SOURCE: “Maurice Blanchot,” in The Novelist as Philosopher, Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 147-65.

The seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the Negative.

Hegel

Blanchot’s work, says one of his few interpreters, offers no point of approach whatsoever. Today, twenty years after his first novel, he is still the most esoteric writer of contemporary France. There have appeared only three or four essays on his fiction; his novels remain untranslated. This is the more remarkable as Blanchot is also a prolific and well-known critic: besides his three novels, a number of récits, and a dyad of short stories, he has published five thick volumes of criticism. But then his criticism has its difficulties too.

One could draw on his criticism to illumine his novels. Such an inquiry, however, though helpful, would also be reductive. I will only use one clue provided by it: Blanchot, as critic, always goes from the work under discussion to the ‘problematic’ nature of literature. He illumines, therefore, the literary activity in general as well as this or that text. Literature, for him, is problematic in that it cannot be taken for granted: it is an activity hedged with contradictions, plagued by philosophic doubt, and shadowed by prophecies of obsolescence. This establishes a presumption that his novels will also deal with this area of concern, with the problematic status of literature.

They certainly tease us with the question of whether they are novels, or even literature. The difficulty is not in the prose, which is eloquent, or in the characters and world which are physically (if not entirely) ordinary. It is, as in Kafka, the atmosphere and action that puzzle, yet all charmy realism is absent. There is little plot, little characterization, and the ordinariness may be breached by the fantastic. If Blanchot must be attached to a tradition, it involves rather than derives from Kafka, and goes back to the rebirth of romance and the beginnings of surrealism in the Romantic period. Between Flaubert’s réel écrit and Blanchot’s irréel récit there is a distance as great as between Mlle de Scudéry and Flaubert. It has recently been argued that the change from the romance to the novel proper had a distinct philosophical cause; and I will eventually suggest that there is also a philosophical analogue to the apparent reversal of direction, the return of the novel to a romantic or surrealistic form. The German Romantics encouraged it by bringing the novel closer to fairy-tale and novella, and the reverse development passes via Novalis, Poe, Nerval, and Baudelaire, to Mallarmé’s Igitur, and the quasi-confessional literature of Gide, Breton, Leiris, and Bataille.

The ranging of Blanchot within a certain tradition is a comforting but hardly an illuminating state of affairs. For that tradition, and what it intends, are still somewhat obscure. It may be that Blanchot, understood, will focus it more sharply; but one cannot begin with it. A last extrinsic resort lies with the interpreters of Blanchot; and these also do not take us beyond our starting-point: that the novels somehow have themselves, or the activity of art, as their subject. Sartre, for example, calls Aminadab (1942) a new type of fantasy and secular ghost-story. He notes in it an evasive mood of finality, and identifies this as the ghost of transcendence floating loose in a world deprived of transcendence.¹ What Sartre means by ‘evasive finality’ I can best show via a short passage from a later novel, Thomas l’obscur (‘nouvelle version’, 1950):

The book rotted on the table. Yet no one moved about the room. His solitude was complete. And yet, as surely as there was no one in the room and even in the world, so surely someone was there, who occupied his sleep, dealt intimately with him, was around him and in him. Naïvely, he sat up, and tried to eye the night … but nothing would let him catch this presence as a form or as an other. … It was a modulation in what did not exist, a different mode of being absent, another void in which he came alive. Now, for certain, someone was coming close, who stood not nowhere and everywhere, but a few feet away, invisible and sure. By a movement which nothing stopped yet which nothing hastened, a power was coming toward him whose contact he could not accept

(pp. 36–38).

I leave aside the question of whether an English or American mind can tolerate even Blanchot’s maturest prose. The French have a higher level of sympathy for experimental philosophical fiction: and I shudder to think what F. R. Leavis might say. But we can, on the basis of the later novels, move beyond Sartre’s rather professional insight. The subject here is clearly art, and its relation to consciousness. The dilemma rendered is the artist’s own, that of a mind that seeks to overcome itself from within, to pass into reality rather than into more and more consciousness; and it is through art that it intends to become real rather than more conscious. The evasive, ghostly finality Sartre has noted is projected by the mind while seeking to confront itself as a real body. Something of the agony of its quest to get out of itself without ceasing to be itself is given by this further passage from Thomas l’obscur, in which the hero

felt himself bitten or struck, he did not know which, by a thing that seemed to be a word, but resembled rather a gigantic rat, with piercing eyes, pure teeth, an all-powerful animal. In seeing it a few inches from his face, he succumbed to the wish to devour it, to make it the most intimate part of himself. He threw himself on it and, digging his nails into its entrails, tried to make it his own.

