Song of Songs without witnesses: Patrick Autréaux

Patrick Autréaux' L'Époux (2025) is a quiet, existentially intense novel that begins with the civil wedding of two men. A ritual intended as a sign of social recognition becomes an experience of radical isolation: through the conspicuous absence of their families, one geographically distant, the other ideologically and religiously opposed. The narrator observes his partner's tears; in that moment, years of silence, conformity, and suffered rejection are unearthed. From this moment onward, the text unfolds a multifaceted retrospective in which a homosexual love story intertwines with biographical wounds, illness, and a profound spiritual quest. Central to this is the Jewish background of the partner's family, whose history is marked by the Holocaust, expulsion, and exile, and whose traumatic experiences culminate in religious rigidity and the rejection of the relationship. Autréaux shows how these collective wounds poison familial bonds and breed silence, erasure, and exclusion. In its engagement with the Song of Solomon and the work of Edmond Jabès, the novel develops a poetics of absence, silence and exile, in which the body of the beloved becomes the place of the sacred. L'Époux It reads like a modern hymn of praise, combining the intimate story of a homosexual love with the burden of Jewish memory and sketching a fragile but persistent transcendence – “coming out of the desert, as one comes from beyond memory”.

The civil wedding ceremony is the only clearly datable contemporary scene in the novel. Its starkness contrasts with the emotional force it unleashes for the couple. The absence of their families is more than a mere social detail: it marks a void, one charged with religious, cultural, and genealogical significance. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, marriage is a public, communally sanctioned union. Here, however, it remains without witnesses. Love stands literally without a legacy. The partner's tears are not merely an expression of personal hurt, but rather the culmination of a historical experience of homosexual love: to have loved without recognition, to have lived without blessing. The wedding thus becomes a paradoxical moment in which intimacy and publicity fail to converge. From this point, the novel branches out into several interwoven narrative threads.

Biographical narrative thread

In The husband Three essential dimensions of human experience are woven into a dense, polyphonic narrative that transcends a mere love story. The groom's tears during the ceremony trigger years of suppressed memories in the first-person narrator and the need to break the "silence of years" through writing. From this focal point, the biographical thread unfolds a merciless analysis of the past. The narrator looks back on a previous, toxic relationship with a lover he calls "Casanova." This liaison was characterized by violence, nihilism, and a superficial greed, which the narrator retrospectively describes as a "second loss of virginity," as it destroyed his "enchanted solitude" and his inner dialogue. In parallel, the novel illuminates deep-seated wounds from his parents' "divorce war," in which the narrator was forced to assume the role of a "makeshift therapist" from an early age. Particularly formative is the realization of his lack of paternal love; His father once confessed to him that he had not been wanted as a child, which intensified his feeling of existential rootlessness.

A central pillar of this biography is the overcoming of a serious cancer diagnosis at the age of thirty. The experience of chemotherapy, which the couple had already endured together years earlier during a civil partnership in New York, permanently marks the narrator's body as a site of both fragility and healing. In this context, writing becomes an act of survival that transcends mere medical recovery. The body is not cataloged anatomically in the novel, but poetically: the narrator describes the scars and aging not as flaws, but rather as testimonies to a shared history.

Amidst this wreckage of the past, the love story unfolds as a slow, almost meditative approach between two men. Its dynamic is characterized by a peculiar balance of intense physical presence and a respectful, taciturn silence. The partner, whose name is never mentioned in the text, provides the narrator with an unshakable anchor and a safe haven. Autréaux sacralizes this relationship in the form of a modern hymn, celebrating love in all its phases: from youthful impatience through the feverish bouts of illness to the acceptance of the aging body. This unconditional affection allows the narrator to retain a sense of the infinite, even though he has lost his traditional faith in God.

The narrative arc spans a wide geographical area, from their first encounters in Paris through travels to Israel and Spain to their shared exile in the USA. In New York, the couple witnesses the collapse of the Twin Towers, an event that reflects the historical fragility of the world and underscores their personal search for peace in an unstable modern world. The love between the Christian narrator and his Jewish partner thus becomes a "place of reconciliation" between different cultures and traumas, offering a human warmth in the face of the world's "nothingness."

Family-religious narrative thread

Here, literature becomes a bridge across the abyss of familial rejection. Since the narrator, due to his background and identity, will never be fully integrated into his partner's family, he chooses the path of intellectual and emotional affinity. He "becomes Jewish" by sharing the experience of exclusion and exile through reading Jewish authors (such as Singer or Roth). Reading is thus not a passive pastime, but an active spiritual exercise in empathy and justice.

