Solitude and the Restlessness of the Immemorial: Levinasian Traces in the Discourse of Patrick Modiano

Abstract

Emmanuel Levinas contested Western ontology's insistence on the importance of individual autonomy and systematized knowledge, developing a new description of how identity and intersubjectivity are constructed. In the early De l'existence à l'existant and Le Temps et l'autre, he explains how the effort of existing is assumed, creating a sense of mastery but also of solitude, for the ego and the self are tied to one another, but it is not until Totalité et Infini that he elaborates on the ethical encounter with the face as discourse. In his last major work Autrement qu’être ou au‐delà de l'essence, he focuses on the consequences of this epiphany for the subject, and relates this to the trace, a special kind of sign that focuses not so much on the relationship between sign and referent as on the irreversible passing of those who left them.The paired texts of Patrick Modiano's Voyage de noces and Dora Bruder most strikingly inscribe the simultaneous self‐absorption and tedium of existing, but also depict how traces from the immemorial shatter the subject's autonomy. Modiano is haunted by the missing person ad's description of a runaway girl who disappeared in December 1941, was interned in Drancy the following summer and then deported to Auschwitz. He first wrote Voyage de noces to exorcise the spell the ad cast upon him, was eventually compelled to respond directly to the summons by composing Dora Bruder. Modiano tries to retrieve fragments of the adolescent Dora's past and rescue her from oblivion, but his efforts prove largely futile, for there is no memory to retrieve. His insistence on Dora's decision to remain in Drancy with her father makes it possible for him to forgive his own father's failings and acknowledge his admiration both for him and all those who defied Occupation hypocrisy. Lastly, Modiano's text calls upon us as readers to become the guardians of the pleas that French authorities ignored and thereby accept the summons of the immemorial ourselves.