Morag Young

Clarity and obscurity in the work of Patrick Modiano
Morag Young
Patrick Modiano is a prolific writer who has written over twenty novels
since his literary début in 1968, as well as other works including children’s books,
a film script, and, most recently, an autobiographical fragment, Un Pedigree,
published early this year. His writing, which revolves round his personal identity
quest, has remained remarkably homogeneous over the past 37 years: his novels
invariably describe how a first-person narrator, who bears a distinct resemblance
to the author, returns to the past to search for his (or in a few cases, her) origins.
This quest is similar to the detective story in that it involves the narrator in trying
to unravel a mystery but, in marked contrast to the traditional roman à énigme, this
mystery remains unsolved and narrative closure is not achieved. Modiano’s use of
this format with little change over such a long period has aroused expectations in
his reading public, who eagerly await each new permutation on the same theme.
The apparent uniformity of Modiano’s writing is, however, deceptive. On
closer inspection, his work reveals itself to be characterised by contrasts which
give it a paradoxical quality: his quest for identity involves not only quest but
flight, leads him back into the past in order to make sense of the present and
opposes memory and forgetting. Alan Morris’s recent study of the author 1 is
constructed entirely round the theme of oppositions in Modiano’s fiction, which
Morris perceives as pervaded by ambiguity. In the introduction to this book,
Morris provides a long list of bipolar tendencies which he sees as underlying
Modiano’s writing:
Présent/passé, remémoration/oubli, construction/anéantissement, association/
dissociation, modernisme/classicisme, fixité/dérive, intégration/marginalisation,
approche/ recul, enfance/âge adulte, bonheur/douleur, innocence/culpabilité,
positif/ négatif, vérité/mensonge, certitude/mystère, réalité/rêve, clair/obcur,
présence/absence, vie/mort (p. 11).
It is to the antepenultimate pair of opposites, clair/obscur, that I wish to turn
in this short article, where I shall address the subject of clarity and obscurity in
Modiano’s oeuvre. I intend to interpret these terms in quite a wide sense, first
looking at the tension between clarity and obscurity in Modiano’s use of style and
genre before turning to more concrete examples of his use of black and white
imagery in his novels.
Firstly, in order to understand the ambiguity at the heart of Modiano’s
work, it is necessary to examine his reasons for writing. These have been very
clearly stated by the author himself:
1
Alan Morris, Patrick Modiano (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000).
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Comme tous les gens qui n’ont ni terroir ni racines, je suis obsédé par ma
préhistoire. Et ma préhistoire, c’est la période trouble et honteuse de
l’Occupation: j’ai toujours eu le sentiment, pour d’obscures raisons d’ordre
familial, que j’étais né de ce cauchemar. Les lumières crépusculaires de cette
époque sont pour moi ce que devait être la Gironde pour Mauriac ou la
Normandie pour La Varende; c’est de là que je suis issu. Ce n’est pas l’Occupation
historique que j’ai dépeinte dans mes trois premiers romans, c’est la lumière
incertaine de mes origines. Cette ambiance où tout se dérobe, où tout semble
vaciller… 2
Here the contrast between light and dark is apparent, as Modiano explains
his pressing need to recreate the murky period of the Occupation in order to
illuminate his origins. The writer carries out what amounts to a forensic
investigation, adopting the framework of the detective story in his efforts to shed
light on the mystery of his family’s past. As Todorov has observed, clarity of
language is a characteristic of the roman à énigme, to offset the complications
necessitated by a plot in which prospection and retrospection vie with each other,
as the first story, that of the crime, becomes intertwined with the second story,
that of the unravelling of the mystery surrounding it: ‘Et c’est de peur que cette
seconde histoire ne devienne elle-même opaque, ne jette une ombre inutile sur la
première, qu’on a tant recommandé de garder le style neutre et simple, de le
rendre imperceptible’. 3 Again, images of light and dark are in evidence.
Modiano’s use of conventions from the detective story is complex, so I shall
return to this subject later in this paper. What I would like to consider at this
point is whether his style is in fact characterised by the clarity which Todorov
considers appropriate for a detective-style investigation of a past mystery.
Modiano’s style is indeed noted for its purity: the author has described himself as
writing in ‘la langue française la plus classique’. 4 This choice of style is quite
surprising, considering the date at which he started writing, 1968, and the main
focus of his novels, the identity quest. His decision not to engage with the
revolutionary events which were taking place as he embarked on his literary
career but to return to the past, using a fairly conventional rather than an
innovative style in his search for self sets him apart from other writers, so that his
work cannot be considered to belong to any existing school. 5 He can, however,
be considered to have been instrumental in inaugurating a literary trend, that of
the mode rétro, involving the reassessment of the present by means of a return to
2
Jean-Louis Ezine, Les écrivains sur la sellette (Paris: Seuil, 1981, p. 22).
