mirror

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-12-17T12:45:00.000-08:00

Part-24

Actually at that horrible period there were none to trust. Everyone had to be terrified with any sort of ominous incidents. Many had to tread the dark paths with the gangsters and even with collaborators for their own survival. Such was the matter in case of the protagonist possessing a fake Nansen passport ,a status of persona non grata, no place to find peace and not any trustworthy one whom he may express his agony for getting relief from pangs of conscience. His only support was his own world of reflection where he has been able to get good companionship with his two weaklings and keep himself safe for a while from bad companionship of the survivors in the dark world by being engrossed in hearing pre-war songs like Swing Troubadour, Étoile Rio, Je n’en Connais pas la Fin, Réginella or by inventing his own self anew in some places frequented once by different people before the Nazi occupation. That’s why he has been throughout the novel like a European troubadour of the Middle-Ages muttering lonely even amidst all the tumult of his surroundings! He reflects: “Not that I found these two creatures more moving or more vulnerable than the majority of humankind. They all would inspire in me a hopeless, maternal compassion. But Coco Lacour and Esmeralda alone remained silent. They never moved. Silence, stillness, after enduring so many useless screams and gestures. I felt no need to speak to them. What would be the purpose? They were deaf. And that was for the best. Were I to confide my grief to a fellow creature, he would immediately desert me.”(Modiano, 1971:207)
( to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-22T14:01:00.003-07:00

Part-23

Such state of laissez-aller was a commonplace at the time of Nazi occupation when there was not a single car in Paris. Not a single person on the streets. Sometimes a tolling clock would break the silence. Everyone had left Paris in July, the fireworks season. A whole world, on the brink of extinction, was sending up one last flurry of sparks beneath the foliage and the paper lanterns. In the evenings, they would gather one last time on the café terraces along the Champs-Élysées and in the Bois de Boulogne. Smoke was rising from the chimneys: people were burning their old papers before absconding. They didn’t want to be weighed down by useless baggage. Rivers of cars were streaming toward the gates of Paris in this flight. But going through those dirty works he hasn’t been seen to be forgetful of his own maman(mother) and his own created weaklings—Coco Lacour and Esmeralda—embodiment of his caring mind as has been visualized in his thought:

“...Something would be born of my old age, my loneliness, like a bubble on the tip of a straw. I waited. In an instant, it took shape: a red-headed giant, clearly blind, since he wore dark glasses. A little girl with a wizened face. I named them Coco Lacour and Esmeralda.Destitute.Sickly.Always silent. A single word, a gesture would be enough to break them. What would have become of them without me? At last I found a reason to go on living. I loved them, my poor monsters. I would watch over them...No one would harm them.”(Modiano, 1971: 206)

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-10T12:37:00.003-07:00

Part-22

Accepting the humiliating consequence under the Nazi occupation as a fate he has been used to going against his own conscience for the survival as he thinks:

“J’ai déjà dit que je me souciais peu du sort du monde.Le mien non plus ne me passionnait pas outre mesure.Il suffisait de se laisser porter par le courant.Fétu de paille.”^viii(Modiano,1969:108)

Following the orders of his boss ‘le Khédive’ he starts struggling in occupied Paris to navigate working as a double agent for a French gang that collaborates with the Nazi as well as a group of French resistance fighters. Bearing two aliases— the ‘Princesse de Lamballe’ in favour of a group of young patriots in a resistance cell and ‘Swing Troubadour’ in favour of murderers, blackmailers, police informants, prostitutes, and thieves— he has been playing a betrayal role of double agent in arresting patriotic Frenchmen and helping the collaborators for stealing from the houses of those who have fled the France. Le Khédive used to have him raid private houses and confiscate objects of art: Second Empire hôtels particuliers, eighteenth-century ‘follies’, turn-of-the-century buildings with stained-glass windows, faux-châteaux in the gothic style.

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-09T13:14:00.002-07:00

Part-21

Let’s turn our observation to ‘The night watch’, another novelette with the same epigraphic style as adopted in the novel ‘La place de l’étoile’ , begins taking Scott Fitzgerald’s ominous cry:

‘Pourquoi m’étais-je identifié aux objets mêmes de mon horreur et de ma compassion?’^vi

that tends to create first-hand a belief— there’s some sort of unexpected destiny to which every human soul is bound to be prone—before leading the readers to the story of the novelette.

‘Unlike the protagonist in The place of the star (La place de l’étoile) the protagonist with his role of an unnamed narrator in ‘The night watch’ (La ronde de nuit), acting like a double-faced Roman God Janus, has been seen to survive his life looking and searching something hopeful in two opposite directions without being unconscious of his guilt and hypocrisy every moment.’(KhabirUddin, 2016:Vol.XIV, No.122, p-9) The more he has been on the run to escape the cruel destiny the more he has been entangled with the dregs of the dark society where tread always dark characters like Henri Normand alias le Khédive, Philibert, Frau Sultana, Baroness Lydia Stahl, Jean-Farouk de Méthode, Count Baruzzi, Ferdinand Poupet alias Paulo Hayakawa, etc. In spite of being accompanied by a gang of these dark characters he impersonated his brainchildren like Coco Lacour and Esmeralda just to relax himself and overcome his agony as has been, he supposes, in case of Hitler himself:

“Je suppose qu’Hitler lui-même éprouvait le besoin de se détendre en caressant son chien.”^vii(Modiano,1969:158)

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-08T12:19:00.000-07:00

Part-20

Suddenly everyone mentioned earlier is getting revived, acting weird and talking nonsense. The act of recapitulation makes Raphaël’s head explode, but he does not know whether from the bullets or from his delirious joy. And suddenly by his bed sits Sigmund Freud telling him that there is one thing you must understand at all costs. THE JEW DOES NOT EXIST, as Schweitzer de la Sarthe so aptly puts it. YOU ARE NOT A JEW, you are a man among other men that is all. You are not a Jew, as I have just said, you are suffering from delusions, hallucinations, fantasies, nothing more, a slight touch of paranoia...

Being a Jew Raphaël Schlemilovitch has been seen to malign the Jews. This self-contradictory trait can exist only in a mind suffering from deliriums resulted from pangs of paranoia!

