Remembering Dora Bruder: Patrick Modiano’s Surrealist Encounter with the Postmemorial Archive

“But where does the outside commence? This question is the question of the archive.”
 

–Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

French novelist Patrick Modiano’s oeuvre is obsessed with les années noires of the German occupation and Vichy regime.¹ Since he debuted in 1968 with the angrily hysterical pastiche of 1940s French antisemitism, La place de l’étoile, Modiano has become one of the most prolific and celebrated writers on the contemporary French scene. His works—including Les boulevards de ceinture (1972), Rue des boutiques obscures (awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978), and Chien de printemps (1993), to name only a few of his approximately 30 novels—recreate shadowy atmospheres of wartime deception, disorientation, danger, fear, and claustrophobia. And, typically, they end on notes of radical undecidability—so much so that French historian Henri Rousso wrote in 1994 that, for Modiano, “the Occupation has lost all historical status. It is a puzzle that must above all not be pieced together, as truth filters through the empty spaces” (Rousso 152; my translation). Much of Modiano’s writing seems to embody the schizophrenic loss of historical consciousness and experience that, however differently, Fredric Jameson, Jean Baudrillard and others have argued to be a defining feature of postmodernity.² Or, to adopt Dominick LaCapra’s diagnostic idiom, we may see in Modiano’s stylized novelistic iterations of France’s involvement in the Shoah the symptomatology of an interminable “acting out.” While wartime “memory” is arguably Modiano’s central, obsessional concern, in so much of his work it appears unmoored from its historical referent. Taken together, Modiano’s works seem doomed serially to reconstruct France’s wartime past as a nebulous atmosphere of anxiety. Modiano evokes the past exquisitely, but as seductively terrifying, and irresolvable. In this, Modiano’s novels are paradigmatic of the close relationship prominent theoreticians of trauma such as Cathy Caruth and Shoshana Felman have posited between trauma and literature: according to trauma theory, literature inscribes—even more, it embodies and transmits—trauma because it responds to events that it can only gesture toward obliquely and cannot represent.³
 
Modiano’s 1997 hybrid text Dora Bruder—it draws on biography, autobiography, documentary, memoir, and detective novel (and this list could be extended)—continues Modiano’s tortured personal involvement with the past, in particular with France’s war years; however, the book also marks an emphatic turn toward a more direct engagement with history and referentiality. One can read Modiano’s reorientation as part of a wider engagement in France with Vichy and the Shoah during the years he was at work on Dora Bruder. A series of scandalous disclosures and public trials fueled an intense new phase in France’s confrontation with its ambiguous past: the discovery in 1991 at the Ministry of Veteran’s Affairs of a file of some 150,000 names and addresses compiled during the occupation and used by Parisian police to round up Jews;⁴ the projected trial and then, in June 1993, the murder of René Bousquet, the head of French police during the peak years of deportation, 1942-43; the 1994 trial for crimes against humanity of Paul Touvier, an intelligence officer under Klaus Barbie in the pro-Nazi paramilitary Vichy police force, the Milice; and the scandalous re-emergence of Shoah denial with the publication of Roger Garaudy’s Les Mythes fondateurs de la politique israélienne in 1996.⁵
 
Modiano’s interest in Dora Bruder and, eventually, the book bearing her name, both begin with an encounter with the archive. In the book’s opening sentence, Modiano informs us that eight years prior (we later learn it was in 1988) he came across a missing persons announcement in the wartime paper Paris Soir, dated 31 December 1941. The announcement, ostensibly placed by Dora’s parents, functions like a horrific version of the fait-divers that launch so many detective narratives. The annonce so interpolated Modiano that he spent eight years trying, as it were, to answer it by searching for traces of the girl’s existence. Dora Bruder relates and self-reflexively meditates on this layered quest to recover Dora Bruder from her terrible anonymity. The scant information that Modiano ultimately recovers amounts to a few biographical tidbits: Dora Bruder was the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants; she ran away in December 1941, at age 15, from the Catholic boarding school where her parents had managed to install her without the knowledge of the Jewish Affairs police; she returned briefly to her home in April 1942 and then ran away again for a few weeks; finally, she was interned, first in the Tourelles prison, and subsequently at the deportation camp Drancy. There she was reunited with her father Ernest Bruder. From Drancy, father and daughter were deported together to Auschwitz on September 18, 1942. Five months later, Dora’s mother Cécile Bruder was likewise put on a convoy to Auschwitz. Against claims that Modiano radically subverts the very notion of historical truth, Colin Nettelbeck rightly stresses that “[t]he reader of this work can have no doubt, at the text’s end, about the real, historical existence of Dora Bruder or about the terrifying simplicity of the world that sent her to her death” (Nettelbeck 248).
 
Modiano’s turn in Dora Bruder exemplifies the epistemological and ethical challenges of relating to the Shoah and its legacy that Marianne Hirsch and others have theorized in the concept of “postmemory.” Postmemory describes the relationship that children of survivors of collective traumas (in particular the Shoah) maintain to the traumatic event, which they know only second hand. The term “postmemory”
 

is meant to convey its temporal and qualitative difference from survivor memory, its secondary or second-generation memory quality, its basis in displacement, its belatedness. Postmemory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation. That is not to say that survivor memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that they can neither understand nor re-create.
 

(Hirsch, “Projected Memory” 8)

At the present historical juncture, in which we find ourselves positioned–in James Young’s apt phrase–“at memory’s edge” in relation to the Shoah, when our memory of that catastrophe necessarily becomes vicarious and (hyper)mediated, many have found Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” useful.⁶ A chief aim of this article is to advance our understanding of the workings of postmemory—its potentialities, and, as I see it, inescapable risks as an ethical and critical practice. To do this, I find it useful to distinguish the dynamics of postmemory from those of trauma, to which they can easily be assimilated.⁷ Although postmemory and trauma share much, as phenomena and as theoretical interventions they rely upon and imagine quite different relationships to representation, referentiality, and the archive. If, in Caruth’s phrase, “history, like trauma, is never simply one’s own . . . history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24), the “traumatic” mode of transitivity by which we become implicated in the traumas of others operates on the basis of the collapse of representation. The transitivity implied in the very term postmemory, in contrast, requires representation, however limited and ambiguous. Because it is so proximate to, yet also fundamentally different from, the dynamics of the trauma paradigm, postmemory as a phenomenon and an ethical and critical practice can point toward ways of continuing an engagement with many of the central concerns of trauma theory—our responsibility vis-à-vis effaced others, and how to read their traces; the dangers of appropriation and of totalizing knowledge, among others—while also avoiding some of the dead-ends and the egregious ethical implications for which trauma theory has been criticized.⁸

 
This is not to suggest that postmemory, for its part, can ever escape the irreducibly problematic nature of its epistemological and ethical enterprise. As he searches for traces of the lost girl, the author-narrator of Dora Bruder explores Paris as an archive in a way that I argue is both paradigmatic of postmemory and highly evocative of, and indebted to, surrealist epistemo-esthetic experimentation. A certain surrealist openness or disponibilité to chance, coincidence, and the irrational are integral to the techniques and experimental epistemology through which Modiano pursues his labor of recovery. The book carries on an implicit and explicit dialogue with key surrealist works, authors, concepts, and practices, even as Modiano’s historical distance from interwar surrealism and its central aspirations demarcates his own particular postmemorial predicament. These profound, and perhaps uneasy, ties between the workings of postmemory and surrealism in Dora Bruder might usefully provoke anyone who would want to domesticate postmemory to fully consider its strangeness: part of my argument is, indeed, that to pursue the work of postmemory is, in some sense, to behave like a surrealist. More importantly, it is crucial to examine Dora Bruder‘s proximity to surrealism because this proximity illuminates some of the most fundamental aspects of Modiano’s postmemorial project, and of postmemory in general.
 
