L’œuvre-trace, questionnement de la présence dans les récits d'Antonio Tabucchi, Peter Handke et Pierre Péju

The trace can be defined as the tangible relic which provokes confusion in theobserver’s mind by revealing a form of absent presence. The narratives of Antonio Tabucchi,Peter Handke and Pierre Peju, three writers born in the 1940s in countries – Italy, Austria and France – that collaborated with Nazi Germany, are filled with an anxiety which is historical aswell as it is ontological, and display the various forms of the spectral presence of the trace. Butthis spectral presence, which classically entails a distressing feeling of dispossession, also manifests the emergence of a new world which is physically perceived as it reveals itself. It is successively an epiphany, the revelation of an original advent, and the return of past spectres,and more particularly those of the Second World War. Through its themes, diegesis and stylisticchoices, the narrative as trace thus conveys an ethical injunction. It discloses the importance of atwofold responsibility: the historical legacy of the 20thcentury’s ashes, and the ontologicalrequest of accepting a present without certainty, that can only be apprehended through the verybreach that constitutes it. The narrative as trace thereby becomes the literary representation of asplit state of being, everlastingly wounded and ultimate condition of the coming future; and the heuristic pursuit, by rejecting any possibilities of assertion, concurs with the reasoning ofsceptical philosophy. Understanding can only be approached in an asymptotic way, trace ofwhat has been and sketched glimmer of what will be.