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-07T14:47:00.002-07:00

Part-19

It is to be noted that after his confiding that he is a French Jew, he is ushered into a sealed cabin .He is tortured by Jews, going to be sent to a disciplinary kibbutz and cleansed from the germs of the cosmopolitan Jew .The person in charge tells Raphaël that from Tel Aviv to the Dead Sea, from Haifa to Eilat, no one is interested in hearing about the anxiety, the frantic restlessness, the tears, the Jewish bad luck. No one! We don’t want to hear another word about the Jewish critical thinking, intelligence, Jewish scepticism, Jewish contortions and humiliations, Jewish misfortune... In kibbutz Raphaël meets Rebecca, a lieutenant in the Israeli army, who says her love to him suddenly and wants to take him to Tel Aviv and go back to Europe with him. But they have been caught in Tel Aviv and tortured. They rape and kill Rebecca.

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-06T13:33:00.001-07:00

Part-18

After such punishment Schlemilovitch has been brought to a General named Tobie Cohen, Commissioner for Youth and Raising Morale in response to the question—why did you come to Israel?—of whom he says:

“Je suis une nature romantique.Je ne voulais pas mourir sans avoir vu la terre de mes ancêtres.”^v(Modiano, 1968:IV.184)

Then the General started advising:

“And you are intending to RETURN to Europe, are you not? To go back to this playacting, this farce of yours? Don’t bother to answer, I’ve heard it all before: Jewish angst, Jewish misery, Jewish fear, Jewish despair...People wallow in their misfortunes, they ask for more, they want to go back to the comfortable world of the ghettos, the delights of the pogroms...I am sending you to a disciplinary kibbutz immediately. Don’t worry, you will only be there for three months. Just enough time to build up the biceps you sorely lack and cleanse you of the germs of the cosmopolitan Jew. Is that clear?”(Modiano, 2015:IV.101-103)

At about four in the afternoon, they arrived at the penal kibbutz.A huge concrete building surrounded by barbed wire. All around, the desert stretched as far as the eye could see. Isaiah and Isaac lined us up by the gates and took a roll call. There were eight of them: three English Jews, an Italian Jew, two German Jews, an Austrian Jew and him,a French Jew. The camp commandant appeared and stared at each of them in turn. The sight of this blond colossus in his black uniform did not fill him with confidence. And yet two Stars of David glittered on the lapel of his jacket.

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-05T12:31:00.002-07:00

Part-17

After having been arrested and sent by Admiral Levy aboard the ship Zion to Israel, Schlemilovitch along with other foreign Jews was being tortured by four officers bearing the names of Biblical Prophets such as Saul, Isaac, Isaiah, Elias. They took Schlemilovitch seriously when they found in his luggage several books by Proust and Kafka, reproductions of Modigliani and Soutine, some photos of Charlie Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim and Groucho Marx.

Elias stroked his chin. ‘This is the prison for the foreign Jews,’ he said to him, ‘we’ll take you to the cell for French Jews. You’re the only one at the moment. But there will be more along soon. Don’t you worry.’

‘The little shits can sit around talking about Marcel Proust,’ said Isaiah...Isaac and Saul pushed him into a little room. Isaiah came in and handed him a pair of striped pyjamas. Sewn onto the pyjama jacket was a yellow Star of David on which he read Franʐösisch Jude. As he closed the reinforced door, Isaac tripped him and he fell flat on his face.
(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-04T13:11:00.001-07:00

Part-16

Then he has been seen leaving his girlfriends without saying good-bye and following an avenue as far as Danube where he was caught by a policeman while thinking disorderly in a drunken state:

“I was incorrigible. I was prepared to appropriate another man’s death just as I had appropriated the pens of Proust and Céline, the paintbrushes of Modigliani and Soutine,the gurning faces of Groucho Marx and Chaplin. My tuberculosis? Had I not stolen it from Franz Kafka? I could still change my mind and die like him in the Kierling sanatorium not far from here. Nerval or Kafka? Suicide or sanatorium? No, suicide did not suit me, a Jew has no right to commit suicide. Such luxury should be left to Werther.What then? Turn up at Kierling sanatorium? Could I be sure that I would die there, like Kafka?”(Modiano, 2015:IV.89)

After having been brought by the policeman to the police station the Komissar started saying:

“It doesn’t surprise me. At your age, everyone is consumptive. It needs to be treated, otherwise you end up spitting blood and dragging yourself along all your life. This is what I’ve decided: if you’d been born earlier, I would have sent you to Auschwitz to have your tuberculosis treated, but we live in more civilised times. Here, this is a ticket for Israel. Apparently, over there, the Jews...” (Modiano, 2015:IV.92)

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-03T12:53:00.001-07:00

Part-15

Suddenly he has been seen to be willing to confess to her that his father was responsible for these miniature works of art, but she constantly kvetches to him about the Jews. They demand compensation on the pretext that their families were exterminated in the camps, they are bleeding Germany white. They drove around in Mercedes drinking champagne while the poor Germans were working to rebuild their country and living hand-to-mouth. Oh, the bastards! First they corrupted Germany, now they were pimping it.

However, She (Hilda) tried to make him forget Austro-German uncouthness, talking to him about Mozart, Schubert. Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After listening to her talks about them Schlemilovitch starts prattling as usual:

“Hofmannsthal?’ I said, ‘A Jew, my little Hilda!

Austria

is a Jewish colony. Freud, Zweigl, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, it’s a ghetto! I defy you to name me a great Tyrolean poet! In France, we don’t allow ourselves to be overrun like that. The likes of Montaigne and Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Céline have never succeeded in jewifying our country. Ronsard and Du Bellay are there, keeping an eye open for any trouble! In fact, my little Hilda, we French make no distinction between Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians and all the other Jews. And don’t talk to me about your papa, SS Murzzuschlag, or the Nazis. All Jews, meine kleine Hilda’, the Nazis are the shock troops of the Jews! Think about Hitler, the little runt of a corporal wandering the streets of Vienna, beaten, numb with cold, starving to death! Long live Hitler!” (Modiano, 2015:IV.83)

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-02T12:34:00.000-07:00

Part-14

In the fourth part Schlemilovitch with Lévy-Vendôme arrived at the Burggarten and sat on one of the benches. Suddenly they heard the sound of a wooden leg striking the ground. A man was walking towards them, a monstrous cripple...His eyes were luminous, and his sweeping fringe and his stubby moustache glistened in the darkness. His lips were set in a rictus that made our hearts pound. His left arm, which he extended, tapered to a hook. They had expected to run into him in Vienna. Inevitably. He was wearing the uniform of an Austrian corporal the better to terrify us.He threatened them, bellowing: ‘Sechs Millionen Juden! Sechs Millionen Juden!’Shrapnel from his booming laugh pierced our chests. He tried to gouge their eyes out with his hook. They ran away. He followed them, shrieking: ‘Sechs Millionen Juden! Sechs Millionen Juden!’ For a long time they ran through the dead city, this drowned city washed up on the shore. Hofburg, Palais Kinsky, Palais Lobkowitz, Palais Pallavicini, Palais Porcia, Palais Wilczek... Behind them, in a rasping voice Captain Hook sang ‘Hitlerleute’, thumping the pavement with his wooden leg. It seemed to them they were the only people in the city. After killing them, their enemy would wander these empty streets like a ghost until the end of time.

