Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator
- Disorderly Narratives: The Order of Narration
- Unreal Stories: The ‘effet d'irréel’
- Being Serious: Modiano's Use of History
- Being Playful: Parody and Disappointment
- Being Popular: The Modiano Novel
- Notes to Introduction
- Notes to Chapter One
- Notes to Chapter Two
- Notes to Chapter Three
- Notes to Chapter Four
- Notes to Chapter Five
- Notes to Chapter Six
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator
- Disorderly Narratives: The Order of Narration
- Unreal Stories: The ‘effet d'irréel’
- Being Serious: Modiano's Use of History
- Being Playful: Parody and Disappointment
- Being Popular: The Modiano Novel
- Notes to Introduction
- Notes to Chapter One
- Notes to Chapter Two
- Notes to Chapter Three
- Notes to Chapter Four
- Notes to Chapter Five
- Notes to Chapter Six
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Faute d'audience, faute de pouvoir s'adapter au rythme du monde moderne, […] le roman ne peut plus, à mon sens, déterminer ou orienter la sensibilité commune, comme il pouvait encore le faire au début de ce siècle. Bousculé par le cinéma et les moyens d'expression modernes, son influence est plus sournoise et réduite qu'au temps ou` il était interdit dans les pensionnats.
Patrick ModianoIn 1975, after four successful novels at only just thirty, Patrick Modiano was already sufficiently famous to be asked about his reactions to celebrity:
Ezine: Comment accueillez-vous la célébrité? Comme un encouragement, comme une menace?
Modiano: On ne peut pas parler de célébrité alors que l'audience des romanciers de notre génération se limite aux happy few. La célébrité romanesque existait au 19e siècle, et si elle a allumé encore quelques feux superbes entre les deux guerres, elle s'est dérobée depuis avec une constance qui force l'explication: il n'y a rien de plus anachronique aujourd'hui que le roman. C'est un art trés rétro finalement … et qui aura paradoxalement connu sa plus forte audience quand il était considéré comme un genre mineur ou même ‘vulgaire’.
Modiano's response is characteristic of him. He begins by ‘playing down’ the importance of the novel, arguing that it is a minor and anachronistic genre: how can novelists be famous, he asks, when so few people read novels? He thus shifts the focus of the question from the novelist to the novel, and avoids answering the interviewer's question directly. En se dé robant, like so many of his fictional narrators, he leaves behind the contradiction that he has just set up: if the novel is such a minor genre in the late twentieth century, how and why is he such a famous and successful novelist? For Modiano himself is living proof that it can be done, in spite of competition from ‘le cinéma et les moyens d'expression modernes’: Modiano the best-selling author, a household name in France.
In the 1975 interview with Ezine, there is another issue from which Modiano keeps his distance, that of experimental or self-conscious writing. ‘La littérature pour la littérature, les recherches sur l'écriture, tout ce byzantinisme pour chaires et colloques,’ he tells Ezine, ‘ça ne m'intéresse pas.’
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- A Self-Conscious ArtPatrick Modiano’s Postmodern Fictions, pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2000