[In the following essay, Champagne discusses the influence of Judaic thought and biblical paradigms on Blanchot's philosophy of language. In particular, Champagne considers the poststructuralist literary theory with which Blanchot associates literary space with the Promised Land, literary text with scripture, and the writer-reader relationship with that of a sacred covenant.]

“For the writer, the genuine responsibility is to support literature as a commitment not yet realized, as a Mosaic view of the Promised Land of reality.”

—Roland Barthes, Tel Quel No. 5

Maurice Blanchot has been writing French philosophical and critical literary essays for some thirty years. Some would have him be “a hidden center of 20th century fiction and criticism.”¹ Especially in the last decade, Blanchot has provided the philosophical bases for the creative work of the French “new novel” of the 1950s, the “new criticism” of Roland Barthes and his colleagues, and the philosophical positions now recognized as French structuralism.² Blanchot has been “the hidden center” because he has not been translated into other languages as much as Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, or Lévi-Strauss. Nevertheless, these writers refer to the groundbreaking of Blanchot’s writing style and insights. His style is characterized by a philosophical sense of writing which Barthes has subsequently named “scripture” (écriture). Blanchot’s insights are gathered in essays which reveal the genius of known and unknown international literary figures in light of this “scripture”—a type of reflexive writing that is aware of its own limitations. Guided by the philosophical hand of Blanchot, “scripture” has become the basis for French literary theory in the last decade. This literary theory has given us the parameters by which to understand the “new novel,” “new realism,” and literary structuralism. It has been concerned with how a text produces a literary interaction between writer and reader. From the fragmentary nature of Blanchot’s essays containing his literary reflections, we can glean a proposal for the directions of “scripture” during the next decade.

Jacques Derrida (in his De la grammatologie, 1967) revealed that Western civilization has been perpetrating the myth of the supremacy of logos (i.e. the Word, Reason, and Logic) in its literature which conditioned the understanding of the literary text by its writers and readers. Maurice Blanchot had, however, already been practicing alternative methods of reading and writing before the appearance of Derrida’s work. Rather than a “logocentrism” (sic Derrida)—which subordinates discourses to the Greek model of the logos—Blanchot resurrects the Bible as a model for the encounter of writer and reader in the literary text. In her study of the works of Blanchot, Françoise Collin has noted that the majority of Blanchot’s images are Judaic.³ This pattern is consistent with Blanchot’s implied modelling of the literary artifact (l’écriture) on the Bible (les écritures). Some explorations into the possibilities of post-structuralist writing have similarly pointed to Blanchot’s precedent in establishing such a model. The Change Collectif—a Paris-based avant-garde group which since 1968 has published a quarterly journal, Change, and a series of books with the publishing house Seghers/Laffont—has featured the example of Blanchot’s Judaic writing for an issue of its journal (No. 22, Spring 1975) on “nomadic scripture.” The writings of Blanchot provide many such features which offer new possibilities for creative writing and reading but have not yet been fully developed because of the fragmentary nature of his essays. This mosaic of his proposal for a Judaic contract in literature, modelled upon the Bible, is only one of those possibilities.

Creating his own jargon for critical and fictional tasks, Blanchot actually practices his Biblical model as he employs Scriptural references to elucidate his insights. First of all, the Judaic cosmology of the Promised Land displaces attention away from literary “tradition” that accumulates a linear sequence of written artifacts located in time and place. The Promised Land is Blanchot’s metaphor for a distinctive literary space (espace littéraire) wherein creativity becomes the focus of attention in that it offers differentiation from literary tradition. Some forty years ago the Russian Formalist Tynianov, one of the forerunners of the French structuralists, indicated a need for such a notion in literary history: “The fundamental feature of literary evolution, that of the substitution of systems, and the problem of traditions must be reconsidered from another perspective.”⁴ Rather than the substitution or the replacement of one literary tradition for another, Blanchot posits the literary artifact as participant in the discontinuity of existential experience. Literary space, like the Promised Land, is not conditioned by time and place but creates absence by negating everything else. In its re-presentation (le retour) of problems, literary space precludes the Western fixation with linear temporal moments. Blanchot notes that “the necessity to re-present would therefore be a necessity for time without a present sense, a time which would also be the time of scripture—a future time and a past time, a radical disjunction (by the absence of any present sense) which would preclude any identification other than the difference implied by repetition.”⁵ Literary space is similar to the Promised Land in the hope of perfectibility which it offers to some. As hope, it is continually absent. The privation of perfection would seem to have a stunting effect on those who partake of the covenant of “scripture” with the hopes of achieving their deal. Yet those who believe in the realization of this covenant will continue to seek that perfection which always seems to be lacking either in the Promised Land or in literary space.

