Modiano and the three functions of the name after Barthes

Christina Pawlowitsch

October 10, 2020

ABSTRACT: This essay takes Barthes’s theory of the proper names (as sketched out in Proust et les noms) as the key for a narrative analysis of the work of Patrick Modiano. If, as Barthes says, the entire Search of Lost Time “comes out of a couple of names,” then Modiano’s novels, so I argue, exemplify the generative force of the names in pure, minimalized form. I explore in particular how Modiano systematically exploits the three properties of the Name singled out by Barthes: the force of essentialization, the force of citation, and the force of “exploration.” This close look at Modiano’s narrative technique moreover leads to an extension of Barthes’s analysis: With Modiano, fragments of language (often phrases that appear in the narrated world in some reified form, for example, printed in a document) often draw on the very three functions that Barthes recognizes in the proper name, with the difference that such elements do not only have the “force of citation” but are citation. Typical for Modiano is that such “linguistic clippings,” by force of their reification, travel over time and thereby come into the function to advance or even to trigger the narrative. Furthermore, I look into how Modiano uses the names and such linguistic clippings to transform pictures that appear in the narrated world into units of discourse. Modiano’s voice, over more than thirty novels and other works of fictional narrative, has undergone profound change. A continuity in his work—and this is the main thesis of this essay—is his unique command of the language of narrative, which so importantly relies on his way of exploiting of the narrative potential of the Names.

KEYWORDS: Barthes, Proust, proper names, linguistic clippings, turning an image into a unit of discourse

Christina Pawlowitsch is Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University Panthéon-Assas in Paris. In her research she is notably concerned with applications of game theory to the study of language.

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Always the same book? It is sometimes said that Modiano would always be writing the same book: a reminiscing narrator, walking through Paris, in search of a person or the memory of a person.1 In Modiano’s novels, the narrator is indeed, in one way or another, committed to an effort to understand the past. This is often linked to the search of a person (sometimes himself in an earlier life), and often this takes him to revisit the places of this past, or conversely, it is the return to a place of the past that triggers his memory. It is not always, or not only, Paris though.2 In Les boulevards de ceintures, the place of return is a village south of Paris at the Fontainebleau Forest; in Villa Triste, it is a town at a lake at the border to Switzerland (modeled after Annecy); in Rue des Boutiques Obscures it is a village in the French Alpes close to the Swiss border; in Dimanches d’août it is Nice and a small town East of Paris at the Marne river; in Voyages de noces it is Milan and the French Riviera. And while it is true that in Modiano’s more recent novels it is possible to discern certain regularities in how the narrative evolves (a woman is missing, the narrator sets out to find her or to understand the reasons of her disappearing), it cannot be maintained over the author’s entire work, consisting of more than thirty novels and other works of fictional and nonfictional narrative, that he would always be writing the same book. While the past, that is, an individual’s attempt to comprehend the past, can be singled out as the unifying theme in Modiano’s act, Modiano has created narrative works that treat this theme through quite different narrative forms, or to be more precise, different narrative modes. While Modiano’s first novels are carried by a terribly chatty, unreliable narrator, whose report (by his own indications) finally is revealed as a fantasized one, the narrator who today has come to be widely identified with Modiano talks to us in an irresistibly calm and settled voice that makes him naturally appear as a reliable investigator of the past—reliable namely in the sense that he is honestly engaged in his effort to find out what had happened then, including admitting his own lacks of memories, which, of course, only reinforces the impression of trustworthiness. The voice that we meet when we open Modiano’s first novel (La place de l’étoile) or Modiano’s so far latest novel (Encre sympathique) is indeed so different that a reader who encounters them for the first time, in ignorance of the author, might not even attribute the two books to the same author. Is there then at all, as far as the narrative structure (and not “content”) goes, a unifying trait in Modiano’s work? It is the names, I propose. It is Modiano’s unique way to exploit the proper names of persons and places as novelistic devices. The key to this observation comes out of Roland Barthes’s analysis of the proper names in Proust.

1 Patrick Modiano himself has sometimes commented on his work in that direction. See, for instance, his Nobel lecture (Discours à l'Académie Suédoise) or the recent article by Raphaëlle Leyris in Le Monde. 2 The role of the city of Paris in Modiano’s work has been given extended attention. See, for instance, Commengé, and Schlesser.

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The three functions of the name after Barthes The entire Search, poetically, comes out of the Names, says Roland Barthes (1972) about Proust’s multi-volume novel (124). Barthes takes it as accepted that In Search of Lost Time is the story of the writing of a novel. “In three acts,” as he adds: Act 1, the young narrator perceives the wish to write; act 2—which occupies most of what can be called the lost time—treats the inability to write; act 3, when the hero has already given up the project to write and thus sadly relieved betakes himself to the matinée of the Duchess of Guermantes, at the lowest point of his retreat, he finds “through a truly dramatic reversal,” as Barthes says, the force to write (le pouvoir d’écrire)—the part that Proust entitles the Time Regained.3 The force to write, Barthes argues, Proust’s hero finds through a movement in three moments as well. The first moment, so Barthes, again falls into three parts—three flushes of memories (trois réminiscences) that are brought to the narrator by three coincidences at his arrival at the city palais of the Guermantes (a cobble stone of uneven height that his foot touches; the sound of a little spoon knocking against a plate; a towel that a servant hands him). The memories triggered by these coincidences (Saint Mark’s Basilica; three trees seen from the train, the moment that he opened a bottle of beer, which at the time had given the last push to give up writing; Balbec, a town at the sea in Normandie, invented by Proust) procure the narrator simple pleasures, moments of true joy, which, so Barthes, “now have to be comprehended, if one wants to conserve them, or at least be able to recall them at one’s own digression” (119). The second moment of this coming-into-the-powers to write, in Barthes’s analysis, consists in that the narrator of the Search systematically studies the signs that he has received, which, in Barthes’s interpretation, takes him at the same time to understand “the world and the Book—the Book as a world and the world as a Book” (119).4 A last obstacle though, so Barthes, blocks him the way: looking at the other guests—of whom he had lost sight for some time—he realizes that they all have grown older: Time, which has provided him with the key to writing, so Barthes sums up the narrator’s thoughts, threatens also to take it away from him: “Will he live long enough to write his book?” “Yes,” and this closes the movement, “if he takes the decision to retreat from the world, to give up his society-life in order to save his life as a writer” (119). Proust himself, Barthes explains, in order to write In Search of Lost Time, has passed through such a process of initiation. The early wish to write, formed at the Lycée, so Barthes, was followed by “a long phase, certainly not of an inability to write but some kind of taping around” (119). Many of the big units of what finally would become In Search of Lost Time, such as the relation between the characters and the critical moments of the novel, Barthes explains with reference to Proust’s earlier writings (notably the Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust’s posthumously published critical work), have already been there for quite some time. But Proust was, in Barthes’s interpretation, “missing for a long time the one big unifying act,” which finally would allow him to set down the seven volumes of The Search, from 1909 until his death (in 1922). “What then,” Barthes asks, “is the

3 With this reading, Barthes joins some of the now classic, but then newer receptions of Proust, notably that of Gilles Deleuze in Proust et les signes, which Barthes cites, but also that of Jean Rousset in Forme et signification, as Antoine Compagnon, for example, points out. 4 Barthes (in the original French) sometimes uses capital letters to emphasize a word, such as here “the Book.”

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incident, not of biographical but of artistic nature, that unites a work that is already sketched out and thought through but not written yet?”

What is the new cement that will give to the many discontinuous and scattered-out units one big syntagmatic unit? What will allow Proust to put down his work? In one word, what is it that the writer finds, in symmetry to the memories that the narrator finds at the matinée of the Guermantes? (120)

It is, Barthes says, the Names—the proper names of persons and places. Barthes develops this analysis—and he insists on that—not biographically; not, as he says, in “analogy,” but in “homology” to the experiences of the narrator of the Search. The narrator of the Search, Barthes explains, is “going to write,” and “this future keeps him in the domain of being, and not in the domain of the word.” “He struggles with psychology not with a technique.” “Marcel Proust, instead,”—and it is not accidentally that Barthes at this point refers to the author of the Search for the first time by his name—“writes; he fights with the categories of language, not with those of behavior” (121). Flushes of memory, Barthes explains, because they pertain to the world of the signified (and not the world of signifiers), cannot directly serve as a unit of discourse. What Proust needs though, in Barthes’s analysis, is precisely that: “a truly poetic element (poetic in the sense that Jakobson gives to this word),” which, however, “like a flush of memory, has the force to constitute the essence of the objects of the novel.” “But there is,” Barthes pushes his argument to its conclusion, “one class of linguistic units that has this constitutive force at the highest level: it is that of the proper names” (121). The proper name, after Barthes, has the very three properties that the narrator of the Search attributes to flushes of memory:

- The force of essentialization (le pouvoir d’essentialisation), because it has one referent only.