Despite its all-out assault on bourgeois so-called normalcy (and with it, so much “normal” representation and experience), interwar surrealism affirmed (“madly”) the possibility of representing the unrepresentable and experiencing the unexperiencable. As Maurice Blanchot observed in 1945, despite its “nonconformist violence,” “today, what strikes us is how much surrealism affirms more than it denies . . . . above all it seeks its Cogito” (Work 86). By rejecting in principle any a priori limit to experience or representation, surrealism models both an ethos and a set of techniques rich in promise for Modiano as he struggles to move beyond what we can call the traumatic logic of his earlier literary project. Closely related to interwar surrealism’s faith in the possibility of representing and experiencing across a would-be insurmountable divide, moreover, is the way in which it consistently refers subjectivity to an outside (to Paris as a topography of the unconscious, to the found object or the marvelous coincidence, or to language as an exterior realm with a magic life of its own, for example). Surrealism’s operation at an experimental seam between interiority and exteriority motivates Modiano’s engagement with it in his turn to postmemory in Dora Bruder. The postmemorial subject, too, is referred to, indeed constituted in, historical remnants, or the archive: one way to characterize postmemory as a project is precisely as the attempt to forge a relationship between an interiority (memory) and an exteriority (post).
 

Trauma, Postmemory, and the Archive

 
In its limited and more or less clinical definition, as a phenomenon that affects the descendents of Shoah survivors, postmemory is a useful term for a range of cases that involve the inter-generational after-effects of traumatic experience, and for numerous works of autobiography, auto-fiction, fiction, and autobiographical criticism that are structured around such dynamics, such as Art Spiegelman (Maus), Georges Perec (W, ou le souvenir d’enfance), Henri Raczymow (Un Cri sans voix), and Marianne Hirsch.⁹ Outside a clinical or autobiographical context, however, the concept becomes problematic. Hirsch grants that people who are not children of Shoah survivors can speak “from the position of postmemory” (“Projected Memory” 8).¹⁰ For Hirsch,
 

postmemory is not an identity position, but a space of remembrance, more broadly available through cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance, identification, and projection. It is a question of adopting the traumatic experiences—and thus also the memories—of others as one’s own, or, more precisely, as experiences one might oneself have had, and of inscribing them into one’s own life story.
 

(8-9)¹¹

While such an opening of the concept makes it more available as a “space of remembrance” and as a critical posture, it also positions postmemory between being a descriptive or analytical term and an ethical imperative (one “should” identify with the victims).¹² Moreover, widening the scope of the concept in this way raises multiple questions. When, how, and to what degree can anyone choose to adopt the position of postmemory? And how can one distinguish such a choice from the predicament of those who find themselves, in the term’s more restricted definition, “dominated by narratives that preceded their birth”?¹³

 
To distend the notion of postmemory too far entails the risk that it might become as inflated a term as “trauma.” The attraction of both “trauma” and “postmemory” for many whose subject positions bear no clear relationship to either phenomenon surely has a great deal to do with a particular “postmodern” historical juncture, marked, as so many theoreticians of postmodernity have argued, precisely by the attenuation of historical sensibility. That is, children of Shoah survivors experience postmemory—a mediated encounter with a traumatic reality—at the same time as many people “in general” maintain a relationship to history only through the mediation of stereotypes and simulacra. The Shoah (and, more perversely, Nazis) frequently become signs par excellence of (lost) historical reality, even as this “reality” is experienced through representations like Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) or Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Der Untergang (Downfall, 2004). Many Shoah films (and films about Nazis) thus become “nostalgia” films in Jameson’s sense.¹⁴ One might suspect in the wider “postmemory” of the Shoah a symptom of a generalized experience of the loss of, and nostalgic longing for, historical moorings. As Karyn Ball has argued, trauma theory proved attractive to many academics in the 1980s and 1990s in large part because it seemed to provide a nuanced way to maintain a claim on historical experience in the wake of poststructuralist challenges to naïve recourse to authentic experience (Ball 2 10).¹⁵
 
Postmemory shares with trauma a structural ambivalence about where it begins and ends, which only compounds the likelihood of the concept’s becoming inflated. If trauma theory insists that trauma can never be “simply one’s own” (Caruth), it can be likewise impossible to say whose memory postmemory is, since postmemory is memory that, by definition, is not one’s own. Yet while it is certainly possible to understand postmemory as a variation on trauma, it is also possible, and more useful, to distinguish them. If a certain super-transitivity lies at the heart of both trauma and postmemory, the mechanism differs in each case. The subjective excess of the traumatic event, the fact that, as Caruth insists, it inscribes itself “literally” in the unconscious means that it may be experienced only in its iterations—both by the subject who was originally traumatized, and by others.¹⁶For Caruth, it is precisely because trauma is never “simply one’s own” that it becomes historical, that it inevitably implicates others.¹⁷ Trauma, then, becomes exceedingly transitive—different traumas inevitably become “entangled”—a key term for Caruth—because the negative centers around which they pivot, while they can never merge into identity, can never be neatly distinguished one from the other, either. It is the failure of reference and of subjective experience, which trauma theory takes as axiomatic, that renders it structurally impossible to sort out whose trauma trauma is. What subjects of trauma “share” is a structural alterity, or lack (and thus why “share” must be written in scare quotes: because they share it to the extent that they never had “it” in the first place).
 
Several critics have remarked that the essential negativity at the core of trauma theory tends to level historical and subjective specificity.¹⁸ LaCapra argues that trauma theory (specifically Felman’s treatment of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah) elides historical reality in favor of the Lacanian real, “and the result is an absolutization of trauma and of the limits of representation and understanding. Trauma becomes a universal hole in ‘Being’ or an unnamable ‘Thing,’ and history is marginalized in the interest of History as trauma indiscriminately writ large” (History and Memory 111). What traces of traumatic experience signify, in the final analysis, is precisely what they are not and by definition cannot be: alterity, absence, excess. To be sure, trauma theory is deeply concerned with ethics, above all with the imperative to listen, in Caruth’s articulation, “to the voice and to the speech delivered by the other’s wound” (Caruth 8). Yet as Debarati Sanyal argues in a trenchant critique,
 

[Trauma theory’s] repeated emphasis on a “crisis of representation” runs the risk of treating history as “contentless form.” The dislocation of the event’s particularity and of the traumatized subject’s specificity has fostered a dehistoricized, catastrophic vision of history that may become a cultural master narrative in its own right. Further, trauma theory’s focus on aporetic modes of knowledge and representation also assumes—too swiftly—that nonidentitarian articulations of history and subjectivity are inherently ethical. It may be true, in theory, that a recognition of history as “traumatic entanglement” opens us up to another’s history, and perhaps even a history of otherness. However, in critical practice, this ethics of entanglement can turn into a violent appropriation of otherness.
 