Around them, every table is occupied by several women—Whores. Hilda is a whore.In the person of Raphaël Schlemilovitch, she has just found her pimp. In future, he will call her Marizibill^iv(Apollinare,165):when Apollinaire wrote about the ‘Jewish pimp, red-haired and ruddy-faced’ he was thinking of him. He owns this place: the waiter who brings him his alcools looks like Lévy-Vendôme...he imagines five hundred thousand Reichsmarks would suffice, given that a Jew is not worth the rope required to hang him.

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-10-01T14:01:00.001-07:00

Part-13

At first, the Marquise seems to be entirely natural. But later on she has been seen to be in a state of paranoia while recalling the past of her forefathers as the conversation between them in the following manner:

“Your name is Schlemilovitch, isn’t it?’She (The Marquise) asked in a coarse accent he had never heard her use. ‘Born in Boulogne-Billancourt? I read it on your identity card! A Jew? I love it! My great-great-uncle Palamède de Jusquiames said nasty things about Jews but he admired Marcel Proust!...’ Now, let’s talk about you, Schlemilovitch! Let’s not waste time! You’re a Jew? I suppose you’d like to rape a queen of France. I have various costumes up in the attic. Would you like me to dress as Anne of Austria, my angel? Blanche de Navarre? Marie Leszczyńska? Or would you rather fuck Adélaïde de Savoie? Marguerite de Provence? Jeanne d’Albret? Choose! I’ll dress up a thousand different ways. Tonight, all the queens of France will be your whores...” (Modiano, 2015:III.70-71)

In this third part at last it has been observed that the vicomte tends to make Schlemilovitch understand Charles Swann’s belief in origins through a portion taken from Sodom and Gomorrah (Sodome et Gomorrhe), the fourth part of ‘In Search of Lost Time(À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu)’ as follows:

“D’ailleurs peut-être chez lui en ces derniers jours la race faisait-elle reparaître plus accusé le type physique qui la caractérise,en même temps que le sentiment d’une solidarité morale avec les autres Juifs, solidarité que Swann semblait avoir oubliée toute sa vie,et que greffées les unes sur les autres, la maladie mortelle, l’affaire Dreyfus,la propaganda antisémite, avaient réveillée.”ⁱⁱⁱ(Proust, 1989:I.89)
(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-30T12:58:00.002-07:00

Part-12

Even while playing role as a teacher Schlemilovitch has been seen getting ill-tempered towards his student. In the end, when he could bear it no longer, he pointed his forefinger at Cran-Gervrier, his best pupil:

“It was a Jew who broke the vase of Soissons! A Jew, d’you hear me! Write out a hundred times “It was a Jew who broke the vase of Soissons!” Learn your lessons, Cran-Gevrier! No marks, Cran-Gevrier! You will stay back after class!’ Cran-Gevrier started to sob. So did I. I stalked out of the classroom and sent a telegram to Lévy-Vendôme to tell him I would deliver Loïtia the following Saturday. I suggested Geneva as a possible rendezvous for the handover.Then, I stayed up until three o’clock in the morning writing a critique of myself, ‘A Jew in the Countryside’, in which I derided my weakness for the French provinces. I did not mince words: ‘Having been a collaborationist Jew like Joanovici-Sachs, Raphäel Schlemilovitch is now playing out a “Back to the land” shtick of a Barrès-Pétain. How long before we get the squalid farce of the militarist Jew like Capitaine Dreyfus-Stroheim? The self-loathing Jew like Simone Weil-Céline? The eminent Jew in the mould of Proust-Daniel Halévy-Maurois? We would like Raphäel Schlemilovitch simply to be a Jew...” (Modiano, 2015:III.62-63)

Having shifted himself to another role Schlemilovitch was in a mood to dream of the blonde tresses of Princess Eleanor, of the château towards which he was gliding. Not for a moment did it occur to him that, having been a collaborationist Jew, a bookish Jew, a bucolic Jewish, he was now in danger, in this limousine emblazoned with the Marquise’s coat of arms (Gules on a field Azure, Fleurs-De-Lis sautéed with Stars per Saltire),of becoming a snobbish Jew.

(To be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-29T14:55:00.002-07:00

Part-11

Finally he whispered:

“Let me be alone, please. Leave immediately. Travel forms the young mind. Go east, Schlemilovitch, go east! A pilgrimage to the source: Vienna, Constantinople, the banks of the Jordan. I am almost tempted to go with you. Leave France as soon as possible! Go! This country has wronged you. You have taken root here. Never forget that we are international association of fakirs and prophets.” (Modiano, 2015:III.76)

In a theological conversation Schlemilovitch has been seen to go against the typical Savoyard parish priest Father Perrache. The father talks to him about the Jew Jesus Christ; whereas, he talks to father about another Jew named Judas of whom Jesus Christ said ‘Good were it for that man if he had never been born!’Their theological discussion continues all the way to the village square. Father Perrache is saddened by his preoccupation with Judas. ‘You are a desperate soul,’ father tells him gravely; ‘despair is the worst sin of all.’ But Schlemilovitch tells this saintly man that his family has sent him to T. to get some fresh air into his lungs and some order into his thoughts. He also tells father about his all-too-brief time studying in Bordeux, explaining that he hated the radical socialist atmosphere of the lycée. The priest rebukes him for his intransigence.