- The force of citation (le pouvoir de citation), because with it—by pronouncing one word

only—one can call on the essence that it encapsulates.

- The force of exploration (le pouvoir d’exploration), because one can “unfold” a name like a memory.

Barthes attributes particular attention to the last point, the force of exploration. Because the proper name, in Barthes’s understanding, is not only an index—an arrow directed to one referent—but also a sign. And as a sign it wants to be deciphered; offers itself to an exploration (122).5

5 In his recognition of the signifying and not just indexing character of the proper name (“le caractère signifiant, et non pas seulement indiciel”), Barthes follows, as he indicates (129), notably Claude Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the proper name as developed in La Pensée sauvage (285).

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The name, Barthes says, on the one hand, always signifies a certain milieu, “which one has to dive into and bath in the reveries that it promises.” The name Guermantes, for instance, Barthes extends, “immediately covers everything that memory, usage, or culture might put into it.” Proust has—and this factual detail should not be forgotten—invented a number of the names and places that appear in the Search: “Whether Laumes, Argencourt, Villeparisis, Cambray, or Doncières exists or do not exist,” Barthes says, “they nonetheless represent (and this is what is important) what can be called a certain ‘francophonic plausibility’: what they really signify is: France, or more accurately ‘Frenchness’” (127). At the same time, the name, so Barthes, “is a precious object, compressed and embalmed, that has to be opened like a flower” (122). To Barthes, and that follows from how he extends, this notably is to say that the name is an onomatopoetic unit, composed of syllables that have a certain phonetic texture, which evokes certain associations, often mediated by a third (in Proust’s case, as Barthes points out, often a color). The narrator of the Search is permanently engaged in the “unfolding” of the names. His associations to the name Guermantes, for instance, oscillate around the image of the tower of a medieval castle, which he evokes in tones of orange and yellow. The real (in the fiction real) city palais of the Guermantes appears to him “luminous as its name.” “Balbec” (the town at the sea in Normandie invented by Proust), in Barthes’s analysis, thrives on two “semes” that are brought to the narrator (and hence to us) through narratives within the narrative: “Balbec” is, for one, “a place at the end of the world hoovered over by storms” (Legrendin’s story). Its church is a building in the Norman Gothic style with Roman elements (Swann’s story). The name “Balbec”, in Barthes’s reading, has always these two simultaneous meanings “gothic architecture, storm over the sea” (123). The proper name with Proust hence, according to Barthes, is also a sign. But a sign unique in kind. For as Barthes says: “The Proustian Name is by itself, and in any case, the equivalent of an entire category in the dictionary … It knows no selective restriction; it is indifferent to the syntagmatic context in which it is placed; it is hence, in a certain way, a semantic monstrosity.” “This is the price—or ransom—of the phenomenon of ‘hypersemanticity’ that inhabits it, and which, evidently, places it in the proximity of the poetic word” (122). Certainly, the movement by which the narrator unfolds the names runs in reverse direction to the movement by which the writer has chosen those names. As Barthes says: “the first decodes; the other codes, but both are governed by the same system, and this system, in one way or another, is a motivated one, based on some relation of imitation between the signifier and the signified” (124–125). But certainly, so Barthes clarifies, “the semic spectrum of the name is variable in time,” “according to the rootedness in time of its reader, who adds and subtracts some of its elements, exactly as language does in its diachrony” (123). This double-directed movement between writer and narrator, of course, extends to the reader. And in fact Barthes says: “The

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name can indeed be catalyzed; 6 it can be filled-up and extended; one can smooth out the interstices of its semantic armature by an infinity of supplements”:

It is for the very fact that the proper Name proposes itself as a catalyzer of infinite wealth that one can say that—poetically—the entire Search comes out of some names. (124)

The three functions of the name with Modiano If one can say that Proust’s Search of Lost Time comes out of the names, one can say that Modiano’s novels are reduced to that principle, that they expose that principle in pure, minimalized form. With Modiano, the names, the poetic transaction that happens through the names, constitute the essence of the novel. Modiano’s narrator (other than Proust’s narrator) is not searching to write. He is not someone who is searching to express his memories: He is someone who is looking for his memories in the first place. More accurately, someone who is trying to comprehend the logic, or if one wishes, the system, of his memories, and thereby who he is or has become. And this processes, for him, very importantly happens through the names. We as readers understand that by the repetition of the names: because these names are pronounced in a particular way, at a particular moment in the narrative, and are then repeated in exactly that way. This is quite distinctively so in Rue des Boutiques Obscures (literally “The street of dark workshops”), where the narrator, Guy Roland, when the detective agency that he has worked for over a number of years closes, decides to take on his own case, that is, find out who he was before he became Guy Roland: “Gay Orlow,” who the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures for a long time thinks to have been his girlfriend, “Freddie Howard de Luz,” who he might have been himself, “Jimmy Pedro Stern,” alias “Pedro McEvoy,” who he thinks at the end to have been, which makes appear as his girlfriend not Gay Orlow but “Denise Coudreuse” … for the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, the sequence of these names traces the itinerary of his search. The reader, on the other hand, finds in these names the cardinal functions of the narrative.7 Indeed, what happens in Rue des Boutiques Obscures can be recounted by means of what the names do in the narrative. For the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, these names are like an form (empty at the beginning) that he carries with him and in which he puts everything that he collects about these persons as he pursues his search—everything that, if one wishes, makes up their essentiality.

6 In “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (“Introduction à l’Analyse Structural des Récits”) Barthes uses the term catalyzer for those elements in a narrative that belong to the narrated world (acts or character traits of the actants in the narrative), the function of which is however not, or not only, to bring forward what happens in the narrated world (the succession of what Barthes calls the cardinal functions) but to negotiate the contact between the narrator and the reader (6–11). Barthes explicitly deduces this concept of catalyzers from Jakobson’s (1960) phatic function of language. 7 For Barthes’s concept of cardinal functions see, for instance, his “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (6–11).

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What is explored is the essentiality of that person and the name serves to provide a form, by which it can be contained (a form like a bowl) but which also serves to call on it. In one word, Modiano uses the first two functions of the name according to Barthes: the force of essentialization and the force of citation. At the same time, the narrator’s recurring inner pronunciation of these names creates a rhythm that underlies the narrative. The name with Modiano has a truly poetic function. Linguistically, or formally, the poetic function of the name, in Rue des Boutiques Obscure as elsewhere in Modiano, is often marked by the fact that the complete name is pronounced when, in context, the first name (or just a pronoun) would be sufficient: “Gay Orlow,” not “Gay; “Denise Coudreuse,” not “Denise.” When we read “Gay Orlow,” we know that what is talked about here is not the real (in the fiction real) person Gay Orlow but instead all that which the name represents, or has come to represent, for the narrator. At the same time, Modiano uses the difference between the full name and the first name, as for instance the difference between “Denise Coudreuse” and “Denise,” also as a dynamic element: When the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures comes to the conclusion that he has been Jimmy Pedro Stern, alias Pedro McEvoy, he thinks to recover bits and pieces of memories. When he talks as the person who acts and sees and thinks in these memories, it is “Denise,” sometimes even “her,” and not “Denise Coudreuse” anymore. (How reliable are these memories though? When he still thought to have been Freddie Howard de Luz, there were some beginnings of such flushes of memories, which later he had to reinterpret.) The poetic function of the name, with Modiano, is often also reinforced through capitalizations, or more powerfully still, by the fact that the name appears in capital letters written somewhere in the reality of the narrated world:

C. M. HUTTE Private Investigations

we learn from the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures is engraved “in black marble, in gold shiny letters” at the door of the agency that is now closed (14).

October 23rd, 1965

Subject: ORLOW, Galina, called “Gay” ORLOW. Born: in Moscow (Russia), 1914, as the daughter of Kyril ORLOW and Irène GIORGIADZÉ. Citizenship: stateless … Mademoiselle Orlow arrived in France in 1936, coming from the United States.

