Philippe Vilain ou la logique du rêve

Abstract

Love is a Janus bifrons. On one side, love is a deliberate choice of attitude and behaviour. On the other side, it involves an involuntary part of ourselves: passion and affect. Philippe Vilain’s literary expression unites those two sides of love in the synthetic pattern of a waking dream. This dream is both passively felt and the result of the intense activity of imagination. The choice of a past tense (“imparfait”) corresponds to this dreamy mood in his novels. Thus, Vilain’s literary expression points up two fundamental problems of love. First, love appears to be the result of chance or arbitrary circumstances that make two people come across one other, and, it would appear, two free persons choosing one another. Nevertheless, intense love is felt as a fatality, opposite to chance. Secondly, love is always
real, because it is undeniably felt. But this feeling is often nurtured by illusions.