Maurice Blanchot, The Station Hill Blanchot Reader:
Fiction & Literary Essays, edited by George Quasha
(Station Hill Press)

Jack Foley

The Station Hill Blanchot Reader is a marvelous introduction to the work of an enormously influential French writer who is little known in America. It is, as the back cover says, the only collection in English of Blanchot's mature fiction--the unique genre he called recits (tellings, narratives)--as well as a selection of literary/philosophical writings drawn from five of his major works. Susan Sontag has described Blanchot--born in 1907--as one of "the small number of unimpeachably major, original voices in modern French literature." It's about time that this contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre should be introduced to American readers, and introduced not only through his "ideas" but through his creative work.

What we call the "popular novel" functions in large part to reassure the bourgeoisie (its primary consumer) of the truth of bourgeois beliefs about the world--the belief in "love" or in "characterization," a particular understanding of the way people function. The aim of this kind of novel is usually to move from enigma or mystery or uncertainty--crisis of some sort--to certainty; to escort the reader from the possibility of chaos to the assertion of order.

All this is overturned by Maurice Blanchot. Writing of "Mallarme and the Art of the Novel," Blanchot asserts that language is not "a system of expresson, a useful and convenient intermediary for the mind that seeks to understand and to make itself understood, but...a force for transformation and creation, made to create enigmas rather than to elucidate them."

In an essay on the Marquis de Sade, Blanchot goes even further:

In the end everything has been brought to light, everything has been expressed, but equally everything has once more been plunged into the obscurity of undigested ideas and experiences that cannot be given shape.

When he comes up against this way of thinking which is only clarified by the pressure of another thought which, at that moment, cannot itself be clearly grasped, the reader's uneasiness is often extreme.

Stylistically, Blanchot's recits--particularly Thomas the Obscure--recall late Henry James. This is a passage from James's The Wings of the Dove:

It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was most to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation, within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of that arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen it in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his hands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which--if relief was the name--he could find only by getting away and out of reach.

Blanchot pushes this kind of thing almost to the point of parody: indeed, there are moments when parody seems to be his aim. This is from the second version of Blanchot's Thomas the Obscure:

It was in this new state that, feeling herself becoming an enormous, immeasurable reality on which she fed her hopes, like a monster reavealed to no one, not even to herself she became still bolder and, keeping company with Thomas, came to attribute to more and more penetrable motives the difficulties of her relationship with him, thinking, for example, that what was abnormal was that nothing could be discovered about his life and that in every circumstance he remained anonymous and without a history. Once she had started in this direction, there was no chance of her stopping herself in time. It would have been just as well to say whatever came into one's head with no other intention than to put the words to the test. But, far from condescending to observe these precautions, she saw fit, in a language whose solemnity contrasted with her miserable condition, to rise to a height of profanation which hung on the apparent truth of her words. What she said to him took the form of direct speech. It was a cry full of pride which resounded in the sleepless night with the very character of dream.

"Yes," she said, "I would like to see you when you are alone. If ever I could be before you and completely absent from you, I would have a chance to meet you. Or rather I know that I would not meet you. The only possibility I would have to diminish the distance between us would be to remove myself to an infinite distance. But I am infinitely far away now, and can go no further. As soon as I touch you, Thomas...."

Hardly out of her mouth, these words carried her away....

The tunes are similar: in both writers the prose assumes and mimics an extreme delicacy of feeling. The difference between James and Blanchot is that Blanchot moves us into an even more intense "delicacy"--a "delicacy" which does not shrink from utter incoherence. "‘If ever I could be before you and completely absent from you, I would have a chance to meet you." Huh? Is that intense, metaphorical, paradoxical speech or is it nonsense? Other examples: "finding in this absence of shape the perfect shape of its presence"; "he knew himself to be dead, absent, completely absent from his death." Sentences and passages frequently end in a completely different, often opposing context from the one in which they began, and the author does nothing to soften the opposition; rather, while maintaining us in the shape of his "fiction," he also moves us violently--though never too violently--towards a point at which "everything has once more been plunged into the obscurity of undigested ideas and experiences that cannot be given shape." The theme of nothingness haunts everything Blanchot writes. At the conclusion of "The Last Word" (the author's first story) one of the characters cries out, "Oh no, can't you feel that we're not standing on anything?" Another story, "The Madness of the Day," ends, "A story? No. No stories, never again."