The melodious horror of this combat is sustained for another page, at the end of which we realize that Thomas is fighting, like the writer, with the nature of consciousness.

This quest, to make the mind real rather than more conscious, involves, as the above passage shows, an attempted self-estrangement. The old question, of whether the artist is more conscious or less conscious than the thinker, is resolved in an interesting manner. Art, Blanchot suggests, is consciousness in search of an unselfconscious form, consciousness estranging itself as in a dream, which is still a dream of itself. In a beautiful phrase he describes the movement of his characters, and perhaps of his novels as a whole, as that of a strange and burning wheel without a centre, ‘l’étrange roue ardente privée de centre’.

I need hardly add that this attempt to transmute consciousness always fails, that success is only its asymptote, and that, according to the image of the wheel, the effort is continually renewed. But there is an inner principle of progression. The writer’s failure increases, by a kind of peripety, his burden of consciousness, so that the ghost figure, or the mind thirsting for concreteness, exercises a constantly stronger allure. This ghost figure, just like its avatars, demands flesh and blood; yet being consciousness, being ‘ce refus d’être substance’, it cannot be incarnated, and therefore actually haunts some characters to their death. To die may become a ruse for giving a body to its void (see Thomas l’obscur, p. 130).

The most puzzling as well as the most imaginative features of Blanchot’s novels are linked to this dialectic of emanation, of strange intimacies and intimate estrangements. The distance between any two human beings in his novels is infinite and yet nothing. The magic of chance crystallizes and dissolves relationships. The shifts between familiarity and estrangement or, occasionally, life and death, are so quick and pervasive that they affect the very nature of the symbols used, and put the essence (the ontological status) of words in doubt. Blanchot is difficult to interpret because we can never say that here he reflects the world we know and here an imaginary world. He endows his symbols with a middle and unresolved quality, and he does this in part by a judicious use of the improbable, and an only exceptional use of the sheer fantastic. His latest récits, in fact, move purely in the realm of the improbable, and contain no fantastic incursions or overt breaches of the tenuous realism. The improbable, being a special case of chance, keeps the mind within the story, teasing it with the hope that all details together might solve the mystery, since no single event is quite absurd. But no resolution occurs, and the reader is obliged to take the mystery as an integral rather than resolved part of the whole; and since the whole is simply the novel, he thinks of the latter as the space in which a mystery is revealed, but as a mystery.

Sartre has interpreted the improbabilities to which we refer as depicting a revolt of means against ends, and so constantly inciting, yet denying, the idea of finality. There is a labyrinth of corridors, doors, staircases, and messages that lead to nothing. Locked doors open, a person summoned to appear is asked why he requested the interview, and characters or narrator find themselves returning to the point they started from. But if these and similar improbabilities keep us fascinated, it is because they point obliquely and inexhaustively to a specific mystery. They could be explained by positing an all-pervasive forgetfulness. And this seems to be a part of the general pattern of self-estrangement. Blanchot’s personae never walk the straight line between two points: they seem imbued, physically and mentally, with a spirit of oblivion, and his novels strike us as being the most un-Aristotelian ever written—they are all middle. To be in Blanchot’s world is to err: to follow something, to be involved in a maze of words or passageways, to encounter chance openings, to be attracted and distracted continually, to forget to remember, to remember to forget.

With this we come to our first substantive philosophical link. Blanchot’s emphasis on forgetfulness harmonizes with what Heidegger calls the mystery of oblivion. Heidegger himself has sources in Hegel and the Romantic period; and it is quite possible that Blanchot assimilates Heidegger through the perspective of a common literary tradition, reaching from the German Romantics to the French Symbolists and Rilke. The mystery of oblivion is described by Heidegger as follows.² Historical existence, or man’s attempt to live fully in the here and now, would not be possible without an intrinsic oblivion on his part. He learns about the earth by being practical, by attending to each thing as it appears necessary or interesting to him. Yet to do this he must forget the possible wholeness of things, and rest content to substitute continually the part for the whole or being for Being. But how, asks Heidegger, can he forget the whole? There must be, first of all, a dissimulation in Being itself, one that offers him the possibility of mistaking the part for the whole. The part comes to be or appear only in so far as the whole sets it off, but invisibly, without overshadowing. Man’s turning towards the part or anything apparently ‘open’ to him (Heidegger plays on the Greek for ‘truth’, a word cognate with ‘unhidden’) means a turning away from the whole; yet he is attracted to the part precisely because it also promises a whole, albeit a different one: the earth in its fullness. Thus the direct search for wholeness (the metaphysical quest) is displaced by an historical appropriation of the earth (the existential quest), and by means of a movement which Heidegger calls error, because it is an erring, a wandering from part to part, and because it is erroneous, the mistaking of being for Being.

