‘SO YOU DON’T GET LOST IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD’ BY PATRICK MODIANO: POETICS OF THE ‘NOVEL ABOUT A NOVEL’

Abstract

The article analyzes the novel by the modern French writer Patrick Modiano So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood (‘Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier’, 2014) in terms of the genre poetics of the ‘novel about a novel’. The paper explains the use of the terms ‘novel about a novel’, ‘metanovel’, etc. in modern literary criticism. As part of research, there was studied the writer’s Nobel Lecture, read by him in the year of the novel’s publication, and the works of Modiano’s researchers from different countries. The conclusion is drawn about the game structure of the ‘novel about a novel’, which is architecturally connected with the French modernist tradition (M. Proust, A. Gide, and others). Throughout the novel, the hero-writer Jean Daragane dreams of his own life, combining memories and imagination (the process of creative work, according to Modiano). Plunging into the past, Jean Daragane discovers in childhood a source of his loneliness (loneliness is a condition of the writer’s work and the theme of the ‘novel about a novel’). Recor­ded in a multitude of overlapping texts belonging to different genres (fake passport, business card, note book, phone book, article, letter, police report, dossier, brochure, novel, poems, etc.), the palimpsest novel creates a communicative space of dialogue, which is the only possible way out of loneliness for the writer. Inside the ‘self-begetting novel’ is the story of the creation of the hero’s first novel The Black Color of Summer (‘Le Noir de l'été’) as one of the intersecting storylines. Among the different intertextual references, Natural History by the French naturalist of the 18th century Buffon and the collection of poems by the eight-year-old girl Minou Drouet Tree, My Friend (‘Arbre, mon ami’) (1957) constitute the immediate context of the novel created in the process of reading and testify to its lyrical and philosophical character. Thus, Modiano’s work draws closer to the lyrical type of Proust’s ‘novel about a novel’, although the detective component and third-person narrative reveal the influence of A. Gide. The reference to the tradition of the modernist ‘novel about a novel’ emphasizes the author’s belonging to the ‘intermediate generation’ of writers who represent the difference between monumental novels of the past and fragmentary works of the present as self-reflection of the genre.