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

Jack Foley

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." In the introduction to his translation of L'Attente l'oubli, Awaiting Oblivion, John Gregg remarks that one of Blanchot's primary rhetorical figures is the oxymoron--the contradiction in terms. Another is "paronomasia":

Paronomasia is understood here as the stringing together of words that are derived from the same root but that function grammatically as different parts of speech. An example, in the original: "Attendre, se rendre attentif a ce qui fait de l'attente un acte neutre, enroule sur soi, serre en cercles dont le plus interieur et le plus exterieur coincident, attention distraite en attente et retournee jusqu'a l'inattendu. Attente, attente qui est le refus de rien attendre, calme etendue deroulee par les pas."

["To wait, to make oneself attentive to that which makes of waiting a neutral act, coiled upon itself in tight circles, the innermost and outermost of which would coincide, attention distracted in waiting and returned all the way to the unexpected. Waiting, waiting that is the refusal to wait for anything, a calm expanse unfurled by steps."]

The repetition is not an assertion of an ur-word which gives meaning and coherence to all its forms. Rather it is an assertion that, despite all this activity--all these words--"can't you feel that we're not standing on anything?"

Interestingly, Blanchot's work recalls the "Ern Malley" hoax of the 1940s--poetry created by two men utterly hostile to modernism and attempting to "expose" it for the sham they believed it to be. Australian writers James McAuley and Harold Stewart invented a modernist poet whom they called "Ern Malley." Quickly producing some poetry by the fictitious Malley, they sent it to a magazine called Angry Penguins, a bastion of Australian modernism. The magazine fell for the hoax and produced a special issue. Eventually, the hoax was exposed and there was much publicity over the affair-- particularly over the issue of whether McAuley and Stewart had unintentionally produced better poetry as Ern Malley than they had published under their own names. Michael Heyward's The Ern Malley Affair describes the kind of writing "Ern" created:

In cooking up their poet to a satirical recipe, McAuley and Stewart threw into the brew a seasoning of anarchic intelligence and comic self-laceration. Writing pretentiously, they described a mind so aware of pretension that it debunks itself with aplomb. In the end, Malley is really unlike the sort of grandstanding, romantic surrealism he mocks. It pays to remember that two very different temperaments and personalities were constructing the work without bothering to smooth the edges. Like a medium possessed by a host of spirits, Ern Malley freely exhibits his multiple consciousness. There is not one Ern Malley but several, and they are all mutually exclusive characters. There is Ern Malley, the black swan of trespass, the native modernist talented enough to turn the poetic tradition of his country on its head. There is Ern Malley the jejune and modish experimentalist who does belly-flops in his attempt to look significant. There is the Ern Malley who bravely stares his own death in the face, and the Ern Malley who slyly tells the reader he never was. All these writers were essential to the hoaxers' fiction. Each contradicts the others and helps give the poetry its dizzy, speeded-up quality, as Malley rifles through his composite self.

A passage from Blanchot's "Literature and the Right to Death" describing "the writer" as "someone...perpetually absent" sounds eerily like Heyward's description of Ern Malley:

The trouble is that the writer is not only several people in one, but each stage of himself denies all the others, demands everything for itself alone and does not tolerate any conciliation or compromise. The writer must respond to several absolute and absolutely different commands at once, and his morality is made up of the confrontation and opposition of implacably hostile rules.

Reading Blanchot is a fascinating but utterly exhausting enterprise, not so much because he is "obscure"--there are plenty of writers far more "obscure" than he--but because to read him is to encounter a mind attempting to keep itself fully and constantly awake, balancing "several absolute and absolutely different commands." As we have seen, these "commands" often manifest themselves in the context of the same sentence. "Nowadays people often talk about the sickness of words," Blanchot writes in "Literature and the Right to Death": "The trouble is that this sickness is also the words' health." The effect of his work is at once exhilarating and fatiguing. Whenever we tend to drift, to relax for a moment, suddenly some new impossibility strikes us with the force of a slap in the face--and we are back to attention again. It is no wonder Blanchot admires the Marquis de Sade. Blanchot's writing is a mode of what Artaud was to call "cruelty." We can remind ourselves that there are many, many things Blanchot is unable to do--things which other writers can do admirably. We can close his book and attempt to ignore it. But once the wound of his work opens in us, we must admit that he can give us what few writers can: not plot, not characterization, not depth of knowledge, not poetry, not elegance of style, not power of description, not music, not sentiment, not wit--but a simulacrum of the pure motion of consciousness as it attempts to know itself. In The Space of Literature Blanchot refers to "the light, innocent Yes of reading." That is the de Sade in him, deliberately arousing our desire for an innocence and simplicity which the author himself has left far behind and which we are certainly not going to get from his work. "For Kafka," he writes in the same essay--for the author, not the reader--there was anything but "innocence":

there was dread, there were unfinished stories, the torment of a wasted life, of a mission betrayed, every day turned into an exile, every night exiled from sleep, and finally, there was the certainty that "The Metamorphosis is unreadable, radically flawed."

Blanchot may conceive of his reader as a sort of Sadean heroine uttering a "light, innocent Yes" to his linguistic assaults, but the world he creates is hardly a world of innocence; it is alive with knowledge. If in some senses Blanchot's world is a nightmare version of Henry James or even of a Groucho Marx routine, it is also a plunge into Satanic rhetoric, an attempt, as Milton puts it, to "make the mind its own place." In "Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image," Paul de Man writes of "a possibility for consciousness to exist entirely by and for itself, independently of all relationship with the outside world, without being moved by an intent aimed at a part of this world"--total philosophical egotism. It is in some such direction that Blanchot's work moves. (The negative aspects of that aspiration are present in the recurrent image of the "prison"--particularly the "happy prison" of "The Idyll.")

What Blanchot "knows," and knows to the bone, is the tremendous isolation of the thinking self, of the truly "awakened one," the one for whom "meaning...is always ambiguous" ("After the Fact"):

Kafka...thought he threw a shadow on the sun and that once he was gone his family would be happier. So he died, and then what happened? There was only a short time left; almost everyone he loved died in those camps which, no matter what their names, all had the same name: Auschwitz.

Maurice Blanchot's work is an invitation to the reader to join him on those severe and icy slopes of consciousness, to experience what it means to be both fully dead--utterly separated from the world, "a shadow on the sun"--and fully alive. It is an amazing, exhilarating, appalling experience. Station Hill Press should be congratulated for its courage in bringing forth this important but obviously not very commercial enterprise. Blanchot's work is, as he says, "a force for transformation and creation, made to create enigmas rather than to elucidate them." For the first time, we are able to see it with some clarity.

Jack Foley