French Forum

As might be expected of a Nobel Prize winner, Patrick Modiano stands out from the crowd. His œuvre is highly personal, and highly literary, thanks to its distinctive interplay of “fiction et diction” (Genette 2004). With each successive text, the same basic universe returns, albeit with slight variations. Typically, an autodiegetic narrator—the novelist’s ludically fictionalized, and sometimes autofictional, alter ego—embarks on a quest back into the past, because a now-distant event, or an abiding mystery, continues to impact upon the present. Revisiting once familiar sites (usually in Paris), this protagonist recalls (or occasionally imagines) old experiences, and seeks to preserve, through writing, the little that can still be saved from oblivion. Themes such as identity, difference, loss, remembrance, and forgetfulness predominate; characters and character types recur; a plethora of genres (biography, the historical novel, the roman noir, the love story, amongst others) intermingle; there is a constant va-et-vient between the real and the invented; and temporal levels collapse into a “présent éternel” (mirroring the workings of memory). Stylistically, a self-aware use of intertexts shows that literary creativity subtends the retrospection; the narrative combines with a meta-narrative, undermining any suspension of disbelief; and circularity proliferates, all of which reinforces the lack of final resolution, and ensures that each text is irrevocably non-totalizing. Incapable of being shoehorned into established categories, l’œuvre modianesque is, in a word, unique.

Against this general backdrop, the present article will explore Modiano’s relationship to the Holocaust, in order to situate him vis-à-vis his peers, the members of “the second generation” or “those who come after” the Shoah,² and to assess the extent to which he falls into, or remains detached from, this recognizable group of writers. More particularly, the analysis [End Page 13] which follows will have three broad centres of attention: firstly, Modiano’s family background; secondly, his writing; and finally, the question of how well or how poorly his writing reflects the Nazis’ attempted genocide. However, not all of his texts will be considered. He currently has a total of twenty-eight major works behind him, so the spotlight will be trained principally, but by no means entirely, on the two parts of his œuvre which seem to reveal the most about his treatment of the Holocaust, that is to say his first three novels and Dora Bruder. From this targeted, but nonexclusive, focus, it will emerge that, in his depiction of World War Two, Modiano’s aforementioned uniqueness is once again to the fore. He will be seen to be a second-generation, post-Shoah novelist who is haunted by the Occupation, but who, on the whole, and with the glaring exception of Dora Bruder, barely talks about the Holocaust at all.

At first glance, Patrick Modiano appears to be a typical author “who comes after,” for he too is marked by the belatedness and the legacy of absence that commentators such as Marianne Hirsch and Eva Hoffman (on the second generation), and Susan Rubin Suleiman (on the 1.5 generation), see as characteristic of these writers. Born on 30 July 1945, of a Belgian, Flemish-speaking actress (Luisa Colpeyn) and a Paris-born Sephardic Jew (Albert Modiano), he did not live through the war years, so experiences them as a hole. Yet as he discloses in his most profoundly autobiographical text, Un pedigree, he believes these years, and especially the unwholesome period of the Occupation, to be fundamental to his inheritance: “le terreau—ou le fumier—d’où je suis issu” (20).

Unlike many mothers and fathers of “those who come after,” Albert Modiano was not deported during the war, but this did not mean that, as he was growing up, Patrick had first-hand sources to inform him about the early 1940s. He was neglected by his parents, and regularly entrusted to a host of other people and to boarding schools all over France (from which he would often run away).³ This sense of solitude and upheaval was subsequently increased by an event that was to taint his life and his future writing—the...