How the Grass Grows in the Works of Patrick Modiano

Abstract

This article is an attempt at deciphering the enigmatic title of Patrick Modiano’s 2012 novel: why did he choose to call it L’Herbe des nuits, despite the book’s apparent lack of engagement with plants? In Jardins de papier, Evelyne Bloch-Dano understands the references to nature in the rest of Modiano’s œuvre as metaphors for the author’s poetics of memory and childhood. I want to argue that another interpretation is possible if we fully consider the plant physiology of grass: unlike trees, it grows from the middle and in between other crops. My article builds on this singularity to flesh out the forms of “middleness” in Modiano’s plots, writing style, and social “milieu.” Such an attention to the specific process of plant germination provides a new entry point into his works and their numerous allusions to vegetation, such as the metaphor of Occupied Paris as a soil, a manure, or an “artificial flower.” Like the narrator of Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, Modiano should be viewed as a “Buffon of trees and flowers,” notably because of the various connections between flora and fauna throughout his texts. To sustain these hypotheses, the article engages with botanical and ecocritical writings on plants, meadows, grass, and class (Rachel Bouvet, Alain Corbin, Gilles Deleuze, Francis Hallé, Denise Le Dantec, Stephanie Posthumus).

Keywords:

• Modiano
• grass
• flora
• fauna
• milieu
• class

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Notes

1 On Houellebecq and agronomy, see Christy Wampole (“Conceptual Botany: Michel Houellebecq and a Burgeoning Vegetal Interest,” French Forum 44, no. 2 (2019): 207–223, pp. 207–210).

2 On walking as botanizing, see Catrin Gersdorf (“Flânerie as Ecocritical Practice: Thoreau, Benjamin, and Sandilands,” Ecology and Life Writing, edited by Alfred Hornung and Zhao Baisheng, Heidelberg, Universitätesverlag Winter, 2013, pp. 27–53).

3 See his Éloge des vagabondes: herbes, arbres et fleurs à la conquête du monde, Paris, Nil, 2002.

4 For a discussion between the author of this sentence (Emmanuel Berl) and Patrick Modiano, see their Interrogatoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 88.

5 See Pierre Schoentjes, Ce qui a lieu: essai d’écopoétique, Marseille, Éditions Wildproject, 2015, pp. 51–55.

6 On “adopting a literary botanical approach” to reading, see Rachel Bouvet and Stéphanie Posthumus (“Introduction,” special issue Plant Studies / Études végétales, L'Esprit Créateur 60, no. 4 (2020): 1–8, pp. 1–2). On the “plasticity” of plants, see Denise Le Dantec (Encyclopédie poétique et raisonnée des herbes, Paris, Bartillat, 2000, p. 47).

7 On the “unique bloc of in-between expressed by the phenomenon of plant communication,” see Houle 98. On the connection between “vegetal world” and “middle voice,” see Luce Irigaray (“What the Vegetal World Says to Us,” The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature, edited by Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan, and Patrícia Vieira, U of Minnesota P, 2017, p. 133). On the shared in-betweenness of trees and weeds, see Rachel Bouvet (“Les Espaces interstitiels du végétal: le flamboyant et le sumac au seuil des habitations chez Marie Ndiaye et Olivier Bleys,” Phantasia 10 (2020)).

8 On Deleuze’s and Guattari’s “runaway metaphorics surrounding plants,” see Nealon 83–100.

9 On grass in Barry’s photographs, see Marie Darrieussecq (“Ce presque rien,” The Habit of Being, Paris, Xavier Barral and Le Bal, 2017, p. 114) and Jean Rolin (Savannah, Paris, POL, 2015, p. 54).

10 Deleuze and Guattari underline a similar entanglement in the words “chiendent” and “crabgrass” (Plateaus 7). Raymond Queneau’s first novel is titled Le Chiendent (The Bark-Tree in English). On Queneau as a tutelary figure for Modiano, see Pedigree 113–115.

11 Zina Modiano’s children books Le Chien mythomane and Moutoncaniche; Marie Modiano’s songs “Entre chien et loup” and “Le Chien noir du chagrin” (written by Patrick Modiano); Dominique Zehrfuss’s memoir Peau de Caniche, and Modiano’s and Zehrfuss’s children books on a labrador, Une aventure de Choura and Une fiancée pour Choura.

12 On Deleuze's “thinking par le milieu” and the double meaning of milieu as “the middle and the surroundings or habitat,” see also Isabelle Stengers (“Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices,” Cultural Studies Review 11, no. 1 (2005), pp. 183–196, p. 187). On milieu and environment versus ecology, see Posthumus pp. 14–15. On plants generating their own milieu, see Emanuele Coccia (La Vie des plantes: une métaphysique du mélange, Paris, Rivages, 2016, p. 23).

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Morgane Cadieu

Morgane Cadieu is Assistant Professor in the Department of French at Yale. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century prose; space and randomness in theory and literature; narratives of social emancipation and migration; materialist philosophies; and the aesthetics of trains. She is the author of Marcher au hasard: Clinamen et création dans la prose du XXème siècle (Classiques Garnier, 2019.) In her next book in progress, she analyzes the representation of social mobilities from the 1970s onward.