Kick the Tragedy, Part 2 “Suspended Sentences”
Second of a three part series on Patrick Modiano's collection of novels
You can read part 1 of Kick the Tragedy here for some background and introduction to the collection of novels.
The second, and titular novel of the volume, “Suspended Sentences,” (Remis de peine) follows the narrator Patoche, the diminutive of Patrick, as he lives with his brother and a strange cast of characters while their parents are away. Similar to the narrative device in “Afterimage,” the narrator in “Suspended Sentences” is both child and adult, at once remembering the events of childhood through an adult voice. In this simultaneous position, the narrator takes on a new resonance in “postmemorial” representation. The initial childhood gaze of the narrator within the center of the story draws the reader in and allows for an over appropriation of the crimes detailed in the novel as universal, rather than local. The adult Patoche, in viewing childhood as a place of continued disenchantment, illuminates the struggle of viewing the past. He attempts to learn what happened around him as a child and only upon re-creation of the events is he able to fully recognize the truth around his childhood.
The challenge for Modiano presenting a child protagonist is to find a balance that allows the reader to enter the narrative, but that simultaneously avoids over-appropriation that collapses distance and creates a too easy access to a particular past. Again, we see in “Suspended Sentences,” the subjective attempts to move outward onto objective reality. The child fills the subjective space while the adult, the objective; yet, the concept of a child is constructed by adults, not children themselves. Readers can easily identify with child-narrators because they are largely blank slates, things equally untainted (so the story goes) by trauma as well as more the more pesky consciousness. They have straight-forward and often morally clear interactions and view points. As a sight of presumed innocence, the child sits opposite the postlapserian adult: once fallen, we can look back wistfully and complexly at the events of the Garden.
This looking-back does however risk blurring the lines of the subjective adult gaze and eliminating the nuances of the adult’s specific social status. Thus, an adult descendant of a Nazi could overly identify with a Jewish child victim of the Holocaust, despite that viewer’s own subjective past.
To Mathilde, Patoche is known as “blissful idiot,” and the narrator also alludes again to the Rue Lauriston gang, who worked alongside the Nazi occupiers, and which his father was a member. The narrator notes “a few years later,” he heard the name “Rue Lauriston gang” once more and it haunts him “for such a long time.” A child’s knowledge, controlled by adults, doesn’t truly become affectual until full consciousness grows through adolescence. Therefore, the narrator could not be affected by the name Rue Lauriston in the present-tense of the story because he could not comprehend the importance of their actions to his ill-defined childhood identity.
Children are less individualized, less marked by peculiarities of identity, which in turn invites multiple projections from readers and lends children to universalization. The subjectivity of individual viewers, gazers, and readers is enhanced because childhood images are easily manipulated to adult subjectivity. The child witness, like the narrator in “Suspended Sentences,” is “merged with the victims she or he sees” suggests Hirsch. A child seeing horror or playing a part in horror becomes indistinguishable from the victims. The adult encounters the child (the other child and their own child self) both as a child, through identification and from the protective vantage point of the adult looking subject. Later in the novel, as the adult version of Patoche asserts himself more clearly, the distinctions between the adult gaze and the child viewer are conveyed. Patoche notices one of the women he is with “might have been doing something very serious,” a phrase which a police office later repeats to the child Patoche at the conclusion of the novel. The repetition of the “something very serious” represents both the uncertain legality of the crimes committed by the Rue Lauriston gang because of the omnipresent moral ambiguity, and the lack of concrete answers Patoche finds both as a child and adult about his time with the family friends. The cigarette case he carries as a child and adult “was the only object that bore witness to a period of my life I couldn’t talk to anyone about, and whose very reality I sometimes doubted.” He places his agency within the object, moving it from symbol to character. He relegates his past to the silence of an inanimate object.
Wishing he could name the people “parading through [his] memory,” Patoche wants to make them “remember that they used to keep bad company.” Patoche was not explicitly a victim of their crimes, but the people around him and their arrest certainly traumatized him. Patoche is “amazed” the police do not question him: “children see things, after all. They also hear things.” He wants to testify to what he has seen, but given his age he does not. Carceral judgement grammarized in spiritual language runs rampant through Modiano’s fiction as it struggles to manage the joint societal and personal questions of punishment and justice. The lack of release, of admission on the part for the child Patoche haunts the adult Patoche forcing him to tell this story. Yet, the adult narrator doesn’t feel closure. Modiano uses the child witness to express the truths he remembers from a subjective time in his life. Because children are easily identifiable, the child narrator, Patoche, screens out the subjectivity of the reader, replacing it with what the adult Patoche wants. Modiano searches again for closure, but cannot find it in his memory. This viewing of children exaggerates their ability to deliver truth, albeit the truth the adult viewer is searching for. In this case, the adult narrator wants answers to a childhood trauma, but the overflowing of that story does not directly lead to the catharsis he wants.
The project of writing down this story, as the adult Patoche does, serves as a sort of “therapy,” which while trite given the contemporary fetishization of lived experience, provides some understanding to Modiano’s method. It isn’t simply by transferring the information from pen to reader Modiano engages with trauma, this view elides first the construction of a novel (that is, a planned piece of writing regardless of supposed concepts of “stream of consciousness”) and secondly, the persistence of themes and characters across Modiano’s works. He doesn’t write sequels or prequels, but rather his body of work circles the drain of truth and identifies the inability to offer it amidst a world littered with silence. His repeated characters and their suggestive rather than explicit crimes show the slippages in our precarity at once true and false, and also neither, somewhere between the two and in multiplicity.