(12)

Postmemory can readily be elided to traumatic memory because both are belated encounters with events one has not experienced. Yet postmemory’s specific mode of historical exploration implicitly contests the epistemological and representational aporias axiomatic to trauma theory. Postmemory and trauma often produce strikingly similar effects because they mirror each other: each inverts the other’s relationship of interiority to exteriority. The traumatic kernel, the unconscious “object” of traumatic memory, constitutes an internal exteriority. In Caruth’s influential formulation, it is “unclaimed experience” that one carries within oneself as part of the internal exteriority of the unconscious archive, or what Derrida in Archive Fever calls a “prosthesis of the inside” (19).¹⁹

 
Postmemory, on the other hand, is a sort of exterior interiority: there is something “out there” beyond one’s own experience that nonetheless seems uncannily intimate. Postmemory is not only (like all memory to some degree) mediated by, but is in fact constituted in interpellation by objects, documents, narratives, meaningful silences, topographies and, arguably paradigmatically, photographs. Postmemorial subjectivity forges unstable and irreducibly ambiguous relationships between self and other, a present and a past, an interiority and an exterior archive of traces into which it cannot not insert itself. If a failure of representation initiates traumatic subjectivity, postmemorial subjectivity fabricates itself in the equivocal margin of representation’s success. The postmemorial archive is experienced as a realm of presences, no matter how fragile and fragmentary. And although what is arguably most present in the postmemorial archive is, inevitably, absence, postmemory works to return to absence a margin of specificity that trauma theory tends to erode. For absence needn’t be generalized; it, too, has its own facticity.
 
If it is trauma’s negation of representation and experiencing subjectivity that insures that it will—can only—return, postmemory must be sustained by an active investment, a work of recovery. It requires, as Hirsch says, “projection, investment, and creation” (emphasis added).²⁰ As the subject of postmemory engages with sites, artifacts, and narratives that mediate another’s traumatic experience, he or she becomes involved in an ethically complex, delicate, and ambivalent game of, on the one hand, assimilating the traces of the other’s trauma and, on the other hand, resisting the temptation of appropriative identification.²¹ Moreover, in the creative activity of filling in a radically incomplete memory and discovering a secret not one’s own, the postmemorial subject does not simply explore a given archive, for the archive is, precisely, never simply given. Its edges remain difficult to establish; the archive may be nowhere, and is potentially anywhere. In what we could broadly call postmemorial literature, we frequently witness personae who search, interrogate, and experience sites, traces, and “clues” as though they were archives. Postmemorial “archivization” can at times deal less with the recording of memory traces than with perceiving or constituting certain places, narratives and artifacts as (virtual) traces of “one’s” postmemory.²² In this way postmemory can discern an archive where none may “actually” exist.²³
 
Sanyal and others have been right to point out that trauma theory is wont to perpetrate violence of its own in the name, paradoxically, of respecting alterity. In contrast, if postmemorial projects confront the manifest and inescapable ethical and epistemological ambiguity that mark their every step, they can work against the violence of trauma theory’s grand claims. Postmemory as an ethical and critical project is filled with very real risk, but at its best is intricately concerned with—is to a great degree the concern with—this very risk.
 

Klarsfelds’s Memorials

 
In an often-cited preface to his interview with the French Jewish cultural figure Emanuel Berl published in 1976, Modiano writes: “He [Berl] returns from far away. He faced the century’s peaks and valleys. It was by no means a century of calm. Facing Berl, I return to my preoccupations: time, the past, memory. He reanimates these preoccupations. He encourages me in my project to create for myself a past and a memory with the past and the memory of others” (Berl 9; my translation). Dora Bruder continues Modiano’s postmemorial project to create for himself “a past and a memory with the past and the memory of others,” yet approaches questions of history and memory far more directly (if still intricately) than do his works of fiction, including those in which he inserts real historical personages.²⁴
 
Modiano addresses his ambivalence about the obliqueness of his literary responses to the Occupation and the Shoah in a November 1994 Libération article marking the publication of Serge Klarsfeld’s Mémorial des enfants juifs déportés de France (Memorial of the Deported Jewish Children of France).²⁵ Modiano relates that Serge and Beate Klarsfeld’s earlier Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France (Memorial of the Deportation of the Jews of France) of 1978 had transformed his understanding of himself as a writer:
 

[Klarsfeld’s 1978] memorial showed me what I didn’t dare truly countenance straight on, the cause of a disquiet [malaise] that I had not been able to express. Too young, I had written a first book in which I toyed [rusais] with what was essential in an attempt to respond in a casual manner to the antisemitic journalists of the Occupation, but this was a way of putting myself at ease [comme pour se rassurer], like playing clever when one is afraid, whistling in the dark. After the appearance of Serge Klarsfeld’s memorial, I felt like a different person. I now knew what sort of disquiet I felt.
 
At first, I doubted literature. Since the driving force behind it is often memory, it seemed to me that the only book that needed to be written was this memorial that Serge Klarsfeld had made.

If the Klarsfelds’s 1978 memorial awakened doubts in Modiano about the worth of his own indirect, displaced, or “literary” treatment of the Shoah, the 1994 photographic children’s memorial precipitated a similar crisis. Intimately connected to Klarsfeld’s Mémorial des enfants, Dora Bruder responds to this crisis by going farther than any previous Modiano text in the direction of what we might call anti-literary memorialization.

 
In his Libération article, Modiano quotes in full the missing person announcement that launched his quest to recover information about the girl, as he would later on the opening page of Dora Bruder. He writes of the Bruder family: “These parents and this young girl who were lost New Year’s Eve 1942 and who, later, all three disappeared in the convoys to Auschwitz, do not cease to haunt me.” Modiano also expresses the hope that, through Klarsfeld, he might be able to learn something of Dora Bruder. Though the Klarsfelds list Dora Bruder in their 1978 memorial, she was not included in the first, 1994 edition of the Mémorial des enfants, as they did not know her birth date (and thus whether or not she was a child deportee). But Modiano’s hope would be fulfilled. Modiano received photos of and details about Bruder from Klarsfeld on several occasions over the following years.²⁶ Klarsfeld was able to discover and include in the updated 1995 edition of the Mémorial des enfants a photograph of Bruder and her parents, as well as Bruder’s date and place of birth, last known address, and that she was deported from Drancy.²⁷ In a letter of June 20, 1995, Modiano thanked Klarsfeld for a copy of the new edition with Bruder’s picture, and refers to the book as “the most important in my life” (“le plus important de ma vie”) (La Shoah 538).
 
