Les écrivains «archéologues» de la mémoire en quête de l’identité (Patrick Modiano, Jean-Luc Coatalem)

Abstract

Literary history knows a countless list of the writers who explore their memory, the history of their ancestry, not to mention Marcel Proust, James Joyce or even closer to our time, Georges Perec, Le Clézio, Romain Gary, etc., whose mode of writing is described as the archeology of memory.
What archeology and literature have in common is that they both explore historical memory. The difference is that the characteristic of literature is to combine reality and fiction. Thus, the novels of the writers under discussion – Dora Bruder by Patrick Modiano and La part du fils by Jean-Luc Coatalem – reveal the mixture of reality and fiction, since as Modiano asserts, “Imaginary can say something about reality […] we can reveal through the writing a kind of intuition of what the reality could present”. What can be observed as the common feature of the writings of these two authors is that they are both interested in characters who disappear in their destiny, that determines the choice of themes that run through their texts and that can be summed up in a single word: missing that even determines the originality of their style. Both authors show themselves as true archaeologists of memory in sense of finding and preserving the slightest document which relates to the time of Occupation, so insignificant at first glance, in order to gather information about the missing characters. As a result, two texts under discussion deal with the eternal problems of identity in terms of family relationship and values with the theme of the "disgust" of war that tears human lives apart. Also, we decided to analyze these two texts from the point of view of searching for identity to show that through the search for identity of their characters, the writers actually are in search of their own identity. The features indicate that the writers under discussion are “archaeologists" of memory. Summing up the reflection of José Saramago "we present only the memory that we have" that Jean-Luc Coatalem highlights in his novel.