Blanchot tells us that the covenant between reader and writer in a literary artifact owes much to the Biblical model since “a text has its beginnings in the Bible where the logos is inscribed as law.”⁶ The logos is antedated by a more primitive inscription—that of the Law. For Blanchot, the Law which had governed the Judaic search for the Promised Land, still traces he condition of mankind in such texts as Kafka’s wherein “Kafka reminds us that human beings have no other choice but this one: either to search for the Promised Land from the side of Canaan or from that other world which is the desert.”⁷ On one side is the writer in Canaan who searches for the Promised Land by attempting to perfect the literary artifact. On the other side is the reader who combs the “deserts” of literary artifacts as he or she tries to perfect the art of reading. In effect, both writer and reader are searching for perfection in their Promised Land of the literary text. They are thus participating in the experience of “nomadic scripture” which Philippe Boyer of the Change Collectif describes thus: “Nomadic scripture follows a dubious thread in the desert of the blank page, in that uninhabitable non-place of the text.”⁸ The figure of the wandering Jew, so well incarnated by Blanchot’s hero in his fiction Thomas l’obscur, represents a whole array of distinguishing feature which specify the condition of perpetual exile (étrangeté) for the writer and reader of “nomadic scripture.” That exile continues even in Canaan since the Promised Land has yet to be perfected. The Biblical “voice crying in the desert” is perpetually renewed in literary artifacts, as Blanchot tells us: “It’s once again as if we were in the desert because discourse is like a desert in that a voice needs the desert in order to cry out and to re-awaken in us the fear, understanding, and memory of that open space.”⁹ Indeed, writing is very much the desert which reminds both writer and reader that there is no secure home or anchorage from which or to which they can base their activities. The tasks of reading and writing participate and continue the wandering, circuitous adventures of the Jewish condition—a history of “errance” according to Blanchot.

This “errance” is a displacing performance which “locates” the activity of a literary artifact in the ambient status between the alternatives of the desert and Canaan. Literary language is the object of perfection for both writer and reader. But their tasks are constantly ones of approximation—not exactly the aimless wandering in an awesome desert, nor the attainment of a perfect Promised Land. Displacement is the very nature of an activity that attempts to manipulate the literary artifact. The Law of the literary text remains that which cannot be duplicated, either through reading or writing. Blanchot tells us explicitly that “the Law is the summit which has no twin and scripture remains outside the arbitration between high and low.”¹⁰ If the literary artifact represents such an absence of place, how do a writer and reader confront such a phenomenon? Let us examine the covenant of writer and reader, according to Blanchot, in order to explain their perspectives on such a literary artifact or text.

