Election Night on the Brink: Power, Drugs, and Authorship in the Works of John Jefferson Selve

The sovereignty of intoxication: from the death of the child to the birth of writing

The novel depicts a France in a state of predicted doom: a Paris that merely imitates its own clichés, a "parody of a parody" where gentrification, the art market, and soulless decoration reflect an exhausted elite. Overarching everything is the electoral victory of the far right, a foregone conclusion from the very first page, which a cynically resigned capital accepts. The novel aims to show that power here functions not through prohibition, but through numbing: a drug distributed across the board with state tacit approval pacifies a youth "without horizons," while migrant and child suppliers are exploited as readily available "human matter"—a concept encapsulated in the unpunished death of the child drug dealer. Beneath this backdrop, the book reveals a deeper historical layer: the far right as the legacy of colonial violence, torture, and falsified memory, and a country where the repressed—race, class, death, faith—returns "from the gutters." At the same time, the novel refuses to adopt an accusatory stance, for it also holds its privileged, aestheticizing protagonists accountable for their complicity – and ultimately counters the political hopelessness with only a private, almost defiant gesture: the refusal to be numbed.

La matière humaine The novel takes place over a single weekend in 2027, on the eve of a presidential election that promises victory for the far right. It opens with Anthea, a young woman under the influence of ketamine and belladonna, sitting in the underground restroom of a Parisian club called "L'Endroit," staring at her reflection. While an impatient crowd waits outside, the words that give the novel its title form in her mind. Simultaneously, Saul, a failed writer turned to drug dealing out of bitterness, recounts the arrest of his supplier, a boy of about ten: seven police officers storm the building entrance, the child doesn't betray his customer, is taken away, and dies shortly afterward in the ambulance. This scene of guilt forms the traumatic core around which the novel's three voices—Anthea, Saul, and her older friend John—revolve.

The second part flashes back and primarily unfolds Saul's biography: his mother, who died young from an overdose; his cesarean section from a drug-addicted body; his stutter, which began at age ten; his only, failed novel; and his descent into the drug trade, which he pursues as revenge against the contemptuous cultural milieu. Interwoven is his first encounter with Anthea at a Black Bloc demonstration, from which a "primitive" friendship develops between two similarly isolated individuals. Also included is the portrait of John, an editor who disrupts art openings with a "bear dance" during the full moon and records his observations in a notebook called "Délivrances."

The third part takes us through the hours following the child's death. Saul wants to turn himself in but is overcome by intoxication; John disappears at dawn. Anthea reaches her lowest point: she climbs onto the tracks in the Métro to kill herself, is saved by chance—a blocked train—and by an angelic doppelganger, and then goes to the Lafayette Bridge, where, instead of jumping, she performs a backbend from her childhood gymnastics routine, which she says "grounds" her. She becomes sober for the first time in years and enters an inner state she calls her "fifth season."

The book concludes with two scenes of rebirth. In the titular bathing scene, Anthea and Saul wordlessly enter an ice-cold tub; their shared shivering becomes a "return to life," tears and water merging. In the final chapter, the two walk through migrant-dominated Paris as election results arrive and drug dealers send out special offers. Anthea announces the ending of her forthcoming book: the reversal of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a prayer instead of a cry of despair. The novel ends with her thrice-invoked “L’espoir”.

The title La matière humaine – “Human matter” – is programmatically ambiguous and embodies the novel’s fundamental conflict. It links the animate (“humaine”) to the available, the dead, the processable (“matière”), thus naming the process of dehumanization that the text demonstrates on several levels: The talking drug explicitly declares its users to be disposable material – “I’ll turn you into human matter.” ¹ —the migrant and child laborers become interchangeable material in a “uberized” economy, and the dead bodies in the Mediterranean, like the dead boy in the ambulance, are the literal “matter” from which history and the market derive their profit. At the same time, however, the title reverses this logic: In the imagined dance of Sartre and Bataille, “the only question of human matter” arises. ², and in the end, the drug laments being replaced by a “Camisole-monde” that is “far removed from all human matter” ³ operiere – here, “matière humaine” becomes the epitome of what contradiction, physicality, and presence still allow, against odorless annihilation. This tension is intensified by Anthea’s spelling “Matière/Humaine,” which “simply” comes to her: The slash simultaneously makes the two words opposites and a unity, transforming the title into a mise en abyme, for it is also the title of the book within the book that Anthea promises to write. Thus, she summarizes La matière humaine The central theme of the novel in two words: the reduction of man to numbed matter – and the attempt to extract from this very matter an awakening word, i.e., literature.

