Maurice Blanchot

Blanchot, Maurice (1907-2003). French critic and novelist. After graduating, he worked as a journalist until 1940; from that time on he devoted himself exclusively to literary work, both on his own account and for various publishing concerns, particularly Gallimard and the NRF.

Long known only to a small number of readers, he is now widely regarded as one of the greatest critics of the century; although it is not entirely clear why this change has come about. What is clear is that Blanchot himself has not abated one whit of his fierce, passionate, and wide-ranging commitment to the practice of literature. Over a period in which commitment itself has most commonly, as in what was called littérature engagée, been taken to imply the conviction that writing served causes or principles outside itself [see Engagement], Blanchot has devoted his life to showing that it is in writing, not beyond it, that the central human choices are made. This revaluing of literature he has pursued both directly, in his more general essays, and by way of his readings of a number of writers, two of whom have perhaps paramount importance: Mallarmé and Kafka. Blanchot's contention is that the stakes of literature are dauntingly high; the writer writing must come to terms, in one direction, with the tenuousness and narrowness of his or her hold on language, and, in the other, with the comparably overwhelming realities of silence and death. And so his exemplary figures are those who, like Mallarmé and Kafka, both remain wholly aware of these stakes and yet venture into the space of writing. One of Blanchot's best and most representative books of essays is called L'Espace littéraire (1955), and his explorations in that space and of those who, recognizing it, have made the venture into it form the core of his work.

Setting the highest standards, Blanchot treats his chosen writers with a respect that borders on veneration. At a time when Roland Barthes was inveighing against the doxa of automatic respect for famous writers, so many statues that we piously dusted off, Blanchot, moving in an apparently opposite direction, was in fact showing how Barthes's polemical exaggeration was to be distinguished from mere iconoclasm. The notion of space implies that of boundaries, and much of Blanchot's critical writing is taken up with writers for whom, in their very different ways, boundaries are an urgent and constant preoccupation: Mallarmé and Kafka, but also, among others, Sade, Lautréamont, Rilke, Beckett, Duras. One essay opens with the words: ‘Qui parle dans les romans de Samuel Beckett?’ (Le Livre à venir, 1959), a question that succinctly anticipates much narratological theorizing. And the fact is that Blanchot himself stands at the convergence of many boundary-lines. The long speculation on language, death, and the creative process, and a disposition for philosophy that takes him from Plato through Hegel to Heidegger and Levinas: these push him too to argument of a more general, though not more abstract kind. Thus, L'Écriture du désastre (1980) explores, in aphorisms, fragments, and longer pieces, the relation of language to catastrophe, whether it is the bereavement of individuals or the horror of Auschwitz. But even here he never forsakes the radically idiosyncratic démarche that is the mark of the writer, rather than that of the thinker or theorist: there can be no joining of a group or institution. His arguing is dense, demanding, urgent, and always and everywhere serious.

Blanchot's concerns find expression too in récits or novels, such as Thomas l'obscur (1941) or Arrêt de mort (1948), and in free-ranging reflective works such as Le Pas au-delá (1973). These, lacking perhaps the steadiness of focus that reference to other writers imposes, sometimes drift towards the portentous—always a risk in Blanchot. Interestingly counterposed to this tendency is L'Entretien infini (1969): again casting its reflective net freely and widely, but, connected always to particular readings, far surer in its movement. But, whether in book reviews, longer essays, or rhapsodic explorations, this fiercely private man celebrates as an intimate the essential strangeness of literature, of writing.

[George Craig]

Bibliography

• R. Laporte and B. Noël, Deux lectures de Maurice Blanchot (1973)
• F. Collin, Maurice Blanchot et la question de l'écriture, 2nd edn. (1986)

Quotes:

"There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him."

"A writer who writes, I am alone... can be considered rather comical. It is comical for a man to recognize his solitude by addressing a reader and by using methods that prevent the individual from being alone. The word alone is just as general as the word bread. To pronounce it is to summon to oneself the presence of everything the word excludes."

"Lovers of painting and lovers of music are people who openly display their preference like a delectable ailment that isolates them and makes them proud."

"A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it."

"To write is to make oneself the echo of what cannot cease speaking -- and since it cannot, in order to become its echo I have, in a way, to silence it. I bring to this incessant speech the decisiveness, the authority of my own silence."