DISCOURSE OF SILENCE BETWEEN AUTHORITY OF FUNCTION AND ACT OF INTERPRETATIONIN NOVEL DESERT BY JEAN-MARIE GUSTAV LECLEZIO

Silence, as a new form of eloquence in contemporary fiction, parallels the eloquence and authority of speech in terms of its shades of meaning. It can demonstrate what the tongue shuns from stating, by choice or coercion. This discourse is located in the structure of a narrative text in the form of topographical markers such as blanks, ellipsis and amputation. These markers rest on erasure writing and hinting language, opening spaces to be filled by the reader who is provoked by the product of dialectical relations between speech and silence, presence and absence, disclosure and insinuation, and other aspects by which silence occupies important angles in the text. In the novels of the French writer Jean-Marie Gustav Le Clézio, the 2008 Nobel Prize laureate in literature, specifically in his novel Désert (1980), silence lends itself to the highest readiness for reading and analysis by pushing the reader to interpret and disclose the text. Hence lies the importance of the subject in the ability of silence to overcome its aesthetic function and work alongside the discourse of revelation to disclose the text’s intellectual, cultural and ideological visions. In the light of this premise, the paper attempts to Reveal Le Clézio’s strategy in the writing of silence and its aesthetic use in novel Désert. Highlight the double-effect of silence in the narrative text and its recipient, as well as its transformation into a signifier in the novelist discourse.

Keywords