How Postmodern Is It?

Mark Cohen
Sarah Lawrence College

mcohen@slc.edu

Review of:
Maurice Blanchot, The Book to Come. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

The Book to Come was published in 1959 and is composed entirely of articles written for the Chroniques section of the Nouvelle Revue Française between 1953 and 1958.[1] It came at a particular juncture in Blanchot's career, marking the end of his period of "retreat" into literature. After his passionate involvement with right-wing journalism, which had culminated in anti-Semitic articles against the Blum government in 1936-37, Blanchot refrained from making any direct political statements for another two decades. Instead he became a highly productive and widely recognized literary critic and novelist. In the 1950s alone, he wrote a hundred articles as well as four novellas or récits (as Blanchot called them then). Although these reflections on literature incorporated philosophical and political references, the latter always remained subordinate to literary concerns. In 1958, however, what Blanchot considered to be De Gaulle's legalized coup d'état and the revelations of French war crimes in the Algerian conflict roused him to enter the political arena once more, this time on the left wing. Over the next three decades his writing and activities become more broadly engaged with issues that went beyond the strictly literary, in particular in the form of anguished reflections on the Holocaust and "Jewishness," understood more as an existential category than as one restricted to a real historical or religious group. He also participated actively in the événements of 1968 on the side of the insurgent students. In a similar move toward engagement, responding to new art forms and philosophies, he abandoned fiction for a hybrid form of discourse that incorporated criticism, dialogue, and the fragmentary, becoming in turn a highly influential figure for radical French philosophy and writing of the 1960s and 70s.

The Book to Come represents then the purest version we have of Blanchot littérateur in what proved to be his last major work of literary criticism. Emblematic of its exclusiveness in this regard was its close association with the NRF, which began publication in the 1950s after a ten-year hiatus. It became a flagship for a certain small-scale, even "provincial" variant of modernism in its apolitical promotion of a "pure" literature untethered to either ideological statements or grand projects. Under the guidance of the legendary Jean Paulhan, it promoted an investigation of the workshop of writing, printing short excerpts of novels, notebooks, diaries, and reflections by writer-aestheticians like Caillois, Cioran, Jouhandeau, Malraux, and others. Blanchot's tortuous avoidance of direct reference to his prewar mésalliance has been dealt with at length by American critics. Steven Ungar, for one, finds in the title of The Book to Come an uncanny repression of one of Blanchot's fascist essays of 1938 entitled "The Revolution to Come." Indeed, looking at the structure and institutional self-identification of The Book to Come affirms just how comfortable he was in his attachment to the literary. The NRF was a tolerant milieu, defiantly indifferent to partisan, résistant polemics, and thus accommodating of former right-wingers like Blanchot. He quickly came to occupy a special role in the review, becoming what amounted to its house critic during the 1950s, well-placed to create an audience for his own fiction and that of others working in the same vein. The secure position he enjoyed is evidenced in a prefatory note that not only foregrounds his dual activities as both writer and critic but gives biographical information (however exiguous) that is completely uncharacteristic of his habitual reticence about such matters: "Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic, was born in 1907. His life is wholly devoted to literature and the silence unique to it."[2] Equally unprecedented in the Blanchot corpus is a postfacial note referring to the essays' provenance--"A little modified, these texts belong to a series of little essays published starting in 1953, in La Nouvelle Revue Française."

In comparison with his other nonfiction prose, The Book to Come lacks the central theoretical essay of its predecessors Faux pas (1943) and The Work of Fire (1949), the high level of abstraction and metaphysical drama of its sister-work The Space of Literature (1955), and the broad cultural-philosophical sweep of The Infinite Conversation (1969) and Friendship (1971).[3] To be sure, the roughly contemporaneous Space of Literature shares with The Book to Come the same abyssal view of literature, a common metaphorics, and rhapsodic style. Nevertheless the former operates on a far more rarified level of ontology, in which a dramatic metaphysics of solitude, death, inspiration, and experience are programmatically interconnected with one another throughout the book as a whole. The Book to Come's essays, in contrast, converge toward the same end but separately. Even the opening essay, a retelling of the Sirens myth that describes how narrative works, is immediately followed not by a look at Kafka or Mallarmé's treatment of Sirens, of which Blanchot was well aware, but by a specific case study of narrative in which Sirens have no obvious place: a review of Proust's Jean Santeuil. This ad hoc alternation of general and particular is typical throughout.

