Patrick Modiano: Memory as recomposition of a conflictual European universe
Patrick Modiano: Memory as recomposition of a conflictual European universe

Summary/Abstract: The novelist, dramatist, essayist and scenarist Patrick Modiano is the last one to complete the list of French recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, being appreciated – according to the declarations of the Swedish Academy – for “the art of memory with which he evoked the most abstruse destinies and revealed the universe of the countries under occupation”. In the post-war period, when the heroic myth of the French Resistance during the German Occupation was actively cultivated, Modiano argues with the myths of the ancient France and describes aspects of anti-semitism, collaborationism and their traces. Fragmentation of the approach to topics of national history appears as the emblem of a controversial memory. The importance of Modiano’s novels is emphasized by his having tackled certain aspects of the French Past passed under silence, given that few writers have had the courage to reveal its dramatic authenticity. Within this perverting atmosphere of the Occupation, he brings to the stage marginalized people, traffickers, collaborators, double agents, resistants, characters that stand between betrayal and heroism. The presentation of man in relation to his own memory represents the fundamental ideational feature of the French writer’s vision. Beyond the official history, Modiano imposes himself as a voice of stories and destinies, making them heard against the forgetfulness of the amnesic present. Thus, his poetic consciousness registered, examined, analyzed and interpreted the configuration of this space of fragmentary and conflictual memory, completing it with the interrogations of the present, thus succeeding in surviving through memory.

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