A central thesis of this essay is that La matière humaine The drug is staged not merely as a subject, but as a narrative and dominant force that challenges the sovereignty of human subjectivity—and the novel derives its poetics precisely from this power struggle between chemical anesthesia and creative attention. When the drug speaks for itself at the end of the first part with the words "Et je règne," this is not merely a rhetorical effect, but a narrative-theoretical claim: a non-human "matter" lays claim to the word, memory, and form. From this arise the guiding questions for the following reading: How does the polyphonic narrative perspective, linked to drug physiology, relate to the classical subject discourse of the novel? Which genre signals does the text evoke—urban novel, Künstlerroman, drug confession, apocalyptic fable—and how does it subvert them? To what extent do the spatial and temporal structure (the subterranean, circular Paris of a single election night) correspond to the semantic opposition of anesthesia and rebirth? And finally: How does the novel intertwine its autopoetological reflection on writing with a gender order in which female creation replaces male failure? The thesis is that the death of the child and the birth of writing in La matière humaine The same movement, read from two sides.

Polyphony under chemical pressure: genre, perspective, communication and construction

Hybridization of the genre: urban novel, artist novel, and post-apocalyptic fable

The novel defies categorization into any single genre, instead working with the overlapping of several. As a novel about a metropolis, it portrays a Paris that has become the backdrop for its own parody – a city that merely imitates its own clichés without grasping the impending catastrophe; Anthea calls it a "parody of parody." ⁴As an artist's novel, it traces the genesis of a female writer who develops her work Le Plan primitif only as a possibility. As a drug confession, he ultimately intertwines Saul's self-accusation with the voice of the drug. The signature of the end-times fable lies over these hybridizations: the recurring formula of the "last war" and the apocalyptic motifs (Ezekiel, the massacre of the innocent, the Book of Revelation) elevate private decay to a world-historical threshold. The mixing of genres is not arbitrary, but rather the formal correlate of a perception that has lost its stable orders—both those of genres and those of society.

A fourth, non-human voice: narrative perspective and its ruptures

The narrative structure is remarkable. The novel alternates between a third-person narrative about Anthea and first-person narratives from Saul's and Anthea's perspectives, with the transitions deliberately left unmarked and linked to the effects of drugs: mid-sentence, "knowing that" ⁵The perspective shifts in Saul's monologue. These cuts mimic the gliding of cocaine-fueled consciousness "from one world to another." The decisive break with convention, however, is the fourth voice: the speech "LA POUDRE," set in all caps or as a block. The drug not only narrates, it knows—it foretells Saul's eye cancer, claims authorship of the characters' encounter, and ascribes to itself the sovereignty denied to humans. With this, the novel shifts the question of focalization into the posthuman realm: the text's most knowledgeable instance is not a person, but a substance, a "matière humaine," which declares its consumers to be matter itself: "I make human matter out of you." ⁶ However, in the final passage of the third part, this sovereignty is itself relativized: The drug announces its replacement by a "nameless and odorless drug", a "Camisole-monde" – a consciousness "that banishes all contradiction" ⁷The ruling voice is aware of its own downfall.

Stuttering, text messaging, and a dictionary

Communication is in La matière humaine The novel is consistently disrupted, mediated, and thematically reflected upon. Saul's stutter is declared the primal scene of literature: literature begins "in the fear of not being heard," and speaking is a running headlong rush against walls, a walk to the scaffold. This physical rupture of spoken language contrasts with the digital written form of text messages, which structures the novel: quotations from Schwob, La Bruyère, Proust, and Baudelaire circulate as messages between the characters; emojis are examined "as if by an archaeologist"; and Anthea's condensed message "turespiresencore?"—without capital letters, without spaces—transforms breathlessness into orthography. A third form is the shared dictionary search (antidote), a "clinging to the meaning of words as to a mast," which the three characters employ as a ritual survival technique against the dissolution of language. Thus, the form of communication itself becomes the content: A society which, according to Saul, is “a monstrous conspiracy to avoid speaking,” finds its exact formal equivalent in fragmented, quotation-like, chemically accelerated exchange.

