Foredawn

I opened the front door and went out into the foredawn, into the hissing of the silence and the humming of the underground trains standing empty with lighted windows on the far side of the common.

Condé innovates, or at least transforms, this structure to generate a response uttered in the speech of the Caribbean night: from dusk to foredawn (the deceased being evoked only at night?) in opposition to Faulkner's story “On the Road” (entirely typical of the American imaginary), the "story of a long funerary voyage" to pick up Carson McCullers's expression cited by Michel Gresset in his preface to the bilingual Folio edition of As I Lay Dying.

So when Gerald Owen heard the voice in the dark of foredawn, he had no idea that its instructions would come to naught.

Full, as they are, of murmurous silences in the foredawns And budding with the dawns in a noise of cranes

I see in it a wonderful fulfillment of things and plans which have been foredawned in my mind, many years ago;

The desiderium is the most certain Being and the only honourable quality of all men; the desiderium to give shape to that which foredawns so clearly, which questions in objects themselves and seeks its poet, with an as it were demanding gaze, is Having and Not-Having itself.