Penser la timidité comme énergie littéraire.

Abstract

To think of shyness as a literary energy in Philippe Vilain's work is to connect with thetroubled experience of the white space between letters, words and sentences, as well as with the margins. The emptiness, the mute places that cross the pages, offer the possibility for other words to insert themselves, to take their place in what is not expressed, but wants
to be said. For if Philippe Vilain fills this void, biographizing himself in his work, where couples separate and drift apart, between secrets and silences more or less asserted, the writer Annie Ernaux, who was his companion, regularly introduces it in several of her works. Philippe Vilain, now the ghost of a life, a reserved, mysterious man as he defines himself, manages in spite of himself to appear in pages foreign to him. Pages written by a woman writer, who brings him back to life from time to time. It's an unsettling, mirror-like experience, and an interesting way of understanding the extent to which shyness can thwart certain predictions of self-effacement, which is what shy people aspire to.