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-28T12:03:00.000-07:00

part-10

In the third part Raphaël’s first job leads him to an alpine province. Vicomte taught how to cultivate the interests of a commercial traveller: belote, billiards and aperitifs. Raphaël takes the French identity of his friend Des Essarts but can’t find a suitable girl.He went to Normandy to do his second assignment for the Emir of Samandal. His aim is the Marquise of Fougeire-Jusquiames, in the heart of rural France. By showing his interest in a planned way to her he has managed to convince her to invite him as a guest at her Château. Through an intimate conversation she has been exposed to her lust and desire taking the postures of all the queens of France. She knows that he is a Jew, which he had tried to hide, and it is a turn on for her. She told him that the Château was a high-class brothel and her late father, Charles de Fougeire-Jusquiamed, pimped for French intellectual collaborators. Now she was just acting like her dad supporting her father’s thought that sex often determines one’s political fortunes. So, for Raphaël it has been so easy to deliver her to Vicomte.But he is furious with Raphaël for being his late to perform his duty. While being fired from his job Raphaël has to listen to the Vicomte’s monotonous recitation:

“The Jew is the substance of God; non-Jews are just cattle seed and created to serve Jews. We order that every Jew, three times each day, should curse the gentiles and call upon God to exterminate them with their kings and princes. The Jew who rapes or despoils a non-Jewish woman or even kills her must be absolved in justice for she is only a mare.”(Modiano, 2015:III.75)

( to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-27T13:46:00.006-07:00

Part-9

Even at the time of his adolescence while being in a dormitory he started facing the problems related with his Jewish origin as has been observed in his own recalling as follows:

“I went up to the dormitory. I had had no experience of secular schooling since Hastener (the Swiss boarding schools in which my mother enrolled me were run by Jesuits).I was shocked, therefore, to find there were no prayers. I conveyed my concerns to the other boarders. They burst out laughing, mocked the Blessed Virgin and then suggested I shine their shoes on the pretext that they had been there longer than I. My objection was twofold:

1) I could not understand why they had no respect for the Blessed Virgin.

2) I had no doubt that they had been here ‘before me’, Since Jewish immigration to the Bordeaux area did not begin until the fifteenth century. I was a Jew. They were Gauls. They were persecuting me.’

Two boys stepped forward to arbitrate. A Christian Democrat and a Bordeaux Jew. The former whispered to me that he didn’t want too much talk of the Blessed Virgin because he was hoping to forge ties with students on the extreme left. The latter accused me of being an ‘agent provocateur’. Besides, the Jew didn’t really exist, he was an Aryan invention, etc., etc. (Modiano, 2015:II.40)

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-26T12:42:00.003-07:00

Part-8

In the second part he criticizes his father as a fat New York Jew and tells his father’s story about his being born in Caracas to a Sephardic Jewish family and fleeing the America to escape the police of the dictator of the Galapagos Islands whose daughter he had seduced. In France, he became a guide and lost no opportunity to entertain them at clubs thanks to false papers in the name Jean Cassis de Coudray-Macouard. In July 1944 he managed to sell Fontainebleau forest to the Germans, take the money and immigrate to United States where he set up a kaleidoscope company Ltd. Now Raphaël is the fourth-richest man in America. He tells his decision of giving up his shallow, decadent cosmopolitan life to his father and his intension to move to the French countryside .Two weeks later he was spending his last few francs in a restaurant where Vicomte Charles Lévy-Vendôme would like to get acquainted with him. The ancestors of the Vicomte were jesters to the dukes of Pithiviers for generations. Being a white slave trader Vicomte Charles offers Raphaël a despicable job of supplying young and elegant French girls for the brothels in Rio de Janeiro and Beirut. He introduces him to his henchmen, Moloud and Mustapha, former Waffen SS members from the Légion nord-africaine. Vicomte wants vengeance!

Schlemilovitch doesn’t seem to be ashamed of expressing his sarcastic and delirious words regarding his origin while thinking in this shameless manner:

“I would fall in love with the mayor’s wife; we’d meet on Thursdays in a hôtel de passe in the next town. It would all depend on the nearest country town. I would serve France by educating her children. I would belong to the battalion of the ‘black hussars’of truth, to quote Péguy, whom I could count among my colleagues. Gradually I would forget my shameful origins, the dishonourable name Schlemilovitch, Torquemada, Himmler and so many other things.” (Modiano, 2015:II.35)

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-25T12:29:00.001-07:00

Part-7

Even sometimes it has been observed that very disorderly and contradictory speeches being delivered by people like Maurice as he is worried about the protagonist’s increasing racism. He says:

“You keep harping on at old stories .It’s not 1942 anymore, old man! If it were, I would be strongly advising you to follow my example and join the Gestapo that would change your perspective! People quickly forget their origins, you know! A little flexibility and you can change your skin at will! Change your colour! Long live the Chameleon! Just watch, I can become Chinese, Apache, Norwegian, Patagonian, just like that! A quick wave of the magic wand! Abracadabra!” (Modiano, 2015:I.21)

In spite of being a Jew Raphaël Schlemilovitch has been seen to be in favour of anti-Semitism. He goes through how he wrote for anti-Semitic magazines and was involved in the entire Nazi machinery, being accompanied with all the top-notch personalities. Of them the numbers of French authors are the most prominent. The vulgarly anti-Semitic Schlemilovitch, who very well may be a paranoid schizophrenic, is unabashed in his racism and perversity:

“Oui,je dirige le complot juif mondial à coups de partouzes et de millions.Oui,la guerre de 1939 a été déclaré par ma faute.Oui,je suis une sorte de Barbe-Bleue,un anthropophage qui dévore les petites Aryennes après les avoir violées.Oui,je rêve de ruiner toute la paysannerie française et d’enjuiver le Cantal.”ⁱⁱ(Modiano, 1968:I.48)

(to be comtinued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-24T13:53:00.005-07:00

Part-6

Such delirious and uncontrolled thoughts have been observed throughout his internal monologues reflecting sometimes oblique meanings as has been observed in the following thought:

“I quickly make myself indispensable; I am the only Jew, the ‘good Jew’ of the Collaborationist movement. Luchaire introduces me to Abetz. We arrange to meet. I set out my conditions: I want 1) to replace that vile little Frenchman Darquier de Pellepoix at the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs, 2) to be given complete freedom of action. It seems to me absurd to eliminate 500,000 French Jews.” (Modiano, 2015:I.18)

With such contradictory thought Schlemilovitch has even gone against the great personalities of his own religion as he worries:

“Much fuss was made of Franz Kafka, the elder brother of Charlie Chaplin. A few Aryan prigs put on their jackboots to trample his work: they promoted Kafka to professor of philosophy. They contrast him with the Prussian Emmanuel Kant, with the Danish genius Søren Kierkegaard, with the southerner Albert Camus, with J.-P.Sartre the half-Alsatian, half-Périgourdine penny-a-liner. I wonder how Kafka, so frail, so timid, could withstand such an onslaught.”(Modiano, 2015:I.21)