The familial and religious narrative thread in Patrick Autréaux's novel "L'époux" unfolds as a painful chronicle of rejection, described as a years-long "cold war" between the couple and the partner's Jewish parents. This conflict began fifteen years earlier with their son's coming out in Paris—a moment that plunged the parents into a profound identity crisis and triggered a series of denials, misunderstandings, and condemnations. For the parents, whose family history is marked by traumatic experiences such as the Holocaust and their expulsion from Egypt, their son's homosexuality and his relationship with a non-Jew represent an unacceptable break with tradition.

The partner's mother, in particular, reacts to the perceived shame with a radicalization of her religious practice. This newfound piety is characterized in the novel as an "acidic bandage" ("pansement acide")—a bitter form of spiritual consolation that does not serve healing but rather is used to brand her son's homosexual identity as a fundamental failure to follow the Torah. In her logic, the catastrophe of her son's "deviation" is a consequence of a lack of biblical fidelity, which is why she seeks refuge with strict rabbis and attempts to atone for the "problem" through stricter adherence to Jewish rituals.

This systematic rejection manifests itself in a cruel, symbolic erasure of the narrator from the collective family memory: the narrator's name is almost never spoken in conversation; he is reduced to a "scandal-bringer" and a "ghost" who has no place in his parents' house. The narrator is consistently excluded from family photographs or even retrospectively "erased" from visual memory, so that he is treated as virtually non-existent in the minds of his relatives. In an almost ritualistic purification, the mother removes all works from her library that are not by Jewish artists or do not explicitly deal with Jewish themes, including books on interreligious dialogue.

This years-long strategy of silence and "swallowing down" the unspoken ("ravaler les non-dits") reaches its emotional climax in the parents' demonstrative absence from the civil wedding ceremony. While the registrar solemnly speaks of their acceptance into the family circle, the couple's actual isolation is painfully evident in the empty chairs in the hall. Only through the intervention of a wise aunt, who strategically reveals other queer family members ("Sodom and Gomorrah"), does the narrator finally manage to curb his resentment and understand the rejection as part of a complex, wounded family history, which he attempts to heal through writing.

The silence in L'Époux Silence is not merely an expression of speechlessness; it is also a conscious ethical stance. Autréaux develops a poetics in which silence acts as a protective space within the relationship. Particularly in scenes of physical intimacy, it becomes clear that words could be perceived as an intrusion—as an attempt to define the unavailable. The partner's silence is of particular significance here. It points to a history of survival, to intergenerational experiences of persecution, loss, and discretion. The narrator learns not to interpret or fill this silence, but rather to respect it as it is.

Poetically, this silence corresponds to the text's structure itself: short paragraphs, elliptical transitions, semantic gaps. Autréaux doesn't write against silence; he writes with it. The text preserves zones of indeterminacy in which readers can linger.

Intellectual and spiritual quest

The intellectual and spiritual odyssey of the narrator in The husband Another narrative thread presents a radical quest that transcends the loss of traditional Christian faith and culminates in a profound engagement with Jewish thought and literature. Driven by the central question of how to preserve a sense of the infinite without believing in a dogmatic God, the protagonist utilizes biblical archaeology and evolutionary biology as tools for intellectual immunization against religious prohibitions. By exposing the Bible, through scientific insights, as a heterogeneous, man-made mosaic of legends and fragments, he liberates himself from the moral burden of dogma and shifts the sense of the sacred into the immanence of human connection and the safe haven of marriage.

This intertextual discourse, which structures the novel as a poetic-theological space for reflection, finds its anchor particularly in the engagement with the work of Edmond Jabès and with the biblical Song of Songs. Jabès's "Book of Questions" forms a "navel of love" and a portal to Judaism, enabling the narrator to understand emptiness not as a threat, but as a space of freedom and "knowing ignorance." In the intertwining of sensual praise of the beloved—which characterizes the work as a "new Song of Songs"—and the intellectual deconstruction of religious teleology, Autréaux designs a modern form of spirituality in which writing itself becomes an act of survival and the only possible form of redemption.

