Kick the Tragedy Part 1 "Afterimage"
On Patrick Modiano's collection of mid-career novels, Suspended Sentences
My delusions of grandeur struck fairly young when I was granted a research opportunity from my college as a Sophomore to engage with the work of Patrick Modiano, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature a year prior, in 2014. Only three of his novels had been translated into English at that point, collected as Suspended Sentences. I do not speak French. I am not trained in psychoanalysis or Freudian theory. I was out of my depth and remain so in many facets of life.
My lack of intellectual depth perception has bitten me in the ass a few more times since then, but nevertheless, my brain is hard wired towards grandeur and delusion. I had argued that writing in short, concise vignettes, Modiano explores the ennui of a sort of post-memorial thinker. This concept, adapted from the work of theorist Marianne Hirsch in her work Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, attempts to define the second and third generations of Holocaust survival as distinct forms of memory-making from first generation. The idea of “generational trauma” has perhaps become more chic since I first encountered Hirsch’s work, and now reading my notes from the time as I wrote this post, the work reads a bit unidirectional and relying on certain Freudian or even Jungian concepts of cultural transference that I don’t ascribe too.
As applied to Modiano however, this concept proved fruitful. The French writer’s work is elliptical and repetitive in the way trauma often can feel. He further attempts to illuminate and narrativize the Jewish and French people who did in fact collaborate with the Vichy Regime, while eschewing narratives of Fascist resistance that ascribe more honor to members of the French ruling class than they might deserve.
The three novels in Suspended Sentences, “Afterimage,” “Suspended Sentences,” and “Flowers of Ruin,” were published individually between 1988 and 1993 in French. Written in the first person, Modiano’s authorial voice can be difficult to distinguish from that of the first-person narrator.
The first novel in the volume, “Afterimage” (Chien de printemps), follows Modiano’s narrator through cataloguing the collected work of photographer Francis Jansen. The main story takes place sometime during the late 1960s, but is told by the narrator from a perspective twenty-five years later. The narrator works as an archival artist for Jansen, where he views the people in the photographs, people he never knew, as his loss. Jansen, as a survivor of the Nazi Occupation, fights against the narrator’s desire to Never Forget.
The narrator attempts to “rediscover the quality [Jansen] possessed in art as in life.” One of Jansen’s photographs “can express silence” and at the same time, the narrator wishes he could break it to hear about the world Jansen knew. When the narrator writes his first novel, a novel of disclosure about what Jansen had told him, the narrator muses he “hadn’t respected the instructions of silence he’d given me.” Jansen “was after silence,” and the narrator disrupts that journey by compiling and cataloguing his photographs. Photographs offer a voice for the narrator to understand Jansen and a specific time in his life. They breach the silence created by Jansen’s ennui, a feeling captured by his knowledge of life under Vichy and the ensuing narrative foreclosure of French life since then.
Going so far as to say to become Jansen in a dream, the narrator begins to combine with the photographer and mold his own version of their shared life. He becomes so closely linked to his object of study that he literally unifies his subconscious with Jansen’s perceived subconscious. His subjectivity, once stabilized by the persistent “I” of Modiano’s autofiction, reveals its volatility. An individual attempting to narrate their life and their experience can never exist truly alone, and it is a formal irony that Modiano’s autofiction devolves from the restrictions of the singular.
The narrator takes up his job as Jansen’ secretary because he “refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace.” The fusion of Jansen and the narrator bisects attempts at silence, forcing the desire to disappear with remembrance which becomes ritualistic in the act of cataloguing photographs. In the game of chicken between remembering and forgetting, oblivion wins out as Jansen disappears, leaving memories half formed and slippery. An attempt at objective memory eludes the narrator who reinscribes his own memories in the act of novel writing, which as a form offers questions of truth and reality.
The conceit of Modiano’s “Afterimage” attempts to balance subjectivity and truth, but it is to subjectivity we return persistently, almost like a compulsion. We are left with the caustic after-images of Jansen seen through photographs, slippery, dead things. Attempts to liven them through the dual rituals of cataloguing (the plot of the novel) and narrating them (the novel itself) provides puppet strings on top of the novel’s actors. The exploration comes with self-awareness of this act with a juvenile persistence in continuing despite resistance from Jansen.
The narrator views Jansen’s photographs as key to unlocking the past, but being flawed as such, they only bear witness to what the narrator wants to see. He believes they hold the secret to unlocking Jansen, but they equally might not. Photographs function as points of visual addition onto histories interpretative mode. If history is a contest, photographs provide exhibits offered as evidence, but they aren’t a substitute for the actual production of historical knowledge. They are a material connection to a past, but only in points of time. At times, the narrator reads too much into the photographs, such as believing they could “rescue” Jansen. His photographs are personal, individual work that the narrator reads into the collective, points of memory which function both as recall objects and arguments about subjects and their temporality. In viewing the photographs as memories, the narrator begins to place a heavy burden on his novelistic work, making his individual effort more grand than it may be. The photographs provide an argument about Jansen’s past life, but does not provide a complete image of Jansen.
As is common in some autofiction, Jansen and the narrator’s world shrinks to their specific environment. The society surrounding the original setting of Jansen’s photographs is not elucidated or explored by the narrator in any serious way. He is viewing the photographs within his individual context and subjectivity. But by reflecting on his thoughts twenty-five years later, Modiano’s narrator changes his subjectivity by temporally removing himself even more. The fragmentary arguments of Jansen’s photographs ferment an obsession in the narrator. The novel is a mediation on his obsession with a singular man and his singular collection of photographic testimony. That testimony, the narrator hopes, will present answers about the past. Affiliating and identifying as best as he can, Modiano’s narrator works to uncover a lost truth in the elusive world of photography. Ultimately acting out ritual with an archive, the narrator reveals his position within the larger framework of French collective memory. He is narrativizing an experience of an experience, doubly moving autofiction from a place of singular memory to a multiplicative project that forces the reader and the subjects to meet. Unlike autofiction in the stripe of someone like Ben Lerner where the act of writing about near-past events is meant to extract meaning, for Modiano, significance exists in narrativizing a dislocated history which lives in fragments both physical and human.