Context

Gripping mini-narratives with inherent philosophical consequence likewise fill out the ruminative books of Pierre Bergounioux (b. 1949), one of the most profound writers belonging to the generation born after the Second World War. He has now published Le Premier Mot, a memoir tracing his path from la France profonde to one of the elite Ecoles normales superieures of Paris, and charting his search, as a young man, for the "first word" that would confirm his literary calling.

Like Simon, Bergounioux is obsessed by the ways that the past is filtered through—and in fact determines—an individual sensibility. This new book crowns and indeed justifies an already impressive series of autobiographical narratives marked by this overarching theme. Setting his recits in his native Limousin (a backwoods part of central western France far removed from the hustle and bustle of the capital), Bergounioux has created a new kind of regionalist literature.

One might nonetheless be tempted to associate Bergounioux’s books—actually more extended personal essays than novels—with classic Midwestern fictions pitting rurality against the ethos of the modern metropolis. Moreover, one of the author’s acknowledged mentors is Faulkner. Bergounioux’s intense focusing on the Limousin and his hometown of Brive remotely resembles Faulkner’s fictional search for universals within the confines of Yoknapatawpha County.

Yet the author of La Mort de Brune, Miette and L’Orphelin actually digs differently into his native soil. No creator of fictional characters, no fabricator of drama (which by no means implies that his pages leave one indifferent), Bergounioux instead initiates an autobiographical quest in ancient settings, often involving geological periods going back before the advent of mankind. He bases his explorations on the idea that "one is [made up of] the things to which one is born," as he puts it in Le Chevron. These "things" can just as well be ubiquitous landscape features as long-standing family character traits. Bergounioux mines both veins earnestly, illustrating his narratives with stories, with more abstract reflections concerning his parents, grandparents or relatives, as well as with penetrating descriptions of the forests and hills that surrounded him during his formative years. His highly-crafted style, at times rugged and abrupt like desolate Limousin gorges, at times sinuous like the winding roads of the back country, seeks to mirror the sundry emotions aroused by one’s relationship to a native region, to family members, to the haunting presences of dead ancestors. The author also memorably commemorates manual labor; his descriptions of tools and hard work rival Simon’s.

In Le Premier Mot, comparatively more self-oriented than his earlier books because it is devoted to the genesis of this magisterial project, Bergounioux makes it clear that he examines his own existential predicament as a means of delving into the collective unconscious of his fellow countrymen. He suggests that he has been fated to become articulate so as to give voice to the inarticulate. The role fully assumed here by the autobiographer recalls Joyce’s famously troubled relationship to his Irish origins. To write about one’s origins is already to be ontologically apart from them, to be separated, in exile. Autobiography begins when one can no longer go back home, when one can no longer recover intimacy with one’s former self.

One moreover thinks of Stephen Dedalus’s remark, in Ulysses, about History being a "nightmare" from which he is trying to awake. Bergounioux has been acutely attentive to the destruction, by modern life, of the archaic rural lifestyles that persisted in such parts of France until the Second World War. Once again, his literary efforts have been devoted not to bewailing a "paradise lost," but rather to lucidly analyzing the consequences for contemporary mentalities linked to such regions as the Limousin. His conclusions are fundamentally pessimistic. In book after book, he develops the notion that an individual inherits a massive "debt" from such places and from one’s ancestors. As the "accountant" of such debts, he can only calculate, time and again, that destiny nearly always wins out over free will.

Fatality likewise pervades the novels of Patrick Modiano, who regularly achieves the tour de force of making us believe that he is writing about himself. Autobio-graphical in effect, his stories are inevitably concerned with the Occupation, even though he himself was born in 1945. It is difficult to think of another European writer who has explored more subtly the lasting psychic consequences of the Occupation: the perverse deeds of collaborators, especially the deportations of Jews to death camps.

His fictions are oblique autobiographies because he, like Bergounioux, measures the effects of the past on the present—his own present, our present. His latest novel, La Petite Bijou, is recounted by a young woman who somehow also seems to be the author, an illusion persisting long after the reader has double-checked the suffixes that define gender. Never has this author been bleaker while developing his recurrent themes: the search for missing or absent parents, the search for personal identity, the search for existential stability in the post-Holocaust world.

