Many of the protagonists of Marguerite Yourcenar's fictional works strike us as "cosmopolitan." To be cosmopolitan in the Yourcenarian sense, however, has little to do with the social sophistication or worldly education and polish with which the word is frequently associated today. If we look in Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, we find the word defined first as "of or from or knowing many parts of the world," and second as "free from national limitations or prejudices." In either instance, "cosmopolitan" involves transgressing (literally, "going across") frontiers and limits; hence, the word is also emblematic of multiplicity and fragmentation. Yourcenarian heroes often start out as "borderline" beings that inevitably "transgress" those borders or limits-both literal and symbolic. Whether by exposing an uncertain sexual identity, exhibiting a supranationalism expressed as perpetual nomadism or self-directed exile, or engaging in multiple and, on occasion, socially suspect professions, they yearn for an unattainable Absolute (from the Latin: "free, unrestricted, unconditioned"). There has been a tendency among some readers and critics either to conflate or to equate that quest with a striving to achieve the immutability associated with the universal. Yet, Yourcenarian protagonists repudiate, either outright or indirectly by way of their actions, the epistemologically and ethically limiting conventions of Western (Aristotelian or Platonic) universalism, which prove an ineffective compass in Yourcenar's fictional world of shifting centers and unfathomable chaos. The characters' unsuccessful attempts to achieve the Absolute lead them instead to strike a compromise that might best be explained by the term entre-deux: a place and time where the borders, though extant, are bracketed. Within the entre-deux, these characters may maintain a precarious, if ultimately illusory, freedom of action as well as enough distance to form some manner of perspective, however limited. At the same time, the entre-deux is, paradoxically, almost characteristic of Yourcenar's protagonists, whose uncertain subjectivity and lack of epistemological or ideological parameters make room for the author's aesthetic preoccupations.

In my presentation I shall examine the protagonist of L'Oeuvre au Noir and those of one or two other fictional works of Marguerite Yourcenar to identify the nature of the entre-deux in which they are situated and to define their particular function in the work.