The essays in The Book to Come can be conveniently divided into three types: 1) the study of an individual author's path to his Blanchottian masterpiece, including a subset of shorter pieces on contemporary works (by Beckett, Duras, Robbe-Grillet) that, as Blanchot sees it, simply perform in one way or another the essence of literature; 2) the generic study of narrative, notebook, diary, correspondence as they limn, resist, and adumbrate the same; 3) more general meditations on reading, a speculation on the "last" writer, symbolic interpretation, and publicity. It is precisely the relative dispersion of its essays and their corresponding embeddedness in the practical activity (as opposed to the ontology) of writing that reveals Blanchot's aims so well. In The Book to Come we witness what amounts to an inductive procedure of collecting quite a wide range of examples of authors and genres with the intention of analyzing them in such a way that they confirm his own theoretical insights, literary historical intuitions, and fictional practices.[4] The random spread of the monthly reviewer dovetails with the forging of an artistic credo. Many of these authors--Musil, Broch, Borges, and Hesse, for example--did not form part of Blanchot's preferred modernist canon, and he never wrote about them again. An illustration of this more "professionalized" emphasis can be gleaned from a brief comparison of statements written more or less contemporaneously on the same topic taken from each of the respective books. In The Space of Literature, "to write is to enter into the affirmation of the solitude in which fascination threatens" (33); in The Book to Come, "every writer feels called to answer alone, through his own ignorance, for literature, for its future" (201). It is the difference between an ontological state in which one exists and a specific condition in which one fulfills a task, between space and time.

The stakes of The Book to Come are well captured in the opening lines of "The Disappearance of Literature , " the essay that begins the fourth section: "Where is literature going? . . . towards itself, its essence, which is disappearance" (195). Blanchot's criticism from the 1950s charts this strangely circular journey to extinction and explains that literature must be understood to take place in a wholly other time and space than we are accustomed to. Because, strangely, it is precisely literature's weakness that is its strength or rather its being. It brings a difference into human life in which the systems and ontologies that govern the real world of everyday exchange and rationality no longer apply. But this opposition is not underwritten by the ideology of the Romantic artist or utopian dreamer. The imaginary world is not a better world or more authentic--indeed it can only be truly critical of the existing world by not assuming any such implicit mastery. For substantive critique would require literature to take up the modalities of the non-literary, which for Blanchot means the successful carrying out of a project, the desire to represent, to claim authority, relay tradition, or move others to feel or do. Instead modern literature now tends to examine itself, the nature of the fictive act, and all this entails in terms of speaker, addressee, thought, and temporality/ies. (The difficulties of fitting this into any standard literary history are not something Blanchot examines with any rigor.)

The basic trope governing the Blanchottian ontology of literature in The Book to Come might be called the recursive future and can be described in a simple equation: x = not-yet x. The equation works in both directions, both as a logical and as a temporal description. The being of x is only truly grasped as not yet existing. Any attempt (the result of what Blanchot calls "impatience") to finish something and achieve it once and for all means that one will fail to do so. Only by realizing that it would be impossible does one do justice to it. This leaves us with the approach to the object and the experience of approaching. The whole linear apparatus of plan, execution, and goal is no longer applicable. The future of a book armed with this consciousness is not in its worldly future--who will read it, the world it will create, the imitators it will spawn, its place in literary history--but the reiteration of its quest to become literature, which is, paradoxically, a search for its original moment of emergence from the silence. Its future is a now that searches back in the past. The eponymous "book to come" then is not only the future of literature in history (though Blanchot does think that on some level), but books like Blanchot's fiction that in conventional terms never end or even begin. The past here, likewise, does not mean the publicly historical past but the past that is always presupposed as the past in relation to this present moment in which we are reading. Such an unwonted order of temporality also has repercussions for all the components of the world that are presented (if not represented) in texts: the self in literature is always a moment within the text, a fading-reappearing instance of enunciation rather than a substantial, well-defined character; the encounter with others is always impossible yet framed by desire and curiosity; the event is no longer something represented as if it had existed but is the ever-receding quest for its own existence as we experience it in the performative instant. In this intensively temporalized view of literature there is no place for literature as a monumental achievement. Reversing the usual worldly valuations, in Blanchot's view success in fulfilling one's projects would be failure in terms of the search for literature and vice versa. As a result, in the The Book to Come's penultimate essay, Mallarmé's oeuvre is said to be most truly formed not from a triumphant sequence of masterpieces but from the detritus of his never-carried-out plan to write an encyclopedic sequence of works to replace the world. According to Blanchot, its wild ambition is realized not because it does replace the world with another but because it reveals so clearly literature's inevitable failure to do so. Similarly, in the essay on Artaud, Blanchot homes in on the fact that it is Artaud's failed poems that arouse Jacques Rivière's interest. Ultimately, it is the penumbra of the poem, his correspondence with Artaud about the latter's state of mind, that ends up becoming a successful work.