In La Petite Bijou, the young woman narrator, as a girl (who was then nicknamed "The Little Jewel"), was abandoned by her mother. Her father she never knew. Later she learns that her mother died in Morocco during the war, "perhaps" in sordid circumstances, which in addition "perhaps" involve acts committed in France at the onset of the Occupation. Many years later, a chance encounter in a crowded Parisian métro car makes the girl, now a young woman, think that she has met up with her mother. She secretly follows the alluring passenger home, although she decides not to confront her. She seeks out the concierge of the building in which the passenger has disappeared; she inquires about her; she even goes so far as to pay off the woman’s overdue rent.

As always in Modiano, mysteriously intermingled strands of plot drift off into inconclusiveness. A parallel story eventually takes shape, revolving around another girl—also unloved by her parents—for whom the young woman narrator temporarily becomes a governess. The destiny of this girl is also left up in the air; she simply vanishes. Possessing few credible clues about her mother’s fate, about the identity of the strange passenger, about the girl for whom she baby-sat, let alone about her own identity, and increasingly tormented by the sentiment that the past is being superimposed on the present, the young woman narrator finds her moods shifting from listlessness and emptiness to utter desperation.

Such narrative ambiguities as are at work here, traditionally associated with the New Novel, occur in this and other novels by Modiano with admirable naturalness. In few other authors are blanks, silences and pauses so determinative of the essence of selfhood; and of the essence of writing, one must add, in light of the ending of La Petite Bijou. Recovering from a suicide attempt, the hospitalized narrator hears water flowing and thinks that "from this day on, life begins"—a realization that presumably inspires her to write the disturbing book that we have just read.

Paris comes alive in Modiano’s pages in highly personal ways. He concentrates so sharply on certain street corners, passageways or buildings that one no longer walks by them—in "real life"—without thinking of his pseudo-autobiographical characters. In a completely different vein, yet equally evocative of the capital, are the prose writings of Jacques Reda (b. 1929), who is also a poet. He has explored every nook and cranny of Paris—on foot, by bicycle, by moped. His latest collection, Accidents de la circulation, is exemplary of a preeminently French literary genre that he—more than anyone else—has brilliantly set forth: the "literary stroll." The Ruins of Paris (1977), the only book of his to exist in English, marked his first contribution to what has since then become an authoritative (and delectable) series. Books like L’Herbe des talus, Recommandations aux promeneurs, Le Sens de la Marche and Le Citadin have nothing to do with "travel writing," "street journalism," or the like.

By wandering along ordinary Parisian streets, taking buses by chance, getting lost, exploring outlying suburbs and endeavoring to determine "what happens when nothing happens" (as he formulates it in an essay devoted to another ecrivain-promeneur, the late Georges L. Godeau), Reda enters (almost despite himself) into the realms of philosophy. What is a "happenstance," a "coincidence," a bizarre or banal "ambience"? What is the self’s relationship to place? What kinds of events or places give us the feeling that we are "double"? Are there special moments, or configurations of the material world, which provoke the self into "transcending" itself? These grave questions are raised by his otherwise delightful and often downright funny accounts of his peregrinations. His own self is indeed the pivot of his droll, but also sometimes melancholy or even fantastical autobiographical recits, which often simultaneously chart an attempt to seek out, even attain, a sort of "selflessness." This idea of "looking outward" from the self also characterizes the work of major French poets such as Yves Bonnefoy, Philippe Jaccottet, Andre du Bouchet, not to forget Reda himself. For the French, "going outside" is an act of the highest significance, not just a matter of opening and closing doors.

With respect to the fatality absorbing Modiano and Bergounioux, Reda seeks out freedom from the human condition—even if the feeling of self-liberation is transitory. Not for nothing is one of his books entitled La Liberte des rues. Yet liberty is not something that can be planned on or intentionally acquired; it must be come across, spontaneously; and Reda conveys gratitude whenever he finds it. His eccentrically rambling texts often turn upon an unexpected encounter, not so often with people (though he might spot a girl whose eyes are like "two mint leaves on the edge of a natural source") as with unusual architectural contours, odd objects, or unforeseeable alternatives to the inherent logic of his itinerary. In successful instances such as these (yet Reda, a master at self-mockery, likes to dwell beforehand on his mishaps and frustrations), the perceiving self unwittingly finds itself in a "special place." This privileged locus may consist of nothing more spectacular than a "double row of maple trees" which seems to be "growing more distant," as he recalls in a piece devoted to the 8th arrondissement. As he studies this illusion from behind a high grille, the writer comes to feel that he too is on the other side of the high bars and fading into the distance. He becomes a remote "silhouette." But who now is "he"? Reda is never more convincing than when he demonstrates with wit and whimsy that certain thresholds are potentially, even necessarily, ontological.