But besides this dissimulation of the whole there must also be a dissemblance of the dissimulation. A mere veiling of the essence of things would only spur us to pierce the veil, to become mystics rather than existentialists. To accept our human nature we must become freely blind, and dissemble the original dissimulation. And when our eyes are occasionally opened, it is to the existence of dissimulation rather than to Being itself. The mystery of oblivion is an oblivion of mystery, and this alone enables us to live humanly and dynamically and to keep making errors and so gradually to explore and possess the earth.

It will already be clear that Heidegger is giving a very subtle version of Plato’s mythically expressed theory of reminiscence, but shifting the emphasis to an involved process of discovery and forgetfulness. Plato’s myth is revived in all its potency in the Romantic period; there is hardly a great writer, from Novalis to De Quincey, who does not explore both the existential and metaphysical implications of—shall we say—sleep. I mention this because, though I think Blanchot is indebted to Heidegger, his understanding of the latter’s philosophy is likely to have been mediated by a larger and predominantly literary tradition. If there is any one trait that unifies literary movements since the Romantic period, it is their quest for an adequate theory of unconsciousness or creative self-oblivion.

Blanchot certainly gives Heidegger’s concepts a rather exact presence. The oblivion that besets his characters alienates them from various finalities, intensifies their erring motion, and brings them into a freer contact with life, a contact having the surprise, sharpness, and inconsequence of ‘chance’. Yet his novels’ endless estrangement of every final term raises a double nostalgia which Heidegger also describes: a nostalgia for the concrete, the here and now, and for something greater than every here and now. The first, a tenacious holding on to the part as if it were the whole, Heidegger names insistence (in contrast to existence); and the second is the revived metaphysical desire for the vision of the whole. Heidegger shows, however, that the latter cannot be attained except by first passing through and standing outside everything; or projecting, as he also expresses it, into Nothing. Human life in its freedom is a transcendence towards Being, but always as this Nothing, this eclipsed or veiled form. Certain passages in Blanchot seem to translate Heidegger’s dialectic of finitude almost word for word:

I saw immediately [says the narrator in Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas] that I must stay in this place. Perhaps the insight did not teach me anything I had not known. Perhaps in showing me the only point by which I could hold to something real, it screwed the anxiety of the void tighter on me, as if, these words being the only ones I could live in, I had felt them slipping away, as if they were the last abode from which I could control this errant coming and going [‘le va-et-vient errant’]. I understood well enough, or seemed to understand, why I had to take root here. But, here, where was I? Why near him? Why behind everything I said and he said was there this word: ‘Surely everything, where we are, is dissembling?’ I heard and did not hear; it was beyond being understood.

(pp. 98–99)

If the realistic novel puts man wholly into his physical setting, then the ‘irrealistic’ novel may be said to put him wholly into Nothing. A good part of the action of the récit quoted above is the narrator’s attempt to describe his physical setting and the inability to do so. The narrator cannot embody himself. In Thomas l’obscur, similarly, Thomas seeks various embodiments, and in vain. The sea and earth reject him, and one is reminded of the Old Man in Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ who knocks on the gate of his mother earth, seeking death, imploring her to let him in. Yet Blanchot’s value is not in the transcription, however imaginative, of a philosophy such as Heidegger’s. This would make his novels a kind of allegory, which they are not. What is perhaps hard to understand is that they participate in the dilemma they describe. They are a passion imitating an action. Blanchot does not merely represent ‘Nothing’, or the dissimulation of Being as dissimulation. He endures it, and fiction is his durance. In one of the récits this is given literal form by the author moving self-divided through his pages, seeking to attain unity of Being, yet questioning the symbols that promise it. But all his novels create a void rather than a world, an espace littéraire as ontologically equivocal as mind itself, and which neither reader, author, nor characters can cross to reach Being. What Ortega y Gasset said of Proust can be applied, with a slight though important change, to Blanchot: ‘He stands as the inventor of a new distance between symbols and ourselves.’