… these are the first lines of a machine-typed report that the narrator receives from one of Hutte’s acquaintances, who has kept “good relations with people at various offices” (53). What happens here is an iconization of the names. In a double sense, actually. On the one hand, the name comes to exists in some reified, iconized form in the reality of the narrated world: engraved in the door plate, typed in the letter. At the same time, it comes to exist, in this iconized

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form, in the reality of the real world: it is printed in the pages of the book. An interesting reversal, or coincidence, between what is imitation and what really exists happens here: The narrator appears to reproduce, in the pages of the book, the lettering of the name that exists in the reality of the narrated world, engraved in the door plate. But truly, in the reality of the real world, it is the author who brings the lettering on the door plate of Hutte’s agency into existence by having it put down in the pages of the book. For us, as readers, these two become superimposed. When we look at “C. M. HUTTE. Private Investigations,” printed on the page, in the book, it is as if we were looking at the door plate. The report about Gay Orlow—and Modiano is a master of such delicate moves—quite silently, takes on an double functionality. Besides its function to provide the name with the basic elements that make up the essentiality that it points to, it assumes a second, and in fact cardinal function for the narrative: it anchors the narrative in time. The narrator never tells us what year it is. We learn it, if we are attentive enough, from that document. Another narrative move that Modiano employs with great precision is that a name is spelled, or written out, by a character in the narrative: “I was relieved when she repeated my name because I had not fully understood it when she had pronounced it first,” the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures entrusts us, when he meets a woman who recognizes in him a man (who she addresses by his last name) of whom he so far knows the first name (Pedro) only:

– I like the way your pronounce my name, I said. That isn’t so easy for a French speaker … But how do you write it? […] I took on a playful tone. She smiled. – M … C … capital E, V … O … Y, she spelled. (119)

At this point, the narrator has heard the name “McEvoy” for the first time. Was he that Pedro McEvoy? The spelling of the name here has not only the phatic function to plant the name “McEvoy” in the mind of the reader, but in fact the cardinal function that the narrator himself, as the character in the narrative, gets to know that name. What is remarkable indeed with Modiano is that the first two functions of the name, the force of essentialization and the force of citation, become operational directly in the world of the narrative (and not in the discourse of the narrator): the names fulfill these functions directly for the narrator in his relation to the real (in the narrative real) world, and it is through that movement that they carry over to the reader. Different, at first sight, as what concerns the third function of the name, the force of exploration: Modiano’s narrator (other than Proust’s narrator) does not engage in the “unfolding” of the names. The narrator has, when he repeats the name “Denise Coudreuse,” no associations as to how “Denise“ or “Coudreuse“ might sound. More correctly though: the unfolding of the names is not part of the discourse of the narrator. The narrator might have such associations, but he does not voice them. He does not unfold them for and in front of us. We do understand though that the name means, or has come to mean, something to him. We know that from how he carries the name in his discourse: by the repetition of the name, by how he clings on to the name;

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for example, his pronouncing of “Denise Courdreuse” when “Denise” alone would do, or later, when it has become “Denise,” by his insisting on “Denise and I” (“Denise et moi”):

I remembered this because we used to go to that bar, Denise and I … We pathed ourselves a way to the entrance, Denise and I … We stopped for a last time at the apartment in the Rue Cambacérès, Denise and I. (210–211)

But with that, the force of exploration is marvelously both: on the one hand, completely rooted in the narrated world (as the first two functions), and at the same time completely (and silently) passed on to the reader. If, in Modiano’s novels, a name is unfolded, then this is regularly embedded in the narrative: “It’s curious, all of a sudden, I remember the name of the Frenchman who Gay had met in America,” says Waldo Blunt, Gay Orlow’s former husband, an American who lives in Paris now, to the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures:

What was his name? I asked, my voice trembling. – Howard … That was his last name actually … not his first name. Wait … Howard “de” something … I stopped and bent towards him. – Howard “de” what? … – De … de … de Luz. L … U … Z … Howard de Luz … Howard de Luz … the name hit me … half English … half French … or Spanish … – And his first name? – Well that … He made a gesture which expressed that that was beyond his powers. (64)

His names, Modiano must have chosen—or invented—them well.8 For even if the narrator in Modiano’s novels does not practice the unfolding of the names, that does not mean that Patrick Modiano has not chosen these names for their sound or the associations that one might put into them; even if the narrator in Modiano’s novels does not engage in the unfolding and exploration of the names, that does not mean that the reader will not do it, if a name that can be unfolded, or to say it in Barthes’s terms, that can be “catalyzed,” is offered to him. And Modiano knows and anticipates that. Modiano trusts that his reader engages in the unfolding of the names automatically, without the intervention of the narrator. Modiano counts, one could say, on the invisible hand that operates through the names: “Gay Orlow,” the name alone, over and over again calls on the facts that we have learned about this person: “born in Moscow, 1914,” “stateless,” “came to France in 1936, from the United States.” “Gay Orlow” represents an entire milieu, to speak with Barthes; but also a part of history. “Denise Coudreuse” stands for a certain milieu too; a certain “frenchness,” to speak with Barthes again, which here however is not, as with Proust, the old, land-owning aristocracy but the French working middle class.

8 “But also one has to choose them [the names]—or invent them well,” Barthes says in Proust et les noms (124).

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The name, with Modiano, is always the germ of a little narrative within the narrative: “HOWARD DE LUZ (Jean Simety) [followed by the symbol of a war cross] and Madame, born MABEL DONAHUE in Valbreuse, Orne … CGP – MA [followed by the symbol of a sailboat],” this entry the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures finds in one of the old issues of the Bottin mondain, “from some thirty years ago” (from the 1930s, then, if we combine this with the date on the report about Gay Orlow), that sit on a shelf in the now deserted offices of Hutte’s agency (74).9 “CGP,” the narrator finds out by consulting the list of symbols and abbreviations in the Bottin mondain, stands for “Club du Grand Pavois,” “MA” for “Motor Yacht Club of the Côte d’Azur,” and the little sailboat, well, for ownership of a sailboat. Ten years later, so the narrator tells us, “MA” and the little sail boat have disappeared. This can be read as the summary of a life. “Was this my father?” the narrator asks himself when he finds these entries—a moment at which he still thinks it possible to have been Freddie Howard de Luz. This hypothesis, he later will give up in favor of the belief that he was Jimmy Pedro Stern, who so far he had thought to be a friend of himself in the past. Again, thanks to Hutte’s acquaintance who still has good connections to the French administration, he acquires more precise information concerning Jimmy Pedro Stern:

Subject: STERN, Jimmy, Pedro. Born: in Salonika (Greece), September 30, 1912, as the son of Georges STERN and Giuvia SARANO. Citizenship: Greek. Married to Denise Yvette Coudreuse, a French citizen, April 3rd, 1939, at the city council of the XVII Arrondissement in Paris. It is unknown where Monsieur Stern lived at that time in France. In the hotel registers, one finds a single entry, from February 1939, from which follows that at that time, Monsieur Jimmy Pedro Stern had taken residency at the following address: Hôtel Lincoln 24, rue Bayard, Paris, 8th arrondissement. This, by the way, is the address that appears on the marriage certificate … The entry in the register of the Lincoln hotel says the following: Name: STERN, Jimmy, Pedro. Address: 2, Via delle Botteghe Oscure, Rom (Italy). Profession: broker. Monsieur Jimmy Stern is considered to have disappeared in 1940. (179)

Jimmy Pedro Stern later became this McEvoy, who in 1943, together with Denise Coudreuse, disappeared at an attempt to illegally cross the French-Swiss boarder in the Alps—this in any case is what the narrator finally decides to believe. Guy Roland, the narrator of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, carries a name that couldn’t be more average given the time and place in which the character is located. The narrative suggests that this is not his real name. The fact to have chosen a harmless, average name, hence becomes a

9 Bottin mondain, is a yearly publication to publishes “advertisements about families,” certainly wealthy but not necessarily aristocratic families.

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narrating element. (But who after all is this Guy Roland truly? How and why did he get to work for Hutte?) C. M. Hutte is a name that is not easily categorized. For sure, not a French name. Is it Swiss? Dutch? German? The abbreviation of some longer name? Modiano actually provides us with an indication as to the origin of the name. We learn it from a detail that the narrator evokes in passing when telling us some other fact about Hutte: Hutte, so the narrator claims to have found out later, was so friendly with him, because he too had lost the memory of an entire period of this life: “For which relation should exist between the old, hunchbacked man who I see walking away in the dark, in his worn-out coat and the big black bag, and the former tennis player, the handsome, blond and tall Baltic Baron Constantin von Hutte” (16). But maybe Modiano has chosen the name “Hutte” with much more potential for an “unfolding” of the name in mind: The word “Hutte,” or “hut” in English, is not without reference in the history of linguistics. Roman Jakobson (1956), whose theories deeply influenced the French structuralists (let us not forget that Barthes’s Proust et les noms appears in a volume in honor of Roman Jakobson), refers to a “well-known” experiment with school children who were asked to respond spontaneously to the word “hut.” Some of the school children said that a “hut” was a small house; some said that it was a house that had burnt. For Jakobson this experiment was an exemplification of two poetic figures: metaphor and metonymy. The experiment reported by Jakobson was popular among French thinkers, notably since Lacan had taken it up. And also Barthes refers to the experiment referred to by Jakobson, namely in “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure” (the first phrase of Proust’s Search), Barthes’s very personal and moving talk at the Collège de France in which he contemplates his preparations to write a novel (which in the end would not be written, a decision that is actually the subject matter of the talk). “Hutte” is the rendering of the word “hut” used in the French discussion to recount the experiment described by Jakobson. For Barthes, metaphor is the principle of the Essay (What is a thing? What does it mean?); metonymy, that of the Novel. Has Modiano heard of the experiment with the class of school children? Does he know of Jakobson’s theory? Barthes’s reflections on it? At the end of Rue des Boutiques Obscures, the narrator will have come to believe to remember what had happened then: They are in Megève, a village in the French alps, close to the Swiss border. He goes with one of the men who should bring them over the boarder; Denise with the other. After marching behind the man, in the snow, for a while, the man tells him to stop and wait. They would be very close to the boarder and he would go first to scout around. After a few minutes Jimmy Pedro Stern, alias Pedro McEvoy, gains the certitude that the man will not come back: “Why did I drag her with me into that trap? I tried to suppress with all my force the thought that Wrédé would also leave her behind and that nothing of the two of us would be left” (231). Here, at the climax of the narrative, it has become “her.” The movement from “Denise Coudreuse” over “Denise” to “her” is homologous to the degree by which the narrator thinks to regain access to his memory, to the past; to himself, including his guilt. At the end of Rue des Boutiques Obscures is the beginning of a new search that will lead even further back: Thanks to Hutte’s contact again, the narrator finds the trace of Freddie Howard de Luz, which leads to an island in the Pacific. When the narrator arrives there, he learns that the man

