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The “Short Novels” of Jean de Palacio: Forms and Ordeals of Sensitivity
Abstract
This article offers a synthetic reading of Jean de Palacio’s seven novellas through the concept of sensitivité, understood not as an emotional disposition but rather as an ontological vulnerability and a formal principle of writing. Rather than viewing these fictional texts as stylistic “à la manière” of fin-de-siècle literature (a field that nonetheless shaped Jean de Palacio’s research and teaching), this article identifies a deeper, shared source, grounded in a common sensitivity to decline, fragmentation, and the erosion of time.
Sensitivité emerges through a poetics of porosity, silence and variation, in which music, writing and image form an interconnected system of echoes. Wounded female figures, the motif of the exposed heart, aborted concert performances, and endangered books imbue these texts with an aesthetic of lack and incompletion. Free from narrative pathos, this elegiac writing reflects on time, separation, and the precarious persistence of meaning. Variation thus appears not as a mere formal device, but as the very governing principle of this writing.
Keywords:
Palacio, sensibility, vulnerability, doubling principle, variation, poetics of lossDetails
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.