Circular structure and mirrored strands

The plot is not linear, but circular and mirrored. The novel begins and ends at The placeAnthea's text message at the end of the second part, "Et voilà, nous sommes à L'Endroit!", narratively leads back to the opening scene, so that the first part revolves around a self-contained night, which the second grounds in prehistory, and the third transcends. The three narrative threads—Anthea's path to suicide, Saul's night of guilt, John's disappearance—do not converge but remain parallel, meeting only in the digital simultaneity of the group chat. The constellation of characters is arranged around an axis of reflections: Anthea and Saul are "two identical solitarinesses," "skewed in the same way." ⁸The rescuing stranger on the tracks is Anthea's idealized doppelgänger; the dead child is Saul's dark mirror, for it has "exactly the same color" as him. John functions as a comic and tragic contrasting figure, whose ritual "bear dance" profanely repeats Sartre and Bataille's imagined dance scene. Above all stands the drug as a unifying force, creating and disintegrating all relationships.

Anesthesia in exchange for attention

Underworld and mirror: the spatial structure of a sunken city

The novel's space is organized vertically and katabatically. The opening situates Anthea "nine meters underground in the worst city in the world," in a toilet whose mirror is "dirtyed with artificial mercury stains to appear real." This underworld—cellar, sewers, metro tracks, grave—forms the axis of depth along which the characters descend. The sewers, from which "the repressed—sex, race, death, faith" resurfaces, represent the political image of this space: what the surface of the gentrified capital denies returns from below. This corresponds to the recurring metaphor of mirrors and reflections: the surveillance screen image in the toilet, the shop windows of the demonstration, the window front at dawn, the telephone that no longer recognizes Anthea's face. The only ascent is ultimately achieved via two threshold spaces – the bridge and the bathtub – where the katabatic movement transforms into an anabatic one, a rebirth.

Election night as world time: the temporal structure between standstill and threshold

The narrative time is condensed into roughly twenty-four hours, yet its experience is stretched and hollowed out. "For you, time no longer exists," the drug explains; time is "a video artwork in a trendy underground toilet." Subjective and objective duration diverge: "Two hours later, three minutes for her"—drug physiology replaces the clock. Over this suspended private time, the novel superimposes the historical threshold of choice, present as a "hammer blow" on every street corner. The two temporal orders converge at the end when Saul understands "in his flesh" that the child has been "dead for twenty-four hours," while the crowd cheers "a name among names." Private grief and political catastrophe coincide in the same instant—the threshold of night releases the characters not into salvation, but into an open, threatened present.

Anesthesia, Dance and Sacred

The novel's semantics are organized around the tension of its title. "Human matter," as explained above, connects the material, the available, the dead with the human, the animate—and is evoked both by the drug (which reduces people to matter) and in the imagery of mass graves and the "human puddle" of waiting users. Three key metaphors permeate the text. First, anesthesia: ketamine as a "graveyard for the mind," the drug as "anointing," as an "extreme refraction of despondency." Second, dance as a figure of wordless, corporeal thought—in the imagined duel between Sartre and Bataille, in John's "bear dance," in the "dance epidemic" that arises in Saul's mind when he stutters. Thirdly, the sacred: The child becomes the "Son of God" and the "Charogne" Christ figure according to Huysmans; attention, according to Weil, is "the same as prayer," and the final scene rises to the "seventh day of creation." These sacralized realms stand in contrast to the devaluing language of markets and platforms—"Safari. Amazon. Meta. Alphabet."—whose "permanent bitterness of falsehood" is on Anthea's tongue. The metaphor thus carries the fundamental conflict: chemical numbing and market-driven datafication versus an almost religious concentration that appears as the last human possibility.

Four Simons and the Reversal of the Gender Order

Gender is a structural element in the novel. Saul embodies a male creative impotence: he has written only one failed book, deals drugs instead of writing poetry, and delegates his hope to Anthea, "because she will do what I haven't understood how to do." Drugs mock the "fifty-year-old man sniffing" and the men's nightly "moi, moi, moi" monologues "until they can't get it up anymore." In contrast, female creation and bodily sovereignty are celebrated: Anthea's sexual self-determination, her MMA training, her rejection of the lustful old publisher. Her self-interpretation culminates in the vision of the four Simones: she wants to be a "fourth Simone," alongside Simone Weil (the saint), Simone de Beauvoir (the theorist of becoming a woman), and Simone from Bataille. Histoire de l'œil (of the transgressive) – “a fourth Simone, like a fourth cross erected on Golgotha”, “a cross that does not place the son at its center” ⁹The gender order of the novel thus amounts to a replacement: The male sacrificial institution – Saul calls himself “not sacrificed, but the one who sacrifices” ¹⁰ – is overwritten by a female authorship that takes on the legacy of guilt, “but whose hand will know no fear”.

