Literature and City Spaces: Palimpsests and the Writing of History in Patrick Modiano Cover Image

Littérature et espace urbain : palimpseste et écriture de l’histoire chez Patrick Modiano
Literature and City Spaces: Palimpsests and the Writing of History in Patrick Modiano

Author(s): Emma Lacroix
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Editura Politehnium
Keywords: Space; History; Paris; palimpsest; Dora Bruder;

Summary/Abstract: This article looks at how urban space is written in Dora Bruder, a novel by Patrick Modiano (1997), in order to examine how the city of Paris is shaped by the text, both as a material and a space. The space of – or in – Paris, when seen through its multiple representations, becomes thicker, stratified, more complex, because it generates several temporalities, which are bygone and to come at the same time. According to Walter Benjamin, such a vision of time and space necessarily raises the question of their relationship to History. Furthermore, Dora Bruder stages a perception of space that is not dissimilar to the palimpsest, meaning that urban space could possibly reveal something about literature. From the outset, literature raises the question of space, since words create both the space of the fictional universe and that of the book (Ropars-Wuilleumier): this space, always (minimally) dual, allows for a better understanding of the multiple times that intersect inside the literary work. In Modiano’s novel, Paris is a city that is haunted by its past, caught in the overlap of spaces and times – and its History only becomes visible to the narrator in flashes, around a street corner or in the course of a sentence. The multiplication of times and spaces bypasses the linearity of History: thus, the narrative gets through layers of memory, past and present events, writing a History that is intimately tied to the experience of space in the city.

  • Issue Year: 3/2019
  • Issue No: 05+06
  • Page Range: 47-58
  • Page Count: 12
  • Language: French