ABSTRACT
The previous chapter explored the personalization of religious narratives in novels by Ben Jelloun and Maalouf against the backdrop of readings of sacred scripture that are used to generate a strong sense of collective identity. This is expressed throughout both novels using the motif of a withdrawn book. A search for the book leads far and wide, but its contents always remain withheld. Thus whilst the book guides protagonists’ movements and shapes their personal destinies, it does not impart textual information, suggesting that divine wisdom is better discovered through experience than read from a book. Following on from this, I will examine here the motif of vanishing people in Georges Perec’s La Disparition and Assia Djebar’s La Disparition de la langue française. Both novels feature characters who disappear and are thus made absent from the text. They are evoked through the sense of silence they leave behind. I will interpret these motifs of vanishing bodies and silence in both novels through philosopher Jean-Luc Marion’s understanding of silence as an ultimate expression of the divine. Marion argues that the divine remains beyond any attempts at codification or representation, and that silence is the best way to conceive of the divine as distance and withdrawal. Both the novels of Djebar and Perec present multiple languages and codes. The introduction of each new language or code suggests the imperfection and incompletion of the others at work in the texts. The more of these employed, the greater the emphasis on a lacuna that exceeds them all. In this way, both novels foreground a tension between a need to speak and to fill a silence, and an awareness that this silence cannot be filled. Marion’s silence, which lies beyond all systems of code and logic is theistic, affirming the divine, unlike the excess evoked in the writing of Meddeb and Nancy. Indeed, for Marion, the idea of the divine as silence defies the possibility of it being argued or explained away. This will allow for a reading of withdrawal in the novels of Perec and Djebar as affirmative of a divine that cannot be inscribed.