Attention as a form

The novel explicitly develops its poetics from within the plot itself and is highly autopoetological. Writing is repeatedly defined: as "letting back the dead pieces of flesh" that shook the decadent; as "mixing death and life and dividing them into moments" (according to Schwob); as working on "the least of speech." The drug's admonition to Anthea is simultaneously the novel's self-instruction: not archive and psychology, but physicality—"Be raw and powerful." ¹¹This aesthetic of crudité, of stark sexual and physical directness, is understood by Saul "as much as morality as salvation." Its poetics, however, is Weilian attention: "Concentration must be my spine," says Anthea under the cedar tree. The novel we read is thus the paradoxical proof of its own thesis: it is the book that Saul could not write and that Anthea promises to write—a work that reclaims attention from within anesthesia. The titular phrase "Matière/Humaine," which comes to Anthea "just like that," is simultaneously a title within the work and a self-designation of the text: a mise en abyme in which the novel circles its own origin.

Conrad, Weil and Joy Division: intertextual and intermedial references

Hardly a paragraph goes by without a reference; the network of references is dense and functional. Two poles dominate the literary landscape: on the one hand, transgressive modernism (Bataille, Sartre, Huysmans, Bukowski, Conrad), and on the other, the ethical-mystical tradition surrounding Simone Weil, whose pronouncements on attention, justice, and unhappiness recur as leitmotifs. The concluding point is an overtly marked intertextual reversal: Anthea's book is meant to be "the opposite of Heart of Darkness“To Kurtz’s ‘L’horreur, l’horreur’, a triple ‘L’espoir’ is answered. She consciously rejects the duller-sounding ‘espérance’ – the choice of words itself becomes a poetics decision. Intermedially, the novel invokes pop music as a memory of emotions (Joy Division, Nick Cave, Talk Talk, Bauhaus), cinema as a reservoir of images (Méliès’s moon-faced ‘A Trip to the Moon’ as an ‘ancestor of our little icons,’ ‘ET,’ Ferrara), and contemporary visual art, which it simultaneously quotes and critiques: The exhibition ‘NEN’ with rotating racialized bodies on black marble and the panels inscribed with the names of victims of police violence demonstrate the aestheticization of suffering, which the novel itself seeks to break through.” The intermedial references are therefore not part of the diagnosis: A culture that only recognizes itself in filters, stories and smileys is supposed to regain a presence in the literary word that the "datafication of the world" has taken away from it.

Repression through anesthesia: the political diagnosis of the novel

The announced election as a doomed horizon: The Navy and the “moral state of emergency”

La matière humaine It is a political novel because politics is not a mere theme alongside others, but rather the foundation of the experiential horizon of every single scene. The presidential election is not the goal of the plot, but a predetermined fate: the victory of "Marine"—always referred to only by his first name, which makes the character both familiar and ghostly—is "foreshadowed" from the very first page and further darkens "the dark faces." ¹²The novel thus does not tell the story of the struggle for a decision, but rather the atmosphere of the aftermath within the before – a city that is under a “moral, identity-related state of emergency” and in which the election strikes “like a hammer blow on every street corner”. ¹³This omnipresence combined with its lack of consequences is itself a political statement: The capital city "would vote as it should, without believing in it." ¹⁴Liberalism appears as an exhausted, cynical gesture that has nothing to offer in the face of the identitarian shift – a choice between “plague and cholera”, as the drug sneers.

From the legacy of torture to oligarchy: the extreme right as a historical deep layer

The novel treats the extreme right not as a sudden event, but as the culmination of a long trend. Saul himself marks the crucial distinction: "It is not the people I accuse, but this oligarchy without any decency towards them." ¹⁵The party is defined by its genealogy – “built on heritage and glorious, falsified memory”, on “the yearning for the colonies”, the “Gégène”, the “summary executions” and “torture in every direction”. ¹⁶The father's name – Saul's childhood was "shaped by violence," and "his daughter will continue it" – links the personal biography of the "métis" with the colonial history of violence in France. Remarkably, there is no nostalgia: Anthea and Saul know that "things were hardly better before." ¹⁷The novel suggests that this "gradual slide" into the present has a prehistory. It thus resists the temptation to portray the extreme right as a break with a pristine past; it reads it as a truth returning "from the gutters"—alongside "sex, race, death, faith," also "tomorrow in the polling stations." ¹⁸.

