Search

This article analyses the essence and roles of silence in the œuvres of Mallarmé and Valéry. The Mallarmé’s musicality gradually gives way to the silent music of words; poetry is becoming spatial and takes the form of the music score. In the poem Coup de dés it gets up to the incarnation of silence which shows the ideal of the Mallarmé’s musicality; the ideal in which an eye serves to listen. The theme of music and silence reappears in the Valery’s œuvre. In spite of the connection between music and architecture, which can incarnate silence, poetry uses the subjectivism of music and the ambiguity of silence to achieve the ideal of pure art which is hidden in the artist’s interior. Silence as nothingness is the starting point for poetry whereas non-incarnated silence can express the mystical sense of poetry.

This article analyses the essence and roles of silence in the œuvres of Mallarmé and Valéry. The Mallarmé's musicality gradually gives way to the silent music of words; poetry is becoming spatial and takes the form of the music score. In the poem Coup de dés it gets up to the incarnation of silence which shows the ideal of the Mallarmé's musicality; the ideal in which an eye serves to listen. The theme of music and silence reappears in the Valery's œuvre. In spite of the connection between music and architecture, which can incarnate silence, poetry uses the subjectivism of music and the ambiguity of silence to achieve the ideal of pure art which is hidden in the artist's interior. Silence as nothingness is the starting point for poetry whereas non-incarnated silence can express the mystical sense of poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Yannis Kiourtsakis wrote Le Dicôlon, an autobiographical novel which describes all the important events for the Kiourtsakis family throughout the twentieth century. The novel is written under the spell of the author’s brother’s absences as he committed suicide. The experience of an irremediable loss echoes the collective destiny of Greece. The article focuses on the conditions of the staging of this loss with an analysis of different types of narration. In which way is the autobiographical genre affected by the writing of the death?

In his novel entitled Gazole (2001), Bertrand Gervais, a Quebec writer, takes up the issue of suicide and its psychological and social impact. The main character, Lancelot Tremblay, whose job is to write lyrics for a rock band Le Livre des Morts (Eng. The Book of the Dead), hangs himself in his apartment. His naked body with an erect penis is discovered by the other members of the band Gazole and Pyramide. Their reactions to this deadly act are, however, different. Submerging himself in mourning, Pyramide withdraws emotionally from his relationship with his girlfriend Gazole, who, deeply touched by her partner’s newly developed indifference to her, delves into an investigation into the causes of Lancelot’s suicide. Being increasingly fascinated by the figure of Lancelot, Gazole reconstructs a new picture of him. Pieces of memories conjured up by those who knew Lancelot, like incomplete pieces of a puzzle, make Gazole form a romantic image of his absence. The mysterious and tragic figure of the young poet who chose to extinguish himself fires the woman’s imagination, who fantasizes about a sentimental and erotic relationship with him. An emptiness created by the suicide forces the woman to ponder over the nature of death, an eternal absence. Obsessed with this imaginary presence of Lanelot, Gazole has to set herself free from its influence, which causes her to flirt with a razorblade in a bathtub. The foray into Lancelot’s suicide gives Gazole an insight into her own true identity. Gazole discovers her internal feminine strength and frees herself from the shackles of Lancelot’s mental and sexual hold.

Our approach is focused on the issue of the “markers” of absence as well as on the expression and materialization of that absence in a corpus of works formed of the following plays: L’Intruse, Les Aveugles, Intérieur by Maurice Maeterlinck. The acceptions the concept of “absence” may receive throughout our analysis are parts of the phenomenon of progressive alienation seen, for instance, as separation (stressing the idea of distance and departure), or as solitude, then omission (in the sense of forgetting), and culminating with the inability of perception that anticipates isolation, physical imprisonment and announces death (designated through a privative prefix) as an absence that is always present and obscurity. We attempt to reveal the “markers” of absence on the level of certain constituents of the play: the character, formed of a discursive feature, infinitely simple and repetitive, much more diminished and developing without individuality, like a silent, mysterious ghost; and the action where it is rather inaction that represents our primary direction of research. As a secondary direction, we consider the markers of absence in a language that, in the case of Maeterlinck, is remarkably pure and lacks any syntactic or lexical complication, from lexical structures (the reassessment of short expressions makes the utterances seem captivatingly strange, revealing, beyond words, unutterable, unspeakable) and the grammar, especially the semantics of its forms – the 3rd person pronouns, a form we may consider as deprived of referential content, the indefinite pronouns which indicate absence –, the semantics of punctuation, especially that of the suspension points.

In 1961 Philippe Jaccottet wrote: "The best answer to all kinds of questions is the poem’s very absence of a response". In keeping with the elusive nature of the world, abandoned by the gods and by God, the poem remains mysterious, thus trans-lating as well as preserving the inexhaustible richness of Nature and human beings. So the poet not only accepts such a precarious situation, but learns from it. Nevertheless, when someone dear dies, the poet tends to deny the absence of the loved one and revolts against it, since there no longer are any signs of presence: merely incomprehensible absence. Yet he chooses to bear witness, even if he remains ignorant and weak. In effect, this is a duty: poetry provides a link which enables the separation to avoid becoming a definitive absence. Words are repairing shuttles.