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who he thinks was his friend in an earlier life, has been missing for some days. Howard de Luz’s schooner had come back to the coast, no man on board:

I thought about Freddie. No, he certainly did vanished in the sea. He surely had decided to cast off the last moorings and was hiding in one of the atolls. I would find him in the end. And then, there was one last way that I could not leave unexplored: go to my old address in Rome, the number 2 of the Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the street of dark workshops. (251)10

It is possible to extend to Modiano straightforwardly what Barthes says about Proust:

Holding the system oft the names is for Proust, and is for us, to hold the essential meanings of the book, the armature of its signs, its deep syntax. (128)

The proper names of places What can be said about the proper names of persons in Modiano’s novels can also be said about the proper name of places (streets, squares, buildings): they help to structure the narrative and at the same time they take on a distinctive phatic function. Accident nocturne (literally “Accident by night”; in English as Paris nocturne) offers a good illustration for that. Similarly to what the names of persons do in Rue des Boutiques Obscures, in Accident nocturne it is the proper names of places that form a sequence along which the cardinal functions of the narrative develop: la place des Pyramides, l’Hôtel-Dieu (a hospital in the center of Paris), la Voie-Verte, la porte d’Orléans, Jouy-en-Josas, la rue du Docteur-Kurzenne, la place du Trocadéro—this is the itinerary of the narrator of Accident nocturne, from the location of the accident, over his memories of a similar accident in his childhood (triggered by that event), to the place where he finally will find the driver of the car, Jacqueline Beausergent. As the names of persons, the names of places are not just an index pointing to that place, but by their repetition they acquire a poetic function. Similarly as with the names of persons, this effect is reinforced, and indeed marked, by the fact that the name is pronounced in full length, wherever this principle can be applied: “Jouy-en-Josas,” not “Jouy”; “la rue du Docteur-Kurzenne,” not “rue Kurzenne”; “la place du Trocadéro,” not “Trocadéro.”11 That the proper names of places have an important role in Modiano’s novels is also expressed by the fact that some of his novels carry the proper names of places as titles.

10 Rome as a destination of refuge, which is at the same time some coming-back, is a trope that appears also in others of Modiano’s novel, notably in Un crique passe and Encre sympathique. 11 Jouy-en-Josas, a small town south-west of Paris, and the rue du Docteur-Kurzenne, which is a street in this town, appear in a number of Modiano’s novels as well as in the semi-autobiographical Livret de famille and the autobiographical Un pedigree.

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La place de l’étoile, Modiano’s first novel, which seems like the most evident example of this, actually isn’t one, strictly speaking. It is true that La place de l’Étoile, with a capital É, is a square in Paris, but the title of the book is correctly spelled La place de l’étoile, with a small é (a detail often overlooked), and “la place de l’étoile” literally is “the place of the star.” 12 Patrick Modiano prefixes the novel with a “Jewish anecdote” (“une histoire juive”) that builds on the literal meaning of the words:

In June 1942, a German Offizier turns to a young man and asks: “Excuse me Sir, where is La place de l’Étoile?” The young man points to the left side of his chest.

The spelling of the title with the small “é” hence aims at this polyphonic literal meaning of the words. (Is “McEvoy” in Rue des Boutiques Obscures, “with a capital E,” as the narrator is explicitly informed, something like an echo of the importance that could have a small or a capital “E”?) La via delle Botteghe Oscure, literally “the street of dark workshops,” which in its French translation gives Rue des Boutiques Obscures its title, truly is a street in Rome. The street got its name because under it lie the, at its time already, half-underground arches of an antique theatre, which, during the Middle ages, accommodated indeed windowless—hence dark—workshops. But “Botteghe Oscure” has another, more prominent, historical meaning in the more recent Italian history: After the Second World War (and let us not forget that Rue des Boutiques Obscures was published in 1978), the Italian Communist party had its headquarters in that street, and—by metonymy— “Botteghe Oscure” has come to stand for the leadership of the Italian Communist Party. Besides that, Botteghe Oscure is the title of a literary journal that appeared from 1948 to 1959 and which also had it offices in that street. None of this is ever mentioned in the novel. Villa Triste, the title of Modiano’s forth novel, also has an interpretation that comes from the more recent Italian history: the expression was used during the Second World War to refer to buildings occupied by the fascists in which torture was routine.13 But “villa triste,” in French, can also be made sound like “vie à triste”—“sad life.”14 In Modiano’s novel, “Villa Triste” is the name of a deserted villa in a town at a lake at the French-Swiss border (modeled after Annecy), where the natator, as a young man, under the wrong name of “Victor Chmara”—“Comte Victor Chmara”—had taken refuge from Paris, “with the idea that the city had become too dangerous” for people like him, because “a police-state atmosphere reigned there, bombs were exploding, and there were too many razzias.” It was the war, the narrator informs us, “that was referred to as the ‘Algerian’” (14). The key to the house,

12 On the cover of the original Gallimard edition, the title is given in capital letters: “LA PLACE DE L‘ÉTOILE.” At the inside of the book, the title appears as “La place de l’étoile.” The paper-pack edition in Gallimard’s folio series indicates the title on the cover, in coherence with the original edition hence, as “La place de l’étoile”. 13 Modiano’s second novel, La ronde de nuit, is mainly set in such a “Villa Triste” in the exclusive 16th Arrondissement in Paris. In Modiano’s third novel, Les boulevards de ceintures, the term “Villa Triste” is also used in that sense—to hint to a place where people are brought to by the Gestapo (see the excursion “Turning a picture into a unit of discourse” below). 14 This interpretation has been pointed out to me (in a different context) by Yves Gozlan, who I would like to thank for this remark at this place.

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Chmara has from the owner of the house himself, René Meinthe—“Dr. René Meinthe”—who often disappears over longer stretches of time from the town at the sea “to do business.” Meinthe, who refers to himself also as “the queen of the Belgians,” is an impenetrable, eccentric to dubious character, who however seems to mean well with Chmara. As for the names of persons, Modiano often builds on the written word (the in the world of the narrative written word) to reinforce the poetic function of the name. The name “Villa Triste” appears in the narrative for the first time, when the narrator for the first time enters the house:

On the big wooden door, from which the white paint was chipping off, Meinthe (it was himself who had entrusted me that) had written—quite heavy-handedly—in black paint: VILLA TRISTE. (150)

From the point of view of being inside the house, the narrator says:

Indeed, this villa did not exude happiness. No. Still, I first found that the term “triste” did not fit it well. In the end, however, I came to understand that Meinthe had been right, namely if one could recover in the sonority of “triste” something tender and crystalline. (150)

Rare with Modiano, we do find the narrator here engaged in the onomatopoetic interpretation of a name. What however is actually going on? Doesn’t the fact that the narrator engages in this type of interpretation—and not the possible historic interpretation (which should weigh heavier)—tell us that the narrator actually does not know about the historic interpretation? Meinthe, on the other hand, who has written the words “VILLA TRISTE” in black paint on the door, seems to know about the meaning of the name. This interpretation is at least possible. If one admits it, one can see that the onomatopoetic interpretation of the name here is not just for its own sake but actually becomes a cardinal functional element in the narrative—because it comes to transmit a certain state of knowledge or position of the persons acting in the narrative. In the foreground of Villa Triste is the sumptuous decor of the town at the sea and the narrator’s affair with a young actress who also befriends Meinthe. As a function of whether a reader knows or does not know about the historic meaning of “Villa Triste,” he will read and know to interpret the novel in a different way. Modiano allows for this variability, precisely by not pronouncing the historic meaning of “Villa Triste.”

