Paris as a memorial palimpsest in Georges Perec y Patrick Modiano

Abstract

The following article aims to explore the relationship that the work of Patrick Modiano and Georges Perec maintains with Paris, their hometown, and in what way, far from anchoring the city to a historical avantgarde, they represent it anachronistically. That is to say, they make evident that the urban space is traversed by a temporal multiplicity that defines it. Focusing on Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue and Dora Bruder on one hand, we will try to show how the past, both personal and collective, of Paris' Occupation is inseparable from a narrator who would either flee from it or follow its traces through the neighborhoods and streets of a space assaulted by a melancholic atmosphere. On the other hand, although the majority of Perec's literary production has a clear rapport with Paris, it will be the project Lieux that will serve as a support to explore how he understands the relationship with space and how the memory of a lost childhood inhabits the places he lives in the present creating a topography that saturates the space with a temporal cluster.