My dissertation engages with the transmission of the unsayable in novels of French and Francophone writers of the twentieth century. I show that such narratives can be found in the work of writers preoccupied with the limits of representation in writing. By reading together André Gide, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Edouard Glissant, we can identify a kinship between narratives of transmission and a theoretical search for a void inhabiting writing. What they call a “crystal,” a “blankness,” the “impossible,” or “opacity” is revealed to be present in scenes of intergenerational transmission. I argue that this contiguity is not just coincidental; a disappearance of the certainty of the face plagues both. What is passed on in these narratives is not an object or some knowledge, but rather a loss of the speaking face, a disfiguration. Transmission is enacted on the ruins of the ability to speak; in these circumstances, I show that the body is left with the responsibility to bear the weight of the unsayable. The stories in these novels dramatize the complicated relationship between the face and literature. As the bearer of intent, it holds the form together and gives it a foundation. It is also artistic inspiration that is figured through a scene between a muse and a writer, from one face to another. Destabilizing these foundations, the writers I study find the encounter with a void. Nevertheless, Gide, Bataille, Duras, and Glissant take up the task of “facing the void” of encountering and giving a face to this nothingness. Even if I show that this task is impossible, I argue that they turn this impossibility into a force of writing as their novels unfold through the passing on of the undoing of the face. Although the transmission of the unsayable, like in intergenerational trauma, is a phenomenon that impedes life, these texts recuperate this destructive force into a force of creation. In the wake of these creative endeavors, the face loses its centrality, opening a space of potentiality for literature and our understanding of the transmission of the unsayable.