Drug distribution as a governmental technique: repression instead of prohibition

The novel's most radical political thesis is that power functions not through prohibition, but through supply. Since "Marine or her epigones" are soon to be in power, "repression seems to operate through the mass distribution of drugs." ¹⁹The parallel economy is "a sovereign ministry unto itself." The previous presidents—referred to in the text by their first names, "Nicolas, François, Emmanuel"—had allowed it to continue unchecked. Anesthesia becomes biopolitics: A youth that knows itself to be "without a horizon" and is chemically sedated poses no threat. The drug itself articulates the connection as both a threat and a triumph—it is "stronger than your elections, more stable than your votes." ²⁰ and establishes itself “more securely than a far-right party in the West” ²¹The rhetorical question "Plus l'élection approche, plus vous sniffez" (The closer the election, the deeper the collective numbness) definitively intertwines the two levels: the closer the political upheaval, the deeper the collective numbness. Election and intoxication are not opposites, but two states of the same resignation.

Race, class, and the sacrificed child: the politics of visible bodies

The political dimension is embodied in the body of the dead child and in the "Uberization" of drug dealing. Migrants whose papers are confiscated "rent" delivery jobs, while Parisians demand "service on all floors"—"whether tacos or coke, it works the same." The death of the child's delivery man exposes the entanglement of race and class: Saul, himself "métis," survives by virtue of his social position, while the child, barely removed from the bourgeois apartment building, was "already nothing to anyone." The police officers appear as "hoplites of the state," their violence "validated by the authoritarian French poison and its identitarian drive to inflict pain." ²²The NEN exhibition, with its rotating racialized bodies on black marble and the panels bearing the names of real victims of police violence, makes this politics of visibility both an image and a problem, because it demonstrates how the cultural milieu aestheticizes and commodifies the very suffering it politically laments. The novel itself considers this complicity and thus avoids the pose of a mere accuser.

Engagement without a program: the self-criticism of the privileged view and the gesture of hope

Especially because La matière humaine Being political, he rejects the thesis novel. His sharpest criticism is directed at his own protagonists. He condemns Anthea and Saul for their "dandyish romanticism of fools," for their privileged deafness to the suburban youth who "pierce their hearts with a screwdriver" to supply them; in the "last war you long for," they would be "on the wrong side." ²³The appeal to Sartre and the concept of "engagement" is thus both invoked and satirized: political discourse without political action is itself the subject of suspicion in the novel. Saul's bewildered self-examination in the face of impending defeat is telling – "What will we do if the far right wins tonight? We'll wait and see, as always." ²⁴ —to which he can only offer a single, memorized sentence by Simone Weil: that justice consists in “the scales never tipping in favor of strength.” The novel’s political response is thus not a strategy, but an attitude: the “secret society” of friends who want to fight “to the bitter end,” and the concluding “Hope,” which is explicitly not meant as naive consolation, but as a stand against the resignation of an election night in which the crowd cheers “one name among names” while a dead child goes unmourned. Politics here appears as what remains of it after the loss of all political hope: the refusal to be numbed.

Conclusion: The death of the child and the birth of writing as a movement

La matière humaine This is a novel of a double birth from anesthesia. The thesis of the dominant drug – “Et je règne” – is not refuted across the three parts, but rather surpassed: The drug proves correct in its diagnosis of a numbed, datafied present, overtaken by the “last war,” yet it simultaneously heralds its own downfall, and it is precisely in this self-relativization that the narrow crack opens through which the characters escape. Anthea does not descend into death, but into the “fifth season” of sobriety; Saul does not wallow in self-pity, but plunges into the icy bath that fuses tears and water into “the one solution.” The novel's formal point lies in the fact that this rescue is not a reconciliation with the world—the far right wins, the child remains dead, the city sinks—but a rescue into form: into attention, which Weil equates with prayer, and into authorship, which Anthea assumes as a "fourth Simone." The death of the child-supplier and the birth of the writer prove to be one and the same movement, read from two perspectives: the sacrifice that Saul fails to deliver becomes the ground from which Anthea draws her work. When the novel concludes with the shouted "Hope, Saul, Hope," it is not a naive consolation, but a poetics-based assertion against the sovereignty of the material: the claim that a word can still emerge from human matter, a word that does not numb, but awakens.

