, before his existence, the world was a sure and fixed place. It was disrupted by the war and the Occupation, which led to his birth. After the war, after his birth, identity becomes fluid, noisy, tenuous. In his Nobel acceptance speech Modiano remarks: ‘my own generation is a transitional one’. Could it be that the silence he seeks is achieved by fixing an identity – by ending a life, as Ingrid does in Honeymoon? Or by the creation of fiction?
Modiano most clearly investigates this idea – of drawing identity and existence out of the void; of the activity required to maintain that identity and existence; and of an imminent return to silence –in Missing Person (‘Rue des boutiques obscures’, 1978, translated by Daniel Weissbort), which opens with the line ‘I am nothing.’ Modiano’s narrator, Guy Roland, has lived with amnesia for a decade. Employed by a detective agency, Guy attempts to discover his true identity, which he lost during the Nazi Occupation of Paris. His search takes him down many avenues of investigation – meetings with potential friends he has forgotten lead him to new friends and acquaintances. Supported by the typical Modiano bank of data – this time the directories and registers owned by the agency for which Guy works – he builds himself a variety of personae. Furnished at one meeting with a photograph he believes depicts himself, his subsequent refrain to all he meets becomes ‘don’t you think this looks like me?’ – a question that rarely receives a positive answer.
At one point, becoming convinced he is one Freddie Howard de Luz, Guy pays a visit to a chateau near Paris where this ‘persona’ spent his childhood. Outside the station, seeing a child roller-skating, he struggles to distinguish memory from imagination:
I’ve played there too, I thought, a long time ago. This quiet place really did remind me of something. My grandfather, Howard de Luz, used to meet me on the Paris train or was it the other way round? On summer evenings, I used to wait on the station platform accompanied by my grand-mother, born Mabel Donahue.
Modiano here folds together information Guy has gleaned from ‘official’ records, tips and hints he has acquired, and imagination. Guy doubts his memory – ‘was it the other way round?’ – yet in the very next sentence boldly cites an imagined scene as fact (‘I used to wait…’).
As Missing Person progresses, this combination of doubt and certainty, of fixed truth and imaginative exercise, builds to the extent that, when someone does recognise Guy, and gives him his ‘real’ name – Pedro McEvoy – the ‘truth’ rings only as true as the imaginative excursions that Guy/Pedro has so far undertaken.
Furnished with what appears to be ‘hard evidence’, Guy/Pedro pursues a particular line of investigation which suggests a wartime attempt to cross the French border into Switzerland. Having suffered ten years of amnesia, he finds himself able to recall the events in perfect detail:
Now, all I need do is close my eyes. The events preceding our departure for Megève come back to me bit by bit. The large, brightly lit windows of the former Zaharoff residence, in Avenue Hoche, and Wildmer’s disjointed sentences.
Yet this certainty is immediately undermined: he also recalls ‘other less tangible details – the sound of Wildmer’s voice, rough, so low you could barely hear him – all these things serve as my Ariandne’s thread.’
Modiano questions the act of memory, conflates it with the act of imagining, and draws into question the nature of identity. At the same time he deconstructs the process of fictionalisation – or his process of writing fiction.
For nearly all Modiano’s protagonists are cyphers of himself: many are writers; many have fathers arrested during the war; many have mothers who were actresses. As is the case with Guy Roland/Pedro McEvoy, information from directories and registers form the bases of Modiano’s novels. Starting with a birth certificate, an entry in a street directory or a report, Modiano builds a world which he then inhabits, wearing the clothes and assuming the name of the particular character on whom he is focussing. As author, Modiano’s own identity is fluid – merging with and splitting from the identities of his characters. Deep within this dynamic there is, perhaps, a reflection of both a national desire to re-establish secure identities and a national fear that such fixings, such classification, are somehow dangerous.
III.
But it is not only personal identity Modiano questions. Places and locales in his work are similarly fluid. And here is where Modiano directly challenges France’s memory of its own history.
Known for his intimate knowledge of Paris, Modiano’s writing is often described as evoking the city at a particular time – during the war, and in those post-war years before the economic effects of Les Trentes Glorieuses brought gentrification to the traditionally mixed-class arrondissements.
