European literature of the late twentieth century usually appears as belonging to an atheistic, agnostic, materialistic worldview. In post-World War II France, major literary trends created new ways of thinking and writing that seemingly precluded all metaphysical concerns. The present study focuses on a particular French literary movement called Le Nouveau Roman ("The New Novel"). A posterioricritical approach nevertheless shows that novels generated by these authors cannot escape the principles of the eternal return and remain deeply rooted in mythology, particularly in mythological ways of thinking. Directly or indirectly, they reactivate the Orphic myth, and more particularly Orphism as a literary tradition in which language becomes the ultimate, the absolute. With other writers from Le Nouveau Roman, Claude Simon (1913-2005), the 1985 Nobel Prize winner, is a typical example of this type of writing and of the aesthetic evolution of a novelist. Simon's fiction had an enormous impact on contemporary intelligentsia, although it is still considered to be rather hermetic, quite extreme in its deconstruction of the traditional novel. Such a reading of mythical dimensions in Le Nouveau Roman is indebted to Mircea Eliade and Gilbert Durand's studies of myths and the "imaginary,"as well as the analysis of the Orphic myth by Elizabeth Sewell.