Each of the authors surveyed is shown in The Book to Come arriving at the same conclusions about the nature of literature as Blanchot, whether consciously or unconsciously. The works Blanchot discusses and celebrates are shown to triumph when they have successfully avoided two temptations of the modern writer that are metaphysically impossible to attain and in any case undesirable: the Scylla of immediacy, a return to nature or pure self-expression, and the Charybdis of reference (novelistic "thickness," the evocation of a milieu, encyclopedic completeness) or culture (copying the great styles of French literature). This tale is retailed over and over again. Proust in Jean Santeuil is caught between a wish to transcribe simple unconnected moments of experience and the desire to provide a detailed depiction of France during the Dreyfus Affair. Broch wants his great work to cover both scientific rationality and cultural dissolution. Rousseau oscillates between the desire for immediacy and the hope of communicating his great vision of human justice, which necessarily requires the adoption of social conventions and so on. In each case what they have to learn is that the right path for them to take as writers is the path that leads in neither of these directions, one that in fact leads to the full assumption of literary language and the depersonalized form of open, mobile temporality that comes with it. Something in each writer resists the final step but their masterpieces take it.

In the generic essays (as I called them above), Blanchot articulates the idea that the specific temporality of literature is opposed to that of everyday life and rational calculation and that literature is able nevertheless to seep into the world surreptitiously--not necessarily to substitute for the everyday but rather to be always available to problematize it unremittingly. In the essay "Diary and Story," for instance, diaries and notebooks are clearly separated from the work by Blanchot, who sees them as tied to the everyday because they use dates and events to act as a timorous defense against the radicality of what he considers the truly literary. Yet by the end of this essay, the diary's "quest without concern for results" looks a lot like a Blanchottian work, whereas the quotidian is now said to be infected by literature once it has been reconfigured as diary (188). This whirligig of apparently separate categories that end up intermingling offers an early, abstract template for Blanchot's complex and obscure "politics" of literature.

The famous opening essay, entitled "Encountering the Imaginary," uses Ulysses's non-meeting with the Sirens to reveal how even as he, the man of technique, can experience the reality of a dangerous discovery, he makes sure he is in no real danger.[5] By employing his technology in the form of wax in the ears of his men and ropes to hold himself fast, he in fact ensures that no meeting took place.[6] Yet as Blanchot views it, Ulysses loses out anyway because he ends up telling the story of the Sirens and becomes Homer in the process. He tells of his failure to reach them even as they have arrived and keep on arriving in the imaginary medium of his discourse. This now-installed impossibility of completion gives birth to its own genre-to-come: the récit. Technique is something that operates in the world of everyday exchange and the linear temporality of calculation. It lends itself quite comfortably to the creation of narratives, too, describing exciting events, and holding the interest of its listeners. But Blanchot shifts the focus from the telling of an adventure (Ulysses meeting the Sirens) to the defeat of the adventure genre itself from within (Homer-Ulysses telling his story). The revelation of the literariness of the adventure story means that the adventure itself becomes interminable in the constant possibility of its retelling (on the syntagmatic plane) and of its being told differently (on the paradigmatic plane). This is Blanchot's mythic retelling of his own coming to narrative. The non-meeting of Siren and Navigator is structurally parallel to the basic setting of Blanchot's novellas of the 1950s: two or three individuals approaching, exploring, but never finally knowing each other. It is one more sign of how closely The Book to Come is linked in practical terms to Blanchot's contemporaneously written fictional works--his own books to come in both senses of the expression--that in this opening chapter he is actually defining the genre of his own fiction, the récit: "Narrative [récit] is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold" (6). Elsewhere in his critical pieces, he virtually never refers to his fictional work, even obliquely.