The importance of this “most important” book in Modiano’s life was, in a manner of speaking, subtracted from his own sense of self-presence. Modiano writes in the Libération article:
 

Some family photos, Sunday, in the country, with a big brother, a little sister, a dog. Some photos of young girls. Photos of friends, in the street. Smiles and confident faces—whose annihilation will make us feel a terrible sensation of emptiness until the end of our lives. This is why, at times, we no longer feel completely present in this world that has killed innocence.

The feeling Modiano expresses of being haunted and dominated by a present absence is a central characteristic of postmemory, and the final passages of Dora Bruder echo these remarks. The narrator refers to twilight moments in Paris when Bruder’s reality seems more present than his own, when her absence becomes so palpably present as to overwhelm him and his environment (119/144).²⁸ Indebted as it is to Klarsfeld’s photographic memorial to the deported children of France, however, Dora Bruder remains a different sort of project. If this, like the Klarsfelds’s earlier memorial, brought Modiano to doubt the worth of “literature,” Dora Bruder is an attempt not simply to overcome this doubt and keep writing as before, nor to fall silent, as though Klarsfeld’s photographic memorial were somehow sufficient, but rather to write in a different way, or something other than “literature.” It is fitting that in his Libération article Modiano recalls his debut novel La Place de l’étoile, which he now feels to have been insufficient (“je rusais,” “trop jeune”).

 
Modiano leans heavily on interwar surrealism in his attempt to renegotiate his relationship to the history of les années noires and to the institution of French literature in Dora Bruder. Modiano’s engagement with surrealism in Dora Bruder has a precedent in his keen interest in various twentieth-century French literary schools and projects in Place, from antisemitic writers like Charles Maurras, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline to other icons of French literature like Jean-Paul Sartre, Marcel Proust, and also in that seminal experimenter, Montaigne. In Dora Bruder and Place, Modiano returns to modalities of twentieth-century French literary experimentation to explore possible relations to the past and to the canon. With Place, Modiano tries to break into the French literary tradition; with Dora Bruder, he renegotiates the place he has come to occupy within it. The identity crisis that manifests itself in Raphaël Schlemilovitch’s casting about in literary discourses of the early 1940s figures Modiano’s own as he enters the French literary scene in his early twenties. The problem of authorial identity that Modiano’s engagement with surrealism in Dora Bruder helps negotiate is now how to write otherwise than as the novelist he had become. Place articulates rage at the Shoah via hysterical pastiche, the repetition of stereotypes and counter-stereotypes that Modiano finds in wartime writing. Dora Bruder leans on surrealism less as a corpus than as an ethos and a set of practices that open up complex ways of coaxing absence into intelligibility, bridging self and other, present and past.
 
Dora Bruder resists the generic and disciplinary constraints of conventional historiography by being so thoroughly overdetermined by subjective needs. It is not traditionally literary because it so strains to achieve historical recovery. In this way, Modiano’s project is paradigmatically postmemorial. Juxtaposing Dora Bruder with Modiano’s attempt to fictionalize Dora Bruder in his 1990 novel Voyage de noces (Honeymoon) highlights the differences between the (albeit always interrelated) fictional and (post-)memorial alternatives Modiano grappled with in response to the murdered girl, and neatly demonstrates how for Modiano, in this case, the fictional approach remained inadequate.²⁹Voyage de noces (like many other Modiano narratives, including Dora Bruder) superimposes the Occupation years, the 1960s, and the narrator’s contemporary 1990s. Like the narrator of Dora Bruder, the narrator of Voyage finds himself walking in traces of Dora’s fictional double, Ingrid—but here the fictional Ingrid survives and meets the narrator on different occasions. In contrast to his displaced and fictionalized treatment of Dora Bruder in Voyage, in Dora Bruder Modiano draws on the very stuff of historical research. He incorporates oral interviews, letters, police and school records, birth certificates, and photographs—to such an extent that the narrative at times yields to inventory. Modiano’s archive does not stop there, but extends to unconventional forms of archival experimentation. Although a profoundly historical book, Dora Bruder is not a work of history.
 
The postmemorial nature of Modiano’s project is evident in the way that his own personal and familial history inflects, and at times subverts, his work of historical recovery: the micro-historiographical undertaking frequently bleeds into autobiography. Dora Bruder serves as a vehicle for transference and mediates between the different periods of Modiano’s own existence and pre-existence: the 1940s of her youth, the 1960s of Modiano’s, and the 1990s when Modiano was at work on Dora Bruder.³⁰ A number of Modiano’s novels deal with shadowy figures based on his father Albert Modiano, a Jew who survived the Second World War underground in Paris, thanks in part to murky connections to the black market and possibly to collaborators.³¹ In Dora Bruder Modiano writes of his failed attempt to visit his dying father (12-13/17-18). Estranged since Modiano’s late adolescence, the two never reconciled; and Modiano is finally unable, for whatever complex reasons, to find his father in a Kafkaesque maze of hospital corridors. Whether or not this particular scene is fiction or fictionalized, the narrator’s search for Dora in the powerfully but ambiguously mnemonic space of Paris prolongs Modiano’s failed—so interminable—search for his father and his father’s obscure, haunting wartime experience. Dora’s attempts to run away—Modiano fixates especially on Dora’s “missing” months—allow him to revisit his own difficult relationship to his father and his own adolescent fugues. Even Dora’s last name “Bruder” inscribes a faint trace of Modiano’s younger brother Rudy, whose childhood death from leukemia affected Modiano profoundly, and who appears in one form or another in many of Modiano’s novels.³² The text’s deep and demanding personal inscription, the overwhelming needs Modiano brings to his encounter—at times, indeed, near-identification—with Dora Bruder make it an intricate, ethically risky and courageous balancing act between retrieval and appropriation of the other.³³ It is a complex negotiation of historical occurrences through personal memory and vice versa.
 

Looking Back with Surrealism

 
Postmemory and surrealism share a fundamental preoccupation: how to push against and exceed the limits of positive evidence so as to establish correspondences between interior and exterior realities.³⁴ In one of his redefinitions of surrealism, Breton writes in 1931: “I hope [surrealism] will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness” (Communicating Vessels 86). The question of how subjects can discover themselves in the exterior world gained importance for Breton in the course of the 1930s to become a central preoccupation of Mad Love (1937), in which Breton theorizes a “manner of seeing . . . that, as far as the eye can see . . . recreates desire” (Mad Love 15). Such desire-driven attention is apt to discover the trouvaille, the marvelous exterior revelation of subjective desire, the found object in which “alone [we can] recognize the marvelous precipitate of desire” (13-15). Dora Bruder‘s indebtedness to and dialogue with surrealism is important to the way Modiano’s postmemorial archive mediates between subject and object “madly,” by actively ambiguating the distinction between interiority and exteriority.³⁵
 
The topoi of surrealism—haunting, violence, absurdity, uncanny coincidence, characters adrift in place and time, and a pervasive and slightly deranged atmosphere evocative of an elusive “elsewhere” of existence—recur in Modiano’s oeuvre. Yet Dora Bruder draws more from surrealist anti-literary practices than do his novels, precisely because it places so much emphasis on referentiality and the paradoxical project of (re) discovering subjectivity in various forms of exteriority. Modiano evokes surrealism and surrealists more or less explicitly in Dora Bruder on numerous occasions.³⁶ More crucially, Dora Bruder seems unmistakably a post-Shoah re-writing of Breton’s Nadja.³⁷ Like Nadja, Dora Bruder is an autobiographical work in which a narrator tries to discover his identity through an obsessive “detective” pursuit of a young woman who hovers between presence and absence and who seems to emerge from and vanish back into Paris’s streets, as though from a secret and elusive beyond. Both texts inscribe complex relationships to Parisian topographies, and rely on photography’s status as a multi-faceted representational medium that approaches absolute referentiality yet provokes intense imaginary and affective investment.³⁸ Even more important than these explicit references and implicit intertexts is Dora Bruder‘s experimental epistemology, its openness or disponibilité to the irrational in the quest to discover “impossible” connections between inside and outside worlds.
 
