Modiano, Chien de printemps: Lecture Notes
Patrick Modiano (b. 1945) — major French novelist — author of 20+ novels -— 1st novel publ. 1968
1st-person Narrator
Most of his novels feature a 1st person narrator
Typical features of this recurrent male narrator:
1. Solitary, unsociable, very few attachments or possessions, an urban wanderer (flâneur), usually based in
Paris.
2. Tends to be very unforthcoming about his background, his circumstances, himself.
3. Tends to focus his attention on someone else (a biographical urge)
4. Nearly always engaged in a search for something in the past (an historical urge)
5. His searching/researching/amateur detective work rarely leads to a successful outcome.
(whether his search is in pursuit of his biographical urge or his historical urge)
— all found in CdeP (See opening sentence of novel…)
Past/Present
As we read on, the gap between the present and the past is clarified:
The narrator knew FJ between April and June 1964. FJ was a photographer who, having met the young narrator by
chance, then hired him to produce an inventory of all his photos (packed into 3 suitcases). The time they spent
together came to an abrupt and unexpected end when FJ suddenly left Paris for Mexico, never to be heard of again.
All this occurred when the narrator himself was 19 y.o., and FJ 44 y.o. And he’s ‘writing these lines’ (p. 17) in April
1992, 28 years later, at the age of 47.
The Narrator-Protagonist
Both articulated by je. Encountered by reader as both ‘narrator’/ ‘narrating self’ (in the present) and ‘protagonist’ /
‘experiencing self’ (in the past).
What else do we learn about the narrator-protagonist as we read the book? Very little…
• had a girlfriend when he first met FJ
• had already ‘abandoned his studies’
• surviving financially by selling furniture, paintings, books, carpets from an ‘abandoned apartment’ (was he
squatting there too?)
Later in book, we learn a little about his past through memories that return to him:
See pp. 29, 30, 96
NB Significant that these childhood memories all re-surface via narrator’s obsession with FJ. Autobiographical
details are a spin-off or by-product of biographical quest.
All in all, we learn only ‘peu de choses’ about the narrator-protagonist (reflecting his own position vis-à-vis FJ).
Lots of ‘je’, but no name: sums up the curious mixture of presence and absence forming the figure of the narratorprotagonist. Hence a ghost-like figure…
Indeed we seem to have a ghost (narrator-protagonist as biographer) chasing a ghost (FJ as ‘biographee’): an
instance of ‘doubling’.
Jansen: From Biographer to Biographee
(More later on the unknowable, elusive, side of FJ)
FJ’s life before 1964… his friendship with Robert Capa… a real photographer… his famous photo of Spanish civil
War, ‘The Falling Soldier’ (Real? Fake?)
Raises question of ‘real’ characters in fictional contexts
Correspondences between novel and biographies of Capa’s life: eg photo of broken bathtub in Berlin (actress Ingrid
Bergmann in bathtub in ‘real’ photo, Capa and Jansen in the fictional equivalent).
A feflection prompted by this photo: Jansen = ‘une sorte de double de Capa’ (p. 14)
General theme of doubling (‘dédoublement’) in novel
See especially correspondence shown to exist between the author of the novel (‘real’) and the narrator-protagonist
(‘fictional’) created by the author in his novel: author (Modiano) and narrator-protagonist (nameless) share same
age. Both are writers. Both at same young age squatted in empty apartments, stole items and sold them to keep life
and soul together.
All these correspondences suggest that Modiano deliberately set out to make his narrator a fictional double of
himself, just as Jansen is a fictional double of the real Robert Capa. This can be represented as a ‘proportional
schema’:
Author : Narrator :: Capa : Jansen
Each pair is the result of a doubling, and the schema itself represents a kind of doubling of the doubling.
NB Other ‘characters’ in novel who are documented as having been ‘real’: Jacques Besse, Eugène Deckers… and
maybe even Michel Lemoine (if ‘Michel L.’ and ‘Lemoine’ are indeed the same person: see pp. 37-41).