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-23T13:48:00.005-07:00

Part-5

“Rereading an article about me written by Léon Rabatête in a special edition of Ici la France: ‘how long do we have to suffer the antics of Raphäel Schlemilovitch?How long can this Jew brazenly flaunt his neuroses and his paroxysms with impunity from le Touquet to Cap d’Antibes,from le Baule to Aix-les-Bains?Once again,I ask: how long can dagos of his ilk be allowed to insult the sons of France?How long must we go on washing our hands of this Jewish scum...?’Writing about me in the same newspaper, Doctor Bardamu spluttered: ‘...Schlemilovitch?...Ah,the foul-smelling mould of the ghettos!...that shithouse lothario!...runt of a foreskin!... Lebano-ganaque scumbag!... rat-a-tat... wham!...Consider this the Yiddish gigolo...this rampant arsefucker of Aryan girls!...this brazenly Negroid abortion!...frenzied Abyssinian young nabob!...Help!... La-di-da-di-da!... rip his guts out... hack his balls off!...Preserve the Doctor from this spectacle!...in the name of God, crucify him!...this foreign trash with his filthy cocktails...this Jewboy with his international palaces!...his orgies made in Haifa!... Cannes!...Davos!...Capri e tutti quanti!...vast devoutly Hebrew brothels!...Preserve us from this circumcised fop!...from his salmon-pink Maserati!..his Sea of Galilee yachts !...his Sinai neckties!...may his Aryan slave girls rip off his prick!...with their perfect French teeth...their delicate little hands...gorge out his eyes!...death to the Caliph!...Revolution in the Christian harem!...Quick!...Quick!..refuse to lick his balls!...to pander to him for his dollars!...Free yourselves!...stay strong, Madelon...otherwise you’ll have the Doctor sobbing!...wasting away!...oh hideous injustice!...It’s a plot by the Sanhedrin!...They want the Doctor dead!take my word for it!...the Israelite Central Consisttory!...the Rothschild Bank!..Cahen d;Anvers...Schlemilovitch!... help Doctor Bardamu,my little girls!...save me!...” (Modiano, 2015: I: 5-6)

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-22T12:30:00.003-07:00

Part-4

With thought-provoking implication engraved in the epigraph:

“Au mois de juin 1942,un officier allemand s’avance vers un jeune homme et lui dit: « Pardon, monsieur,où se trouve la place de l’étoile? » le jeune homme désigne le côté gauche de sa poitrine”ⁱ

the first novella bears the title ‘The place of the star’ which itself is a pun: whether the place of the star is a famous square in central Paris or the place on the body where Jews under the German occupation were required to wear the Yellow Star, the word ‘Juif’ sewn inside it, over their heart? Perhaps, the young man is alluding to the Star of David that was required to be worn by all Jews rather than the famous place in Paris.

However, in spite of his being first novel ‘The place of the star’ (La place de l’étoile) underlies the careful nonconformity and the nonchalant disposition that gives a deeper reverberation. Being one of Modiano’s trio in connection with L’Occupation, ‘The place of the star’ has turned out to be the most frenetic. The novel in autobiographic manner recounts the story of Raphaël Schlemilovitch, a French Jew haunted by the war and thoughts of persecution just after the war, playing the role of the hero as well as the narrator telling the story in a hallucinatory manner. In his way of surviving or not surviving the holocaust Raphaël Schlemilovitch meets many famous European Jews and

gentiles who have made history. Through his observing many lives in different places and provoking different personalities Raphaël Schlemilovitch has shown always a sarcastic attitude, resulted from accumulated pangs of paranoia, towards the characters as has been observed in the very beginning paragraph of the first part in which he himself shows how the others evaluate him.

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-21T13:12:00.003-07:00

Part-4

However, Modiano’s narratives stage the past as a series of mysteries and invite his readers to follow clues with him through scattered and disorderly flashbacks. In the ‘The Occupation Trilogy’ every novelette bears an epigraph creating some sort of suspension in the readers’ minds from the very beginning. His narratives full of history-consciousness have recalled the past in the protagonist’s mouth as a series of prattling and led his readers to feel the pangs of the characters impounded in a state of paranoia resulted from the Gestapo holocaust. In these novellas Modiano deals with his protagonists in a more subjective manner. The long and unparagraphed passages bearing thought-provoking implications throughout every novel have indeed been imbued with internal monologues that contribute much to feel how hallucinating and humiliating period of the occupation the generation of the protagonists went through! Actually Modiano’s craftsmanship of using lyrics and mechanisms of repetition continually has given a relief to the minds of the protagonist along with the readers getting engulfed with burden of pains and pangs prevailing in the dark and doomed scenario of the occupation. Such horrible and gloomy state of the German occupation has naturally led the occupied Paris to a state of paranoia where every Jew along with oppressed ones had to survive with whatever means they had. So every moment a sense of rancour getting developed beneath stream of consciousness of the victimized characters has pushed them ultimately into the pit of deliriums—such has been reflected through disorderly activities and thoughts resulted from persecution mania prevailed subconsciously into the minds of different characters of The Occupation Trilogy.

Let’s observe the first one of Modiano’s trio i.e. the occupation trilogy.

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-20T14:36:00.001-07:00

part-2

Adopting three remarkable epigraphs signifying a deep sigh rankled in the Jewish minds such mastermind as Patrick Modiano, whose birth coincided with the end of World War II and the beginning of France’s efforts to reckon with its complicity in the Holocaust,took brilliant enigmatic steps to discover his own Jewish shadow in the Jewish lives haunted by the horror of the German Occupation by exorcising the past through exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance. The immediate aftermath of the Second World War (WW-II) and the Nazi occupation of France have brought a dark period into the lives of Jewish people including new born baby Modiano. But with the passage of time when Modiano reached his youth he tried to rediscover himself as one of the panic-stricken Jews along with the other homeless French under the then German Occupation of Paris through different characters disguised in different identities throughout all the three novels—The place of the star(1968),The Night Watch(1969), Ring Roads(1972)—having gained their collective title from the connection with L’Occupation(The Occupation)—France’s enduringly bitter and divisive subjugation by Nazi Germany during the period from 1941 to 44.

