Out of the Dark
Out of the Dark
Out of the Dark
(Du plus loin de l'oubli)
PATRICK MODIANO
Translated by Jordan Stump
University of Nebraska Press
Lincoln
© Éditions Gallimard, 1996
Translation and introduction © 1998 by the University of Nebraska Press.
All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America
The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences - Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Modiano, Patrick, 1945-
[Du plus loin de l'oubli. English]
Out of the dark = Du plus loin de l'oubli / Patrick Modiano; translated by Jordan Stump.
p. cm
ISBN 0-8032-3196-2
(hardcover: alk. paper).
ISBN 0-8032-8229-X
(pbk.: alk. paper)
I. Stump, Jordan, 1959-
II. Title.
PQ2673.03D8313 1998
843'.914-dc21
98-13100 CIP
Translator's Introduction
I find it difficult to preface this novel without alluding to a very different age- nearly thirty years before the publication of
Out of the Dark
in France - and to a year that looms large in the French imagination:
1968
. This was a year of many changes in France. A massive springtime uprising among students and workers paralyzed the nation, shaking many of its most solidly established institutions (notably the university system) to their foundations and ushering in a newly visible and newly powerful youth culture, a culture of contestation and anti-traditionalism that would dramatically change the look and feel of the country. Charles de Gaulle, who had dominated French politics since the early days of World War II, would not survive the blow to his credibility and reputation dealt by his intransigence toward the young revolutionaries; he would resign early the following year. De Gaulle was not alone: many of the great icons of twentieth-century France were finding themselves forced to make way for something new. Jean-Paul Sartre was openly mocked by the insurgent students when he tried to join one of their rallies. The daring of the New Novelists, the avantgarde of the decade before, was beginning to seem less daring than the work of the so-called New New Novelists, who were blending a purely literary discourse with a new critical and theoretical awareness influenced by structuralism and
semiotics. And the purely theoretical discourse of those disciplines- and most particularly of deconstruction and poststructuralism- was beginning to imprint itself on the public imagination, allowing a rigorous and implacable questioning of language, truth, and the ideologies behind them. Existentialism and humanism were rapidly losing ground to a far more radical way of thinking, whose influence is still with us today. In many ways,
1968
was a moment when the shape of the century changed.
It was also in
1968
that Éditions Gallimard published Patrick Modiano's first novel,
La Place de l'Étoile
,
which brought its twenty-three-year-old author immediate critical and public acclaim.
La Place de l'Étoile
is not fully a product of its time: it is not exactly rebellious or transgressive in the way that many texts by young writers were at that time, and it does not incorporate the latest advances in structuralist or poststructuralist theory. Its gaze is turned not toward a bright revolutionary future but toward a rather faded past, and toward a subject that might have seemed strangely an anachronistic to the forward-looking reader of the late sixties: the place of the Jew in France. The novel's protagonist, a presumably young man with the unlikely name of Raphael Schlemilovitch, haunts the holy places of Frenchness, from seaside resorts to Alpine meadows, contaminating them with his very presence, not unlike a character in a novel by the virulently anti-Semitic Céline, of whose writing
La Place de l'Étoile
provides a devastating pastiche. This harsh, funny. profoundly ironic novel offers no hopeful visions for the future; rather, dredging up old hostilities that France would prefer to forget, it casts the Jew as a continual outsider,
pariah, an object of acute terror and loathing. The nation's past, it would seem, could not be done away with quite so easily as some would wish.
Today
La Place de l'Étoile
seems as thoroughly singular a novel as ever, standing well apart from its contemporaries. Indeed, both in style and in subject, it is a deeply personal book, whose themes of persecution and exclusion have their roots in Modiano's own family background. His father was a Jew of Alexandrian extraction, his mother an aspiring actress from Belgium; the couple met and fell in love in the uneasy Paris of the early forties. Modiano was born in 1945, and his childhood was profoundly marked by memories of the Occupation, the Deportation, and the atmosphere of menace and clandestinity that had haunted the years just before his birth. Even if Modiano himself did not live through that dark time, he nevertheless 'remembers' it, both as a historical event and as a way of life, a free-floating and pervasive presence. It is this presence, this unfading past, that forms the backdrop for all his novels, obsessively returning, though never in the same form- only as a palpable but indefinable ambience whose source is never made clear, and that cannot simply be traced to one chronological moment. In other words, Modiano does not write 'historical' novels, even if they are all profoundly shaped by a certain history, a history of marginalization and effacement. Time and again, his central characters arc caught up in an atmosphere of exclusion, imminent danger, uncertain or concealed identities; time and again they find themselves in milieux that are about to be wiped out by the approaching shadows: quaintly glamorous resorts, elegant clubs, places of innocent pleasure for movie stars or up-and-coming champions in tennis or skiing. The story is always the same, and yet the great preoccupation of Modiano's writing cannot be defined by one event, even if it is always a question of the same phenomenon: nothing less (and nothing more precise) than the obliteration of a past.
