[In the following review, Fowlie comments on the literary and historical significance of the essays in The Work of Fire.]

The goals of the new French criticism, in which Maurice Blanchot holds his place beside Derrida, Foucault, Bachelard, Starobinski, and Jean-Pierre Richard, seem very complex. Such criticism may entail more than the analysis of a sonnet or even of a novel: it may be involved with the understanding of the entire experience of an author seen in the light of all his writing, and it may even attempt to illuminate the entire age in which the author lived. Blanchot’s study Lautréamont et Sade, like Sartre’s long analysis of Genet, is a work of criticism in which the critic’s aims are multiple.

Blanchot (born in 1907) was first read in France during the second quarter of this century. His answer to the question What is literature? has become clearer as each of his major works of criticism has appeared. La Part du Feu (The Work of Fire, as Charlotte Mandell has admirably translated the title—and these essays in general) was first published in 1949, the year that Lautréamont et Sade was also published. In these two works of criticism Blanchot expressed his conviction that an authentic essay in literary criticism is an experience by which a writer enters into an existence that he did not know before writing it. The critic moves from book to book, marveling at the endless variety of literature; and he uses comparisons in his art as critic as generously as a poet uses metaphors.

Quite early in his career Blanchot’s writing was called thematic criticism. Rather than analyzing a text, he asks why such a text came into being. Why is there literature? How can one explain the phenomenon of a book? Why is there an author of a book? Why is there a reader of a book? How is literature possible? Such questions are the leading points of departure in the essays collected in The Work of Fire. The books Blanchot needed in order to discuss such problems were contemporary, and among the best of his contemporaries were René Char, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henry Miller.

Blanchot is concerned with the initial movement that created the work, with the movement that literally formed the creator. He shows a marked predilection for Lautréamont, whose Chants de Maldoror are creations of the self. Lautréamont is one of a small group of writers to whom Blanchot returns over and again as authentic artists whose writing is a self-creation. Mallarmé occupies a high place in this group, as do Hölderlin, Kafka, and René Char. Blanchot hereby denies the familiar concept of criticism which claims that a book comes from other books.

Such a theory explains Blanchot’s deep sympathy with surrealism. As Oedipus once listened to the words of the oracle, so the modern surrealist learns to listen to the mysterious words of his subconscious.

The metamorphoses that twentieth-century literature has undergone have been more profoundly explored by Maurice Blanchot than by any other critic. These essays in The Work of Fire reflect symbolism, surrealism, psychoanalysis, abstract art, the movies, the theater of the absurd, pop art, happenings.

It has been said that all modern criticism is “structuralist.” By the word structure, as applied to criticism, is meant not only the visible organization of the work, but the invisible, the inner, and the psychological architecture of the human experience out of which the writing comes. It is criticism of the work’s totality, not one part of which can be understood without reference to the whole. In a complex reciprocal relationship, the part illuminates the whole, as each sentence bears the meaning of the work.

In a literary sense our age is characterized by the large number of books written about books. In dedicating his book to his wife, one of our best American critics wrote: “To the critic of a critic of critics.” Not merely a man of discernment and taste, the critic today is called upon to be an aesthetician, a psychologist, a sociologist, a historian. The critics of each generation pass and are interred as quickly as most of its novelists and playwrights and poets. Few survive for long the rapid turnover of each decade, with the constant shifting of interests, the political changes, the scientific discoveries. Very few critics survive by imposing their methods of criticism even on one decade—and by maintaining the originality of their work.

These articles by Maurice Blanchot, published during the 1940s after his earlier work as a journalist and devoted to such figures as Kafka, Mallarmé, Char, Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Sartre, Malraux, Gide, Valéry, and Nietzsche, seem destined to last for some time. By the serious questions they raise concerning the basic assumptions of literature, concerning the very reasons for having books and having readers of those books, they will endure.