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Cécile Wajsbrot's Conversations avec le maître, the first volume of a series called ‘Haute mer’, is a novel about the experience of listening to music. Through conversations between a composer and an anonymous young woman, it conveys crucial aspects of musical listening and of its verbal expression. This article examines the functioning of dialogue between the two characters ; moreover, it studies the relationship between creation and reception, as expressed in the novel. It also examines what is at stake in this dialogue: the power of art in its relation to reality, to History. How may music become the echo of contemporary catastrophes ? The article offers a close reading of the novel’s descriptions of listening to music : what literary techniques enable the author to put it into words ?

In Patrick Modiano’s inquiry on Dora Bruder, photographical images—mostly portraits of Dora and her parents—play an important role. But in the original edition, these photographs are not reproduced, they are only described. We thus have to do with prose images, with an ekphrasis from existing photographs. In later editions—especially the American and Japanese translations—we find reproductions of these photographs. Their addition to the text modifies the status of it, making it into a biography or document. But our analysis concentrates on the prose images themselves: how do they work out within the narrative? How do they affect the experience of the reader, who «sees» them without really seeing them? What is their relation to postmemory? How do they include the viewpoint of the narrator, who is describing the photographs? We will see that the prose image is a deliberate choice of Modiano’s, and that it perfectly fits the narrative formula of Dora Bruder, which is halfway between a memorial and an autobiography. Moreover, it is in harmony with Modiano’s mode of narration.