Le vide dans les rêves de Marguerite Yourcenar
The Void in Marguerite Yourcenarʼs Dreams

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on several dreams narrated by Marguerite Yourcenar, in which the writer herself identified certain recurring motifs that keep returning under all kinds of variations. Many of the dreams are oriented around a fantastic atmosphere, considering that the dreamer manifests a certain pleasure in remaining suspended inside virtuality. It is all about a feminine register, oriented towards the frame, towards the space – in its shape of an empty space, dissimulating the story of a content. Many of the spaces evoked in her works are connected to a past that is not explicitly rendered, the changes in the spatial configuration being accompanied by problematic fissures in the temporal continuum; the confusion between spaces, fueled by the sensation of transparency, comes back within the dreams presented. The dreamer character often seems to experience a certain struggle with the matter, the void betraying a need for communication – and hence the need to highlight one element of the landscape, most often by isolating it. The void is also experienced as a place where the feeling of plenitude emerges; this venture is associated with an impression of theatricality, as if the stage had been emptied right before the performance. The dreams displayed in this book mainly concern the movement and its frame, not simple settings. This results in a constitutive vacuum, capable of creating other spaces.

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