Modiano’s profound investments in Dora Bruder and her story lead him to distend the parameters of the conventional archive and to venture into experimental forms of subjective and affective “evidence.”³⁹ The narrator repeatedly senses Dora’s presence in streets. Modiano also seeks a connection with Dora by literalizing his obsession with the atmosphere of Occupation France in a way that, however tentatively or even illusorily, bridges her physical presence and his (and our) own. So as to gain at least some knowledge of Dora during her fugue, for example, Modiano researches (and rehearses) the weather conditions in Paris during her four “missing” months. The meteorological report/reverie, which includes bombs alongside rain, snow, and hail, is startlingly intimate in the way it evokes Dora. She becomes a fragile body—perhaps cold and wet—somewhere in Paris (73-74/ 89-90).
 
In a striking passage, to take just one further example, Modiano describes the near-epiphanic sensation he experiences while watching a film made and circulated during the Occupation, namely that the gazes of its original viewers, including perhaps that of Dora Bruder, had somehow, as if chemically, left their imprint on the film stock and were now looking back at him.
 

In the summer of 1941, one of the films made under the Occupation, first shown in Normandy, came to the local Paris cinemas. It was a harmless comedy: Premier rendez-vous. The last time I saw it, I had a strange feeling, out of keeping with the thin plot and the sprightly tones of the actors. I told myself that perhaps, one Sunday, Dora Bruder had been to see this film, the subject of which was a girl of her age who runs away. She escapes from a boarding school much like the Saint-Coeur-de-Marie. During her flight, as in fairy tales and romances, she meets her Prince Charming.
 
This film paints a rosy, anodyne picture of what had happened to Dora in real life. Did it give her the idea of running away? I concentrated on details: the dormitory, the school corridors, the boarders’ uniforms, the café where the heroine waits after dark…. I could find nothing that might correspond to the reality, and in any case most of the scenes were shot in the studio. And yet, I had a sense of unease. It stemmed from the film’s peculiar luminosity, from the grain of the actual stock. Every image seemed veiled in an arctic whiteness that accentuated the contrasts and sometimes obliterated them. The lighting was at once too bright and too dim, either stifling the voices or making their timbre louder, more disturbing.
 
Suddenly, I realized that this film was impregnated with the gaze of moviegoers from the time of the Occupation—people from all walks of life, many of whom would not have survived the war. They had been transported toward the unknown after having seen this film one Saturday night, which had been a reprieve for them. While it lasted, you forgot the war and the menacing world outside. You were huddled together in the dark of a cinema, watching the flow of images on the screen, and nothing more could happen to you. And, by some kind of chemical process, all of these gazes had materially altered the actual film, the lighting, the voices of the actors. That is what I had sensed, thinking of Dora Bruder and faced with the ostensibly trivial images of Premier rendez-vous.
 

(6566/79-80; translation modified)

This passage is representative of the way that research informs so much of the fabric of Dora Bruder, even when Modiano does not highlight it (Modiano knows that Premier rendez-vous first played in Normandy; knows when it came to Paris; has screened it multiple times). Such inquisitiveness exemplifies the desire to recover any fragment of Dora Bruder’s possible experience, and prepares the hallucination that ensues, which, importantly, is a fantasy of indexicality. The narrator so wishes to connect with Dora Bruder and her “moment” that he first finds himself scrutinizing the movie set as though it corresponded to (her) reality, and then imagines that the various gazes of the film’s original viewers had “materially altered the actual film.” The narrator’s quest for connection via the referential trace is reflected here (as elsewhere in Dora Bruder) in pronomial ambiguity. The French on (“one,” “they,” or “we,” or as it is rendered here, “you”)—”On oubliat, le temps d’une séance, la guerre et les menaces du dehors . . . . on était serrés les uns contres les autres, à suivre le flot des images de l’écran, et plus rien ne pouvait arriver” (80)—allows the narrator to include himself in the phenomenon he describes. He, too, is borne away by the flow of images and in his own way pulled into the experimental space of the film, where he commingles briefly with its historical viewers. This is not so much a moment when representation and referentiality fail, as a fantasy of their mad success. Much like the surrealists before him, who tended to view all barriers as in principle surmountable, given the right method, technique, frame of mind, experiment, or sheer accident, Modiano remains remarkably open to this uncanny encounter.

 
Modiano’s postmemorial project engages with Parisian topographies in ways that likewise recall the surrealists’ experiments and experience in the city.⁴⁰ Paris’s eighteenth arrondissement, where Bruder lived with her parents, is home to the quintessential surrealist archive, the famous Saint-Ouen flea market. James Clifford observes that:
 

The world of the city for Aragon’s Paysan de Paris, or for Breton in Nadja . . . suggested beneath the dull veneer of the real the possibility of another, more miraculous world based on radically different principles of classification and order. The surrealists frequented the Marché aux Puces, the vast flea market of Paris, where one could rediscover the artifacts of culture, scrambled and rearranged.
 

(542)

The Paris-Soir announcement that opens Dora Bruder (placed by M. and Mme Bruder of 41 Boulevard Ornano) elicits the narrator’s childhood memory of the nearby flea market: “I had long been familiar with that area of the Boulevard Ornano. As a child, I would accompany my mother to the Saint-Ouen flea markets” (3/7).⁴¹ The flea market serves as the mnemonic-topographical gateway through which Modiano passes to begin his postmemorial work of recovery. Through this quintessential surrealist site the narrator discovers his first personal association with Dora Bruder.

 
In a postmemorial version of the surrealists’ notion of le hasard objectif, or objective chance, Modiano becomes conscious of several uncanny parallels between his life and Bruder’s, nearly all mediated by Parisian sites and neighborhoods they both knew.⁴² Disparate periods of Modiano’s life, and even periods preceding Modiano’s life, become juxtaposed in a temporality that defies time’s arrow:
 

From day to day, with the passage of time, I find, perspectives become blurred, one winter merging into another. That of 1965 and that of 1942.
 