Blaise Pascal and his Pansies These elements form a central philosophical anchor point in the novel, structuring the narrator's existential anxiety and spiritual emptiness. The famous quote about the "eternal silence of these infinite spaces" serves as a leitmotif throughout the book, reflecting the narrator's turmoil as he tries to maintain a sense of infinity while losing his traditional faith. The anecdote, mentioned several times in the novel, about Pascal, who throughout his life saw an abyss ("gouffre") to his left and placed a chair in front of it to reassure himself, becomes a central metaphor for the protagonist's struggle with his own suicidal crises and metaphysical groundlessness. Pascal is not portrayed as a comforter; he is an "unyielding, doubting spirit" and a "friend" in the darkness, who does not alleviate the pain of being human through dogma, but rather makes it habitable through enduring paradoxes and an "uncompromising vigilance." In the connection to Pascal's "Mystery of Jesus," the narrator finds a justification for his own restless search: The idea that the agony of the world lasts until the end of time and that one must not sleep during this time, he translates into his poetic practice of paying attention to the fragility of life and the beloved.

Narrative structure

These threads are not arranged linearly. Autréaux chooses an associative, cyclical narrative style in which present and past, memory and reading, bodily experience and textual interpretation merge into one another. The novel's time is organized less chronologically than existentially: it follows the movements of proximity and distance, of speaking and silence.

The narrative structure of L'Époux The novel is conceived as a space of movement in which memory, present, and reading constantly overlap. The wedding forms a fixed point from which the narrator tells the story backward and laterally. This structure can be described as palimpsest-like: past experiences of love, childhood memories, episodes of illness, and scenes of reading are superimposed. Time does not appear as a sequence, but as a condensation. It is particularly striking that central events—the initial meeting, first touches, separations—are not recounted with dramatic climax, but rather in tentative, fragmented images. This narrative style corresponds to the thematic focus on silence and absence. The novel's time is a time of interruptions. Pauses, gaps, and ellipses structure the text more strongly than chains of action. Autréaux thus stages a poetics of discontinuity that corresponds to the experience of homosexual existence in a society that does not accept homosexuality.

Central for L'Époux The tension between language and silence is central. The narrator repeatedly reflects on the inadequacy of language when it comes to expressing love, the body, and the loss of faith. Particularly in the relationship with a partner, silence becomes an independent form of communication. Concrete scenes—lying together in the dark, wordless touches, glances—demonstrate that intimacy arises beyond what is said. Language often appears dangerous: it can wound, fixate, betray. Silence, on the other hand, preserves openness. This poetics rejects narrative transparency and insists on the unavailability of the other.

Song of Songs metaphor: body, voice, absence

The Song of Solomon in Patrick Autréaux's The husband The central intertextual matrix, which extends far beyond mere quotations, structures the entire novel as a "new Song of Songs." In a world where religious dogmas—especially the punitive verses of Leviticus—are often used to brand homosexual love as an "abomination" and to socially and familially ostracize it, this biblical text offers Autréaux a powerful counter-model. The Song of Songs celebrates love in a profoundly sensual imagery that eschews moral norms and instead sacralizes the immediate human connection. By placing his relationship within this tradition, the narrator removes it from ecclesiastical condemnation and bestows upon it a sacred status that depends not on divine commandments, but rather on the intensity of the experience.

As in the biblical example, the body of the beloved is in The husband Described in fragmented, almost ecstatic images that reflect a deep, all-encompassing affection, the narrator does not catalog his partner's body in an anatomical or clinical sense, despite his own medical background, but rather in a purely poetic act of praise. He lingers on the eyes, the lips, a birthmark on the arm, the veins in the hands, and his husband's breathing abdomen. This poetics of the body is never pornographic, but rather spiritually sacralizing: the body becomes a site of revelation. This is particularly evident in the unconditional acceptance of all bodily states: the narrator celebrates the youthful body in its yearning, as well as the body marked by illness, the scarred body, and finally the aging body. Every wrinkle and every scar is understood as part of a "visual and mystical evidence" that locates the infinite within the flesh.

Within this metaphorical framework, the voice plays a central, albeit paradoxical, role. While in the biblical Song of Songs the lover's voice summons the beloved and ignites longing, in "L'époux" it is often characterized by absence or extreme scarcity. The partner is described as a taciturn and silent person whose communication frequently takes place in silence. His voice appears as a rare, almost precious event, which elevates its significance immeasurably. The narrator learns to "read" this silence and to hear the "muetten suppliliken" (silent supplications) in the letters of his beloved's name. The voice thus becomes a sign of an absolute presence that needs few words to convey a "quiet wisdom" and profound connection. In the "chuchotements" (whispers) of the evening, the narrator finds that sacred quality he misses in the noisy, often hypocritical religious institutions.

