by Lisa Lieberman
He had told me that he shredded street posters himself to uncover the ones hidden beneath the newer strata. He pulled the strips down layer by layer and photographed them meticulously, stage by stage, down to the last scraps of paper that remained on the billboard or stone wall.
Patrick Modiano, “Afterimage”
I picked up Suspended Sentences after Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature this past fall and was immediately reminded of an Alain Resnais film—not that I'm the first to draw a connection between the two memory-obsessed artists. Modiano himself acknowledged a debt to the late filmmaker when accepting a prize from the Bibliothèque nationale for his body of work in 2011. “During my childhood, I saw Alain Resnais's documentary Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) [All the World's Memories] about the journey of a book arriving at the Bibliothèque nationale,” he said, “and the film made me want to write.”
Resnais made the All the World's Memories after his documentary about the death camps, Night and Fog (1955). In contrast to the brutal manner in which memory is evoked in this film and the accusatory tone of the narration, All the World's Memories is irreverent and light-hearted. I can easily imagine the ten-year-old Modiano being drawn in by Resnais's gently ironic depiction of the great library as a fortress dedicated to preserving memory at any cost. Words are captured and confined, books imprisoned, never to leave. Issued with an identity card, “the prisoner awaits the day it will be filed,” we are told, but lest we worry, Resnais is quick to assure us that this incarceration is entirely beneficial. Books are treated well. Scientific expertise is deployed to stave off the destruction of perishable documents: “An ointment is applied to preserve bindings, the writings of vanished civilizations are restored, books are vaccinated, shrouded, holes made by insects are filled in, loose pages glued back in.” Those of us old enough to remember card catalogues will appreciate hearing them described here as “the brain of the Bibliothèque nationale.” And if you were fortunate enough to conduct research in the vast reading room under the glass dome, as I was, you'll be charmed by the birds-eye view of the rows of readers seated “like paper-crunching insects” at those long tables, “each in front of his own morsels of universal memory.”
