Le vide I’ve taken to calling absence. Or at least something close to void, perhaps even vacancy, for a body of work that seems especially beguiled by negative space and hollowed out existences. And of absence, of void, well, there is quite a lot. Some seem bent on rehashing the absence of her acclaim, and I too have wandered into that abyss, addictively scrolling indexes, web pages, and book shelves just to feel my heart plunge when names jump from Beckett to Bobin. It is indeed hard to understand how a remarkable literary culture could lose sight of one of its most remarkable writers, but it’s become even harder for me now to watch us fixate on the calamity. She herself would have mocked this, us, I’m almost sure. Must the retelling of her tragedy (for I will join you in calling it one) persist, then, or at least in this heavy-handed way that risks overshadowing her work? Isn’t the reason we bring up her name, her name—Hélène Bessette—because we’ve been jolted from our literary stupor by one of her outstanding books?

Bessette wrote prolifically, riskily, altering the stakes even as her oeuvre corroborated its imperviousness. In her day, she indeed published thirteen poetic novels with Gallimard. However, it’s important to recognize, thanks to the powerful reconstruction of her trajectory by her biographer, that Bessette’s writing story was profoundly different from that of her publishing story. La Route bleue may have been the first poetic novel, and thirteen titles is far from “the total count” of her complete works. And if in 2026, we begin and continue to see her novels read and distributed in languages around the world, it is less due to the efforts of the boys’ club that “managed her career” while she was alive (and scarcely the Oulipian who signed her, abandoned her, yet still claims precedence on the covers of her innovation) but more thanks to the modern day Bessettians—Julien Doussinault, Bessette’s biographer; Laure Limongi, first republisher of Bessette; Benoît Virot, current republisher of Bessette; Claude Royet-Journoud, long-time federator of Bessette’s work; Liliane Giraudon, one of Bessette’s literary ancestors; Cédric Jullion; Claudine Hunault; Laurence Noret; and Hélène Sirven—who have taken up her memory, first resurrecting the Gang du roman poétique and now, in more “sugar-coated” version, running the Sociète des ami.e.s d’Hélène Bessette.

Since 2017, following my first hair-raising encounter with Garance Rose, I have been in the throes of a love affair with this work, hosting a sometimes maddening but ever-unflinching desire for the Bessettian utterance. As I continued reading her in that year—first maternA, then Ida ou le délire, and then everything else, I began translating, studying and writing linkages between the scriptural and verbal enunciations of her oeuvre, and through this years-long process I’ve been drawn in deeper (and back should I have strayed) by a certain vortex at the heart of her project. Yes, a kind of cauldron of absence that hithers the reader back into its withholding, the withheld—at the level of the letter, the line, the page but also at its narrative center, a kind of arching, intervalled caesura in the plot itself.

The Poetics of the Bessettian Woman is the title of my dissertation-in-progress. In it, I am questioning how the poem, the tools called upon by the poet—versification, rhyme, anaphora—have served or been adapted by Bessette as a novelist to create what I call The Bessettian Woman. The Bessettian Woman—Bessette herself being the original—is a retreating figure, who opposes the “storied” gesture to cater, explain, assuage, or apologize throughout the course of the poetic novel. That Bessette’s lines shun the urge to fill the margins of our narrative expectations to the brim mirrors the prerogatives of these heroines, her heroines, those who appear to me to disallow existentially their social normalization. Of such an eschewing position, The Bessettian Woman indulges no one, not those who wish her failure nor even her relief. What, then, do we know of these women? Never as much as we might want to but what we do have at our disposal is their description through others’ decree—what feels in many cases like the rumor of a person.

I am beginning to understand how essential The Novel of Absence, or the Roman du vide, is to that frameworking, to exposing how relentless social captivity is for women and how total The Bessettian Woman’s want is to disappoint satisfying their gaze. In her refutation of meeting social norms, The Bessettian Woman is often referred to as an error or problem, her being like an original sin from which she will never find reprieve. But can The Bessettian Woman be bothered to care about her condemnation? In my developing work, I theorize that she cannot, but perhaps it would be helpful to give you a sense of how Bessette establishes this vortex which gives a structure to her protagonists and me my long devotion to a study of her works.

In the epistolary novel, N’avez-vous pas froid (1963), Bessette writes as a minister addressing his missing wife, who left after discovering his affair. His letters pontificate on the meaning of family and faith while growing increasingly misogynistic and unhinged. The reader is never made privy to replies from his ex. In fact, we start to operate under the impression that his verbosity could even have been a reason why she left. His ex-wife then becomes his script’s greatest ghost, the one he can’t stop faulting. Novel as echo chamber, for him, from the wry poke of the title to the final word of the book, his wife’s name: Dora. In one of his letters, the minister writes, “I blotted out my wife. There was a mistake. Somewhere on the scroll of my days. An inkstain. It was my wife.” Here, then, an example of Bessette working the void of The Bessettian Woman, oscillating between her error and her crucial absence—hard always to distinguish which comes first—as a realm-giving force to the romanesque. Or else, a kind of vacuum for it.