(to be continued)

Beneath stream of consciousness pangs of paranoia, resulted from anti-Semitism and Gestapo horror, getting reflected throughout Modiano’s trio.

2017-09-18T14:27:00.002-07:00

Abstract

Keeping a neutral conscience alert with some sort of painful feeling and angst the author has maintained from first to last a scrutiny to fathom the intensity of an elegiac atmosphere prevailing pages after pages full of agony and rancour throughout the ‘The Occupation Trilogy’ including three novelettes such as La Place de l’étoile(The place of the star),La ronde de nuit(The night watch) and Les boulevards de ceinture(Ring Roads)—all the three regarded also as ‘Modiano’s trio’ each novelette of which has been mystified with a mélange of factual and fictitious speeches delivered by different characters named after both real and fictional personalities in a hallucinatory manner. All the three focusing the very darkest period of the Second World War holocaust of anti-Semite and Gestapo [Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police)] horror have picturized on the basis of three different dark and demoralized perspectives wherein surviving the Jewish lives along with other homeless people who bear foreign identities or hide their true identities lest they should be exposed to Gestapo horror. So, How such suspended and suppressed pangs whimpering beneath stream of consciousness ,addressed by different characters in delirious manners; sometimes in paradoxical manners and sometimes even in satirical manners, have suffocated the French lives, especially the Jewish lives; thus leading them through a tormented touch of paranoia to an inhuman consequence within some sort of elegiac atmosphere is my concern.
(to be continued)

Missing Person

2017-07-23T21:00:00.002-07:00

It is very difficult for a person of self-realisation to carry on his life without knowing about his own past which is lost because of amnesia. Such amnesiac as the protagonist of Missing Person, having two assumed names has been picturised by Patrick Modiano so aptly that readers go through some sort of suspension until being compelled to take a pause by the edge,writes Mohammad Khabir Uddin