So insistently does this story recur that Modiano is often said to be 'forever writing the same book.' This is not exactly true: each novel has a perfectly distinct (if sometimes bewildering) plot, perfectly defined (if sometimes ambiguous) characters, a particular (if sometimes permeable) setting in time and space. Still, there is a very strong phenomenon of repetition at work in Modiano's writing, both within each novel and from one to another. It is not only the same tale of loss that repeats itself in his books; again and again, we find ourselves before the same colors (blue in particular), the same sounds (a voice half covered by some sort of noise), the same settings (empty rooms, deserted streets), even the same gestures (an arm raised in greeting or farewell, a forehead pressed against a windowpane). In themselves, these repetitions create a haunting and unforgettable atmosphere, instantly recognizable to any reader familiar with Modiano's work; set against the overwhelming sense of loss and disappearance that is the novels' other most visible element, they make of our reading a deeply disorienting experience, sad and strange. Everything disappears his books seem to tell us, and also - in small but omnipresent echoes- everything somehow stays. This presence of an obliterated past is meant neither to comfort us nor to terrify us: it is there to remind us endlessly of that loss, I think, so that the loss is not itself lost, so that it remains sharp, insistent, present, so that we are continually called to a life that has long since disappeared.
This is the story told by
Out of the Dark
,
Modiano's fourteenth novel, which appeared in
1996
. Its setting is not the Occupation but the early sixties; nevertheless, the oppressive, menacing atmosphere of that earlier time seems to have lingered long after its disappearance. The young narrator, like his friends or even his older self, appears to be on the run from something (but what?), living a strangely worried life whose uncertain joys seem always about to be wiped out; like his friends or even his older self, he has a vaguely marginal air about him, even if we can't quite see why he should or what makes him so. We are far from the dark days of the past, then, but strangely close as well.
At the same time, however,
Out of the Dark
is a sadly funny and touching love story and a personal reminiscence that may well seem oddly familiar to many readers. This is perhaps the most extraordinary of Modiano's feats as a writer: however private his work seems, however inseparable from a personal past, it always speaks to us of something we feel we know, as if these were our own faded memories, our own shapeless uncertainties and apprehensions, our own loose ends. The potency of his strikingly simple, enigmatic, and profoundly moving prose is no secret in France, where Modiano is a perennial best-seller and a household name, still enjoying the same critical acclaim and public success that greeted his first novel. Outside of academic circles, however, most readers in the United States have yet to discover him; they have a great surprise in store.
Modiano is never easy to translate; the apparent simplicity and neutrality of his style conceals a wealth of subtle
difficulties for the translator, and I wish to thank here several people who helped me through those difficulties. The French title of this book,
Du plus loin de l'oubli
, poses a particularly thorny problem, since the English language has no real equivalent for
oubli
, nor even a simple way of saying
du plus loin
. The phrase, taken from a French translation of a poem by the German writer Stefan George, is literally equivalent to 'from the furthest point of forgottenness,' and I have found no way to express this idea with the eloquent simplicity of the original. I would like to extend my most grateful thanks to Eleanor Hardin for coming up with the current title, and for all the invaluable help she has given me with this translation; thanks, too, to Warren Motte and Tom Vosteen for their sympathetic reading and insightful suggestions.
Out of the Dark
For Peter Handke
Du plus loin de l'oubli…..
Stefan George
SHE WAS A WOMAN of average height; he, Gérard Van Bever, was slightly shorter. The night of our first meeting, that winter thirty years ago, I had gone with them to a hotel on the Quai de la Tournelle and found myself in their room. Two beds, one near the door, the other beneath the window. The window didn't face the quai, and as I remember it was set into a gable.