Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk
Description
This paper concentrates on two brief, apparently casual references in Je suis un homme to Modiano’s Les Boulevards de ceinture and La Place de l’étoile, both of which feature a cast of double agents and dual personalities as well as the fractured relationship between a father and son. My analysis demonstrates that the Modiano intertexts present us with a ‘doubling’ not only of Nimier’s protagonist and his father, but also (allusively, subtly, indeed ‘silently’, for the relevant aspects of the intertext are entirely implicit) of the author herself and her problematic father, Roger. Juxtaposing this finding with one further, unnamed intertext (identifiable as Il était une fois dans l’Ouest), I consider Nimier’s intertextual strategy as a form of revenge for her father’s famous question ‘Que dit la Reine du Silence?’.