The example of Orpheus-Eurydice is re-presented by Blanchot to explain the fascination achieved by a writer in “manipulating” the reader. Blanchot’s presentation of the writer is very similar to Father Walter Ong’s observation that “no one is listening. … He [the writer] has to make his readers up, fictionalize them.”¹¹ Orpheus, who was instructed not to look back at Eurydice in Hades, is a mythical model for the writer whose lyrical talent consists of creating an ideal reader who can look at (“read”) the literary artifact from a vantage-point theorized by the writer. Like Orpheus, the writer cannot look back at the object of his lyrics (Eurydice). If the writer does glance at the text again, that object will not be the same. However, even the ideal reader’s vantage-point is never realized because, as Blanchot tells us: “a glance is very different from what we think because it has no light, expression, force nor movement; it is silent, but its silence traverses worlds from the heart of isolation, and anyone who hears it becomes someone else.”¹²

The intended reader of the literary artifact and the actual reader who confronts it are very distinct. However, there is a common fascination by both writer and the actual reader upon what is conceived by both to be the same literary artifact. This fascination is akin to the Jewish fascination with YAHWEH, the unpronounceable deity which defies articulation. The object of this fascination, whether it be a literary artifact or a godhead, is not a unifying force but rather a pluralizing phenomenon which Blanchot has called “the neutral” (le neutre), described thus by Philippe Boyer: “The Neutral according to Blanchot has nothing at all to do with neutrality but is to be understood with Judaic basis, in the paradoxical inscription of double articulation which cannot be understood except in the questioning practice which it initiates.”¹³ This “questioning practice” is one which reviews the myths of reading and writing as complementary activities which complete meaning, information, and sense within given literary artifacts. In the place of these myths Blanchot would have us substitute the working theory of the “neutral,” i.e. that which cannot be named: “The neutral is threat and a scandal for thinking. The neutral, if we think about it, would liberate our thinking from its fascination with unity (whether it be logical, dialectical, intuitive, or mystical) and deliver us from that very different requirement by its capability to check and to slip away from any type of unification.”¹⁴ Thus, the writer and the actual reader participate in a series of open-ended commentaries. Of course, such a view can be very unsettling to those of us accustomed to the promise of scientific verification in writing or to the exhaustion of a literary artifact through the systematic application of such methods as the classic “explication de texte.”

Instead, the discourse between writer and actual reader begins with an incantatory fascination with the powers of the literary artifact in a manner recalled by Sarah Lawall’s insight into the meeting of writer and reader in Blanchot’s art where “words as incantatory powers give rise to a new presence of objects.”¹⁵ Temporarily mesmerized by the presence of words giving the promise of formal control over “communication,” both writer and actual reader initially expect to exchange “information” through the objectified appearances of words. This phenomenon is similar to the effect of YAHWEH upon the tribes of Israel. They were fascinated by the promise given to them by the Covenant—that they were the Chosen People to whom YAHWEH communicated the Law. Similar to the literary artifact, YAHWEH communicated the Law. Like the literary artifact, YAHWEH required a response to his promise. A bilateral contract involved the Jewish tribes and YAHWEH as well as the writer and the actual reader. Another similarity is the concomitant relationship of written and oral expression. Emmanuel Levinas, much admired by Blanchot, has told us appropriately: “The spoken Law is eternally contemporaneous with the written law. There exists between them a primordial relationship whose intellectual realization is similar to the very atmosphere of Judaism.”¹⁶ Oral exegesis is an integral part of Judaic tradition. And the reader’s discourse is similarly a necessary reaction to the production of a writer. The Judaic problem whereby YAHWEH was soon transformed from a fascination to a forbidden entity for the tribes of Israel is an example for the actual reader’s own situation. The actual reader must reject Western civilization’s fascination with the “informative” and “communicative” powers of logos lest he or she also be victimized by the same phenomenon of linguistic mesmerization that haunted Judaic tradition and which is identified by Blanchot thus: “The idolatry of the name or just the reverence which makes it unpronounceable (sacred) is related to the disappearance of the name which the very name causes to appear and which requires that we rise above language where it is hidden in order to qualify it as a forbidden name.”¹⁷ Anaïs Nin has posed a similar alternative in her House of Incest for an actual reader who seeks to respond to the challenge of the literary artifact as she dared her reader to “step out of your role and rest yourself on the core of your true desires.”¹⁸

