ABSTRACT
Stendhal’s use of heteroglossia is also linked to the way of the mother. It is not only a means of giving voice to alterity, as does Louise Michel, but, in the first instance, an excursion into the ‘mother’ tongue, Italian, or a ‘masking’ by the use of code (in both senses of the word). Many male artists feel therefore impelled to play out a drama of feminisation. But, as the peoples will see in the cases of the poet Charles Baudelaire and the uncate-gorisable Jean-Paul Sartre, the access to the world of textual reproduction, which is lived as a dangerous loss of identity, a seductive polymorphism, may be compensated for by a symbolic, and even actual, refusal of biological reproduction. The original play on the word manquer, which is at once to be lacking and to be necessary, leads into the next narrative built on the case vide, one of the child Jean-Paul’s fictions.