The eponymous hero of this little-known play by Jean Anouilh is perceived by other protagonists as absent. Nevertheless, his presence is becoming more and more vivid with the development of the plot, which is illustrated by the analysis presented in the article. It shows the process in which the absent hero transforms into a character fully present in the text. The detailed analysis of the character’s presence in particular space-time dimensions, as well as the actant analysis prove that the main character pretends to be absent from the beginning of the play in order to achieve a definite goal.

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.

Marguerite Duras’s works deal with the problems typical of the literary studies in the second half of the twentieth century: presence and absence, abandoning chronological order of events, and eroticism. This article analyses her literary technique, including text fragmentation and elliptical style. The author searches for appropriate means of expression, often using silence and loneliness in keeping with her vision of absence attributed to women, kept silent by the dominant culture. Omissions in the narrative emphasise the inexpressible, beyond rational. Absence is meaningful, e.g. the missing photograph in The Lover. Absence also implies a desire to change and to write. Duras shows the problem in the context of a hidden image and an act of creation. The missing word alludes to a search of self. The author grasps complexity and diversity of absence. It is part of the theme, style, and text structure, emphasising the limitations of the language and the powerlessness of the protagonist.

Concerning Antonin Artaud it has been question of some lack of work but in the article we propose to the reading we are talking about another kind of absence. Indeed, in his correspondence and in the writings of his youth, the poet was complaining to be absent to himself. He was saying that words could not convey what he felt, that he had the impression to be a spectator of himself. Over time, he will say that he was feeling some emptiness in him. Is it to fill this emptiness that he spent his time writing on notebooks and that he had replaced speaking by screaming? As a conclusion to this article, we spend some time thinking about the concepts of absence and emptiness, following some writings of Pierre Fédida.

Except for Étienne de la Boétie, the friend for ever gone but whose presence pervades the Essais so vividly, the reader can notice the nearly total – and therefore puzzling – absence of Montaigne’s mother, Antoinette de Louppes, contrasting with the recurrent mentions to his father, Pierre Eyquem. He will also encounter strange omissions, such as Montaigne’s silence on St-Bartholomew’s Day massacre, and telling lapses, for instance on the answers given to young King Charles IX by the cannibals from Brazil. Do the Essais really “tell everything” (On vanity, III, 9), as Montaigne claims they do?

In his short novel Bruges-la-Morte Georges Rodenbach presents an inconsolable widower, Hugues Vianne, who ties to immortalise his dead wife by the worship of her souvenirs and installing himself in Bruges, a “dead town”. The aim of the study is to examine how the absence changes into presence. Firstly, the Dead returns in Hugues Vian’s mind, the spouse appears in multiple portraits the widower contemplates every day and especially in the cult of her hair. Then, she reveals herself also in the history and the actual state of Bruges. Finally, the dead woman returns in her “double” – Jane Scott, a theatre dancer, who becomes for Hugues Vianes, his wife risen from the dead, unfortunately only for a while. Georges Rodenbach chooses absence as the main aspect of his novel but he joins it to all kind of attempts, especially related to the fantastique, to transform it into presence.

The French nouveau roman is characterised by lack of numerous elements typical of the traditional, commonly called Balzacian, novel. This lack involves the rejection of plot, omniscient narrator, psychological, moral and ideological factors, social and political engagement, the decomposition of character, the indeterminacy and gradual implosion of time and space as well as the text generation based on some lack or void. The aim of the article is to present these missing elements of the represented world and to discuss their functions in the works of leading practitioners of the nouveau roman, such as Samuel Beckett (predecessor), Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon.

In the works of Jeane Muno the absenteeism theme has got diffrent features and forms. Escape from grey and sad reality to world of imagination is the best way to deal with mental and physical absenteeism: weary figure is looking for loneliness away from his everyday reality. He wants to dream and reflect in peace and quite. The absence has been showed as a lack, also has been presented in the perspective of ontological. Characters created by J. Muno have personality problems cause by time reality and society. Society determined who character should become. All efforts being yourself ends failure. Muno in his works presents french speakers Belgians, called la belgitude. Heroes of Muno have problem with find them national identity, they suffer because of double culture. They are able to accept and take advantage of this situation.

A dialectic between presence and absence, remembrance and oblivion, testimony and silence, body and its trace reflects the gist of the most recent Ernaux’es book. It constitutes not only plenteaus thematic confluence but also or even majorly an axis of the book’s construction. Its structure encompasses various layers such as: rhetorical, stylistic and typographic, which separately and together combined reside in prevailing tensioned coexistence of presence and absence.