WITH an oddity the English Missing Person, translated from Modiano’s French novella Rue des boutiques obscures indicating the existence of a real street of Italy— Via delle botteghe oscure (Street of dark shops) — where Modiano himself used to live, starts the story in a fascinating way with a group of words expressed by an amnesiac — the protagonist himself — as he thinks:
«Je ne suis rien. Rien qu’une silhouette claire, ce soir-là, à la terrasse d’un café» (I am nothing. but a pale silhouette at that evening against the terrace of a café).
Throughout the novella a disheartened man’s craving for knowing about his life-span of a decade having past due to amnesia has been reflected through the ceaseless efforts of the protagonist, bearing assumed names, who searches for his identity, a haunting tale of memory and depression. With gaps in his memory Guy Roland — one of assumed names of the protagonist — has worked in a detective agency for a span of about ten years. But at the time of his boss’s retirement and taking decision to close the agency, he starts thinking that the time has come to utilise his detective experience to recover the history of how his life might be in the past he has lost. For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte’s files, street-and-trade directories, year-books of all kinds going back over the last fifty years which are of little use in recovering some specific information regarding his former life. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalised by half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience. Along the way this empty man named Guy Roland, who had been living in the shadows as a private detective for eight years, starts rediscovering old places, meeting old acquaintances, and regaining pieces of his broken memory.
Unfortunately Guy Roland has been unable to piece together his broken memories even after going around talking to various persons. In this novella the protagonist in the guise of a first-person narrator devoid of self or identity, who only listens to others but never talks about himself, has played his role with a sense of nothingness from first to last. He tries to reconstruct his old self using unreliable, fragmentary evidence such as old photographs, letters, a magazine, a book, he receives from different persons he interrogates. These sources may bring back flashes of memory, but are not so reliable as to be assured of whether these recollections are authentic, or just dreams, the result of his imagination. Perhaps he is just creating his past with the memories and the past of others. To him these memories seem to be frustratingly worthless, mere teasing, etches of greater things.
Although sometimes he gets some hopeful clue on the basis of which he intends to go further, he has to recoil from the end of the source shown by his own well-wishers. But while the protagonist’s ceaseless search continues chapters after chapters under some sort of suspension, the readers along with him feel his quick heart-beats immediately before the possibility of getting close to the ultimate source. Of course, it turns out that every piece of information that our detective manages to discover about himself only raises more questions. The witnesses who could have given him the full story are either dead or have disappeared; his own memories, when they start to come back, are not entirely trustworthy; names and addresses turn out to be false; individual stories refuse to connect together into a closed narrative. After the protagonist’s getting frustrated in every search, gradually his frustration starts settling firmly in the readers’ minds. Throughout the novel it is to be noted that the protagonist’s zeal for knowing his true identity has led him to such a level of nervousness from where any person like him is unable to protect his/her selfhood as he has been seen to be getting tensed while approaching his targeted individual whom he would interrogate:
‘I was watching for Styoppa, my heart pounding. Finally, he emerged, among the last.’
Even when the moment had come to approach the individual he would interrogate, it was extremely hard for him because of his shyness and he was afraid he would take him for a madman: he would stammer, his speech would become incoherent. Each time, he has the same hope, and each time he is disappointed. Such intense mental pressure has made the protagonist tensed in every little activity he does in his investigation as has been observed in chapter 13:
«Devant moi,les rangées de Bottins et d’annuaires. L’un d’eux, plus petit que les autres, est relié d’une chèvre imprimée vert pâle. C’est celui-ci qu’il me faut. Tous les numéros de téléphone qui existent à Paris depuis trente ans y sont répertoriés avec les adresses correspondantes. Je tourne les pages, le cœur battant.»
(In front of me, the rows of directories and year-books. One of them, smaller than the others, bound in pale-green goatskin. This is the one I need. All the telephone numbers in Paris for the last thirty years are itemised here, with the corresponding addresses. I turn the pages, my heart thumping.)
Besides, while taking decision to search in the silent and deserted section of Rue Cambacérès, the protagonist seems to have been tensed as he says in chapter 15:
«J’avais décidé de demander aux locataires de chaque étage si le numéro de téléphone ANJou 15-28 avait été le leur à un moment donné, et ma gorge se nouait car je me rendais compte de l’étrangeté démarche.»
(I had decided to ask the tenants on each floor if ANJou 15-28 had been their telephone number at any time, and there was a tightness in my throat, as I was aware of the oddness of this request.)
As per the information delivered to him by individuals at close quarters Guy Roland starts investigating different places and individuals living therein. But after getting close to the end of his investigation, he faces some sort of predicament realising that whatever information he has gathered so far are related to other individuals’ identities..Such predicament is also prevalent in his searching for Gay Orlow as he presumes in chapter 7:
«Que dirait-il, quand je prononcerais le nom de Gay Orlow? Ce nom le sortirait-il un moment de l’indifférence avec laquelle il poursuivait son morceau? Ou n’évoquerait-il plus rien pour lui, comme ces notes de piano noyées sous le brouhaha des conversations?»
(What would he say, when I mentioned Gay Orlow’s name? Would it temporarily jolt him out of the apathetic state in which he played? Or would it no longer mean anything to him, like those notes, unable to continue the hum of conversation?)
At the time of investing the possible truth of information got from different sources Guy Roland’s subconscious mind provokes him to play the different roles of different persons.
First Guy thinks he might have lived in a milieu of Russian émigrés.
«— vous êtes russe?
C’était la seconde fois qu’on me posait cette question. Le chauffeur de taxi me l’avait posée lui aussi. Au fond, peut-être l’avais-je été, russe. »
(— Are you a Russian?
It was the second time I had been asked this question. The taxi driver too had asked me. Basically, perhaps I had been a Russian.)
Then he imagines he lived once in Hollywood, serving as the companion of the actor John Gilbert:
«Howard de Luz. Il y avait une chance pour que ce fût mon nom. Howard de Luz. Oui, ces syllabes réveillaient quelque chose en moi, quelque chose d’aussi fugitif qu’un reflet de lune sur un objet. Si j’étais cet Howard de Luz, j’avais dû faire preuve d’une certaine originalité dans ma vie, puisque, parmi tant de métiers plus honorables et plus captivants les uns que les autres, j’avais choisi celui d’être «le confident de John Gilbert».»
(Howard de Luz. It might be my own name. Howard de Luz. Yes, the sound of it stirred something in me, something as fleeting as moonlight passing over some object. If I was this Howard de Luz, I had shown a certain originality in my life style, since, among so many reputable and absorbing professions, I had chosen that of being ‘The confidant of John Gilbert’.)
Next it seems he worked as a diplomat for a Latin-American embassy under the assumed name Pedro McEvoy— a false identity to evade arrest.
«—Attendez… son prénom, c’était… Pedro…
Nous restions debout au bord du talus. De tnouveau, il avait sorti sa pipe, et la nettoyait à l’aide d’un petit instrument mystérieux. Je me répétais à moi-même ce prénom qu’on m’avait donné à ma naissance, ce prénom avec lequel on m’avait appelé pendant toute une partie de ma vie et qui avait évoqué mon visage pour quelques personnes. Pedro. »
(— One moment… his first name was… Pedro…
We stood at the edge of the slope. He had taken out his pipe again, and was cleaning it with a strange little instrument. Inwardly I repeated this name I’d been given at birth, this name by which I had been called throughout a whole section of my life and which, for a number of people, had conjured up my face. Pedro.)
Even it occurs to him that he may have been a Greek Jew, a broker who lived in Rome and Paris, called Jimmy Stern, who consorted with the idle rich, including exiled Russian aristocrats. Jimmy Stern was married to a French model called Denise Coudreuse, and was friends with Freddie Howard de Luz of Mauritius (a youthful friend whom he met at an exclusive private school) and his wife Gay Orlow, an American dancer of Russian origin.
But unfortunately at the end when it comes to reality, all he has imagined prove to be wrong:
«Voilà, c’était clair, je ne m’appelais pas Freddie Howard de Luz… Et je ne me souviens plus si, ce soir-là, je m’appelais Jimmy ou Pedro, Stern ou McEvoy.»
(So, it was clear my name was not Freddie Howard de Luz...I no longer remember if that evening, my name was Jimmy or Pedro, Stern or McEvoy.)
Sometimes his mind getting overcast with fit of frustration leads him to such a state of helplessness where everything seems to be of no use as the protagonist has been seen to be negative towards his boss’s help, his own effort and even his surroundings.