Another Case of Doubling: that of Narrator/Protagonist and Jansen
= a key element of the narrative as it develops through the novel
Initial affinities/similarities
• N/P: few attachments to society or others; unforthcoming about himself; present yet absent
• J: ditto: travels light, lives light, wants to be forgotten/left alone: ‘il fait le mort’ (48-9; = ‘he lies low’ + ‘he acts
dead’). A silent man: cf references to photography. E.g. p. 21…
Initial differences
• Photographer v. aspiring writer (but both artists…)
• age gap (Fr. ‘décalage’: discrepancy, time-lag)
• N/P: urge to record, preserve, catalogue (J’s photos + J’s life… whereas J. has lost interest in these concerns:
prefers to forget
The Overcoming of the décalage: from doubling to identification
N/P in 1964 = J. in his younger days
(as evidenced in fact that J. wrote notes, details of who/where/when on back of his photos)
N/P in 1992 = J. in 1964
• age gap overcome
• attitude gap overcome (despite survival of N/P’s biographical urge)
• a narrative of merging identities: N/P’s growing feeling that he is becoming J.
Main points of reference:
• p. 69 (=1992): taking J’s ‘point of view’
• p. 92: account of a dream (= ‘a few months ago’: early 1992?): ‘je m’appelais Francis Jansen’
• pp. 106-7: N/P remembers J. saying that he too had sometimes fallen into ‘black holes’
• pp. 117-8: N/P gives up making an effort, aspires to disappear (like J. before him)
The Urge to Disappear
= ‘the pull of the abyss’?
a metaphysical abyss?
(‘abyss’ as in ‘black hole’, which exercises an irresistible gravitational pull: you’re sucked in and disappear)
Perhaps, but only in part…
a) urge to disappear = a withdrawal (from life, lving with others, being with others: not same as being sucked into a
black hole): significant others in J’s own life-history have disappeared, died. See p. 26: ‘J’avais fini par comprendre
que la mort de Robert Capa et celle de Colette Laurent à quelque temps d’intervalle avaient produit une cassure dans
sa vie.’ Is withdrawal attributable to a fear of further personal commitments?
b) In Jansen’s case, a strong suggestion that 20 th-century history plays an important role, notably via the impact of
war…
••• Note the many references to the 2nd WW in the novel to
• J. and Capa in Berlin at end of war
• suitcase as symbol of the exile, the refugee, the deportee
• J.: a Jew, arrested in Paris during Occupation and sent to Drancy holding camp (19)
• le Mime Gil recalls policeman who stalked him on the day of his arrest (67 — another case of doubling)
• first 2 photos in J’s published album: another reference to Drancy (109-10)
• another double: another Francis Jansen, also a Jew (120-21), a man whose fate could have been J’s own ( cf his
own arrest) –i.e. strong element of guilt in urge to disappear (the guilt of the Holocaust survivor, which led many
such survivors to commit suicide, often at a much later date)? NB use of Fossoli Camp in Italy as transit centre for
deportation of Jews to German concentration camps is an historically documented reality.
Note importance of word “frère”, alongside “double”, in last sentence of book: a probable reference to PM’s own
younger brother, Rudy, who dies age 10 of leukemia…
N/P’s own urge to disappear results from his progressive identification with J. Maybe the same fear and sense of
guilt are lurking in him too? (This would be true of Modiano himself)
The Paradox of the Disappearing Biographer
N/P ‘disappears’, but not before completing his biographical task.
A ‘biography’ that incorporates loss, absence, ghostliness, incompleteness, silence.
Cf idea of words ‘expressing’ silence, of ‘creating silence with words’ (21) + N/P’s comment about J.: ‘De tous les
caractères d’imprimerie, il m’avait dit qu’il préférait les points de suspension’ (21).
‘Points de suspension’: both ellipsis (omission) and the tailing-off of language into silence.
… as in the narrative tailing-off of both N/P’s and J’s lives into ‘black holes’
(see p. 90 for another reference to ‘suspension’: the fixed image of Eugène Deckers playing a role in an episode of
the 1960s TV serial The Saint, leaves him forever suspended in a weightless, ghost-like state, somewhere between
presence and absence.