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Hector Bianciotti's 1988 novel, Seule les larmes seront comptées (Only Tears Will Be Counted), is examined in this article. Bianciotti, who may not be well known to American readers, was born in 1930 in Argentina, of Piedmontese parents, and has lived in France since 1960, thus being trilingual. He became a master of the French language and eventually a member of the Académie Française. At first, he wrote in Spanish, but came to adopt French for his writing because of his preference for the structure and exactness of the language.
Analysts have frequently examined issues of loss and death, as well as the response of the subject in the face of such trauma, but Bianciotti, in a more personal manner, chose to write a novel about these themes. The novel opens with the startling sentence, “My mother is dead tomorrow.” Tomorrow will come only at the end of a tragedy, in the course of which a succession of scenes and situations are put into place, oedipal scenes that permit the elaboration of the trauma of the loss. The time of the novel embraces the time for the acquisition of reality. Tomorrow comes in thirty years, and those thirty years represent the lapse of time necessary for the narrator to put to death the death of his mother, without further sheltering himself behind screen memories that, in their manner, are already parodies of the act of putting to death. Thus, the novel, as a vast anal exercise, is a fantasied manipulation of the representation of the object, offering the possibility of keeping the object, of expelling it, of partially destroying it, or of introjecting it. In the novel, even from its opening sentence, a temporality comes into play in which time (past/present/future) is invaded and disorganized by grief. “My mother is dead, tomorrow, the sixteenth of October, thirty years ago,” gives way to, toward the end of the novel, the following restatement: “My mother died on the sixteenth of October thirty years ago”—a sentence that repositions the event i