Virages des visions de Patrick Modiano

Abstract

This article focuses on some peculiarities in the writings of the French author Patrick Modiano, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 2014, and deals with novels that have made him famous in the national and world art space. The article notes that P. Modiano’s novel mentality is characterized by the synthesis of such basic values as the development of a fabulous, external canvas and focusing on the internal structures of the individual self. The characters of his novels relay the psychological interior of a person imbued with values and consciousness of modern urban life. P. Modiano’s leading semantic plots depict the complex mentality of the sensitive person and the vicissitudes of his dramatic fate in the context of the Hypercity. The landscape of the Supercity or the Hypercity in P. Modiano’s novels is organically linked to understanding a life as a journey of obscurity. For self-narrators to live a full life means to wander through the drips of their memory, to travel the real and imaginary streets of their own prehistory, which turns out to be their main life story in the end. Prominent place in the novels of P. Modiano belongs to the development of the mythopoetics of Paris, which is interpreted as a purely “inner” city in the psychological interior of the self-narrators. The specificity of the novel depiction of Paris lies in the interpretation of this metropolis as a highly detailed toponymic mythologeme. The key point in the article is that each self-narrator is sooner or later confronted with an internal need to investigate his own story. That is why P. Modiano’s self-narrators always delve into complex, contradictory files of their individual self and become a kind of “detective for themselves”. This plot outline becomes the basis for unfolding a holistic ontological concept in P. Modiano’s novels that reveals its marker and matrix features in each of his works.