Linguistic clippings in the rank of a name The three functions of the name—the force of essentialization, the force of citation, and the force of exploration—one remembers, Barthes postulates in “homology,” not in “analogy,” to the three functions that Proust’s narrator attributes to the flushes of memory. Modiano has practically delivered the proof that not only the name but any linguistic clipping can fulfill these three functions in a narrative, when it is embedded in the right way.

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This is exhibited most clearly in Dora Bruder, (in English, The Search Warrant) where the search—and hence the narrative—is triggered by the finding of such a linguistic clipping. At leaving through on old issue of Paris-Soir, the issue from December 31, 1941, the narrator finds the following search-warrant:

“Missing: a girl, Dora Bruder, 15 years, 1.55 cm, oval face, gray-green eyes, gray coat, burgundy pullover, dark blue skirt and hat, brown half-shoes. Indications to be addressed to Monsieur et Madame Bruder, 14 Bouvelard Ornano, Paris.” (7)

The narrator has never met Dora Bruder. She comes to exists from him only in virtue of this historic flotsam. She is for him only that name and that description. This search-warrant, indeed, for him spans a little narrative, as one could say in paraphrase of Barthes, and he makes it his mission, so to say, to complete this narrative.15 Dora Bruder, it should be mentioned, has truly lived, and also this search-warrant has truly appeared in the paper. Why is the narrator (why is Patrick Modiano) struck by this search-warrant when leaving through this old issue of Paris-Soir? Is it the name “Dora Bruder”? Something in the onomatopoetic quality of the name? Something it its meaning? A reader who knows the meaning of the German word “Bruder”, or just the cognate in some other language, such as the English “brother” (the reader indeed learns that Dora Bruder’s father comes from Vienna), will not be able to read this name without thinking of the meaning of the word. Does the narrator (does Patrick Modiano) know, guess, feel that meaning? If yes, he does not spell it out for us. As little as he spells out the meaning that one could find in “Dora”: “d’ora”—“of Gold”, “Dear.” Dora Bruder: “My dear brother,” “You my beloved sibling.” In Accident nocturne too, there is such a linguistic clipping that plays a crucial role: “a car of the brand Fiat, of water-green color”—“une automobile de marque fiat, couleur vert d’eau,” as stands in the report of the accident that a stranger hands to the narrator and that he signs incautiously. “Fiat couleur vert d’eau,” just as “Jaqueline Beausergent” or “rue du Docteur-Kurzenne,” through repetition, is lifted into the rank of a poetic element:

I extended as long as possible my dinner […] At about ten, the owner and her friends would sit down at a table in the back […] They would begin a game of cards. One night, she even proposed to me to sit down with them. But that was the time that I had to continue my search. FIAT COULEUR VERT D’EAU. […] It seemed to me that it would be by night and not by day that I would finally find the FIAT COULEUR VERT D’EAU. (107)

The narrator does not tell us how “fiat couleur vert d’eau” sounds to him. Still and all, from the way he repeats these words to himself, one gets the impression that there is something in the sound of these words that exercise a certain fascination on him. Is it the “vert d’eau”? “Vert d’eau,” which can also sound like “verre d’eau”—“a glass of water”? What is certain is that it is

15 “A narrative is a long sentence, just as every sentence is in its way the sketch of a little narrative,” Barthes says in the “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” (4).

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Patrick Modiano who has given that car its color. “Fiat couleur vert,” a “Fiat of green color,” would not have had the same poetic force.16

The color “vert d’eau.”

That “fiat couleur vert d’eau” functions as a poetic element in Accident nocturne is also linguistically marked, similarly as it is happens for the names by stating them in full length, by the fact that the narrator uses the phrase “fiat couleur vert d’eau” where “fiat” or simply “the car” would suffice (because it would already be clear from the context that it is this car that he is talking about). A remarkable inversion happens her though: “fiat couleur vert d’eau” does not merely have the force of citation: it is a citation—from the report of the accident! This citation functions here as a linguistic form (as a receptacle) in which the entire significance of the accident—which is to have triggered the memory of that earlier accident—can be put and then deliberately be called on. In one word: it is here a citation that is lifted into the rank of a name. Worthy of note is also that in both cases discussed here, Dora Bruder and Accident nocturne, the linguistic clipping that triggers the search, respectively brings it forward, falls into the hands of the narrator truly on a piece of paper: the search-warrant in the newspaper, the report of the accident. These linguistic clippings exist in some physical, reified form, engrained in some object. By that several things are facilitated at the same time: First, it is precisely in virtue of their actual reified form that these linguistic clippings have the force to travel over time (in Dora Bruder, a long stretch of time of some forty years; in Accident nocturne, a short stretch of time of some days) and by that come into the position to take on the cardinal function that they do have in the narrative, which is to trigger the search and the novel as a whole, respectively provide the crucial element for the search. But second also, we as readers read these words the first time from the pages of the book, when the narrator reads them off from that piece of paper in the narrated world. We are, so to say, reading with him from that piece of paper. It is for that reason that these linguistic clippings are so highly effective as a phatic element: When the narrator repeats these words in his mind, it is also for us a true repeating, a true remembering of the moment when we were reading these words for the first time in the book that we are holding in hands.

16 “Vert d’eau” has been established as a color term in French for a long time. In Dauthenay’s Repertory of colors to help the determination of flowers, leaves and fruits, from 1905, it is described as “a very light green that reminds more or less the transparent tonality of big masses of clear water” (252).

Vert d’eau

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No matter though whether it is about the names of persons or places or about such linguistic clippings that acquire the rank of a name: the function of exploration, with Modiano, always runs in opposite direction, or in a somewhat transposed way, relative to how Barthes sees this movement happening with Proust. With Modiano, the possible meaning of a name or a linguistic clipping is not unfolded, at least not in the discourse of the narrator, but what happens is that the reader is provided with the material (namely the world of the novel) that will allow him to put some meaning into the name or respectively the linguistic clipping—that is, not to unfold the meaning of the respective linguistic unit but to fold into it some meaning. There is then a double inversion: from the narrator to the reader, and from an unfolding to a folding-in of meaning.

The backside of the semantic monstrosity—the role of the novel After days of searching, the narrator of Accident nocturne teaches the phrase “JE CHERCHE UNE VOITURE FIAT COULEUR VERT D’EAU”—“I AM LOOKING FOR A CAR OF THE BRAND FIAT OF WATER-GREEN COLOR”—to a parrot that sits in a restaurant in the neighborhood of the Trocadéro, which is where he suspects Jacqueline Beausergent to live. The parrot, the narrator tells us, quickly learned the phrase, though his way to repeat it was “shorter and more effective”: “VOITURE FIAT COULEUR VERT D’EAU” (108). It does not seem to be thanks to the parrot, but it will indeed be in the neighborhood of the Trocadéro that the narrator will finally find—by night, as he expects—the car and its driver, Jacqueline Beausergen. That finding will, however, not provide the knowledge that he had been hoping for: Jacqueline Beausergent is much younger than he had thought; too young in any case to be the woman who had been involved in that first accident in Jouy-en-Josas, in the rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. The restaurant, where the parrot was sitting, the Closerie de Passy, the narrator tells us, does not exist anymore. But, he adds:

Parrots can get very old. Maybe this one, more than thirty years later, is still sitting on his stick in some other café, in some other neighborhood, and is still repeating my phrase, without anyone understanding or even listening to him. (109)

Patrick Modiano exhibits here—practically within the transaction that is the novel—in the linguistic clipping the backside of what Barthes identifies in the name as its “semantic monstrosity”: its semantic armature, its closure. For certainly: as much as the name is, as Barthes says, not modified by the context, but instead persistently points to the one essentiality that it refers to, as much it can by itself not generate this essentiality. The essentiality that a name, or a linguistic clipping in the rank of a name, points to has to remain closed-off for someone who hears that name but knows nothing of the essentiality that it points to. In the end, what Modiano does with his novels, or maybe what novels do in general, one could say, is to generate essentialities—generate the essentialities that the names and the linguistic clippings in the rank of a name at the end of the book will have come to refer to. Modiano has

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condensed the novel to that operation. And with that he has created his own form of the novel. The material of this production, it should not be forgotten, is language alone.

