The wind picks up, a thunderstorm rumbles low on the horizon − then the surf speaks, quietly. These movements of the world form folds in the imagination ; they are at the basis of Julien Gracq’s literary aesthetic. This article, this reading of his novel Le rivage des Syrtes [The banks of the Syrtes], published in 1951, invites us to immerse ourselves again in this possibility of calling the world to the instinctual and conflictual source of the movement of introjection and projection. This to-and-fro movement is understood as a trace of the singular identificatory journey of Aldo, the hero of the story. I propose to explore some features of it through a variety of father figures, collective and individual, who converse in the shelter of repression, but whose whispers are displaced onto a world created with an eye and an ear seeking a metaphor − a hidden father perhaps.