Experience of absence

This entry in my long-neglected blog is prompted by Terry Pitt's blog post, Modiano's Dora Bruder, with & without images which made me think again about the status of photographs in the novel. A complete set of photographs was published for the first time in 2012 in the Cahier de l'Herne no. 98  devoted to Patrick Modiano. The new English edition of Dora Bruder (2014) apparently contains three, in addition to two fragments of a Paris map showing the two neighborhoods, around Clignancourt and Picpus: one can see them in book preview on Amazon; they look like a typical street plan from the 60s or 70s, and I suspect have been thrown in for the English reader's benefit by the publisher, rather than being added by the author. It is probable that the author had little to say about the inclusion of photographs in the English edition: books with images tend to sell better...

I agree with Terry that "the images don't add much to Dora Bruder"; the decision to omit them from the original French publication, however, still merits some reflection. The discovery of the photographs was a turning point in Modiano's search for the traces of Dora Bruder, a teenage Jewish girl who ran away from home just as the police were tightening their grip on the population, and who, like so many others, was killed in Auschwitz. In December of 1988, Modiano discovered a missing-persons ad placed in Paris-Soir on 31 December 1941 and containing a description of the runaway. Thus the first encounter with the girl takes place in language; it is years before her face emerges to light. According to Modiano's correspondence with Serge Klarsfeld, the writer received the first [copies of] photographs of Dora Bruder and her parents in late March 1995, over six years after Modiano had first "responded" to the nearly fifty-year-old newspaper announcement.


The omission of the photographs is tied up with another omission: the unacknowledged debt to Serge Klarsfeld who provided Modiano with a lot of the facts, including the dates of birth, arrests, and deportation of the Bruder family. It could be supposed then that the photographs did not make it into the publication because they were not Modiano's to publish, and including them would entail transforming the narrative into a more scholarly account, in any case into something other than what it is. I had always felt ambivalent about the erasure of Klarsfeld's name from a story the task of which is to remember and recite names. In his last letter to Modiano, Klarsfeld himself expressed deep disappointment at the publication of the book to which he felt he had greatly contributed.

How is it then that a writer of such sensitivity could commit what in the modern world of intellectual production would be considered as an appropriation of another's work? In her essay in Cahier de l'Herne, Mireille Hilsum points toward an answer. She cites an oblique reference to Klarsfeld's Mémorial: the narrator states that he found the names of BRUDER DORA and of her father BRUDER ERNEST on the list of an 18 September 1942 transport to Auschwitz; this list could have been accessed only in Klarsfeld's multi-volume work. Hilsum suggests that this is a way of acknowledging Karlsfeld's contribution (if that were so, it would be an acknowledgement rivaling in obliqueness only with Proust's aunt Céline's veiled remark to Swann intended to convey her gratitude for his gift). Hilsum, however, goes further: the erasure of Klarsfeld's name is coupled, on the one hand, with the erasure of Henri Calet's name whose book Contre l'oubli is the source of the information on François Vernet's graffiti at Fresnes, and, on the other hand, with the story of inadvertently pilfering Robert Desnos's book title for Modiano's own debut book of fiction, La Place de l'Étoile. Hilsum wonders: "Isn't effacing ... the name of Calet, after that of Klarsfeld, a sign of rejection of divided memory: political vs Jewish, memory of the Resistance vs memory of extermination?" She sees this double erasure as a testimony to the project of writing "a story other than that of Jews or even that of Parisian deportees. ... Dora Bruder is a book of the dead, into which secretly [i.e. by way of the word BRUDER] enters Rudy, the beloved brother, deceased in 1957."

Hilsum offers a very insightful analysis of the shifts and substitutions whereby the name of the living collaborator is replaced with another name, Bruder, the meaning of which evokes Modiano's brother who died prematurely at the age of 10. The gesture of appropriation is acknowledged by analogy to the borrowing of the title in another work. But the most important observation, so obvious perhaps that Hilsum didn't feel the need to develop it further, is that Dora Bruder is a book of the dead: like Klarsfeld's Mémorial, it names only the dead, the disappeared, never the living.

Unlike Klarsfeld's Mémorial, Modiano's book is a personal narrative. Photographs, on the other hand, belong to a different order of documents, to historiography. My first impression upon reading the book some years ago was that the absence of photographs made palpable to the reader the irrevocable absence of the missing girl: I insist on the English phrase, "missing persons", rather than "personnes disparues", because of the implication that a missing person is being missed. The impact of the book is that it turns readers into persons missing those who are lost.

