Postmodern Reading of Patrick Modiano's Postmodern OEuvre

Ixecent surveys of contemporary French literature have declared Patrick Modiano to be a writer of exceptional stature, perhaps one for the ages (Prince, Roudiez, Taylor, Thompson, Wright). One objective basis for such opinions comes from his two-fold resounding success among both the public and the critics. The nineteen novels (at the time of this writing, and not counting his three novels for children) that he started publishing in 1968 have often reached and sustained best-seller status in France (Kawakami 109), sometimes as eagerly awaited by the French as each year's Beaujolais nouveau (Rachlin 121). At the same time, his oeuvre has won numerous French literary awards (Morris 1) and has gotten extensive and positive scrutiny by scholars from several countries out side of France (Gellings 9, Kawakami 154-60, and Rossum). The virtual unanimity about the quality of his work, however, has left unchallenged some assumptions about the way in which what can safely be called Modiano's postmodernism manifests itself. (For articles articu lating his postmodernism, see Ewert or Scherman; for a book see Kawa kami.) This unchallenged status is, however, open to several questions. To begin with, Modiano's postmodernism is presumably responsible for what are widely assumed to be aporias resulting from, for example, his novels' occasional chronological and geographic incoherence. In the face of the sensible assumption that literary popularity usually calls for acces sibility, how can one reconcile those presumed aporias with Modiano's great popular success? In addition, no less at odds with what is deemed Modiano's postmodernity is the dramatic, undeniable impact of his work on the real world. His first published novel, the baffling and disturbing La Place de VEtoile, was instrumental in changing the very way France views its recent history. Henry Rousso, expert on France's reappraisal in the 70s of the Gaullist triumphalist myth of la Prance resistante in World War II,