112
PARTISAN REVIEW
and Modiano it is an ad, conspicuous in the one case, inconspicuous in
the other, that yields a clue to the story of a life. Everything else about
the two narratives is different. That a Marquise, during the turmoil of
the Napoleonic wars, resorts to a public medium in order to find her
rescuer-rapist implies a daring solecism, a desperate if courageous act on
the part of a woman born into the nobility.
In
Modiano, however, the
ordinariness of the medium emphasizes the deceptive ordinariness of the
event. The missing girl for whom the novel is named had no power of
self-determination except for the "fugue" or escapade that may have
doomed her. She disappears twice: as a runaway in the winter of 1941,
and again in June of 1942, when she was probably seized in one of the
rafles
for Jews in Nazi-occupied Paris.
Is Modiano's novel history or fiction?
Dora Bruder
offers, at first
glance, nothing to sustain fictional suspense except the removal of a mys–
tification. The "Vichy syndrome" occulted into the 1980s the part played
by the French police in the deportation of Jews. The first-person narra–
tor of
Dora Bruder,
eventually identified as Modiano himself, retrieves
by his research a single unknown girl's life-and death-from obscurity:
he makes her name live, or rather, reveals through it a collective fate.
But there is mystery because we are left to conjecture why he should
engage on precisely this quest, motivated by an announcement seen by
chance. He has no personal or family relation
to
Dora, except in the
sense in which her last name implies universal kinship. He says only that
he is familiar with the
quartier
where Dora lived, and experienced an
adolescent rebellion at the same age. His family, being Jewish, found
itself in a comparably dangerous situation in wartime Paris. He also
betrays regret for the city he knew while growing up, because it is being
altered by postwar changes.
Remarka bly, beca use the author's inq uiry is so thorough, h istorica I
and archival, it's impossible to decide from internal evidence whether
the gradually recovered details of Dora Bruder's fate are fictive, or pre–
sent an actual slice of history. The self-burdened narrator meets the dis–
cipline of history on its own ground, producing a persuasive facsimile.
Yet his novel cannot be called "faction." Modiano respects his
remoteness from the events, and the narrative "I," though distinctive
enough, tied to certain memories and caught up in the search, has only
a spotty autobiographical density. Sparse details about the author's life
contrast with the increasing weight of facts about Dora's fugitive pas–
sage across the landscape of a disastrous epoch.
Without being impersonal, Modiano's "history" achieves a represen–
tational quality similar to neoclassical
reeits
that report terrible events
