French Literature Reviews - 2026
Writings of Absence
Other Literary Studies
Added on 09/03/07: book received, awaiting a reviewer for the Acta-Fabula journal.
Maria Watroba
Writings of Absence
Presses universitaires de Rennes (PUR)
Coll. "Interférences"
Rennes, 2007
ISBN : 978-2-7535-0384-7
172 p
15€
Back cover:
The works of Maria Watroba, gathered in this volume, reflect a sustained meditation on the desire for absolute presence. This presence constantly slips away, leaving writing as its sole trace—a paradoxical challenge, an implicit testimony that itself becomes an absence, ultimately serving as the guarantor of a certain literary creation.
This is why such absence becomes both necessary and desirable: ultimately, only absence can match the perfection of the chosen object's captivation, proportional to the perfection of its withdrawal.
Absence is the promise kept by writing, suspended between the defeat inherent in desire and the jouissance of its expression. Articulation fulfills possession, just as literature fulfills silence.
These reflections on several writers (the Goncourt brothers, Zola, Gide, Proust, Valéry, Leiris) serve as variations on what withdraws from writing, thereby establishing its very body and nurturing a profound inquiry into what literature represents, its object, and its raison d'être.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
GONCOURT
Madame Gervaisais, Hysterical or Mystical Novel?
Thwarted Femininity
Woman – Mother – Aesthete
Artistic Style and Clinical Signs
Necessary Displacements
ZOLA
Thérèse Raquin: Naturalism Between Lies and Truth
Truths of Theory
Thérèse: The Feminine Lie
Truth and Paralysis
Lies, Truth, God, and Women
The Failure of the Lie in Marriage
Laurent, or Suffered Truth
The Voice of Truth, or Posthumous Irony
Murderous Truth
Ultima verba: "Myself, the truth, I die"
The Priest, the Woman, the Family: The Conquest of Plassans
Settings of Fiction: Novel, Church, Theater, and Their Public
Marthe and Faujas in Context
Faujas's Older Brothers
A Flawed Lucifer
PROUST
Figures of Trial, Proust and Surgery
Wars
Solitudes
Jealousy
Writings
GIDE
Paludes, ab ovo
A Work Like an Egg
Unproductivity
Accords and Discords
The Bizarre, The Viscous
The Writing of Morbid Delight: Alissa's Journal
Exiles
She Feels, Therefore She Writes
The Journal, for Want of a Letter, Instead of Prayer
Delectatio morosa
The Epistolary Journal
"Intimate" Journal
Perverse Ethics
The Sacrifice of Sacrifice
VALÉRY
Desire is Pleasure – A Poem by Paul Valéry
A Poetics of the Threshold
Point of Contact with the Elusive
The Desire for the Desire of the Other
LEIRIS
Ambiguity in the Arena – Regarding Michel Leiris
Bullfighting and Sacrificial Eroticism
Portrait of the Torero as a Daedalian Androgyne
Performative Specularity
Metaphysical Misfortune and Brutal Misfortune
The Fault and the Sacred
On Bullfighting Considered as an Incorporation
The Shadowy Side
Life Upside Down
The Sea to Death
"Oneself as Another" / Another as Oneself
"The Shadow of Adventure" / The Adventure of the Shadow
Red Ink
The study of absence in literature often intersects with broader inquiries into the nature of representation and the limits of language. This volume examines the works of the Goncourt brothers, Zola, Gide, Proust, Valéry, and Leiris, focusing on how the act of writing functions as a response to the withdrawal of the object of desire. These reflections serve as variations on what withdraws from writing, establishing its body and exploring what literature represents, its object, and its raison d'être.
The thematic focus on the relationship between silence and articulation reflects an intellectual tradition that views literature as a site of mediation. By investigating how authors represent what is elusive or unsaid, the volume addresses the tension between the perfection of a chosen object and the limitations of its textual capture. Readers interested in the intersection of aesthetics, psychology, and narrative theory may find these variations on the nature of literary representation and the function of the written trace relevant.