HOW TO IU-:CAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
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rather than showing them on stage. Its narrator, however, is not an eye–
witness, as in those
rdcits.
He is a belated observer, drawn as if acciden–
tally-through no more than a printed trace-to an act of necromancy
that rescues Dora from the anonymous mass of Holocaust victims.
Two questions are correlative to any discussion of realism in its con–
temporary phase, when autobiography, biography, testimony, and con–
fessional memoir invade both fictional and nonfictional space. One is
the liaison between the "I" and historical events, as in
Dora Bruder
or
W.
C.
Sebald's
The Eilligrants.
The second is the status of the "[" itself,
which is
I)
a character in the story,
2)
seemingly coincident with its nar–
rative source, and 3) a peculiar linguistic entity.
Let me first deal-briefly-with the status of the
"I."
As a character it
is entirely variable: reticent in
Dora Bmder
and
The Emigrants,
flamboy–
ant in confessional literature or self-expose, a style shifter in
E. L.
Doc–
torow's
City of God.
This chameleon quality is partly enabled by a
linguistic feature. While "I" has the consistency of a name, being a pro–
noun backed by a noun (the name of autobiographer, biographer, or nov–
elist), it is, at the same time, what linguists call a shifter, a conduit allowing
the narrative to proceed,
to
convert
langue
into
parole.
Call it semanti–
cally opaque (like most proper names) but syntactically transparent.
Basically, the "I" promises
to
reveal something factually true about the
speaker. This expectation proves to be deceptive, or very intricate. The
flow of words in personal narratives can become allergic to itself, to that
implicit promise. There is certainly an acute awareness of what Henry
James called "the terrible fluidity" of self-revelation. Hence certain reti–
cences or ellipses. As shifters, moreover, the "I" and some related con–
cepts ("now," "here") express a deceptive temporality, a present unable
to sustain itself and which slips into an anterior future, an "always
already." Such words, then, are either empty universals that promise too
much or part of an imaginary, if credible, biography-more precisely,
thanatography. Reading
Dora Bruder
in the context of Modiano's other
novels, this purely structural feature of first-person narratives opens into
an obsessive pattern, one that suggests a deep-seated identity puzzle.
Modiano often traces the passage of a missing person, who may turn
out to be the narrator himself as in
nue des houtiques ohscures
( 1978).
"] am nothing. Nothing but a clear silhouette," is how the novel begins.
It goes on to explain that "nothing" in a commonplace manner, dis–
closing that the speaker is referring
to
his amnesia. In
Voyage de Noces
(J
990),
however, the literalizing device of amnesia is dropped. Every–
thing slips into a sentiment of unreality, a permanent
fugue,
and the nar–
rator has
to
grasp at various identity-scraps: addresses, places