In its shifts, Blanchot's writing is often comic. This is a dialogue from "The Madness of the Day":

She got strangely worked up. She exalted me, but only to raise heself up in her turn. "You are famine, discord, murder, destruction." "Why all that?" "Because I am the angel of discord, murder, and the end." "Well," I said to her, "that's more than enough to get us both locked up."

One can imagine Groucho Marx speaking that last line: "Mrs. Claypool, that's more than enough to get us both locked up"--though the reference to the Book of Revelations would be unlikely to find its way into a Marx Brothers film.

Blanchot's allusions to Mallarme and to the Marquis de Sade are not casual remarks but central issues of his writing. (Parodying his own title, Blanchot refers to "Mallarme the obscure" in "Mallarme and the Art of the Novel.") In a famous essay, "Crise de vers," Mallarme writes, "Je dis: une fleur! Et...musicalement se leve...l'absente de tous bouquets" ("I say: flower! And...musically there arises...the one that is absent from all bouquets"). This passage is deliberately recalled in Blanchot's great essay, "Literature and the Right to Death." For Mallarme, when God says "flower," a real flower appears ("Let there be light, and there was light"). When the poet says "flower," however, there appears precisely "l'absente de tous bouquets." For Mallarme, God's realm is the realm of Truth and Being; the poet's realm is the realm of Non Being, Absence, Fiction--the realm, in effect, of Satan. The theme of writing as hellish, infernal, subterranean--and of the poet as a kind of unGod--haunts French poetry. Mallarme's passage recalls Baudelaire (with his "Litanies of Satan"), and both Mallarme and Baudelaire were familiar with Paradise Lost.

This is a passage from a paper I wrote some years ago on Satan's first speech in Paradise Lost:
We are not only seeing Satan for the first time in the first poem of its kind, and so on; we are seeing him in the beginning. Like the Spirit of God, Satan too moves "upon the face of the waters," but he is floating unconscious after a terrible defeat and they are not "waters" but "flames." For him too, "darkness [is] upon the face of the deep," but here there will be "No light, but...darkness visible." And if Saint John may say of Christ, "In him was life; and the life was the light of men," we might say of Satan, "In him was death; and the death was the darkness of men." The entire description of creation is inverted, as is the fundamental creative act, the act of naming: "Let there be light: and there was light." For God, the name and the thing named are identical, and the newly-created Adam is able to share in this: "My tongue obey'd and readily could name / Whate'er I saw"--though, of course, Adam merely names things which are already created. The closest Satan comes to this act is in his exclamation, "O how fall'n!"-- but "fall'n" is an adjective, not a noun, and Satan immediately recoils from it. The exclamation is enough, however, to increase the parody even further: for "fall'n" is the "Word" that is in Satan's "beginning": it is from this one term that the immensely confused flood of his speeches flows forth.

If God says, "Let there be...," Satan says, "If thou beest," and the meaning of "thou" is already beginning to drift away from the fact in front of him. For the truth is that Satan has forgotten what it means to be, and his very first speech ends with attractive--but deceptive-- images of defiance and destruction. (His desire "To wage by force or guile eternal War," for example, finds its true fulfillment in the landscape of Chaos, "where eldest Night / And Chaos, Ancestors of Nature, hold / Eternal Anarchy, amidst the noise / Of endless wars, and by confusion stand"--II.894-897.)

But Satan's defiance is not even real defiance. In "arising" from the lake he is fulfilling God's will: "nor ever thence/ Had ris'n or heav'd his head, but that the will / And high permission of all-ruling Heaven / Left him at large" (I.210-213). God wants Satan to be "created," wants him to take his place in the immense scheme of things. The only possible defiance, then, would be to refuse to arise, to refuse to be at all. But that would be total defeat! Satan's position is absolutely impossible: in the universe Milton describes, one simply cannot do anything contrary to the divine will. It is therefore necessary for Satan to "create" another universe in which God is not "omnipotent" but "stronger": in order to do anything at all, Satan must believe that he can defy God, but his very speeches of defiance become in the end merely another euphemism for "fulfilling the divine will."

Blanchot's universe is very much "like" that. Isolated from the source of being, Satan is in a situation in which all his assertions tend to cancel each other out. He is--like Blanchot--"on this side nothing."

Jack Foley