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.

Constellation of images

René Char shares with visual artists a love for the gesture of writing, drawing, a love for the line traced by hand on paper. His poems often re-appear, in handwritten form, in his correspondence, on painted pebbles, or in what we call today "artist's books," often one-of-a-kind. This beautiful Trousseau de Moulin Premier, which I picked up a few years ago at Librairie Compagnie, rue des Écoles, is a reproduction, in shape and size, of a slim cahier of postcards that a tourist to Char's native L'Isle-sur-Sorgue could acquire in the 1930s, as a souvenir of his visit. 

Truth is a stranger

"Ceci n'est pas un récit imaginaire. Tout ce que j'ai écrit s'est réellement passé, les personnages de cette histoire ont réellement existé." / "This story is not an invention. Everything I have written down did really happen; the protagonists of this story did really exist." This assertion, the author's plea to be believed (curiously absent from the English edition) is contained in the opening lines of a short Preamble (in the English edition, less poetically, Author's Note). Photographs interspersed throughout the story (for it is une histoire), starting with the glossy photographic band folded around the cover of the book like a vest, showing Monsieur Proust wearing the coat, are a tangible evidence of the reality of the narrative. Or are they?