This article studies the relationship between literature and life from the perspective of literary reading, a concept that emerged at the end of the last century and takes into account the activity of the reader in the process of aesthetic appreciation of literary art. From literary reading to life, mediation is done through speech, a verbal act common to the writer and his readers, and whose interface is the body and rooting in the material and social world - life. Here the theory of literary reading finds a corollary which highlights the intimate link between writing and reading: to the now classic model of playing, which establishes a dialectical link between affect and intellectual activity, speech adds the notion of verbal performance and the implication, on both sides of the symbolic chain, of a human subject. The verbal and vital interpersonal exchange through literature draws its specific fecundity from its deferred character.