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Force ennemie, a novel by John-Antoine Nau published in 1903, was the first recipient of the Prix Goncourt. The story's main character, Philippe Veuly, wakes up one morning to discover that he is in an unfamiliar bedroom. He then learns that, in fact, he has been in an asylum for two weeks, but he doesn't know why. Gradually, he feels inhabited by a strange force beyond his control: a force that appears to be an extraterrestrial who has taken refuge in him. Veuly escapes from the asylum and looks for a woman with whom he fell in love, all the while still carrying the creature. Is it really an alien force? Or is Veuly's mind deeply disturbed? Nau's novel occupies an uncertain and evocative state, at once a work of science fiction, a tale of the fantastic, a psychological investigation, and a sociological commentary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ways some of Stéphane Mallarmé's famous sayings - "the world was created to end in a wonderful book", "the blank sheet, best protected by its whiteness", are used in various literary and artistic contexts in the works of some authors referring, directly or indirectly, to this Symbolist poet, either with the idea of praising him or distancing themselves from him (André Malraux, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, André Gide, René Magritte, Michel Butor, Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Gaétan Brulotte). The destiny of these sayings which reflect the attitude to literary and artistic creation as a quest for the absolute but which also expose all the difficulties in the way to such an endeavor, outline the history of French literature and art in their development from Symbolism to Postmodernism: they step away from the concrete object (suppression of emotions in poetry, rejection of the plot and the characters in the novel, domination of the interior over the exterior model in painting), in order to explore their own resources and capacities, which will be in turn also brought into question and reduced to the "zero point." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]