Absence, ultimately, is the unifying motif that inextricably links the Song of Songs and the novel. Just as the lovers in the Song of Songs search for each other in the streets and often miss each other, so too does "L'époux" constantly navigate the tension between intimate closeness and painful loss. This absence manifests itself on several levels: in the physical absence of the families on the wedding day, which plunges the couple into painful isolation, and in the theological search for a God who has withdrawn. Autréaux writes a hymn to absence, in which love is defined not as possession, but as an ongoing spiritual journey and longing. The partner offers support in the emptiness of "nothingness," without ever entirely dispelling existential uncertainty. Thus, love becomes a form of "piety founded on ignorance," which finds the infinite precisely where all certainties vanish.

Edmond Jabès: Book, Desert, Name of God

The in-depth engagement with the work of the Jewish-Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès marks a key point in Patrick Autréaux's novel. The husband the decisive turning point of the inner, spiritual movement. Jabès acts here as a fundamental figure of thought, opening for the narrator the "navel of his love" and simultaneously the portal into his partner's Jewish world. Jabès's thinking is profoundly shaped by the motifs of exile, the book, and the absence of God; for him, God is not a speaking, authoritative subject, but a productive void in the text. This concept of a God who has withdrawn ("Tsimtsoum") to create space for the world and the human word allows the narrator to redefine spirituality: as a form of "knowing unknowing" that senses the infinite precisely where dogmatic certainties end.

In this logic, the book becomes, in Jabès's work—and consequently also in Autréaux's novel—the very locus of the question of God. Since there is no longer a religious institution the narrator can trust, reading itself functions as a spiritual practice. The narrator does not read to believe or submit to a ready-made truth, but to understand and to penetrate the "blocks of silence" that lie between him, his partner, and the latter's origins. The book replaces the religious institution and becomes the "only possible salvation," one that does not cover up the experience of the abyss but makes it habitable. This practice of reading is motivated "par et pour toi" (through and for you); it is an act of love that attempts to reconstruct, through writing and reading, the cultural and historical wounds of the other—such as the Shoah or the expulsion from Egypt.

The desert, a central motif in Jabès' work, appears in The husband as a radical inner state of exposure. It represents the existential experience of living without the protective wall of religious or familial certainties. This metaphorical desert finds its echo in the emotional spaces of the novel: in the "guerre froide" (cold war) of familial rejection by the in-laws, in the loss of childhood Christian faith, and in the loneliness of a homosexual love that often has to assert itself through a "discretion endured through hardship." The desert is the place where the narrator encounters "Zéro"—that vertiginous point of nothingness he experienced as a schoolboy at the blackboard, and which now becomes the starting point for a poetry that promises no salvation but demands absolute attention.

Ultimately, in keeping with Jewish tradition, the name of God remains unpronounceable for Jabès. Autréaux, too, refuses any theological definition or naming of the divine in the novel; however, the sacred Tetragrammaton is replaced by the poetic invocation of the beloved. Although the husband's name is never explicitly mentioned in the text, the narrator ecstatically declares: "J'aime les lettres de ton nom" (I love the letters of your name). The name is thus not grasped as possession, but revered as a fragile, unburnable secret, "full of muette supplications." Love here becomes the practice of naming without possession: the beloved eludes complete control, just like Jabès' absent God. In this respect for the unnamable, the narrator finds that "transcendent immanence" which allows him to locate the infinite in the aging, scarred flesh of his partner, rather than in a distant heaven.

Exile and belonging

In the sources, the Holocaust forms the traumatic backdrop to the Jewish family history of the partner, whose ancestors, like his great-grandparents, were interned in Theresienstadt and ultimately murdered in Auschwitz. To understand this historical wound and the resulting religious unwavering faith of his in-laws, the narrator employs a dense intertextual strategy, immersing himself in a veritable "library of catastrophe." He draws on key works and testimonies of the Shoah, such as those by Paul Celan. Death Fugue, Victor Klemperer LTI as well as the harrowing documents of Adam Czerniaków, Emanuel Ringelblum, and Zalmen Gradowski. This literary engagement, which also includes authors such as Joseph Roth, Aharon Appelfeld, and Philip Roth, serves the narrator as a kind of "spiritual immunization"; it allows him to reduce his resentment against his parents' rejection by understanding the experience of exclusion and resilience as a shared heritage. Ultimately, engaging with these texts opens up a path for the protagonist to explore the history of the Jewish people through writing and to deepen his love for his partner by understanding their traumatic origins.

The motif of exile forms one of the key layers of meaning of L'Époux and interweaves biographical, religious, and poetic levels. Exile is not only present as a historical Jewish experience; exile is the fundamental existential figure of modern subjectivity. The narrator's partner stands genealogically within a Jewish tradition that conceives of exile not as an exception, but rather as the norm. Belonging here is never a given; it is always precarious, mediated through texts, rituals, and names. This form of belonging is not territorial; it is textual and bound to memory. The narrator approaches this perspective not through conversion, but through a tentative understanding that includes reading, silence, and respect.

In parallel, the narrator himself experiences a spiritual exile. The loss of his Christian faith does not signify a triumphant break; it signifies a painful deprivation of meaning, language, and community. This exile is not a voluntary state, but rather the result of a gradual alienation. The narrator remains religiously sensitive, but without an institutional home.

Against this backdrop, homosexual relationships become a third space of exile: not fully integrated into society, not recognized by family, and not religiously legitimized. Yet it is precisely this threefold marginalization that generates a special form of intimacy. The relationship becomes a shared experience of not belonging. Belonging arises not from external recognition, but from the shared endurance of fragility.

Uncertainty and liberation

Reading archaeological studies of ancient Israel has an "illumination" effect on the narrator. By recognizing the Bible as a mosaic created by human hands, it loses its dogmatic terror for him. This deconstruction is a liberation: it "immunizes" him against his in-laws' religiously motivated homophobia. God becomes a "great, resonant void," paving the way for a spirituality that seeks the infinite not in scriptures, but rather in human resilience.

The novel's ending The husband The work's biographical, familial, and spiritual threads are brought together in a final synthesis that establishes the motif of "uncertainty" as a liberating state of being. While the journey through the Negev Desert and his partner's shattering fainting spell painfully reawaken the narrator's physical frailty and the "ontological wounding" inflicted by years of familial rejection, he transforms this experience into a spiritual victory: he recognizes that the "almost-nothingness of God" is not an abyss of emptiness, but rather an inexhaustible space of possibilities. The confrontation with his niece Noa about the narrator's systematic erasure from family photographs serves as a cathartic moment in which the years of silence give way to the truth about love, and the narrator learns to accept his partner's suffering without resentment as part of a larger, wounded history.

The concluding scene of a Shabbat evening in Eilat, in which the narrator recites the Hebrew blessings, marks the culmination of his search for "transcendence in immanence." Although he does not fully understand the "language of God" and feels as if he is symbolically "chewing stones" while pronouncing the unfamiliar sounds, this ritual act becomes the ultimate declaration of love and a sign of a profound connection that transcends dogma and formal conversion.

The final image of the poet's "hunting pack," a reference to Saint-John Perse's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, serves in Patrick Autréaux's novel as a powerful metaphor for a spirituality that defies any static arrival. Instead of crowning the search for the infinite with religious certainty or a dogmatic conclusion, the narrator's movement remains a restless sprint across the open space of possibilities. This "pack" symbolizes writing itself, which for the narrator assumes a function formerly reserved for religion: it is the only path that can serve as a substitute for the religious one and perhaps represents the only possible form of salvation. The goal of this hunt, however, is not a distant God, but the ceaseless practice of attentiveness to one's partner. Having deconstructed the Bible through scientific and archaeological studies as a man-made "mosaic," the narrator no longer finds the sacred in holy scriptures; he finds it in the immanence of the human body.

Religious certainty is replaced by a "knowing ignorance," which locates the infinite precisely in "nothingness" or in the abyss of existential uncertainty. Attention is focused on the profane flesh of the beloved, which the narrator sacralizes in all its stages—from youthful desire to the scars of cancer and on to aging—as in a "new Song of Songs." Love thus becomes a visual and mystical evidence that requires no transcendent God, but rather derives its sanctity from the daily, tender affection and the "taciturn silence" of the other.

At the end of the novel, during Shabbat evening in Eilat, it becomes clear that reciting the Hebrew blessings is not an act of religious faith in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a ritual expression of this poetic practice: a declaration of "incomprehensibility on a human level," where the search never ends, finding its true meaning in the constant movement of the "pack"—the perpetual writing and loving.

This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.