Abstract: The article assesses the obvious attention that Claude Simon pays, beginning with Le Sacre du printemps, to the irreducible distance between beings (as close as they are) as he also does to the impossible coincidence between words and things–and words and thoughts. The antagonism between different figures is expressed through the discordance of voices and inspires a poetics of diffraction. This poetics bears witness to the unprecedented evocative power of a novelistic language with which the dissonant material in this text is imbued.