The novel as a big linguistic clipping

In a number of Modiano’s novels, there are indications that the narrator, in the narrated world, is someone who writes; professionally, so to say. Often, this writing existence of the narrator is in some distance to that of the author, Patrick Modiano. In Quartier perdu, for instance, the narrator is the author of detective stories; in Voyage de noces, he is a travel reporter. In L‘herbe des nuits, we learn that the narrator, as the young man who appears in the narrative, has written a manuscript, which has been lost. With Modiano (other than with Proust), the writing existence of the narrator is, however, not the problem of the novel, at least not in the discourse of the narrator. Modiano’s is a “silent” narrator. Just as he does not engage in the unfolding of the names, he says rather little about the practice of writing. Thoughts or confidences on writing, if they are expressed at all, are—as the interpretation of the names—folded into the narrative: “Don’t break your head over it, Jean. They will wind up finding your manuscript,” says Dannie, the young woman who he refers to by her first name only (“out of concern that she might wear it again today”), to the narrator of L’herbe des nuits:

And she added that I was really giving myself too much trouble. It would be enough to search through the boxes of the booksellers at the Seine, and to pick out one of those old novels the few readers of which had been dead for a long time and that no one living suspected to exist. And to copy it. By hand. And then say that one was the author of it. (L’herbe des nuits, 167)

When in the end she will be gone, she will have put a letter under the door of his hotel room, which reads as follows:

Jean,

This time, I am leaving, and it is likely that we will not see each other for a long time. I am not telling you where I go, because I do not know it myself. You will not find me where I am going. I will be far away—any way, not in Paris. If I go now, it is because I do not want to draw you into trouble … PS: I told you a little lie that bothers me. I am not 21 as I said. I am 24. So you see, I will be old soon. (L’herbe des nuits, 168)

This letter, the narrator tells us, she has copied, word by word, from an old book that they had bought together one day from one of the bookseller at the Seine. Is this letter really printed in some book that Patrick Modiano has found at one of the booksellers at the Seine? And was it that find that triggered the book? Does the entire book come

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out of the ambition to play out this narrative move, to embed this poetic element in a narrative? What can be said is that it is a powerful poetic maneuver. More than that, a poetic maneuver that necessitates the form of the novel, that cannot be executed in some other form and hence becomes a celebration of that form. What however, at a closer look, is encapsulated in the idea that it would be enough to copy old novels of which no one knows anymore? Isn’t the novel here playing the same role as the sentence in the mouth of the parrot? For surely, if nobody knows about them anymore, this also is to say that nobody knows anymore what they stand for, have stood for. The novel itself then as a “big linguistic clipping,” a “big semantic monstrosity”?

Excursion: turning a vision into a unit of discourse In Modiano’s novels, written documents are not the only objects that travel over time and that sometimes get to fulfill the function to advance or even to trigger the narrative: this function is sometimes also fulfilled by pictures, notably photographs. This is very distinctively so in Les boulevards de ceintures. The novel opens with the description of a photograph, in which one can sees the narrator’s father and two other men, Jean Muraille and Guy de Marcheret, in the bar of the “Clos-Foucré,” a tavern in a village at the border of the Fontainebleau forest (modeled after Barbizon). Then it is as if the characters in this picture started to move, which first gives us the impression that we are assisting the recounting of a narrative that the son has received from the father. But then, the narrator lets us understand that he is actually also there, back in these “troubled times,” in the tavern, watching the three, and he tells us how he manages to introduce himself to their circle. His father, who he has not seen for some tens years, does not recognize him, though. The main part of the book deals with the narrator’s attempt to get hold of the father, and his memories about the time when, as an adolescent, he has lived with his father for some months in Paris and the father had introduced him to the business of what seems to be some black-market operations. As the narrative advances, the scene gets more and more apocalyptic, intermixed with absurd elements, ending with a group of gestapo men arresting both father and son: “It was so dark that I could not see where we were going. Rue des Saussaies? Drancy? The villa Triste?” (182). In the end, we find the son again in the tavern, in the here and now of the narration, looking at the photograph that the bar man has just given him, which finally confirms the narrative as some kind of day-dream or thought experiment. The whole narrative, so to say “comes out of a picture.” But was everything invented? Were his memories of the father also invented? It’s after all from the time that he lived with his father the book gets its title: “Remember our Sunday walks,” says the son to the father in some kind of imagined dialogue. “From the center of Paris, a mysterious wind always made us converge to the Boulevards de ceintures, where the city throws out its waist and sediment. Soult, Masséna, Davout, Kellermann. Why has one given the names of conquerors to such uncertain places? It was there our native country” (154). In Rue des Boutiques Obscures, photographs take on an important role too. While the names constitute, say, the vertices that define the basic structure of the novel, photographs take on the

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role of connecting these points; of moving the narrator forward in his search. It is a photograph that provides the narrator with the first tangible hint to his former identity: a photograph in which one sees an old man, sitting in an armchair, and a young woman together with a younger man (of some 30 years) standing behind him. The younger man has put his arm around the shoulder of the woman. The narrator thinks to recognize himself in that man. The identity of the old man and the young woman are reported to the narrator by the giver of the photograph (someone with whom he might have been seen together in his former life): “the old Giorgiadzé,” a prominent figure of the Russian emigration in Paris, and his granddaughter, Galina—known as “Gay”—Orlow. Following the trace of Gay Orlow leads to the identity that the man next to her in the picture is most likely to have had: Freddie Howard de Luz, son of a Mauritian-French-American family who has settled in France. A former employee at the property of Howard de Luz’s grandparents recognizes in the young woman in the picture with the old Giorgiadzé indeed “the Russian” who Freddie used to bring along. However, he recognizes in the man next to her not Freddie but a friend of Freddie’s, named Pedro. This is the turning point of the narrative, because the narrator takes it as evidence that he cannot have been Freddie Howard de Luz but must have been his friend Pedro. From the former employee at the Howard de Luz’s property, the narrator receives a box that contains a couple of things the belonged to Freddie, among others a photograph in which the young man from the photograph with the old Giorgiadzé can be seen next to another young man, somewhere at a beach: “Pedro – Freddie – La Baule,” as is written on the back-side of the picture, which allows the narrator to put a new face to the name of “Freddie Howard de Luz,” which just had been separated from the image that so-far had been attached to it. Furthermore in the box, a photograph in which Freddie Howard de Luz, Pedro, Gay Orlow, and another young woman, a “French girl,” as the narrator learns from the former employee, can be seen together at the Howard de Luz’s property. And then, in the box, there is also an envelope, with a four-leave clover on it, that contains four small photographs (“in the size of automatic passport pictures”), one of each of the four. On the back-side of the photograph of the young woman who supposedly was Pedro’s girlfriend is written, in Freddie’s handwriting, “Pedro,” followed by a telephone number. Thanks to the old telephone books that sit on the selves in the now deserted offices of Hutte’s agency, the narrator finds out the address to which this number had belonged. At this address he meets a woman who indeed recognizes in him Pedro—Pedro McEvoy as he learns from her (see the dialogue above)—and who also knew the young woman, “Denise,” as emerges from the conversation with her. The full name of the young woman, “Denise Coudreuse,” the narrator learns from a birth certificate that he finds between the pages of an agenda that has belonged to Denise. Denise and Pedro, this the narrator also manages to infer from his conversation with that woman, in the middle of the war, left Paris to go to Megève, “because it was a safe place” and “from there one always had the possibility to cross the border.” “But what has really happened in Megève?” the woman asks the man in whom she thinks to recognize Pedro, and by this pronounces the question which from this moment on will become the main interest of the narrator (116). The rest of the book is made up by the narrator’s supposed flushes of memories and his attempt to reconstruct how he has met Denise Coudreuse and what has happened in Megève. What’s distinctive in Rue des Boutiques Obscures is how it is each time the interplay between a picture and some piece of information about the persons in the picture (sometimes written on the picture) that allows the narrator to advance in his search. These photographs have, to use

