At the End of Time: A Novel of the Fall?

The imagination of decadence has often inspired brilliant interpreters; here, three of them come to meet us (Anatole France, Alfred de Vigny, and Ernst Jünger), rich in their lost illusions, in their tenderness for a world already fading away, rich also in their errors, their suffering, and their rage. Their acute sense of dispossession inspired the pages that this study illuminates, by identifying parallels and variations, and by restoring to these figures of loss, oblivion, and fall the freshness of a first reading. The ideal of a vanished chivalry, the memory of an ancient wisdom, or the insurrectionary will for a "clean slate" nourish these historical and literary representations, and find constant and profound resonances in the philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Those who identify with the aphorisms of René Char and the novels of Julien Gracq will undoubtedly find here grounds to justify Martin Heidegger's ambiguous promise: "It is as a poet that Man inhabits the Earth."