But how, exactly, do Blanchot’s novels participate in what he calls, in La Part du feu, ‘the realization by literature of its unreality’ (p. 306)? Let us consider shortly certain conventional carriers of meanings, such as book, genre, character, and plot. It will be seen that Blanchot uses these to criticize the very realism from which they spring, and which, as part of literature, they must retain.

A ‘book’ is a portable and condensed experience. For Blanchot it involves the questioning of the idea that portable and condensed experiences are possible: the œuvre of an artist is the path he takes to realize his désœuvrement (see Le Livre à venir, p. 253). It is true that Blanchot’s books are separate entities, individualized by title. Yet he has written two versions of Thomas l’obscur (1941 and 1950), and in a note prefacing the second version says that a work has an infinity of possible variants. This multiplication (by the modern painter also) of sketches and states, though perhaps linked to Balzac’s retake of characters, to the roman-fleuve and devices of perspective, may also have an opposite intent. The difference turns on whether the mimetic power of the artist is strengthened or questioned. Balzac’s novels add up, they increase the depth and ‘realness’ of his world, but Blanchot’s novels stand in an abstractive relation to one another. What the second Thomas l’obscur removes from the first is analogous though not identical to what Cézanne subtracts from Delacroix. Rather than a literary and exotic realism Blanchot purges a literary and exotic ‘irrealism’, or, to give it the more popular name, ‘surrealism’. He is concerned only with the unreality in reality itself.

That is also why Blanchot uses the récit, a form strongly associated with Gide. The récit is a first-person confessional narrative, a kind of dramatic monologue in prose, and through it Blanchot attacks the Achilles’ heel of realism, the notion of the sincere and even of the authorial ‘I’. Like the soul, the ‘I’ is not a simple substance. In the case of the alienated man, who suffers from the ‘disease of consciousness’ (Dostoievsky), the ‘I’ is one of many faces, and at most a dialectical component of the whole man. ‘The whole history of fiction since Arnim,’ writes Breton, pointing once more to the Romantic origins, ‘is that of liberties taken with the idea of “I am”.’ Blanchot, however, is less interested in personality as such than in the personality of words, their deceptive dual character of veil and revelation. His récits in their essence are simply (or not so simply) a critique of word-notions that at once motivate and seduce the artist: the je, the ici, the maintenant, the nous, the fin. To resist them is to restore the space (between the artist and words, between him and the world) which art seems expressly created to deny.

To illustrate this questioning and distancing power of Blanchot’s I choose a passage from Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas (1953), similar in some respects to the one quoted previously from this book. The narrator is reflecting, as he does throughout, on the words of an interlocutor, who has no presence except through cryptic replies, echoing silences:

It is true that from his mysterious word of encouragement I could draw another more persuasive idea, namely, that I need not fear a false approach, the itineraries of error; I did not have one way, I had all, and this should have served to put me on my way with exceptional confidence. ‘All! but on condition that I have time enough, all the time I can bear.’ He did not demur, for of course the essence of a way is to furnish a short-cut across ‘time’; it was this short-cut I sought, with the unreasonable idea that I should find thereby not a continued length of wayfaring but the shortest interval, the soul of brevity, to the point that on taking the first steps, it seemed to me, refusing to go further, that I had the right to tell myself: ‘This is where I stand, this is what I’ll stick to’, and to him this is what I said with increased firmness: ‘This is where I stand, this is what I’ll stick to’, which he happened to answer with a kind of élan and without my being able to resent it: ‘But you have all the time you want!’

(pp. 16–17).

This is part of a development still hinging on the first line of the book, ‘I tried, this time, to approach him directly’; and practically everything in the sentence, the I, the him, the notions of time, way, and directness, are questioned by the récit, which moves forward by the force of its questions. The opening (we shall return to it later) expresses an attempt at immediacy, and, as in Kafka, the narrative ironically unfolds in the space that shows immediate contacts to be impossible, though the hope for them cannot die. But while Kafka draws us into his world, giving it circumstantial and symbolic flesh, Blanchot uses fictional counters as literal as words, and as abstract. Though we ask: who is the narrator? who is his companion? when does it happen? we never reach more than this conclusion: the narrator is the one who narrates, his companion someone inseparable from the act of narration, time and space simply that of narration itself. As such everything remains unreal or virtual, and the theme itself points to the perplexity of ‘living’ in such a condition, again called error. It is, in fact, a comedy of errors, but one that draws us into it insidiously. Though the novel, by its inherently negative progress, leaves us with as little at the end as we started with, it does make the void of thought visible as the space of art. A space, of course, anything but spacious; rather an effort of distance, as if the writer were constantly in danger of being tricked by the nature of words, or crushed by some endless automatic process of mind-murmur, of mental conjunction.