«S’il me prenait en sympathie, c’est que lui aussi — je l’appris plus tard— avait perdu ses propres traces et que toute une partie de sa vie avait sombré d’un seul coup, sans qu’il subsistât le moindre fil conducteur, la moindre attache qui aurait pu encore le relier au passé… j’ai déjà vécu ma vie et je n’étais plus qu’un revement qui flottait dans l’air tiède d’un samedi soir. Pourquoi vouloir renouer des liens qui avaient été sectionnés et chercher des passages murés depuis longtemps?… Je voyais passer les voitures, plus bas, le long de l’avenue de New-York, seul indice qu’il y eût encore de la vie. Tout était désert et figé autour de nous. Même la tour Eiffel que j’apercevais là-bas, de l’autre côté de la Seine, la tour Eiffel si rassurante d’habitude,ressemblait à une masse de ferrailles calcinées… Je le sentais alourdi par la fatigue et l’accablement mais je le surveillais de très près car je craignais qu’au moindre coup de vent à travers l’esplanade, il ne s’envolât, en me laissant seul avec mes questions.»
(If he felt drawn to me, it was because he too—I learned later – had lost track of himself and a whole section of his life had been engulfed without leaving the slightest trace, the slightest connection that could still link him with the past... I had the unpleasant sensation that I was dreaming. I had already lived my life and was just a ghost hovering in the tepid air of a Saturday evening. Why try to renew ties which had been broken and look for paths that had been blocked of long? I watched the cars further down, moving along Avenue de New-York, the only sign of life. Everything about us was deserted, frozen. Even the Eiffel Tower, which I could make out on the other side of the Seine, the Eiffel Tower generally so reassuring, looked like a hulk of oxidised scrap-iron... I could sense him weighed down with fatigue, dejected, and yet I watched him very closely for fear that a puff of wind across the esplanade might carry him off, leaving me alone with my questions.)
However, with the help of different addresses provided to him by his acquaintances he visits different places, which his friends, lovers, family members had once trodden, stirring up the protagonist’s memories hidden beneath his subconsciousness as has been observed in his thoughts at the time of his visiting these places. When he visits any place as per the address, where he was once, the past scenario and persons thereof start reviving into his memory.
At 25, Avenue du Maréchal-Lyautey he imagines that on one side, the building faced an open space that seemed deserted. A large clump of trees, bushes, a lawn that had not been cut for a long time. A child was playing there alone, quietly, in front of a mound of sand, on this sunny late afternoon. He sat down by the lawn and lifted his head toward the building, wondering if Gay Orlow’s windows looked out on this side.
Then at Estate Management mentioned in chapter-11 a feeling of desolation swept over him: he was, perhaps, standing before the château where he had spent his childhood. He pushed the iron gate and it opened without difficulty. How long had it been since he had crossed its threshold?
At Rue Cambacérès he looked around him .In this room too, the parquet floor was damaged and there were pieces missing, though the gaps had not been filled. Across from the window, a marble fireplace with a mirror above it, whose gilt frame was embellished with a shell in each corner. He lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, then at the wallpaper design. He studied the latter so closely, his forehead practically touched the wall. Rustic scenes. Girls in elaborate wigs, seats on swings. Shepherds in puffed knee-breeches, playing the mandolin. Moonlit woods. None of this reminded him of anything and yet these designs must have been familiar to him when he used to sleep in this bed. He searched the ceiling, the walls, and the door area for any sign, any trace, though of what he did not know. But nothing caught his eye.
The view from this room made him feel anxious, apprehensive, a feeling he had had before. These façades, this deserted street, these silhouettes on sentry duty in the dusk disturbed him in the same insidious manner as a song or a once familiar perfume. And he was certain that he had often stood here, at this hour, motionless, watching, without making the slightest movement, and without even daring to switch on the light. Suddenly a mental picture flashed before him, like those fragments of some fleeting dream which one tries to hold on to in waking, so as to be able to reconstruct the whole dream. Something continues to vibrate after they have gone, fading waves, but which can still be picked up if one listens carefully.
At 19, quai d’Austerlitz he entered the building and flicked on the time-switch. A corridor with old black and gray tiles. A door-mat, made of iron. Letter boxes on the yellow wall. And the everlasting smell of lard. If he closed his eyes, he thought, if he concentrated, placing his fingers against his forehead, perhaps he would manage to hear, far off, the slap of sandals on the stairs.
So, it is to be noted that in the course of the protagonist’s earnest searching from one place to another his indomitable zeal for remembering the past imbued with nostalgic enchantment makes him feel compunction as revealed in his thought as follows:
«Il suffirait de retrouver le nom du cocktail — qui était aussi le nom du restaurant — pour réveiller d’autres souvenirs, mais comment? Hier soir, en parcourant ces rues, je savais bien qu’elles étaient les mêmes qu’avant et je ne les reconnaissais pas. Les immeubles n’avaient pas changé, ni la largeur des trottoirs, mais à cette époque la lumière était différente et quelque chose d’autre flottait dans l’air…»
(If I could only remember the name of this cocktail, which was also the restaurant’s name, it would awaken other memories, but how? Last night, wandering through these streets, I knew they were the same ones and I did not recognise them. The buildings had not changed, or the width of the pavements, but in that earlier time the light was different and there was something else in the air...)
Desperately he studied the façade for a long time at 97, Rue de Rome in the hope of recognising a balcony, the shape or the shutters of a window. No, it did not remind him of anything. Neither did the staircase. The hand-rail is not that brass one that shines in his memory. The doors to the apartments are not dark wood. At XVIth arrondissement at the top of each street he would stop, hoping that the trees, the buildings, would make him suddenly remember. He thought he felt something at the intersection of Rue Molitor and Rue Mirabeau and he had the sudden conviction that each evening when he left the legation, this was the locality he found himself in.
Event at Luiza and Albany School of his childhood, by ruminating his infantile memories his failure to recognise some blurred figure of his own father makes the readers sympathise with such imagination as follows:
«Je nous voyais, Freddie et moi, dans nos blazers.Et j’essayais d’imaginer l’aspect que pouvait avoir cet homme, venu nous chercher un jour de sortie, qui descendait d’une voiture, marchait vers nous et qui était mon père.»
(I could see us, Freddie and me, in our blazers. And I tried to imagine what he might have looked like, that man who came for us on one of the days out, who left his car and walked toward us, who was my father.)
The novel has a playful relation to the conventions of detective fiction, by raising the reader’s expectations according to the rules of the genre, but always failing to fulfil them. Guy Roland’s quest is a never-ending search for identity in a world where, as Hutte says,
«Nous sommes tous des«homme des plages» et que «le sable ne garde que quelques secondes l’empreinte de nos pas».
(We are all ‘beach men’ and ‘the sand’ holds the traces of our footsteps only for a few moments.)
Almost up to the end of the novel suspension has remained unchanged as the protagonist has not forsaken his hope to get some information about his former life from his childhood friend Freddie Howard de Luz. But before reaching his destination — a lagoon in the island — where his friend is supposed to be, his agitated mind leads him to a state of utter frustration:
«Jusque-là, tout m’a semblé si chaotique, si morcelé… Des lambeaux, des bribes de quelque chose, me revenaient brusquement au fil de mes recherches… Mais après tout, c’est peut-être ça,une vie...
Est-ce qu’il s’agit bien de la mienne? Ou de celle d’un autre dans laquelle je me suis glissé?»
(Until now everything has seemed so chaotic, so fragmented… Scraps, shreds have come to light as a result of my searches… But then that is perhaps what a life amounts to…
Is it really my life I’m tracking down? Or someone else’s into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?)
Ultimately it is to say that Missing Person having won the Prix Goncourt of 1978 is a haunting tale of amnesia and identity imbued with detective tone. Skilfully interweaving letters, official reports and entries from telephone and street directories with first-person narration the Nobel Laureate Jean Patrick Modiano has been able to build slowly and painstakingly a complex plot and considerable suspense. A superb mélange of classic mystery in the noir mode and sophisticated meditation on the problem of personal identity has been maintained artistically. With elements of noire — Parisian nights shrouded in the mists, murders witnessed or abetted, fake identities, and a host of Russian, American, and British expats — Modiano’s novella the setting of which is post WWII France lends layers of mystery to the protagonist’s search for himself.
Indeed, it is very difficult for a person of self-realisation to carry on his life without knowing about his own past which is lost because of amnesia. Such amnesiac as the protagonist having two assumed names — Pedro McEvoy and Guy Roland — has been picturised by Patrick Modiano so aptly that along with this Guy the readers go through some sort of suspension until being compelled to take a pause by the edge of the lagoon, mentioned in the last chapter 47, where he has to take a decision for returning to his old address in Rome, Via delle Botteghe Oscure, 2 (Rue des Boutiques Obscures, 2) to which both the protagonist and his creator Modiano have attachment.

Mohammad Khabir Uddin is an instructor (English and French) and researcher.