His novels are littered with long Parisian walks. Time during these excursions is not linear: each corner, caf é and apartment building holds memories of other periods. The city is another receptacle of narrative for Modiano – alongside his registers, directories and reports. And each neighbourhood can refer to another place or time. A boulevard is described as ‘rural’; a whole quartier is a desert; the light in an avenue suggestive of Le Midi or Algeria:
Is it the too-harsh light, the silence of the streets, those contrasts of the shade and the setting sun, the other evening, on the facades of the buildings in the Boulevard Soult? The past and the present merge in my mind through a phenomenon of superimposition.
In the same way Modiano overlays imagined narratives on facts, he overlays other times and other places on actual locations.
But he is no flâneur. These walks are not d érives, however aimless they may seem at first. There are quests behind them – for a missing person, an identity, the pieces of a story. In his walks through neighbourhoods formerly familiar he discovers holes, gaps: apartment blocks pulled down; the P ériph érique cutting through quartiers previously bustling with life. Yet these places still hold the scents of their history. In Flowers of Ruin Modiano describes the Champs-Elys ées: ‘It’s like that pond a British novelist talks about, at the bottom of which, in layered deposits, lie the echoes of the voice of every passerby…’
The efforts to leave the Occupation behind, to rub out the past, as he says in his Nobel speech, are futile. But what exactly are the events that Modiano believes are being erased – and of which he cannot help but hear the echoes? Much of his work hints at the horrors of the Occupation; and his major concerns of disrupted identity and shifting place refer obliquely to the crimes of the Vichy Government and its Nazi overseers. Yet most of his books do not deal with these issues head-on.
And then there is Dora Bruder.
Dora Bruder (‘Dora Bruder’, 1997, translated by Joanna Kilmartin) is, perhaps, the novel Modiano took forty-five years to write. This is where all his techniques and preoccupations come sharply into focus. Labelled as a ‘fiction’, it is the true story of a real girl who went missing during the Occupation of Paris. Jewish, but sent to a Catholic boarding school, her father neglects to register her when required to by the authorities – placing her outside of the net of Nazi/Vichy classification. However, when she runs away from the school, her father reports her disappearance to the police – marking himself as a law-breaker, and acknowledging her existence and Jewish identity. With painful inevitably, father and daughter are eventually rounded up. Modiano discovers their names on a list of Jews transported to Auschwitz.
All this information Modiano gleans from newspaper reports, police records, registers and other documentation. But much of this material is buried. For, like the eradicated neighbourhoods, flattened during Les Trentes Gloriouses, the huge quantities of data collected by French officials for the Vichy Government and their Nazi superiors have been destroyed. Attempts have been made to erase the truth about the activities that took place in occupied France. To discover Dora Bruder’s life, Modiano must not only, detective-like, doggedly follow all lines of inquiry, but he must imagine fictively what happened to Dora. He must find examples of other young women on the wrong side of the law, other Jews, similar missing people.
While many of these themes are in line with Modiano’s characteristic method of building fiction, Dora Bruder could be said to be atypical of his work. He addresses the reader as himself, the author, not as a cypher or persona of Patrick Modiano. He discusses when he first came across the newspaper report of Dora’s disappearance, and how this prompted him not to write Dora Bruder, but instead to write Honeymoon, using Ingrid in Dora’s place:
It seemed impossible to me that I should ever find the faintest trace of Dora Bruder. At the time, the emptiness I felt prompted me to write a novel, Honeymoon, it being as good a way as any of continuing to fix my attention on Dora Bruder, and perhaps, I told myself, of elucidating or divining something about her, a place she had been, a detail of her life.
This could be a description of why Modiano is writing fiction at all: elucidating and divining through fiction some detail of the real world – of occupied and post-war France.
Dora Bruder is published in English as Search Warrant. Whatever the thinking behind this translation decision, it almost suggests that this ‘fiction’ is too real; that it requires further fictionalisation: an identity that is at one remove from a biographical account of a life that ended in horror.