To suggest the unreality of his characters—who are like the space they inhabit—Blanchot sometimes uses a word with a strong neo-platonic flavour. They are said to lose resemblance: ‘He saw them lose under his eyes all resemblance, manifesting a small wound on their foreheads whence their faces escaped’ (Thomas l’obscur, p. 57). It is as if the Idea, whose image they are, suddenly disappears. The characters lose their transcendence, are unable to reach an au-delà, whether this is nature, supernature, or symbolic existence. Shades doomed not to rest, they wander through the author’s pages as if neither his nor any world would receive them. But they gain therefore a caricature of immortality. They cannot die. Thomas the Obscure digs his own grave and hangs a stone about his neck as if to drown himself in the earth. Yet he is forced to ‘exist’, to stand outside himself till the end of the novel.

It would be untrue, however, to say that Blanchot’s characters exist only in art; at least they do not ‘live’ in art any more than in reality. They have no inn to live in; they are literally outsiders. They are shown not as alive but rather as deathless, or as afraid of being deathless and so seeking death. I hope to find a fuller explanation for this later; here I can only say that art for Blanchot is intrinsically linked to the quest for and impossibility of realizing the self via symbols; and what does not have real body and yet is, must be a species of ghost. ‘The symbol’, he writes in La Part du feu, ‘has no meaning … it is not even the embodied meaning of a truth otherwise inaccessible, it surpasses every truth and meaning, and what it gives us is this very transcendence which it seizes and makes felt in a fictional work, whose theme is the impossibility of fiction to realize itself’ (p. 86).

In following through, finally, the plot or action of one of these ghostly novels, we come upon a second philosophical link, this time with Hegel, or primarily with him. If my description of Blanchot’s theme is correct, and he shows consciousness seeking to be real rather than more conscious (and failing in this), we already have a Hegelian donnée. For that the mind should need to realize itself shows it is estranged from reality, and this estrangement is then seen to be in its very mode of existence: it desires to have itself external or opposite or invested with ‘reality’. The starting-point, therefore, seems to be what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness (which craves complete consciousness of reality and cannot attain it) or the self-estranged consciousness (whose true self seems split or estranged as if of necessity).³ Yet we have said that the novels are problematic, and have themselves or the activity of art as their subject, rather than consciousness per se. The distinction may seem slight but can now be explored further. It is of some importance to determine exactly what the relation of art to consciousness may be. For religion, according to Hegel, shows a higher state of consciousness than art, and philosophy the highest. The great challenge, in fact, to the autonomy of literature, and hence the real enemy to any rapprochement between philosophy and art, is Hegel’s prediction of the end of art. Only if the two activities are thought co-substantial is the true dignity of either assured. I will now seek to show that Blanchot wants to negate this prediction of obsolescence, that his récits are conceived as an answer to it.

Hegel, though he considers it necessary for the mind to suffer a long history of self-estrangement, yet insists that progress can be made which affects not only the quantity but also the quality of consciousness, and that the philosopher, coming towards the end of this history, will conceive the real as the rational, and so overcome the felt difference between the real world and the world of the mind. Art, however, is not a product of the philosophical but rather of the phenomenological imagination: it is an exile form of consciousness and cannot realize its truth. Blanchot, accepting this characterization of art, will argue that art must, if necessary, work against the grain of history. Even should the real approach the ideal, art must remain ‘unreal’. It is inherently a project of self-alienation.

With this in mind, let us trace the action of Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas. Here, by a tour-de-force as amazing as it is profound, Blanchot exhibits the artist ‘projecting’ art in our presence. We actually see the narrative evolving as a debate, dialectical in form, between the narrator and his estranged self. The narrator tries to overcome the distance between them or to draw from it a third and impersonal person, the unselfconscious unity of both. But we soon learn that neither the self nor its need for an opposing self can be surpassed: that art remains an impossible project, aiming at the ‘concrete universal’, aiming at true unselfconsciousness, yet always preventing its own success.

