ABSTRACT
The first Latin American writer elected to the Acadmie Franaise, at the beginning of 1997, after four novels and countless articles written in French, he has come well prepared for partaking in the eternal task of revising the dictionary of the French language. Octavio Paz has observed that Bianciotti's use of the language is natural, elegant, without archaism or liberties, free of expressionism and affectation, French that does not belong to any one region but rather to literary tradition. As a literary critic, Bianciotti has occupied a comparable position: mostly treating the work of foreigners. In effect, Bianciotti the writer traces to such moments his appreciation of form, order, limits, style, as an antidote to the dizzying emptiness of the plains; not for the sake of an external set of rules, but rather in the ever-renewed practice of divining what the material itself will allow, the material being first of all language.