Like a refrain there returns throughout the book an evocation of that liminal moment before the narrator had ever heard of Dora Bruder and her family, but as if intuited their absence around him:

En 1965, je ne savais rien de Dora Bruder. ... Peut-être, sans que j'en éprouve encore une claire conscience, étais-je sur la trace de Dora Bruder et de ses parents. Ils étaient là, déjà, en filigrane. (p. 12, all page references are to the first edition)

Je ne savais encore rien de Dora Bruder et de ses parents. Je me souviens que j'éprouvais une drôle de sensation en longeant le mur de l'hôpital Lariboisière, puis en passant au-dessus des voies ferrées, comme si j'avais pénétré dans la zone la plus obscure de Paris. (p. 30)

Je me souviens que pour la première fois, j'avais ressenti le vide que l'on éprouve devant ce qui a été détruit, rasé net. Je ne connaissais pas encore l'existence de Dora Bruder. (p. 36)

For Modiano, our existence after the Holocaust is defined by the awareness of that absence, which may be a vague sensation of following in someone else's footsteps without knowing whose (p. 50), or it may be a particular absence, the absence of a specific person in a specific place. This sense of absence turns even the most crowded streets of Paris into deserted avenues: the absent dead are more numerous than the present living. More than that, even a single absence is capable of opening up time and space onto the void of a life suddenly cut short.

Depuis, le Paris où j’ai tenté de retrouver sa trace est demeuré aussi désert et silencieux que ce jour-là. Je marche à travers les rues vides. Pour moi elles le restent, même le soir, à l’heure des embouteillages, quand les gens se pressent vers les bouches de métro. Je ne peux pas m’empêcher de penser à elle et de sentir un écho de sa présence dans certains quartiers. L’autre soir, c’était près de la gare du Nord. (p. 146)

The discovery of photographs of Dora Bruder and her family was "bouleversant": as Mireille Hilsum remarks, the word recurs in Modiano's letters to Klarsfeld every time the writer is presented with new photographs. Wouldn't including them in the text have a similar effect on the reader? Perhaps for those who had read the book years ago, and had been haunted by it since, to have encountered them in the 2012 edition of Cahiers de l'Herne might have produced a comparable shock. To the writer the photographs are precious vestiges of the lost lives, like the places these people used to frequent or inhabit. To reprint the photographs in a book is not enough: by describing them instead in great detail the writer is able to establish a point of contact. The time of reinscription can be compared to the time of the photograph:

Des photos comme il en existe dans toutes les familles. Le temps de la photo, ils étaient protégés quelques secondes et ces secondes sont devenues une éternité. (p. 94)

The photographs are just like any other family photographs, they belong to a certain genre. It is only the work of the writer that is able to "rescue" their subjects from anonymity, to bring them into the present. The task of the writer is to de-scribe, to circum-scribe the empty space which would have been theirs so as to make their absence tangible.

On se dit qu'au moins les lieux gardent une légère empreinte des personnes qui les ont habités. Empreinte: marque en creux ou en relief. Pour Ernest et Cécile Bruder, pour Dora, je dirai: en creux. J'ai ressenti une impression d'absence et de vide chaque fois que je me suis trouvé dans un endroit où ils avaient vécu. (p. 30)

The photographs have a similar status as places, they guard the imprint, the trace. That is also why the prohibition of photographing in places labeled "Military zone", such as Tourelles at Porte de Lilas, or the demolition of old buildings, is so offensive: Modiano sees these actions as a continuation of the effort to erase the memory of the dead, to rewrite history.

Un haut mur entoure l'ancienne caserne des Tourelles et cache les bâtiments de celle-ci. J'ai longé ce mur. Une plaque y est fixée sur laquelle j'ai lu:

ZONE MILITAIRE

DÉFENSE DE FILMER OU DE PHOTOGRAPHIER

Je me suis dit que plus personne ne se souvenait de rien. Derrière le mur s'étendait un no man's land, une zone de vide et d'oubli. Les vieux bâtiments de Tourelles n'avaient pas été détruits comme le pensionnat de la rue de Picpus, mais cela revenait au même.

Et pourtant, sous cette couche épaisse d'amnésie, on sentait bien quelque chose, de temps en temps, un écho lointain, étouffé, mais on aurait été incapable de dire quoi, précisément. C'était comme de se trouver au bord d'un champ magnétique, sans pendule pour en capter les ondes. Dans le doute et la mauvaise conscience, on avait affiché l'écriteau "Zone militaire. Défense de filmer ou de photographier". (p. 132–3)

The sign prohibiting photography is cited a third time a few pages later in reference to the demolition of buildings in "Lot 16", in rue des Jardins-Saint-Paul and around l'hôtel Sens (p. 138). Modiano seems to subvert this interdiction of images precisely by not including any photographs in his text but instead making visible the absence that any explicit policy or plain indifference endeavor to forget.