This shying away from the actual horrors of the Holocaust is perfectly exemplified by a moment towards the end of the novel when Modiano prints, in full, a letter he has discovered. It is from one Robert Tartakovsky, an inmate of a detention centre, waiting to be put on the transport to the death camps.
Tartakovsky complains, but only mildly. He cajoles his correspondent about family issues and who should receive which of his possessions. Domestic and house-keeping issues are mixed with urges for his fellow Jews to escape where they can, with trepidation about what lies ahead, and, heartbreakingly, with the certainty that he will see his friends again. ‘Back soon’ he says. And again, ‘Back soon.’
Modiano intimates his belief that, like Dora, ‘the sender and his family had disappeared in their turn’ – had been sent to the death camps. He leaves it to the reader to fill in the details, to imagine the horrors that were to come for Robert and Dora.
In this way Dora Bruder does resemble the rest of Modiano’s work: sparse, unadorned prose that presents scenes, images and thoughts in such a way that the reader must invest the text with their own imagination, must utilise their own knowledge, their own data banks and experience, to populate the interstices between the facts and Modiano’s utterances. As reader and author act upon the text and its subject, Dora, like so many of Modiano’s characters, moves in and out of silence, from light to shade and back again.
IV.
In his quest to recover recent French history, to illuminate the darkness created by the Occupation and by the collective turning away in the post-war years, in trying to give a voice to the silenced, the missing, and the erased, perhaps Modiano is actually searching for another sort of silence. By fictionalising Dora Bruder – first by renaming her Ingrid and, as he tells us, conflating her with other women, then by calling this document of his search a ‘fiction’ – he is giving her some kind of peace, resolution.
Caught between his Jewish parentage and his French nationality, Modiano is continually searching for a way to reconcile the crimes of the Occupation and the motivations of those that perpetrated them. His method is to fictionalise Occupation experiences and to present half a century of reactions to these seismic events – his fictions so many geodesics that contradict the passage of time, the changes to place, and the very idea of disconnection.
Writing in Dora Bruder about his process of creating Honeymoon, Modiano says:
Today, it occurs to me that I had had to write 200 pages before I captured, unconsciously, a vague gleam of the truth.
It was a matter of a few lines: ‘The train stopped at Nation. The line didn’t go any farther. Rigaud and Ingrid had gone past Bastille, where they ought to have changed for the Porte Dor ée. They came out of the metro into a big snowfield […] The sledge cut through several little streets to get to the Boulevard Soult.’
Those back streets lay behind the Rue de Picus and the Holy Heart of Mary, the convent from which Dora Bruder made her escape, one December evening when it had probably been snowing in Paris.
That was the only moment in the book when, without knowing it, I came close to her in time and space.
In his Nobel speech, he expresses this drive once again, even more poetically:
Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies.
Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean.
Is this aimless drifting the best they can ask for, those of Modiano’s generation, who, faced with their parents’ silence, had to ‘work it all out’ themselves? Certainly directionless meandering, or even immobilisme, is better than the horror Dora Bruder, Robert Tartakovsky and millions of others faced.
Perhaps it is for another generation to find some new direction; a generation that doesn’t see the ghosts of the Occupation on every corner. Perhaps it is for another profession than novelist. Or another novelist than Modiano, who has fulfilled his vocation by making words from silence, and silence from words.
N.B. The English-language translations referred to in this piece are:
Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano, translated by Barbara Wright; David. R Godine, Publisher, 1995
Missing Person by Patrick Modiano, translated by Daniel Weissbort; David. R Godine, Publisher, 2005.
Search Warrant by Patrick Modiano, translated by Joanna Kilmartin; Harvill Secker, 2014.
Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polozzotti, Yale University Press, 2014.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
West Camel is a writer, reviewer and editor. He has contributed work to a variety of publications and organisations, including Culture Compass, Writers’ Hub, Ahh… and Korea’s List magazine. He was an editor for Dalkey Archive Press, where he edited Best European Fiction 2015 and is now editing for new press, Orenda Books. He has also written a novel, several short stories, and scripts.