Blanchot’s literary criticism offers a model for the actual reader’s conformity to his or her own desires. His essays are often interrupted by tangential arguments, parenthetical comments, and fragmentary glimpses into an artist’s work. Yet there is a philosophical flavor to his critical and his creative writings that characterize them as Blanchot’s own productions. Perhaps there is no conscious attempt to create a style or a consistency in his writings and readings. Indeed, Blanchot notes that: “I must have recognized that I was not capable of forming a story with these events. I had lost the thread of the story: that happens in many sicknesses.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, the readings and writings produced by Blanchot are unmistakeably stamped by his choice of topics, themes, vocabulary, and organization. For example, his work is often characterized by the word “exactitude” (exigence). This may be linked to an obsession with literary analogies, often expressed with the term “as if” (comme si). Luzius Keller’s study of Blanchot’s Thomas l’obscur offers a pertinent comment which may elucidate Blanchot’s use of “exactitude” and the links of similitude (“as if”) in that “Blanchot only expresses the tragic as a linguistic reality, namely in metaphors.”²⁰ Indeed, Blanchot’s own example as a writer and an actual reader demonstrates his initial fascination with language. However, he does move away from an absolute confidence in the forms of language. As he himself has just said, he “loses the thread of the story” in order to participate in the discontinuity of the writer, the actual reader, and the literary artifact. Blanchot has observed that the very nature of desire which binds those three together is also that which precludes their identity within the literary artifact: “Desire is the very separation which becomes attractive, the interval which becomes sensible, the absence which returns to presence, and the return whereby, when everything disappears in the middle of the night, the disappearance becomes the very thickness of the shadow …”²¹ This “thickness of the shadow” is the bond of desire between the writer and the actual reader: the text’s words as a covenant of communication.

Such a covenant in the texts has been assumed by others such as Father Ong who noticed that “a reader has to play the role in which the author has cast him, which seldom coincides with his role in the rest of actual life.”²² Such a role, however, reduces the actual reader to a mere pawn of the writer and the literary artifact. The actual reader is hereby stereotyped away into a static entity. Such is the continuing danger of the original fascination of the reader with the formal properties of the literary artifact. The writer would probably reiterate Blanchot’s narrator who insists upon the localization of his words: “It is at this very moment that I am speaking.”²³ Yet the actual reader is almost never on the same temporal or spatial wavelength as the implied reader of a literary artifact. The actual reader may momentarily be aligned with the implied reader, but that role is an artificial and difficult one to maintain. The“implied reader” role, however, can be a starting point for the actual reader’s participation in a literary artifact.

An awareness of the need to depart from the “implied reader” role begins the assertion of the actual reader’s identity apart from a literary artifact. Sarah Lawall has well described the necessity for such an identity as part of Blanchot’s conception of the power of reading: “Reading, for Blanchot, is more than an acquiescence with the work. It is the creative faculty quickening a work from its inert materiality. The act of reading creates the final act of literature.”²⁴ Thus, the actual reader becomes aware of the covenant offered by a literary artifact. The discourse of the actual reader is a very necessary function. Rather than a victim of the logocentric myth, the actual reader is challenged to become a producer, as Brice Parain predicted some thirty years ago: “Life is transformed into an exercise of literary criticism; … Man is only what he says; the rest is not important.”²⁵ The literary artifact thus provides hope for the active participation of the human being threatened to be obliterated by media transformations, machine cultures, and the other instruments of mass change and consumerism. The actual reader can find the Messiah by fulfilling the covenant of the literary artifact and generating another discourse which continues the one the writer had initially proposed. But the actual reader must not limit the discourse to an isolated experience since Blanchot tells us that stories participate in the continuous reification of existence: “In Hasidism, wherein doctrine is almost nothing and the prestige of concrete action is practically everything, stories become part of the religious experience.”²⁶ Hence, the actual reader’s consciousness of the need to respond is similar to the Hasidic respect for concrete action. Both are concerned with responsive action so that their respective covenants may be continuously renewed, thus reassuring their societies of the viability of individual response. The actual reader’s task is to continually produce his or her response to the literary artifact as an affirmation of the refusal to be overwhelmed by the words of literary artifacts. As Fredric Jameson has said,²⁷ the ethnocentricity of our condition is blinding us from realizing our plight. The blinding speed of a cybernetic society has hypnotized us into ignoring the threat of passivity posed by logocentrism. Maurice Blanchot’s weaving of the Judaic condition of writing and reading into his own works provides us with a pertinent commentary on the need to break away from that hypnosis. The logos has taught us to respect our traditions and to trace the paths of “progress.” However, Blanchot’s arguments for the Judaic covenant of the literary artifact give us cause to wonder whether this “progress” has alienated the writer and reader from their primitive ties of simple communication. The vagabond in Blanchot’s “L’Idylle” echoes forth a plea for the return of alienated readers and writers to their indigenous state in this last quarter of the twentieth century: “Let me be permitted to return to my native land, and I will retain the highest regard for your welcome.”²⁸

