Patrick Modiano and the Bucket: a Note

chapter 11 Patrick Modiano and the Bucket: A Note

Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014. His thirty plus novels are uniformly short, and most focus on aspects of his own life, though it would be rash to identify him completely with any of his representations. His topic is human identity, and his work deserves a place here because a case can be made that his writings demonstrate a kind of proof of Popper’s argument that if we do not begin with a hypothesis, hypotheses are not likely to emerge simply from examining a bucket of more or less randomly collected information. Modiano’s first novel, L’Etoile, sets the stage for his ongoing project. He is the child of a Jewish father and a Gentile mother who was more interested in her acting career than in her two children. His brother died when Patrick was not quite a teen. His father escaped the Holocaust by a combination of luck, pluck, and working in the Paris black market, including work around and sometimes for members of the Nazi occupying force. Modiano seems not to claim a Jewish identity. He was educated in Catholic schools, for the most part boarding schools where his parents abandoned him. His work implies that while of course one has a right to survive, that right can involve individuals in moral and emotional compromises that lead to com- plexities or even contradictions in a person’s sense of identity. His father needed to survive. Denying his Jewish identity was reasonable. What about actually serving the needs of the occupying Nazis? One of Modia- no’s characters commits suicide years after the end of the war when she comes to suspect that her Jewish father’s attempts to find her by posting newspaper ads in the Paris papers, after she had decided to live on her own and moved out, might have led to his arrest and death. It’s not evident whether Modiano’s father, in reality or in his fictional representations, struggled morally with what he did to survive. At one time he even was prepared to turn his own son in to the police. In the case of the woman who committed suicide, her sense of self changed when she discovered, late in her life, that she may have been guilty to some degree of her father’s death. Identity, in Modiano’s novels, is constantly in flux. Sometimes characters recover memories that change their self-concepts. Sometimes they discover facts about their pasts that significantly change how they view themselves. Sometimes they grow and change through travel or through interactions with new people they meet. No personal identity, as a consequence, seems final, so

186 chapter 11 that it is reasonable to live day by day without working to shape or to defend any particular picture of oneself. Moral positions are also in flux. As characters try to survive in a kaleidoscopic world, they accept the behavior of others with little apparent judgment or at least condemnation. An exception may be the filmscript for Lacombe Lucien, a tale about a naïve teenager in southern France who works for the Axis because he is allowed to join, then changes his mind and becomes something of a hero for the allied side before being killed by Re- sistance fighters who do not understand that he has had a change of heart. This story gives more shape to the moral issues and points toward a clear judgment. Lacombe Lucien also advocates understanding and reconciliation among those who for complex reasons found themselves pressured to fight on the wrong side of World War ii. Putting Modiano’s method of presentation into Popper’s terms, what Modiano seems to propose is that anyone may choose not to advance a hypothesis in the face of the bucket of facts and sensations that form one’s life. The truth may be too difficult to identify. Or perhaps the choices and judgments may be too hard to reach. Of course, identity is always in flux for everyone, to some extent. What is distinctive about Modiano’s work is that his books focus not on the construc- tion of a theory of who anyone is, but rather on the loose ends. He is a novelist whose forte is presenting the bucket rather than the hypothesis. So that the point of his collected works is the assertion that life, after all, is a bucket, a collection of experiences that may never assemble themselves into purpose or meaning. Like Michel Houellebecq, Modiano writes about people whose lives do not amount to much. Like Le Clézio, he often writes about people who live in what Gorky called the lower depths: unfortunates, petty criminals, victims of sexual trafficking. Some writers frame hypotheses. Others show the limits or the failures of the hypotheses that have been put forward, as does Schweitzer. Modiano completes a Popperian view of literature by presenting novels that are chiefly about the bucket and what it is like to live with a bucket and no hypothesis, or plot that leads toward a conclusion, or argument. The bucket is the conclusion as well as the beginning. This final note will not offer case-by-case examples of how Modiano creates his work. As in the work of Le Clézio, Modiano’s framework of ideas has con- sequences for the organization of his books, for his treatment of character, for the abruptness with which he makes transitions, for the way he treats time and sequences of events, and for his shortcuts of style. The reader is invited to ex- plore half a dozen of his novels. He makes a case that the bucket is the way that many of us experience life. A critical question worth examining is why, in the