How does Blanchot proceed? He enlists, first of all, the support of the greatest apostle against Hegel, Sören Kierkegaard. The unexplicit motive-power behind the narrator, as behind all of Blanchot’s characters, is despair in Kierkegaard’s definition: the uncertainty, increasing with every increase of consciousness, that one has a true self. ‘The despairing man’, says Kierkegaard (in The Sickness unto Death), ‘cannot die; no more than “the dagger can slay thoughts” can despair consume the eternal thing, the self, which is the ground of despair, whose worm dieth not, and whose fire is not quenched.’ Blanchot’s people are unable to die for this reason. And for the same reason they are unable to be born or reborn into life; they suffer an endless purgatorial state, a death-in-life identifiable with the alienated consciousness. Their quest for a true self must go through self-estrangement, and this increases their uncertainty in an inviolable self. Hegel’s Philosopher is anathema to Kierkegaard and a stumbling-block to Blanchot because he is inviolably self-assured. If, as Blanchot says, ‘the void is never void enough’ (Le dernier homme (1957) p. 164), who can plumb self-estrangement deeply enough to arrive either at pure reality or pure self? The Philosopher, were he possible, would be the last man.⁴

In Celui the desired self becomes, specifically, the self of the Writer. The latter does not wish to die, only to write. To be a Writer—to be that Self—is the impossibility he seeks to realize by means of the récit. Adopting, perhaps, another idea of Kierkegaard’s, that to break an enchantment (here of words) one has to retrace one’s path exactly, and at every error begin again, Blanchot undoes the spell of language in order to be able to write. With shuddering naïveté, with an eternal ressassement, he tries to step backwards from words to the reality of the word. But desiring to write, he is already writing, and falls under the spell he would escape from.

The récit begins with the narrator turning towards an unnamed ‘other’. He complains; says that he is at the end of his tether, that he wants to write and is afraid to write, that through writing he becomes so interested in the Other that he stands in danger of losing himself. … In short, he wants to resolve a situation in which he is neither himself nor not himself. But the Other, whom he wants to appeal to directly and who is very clearly a redeemer-figure, created to make word or thought flesh, obliges the narrator to linger in uncertainty, to stay in the equivocal space of fiction, and be (like his own characters) neither quite living nor quite dead.

Therefore, in one sense, art becomes the enemy of the artist and denies him the realization he desires. The Other, or Persona, is only negatively transcendent (‘celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas’). Though the writer wants to be led into an absolute, this other self shows a curious interest in real things, asking no more of the writer than to stay in his room and to describe it. But he feels this is impossible (he does not want to make the real Words but the Word real?); becomes curiously forgetful; moves nervously about (as in the earlier novels of mistaken rooms and identities, false entries, strange corridors); and also keeps glimpsing ‘someone’ in the room or just behind the window. This new ghostly Other is probably the fictional double on the point of passing from a state of negative to that of real transcendence, as the writer is tempted to pass from the first person (Je) to the third person (Il) form, and thus into full self-estrangement (‘l’alibi du Il indifférent’, Le Livre à venir, p. 199). This, of course, is a necessary movement, if he is to find that original impersonal Word he seeks. Yet, by various means, the double (the second person) prevents him from losing touch with himself and passing totally into a symbol. The tension of relationship, of what Martin Buber calls the I-Thou situation, is maintained. As the narrator is asked to describe the face of this third person, the very effort of visualization makes him aware how much the figure may still depend on him. He cannot, as a writer, attain Being, only being-for-another (himself); and this difficulty of visualizing a face which has no resemblance or a word which has no relation will haunt him even more in Le dernier homme: ‘Face of Nothingness, perhaps. That is why you [the Other?] must watch over this empty space to preserve it, as I must watch to alter it …’ (p. 115).

The récit, or art itself, is simply keeping this space open. It is using the act of writing to invent forms and situations that maintain the writer in the negative despite the strongest contrary pressure. For the récit is, at the same time, the writer’s movement towards the reality of the double, his desire to identify. And though the Other repeats, ‘I can’t do anything for you’, he does admit being linked to the writer through writing (‘par les écrits’). The essential, the inherent temptation is to desert the labour of the negative by going over into one’s symbols. The artist posits a transcendence (metamorphosis) of this kind, but his art exists in order to resist him.