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Barthes’s term, a decisively cardinal function in advancing the narrative. From their physical existence in the reality of the narrated world they derive over and above that an eminently phatic function: With the photograph, there exists a physical object that stands for a particular moment in the narrative (for the narrator, a moment linked to the event of coming to know something), and therefore, by referring to that object, or taking it out again, this particular moment in the narrative is called upon. Besides that, these photographs serve to establish some of the very few physical characteristics that we get to know about the persons in this tale.17 That Gay Orlow was blond, for instance, we learn when the narrator for the first time looks at the photograph in which she can be seen with the old Giorgiadzé and the man in which he thinks to recognize himself; that she was beautiful, we conclude from the way in which her former husband, Waldo Blunt, looks at her picture. The photograph of the four young people, besides its cardinal function for the unfolding of the narrative (to deliver the proof that the four of them have known each other and spent some time at the Howard de Luz’s property) has the eminently phatic function to represents the basic, say, “geometric” structure of the narrative, which can be understood as a quadrangle: from Gay Orlow to Freddie Howard de Luz, from Freddie Howard de Luz to Pedro McEvoy, and from Pedro McEvoy to Denise Coudreuse. It is not by coincidence that this photograph appears at the midpoint of the book. Rue des Boutiques Obscures, in some sense, falls into two parts, over the first of which one could write “Gay Orlow,” and over the second “Denise Coudreuse.” The connecting element between these “two stories,” if one wishes, is the photograph of the four. What is in general—irrespectively of the functions for any specific narrative—the functionality of the narrator’s (or another character’s) look at a picture? It’s functionality is a double one. Certainly, anchoring such an act of looking-on directed to a picture that exists in the world of the fiction first of all has a thoroughly phatic function. Other than an unmediated description of a person or scene (a description from the “off” so to say), such a narrowed view, directed to a picture, is less demanding for the reader, precisely because of the constraints that it implies: The picture itself shows just a particular cut-out, which already focuses the view. Beyond that, the quality of the picture might impose a certain constraint. A photograph could be black-and-white or out of focus—both properties that photographs in Modiano’s novels quite often have. And this takes off some of the responsibility indeed from both, the writer and the reader: If a picture, for instance, does not allow to discern the eye color of a person, the writer is freed from the responsibility to define the eye color, and thereby the reader is freed from the need to remember or even to envision the eye color. But not only that. Because the act of seeing is directed at a picture, that is, some object that belongs to the narrated world and that is clearly referred to by a word or phrase, what is seen in the picture can be called-on with exactly these words. What is seen in the picture becomes quotable by these words:

… scattered out around me, the photographs. I put them in the big, red box, except two of them, which I placed on the bed: the photograph in which I could be seen next to Gay Orlow and the old Giorgiadzé and that one of Gay Orlow as a child, in Yalta. (46)

17 In “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative” Barthes refers to such functions as indices.

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Out of my pocket I took an envelope, which I opened and out of which I took two photographs: the one in which could be seen with Gay Orlow and the old Giorgiadzé and the man in which I thought to recognize myself, and the other one, in which she still was a young girl. (90) I chose this moment to present him the photograph of Gay Orlow and the old Giorgiadzé and myself. “Do you know these people?” (90) The photograph in which I could be seen next to Gay Orlow and the old Giorgiadzé for sure had been taken at that occasion. I planned to show it to him. (190)

… “the photograph of Gay Orlow and the old Giorgiadzé” and that third person who is referred to in different ways—this is, again and again, the linguistic unit used to call upon that picture. Besides that, the variation in referring to that third person fulfills an additional function: it expresses the degree of certainty with which the narrator believes (or dares to admit to believe) to have been that man. At least this interpretation is left possible. It is this a distinctively poetic operation that Modiano achieves here: liking a picture to some linguistic element that comes to refer to it. Modiano fulfills this operation here essentially by using the names of the persons in the picture. Let us note though that “Gay Orlow” and “the old Giorgiadzé” are not the narrator’s words but that it was the giver of these photographs who had called the persons in the picture by these names: “Gay Orlow” (“Gay” after all is not her official name but an abbreviation of “Galina”) and “the old Giorgiadzé” are quotes! With this kind of maneuver Modiano practically solves a problem that Barthes has theoretically exposed. As Barthes says in the “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”:

Narrative does not make see; it does not imitate. The passion that may consume us upon reading a novel is not that of a “vision” (in fact, we “see” nothing), it is the passion of sense, that is, a higher order of relation, which also carries its emotions, its hopes, its threats, its triumphs: “what goes on” in a narrative is, from the referential (real) point of view, strictly speaking: nothing; “what happens” is language alone, the adventure of language, whose advent never ceases to be celebrated. (26–27)

A picture, just as a memory, one could say expanding on Barthes’s analysis from Proust et les noms, pertains to the world of the signified, and not that of signifiers, and therefore “cannot directly serve as a unit of discourse” (121). What Modiano needs though—still transposing Barthes—is precisely that: “a truly poetic element (poetic in the sense that Jakobson gives to this term), which, however, like a flush of memory, has the force to constitute the essence of the objects of the novel” (121). And he, Modiano, finds this element ready-made in the names. But Modiano pushes this method further. In Modiano’s so far latest novel, Encre sympathique, there is a document, a card that permits to receive mail by general delivery, that travels over time and in which all three elements are materialized in one object: a name, a photograph, and a

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linguistic clipping. This card is part of an “act” (un “dossier”) that the narrator has preserved over decades and that stems from the time when, as a young man, he has worked as an apprentice-detective for a certain Hutte. It is in fact the recovery of this act that initiates the narrative. The card has been issued for the person whose disappearance constituted the first case that the narrator had been assigned to by Hutte: Noëlle Lefebvre. The card indeed also contains the address of the card holder: 15, rue de la Convention, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. And then, attached to the card is a photograph of the card holder—a picture that is however too dark as that one could distinguish the eye or hair color. This card, “the card of the general-delivery mail” (“la carte de la poste restante”), or more formally, the “certificate of the issuance of a permission to receive mail by general delivery,” as is written on the card, back then, when the narrator has worked on the case, has been the most valuable element of his search: “The card of the general-delivery mail”—“la carte de la poste restante,” in Encre sympathique, takes on a similar role as “FIAT COULEUR VERT D’EAU” in Accident nocturne: it becomes the refrain of the narrator’s search. These words come to stand for the essence of his search. With this card, Modiano has created an object that contains in reified form: the name of a person, the name of a place, a photograph, and a linguistic clipping. Through this card, the picture becomes citable by a linguistic clipping.

The continuity in the names “Never trust an eyewitness,” says the narrator of Encre sympathique:

I had one more time given proof of my naivety for thinking that Béavioure would tell me everything about Noëlle Lefebvre, which would have allowed me to understand why I had taken such an interest in her over such a long time. And I ended up believing that I was in search of a missing part of my own life … I thought of the sign from the waterfront and its red letters: “Garage du Trocadéro. R. Béavioure. Spécialiste Chrysler. Jour et nuit,” and I wanted to laugh. One should never trust an eyewitness. Their so-called testimonies concerning the persons that they supposedly have known are wrong, most of the time, and they do nothing but cover the tracks. The line of a life disappears behind these obliterations. How shall we separate the true from the false when we think of the many contradictory traces that a person leaves behind her. And about oneself? Does one know more about oneself, I ask myself, thinking about my own lies and omissions and involuntary forgetting. (89–99)

Encre sympathique treats of the narrator’s attempt to gain clearness over the impact that the encounter with the case of Noëlle Lefebvre had on its own life: Noëlle Lefebvre, back then, had been reported missing, by a certain Brainos, who had commissioned Hutte with her search. The case had soon been dismissed by Hutte, because Brainos, who gave no sign anymore, did not seem to “very reliable as a client” and the case did not seem to be “very interesting” (45). The narrator though could not let go of the case, and the book is his account not only of his initial apprentice-detective work on the case and a number of other encounters, stretched out over a period of more than thirty years, that he had with people or elements who were then in the proximity of the case, but most importantly his effort to come at terms with why this case has interested him so much.

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Such concerns are far from the narrator of Modiano’s first novel, La place de l’étoile, who, from the first paragraph, throws us over with this own supposed exploits, which appear by the anger that they provoke:

It was the time when I dissipated my Venezuelan heritage. While some did not stop to speak of my beautiful youth and my black curls, others showered me with insults. I read one more time the article that Léon Rabatête writes at my address in a special number of D’Ici la France: “How long will we have to assist the spectacle staged by a Raphaël Schlemilovitch? How long will this Jew without punishment expose his neurosis and epileptic attacks from Touquet to the Cap d’Antibes, from La Baule to Aix-les-Bains? I ask one more time: how long will the types of his kind insult the sons of France? (13)

The narrator of La place de l’étoile is a terribly chatty, driven, hasty, and unreliable narrator. Such hyperbole and processing of cliché and notably that hast in the voice are remote to the later Modiano narrator. The narrator who today is so tightly identified with Modiano is a particularly calm, at times almost silent narrator, interested not in the “big,” and “overreaching” (neither in a positive nor negative sense) but in the individual, the at first sight unimportant details of a life, which, by the very attention that he devotes to them, he lifts out of their averageness. The voice that opens Encre sympathique is a solidly settled, reflective, almost lyrical one:

There are white spaces in this life, white spaces that you guess, when you open the “act.” A simple sheet, in a sky-blue folder, which has faded out over time. Almost white as well, this former sky blue. And the word “act” is written in the middle of the folder. In black ink. (11). Il y a des blancs dans cette vie, des blancs que l’on devine, si l’on ouvre le « dossier ». Une simple fiche, dans une chemise, à la couleur bleu ciel, qui a pâli avec le temps. Presque blanc, lui aussi, cet ancien bleu ciel. Et le mot « dossier » est écrit au milieu de la chemise. À l’encre noir. (11)

The difference in voice between, La place de l’étoile and Encre sympathique, to take to two extreme points, is so stark that in ignorance of the author, one might not even attribute the two books to the same author.18 The change from one voice into the other happened relatively early, announced already in Modiano’s second novel La ronde de nuit, by a flickering-up of this new, more sensitive and calmer voice (which there however “sits” on a disreputable character), and can be considered as completed with Modiano’s fourth novel Villa Triste.19 Still and all, there is a formal trait that unites these two narrative forms: it is the role of the names. The names function each time as a generative system, adapted to and in fact in the service of the respective narrative form. “Schlemilovitch,” certainly is not just a name but, to speak with Barthes, also a sign. Modiano, however—and this indeed will come to be typical for him—does 18 In addition to that, Modiano has occasionally drawn on a third type of narrative mode and voice: subjective third-person narration, through the consciousness of a character, including female characters, which one finds in Une jeunesse, Des inconnues, La petite Bijoux, and, interestingly, also in the last part of Encre Sympathique. 19 I treat this question in a separate essay written in German, “Modiano und die Geburt der Stimme aus dem schwachen Charakter (nach Lukács)” (“Modiano and the birth of his voice out of a weak character (after Lukács)”).

