Fugue States: Modiano Romancier

Abstract

The essay shows how in Dora Bruder, Modiano is able to call upon imagination and mobilize the novelist's craft while remaining faithful to historical truth. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol31/iss2/9 Fugue States: Modiano Romancieri Lynn A. Higgins Dartmouth University A narrator in the 1990s retraces the life and disappearance of Dora Bruder, age 15, after reading her parents' announcement in an old newspaper (Paris soir, Dec 31, 1942), revealing that she had run away from the convent school where she was in hiding. Moved by the detailed description of the missing girl, and further driven by his own multiple bereavements, he undertakes to document her escapadeher fugue-seeking to understand by bringing it into parallel with his own experience as a runaway and his father's clandestine existence during the Occupation. His itineraries around Paris retracing Dora's footsteps yield information about her parents' background, and he learns as well that the family was deported and died at Auschwitz. The newspaper announcement exists. The young girl's name is real, although so richly overdetermined as to seem invented. Among its associations, the name brings to mind Rudy Modiano, the author's adored (bruder is brother in German), who died at the age of ten; it evokes Freud's Dora; and there are even connections to actress Francoise Dorleac, Catherine Deneuve's sister, who also died young and tragically. Nevertheless, a real Dora Bruder is listed in Serge Klarsfeld's Memorial des enfants juifs deportes de France. Modiano published a tribute to Klarsfeld in Liberation, in which he admits that reading, page after page, lists of names of deported children caused him to have doubts about literature. Since memory is often the primary motor of literature, it seemed to me that the only book it was truly necessary to write was this memorial, as Serge Klarsfeld wrote it. His reading left him especially haunted by the many entries marked unidentified child [ Enfant sans identite,] and so, taking Klarsfeld as an example, I tried to find a 1 Higgins: Fugue States: Modiano Romancier Published by New Prairie Press