Art, therefore, cannot succeed in making the mind real rather than more conscious. A tension in its very nature prevents this. But it discloses the strength of the desire for a reality beyond consciousness. And in Blanchot’s other novels the possibility of really transcending consciousness is expressed as follows. There is generally one character (a woman) who manages to die, while all others are deprived of death. The woman, by an act of will, by a metaphysical Liebestod, aims at a live transcendence: she seeks to pass whole from life to death, and there is, Blanchot suggests, one chance, only one, of doing so, Perhaps the artist in the space of his art also approaches that one chance of transcendence. Perhaps he can truly realize his other self and draw his mind from Consciousness into Being. It is this hope, however slender, however mystical, which moves him to write. If he fails, like Orpheus, it is because he does not dwell patiently enough in the space of alienation, and so cannot ‘convert the negative into Being’.⁵

But most of Blanchot’s characters, like Kierkegaard’s despairing men, are sick unto death yet deprived of the ability to die. Their sickness is consciousness. They suffer an alienation from life within life, and the milieu in which they look for death or else suffer their death-in-life is related to various ancient and modern hells, to Purgatory, the Waste Land, the T.B. Mountain and the House of the Dead. (The milieu of Le dernier homme is indubitably a Sanatorium.) It is not surprising, therefore, that Blanchot’s plots retain features of the prototype of the Quest, but how it begins and what it seeks are peculiar. The mind-errant, having sought life and found death-in-life, now desires an authentic death. The Faustian mind also begins with a perception of death-in-life (in Hegelian terms, with self-consciousness or thought) and proceeds ironically by a wager against life, although this wager dialectically affirms the thing it denies. Among similar ancestors of Blanchot’s characters are the many wandering Jews and Mariners of the nineteenth century, figures deathless (immortally mortal) like the Sybil of Cumae. Blanchot’s earliest complete story, ‘L’Idylle’, has as its central figure that étranger who is the modern equivalent of Mariner, Wanderer, or Faust—in short, a type of the alienated mind.⁶

Our study of Blanchot has led us to a concept of man and a concept of art. His novels evoke a curious middle-world, or rather middle-void. The noble assumption of the Renaissance, that man is a late creation, standing between heaven and earth and sharing the attributes of both orders, is held to but modified. Man is not a mixed mode, though having the seeds of all life in himself, but one who keeps the realms apart, who avoids the contamination of both earth and heaven. Art helps him to find a ‘between’ and to preserve it as the sphere of his liberty. This is a new and hard concept of mediation, which defines man purely by the quality of the void in him, and the artist by a resistance to symbols, human or divine, that would fill this void. Standing in the midst of things, and specifically in the midst of the treachery of words, the artist bears the curse of mediacy.⁷

Blanchot, moreover, relates art to the mind’s need or capacity for self-estrangement. Art is not consciousness per se, but rather its antidote, evolved from within consciousness itself. And though this view has been gained by bringing to bear on Blanchot a particular philosophic tradition, the latter is only one of many having a common base in Romanticism. The nineteenth century yields a profusion of ‘anti-self-consciousness’ theories. But none, I think, has been quite so influential or provided a better foundation for understanding art generically. In England the nearest approach to a similarly adequate theory is Yeats’s concept of the mask, the persona theory of Pound, and the impersonality theory of Eliot. American criticism has added the idea of the poem as an ironic structure. These have some truth and belong to a distinctive branch of inquiry, call it problematics, which should be as important as thematics or the history of literary ideas and forms. To study the problematics of art would be to consider each work as standing in a dialectical relation to consciousness and a critical relation to the whole activity of art.⁸

