Silence and poetry in Gustave Flaubert - A study of La 'Tenatation de saint Antoine'

To the somewhat stiff image of Flaubert the novelist, one should maybe give the counterpart of Flaubert the poet by showing beyond his irony, a silenc e seeker. Actually, the connected reading of Blanchot's works and La tentat ion de saint Antoine allows to catch a glimpse of a silence that grounds th e entire work, that makes it possible and is its condition. However, throug h this silence, the words tend to merge in the original "nothing to say," t he impossibility of the literary works, which, according to Blanchot, only reaches actual existence by vanishing.