In 1965, I knew nothing of Dora Bruder. But now, thirty years on, it seems to me that those long waits in the cafés at the Ornano crossroads, those unvarying itineraries—the Rue du Mont-Cenis took me back to some hotel on the Butte Montmartre: the Roma or the Alsina or the Terrass, Rue Caulaincourt—and the fleeting impressions I have retained: snatches of conversation heard on a spring evening, beneath the trees in the Square Clignancourt, and again, in winter, on the way down to Simplon and the Boulevard Ornano, all that was not simply due to chance. Perhaps, though not yet fully aware of it, I was following the traces of Dora Bruder and her parents. Already, below the surface, they were there.
 

(6/10-11)

The intricate postmemorial fusion of presence and absence makes possible the nachträglich “recognition” of the traces of the Bruder family. They are “already there” precisely, if paradoxically, in their absence—as the haunting absence that in subterranean ways structured Modiano’s experience, identity, and preoccupations already in the mid-sixties, before he came to associate it, retroactively, with them. Thus Modiano’s itineraries—what we could call a form of “automatic walking”—retroactively reveal uncanny correspondences between his desire and Dora Bruder’s history. Once she becomes a figure for Modiano’s absent memory, Dora Bruder can indeed be said to have already—as it were always already—been there. Modiano inserts Dora Bruder and her parents into a space that his own absent center has made available. However, this communing between absences—his and theirs—marks the beginning of a long and meticulous process in which Modiano uses all his resources to glimpse the lived experience of the lost girl.

 
In the way that Modiano’s narrator approaches Dora Bruder in and through the city of Paris, he is an incarnation of the surrealist flâneur, albeit, as Marja Warehime observes, with a difference.⁴³ In the places Dora Bruder lived and the streets she walked—or that he imagines she walked, for he cannot be certain—the narrator seeks, and feels he experiences, her traces. Modiano’s Paris, like Breton’s, is a city of residues—names, images, and languages that vanish but can nonetheless be grasped by way of uncanny coincidences and startling epiphanies. But whereas for Breton such merveilles du quotidien mark a threshold to a magic realm of anarchic plenitude, what uncannily guides Modiano’s itineraries is the presence of absent memory in search of a referent. Modiano’s Paris is above all a layered, archeologically stacked topography of memory. Thus there is an important temporal structural difference between Breton’s and Modiano’s flânerie: whereas the surrealist coincidence privileges a phenomenon of simultaneity or near-simultaneity, Modiano’s postmemorial flâneur drifts between the present and earlier temporal strata. If he seems to take inspiration from surrealism’s affirmation of the possibility of communication between inside and outside, self and other, he directs it to the service of recovery across a would-be absolute historical rupture.
 
The difference between Modiano’s preoccupation with topographical expunction in Paris and the versions of this preoccupation we encounter in Baudelaire, and later in the surrealists, underscores Modiano’s more emphatically historical orientation. Baudelaire ruminates in an acutely melancholic mode on the Hausmanization of le vieux Paris in poems such as his 1857 “The Swan.”⁴⁴ The surrealists estheticize to an extreme their relation to the vanishing Parisian arcades and other sites of a self-metabolizing urban modernity. By contrast, the specific instances of urban erasure on which Modiano dwells are forms of calculated political amnesia, the topographical analogues of the systematic destruction of police records of the French authorities’ rounding up and deportation of Jews. He frequently evokes the sense of emptiness he feels in various demolished areas, notably a section of the Marais neighborhood, where Eastern European Jewish immigrants lived between the world wars. Of the new structures erected there, Modiano writes:
 

The facades are rectangular, the windows square, the concrete the color of amnesia. The street lamps throw out a cold light. Here and there, a decorative touch, some artificial flowers: a bench, a square, some trees. They have not been content with putting up a sign like that on the wall of Tourelles barracks: ‘No filming or photography.’ They have obliterated everything in order to build a sort of Swiss village in order that nobody, ever again, would question its neutrality.
 

(113/136)

Modiano implies that specific agents have conspired to effect the amnesia that this architecture manifests, and they stand accused.

 
Like Parisian topographies, the photographs to which Dora Bruder refers pivot the two distinct registers that alternate in the work: dispassionate documentation, on the one hand, and profound cathexis and investment on the other; or “hard” archival evidence and highly subjective, affective, and even phantasmic elements of a distended postmemorial archive. The photographs simultaneously anchor Dora Bruder in referentiality and provide a space for transferential investment and risk-filled ethical imagining.⁴⁵ Modiano describes a range of photographs in Dora Bruder, including nine photos of Bruder herself or her family. Neither French edition (nrf Gallimard and Gallimard folio) nor the 2000 Harvill Press edition of Joanna Kilmartin’s elegant translation (The Search Warrant) reproduce any photographs, while the original 1999 Berkeley edition of Kilmartin’s translation reproduces three.⁴⁶ Since this edition provides no information about the decision to include the photographs and does not comment on their ambiguous status in Modiano’s book, it is impossible to know on what basis the decision was made to include or exclude photos in a given edition. In lieu of such information, it is also impossible to identify in the “absence” of photographs from the original French editions a gesture akin, for example, to Roland Barthes’s famous withholding of the winter-garden photograph of his mother in Camera Lucida. It bears recalling, however, that a photograph of Dora Bruder and her parents had been published in the 1995 edition of Klarsfeld’s Mémorial des enfants, two years before the publication of Dora Bruder, so at least one of the photographs Modiano describes—and by extension all of them—are in this sense referentially “secure”; they by no means facilitate the same sort of play, or end in the same sort of representational aporia, that photographs so frequently do in Modiano’s wider fictional oeuvre.
 
Like surrealism, Dora Bruder is ambivalent about the role of photographs. As Dawn Ades writes, Man Ray’s and others’ technical experimentation equivocates the status of the photographic referent.⁴⁷ Yet surrealists at the same time exploit precisely the medium’s referential quality. Most notably, Breton in Nadja deploys photographs by Jacques-André Boiffard in all their referential banality as an antidote to the despised institutions of bourgeois literature and art.⁴⁸ The ontology of the photograph that Barthes elaborates sees in photography an “umbilical” connection to referential reality. Both the widely felt “truth” of photography and the particular theoretical elaboration Barthes gives this intuition have contributed to the privileging of photography (most notably by Hirsch) as the medium par excellence of postmemory. Modiano comments that a particular photo “is in complete contrast to those already in my collection” (74/90). This photo—”sans doute” the last taken of Dora Bruder, according to the sometimes doubtful narrator—is also most proximate to the months she ran away, the period in which Modiano is most deeply invested, though it is not clear if it was taken before her flight or after her return. Modiano recognizes a certain defiance in Dora Bruder’s regard (74/90). This Barthesian punctum both inspires and reaffirms his celebration of the margin of agency Dora had in her own defiant attempts at escape before her definitive erasure. In this way, photography’s referential-imaginary dualism authorizes Modiano’s interpretation of Dora Bruder’s irrecoverable but seemingly proximate existence.
 