Hegel’s prophecy of the end of art, like Plato’s older grouse, in no way originates these special relations. But it has made critic and artist more attentive to them, and above all in France where Marxism gives Hegel a redoubled voice. French critics tend to be over-philosophical: they have to fight Marxism on its own ground, to preserve art by a philosophy of art. In the meantime, of course, the cure being worse than the disease, literature may itself succumb to the philosophical habit. But perhaps it will suffer no more in this case than it did, for example, from neoplatonism. Blanchot’s own curious strength is that his récits are neither philosophy nor straight fiction but an autonomous middle-form. In a very tentative way his work is like the organon Schiller called for, one that would mediate between philosophy and art. He who knows fiction will be led by it to consider philosophy, and vice versa: and this suggests that there is a new genre, or even type of literature, in the making. Yet Blanchot, it must be admitted, is not uniformly successful as an artist; sometimes, in fact, I have a sinking feeling that a few verses from Rilke or from Valéry express all he has to say. But this feeling, in turn, may show that Blanchot has taught me to read more strongly and relevantly such lines as Rilke’s description of poetry: ‘Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind’, or Valéry’s many beautiful renderings of the sense of self-estrangement: ‘Qui pleure là, sinon le vent simple, à cette heure / Seule avec diamants extrêmes? … Mais qui pleure, / Si proche de moi-même au moment de pleurer?’ Blanchot’s récits, and especially the latest ones, are sombre and bewitching works, not without tedium, but teasing us vigorously out of thought.

Notes

1. ‘Aminadab or the Fantastic Considered as a Language’, Literary Essays (Wisdom Library, New York, 1957), pp. 56–72. Another interesting critic is Georges Bataille, ‘Ce monde où nous mourons’, Critique XIII (1957), pp. 675–84. On Blanchot and Kafka cf. M. Goth, Kafka et les lettres françaises (Paris, Corti, 1956), ch. iii.

2. My summary is drawn primarily from ‘On the Essence of Truth’ (1943), ‘What is Metaphysics’ (1929 and 1943), and the various essays on Hölderlin published between 1937 and 1943. I present Heidegger’s thought as homogeneous, but this is a simplification: the writings on which I draw post-date Sein und Zeit, and there is evidence that both in them and again in recent years Heidegger has modified certain of his views. Some concepts mentioned below, e.g. ‘error’, have an acknowledged source in Nietzsche and other Romantics and post-Romantics. For Blanchot’s own summary of Heidegger’s thought, and in relation to Hegel’s, see esp. L’Espace littéraire, pp. 263ff.

3. See Phenomenology of Mind, tr. J. B. Baillie (2nd ed., 1949), pp. 241ff. and 507ff.

4. See Le dernier homme (1957). The ‘last man’ is Hegel’s Philosopher. Blanchot conceives of him as having no ‘existence’, i.e. no Being-for-others, which makes him, paradoxically, the central enigma for the other two characters of the novel—the writer or narrator and a young woman. The latter moves from the sphere of the narrator towards the last man, perhaps because her naïve realism, her desire to die intact, at the strongest point, sorts better with the Philosopher (who seems to link the realms of death and life) than with the Artist (who tries to remain outside both). Cf. G. Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure, pp. 48ff.

5. Phenomenology, p. 93. For the inversion of the Orpheus myth, see esp. L’Arrêt de mort, pp. 40–60, and Thomas l’obscur, pp. 112ff.: ‘Anne thought of crossing over to death alive. …’.

6. ‘L’Idylle’ bears direct traces, in the names of some of its characters, of Dostoievsky’s Memoirs from the House of the Dead. On death and deathlessness, see also ‘L' Œuvre et l'espace de la mort’ in L’Espace littéraire, esp. pp. 161ff. Blanchot is fully acquainted with Rilke, Broch, Beckett, and others.

7. For a complete exposition of the idea, see the commentary on Hölderlin (in L’Espace littéraire, pp. 283–92) which is deeply indebted to Heidegger. The latter has coined the term ‘Zwischenbereich’ (mesocosm rather than microcosm!) to indicate the ‘between’ status of man. I borrow the phrase ‘the curse of mediacy’ from Ernst Cassirer, who says that language ‘harbors the curse of mediacy and is bound to obscure what it seeks to reveal’ (Language and Myth, 1925; tr. 1946).

8. The only study of English poetry from a dialectical viewpoint that I know is by Harold Bloom, who approaches Shelley with Buber’s dialectic in mind: see Shelley’s Mythmaking (New Haven, 1959). Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago, 1953), was, I believe, the first to point out the distinctively problematic (‘not merely in the sense in which every literary symbol is indeterminate, but more specifically in the sense that its characteristic subject is its own equivocal method’) nature of a nineteenth-century American tradition, comparable in this to the French Symbolists. Other relevant studies are Erich Heller’s treatment of the ‘ontological mystery’ in The Disinherited Mind (American ed., New York, 1957), and Paul de Man’s questioning of the ‘incarnationist’ assumption in modern English and American criticism: ‘Impasse de la critique formaliste’, Critique, XII (1956), pp. 483–500.