The first lines of Garance Rose (1965) also draw up a presence-absence: “The heroine is missing. / Missing from Paris. Heroine by default. At large. Gone. / Dead (Perhaps)...” Rose de Garance, with her envy-inducing nobiliary particle, is a divorced woman with two children and a troublesome independence. The citizens of the fictional Saint-Cloche are arrested by the audacity of her comings-and-goings—at night, to Paris, a request for time abroad. How does this fit with the curriculum?  Rumors take over, with violence. Of what, for what, the reader does not know, and, despite the locals and school board having no tangible evidence of a wrong-doing, a case is opened. The book ends with Rose renouncing her citizenship:

Madame de Garance is finished

With the colonies.

With the Metropolis.

France down a woman.

Alright now

I cross the border.

Affirmative.

I cross the border.

                                                more to come?

Yes, a frame story of sorts, if you want to read it politically, which I’ve always wanted to. Absence preparing the way for absence. A possibly dead woman becoming a definitively self-exiling woman.

In Si (1964), the heroine takes it even further. Sick perhaps but also at odds with a medical institution that understands nothing of her body, Désira enumerates the reasons for her potential suicide. This time The Bessettian Woman reaches the point of orchestrating her renunciation of life itself, of creating her ultimate absence.

Even in Bessette’s first novel, Lili pleure (1953), the titular character is confronted with her own evaporation. The repeated refrain—Lili pleure—effectively reduces the young woman to a sole action: her cries. In maternA (1954), we begin in a Novel without scenery. / No decor. The novel itself shot out, and in La Grande balade and Le Bonheur de la nuit (even in the posthumously published Histoire du chien), the protagonists are not so much absent as structurally nomadic, changing locations and missions as much as names and afflictions.

Inside the play Le Divorce interrompu (1968), while of course not a novel, absence reels still. This time it is the husband, Helmut, who goes missing. Unable to accept that his wife is leaving him, he decides to act first, disappearing from the scene and thus depriving Delphine, his wife, of any certainty regarding her social status. Through his absence, the husband turns her life into a mistake.

In Ida ou le délire (1973), the final book to be published in Bessette’s lifetime, reproachful monologue from Madame Besson, Ida’s patroness, and an ominous tone to narrative fragments reveal in the first pages that the titular character, Ida—housemaid and social recluse—is already hollowed out, dead, following a traffic accident. The Bessettian Woman’s novelistic role then is left to the strange social autopsy of her survivors, a self-flagellating bourgeoisie, bent on reclaiming the violent language it projects onto others in order to absolve itself. Ida becomes a patchwork of monikers that dissimulate across the pages—Worrisome Ida, Automate Ida, Poet-Ida, New Icarus, Ida the Dream-Thrown, Ida True or Ida False, Ida Guilty of Poverty, Ida Desperados, The Monster-Ida, Soldier-Ida. Yes, Ida, obliterated muse of a mythomaniac community.

I could continue but these examples appear to me sufficient enough to demonstrate some of what Bessette accomplishes in inflicting absence—or heroic vacancy—as a social tension for her heroines in the narrative fabric of the poetic novel. Often, from the outset.

For Jean-Yves Tadié, the space of the poetic story—“le récit poétique”—is distinct from the realist novel in favoring a certain interiority in description, of anamorphic quality, a kind of birth in the negative space of the image, a sunken part of perception. For Bessette, the poetic novel is born of the sunken parts of the forms themselves—novel and poem both deflated of pageantry, of lyricization—a kind of structural deficit and linguistic subterfuge. A book born in perfidy. And this down to the punctuation—periods, dashes, and standard capitalization delighted in their discontinuity, invigorated by their own error. In her manifesto writings, newly assembled in 2021 as Les Résumés, Bessette draws our attention to Novel of Absence —“Roman du vide”—as a defining characteristic of her genre. She insists that a good book is a fury— “un bon livre est une colère.” I’m curious about how this fury, as the charge of a book for Bessette, leads to this narrative delinquency, and, yet, I feel any questioning of it somehow relegates me to the exact forces that would have ennobled The Bessettian Woman’s misconduct. And truly, I’d rather be her, or them. A part of the posse. I mean, gang.

So, what or who benefits from this Romanesque void that Bessette places at the center of her plot? Are we to read the entire book as a sufferance, of being under and chased by the rhetoric of an oppressor? What does one do with a book that lends itself to the monologue of the misogynist and not the woman who chose to leave? The speech of the inflated school board president and not the persecuted teacher? Who exactly are we as readers of Bessette’s Novel of Absence?

Well, firstly, we are readers, to whom Bessette imparts a formidable mission. Readers who must work diligently to escape the historical amnesia and capitalistic mires of the twentieth century.

