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PARTISAN REVIEW
previously visited, phone numbers, and, as in
Dora Bruder,
a classified
ad for a missing person
("On recherche une jeulle fille .
.. "
etc.).
Modiano has confessed to blending "reality and fiction ...a proce–
dure producing a certain uneasiness that would not arise if readers were
sure of finding themselves either inside a totally imaginary situation or
else in historical reality." This uneasy
c1air-obsClir
may convey his revolt
against a deadly bureaucratic world, where only persons with a
fiche
d'idel1tite
have the right to exist.
Yet his fascination with vanishings also has other resonances. Particu–
lar places, illuminated fitfully by the people passing through and as if
into them, glow with a ghostliness reminiscent of old photographs or
homemade movies. A sustained contrast, in fact, governs all the novels.
In
Dora Bruder,
by eliding much of his own biography in order to focus
on the missing girl, "the extreme precision of certain details" sets off "the
night, the unknown, the forgetfulness, the nothingness all around them."
To adapt one of Freud's observations: the dead girl's imaginative
impact is stronger than the living might have been. Why? The historical
context may furnish a clue. The fullness of the empty center called Dora
suggests an incarnation arising from an "absent memory" that afflicts,
in particular, a postwar generation of Jewish writers. Not having
directly experienced the Holocaust era, members of that generation are
compelled to research, rather than recall, what happened in and to their
families. The descendants' imagination is haunted by absent presences.
The engagement, then, that retrieves in the form of a personal quest
the memory of an unwitnessed reality lifts the element of romance in
this kind of fiction to a new level of seriousness. It is a form of belated
witness complementary to the memory that returns in the testimony of
eyewitnesses. By now the popular appeal of these testimonies may have
increased memory-envy in two respects. first, the testimonies are by
people akin to Dora Bruder, rather than exclusively by those who played
important roles in or after the Holocaust. Secondly, they reinforce the
wish, always latcnt in us, for strong, identity-shaping memories.
To come to our other concern: the relation of the invented or recon–
structed "I" to the historical as a form of realism. Does historical fact
always further the realistic mode? In fiction, the specificity of the
famous name, of "Marilyn Monroe" for instance, may not have much
effect, once the surprise wears off. Only when the name is unknown
("Martin Guerre"), or unrevealed (the bearer of a secret identity), or
made evocative by a literature of its own (Proust's "Combray," Joyce's
recycled "Ulysses"), does it become an intriguing index. Otherwise its
reality-claim is no greater than that of the pro-namc "I," which always
