Earthly Encounters and Temporal Sedimentation in Patrick Modiano's Paris

The portrayal of modern Paris that Modiano delineates in his novels continuously preserves the filthy residues of History, in an imagined urban geography saturated with figurative modalities of the earth-whether it be decaying soils, quicksand, or muddy swamps which threaten to immerse the narrators. Exploiting a geological terminology, Modiano approaches Paris as a land covered with several deposits of oblivion. The city has a corrupt, immoral, fraudulent deepness that his protagonists seek to excavate and delve into, with a sense of malaise and alienation that topographical scrupulousness appears to momentarily alleviate. Modiano develops a terrestrial relationship with the past: time has a telluric depth, and the present and past collapse into a single hermeneutic entity. A hidden cartography, based on the Paris of the Occupation, remains unperceptively dormant under the geography of the present-day city. It will be shown that in Modiano's narrative universe, such an obscure episode of History left palpable remnants on the surface of the everyday, in the manner of a haunting sediment that lingers as an essential foundation of the present time.