Paniers à salade : Itinéraire en pays modianesque

• Since its first appearance in the novel La Place de l’étoile (1968), the motif of the police van (panier à salade) has never stopped showing up in Modiano’s works. This article focusses on the scene with the police van in seven novels, in order to show its obsessional character. The analysis shows that the police van appears in a scenario which the reader recognizes from one novel to another, despite some slight differences. In its most recurrent form, the scenario develops as follows: a character who has been stopped by the police can’t prove his/her identity and is transported to the police station in a van. The analysis also shows that this vehicle is emblematic of the past, which is the very substance of Modiano’s novels: on the one hand the collective past (the persecutions of the Jews during the German occupation of France) and on the other the individual past (a loveless relationship between the homodiegetic narrator and mostly his father, during the sixties). This article suggests that the very particular re-writing process at work in Modiano’s novels, where the same motifs, places and kinds of character reappear from one novel to another, creating a strong impression of autobiographical authenticity, presupposes a specific kind of reader, who reads more than one single novel and who needs to re-read.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Modiano

police van

homodiegetic narrator

re-writing

occupation

autobiography

Mots-clés : Modiano

panier à salade

narrateur homodiégétique

réécriture

autobiographie

Publication and Content Type

for (subject category)

ref (subject category)