7 - Bernard Frank and Patrick Modiano: Jewish Writers

Summary

In Un siècle débordé (1970), after mentioning an unpublished novel he had written before 1950 and that was something of a reworking of Camus's L’Etranger, Bernard Frank writes:

[J]e ne considérais pas, a la différence d’un jeune écrivain d’aujourd’hui, qu’un remake d’un livre célebre était l’introduction idéale pour une entrée glorieuse dans la littérature. Il est vrai que Camus, en 1947, était un modele un peu voyant, tandis que Modiano pouvait espérer, a juste titre, qu’on avait completement oublié les deux livres dont il avait, avec tant de talent, paraît-il, assimilé le mécanisme mental. Seulement, quand je vois Modiano avoir le prix Nimier, une bourse Fénéon, je me dis que ce gentil garçon aurait pu m’envoyer une caisse de champagne.

Frank is referring to Patrick Modiano's La Place de l’étoile (1968) and to his own Géographie universelle (1953) and Israël (1955). Modiano quickly replied with a two-page pastiche entitled ‘L’Anti-Frank’ in which he mocks his accuser's mannerisms, his digressions and meanderings, his modest reputation, his scanty productivity, and much more.

A chronicler, critic, and writer of genius, Bernard Frank wrote Géographie universelle, his first published book, when he was twentythree. It is a highly original text, a kind of autofiction avant la lettre whose jocular title is that of the monumental geography organized and conceived by Paul Vidal de La Blache. Its homodiegetic narrator expresses his desires and fears, his ambitions, his obsessions, by discussing his links to seven countries (England, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Denmark, Germany). He assumes many different postures, wears all sorts of masks, evokes all kinds of characters, from Sartre and Heidegger to Léon Blum and Charles de Gaulle, and imagines himself as a politician, a film director, a dandy, a Protestant, an antisemite, a Jew. Israël, which Frank regarded as his most essential work, constitutes a brilliant sequel and a particularly acute exploration of Jewishness. After all, its narrator creates a museum of antisemitism and envisions not only a Jewish museum but also a museum of friends of the Jews and a museum of the Jewified, one of whose number would be Louis-Ferdinand Céline.