Indeed, Bessette, rather famously among her followers, decried in her manifesto writings the lateness of literature to demand of itself a more innovative role. In years that gave way to Jean Dubuffet (a stark non-conformist himself and avid supporter of Bessette’s work) beginning his famous L’Hourloupe series or François Tusques recording his first album of “Free Jazz,” a literature that sated old palates would not do. She was keenly aware of the “open secret” to which the Republic daily submitted itself and berated journalists for their part in upholding it:

Lies mingle with this [journalistic] prose as a matter of interest, in social and sociological trade, a psychological gamble with the imagination. The newspaper is the glorification and apotheosis of these lies.

The carousel of the twentieth century French book shop, for Bessette, was not much better. She chides her contemporary readers for having a bit of milk on the chin as they cozy up to the old classics of new writers who aspire to be “little Prousts, the little Romains, the little Colettes…,” a social pillar that renews itself with a certain interchangeable sameness, even if with rigor and some psychological truths gained. She admonishes the Genevièves—of which she declares there are many—for their affection for “average bookish content” which does more to coddle than to inspire real intelligence. She derides the French Academy for touting superiority when they have in fact only excelled at “popularizing” scientific research topics. With all of her reprimand, Bessette is naturally skeptical of a story-ravenous public and sees many of the most famous French institutions as having colluded to instill such a desire just to prey on it.

“And if there’s one thing I disdain. It’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés.” writes Bessette in Suite Suisse (1965, releasing the same year as Garance Rose), a novel that, while founded on a kind of vacancy—a woman living an artistic exile in Switzerland that slowly reveals the stakes of her more dire economic and structural exile—restores a certain corporality to the lines of the Novel of Absence and The Bessettian Woman. In the original French, Bessette rhymes hais, the first-person present conjugation of “to hate” in French with Prés. It’s a perfect rhyme, ripe with the vitriol we search in Bessette’s oeuvre (if indeed we know it is there we should look, study). To achieve a perfect rhyme in English that maintains Bessette’s semantic constellation is quite difficult. A part of me would like to double-step in English verbs—writing both disdainand dismay—to catch links with Germain and Prés. But of course, this troubles the economy of her line. And yet, it is the linguistic regimes of translation practice that have led me to understand further what Bessette could be doing in evacuating, to put it dramatically, The Bessettian Woman from her novel. The Bessettian Woman is in fact the foreigner of her own book, of the paratextures—social and artistic. If she is disobedient, she is disobeying the auspices of a traditional readership.

“Because poetry, in the novel, doesn’t tell us what we already know about the character but what eludes us, is the element devoted to the analysis of the emotions propelling us like voice-over, speech that doesn’t really speak, muted voices, cries we don’t hear,” writes Doussinault at the end of his Preface to Les Résumés. When I digest his thoughts in light of The Bessettian Woman it is hard for me not to see her as poem itself, as the “what eludes us,” gone and telling you of that goneness.  In the very same manifesto writings that Doussinault introduces, Bessette underscores a part of her poetics and her insistence that the reader feel some purpose in her readership:

This cry not set to verse but recalling Poetry and consequently leaving a great deal of white space. Which troubles the frugal-minded. White space is eloquent as long as black and white are symmetrical. It is the flow of the ebb.

This pulsing this panting of the thought at work, of the absent mind upon thought as it seeks and resolves itself, this is the plume poised over the great depths to which readers are called to be sensitive. And to respond. The reader in turn must seek and resolve for herself.

These two observations seem to shed light on the way in which the absence or disarticulation of The Bessettian Woman is felt, pressed upon the novel, by Bessette’s reshaping of her page, of the sense of time and documentation the page has for so long held, to let, as if through printed-prism, the real humanity of her heroines seep through, disrupting oppressive, prosaic narration over their lives, that which would appropriate their stories.

When we read Ida, we don’t know much more than the narrator, a refrain Bessette’s narrators claim novel to novel. We know Ida stayed up late and watered her plants at unpleasing hours, to the great exasperation of Madame Besson. She spoke little but all the same had her fetish phrase: “I am a night owl.” In the hollowed-out day, Ida found her freedom and livelihood. And in a certain way, in death too. It is curious to me to consider if Bessette did not believe, even in regards to her own life, that a certain oblivion was the utmost liberty. In the sphere of Bessette, it’s hard for me not to see a kind of playful nihilism at work…

But to answer my own question, it seems to me that by fragmenting the conversation of this dominant or oppressive class, by writing a book in the rhythm of their most reprehensible thoughts, Bessette takes ownership of their prose as the crowd has so long taken ownership of ordinary people. She shatters their voice and transforms it into something else on her page-society. I therefore go on to wonder: doesn’t normative prose—the prose of this dominant class—push poetry to manifest itself as a form of rebellion or emancipation? A void into which we can meet ourselves and words anew?

Bessette’s poetic novel aims to play and to unsettle; it is not reducible to mere miserable ordeal. It also seeks to give pleasure—comedy! But perhaps, too, the pleasure of emancipation, of what can happen when we void their stare, not by taking up their tools but by shattering them, just as Audre Lorde went on to teach.

 





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