This paper aims to study La Réticence (Reticence) (1991), Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s fourth novel, from the point of view of the mise en scène of the experience of the artists’s work. Grounding itself in psychoanalytic theories of creation, it analyses the narrator’s itinerary as the lived experience of a subject who endeavor to listen to an imperceptible reality before trying to give it flesh and form in a language closer to its reality, although at the cost of a loss of self. It focuses in particular on the different incarnations of the figure of the other in oneself, which the artist needs to confront him/herself with, as does the reader who, being the second pole of the interaction whereby the meaning of the work is shaped, participates in the creation of the text.