Kick the Tragedy, Part 3: "Flowers of Ruin"
The third and final novel in Suspended Sentences & some concluding thoughts (plus a song)
The third and final novel in Suspended Sentences, “Flowers of Ruin” (Fleurs de ruine) tells the story of detective search for the killers of a couple in 1933, but it turns, as Modiano’s work does, into a meditation on the identity of a man before, during and after the Occupation. In “Flowers of Ruin,” individuals embody the memory the narrator seeks. These individuals become instrumental for his needs, their identities are devoured by the narrator’s search for answers, devolving into simple names on a list. The act of searching in this novel is similar to the “narrative of return,” which is increasingly prevalent in Modiano’s work. In “Flowers of Ruin,” the narrator increasingly returns to the same few clues or elements for answers.
Physical objects trigger bodily responses that are not exactly memories but reenactments and reincarnations of events. The narrator notices the mysterious Pacheo vanished, similar to the narrator’s father, in a way “which leaves you so puzzled you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed. People become like objects of inquiry for the narrator. He uses them as ends to find clues or truths about first the murdered married couple, then Pacheo, both to no avail. This search, or way of searching, demonstrates the ruthless way some Modiano’s characters proceed. The stakes of such searches are incredibly high because the identity of the narrators are contingent upon the success or failure of them.
These return journeys reconnect severed parts and if this indeed a reconnection happens, can release latent, repressed, or dissociated memories that metaphorically live in the place and subject. As the narrator journeys across Paris, his memory “dredged up a few outdated names…[he feels] apprehensive crossing through places [he hasn’t] set foot since [he] was eighteen.” The streets of Paris reincarnate memory within the narrator that forces him to tell his story, thus to journey through his memory to find what answers he can about his past. The narrator begins to list the facts surrounding the case of the murdered couple before proceeding with his excavation of his memory:
At around four in the morning, the guests departed. During the half-hour that then passed in silence, two muffled explosions sounded. At nine o’clock, a neighbor, leaving her own apartment, passed in front of the couple’s door. She heard moaning. Suddenly remembering the shots heard in the night, she grew worried and knocked. The door opened to reveal Gisele T. Blood was slowly leaking from a visible wound beneath her breast.
The language and staccato sentence structure is reminiscent of noir detective fiction of the 1950s and ‘60s: Modiano’s protagonists engage in methodical research that associates them with the private eye, a role emphasized by their shared passion for detective matter. The journey of return in “Flowers of Ruin” takes over the narrator’s story. The narrator compulsively lists names of businesses, people, and co-conspirators. These lists function as possible clues in the narrator’s search for a murderer then for the identity of a possible conspirator, Pacheo. At one point the narrator fuses with a woman’s consciousness, recounting possible events in her day: “Her return to the Occupied Zone…her meeting with a certain Eddy Pagnon in dubious circumstances.” The narrator’s search over appropriates the clues then the story and the truth become personally significant despite his lack of direct involvement or relationship with the characters or events.
This then causes an issue with time. The narrator’s questions result in silence from his suspects because they “were getting dangerously close to the present.” Temporality forces gaps and half-truths into the return narrative. Further, the elusive nature of silence frustrates and puzzles the narrator. When Pacheo leaves forever, the narrator muses, “Did he want to teach me a lesson, show me that reality was more elusive than I thought?” Still, the narrator is firm in the morality and convictions of his investigation saying “sooner or later, everyone is called to account,” and later “they would never call me to account.” The idea of accounting becomes an important motif as the novel concludes by making the moral claims of the narrator paramount in the larger spectrum of morality presented by him. Accounting is confession, it is admission of guilt or innocence for events in the past. However, by searching through the past, the narrator has nothing to admit to save being a bit too eager about how closely his life relates to the past. He loses his identity in some ways by constructing his identity with and against that of the past. His “narrative of return,” while a trope within a larger artistic movement, proves detrimental because he loses himself in the lives of others.
Modiano’s Suspended Sentences offers an entry into the Frenchman’s work as it avoids too much explicit destabilizing of the first person. It is good, hearty autofiction. His early work, on the other hand, concerns subjectivity as an issue of playfulness (I’m thinking particularly of his first novel, La Place de l’etoile, where his stand-in Raphael Schlemiltovitch meets Hitler, survives a concentration camp, and is imprisoned in Israel for being “one of those” weak Jews). Suspended Sentences then, his mid-career work, provides and opportunity to reckon with the adjustments of the novelist.
Questions of aging or changes in context abound (Israel’s founding and warfare play more heavily in the early work, whereas later, Modiano becomes more reflexive towards France). However, his sly use of memory, one that suggests a more active engagement between the self and the public, a necessary friction any writer that has maintained my interest.
The uses of autofiction (political, social, philosophical) all fall flat with me without the type of social (that is, multi-vocal) engagement inherent in fiction outside that mode. Whether we have moved from the experimentation of the “I” in contemporary American fiction to things more speculative (Yanigahara’s latest, St. John Mandel’s work), traditional (Brandon Taylor’s work) or simply bourgeoise (or PMC?) fiction, we will see. Until then, Modiano’s work will remain swirling the self, offering a glance of our collective consciousness in splashes worthy of our attention.
Now a song: