An Obscure Man by Marguerite Yourcenar is the novelist's heritage to posterity. By Yourcenar's own admission, it constitutes her spiritual and literary testament. In this novel, her poetics of self-effacement reaches its culminating point, where Nathanael is portrayed as a protagonist free of any constraints because he exhibits no desire or ambition. The author paints a character who incarnates a constant passive state. But by doing so, one could argue that it is the work of fiction itself that is put into question, as Nathanael's triviality and insignificance --- hence his exemplary conduct --- represents a great threat to the novel as an ontological entity with its own set of rules. And so we ask: for a writer whose aesthetics are closely tied to ethics, particularly to those higher values of lucidity and humility peculiar to Yourcenar's philosophy, does the novel still have a claim to existence? In other words, if there is no illusion, what is left of the novel?

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