The collision of indexical reference and subjective fantasy and identification that occurs in the space of photographs contributes powerfully to Modiano’s drama of how the postmemorial subject’s inside relates to the historical outside. Photography’s referential weight tends to explode diegetic containment so as to implicate authors, and not only narrators. One can understand the ethical questions that then arise by briefly setting Modiano’s citation of photographs in Dora Bruder against the widely theorized relationship between narrative and photography in the work of German writer W.G. Sebald.⁴⁹ Sebald’s highly autobiographical narrators are typically self-effacing. In a manner of speaking, they become “ganz Ohr,” mere facilitators of narratives of others.⁵⁰ The Modiano narrator of Dora Bruder, on the other hand, remains flagrantly present. While one can read the narrative vanishing act in Sebald as a commitment not to appropriate the other’s voice,⁵¹ a paradoxical form of appropriation can occur not only when one drowns out the other’s voice, but also when one effaces oneself and abdicates the responsibility to acknowledge and reflect on one’s subject position vis-à-vis the other. Sebald’s narrators frequently vanish into their subjects’ stories and effectively sidestep the crucial task of confronting, in any explicit or sustained way, themselves—their relations to recent history and their investments in the stories they mediate. Importantly, Sebald’s tendency to equivocate the status of photographic reference goes hand in hand with his narrators’ strategies of guarding their anonymity. Sebald’s problematic authorial self-effacement highlights by contrast the way Modiano grapples throughout Dora Bruder with his subject position as it relates to the story he is trying to recover and tell. While Modiano’s subject position is by no means without ethical risks, his frankly “over-invested” interest in, and at times phantasmagoric identification with, Dora Bruder highlights those very risks. Indeed, I would argue, the text dramatizes an irreducible level of moral risk and ambiguity as a condition of possibility for the labor of recovery Modiano nonetheless embraces.
 
Modiano writes several times of his patience in the eight-year process of tracking down information about Dora Bruder, but also draws attention to the ambiguous nature of his “patience,” which at times merges with a wish to defer knowledge that might contradict cherished fantasies. The invitation from the head of a public school Bruder may have attended to come and check the register elicits this response: “One of these days, I shall. But I’m of two minds. I want to go on hoping that her name is there. It was the school nearest to where she lived” (10/14). The narrator’s “patience”—”But I am a patient man. I can wait for hours in the rain” (10/14)—permits him to persevere in his search for traces of Dora Bruder, but shows equally his need to prolong, defer, and luxuriate in that very search.⁵² Indeed, Modiano’s ambivalent “patience” can be seen as a postmemorial relative of the “idleness” (désoeuvrement) that Breton celebrates in Nadja: the aimless drifting and non-purposeful comportment that facilitates his access to Nadja and/as the surreal. As the narrator of Dora Bruder, Modiano then becomes the sort of unreliable detective who narrates so many of his novels.⁵³ This postmemorial ethical ambiguity is sustained through the very end of the book, where Modiano describes the period of Dora’s “missing” months—about which he hasn’t been able to recover any details—as “her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépot, the barracks, the camps, History, time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to take away from her” (119/144-45). Modiano’s obvious identification with Dora—as well as the pronomial shift from “her” (“son secret”) to a generalizing “vous,” “you,” which easily shades into an implied “me” (“tout ce qui vous souille et vous détruit”)—raises the question of just whose secret this is. Is it really her secret, or has Dora Bruder become Modiano’s precious secret that no one can take from him? Irreducibly, I would argue, both. Modiano labors to wrest Dora Bruder’s particular absence from a more generalized, anonymous one; and it paradoxically becomes his precious secret to the extent that he can return it to her, make it hers.
 
As we have seen, Modiano’s drama of his subjectivity’s relation to the postmemorial archive of Dora Bruder closely links his project with Breton’s conception(s) of surrealism. Yet Modiano’s tenuous residence in a world that has “killed innocence” equally throws into relief the gulf between his postmemorial undertaking and the surrealists’ central aspirations. The surrealists sought to liberate subjectivity and imagination, yet the Shoah exceeded the imaginable. It became almost de rigueur for post-war intellectuals to delimit their own historical, intellectual and ethical positions through a reckoning with surrealism; one recalls, for example, how Jean-Paul Sartre critiqued surrealism in his 1948 What is Literature? (180-198), as did Albert Camus in 1954 in “Surrealism and Revolution,” and Theodor Adorno in his essay of the same year, “Looking Back at Surrealism.” Certainly, surrealism stands out as one of the most fertile and innovative intellectual and esthetic movements of the interbellum period. But, more crucially perhaps, what so fused the Second World War and surrealism in these thinkers’ minds is the way surrealism flirts with violence. Maurice Nadau and James Clifford, among others, stress that surrealism, at its inception, responds to the horrible violence of the First World War, to which European morality and culture had lent the appearance of rationality and respectability.⁵⁴ Instead of advocating non-violence, however, the surrealists champion (mostly imaginary) forms of violence thought to be so extravagantly preposterous and grotesquely ludic as to disrupt bourgeois business as usual. Most infamously, in the second Surrealist Manifesto of 1929, Breton defines the simplest surrealist act as “dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd” (Manifestoes 125).In the wake of World War Two, the surrealists were called to account for their celebration of irrational violence—to be sure somewhat unfairly. Sartre characterizes Breton and the surrealists as disaffected, politically ineffectual bourgeois solipsists, fascinated by apocalyptic violence (“they want to destroy everything but themselves,” “they were all fascinated by violence, wherever it might come from”) (190-91). Adorno notes that “After the European catastrophe the Surrealist shocks lost their force” (87). In 1954 Camus characterized Breton’s definition of the simplest surrealist act as “the statement that André Breton must have regretted ever since 1933” (93).
 
However, what accounts for the most fundamental difference between the surrealist and postmemorial subject is the confidence the interwar surrealists had in the fulfillability of their goals and not, finally, the problematically violent means they sometimes imagined enlisting to fulfill them. Breton & Company always understood surrealism’s revolutionary orientation—whether defined as a revolution in consciousness, esthetics, or as in ambivalent solidarity with an anticipated proletarian revolution—to be driven by dynamic positive forces, untapped energies immanent in the subject and the social, capable of redeeming individuals and society from their tragic repression. In Modiano’s post-Shoah use of surrealism in the service of postmemorial reconstruction, the sovereign surrealist subject constituted in the plenitude of its desire yields to a subject constituted in relation to fragile traces and palpable absences. The surrealists’ confidence in the paradoxical immanence of the surreal is replaced by an ambivalently patient dedication to a delicate labor of at best partial recovery.
 
Blanchot writes in 1945 about surrealism in post-war France:⁵⁵ “There is no longer a school, but a state of mind survives . . . . Has surrealism vanished? It is no longer here or there: it is everywhere. It is a ghost, a brilliant obsession. In its turn, as an earned metamorphosis, it has become surreal” (Blanchot, Fire 85). For Blanchot, surrealism remains “always of our time” (97) because the profound dilemmas and contradictions in which it got caught—above all, the paradoxical dialectic between the assertion of radical esthetico-intellectual freedom, on the one hand, and commitment to socio-political realization on the other—continue to haunt “us.” Blanchot’s posture of surprise, looking back, at the surrealists’ naïve faith in subjectivity and representation, however, already announces a theoretical enterprise that would help set the terms and limits of French engagement with the deeply vexed war years. Dora Bruder is not a surrealist text but rather, in its own way, a ghost of surrealism. Yet if surrealism returns with a difference in Modiano’s postmemorial project, it returns in a form that—however tentatively and ambivalently—affirms surrealism’s affirmations, the very aspects of interwar surrealism that Blanchot’s postwar critique deftly lays to rest.
 

