Paris, ville fantôme : Patrick Modiano et la hantise du contemporain

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between urban space and historical consciousness in Patrick Modiano’s novels, with a particular focus on Paris and its transformation after World War II. Drawing on the importance of the “ghost town” as both a symptom and a symbol of the erasure of collective memory, this study seeks to consolidate literary approaches to urban space that have proliferated under the category of the “spatial turn” — a shift in humanities and social sciences that emphasizes the significance of space, place, and geography in understanding various social phenomena, such as memory. In Modiano’s texts, attention to geography and the experimental recording of the rapidly changing post-1945 Parisian space fuel the possibility of a narrative expression for amnesia. Forgetfulness takes shape through writing, but it stems from the modernizing city. Modiano’s questioning of memory and imagination in relation to the shared, collective space of Paris is particularly relevant, given the radical reorganization of urban infrastructures in France during the postwar period. This era was marked by significant developments and large-scale projects, such as the “grands ensembles.” This new architecture, inspired by the modernist precepts of Le Corbusier, produced a radically different urban reality. Its concrete-made, repetitive landscape had the potential to serially erase traces of past dwellings in favor of an atemporal, ahistorical mode of inhabiting space. We argue that the postwar metamorphosis of Paris, unprecedented since Baron Haussmann’s renovation in the 19th century, profoundly altered the contemporary experience of the city, as it obscured its relationship to past historical events — and more specifically, as Modiano shows, to the unbearable memory of war crimes perpetrated during the Occupation. Through its meticulous exploration of Parisian geographies and investigation into the gradual imprésence of memory — or “hauntedness” —, Modiano’s work illustrates how France’s urbanistic reforms in the postwar era affected the individual’s relationship with their memory of the past.