It is one of the fervent hopes of the "Crossing Aesthetics" series, edited by Werner Hamacher, to promote the passage for aesthetics to politics from within deconstruction itself and thereby preserve the halting, involuted complexity of deconstructive reading in the public sphere. Blanchot can fairly be considered the series' most honored figure: no fewer than three of his books are represented in its catalogue as well as a number of others that are inspired by or directly devoted to him. Yet we should note that this much desired passage does not occur in The Book to Come, which figures politics only in filigree. Blanchot is truly an uncanny precursor for deconstruction here because his politics remain obstinately veiled, retaining a troubling and insistent vehemence that is, as always, coupled with an equally unflappable lack of specificity. A number of the more general essays do allude to important Blanchottian notions of questioning and resistance, that is, the refusal to accept anything as such, a sort of anarchic negativity without any positive component or utopian hope beyond it. Literature is said to make all events equal and equally possible, thus challenging--implicitly--all fixed hierarchies and established values. The fundamental opposition of literary modes of operation to those of the bourgeois world with its goal-oriented work, time, and technology is clear but left without any details or applications to the contemporary context. The beginnings of Blanchot's deep critical engagement with Judaism, which is an essential element in his politics of the 1960s, can certainly be discerned in the titles of the essays "Prophetic Speech" and "The Secret of the Golem"--but only in their titles. "The Secret of the Golem," for instance, discusses the confident use of symbolism in literature as emblematic of wrong-headed attempts to make language represent the world. Jews and "Jewish-ness" as such are otherwise absent.

The most overtly political moment in The Book to Come comes at the end. The final essay, "The Power and the Glory," does bring up an important cultural theme very much in the air in France in the 1950s: the relationship of the writer to mass culture. Blanchot in effect compares the alienation imposed on the reader by literature with that of the public on the individual. What might in Heideggerian terms look like a fall into the "they" or more conventionally and nostalgically the loss of identifiable human beings ("friends") who might read one's books is actually embraced by Blanchot as a happy meeting of the twain. In his closing lines, he is implicitly celebrating the equalizing powerlessness that language can, if understood properly, induce us to accept and thus clearing the ground for his, the writer's, return to politics. In a rarely remarked allusion to Orpheus that is no longer that of The Space of Literature, where it is used as an allegory of Blanchottian creation, here the poet is said not to find the artwork by losing its object but to arrive at his speech by joining the flow of his song with the indifferent murmur of public culture:

If today the writer, thinking of going down to the underworld, is content with going out into the street, that is because the two rivers [the underground and above-ground Styx] . . . passing through each other, tend to be confused. . . . the profound original rumor . . . is not unlike the unspeaking speech . . . the "public mind." (250)

French Department
Sarah Lawrence College
mcohen@slc.edu

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Notes

chercher, recherche, navigation

1. With the exception of his brief review of Bataille's Madame Edwarda.

2. "Maurice Blanchot, romancier et critique, est né en 1907. Sa vie est entièrement vouée à la littérature et au silence qui lui est propre." The expression "lui est propre" could also be translated "which belongs to it" or "which is properly its own."

3. The latter two books contained essays from the 1950s as well as the 1960s that Blanchot had not collected in book form at the time but were philosophical and cultural in nature and so more congruent with his later interests.

4. Space does not permit any detailed consideration of the numerous echoes of his 1957 récit Le Dernier Homme. One essay, for instance, is about "The Death of the Last Writer."

5. Mandell's felicitous translation for "La rencontre de l'imaginaire."

6. The French word Blanchot uses is technique, which recalls Heidegger's 1953 essay attacking the nihilism produced by modern Technik.

Works Cited

Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.

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