Conclusion

 
Modiano’s postmemorial project in Dora Bruder offers no easy way out of the ethical quandaries involved in Shoah memory. In stressing its affinities with surrealism, my aim has been both to illuminate this project’s specific mechanisms and modalities, and to underscore their irreducible risk, and strangeness. Dora Bruder dramatizes a postmemorial labor that can only be pursued via an irresolvably problematic relation to an unstable—haunted and haunting—archive. Yet for all its real risks, and in some sense because of them, Modiano’s project can provide a productive counterpoint to a range of reflections that variously construe the Shoah as ineffable: among others, the trauma theory of Caruth and Felman; Lyotard’s ruminations on Auschwitz in The Differend and elsewhere⁵⁶ ; and Blanchot’s various, oblique treatments of the Shoah. Perhaps the most powerful iteration of the Shoah’s unspeakability on today’s critical horizon is Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999).⁵⁷ After its initial, overwhelmingly positive reception, Agamben’s text has received a growing amount of incisive criticism: for leveling historical specificity; for generalizing a condition of culpability; and for silencing real witnesses in favor of an essentially linguistic (and highly estheticized) theory of subjectivity whose relation to the Shoah and its victims verges on gratuitous, if not instrumental.⁵⁸
 
Because Agamben evokes the archive as a central concern of his post-Auschwitz ethics, the way his theoretical elaboration in fact works relentlessly to efface the archive can illustrate a troubling tendency evident, in one form or another, I would argue, in all the various discourses of Shoah ineffability. Agamben’s bracketing of the archive also helps to throw into relief the more nuanced openness to historical experience that Modiano models in Dora Bruder.
 
Agamben claims to explain a paradoxical structure of subjectivity at the heart of Auschwitz, which pivots on the irreducible interdependence of the inhuman and the human, desubjectification and subjectification, silence and speech. But if the lesson that Agamben would have us learn from Auschwitz—or from the fetishized (or in J.M. Bernstein’s view, “pornographic”) figure of the muselman⁵⁹—is that the subject is constituted in its own desubjectification, then it should throw up a flag that Agamben can discover versions of the paradox of desubjectified subjectivity in such a wide range of philosophical and literary discourses: for example, Martin Heidegger’s and Emanuel Levinas’s reflections on shame; Derridian deconstruction; Emile Benveniste’s work on the dynamics of enunciation; the relation of the authorial “I” to the corpus of any number of writers including Rilke, Keats, Ingeborg Bachmann, Fernando Pessoa, and Giorgio Manganelli; and in reflections by Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Binswanger, among others. It is fairly clear, in short, that Agamben does not need to involve—and in fact does not meaningfully involve—the Shoah and its victims in his ethical reflections, but rather merely points to the desubjectified muselman as exemplary of “the hidden structure of all subjectivity” (128), a structure he finds not so much in Auschwitz as, seemingly, everywhere he looks.⁶⁰
 
Agamben’s ethics would situate the speaking subject in a relation to the impossibility of speech, yet it has the effect of insulting such speech as is possible—precisely because it is possible. “[T]he survivor, who can speak,” Agamben tells us, “has nothing interesting to say” (120). Derrida’s concept of “anarchivic” desire, which he develops in Archive Fever to rethink the Freudian death drive as it relates to the archive, helps lay bare the destructive thrust of Agamben’s particular version of respect for ineffable alterity.⁶¹ In a sense, what the death drive-as-archive fever strives to do is “ingest”—consume or possess—the archive: the desire is to eliminate it as an exterior substrate of memory so that one may “return” to a purportedly pure, unmediated origin (91).⁶² Clearly, Agamben pursues no plenitudinous origin or a site of self-present speech. On the contrary, Agamben’s muselman figures the subject’s irreducible ethical relation to the abjected, the non-human remainder deprived of speech. In defining all subjectivity as paradoxically constituted in abject desubjectification, however, Agamben reduces the ethical relation to the structure of subjectivity itself; subjectivity, inherently, is this (impossible but inescapable) relation. History becomes absorbed into a mode of subjectivity that, however theoretically sophisticated, remains hermetically sealed, self-contained. While Agamben argues vigorously against the self-presence of speech, he effectively demarcates a negatively “pure” realm—of silence, alterity, lack—that excludes and derogates the archive of Shoah testimony as ethically irrelevant by definition.
 
Agamben virtually defines his conception of “testimony”—the ethical relation between the occurrence and non-occurrence of speech—as that which remains uncontaminated by any residue of “mere” facts, memory, or other banalities of the archive: “Testimony . . . guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the archive, but rather its unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive—that is, the necessity by which, as the existence of language, it escapes both memory and forgetting” (158).⁶³ Agamben reduces the German genocide to “Auschwitz,” “Auschwitz” to the figure of the muselman, and the muselman to the silence to which the language of the witness refers inherently: beyond any possible dynamics of memory and forgetting, and in excess of facticity, referentiality, the archive. Even as he purports to be working out an ethics in relation to a radically historical event, Agamben’s abstraction away from the event and its archival traces is so total that ultimately, in his words, “to be a subject and to bear witness are in the final analysis one and the same” (158). The speaking subject bears witness to the inability to speak by virtue of its “own” inherent structure: “the constitutive desubjectification in every subjectification” (123). The conceptual purity Agamben achieves comes at the high cost of dismissing the archive as ethically irrelevant, as so much “noise,” as it were, that could only distract from the irrecoverable silence of the “essential” witness to whose mute remains Agamben’s post Auschwitz ethics continuously refers the speaking subject. In this way, commitment to the violently silenced becomes, itself, violently silencing, and Agamben forecloses on the traces that remain of the very victims of the Shoah that he would place at the center of his re-thinking of ethics after Auschwitz.
 
Instead of basing an ethics on the referral of speech and representation to essential silence, Modiano’s postmemorial pursuit insists, sometimes “madly,” that an encounter with the archive can alter ethical subjectivity. Dora Bruder is the account of such an encounter and such a mutation. Postmemorial subjectivity in general, and Modiano’s in Dora Bruder in particular, engages with and becomes ambiguously enmeshed in an archive of traces, even as it continuously redefines and experiences anew its, and the traces’, equivocal boundaries. Dora Bruder negotiates a relationship to silence, to be sure, but the silence is never pure. Equivocal “noise” haunts Modiano’s Paris. His work of postmemorial recovery in the city where he lives and in which Dora Bruder lived is, finally, a commitment to remaining open to an idiosyncratic, murmuring archive of fragmentary traces, but traces nonetheless.⁶⁴