Narrating via Fragments: Patrick Modiano's Metonymic Style in Dora Bruder

Abstract

This paper examines the narrative strategy that Patrick Modiano pursues in Dora Bruder (Paris: Gallimard, 1997) to find a solution to the dilemma of how to narrate the Holocaust without giving it meaning, mainly storytelling via fragments. Using Roman Jakobson and David Lodge's distinctions between “metonymic” and “metaphoric” discourse as a theoretical framework, I show how the predominance of a fragmentary, “metonymic” style in Dora Bruder on many levels leads to the creation of a text that resists all attempts to attribute meaning to the events related. This “metonymic” style consists of narrating via fragments of newspaper articles, journals, and photos that are juxtaposed and connected, but never presented as symbols or metaphors. The characters are always portrayed according to their surroundings, and the narrative itself proceeds via tangents and relations of contiguity between the people, objects, and places described. Above all, the narrator seeks to lead the reader to think of the victims of the Holocaust in terms other than the categories in which they were classified (Jews, Resistants, etc.) and to avoid suggesting similarities between Dora and other Jews, such as his own father, since he deems the invention of categories and establishment of relations of similarity to be extremely dangerous acts.