Home is where the heart is, they say. When I got off the bus at Elsinore Gardens the street was still sealed by white security tape and manned by a police officer. I explained my case to him; after pondering it, he held up the tape to let me through. Five minutes, sir, he said. As I stooped under the tape I heard the tap of a cane and out of the corner of my eye I saw the blind man coming down the Antrim Road, dressed in his familiar nondescript anorak, his long white cane swinging metronomically from side to side like the antenna of a mine-detector, and I thought how the white security tape had made a blind alley of the street where I lived. I walked towards my house, my home, feeling like one who has been away for so long a time that he has become a stranger. It was an eerie feeling to turn the key in the lock and enter the hallway, knowing that I had but a brief temporary access to the house where I had lived all my life, that soon I would be homeless again. Though I was in the house, it seemed haunted by my absence.
In retrospect I am reminded of Sigmund Freud’s essay on the Uncanny, and his teasing out the meaning of the German word unheimlich, literally ‘unhomely’, but translated into English as ‘uncanny’; into Greek as xenos, ‘alien’; into French as sinistre; and into Latin as suspectus, as in the expression locus suspectus, ‘an eerie place’. Heimlich is ‘homely’; yet, as Freud observes, there are contexts in which the word becomes increasingly ambivalent, moving from meaning homely, comfortable, tame, familiar, intimate, to secret, privy, inscrutable, hidden, locked away, removed from the eyes of strangers, until it finally merges with its antonym, unheimlich.
At the heart of Freud’s essay is an analysis of E.T.A. Hoffman’s story ‘The Sandman’, which revolves around the fear of blindness. Freud reads this as fear of castration. As a child, the protagonist Nathaniel is told in the evenings that he must get to bed because the sandman is coming, and on occasions he hears something clumping up the stairs with a slow, heavy tread. When he asks his mother about the sandman, she tells him of course there is no sandman, it’s only a figure of speech, a way of saying that you’re sleepy and can’t keep your eyes open, as if someone had thrown sand in them. But when he asks his sister’s old nurse, she has a different story. The sandman is a wicked old man who comes after children when they won’t go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that their eyes jump out of their head all bloody, and then he throws them into his sack and flies off with them to the crescent moon as food for his little children, who have their nest up there and have beaks like owls and peck up the eyes of the naughty children. Nathaniel becomes increasingly obsessed with this figure, identifying it with a frequent visitor to the family home, the lawyer Coppelius, a loathsome fellow who might or might not be the doppelganger of an Italian optician called Coppola, or of a Professor Spalanzani, who has made a female automaton with which Nathaniel falls in love, neglecting his sweetheart Clara. At one point he is assured by her that his obsession with the sandman is just that: perhaps there does exist a dark power, she says, which fastens to us and leads us off on a dangerous and ruinous path which we would otherwise not have trodden; but if so, this power must have assumed within us the form of our self, indeed have become our self, for otherwise we would not listen to it, otherwise there would be no space within us in which it could perform its secret work. This power can assume other forms from the outer world; but they are only phantoms of our own ego.
I was interested to learn that Hoffman was a Jekyll and Hyde figure: by day a respectable lawyer in the Prussian civil service, by night a user of laudanum, debauchee, and author of bizarre tales and satires. In 1819 he was appointed to the Commission for the Investigation of Treasonable Organizations and Other Dangerous Activities. Within two years he had written a satire on the commission that employed him; it came to the attention of the authorities, but proceedings against him were halted when it was discovered he was dying from a combination of syphilis and years of alcohol and drug abuse. On his gravestone are carved the words, ‘Died on June 25th, 1822, in Berlin, Councillor of the Court of Justice, excellent in his office, as a poet, as a musician, as a painter. Dedicated by his friends.’ He was forty-seven. The formal cause of death was given as locomotor ataxia, inability to control the limbs, or paralysis.
I take my medication: a tablet each of clopidogrel, atoravastatin, bisoprolol, amlopodine, and perindopril, and it strikes me that I do not know what these words mean. For the first time I read the accompanying leaflets, and learn that among the possible side effects of these drugs are dizziness, constipation, diarrhoea, anorexia, muscle spasms, nausea, nightmares, insomnia, hearing loss, fever, liver failure, blistering of the genitals, impotence, loss of memory, hallucinations, paralysis, and blindness.
Une Falsification
The room on the first floor of 57 Rue du Bac was crowded when Kilpatrick and Gordon arrived. They stood on the threshold of the double doors. There was a dull thud, then another, and the buzz of conversation died down. Peering over shoulders, Kilpatrick saw Freddy Gabriel standing at a microphone, dressed in a navy-blue flannel suit, white shirt and burgundy silk knitted tie. He had a white carnation in his buttonhole. Beside him, on the closed lid of a grand piano, was the black briefcase and a half-filled glass of champagne. Gabriel tapped the microphone. Another dull thud. Silence. Messieurs et Mesdames, began Freddy Gabriel, and he launched into a speech alternately in French and English. The English, Kilpatrick noted, was sometimes a more or less direct translation of the French, but sometimes not, more an addendum or sidetrack. It transpired that Patrick Modiano was indisposed that evening, having been overcome by a bout of gastric flu. Monsieur Modiano vous prie d’excuser son absence. Il est désolé. However, said Gabriel, in his absence Monsieur Modiano has very generously granted his permission for me to read an extract from his current work in progress, provisionally titled Rue Daguerre. But first some words about the author.
Jean Patrick Modiano was born on 30 July 1945 at Boulogne-Billancourt on the outskirts of Paris. I cannot say why he chose to be known as Patrick, or whether it was chosen for him. But for the writer Modiano, whose work is engaged with a search for identity and its embodiment in language, the names are not without significance. Jean, or John, is the author of the eponymous Gospel, which begins, In the beginning was the Word; John the Divine is the author of Revelation; as for Patrick, the apostle of Ireland — and I am glad to welcome our Irish friends here tonight — many of the salient details of his life, such as his birthplace, are a matter of conjecture. By his own account he was born of Roman parents somewhere on the island of Britain, and taken as a slave into Ireland. He is an exile, and one could say that the protagonists of Modiano’s novel are in a state of internal exile, forever searching for a home. Or searching for an absent father; we note that the name Patrick has its roots in the Latin pater, father. Modiano’s own father is a mysterious figure …