Tzvetan Todorov (1966) ‘Typologie du roman policier’ in Poétique de la prose (Paris: Seuil, 1971),
p. 59.
4
Jean-Louis Ezine, Sur la sellette: Patrick Modiano ou le passé antérieur, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 612 October 1975, p. 5.
5
See C.T. Mitchell and P. R. Côté, Shaping the Novel: Textual Interplay in the Fiction of Malraux,
Hébert and Modiano (Providence-Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996, p. 164).
3
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the Vichy period. 6 This period was still surrounded by secrecy and obfuscation
when Modiano started writing, so he adopted a clear style in order to shed light
on it. This contrast between purity of style and opaqueness of content persists
throughout his work.
Modiano’s least fictional novel, Dora Bruder (1997) provides the clearest
illustration of this contrast. In this book, he painstakingly recreates the
movements of a Jewish girl in Paris up to and including her deportation to
Auschwitz where she and her family perished. Onto her tale of flight, as she runs
away from home, and ultimate disappearance he projects his own subsequent
experience of absconding from boarding school, together with veiled references
to his brother’s untimely death. The work as a whole is a swingeing indictment of
French collaboration in the Holocaust, the extent of which Modiano sets out to
expose, methodically unearthing evidence of long-concealed crimes. His aim in
writing the book is expressed with the utmost clarity, using language which is at
once polished and lapidary, as the following quotation will demonstrate: ‘En
écrivant ce livre, je lance des appels comme des signaux de phare dont je doute
malheureusement qu’ils puissent éclairer la nuit. Mais j’espère toujours’ (p. 42).
This striking image of the writer’s role as a beacon illuminating a murky area
underlies the novel, which contains frequent references to the opposition between
light and darkness, retrieval and concealment, as in this example, where Modiano
underlines the difficulty of his task: ‘Il faut longtemps pour que resurgisse à la
lumière ce qui a été effacé’ (p. 13). By using a clear but refined style, Modiano
imparts an elegiac quality to this sombre tale of flight, disappearance and death.
The urgency of the task of turning the spotlight on the hidden crimes of the
Holocaust before all the evidence for them disappears is also reinforced by the
plainness and directness of the language he uses.
We have, then, an apparently clear dichotomy in Modiano’s writing
between clarity of style and darkness of subject matter. As stated at the beginning
of this article, however, Modiano’s work is characterised by ambiguity, so that
nothing is exactly as it seems. I now wish to consider briefly some aspects of his
use of language, which reveal underlying complexity, before moving on to
examine his use of genre, where he ludically adapts the rather simplistic
conventions of the traditional detective story to reflect the considerably more
complicated reality of life in an age of uncertainty.
Two linguistic features recur throughout Modiano’s writing, disrupting the
simplicity of his style by introducing an element of uncertainty. These are
pronoun switching and unorthodox tense usage, which I shall now examine in
turn. Pronoun switching is most in evidence in Modiano’s first novel, La Place de
l’Étoile, a dazzling exploration of the theme of identity in which the author creates
a protean hero, Raphael Schlemilovitch, who embarks on a picaresque exploration
of his Jewishness. In the second half of the novel, Modiano abandons the use of
6
See A. Morris, Collaboration and Resistance reviewed: Writers and the Mode Rétro in Post-Gaullist
France (New York-Oxford: Berg, 1992).
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the first person on several occasions, switching to both the second and the third
person singular and also to the first person plural. 7 This pronoun switching has a
profoundly disorientating effect on the reader, as the focus of the narrative is
abruptly and repeatedly altered. The technique, however, is extremely effective
in representing the multidimensional nature of the identity quest, in which
subjectivity and objectivity compete with each other as Schlemilovitch explores
both his relationship with his estranged Jewish father and his role as an aspiring
European writer. Though considerably less prominent in his subsequent novels,
pronoun switching persists throughout Modiano’s writing, destabilising the
narrative. In Rue des Boutiques Obscures, for example, the first-person narrator,
who, having lost his memory, is searching for his missing self, is mysteriously
transformed into the third person for the space of one chapter, further obscuring
his already confused identity. 8 In La Petite Bijou, a novel concerning a young girl’s
search for her lost mother, in which the two main protagonists already have
multiple identities conferred by the use of a variety of names, Modiano makes
brief but telling use of pronoun switching. At the end of the story, when the firstperson narrator finally comes to understand the nature of her quest, she becomes
detached from herself, seeing herself from outside: ‘Tu vas encore rester là
quelque temps, et après, ce sera fini. Tu es là parce que tu as voulu remonter une
dernière fois le cours des années pour essayer de comprendre’ (p. 147).