Notes

1. Thus Steven Ungar refers to Blanchot’s work in his introduction to his special issue of Sub-stance, No. 14 (1976) on Blanchot. All the essays therein are in English and represent a cross-section of appreciations of the style and thought of Blanchot. Ungar also provides a thorough bibliography of and about Blanchot’s works in that issue (pp. 142–159).

2. A working hypothesis of French literary structuralism has been isolated by Tzvetan Todorov in his The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 193: “The important thing, then, is not time or space but, as Khlebnikov puts it, ‘proportion, order, and harmony.’ His first goal is to denounce ‘so-called chance,’ to show that there is nothing fortuitous, that the arbitrary is merely a relationship not yet understood. A universal harmony prevails; man must honor it by a generalized calculus which will reveal its rules.”

3. Françoise Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l’écriture (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 74.

4. “De l’évolution littéraire,” in Théorie de la littérature, Tzvetan Todorov, ed. (Paris: Le Seuil, 1965), p. 122. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

5. Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 27.

6. Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 627.

7. Maurice Blanchot, L’Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 81.

8. Philippe Boyer, “La Question interrogée,” Change, No. 22 (March 1975), p. 5.

9. Maurice Blanchot, Le Livre à venir (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), p. 99.

10. L’Entretien infini, op. cit., p. 636.

11. Walter J. Ong, S.J., “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction,” PMLA, 90, 1 (January 1975), 11.

12. Maurice Blanchot, L’Arrêt de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 125.

13. Philippe Boyer, “Le Point de la question,” Change, No. 22 (March 1975), p. 63.

14. Maurice Blanchot, L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 250–251.

15. Sarah Lawall, Critics of Consciousness (Cambridge [Mass.]: Harvard U.P., 1968), p. 232.

16. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile Liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1963), p. 167.

17. Le Pas au delà, op. cit., p. 69.

18. Anaïs Nin, House of Incest (Chicago: The Swallow Press, Inc., 1958), p. 27.

19. Maurice Blanchot, La Folie du jour (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1973), p. 32.

20. Luzius Keller, “Maurice Blanchot: Thomas l’obscur” in Walter Pabst, ed., Der moderne französische roman (Berlin: Erich Smidt Verlag, 1968), p. 185.

21. L’Entretien infini, op. cit., p. 281.

22. “The Writer’s Audience,” op. cit., p. 12.

23. Maurice Blanchot, Le Très haut (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), p. 243.

24. Critics of Consciousness, op. cit., p. 241.

25. Brice Parain, A Metaphysics of Language, trans. by Mary Mayer (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971), p. 19.

26. L’Amitié, op. cit., p. 265.

27. Fredric Jameson, “The Poetics of Social Forms,” lecture given at The Ohio State University, 13 March 1975.

28. Maurice Blanchot, Le Ressassement éternel (Paris and London: Gordon and Breach reprint, 1970), p. 51.