Hello Gentle Reader,
There is a short vignette – a brief sentence – from “Invisible Ink,” which provides with understated eloquence the literary visage of Patrick Modiano:
“[. . . ] behind the accused were about 30 suitcases – the only remaining traces of person who had gone missing.”
The image recalls the enclosures and display cases within the Memorial and Museum of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The exhibits display the unmistakable quantity of people who were deported and sentenced to a universe of death. The shoes, the hair, the artificial limbs, become the only tangible anchor and traces of the individuals who were consumed and eradicated in the camp before being released out the chimney. Though 6 million jews were reported to have been exterminated in the holocaust, this number itself becomes vague and intangible, but the physical quantity and expanse of the objects of possessions or even hair, makes the number more palpable. It anchors the lost or incorporeal to the land of the living, to reality. The same can be seen in that scene with the accused. 30 is but a ubiquitous number. Ever present and routinely cycled throughout daily life, in all manners of speech. Even to discuss 30 people who went missing carries the gesture of simple accountancy, a record of an otherwise innocuous transaction. The context, in turn however, of the 30 suitcases become the revealing human element of just how many people went ‘missing,’ or just disappeared. Theses suitcases remain anonymous, but representative of an individual who has unexpectedly and unexplainably been redacted from the world. Perhaps this is what is most frightening regarding the Holocaust and its associative horrors and tragedies, which includes The Occupation and the Vichy Regime of France, is in which the casualty and bureaucratic efficiency of the crimes took place. Mass killing and genocide was treated as business of the day. Through defined and described in the context of ideological rationale and obligation, achieving the prescribed notion of what has been deemed the common good. The clockwork efficiency of its endorsement, deployment, and facilitation remains inhumanely horrifying in the perversion of human life and the basic principles of dignity. This is what makes the 30 empty suitcases a haunting image in Modiano’s elegiac prose. These empty suitcases become the only representation and evidence that its owner existed and lived, that at the time of their departure they had two ears, two eyes, one nose, one pair of lips. Before their abrupt disappearance, they carried on with life in a fashion as unassuming as everyone else’s. Yet, now they are reduced to a commonplace item as the sole representation of the evidentiary existence to the world.
The literary universe of Patrick Modiano is a monochromatic purgatory landscape. An afterthought of a world. A meager shadow which existed within the most elliptical of moments that had since unraveled in the bleaching torrent of ellipses. It is here in the negative space of history; the afterimage of memory; the mere threshold on which Modiano’s characters teeter on the precipice of the abyss. Through simple and elegiac prose, Modiano conjures a world of contemporary history, which has quickly been redacted due to its airs of shame, scandal, and indigent infamy. All of which is facilitated by the act of forgetting, an otherwise collective amnesia. A social and political institution of erasure, to save face. All of which describes the mercurially unknown world of the Occupation and the terrors of Vichy France, which becomes dominate nodal point of Modiano’s literary work.
“Invisible Ink,” deviates from directly commenting on the occupation as the rotten pit obfuscated and removed from contemporary Parisian cityscape and memory, whose shadow crosses the paths of the dubious, the nefarious, and the innocent in equal corruptible measure, and instead takes a more subtle perspective, with an otherwise geriatric and nostalgic gaze towards the past, with haunting questions of curiosity and a sense of unfinished business, a desire for resolution or at least some vague notion of conclusion. Such pursuits are the baseline of Patrick Modiano’s narratives as well-seasoned readers of a Modiano’s particular novels will certainly testify to. In “Invisible Ink,” a retiring middle aged private detective picks up the case from 30 years ago, regarding the missing persons case of a certain Noëlle Lefebvre. The clues regarding Lefebvre’s disappearance are scant, producing nothing of recognizable merit, a few names of inconsequential meaning and a phrase which ominously repeated and peppered throughout the novel:
“If I had known.”
Throughout the mundanity of the few scraps collected regarding the vacant and faint existence of the absent and missing Noëlle Lefebvre, the line: “If I had known,” stands out with forewarning and unresolved consequence, as if someone in passing had meant to let a detail slip or provide some news, but the recipient was late or they themselves were running late, and though they wished to converse they needed to dash off into the ambiguity of their own life. Its vagueness teeters between desolation and an imprecise attempt requesting salvation and forgiveness, a pleading request that a lack of knowledge (if albeit complete ignorance) is defensible enough to be exonerated. Either way, Jean Eyben, the detective circles back to the phrase often, attempting to decipher its content, while it operates as his lodestone, the anchoring point of his investigation and perhaps in turn the old record (by her own hand at least) of Noëlle Lefebvre herself, providing some sketch of a legacy, an acknowledgement of her own existence on the earthly realm.
Springboarding from there, Modiano’s Jean Eyben finds the acquaintances of the elusive and perilous Noëlle Lefebvre and seeks to slip into a two dimensional persona and build an identity and history around the information which is being provided by these shadowy colleagues, and in turn decipher and discern some further knowledge of Noëlle Lefebvre and the circumstances of her disappearance, which stereotypically in archetypal form of Modiano, are elusive if non-existent, which is the charm of Modiano’s work, the exploration of a liminal space. Traversing the precipice between unreliability and fabrication and how they intercept into the realm of memory. The unanswered questions, the deliberate inarticulation, the disintegration of conclusions, and an endless sense of aimless disorientation are the hallmarks of Modiano’s style, and it comes as no surprise that the disappearance of Noëlle Lefebvre, her involvement with what can only be presumed to a shady businessman, and mercurial outdated and less than stellar actors, which in itself is a profession of both glamourous airs and dreams, cruelly denied by realities and the trivial business of life. Yet at the of the novel, there comes a strange reprieve in the instance of Modiano, reminiscent of “Out of the Dark,” where the novel turns to the eternal city of Rome—that fabled city of “After the Circus,” a city which exists in the dreams and the immigration, a place to envision escaping to or running to, hiding in, and eventually existing in—where a curious female, who is heavily implied to be Noëlle Lefebvre enjoys the company of a male companion, whose questions ensure she evades giving a direct answer to her time in Paris. Did Jean Eyben finally accomplish locating the elusive, the vague, the vacant, and absent Noëlle Lefebvre, whose rueful and regretful: “If I had known,” became her legacy in Paris; or is this unknown and even threatening man, one of Noëlle Lefebvre’s acquaintances from all those years ago, who has since hunted her down and is ready to begin anew? Yet on this unknown woman’s part, who may or may not be Noëlle Lefebvre, there is a commitment to come clean, to surface from obscurity and fill the void like wound of absence.
All of Patrick Modiano’s novels are self-contained chamber pieces, small orchestral arrangements of an otherwise intimate nature. Despite their independence they join the symphony of Modiano’s complete bibliography, compromising of variations of the same themes, preoccupations, imagery, and names, but inflected with a new nuance, a different pitch, a cadence all their own, which leads to each new book being a new crescendo cresting on the continuing and endless symphony that Patrick Modiano has composed from his debut novels to his orchestral maturity that changed the direction of his oeuvre and taken on that silvery silk gossamer of a style originating in the seductive novel: “Villa Triste.” “Invisible Ink,” is no different, its own composition of chamber music, intimate and close, but more fermented in its atmosphere, comfortable and well worn. Though not original in Modiano’s work, its niche is complementary to the greater symphony and joins the parade with ease, never out of step or out of tune.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
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