Modiano’s continued though discreet use of pronoun switching, then, underlines
the shifting focus which characterises the modern identity quest.
As far as tense usage is concerned, Modiano makes anarchic use of the
narrative tenses, introducing temporal instability into his writing. By constantly
changing from the narrative present to the passé composé and passé simple with
transitional use of the narrative imperfect, he switches the focus of events
between the present, the past seen from the present perspective and the past seen
from a more detached, objective standpoint. A short section in Les Boulevards de
ceinture, for example, describing the narrator’s first meeting with his estranged
father, starts in the passé composé: ‘C’est à dix-sept ans que je l’ai rencontré pour la
première fois’ (p. 77). The text then moves briefly into the past historic to
describe the first appearance of the father figure: ‘Un inconnu à la peau basanée,
au costume de flanelle sombre et qui se leva lorsqu’il m’aperçut’. After the father
has introduced himself, the passé composé reappears: ‘Nous nous sommes retrouvés
dehors’, followed by a narrative imperfect: ‘Il me souriait’. Finally, there is a
move into the narrative present: ‘Il pleut. Mon père et moi nous marchons côte à
côte, sans dire un mot’ (p. 77). A somewhat different instance of unconventional
tense usage occurs in Remise de peine, in which, as Jean-Michel Adam has pointed
out, 9 a section of narrative concerning a night time visit to a castle by the two
7
See La Place de l’Étoile, pp. 121-5, 128-32, 132-3, 141-3, 160-2 and 200-1.
See Rue des Boutiques Obscures, pp. 171-3.
9
See Jean-Michel Adam, Mémoire et fiction dans Remise de peine de Modiano in Doubrovsky,
Lejeune, Lejeune (eds), Autofictions et Cie (Ritm 6: Université de Paris X, 1993, pp. 43-57).
8
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young brothers is told in a mixture of conditional and imperfect tenses, so that it
is unclear if the visit actually took place or was merely envisaged. Tense mixing of
this type has been theorised by linguistics specialists, notably Anne Judge, who has
christened it le système multifocal. In this system, ‘il n’y a pas de point de vue
unique, mais une multiplicité de points de vue, selon le temps employé.
L’optique ressemble à celle d’une caméra qui change de position, d’angle et de
profondeur’. 10 Thus, as with Modiano’s use of pronoun switching, a shifting
perspective is revealed by his idiosyncratic use of tenses. I would argue, therefore,
that the apparent simplicity of his style is to some extent deceptive, concealing
hidden depths of meaning.
The tension between surface simplicity and underlying complexity is also
apparent in Modiano’s use of genre. As we have seen, Modiano uses a framework
for his search for self which superficially resembles that of the classical detective
story: the narrator travels back in time in order to elucidate a past mystery by
means of the examination of a large amount of factual evidence, presented in the
form of clues. On closer inspection, however, Modiano’s use of conventions from
crime fiction turns out to be subversive rather than imitative. Firstly, he
complicates the fairly straightforward duality represented by Todorov’s first and
second stories by introducing many more time layers: each of his novels moves
frequently between at least three main time periods, the writer’s present, the
narrator’s adolescence in the 1960s and the period of the Occupation with which
it is linked. In some works, such as Dora Bruder, considerably more time layers
may be involved: there are nine main periods in this book, the earliest of which
concerns the evocation of Jean Valjean’s flight through Paris, 11 followed by
references to the history of the Bruder family in the 1920s and 30s, then the
crucial period of the Occupation and subsequent references to five periods in the
author’s life which link him with Dora. Secondly, most of the clues are revealed
to be red herrings and the author resolutely refuses to solve the mystery at the
heart of each novel. Thus, instead of imitating the artificially ordered world of
crime fiction, Modiano can be seen to be parodying it, demonstrating that the
identity quest is not susceptible to neat solutions. This ludic element is
increasingly apparent in the writer’s most recent works, where a note of selfparody creeps in, as he gently mocks his pursuit of a search for self which defies
resolution. In Du plus loin de l’oubli, for example, a chance encounter with a
woman, Jacqueline, whom the narrator had been closely involved with fifteen
years previously relaunches an identity quest which now seems to have become
circular. In a telling exchange between the narrator and Jacqueline (now renamed
Thérèse), Modiano can be seen both to be mocking the easy answers provided by
the detective story and casting doubt on the possibility of recreating the present
self by means of the recourse to the past. This occurs at the end of an episode
10
Anne Judge, ‘Les temps du passé français et leur enseignement’ in Cahiers Chronos 9 (AmsterdamNew York: Rodopi, 2002, p. 137.