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not unfold its meaning for us. In this first novel, the meaning of the name as a sign is indeed so evident—is in fact cliché—that any unfolding of its meaning would spoil the narrative. More than that: the name is program here, precisely in its function of cliché, by which it is announced that the discourse of the narrator has to be read as a “long cliché,” so to say. What happens in La place de l’étoile is essentially the discourse of the narrator, who delivers an account of his supposed intellectual and exploits and his rivalries and encounters with a number of (real or fictional) personalities like Léon Rabatête, a certain doctor Bardamu, Maurice Sachs, Otto Abetz, some Vicomte Charles Lévy-Vendôme, Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle, Dreyfus, Freud, Hitler, Eva Braun … These names, certainly, not only have the force of citation, they are citation. It is some kind of historic name dropping, which, precisely because of its hyperbole and notably the fact that a real encounter with all these personalities, as they appear in the narrative, is not possible in real historic time, marks the discourse of the narrator as a fantasized one. The narrator finally claims to be lying on the couch of a certain doctor Freud in Vienna, which is the final crash of any form of reliability. The names are highly functional here: Not only what is narrated but the whole narrative, including its voice and mode (how it relates to the real world), comes out of the names. And, though the tone is an altogether different one, the names play a similar constitutive role in in Encre sympathique. “Noëlle Lefebvre” is a name perfectly common for a woman who was young in the France of the 1960s. The narrator himself speaks it out at two occasions: “There certainly where many Noëlle Lefebvres in France” (20); “Lefebvre … a very common name in France” (82). “Noëlle Lefebvre” is program: it means “one life.” No particular life, but the particularity of an individual’s experience of “life” itself. With Modiano, the names, each time, have the function of “signifying” the essence of the novel. As far as the techniques to exploit the functions of the names go (to place theme in the narrative, to reinforce and mark them as poetic elements), one finds in La place de l’étoile already the very means that would become so typical for Modiano. One finds them, in fact, in the opening paragraph of the book (“It was the time that I dissipated my Venezuelan heritage …”). The tone is just so loud—and this is part of the operation—that it has a tendency to cover-up the technique: It is not that the narrator introduces himself as “Raphaël Schlemilovitch”; no we infer that this is his name, or the name that he pretends to have, because he tells us that someone else refers to him by that name. And this supposedly happens, not just in the course of some verbal exchange, but as part of some written dispute: printed in the pages of this paper. And then, when Schlemilovitch meets Charles Lévy-Vendôme, to take out another example, this happens in the following way:

I was about to spend my last bank notes in the Dubern restaurant, when a man sat down at the table next to mine. His monocle and his long jade cigarette holder attracted my attention. He was completely bald, which added a worrisome note to his appearance. During the meal he did not leave his eyes from me. He called the waiter by an idiosyncratic wink with his finger … I saw him write some words on a card. He pointed to me with his finger, and the waiter brought me a card on which I read:

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VICOMTE CHARLES LÉVY-VENDÔME

Animator, wishes to make your acquaintance. (88–89)

This is the very same technique by which Victor Chmara will read VILLA TRISTE on the door of the house in the town at the lake and Guy Roland will read HUTTE on the door of the agency. And it is the very same technique by which Jean Eyben, the narrator of Encre sympathique, will find out that over decades he had gotten the spelling of “Behaviour” wrong:

I arrived at the height of the big garage just before the high-lane metro and the steps up to the Square de l’Alboni. At the entrance of the garage, a white shield carried this inscription in red letters:

G A R A G E D U T R O C A D É R O

R. Béavioure Spécialiste Chrysler jour et nuit (92–93)

While Modiano’s voice has changed, this technique has remained intact. It has traveled over the more than fifty years, over more than thirty novels and other works of narrative fiction.

Works Cited Barthes, Roland. Critique et Vérité, Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1966. Quotations in this article translated by Christina Pawlowitsch. Barthes, Roland. “Proust et les noms.” In Roland Barthes, Le degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques, Éditions du Seuil 1972. The text (in the original French) first appeared in: To Honor Roman Jakobson, Essays on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, De Gruyter Mouton, The Hague, Paris, 1967. Quotations in this article translated by Christina Pawlowitsch. Barthes, Roland. “Introduction à l’analyse structural des récits.” Communications 8 (1966): 1–27. Quotations in this article translated by Christina Pawlowitsch. Barthes, Roland. “Le degré zéro de l’écriture.” In Le degré zéro de l’écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Originally published 1953 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil). Roland Barthes, “‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.’” In Roland Barthes, Le bruissement de la langue. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984. Originally published 1982 (Paris: Inédits du Collège de France, Nr. 3).

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Barthes Roland and Lionel Duisit, “An introduction to the structural analysis of narrative,” New Literary History, vol. 6, no. 2, On Narrative and Narratives (1975): 237–72. Commengé, Béatrice. Le Paris de Patrick Modiano, Paris: Alexandrines, 2015, Schlesser, Gilles. Paris dans les pas de Patrick Modiano, Paris: Parigramme, 2019. Compagnon, Antoine. “‘Proust et moi.’” In Autobiography, Historiography, Rhetoric. A Festschrift in Honor of F. P. Bowman. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994. Dauthenay, Henri. Répertoire de couleurs pour aider à la détermination des couleurs des fleurs, des feuillages et des fruits : publié par la Société française des chrysanthémistes et René Oberthür ; avec la collaboration principale de Henri Dauthenay, et celle de MM. Julien Mouillefert, C. Harman Payne, Max Leichtlin, N. Severi et Miguel Cortès, vol. 2, Paris: Librairie horticole, 1905. Deleuze, Gilles. Proust et les signes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964. Jean Rousset, Jean. Forme et signification: essais sur les structures littéraires de Corneille à Claudel. Paris: J. Corti, 1962.

Jakobson, Roman. “Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances.” In Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton, 1956. Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by T. Sebeok, 350–77. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. La Pensée sauvage. Paris: Plon, 1952. Leyris, Raphaëlle. “Patrick Modiano: ‘Je préfère écrire à la dérobée,’” in: Le Monde, online edition, published October 2, 2019; updated October 3, 2019. Modiano, Patrick. La place de l‘étoile. Paris: Gallimard, 1968 (revised and corrected 2004). Modiano, Patrick. La ronde de nuit. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Modiano, Patrick. Les boulevards de ceintures. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. Modiano, Patrick. Villa Triste. Paris: Gallimard, 1975. Modiano, Patrick. Livret de famille. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. Modiano, Patrick. Rue des Boutiques Obscures. Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Modiano, Patrick. Une jeunesse. Paris: Gallimard, 1981.

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Modiano, Patrick. Dora Bruder. Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

Modiano, Patrick. Des Inconnues. Paris: Gallimard, 2001.

Modiano, Patrick. La petite Bijoux. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. Modiano, Patrick. Accident nocturne. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

Modiano, Patrick. Un pedigree. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

Modiano, Patrick. L’herbe des nuits, Gallimard. Paris: Gallimard, 2012.

Modiano, Patrick. Discours à l'Académie suédoise. Paris: Gallimard, 2015.

Modiano, Patrick. Encre sympathique. Paris: Gallimard, 2019.

Schlesser, Gilles. Paris dans les pas de Patrick Modiano, Paris: Parigramme, 2019.

*** Acknowledgements: I would like to express my gratitude to Martin Riedl for his reading and detailed comments on this essay through different phases of its coming together. I also would like to thank Yves Gozlan for his remark that “Villa Triste” can be read as “vie à triste” and Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde for numerous exchanges on Modiano.