On the street, in front of the ambulance with the dead child, the city "sweats," water rises from the manhole covers "not in waves, but in bursts, like a gag reflex," and Saul's former publisher remarks that the sewers were "the most beautiful thing the capital possessed." From this, the text develops its central image: "The people rummage through what the elite no longer even deign to urinate on. Everything repressed—sex, race, death, faith—returns through the gutters, and perhaps tomorrow to the polling stations." Here, the psychoanalytic concept of repression is translated into an urban geography: The surface—the gentrified, decorated, curated capital—denies four realities that it cannot integrate (sexuality, ethnic conflict, mortality, religion), and these are precisely what are pushing their way back up from below, from the sewer system.

Why these four in particular? The list "sex, race, death, faith" is no coincidence, but rather names the taboo zones of a secular-liberal, market-driven superficial culture that the novel consistently criticizes: a world of filters, stories, and "datafication" that represses the physical, the conflictual, the finite, and the sacred. The point of this passage lies in the equation of the sewer and the ballot box: what the elite has pushed underground returns politically as a voice. The rise of the right thus appears as a symptom of repression—the anger simmering in the gutter finds its outlet at the polling station. In this way, the novel connects its two movements: the historical depths (the unaddressed colonial legacy) and the repressed present (race, class, death, faith) are the same material that, long kept beneath the smooth surface, now bursts to the surface.

The novel deliberately withholds the election result, and derives its power from this withholding. Although the entire plot builds towards election night, no result is ever mentioned—no percentage, no winner's name. In the final chapter, the results arrive only as sound and vibration: Anthea's hand feels "the phone vibrating incessantly" in Saul's pocket, then "the murmuring swells all around," and finally "a cry breaks out" ("Puis une clameur déferle"). Saul simply says, "Look, those must be the results." The information itself is omitted—the novel stages the result as noise, not as news.

The only concrete detail is a calculated omission: “the crowd cheers one name among the names” (“la foule acclame un nom parmi les noms”). This formula denies identification and accomplishes two things simultaneously. First, it presents the obvious interpretation—Marine’s announced victory, “annoncée” from the outset—as the fulfillment of fate without explicitly stating it. Second, it places the cheered-upon “name” in bitter tension with the other “names” of the novel: the real victims of police violence listed on the NEN boards and the nameless dead child. At precisely this moment, “Saul believes in his flesh that the child has been dead for twenty-four hours,” and Anthea says: “C’est pour lui”—“This is for him.” The cheering for a political name and the unheard grief for a dead man coincide; the point is that the crowd is celebrating the wrong person.

Instead of a result, the novel presents images. First, that of the market: parallel to the "clameur" (a chorus of praise), messages from dealers arrive—"a gram for €30, exceptional evening"—and Saul formulates the economic law that replaces the political one: "The more a society struggles to feed itself, the more the price of drugs falls." The "carnival-like pandemonium of the promotional drug" merges with fireworks and mortars, so that election night and collective numbness become indistinguishable—the political decision appears as a mere continuation of the intoxication by other means. Second, the acoustic image of the "long cry, almost a whale song, before it washes ashore" ("un long cri, presque un chant de baleine avant qu'elle ne s'échoue"), which tips the jubilation into the elegiac, into the image of a dying animal. Thirdly, the apocalyptic-biblical framing: black puddles "like orcas," the feeling of standing "on the seventh day of creation," the world will "give birth to a spectre." The election result is thus staged not as a date, but as a moment of creation and destruction.

This omission is consistent: since Marine's victory is a foregone conclusion from the very first page, and the city "votes as it should, without believing it," announcing the result would be redundant. By leaving the outcome unmentioned and instead contrasting it with the indifferent "We'll wait, as always" and Anthea's threefold "L'espoir" (Hope), the novel shifts the focus from the political outcome to the subsequent attitude. The true "result" of the night is not the election result, but the two characters' decision to refuse the sedative—the election in the book becomes a backdrop against which another, private choice takes place.