 Literature, too, occupies a special place in Henry’s oeuvre. It is the one art that he himself practiced as a novelist—his novel L’amour les yeux fermés was awarded the French Prix Renaudot in 1976—though literature as an art form is never clearly theorized in his philosophy. In a 1991 interview published under the title “Narrer le pathos” (“To Narrate Pathos”) Henry admits that an aesthetic theory of literature still remains a task for his phenomenology. Nonetheless, the interview contains several indications concerning the direction such a theory would have to take. As the title indicates, novels and other forms of fictional writing such as poetry for instance, are conceived both as an expression of pathos (from the standpoint of the artist) and as its reproduction or intensification (from the standpoint of the reader). As in the case of painting, it is Henry’s approach to music that provides the foundation for the aesthetics of writing. In order to accomplish this task, the words of the poet or those of the novelist must be able to unveil affectivity rather than be limited to ek-static appearing as their ultimate phenomenological possibility. In the latter case, they are bound to give the thing as absent, as Henry argues while commenting on Heidegger’s analysis of Trakl’s poem “Ein Winterabend”: the snow, the ringing of the bells when the night falls, etc., are brought into presence by the poet’s words, but, at the same time, this presence is retrieved from them since they are given as not really being there. But this is only true in so far as the presence to which words refer is the one that characterizes what can be seen or perceived within the ek-static appearing of the world. In such a context, poetry can only give things through an ambiguous presence-absence (“Phénoménologie matérielle et langage”, PHV III, 333). For Henry, it is only when words are envisaged as the expression of pathos that they speak to a living present beneath the words and their representations. Such a language of affectivity would thus have to be largely disconnected from any form of realism and objectivity, while making room for the imaginary as in hallucination, since “in hallucination pathos governs directly its own images” (PHV III, 313).