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.

Translating, ruins

I came upon this book the way one comes upon one's own reflection in the mirror and views it as other. Or perhaps the other way around: seeing another's reflection and mistaking it for one's own. To talk about oneself when talking about a book might be a fallacy of interpretation, yet the constellation of ideas mapped out here, and thinkers invited to dialog, so closely matches what I have been working on, what I have been nearly obsessed with, while submitting it to an unexpected dislocation, that the effect of this encounter is a sort of shock: photography -- memory / forgetting -- geological, temporal, affective ... fault lines -- translation . . . Ilse Binge, Germaine Krull, Vieira da Silva, Hervé Guibert, Viktor Kossakovsky, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, Georges Didi-Huberman . . .

I could start differently: Nathanaël's Sisyphus, Outdone is a meditation on photography and catastrophe, on the ruin of memory that is perhaps triggered by the opening of the rift that is the shutter and the seismic event that is the act of taking a shot.

After an aftershock, there is stillness in the fault plane. With and without (visible) fault lines. The fault may be mine. In keeping with the fault, out of line. Seismically, I presume -- I know nothing of such things -- the stillness to be measurable, the way tremors are. Seismically, I presume again, for it not to be possible, ever, for the earth not to move. For the rest of us not to be moved by it. Every which way: still. (p. 14)

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?

A loop, a noose, and a plot

If one were to plot the narrative topography of Paweł Huelle's mercedes-benz (in the original edition, published by Znak, 2001, the title and the author's name appear in lower case), one would come up with a coiling serpentine squiggle, or perhaps a childlike doodle -- if you imagine a three-year-old, her tongue sticking out, diligently applying a crayon to paper, with satisfaction retracing the same, but never quite the same, circle over and over. . . "i znów życie zatoczyło niesamowitą pętlę" . . . "and life again turned a full circle" . . . This is the refrain: the pętla, the loop, the full circle, or the noose, the line that plots the story from beginning to end and back, and ties it tight, leaving the reader breathless. Life likes series, as does narrative: a series of cars, crashed, sunk, confiscated, abandoned, and driven in circles; a series of photographs, remembered, lost, found, imagined . . . I am not sure which machine, the camera or the automobile is the true vehicle of the story.