Maurice Blanchot, The Work of Fire, Translated by Charlotte Mandell, 344pp.
Stanford University Press; distributed in the UK by Cambridge University Press.
Pounds 30 (paperback, Pounds 10.95). - 0 8047 2432 6.
The Writing of the Disaster, Translated by Ann Smock152pp. Lincoln: University Press of Nebraska; distributed in Europe by AUPG. Paperback, Pounds 11. - 0
8032 6120 9.
Michael Holland, editor, The Blanchot Reader, 329pp. Oxford: Blackwell. Pounds
40 (paperback, Pounds 13.99). - 0 631 19083 X.
When, in the early 1970s, I was trying to persuade British publishers to bring out a selection of the essays of Maurice Blanchot, no one was interested. Now at last the bulk of his work is becoming available in English, thanks largely to the Anglo-American academic interest in his friends and contemporaries Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jab s and Emmanuel Levinas. But this has led to a curious bias in our perception of Blanchot, since what has caught the attention has been that part of his work which was either specifically written in dialogue with these writers, or which seems closely related to their concerns. That bias is very perceptible in Michael Holland's selection and admirably informative annotations in The Blanchot Reader; but the translation of Blanchot's second book, La Part du feu (1949 "The Fire's Share" rather than The Work of Fire), helps to redress the balance and allows us to discover a writer who is in many ways much closer to the central tradition of European literary criticism, at least as it has been practised by poets and novelists from Coleridge to Michel Butor, than the Hegelian and Heideggerian sage and Utopian political thinker who emerges from the later work.
What is immediately striking about the essays in La Part du feu is how precise, lucid and quiet they are. This does not mean that they are not original or profound, but rather that they never set out to impress. Blanchot's eye is always on the object, the work or author he is considering, and his ear is always open to the movement and pace of both poetry and prose.
As with Proust's essay on Flaubert and much of T. S. Eliot's best criticism, Blanchot is moved to write by what he sees as the crass incomprehension of the ways of literature evinced by academics, philosophers and even well-meaning friends. Thus, in the essays on Mallarme and Kafka, he gently questions whether the views of Henri Mondor and Max Brod do not help to hide rather than illuminate the work, and in the great essays on Hoelderlin and Baudelaire he deftly dissociates himself from the powerful and persuasive readings of Heidegger and Sartre: Sartre's demonstration is very impressive and, as a whole, quite fair. It is true, then: Baudelaire had the life he deserved, a sordid life without refinement, conformist in his revolts . . . a life faked and failed; all these judgements demand few reservations. But if we accept them, as we must, we must accept another, which Sartre neglects: it is that Baudelaire also deserved Les Fleurs du Mal, that the life responsible for his "bad luck" is responsible for this signal good fortune, one of the greatest of the century.
Whether he is examining the role of Spanish words in Hemingway (via a comparison of Tolstoy's use of French in War and peace), contrasting Gide's acceptance of contradiction with Valery's need to sort everything out, or patiently exploring the nature of Hoelderlin's language, Blanchot is never satisfied with an initial apercu but always pressing forward against the difficult and the paradoxical ("He does not exist, but he has to be already what he will be later, in a 'not yet' that constitutes the essential part of his grief, his misery, and also his great wealth. Historically, this situation is one that Hoelderlin experienced and sang of in the deepest grief . . . .") until he has teased out not a solution that would be absurd but the full extent of the problem. That is why one wants to return to these essays again and again, and why they are as fresh now as when they were written.
The Work of Fire concludes with a long essay entitled "Literature and the Right to Death" in which Blanchot stands back from specific works and authors and tries to explore the themes touched on earlier, in a more extended manner. This seems to me a mistake. In the wonderful essay on Kafka's diaries, he had focused on Kafka's remark that it is possible, while in the deepest anguish, to write "I am unhappy", and pointed out that "it is not enough for me to write 'I am unhappy'. As long as I write nothing else, I am too close to myself, too close to my unhappiness, for this unhappiness to become really mine in the form of language . . . . It is only from the moment I arrive at this strange substitution, 'He is unhappy', that language begins to be formed into a language that is unhappy for me . . . ." In the same way, released from the obligation to listen to another, Blanchot gets too close to himself and so not close enough; instead of clarity and sweet precision, we have turgidity and portentousness.
Unfortunately, this has become the manner of his more recent excursions into print, of which the best known is The Writing of the Disaster. There are still some marvellous paragraphs on individual works, notably Melville's Bartleby
("'I will not do it' would still have signified an energetic determination, calling forth an equally energetic contradiction. 'I would prefer not to' . . . belongs to the infiniteness of patience; no dialectical intervention can take hold of such passivity"). But more frequently what we get is this kind of thing: The disaster is not somber, it would liberate us from everything if it could just have a relation with someone; we would know it in light of language and at the twilight of a language with a gai savoir. But the disaster is unknown; it is the unknown name for that in thought itself which dissuades us from thinking of it, leaving us, but its proximity, alone.
Michael Holland and the new generation of Blanchot's academic admirers obviously have no difficulty with this, They are adept at relating it to issues in Hegel, Heidegger and Levinas. Even in French, though, it seems to me that, by trying to say too much, it ends up not saying anything at all. The temptation to take on the role of the sage is obviously great, and who would be a mere literary critic if he could be a sage? Yet our century has spawned sages aplenty, but very few great literary critics. Blanchot's early essays show him to be one of these, and it is high time we started to listen to him.