11
From Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
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where the narrator, having vainly attempted to get Thérèse to admit to
remembering their shared experiences, resorts to a stratagem to gain her
attention:
Maintenant, son regard n’exprimait plus rien, et il évitait le mien. J’ai secoué
vivement la tête, pour avoir l’air de quelqu’un qui se réveille en sursaut.
- Excusez-moi… Je pensais au livre que j’écris en ce moment…
- C’est un roman policier? m’a-t-elle demandé d’une voix calme.
- Pas tout à fait.
Cela n’avait servi à rien. La surface était restée lisse. Des eaux dormantes. Ou
plutôt, une couche épaisse de banquise qu’il était impossible de percer après
quinze ans (p. 171).
Thus his long search for self through a return to the past has brought no
simple solutions but has increasingly involved the author in a literary game in
which the writer debunks the facile but artificial world of crime fiction,
contrasting its neat paradigms with the complexity of the existential identity
quest. In his exploration of the contrast between these two worlds, Modiano has
become increasingly preoccupied with mystery rather than its solution, to the
extent of revelling in the insoluble. In his most recent work, the autobiographical
text Un Pedigree, Modiano acknowledges this fascination with mystification,
admitting, when discussing his writing, that ‘plus les choses demeuraient obscures
et mystérieuses, plus je leur portais de l’intérêt. Et même, j’essayais de trouver
du mystère à ce qui n’en avait aucun’ (p. 45).
Having demonstrated the complexity which underlies Modiano’s use both of
seemingly straightforward language and of the well-worn conventions of the
detective story, I now wish to return to the images of darkness and light which
recur throughout his fiction. Surely here there is a clear contrast between black
and white? As we saw when considering Dora Bruder, Modiano’s work does indeed
contain many striking images in which light and dark are contrasted. A
characteristic of his writing is his use of the physical environment to represent his
protagonists’ inner turmoil, as they struggle towards increased self knowledge.
Sunlight and shadow, summer and winter are frequently invoked in this way, as
the following example from Du plus loin de l’oubli will demonstrate:
L’autre nuit, un soleil couchant de février m’éblouissait, le long de la rue Dante
[…] Au réveil, la période de ma vie où j’avais connu Jacqueline m’est apparue
sous le même contraste d’ombre et de lumière. Des rues blafardes, hivernales et
aussi le soleil qui filtre à travers les fentes des persiennes (p. 14).
In Vestiaire de l’enfance, the narrator’s chance meeting with a girl who will
plunge him back into his deliberately suppressed past is foreshadowed by a strong
contrast between light and darkness as he enters the café where she is sitting:
‘Dehors, la lumière du soleil est si forte qu’en pénétrant au Rosal, vous plongez
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dans le noir’ (p. 13). Note, by the way, how Modiano’s use of the narrative
present and the second person pronoun involve the reader in the narrator’s
moment of drama. Elsewhere, the contrast between black and white is more
oblique: in Remise de peine, the contrast between the innocence of the two young
brothers and the guilt of those who surround them is economically expressed
through references to a magazine entitled Noir et Blanc, copies of which litter the
house, while in Des Inconnues, a book entitled In Search of Light and Shadow figures
prominently (p. 160).
It seems to me, however, that in between these polarised extremes of light
and dark, a third metaphor intrudes which better encapsulates the complexity and
ambiguity of Modiano’s writing. This is the image of twilight, where Modiano’s
characters wander, a diaphanous grey in which they appear as ghosts without a
clear identity. In each novel, among the stronger contrasts between darkness and
light alluded to above, crepuscular images are quite frequently evoked. In Livret de
famille, for example, the meeting between two of the many father surrogates who
populate Modiano’s novels is accompanied by gradually fading light: ‘La
pénombre entrait peu à peu dans la pièce’ (p. 37). The same twilight engulfs the
narrator of Dimanches d’août, as he becomes embroiled in a sordid story of
diamond smuggling: ‘Peu à peu, la pénombre a envahi ma chambre sans même
que nous nous en apercevions’ (p. 179). The discovery of an old photograph
which triggers the search for the father in Les Boulevards de ceinture is also described
in terms of grey rather than black and white: the group of men, including the
narrator’s father ‘demeurent prostrés et silencieux dans la pénombre qui les
ronge’ (p. 20). Here again, the use of the narrative present and the choice of a
very powerful verb to describe the effects of time on the viewer of the old
photograph are striking.
In conclusion, then, the image of pénombre appears to me to reflect the
atmosphere of Modiano’s novels perfectly, merging darkness and light into an
ambivalent twilight. Although, as we have seen, much contrast between clarity
and obscurity is in evidence in his writing, the degree of underlying ambiguity is
such, both in style and subject matter, that grey rather than black and white can
be considered to be the predominating shade which characterises his complex
search for self.
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