L'Anorexie créatrice

A turn-of-the-century pathology — just as hysteria was before it — anorexia fascinates even as it reaches epidemic proportions. Nonetheless, excessive fasting has always existed, as biblical tales and contemporary testimonies have shown. As the affirmation of a denial, a quest for the sacred, or an internal experience of the void, anorexia has been the prey of so much discourse as to assume mythological status. The emaciated body is its dead metaphor. Now that medical arguments are nearly exhausted, literature offers new interpretations by way of the figurations of it presented by the authors.Anorexia and writing are two ways of exploring one's limits. Whether a driving force, a cure, or a consequence of anorexia, the act of writing is intimately associated with it. These two practices are so curiously intertwined as to make anorexia appear to be a writing pathology. This tour of literature, from its fasting champions to its self-starvation artists ranging from Kafka to Gide — not to mention Byron, the Bronte sisters, and Woolf — allows the author to define a « semiotics of anorexia » : what we will call here « writing size zero ». By endowing anorexia with the meaning it lacked, writing has also bestowed upon the latter its own code of ethics.Isabelle Meuret teaches English at Université libre de Bruxelles. She has published numerous articles on the topic of anorexia in twentieth-century literature, as well as a book, Writing Size Zero : Figuring Anorexia in Contemporary World Literatures.