This chapter begins with the provocative maxim: that “In the beginning was the (dead) body”, as a fitting epigraph or preamble to the novels and imaginary universes of Gabriel García Márquez and Labou Tansi. The two authors initiate their creative world by first “exposing” God’s creation in its ample state of abjection, symbolised by the dead body. The dead body unleashes the creative impetus and constitutes the defining motif in many of both authors’ texts, thereby setting the tone, determining the course of the narration, and accounting for the unconventional diction and existentialist intensity of their texts. Jean-Luc Nancy's statement that literature has nothing other than the body (Richter 2000, 62) finds its most appropriate incarnations in their novels. Literature, as defined here, goes beyond social commitment, infusing literary creativity with vitality within the economy of life and death.