CHAPTER 16
Blanchot’s criticism in the 1930s is a criticism of ideas, books of ideas, and above all books of ideas from his milieu. It is also a criticism of literary works, for the most part novels (there is not a single article on poetry or theater). It rarely moves beyond these forms—as if literature or the written word counted above all.
Within Maurras’s sphere of influence, or for those dissenting from him, the main critics of the time were Bellessort, Rousseaux, Brasillach, Maulnier, Vincent, Haedens, and Claude Roy. For a certain period Arland’s signature appeared alongside theirs, for Réaction. Blanchot was far from the most prominent among them. His critical texts are few; most often, they are reading notes that remain largely undeveloped. However, in 1937 Maulnier asked him to write the Readings of the Insurgent column, something that demonstrates his intense respect for Blanchot.1 This was perhaps a decisive experience: being constrained to producing criticism at a quick, coherent, weekly rhythm, with each article Blanchot develops his penetrating and insistent analyses, taking as his pretexts varying publications in order to develop his exacting research. The Insurgé column comes to reflect the creative preoccupations of the secret novelist. As the months went by, the texts become more profound, the choices more decisive. Several theoretical notions are sketched out: the abolition of the author, the function of myth, the work’s relation to time. Perhaps we ought to see this search for critical thinking as a turning point. For literature seems to become Blanchot’s main concern from 1938 onward. That is when the literary pages of Aux Écoutes became longer, more diverse, and over a period of two years, the editor-in-chief arranged to have contributions from Arland, Haedens, Jaloux, Maulnier, Maxence, and Pelorson. It was probably Blanchot himself who, in an unsigned article of November 12, 1938, penned a vibrant homage to Henri Mondor, whose biography of Mallarmé he would analyze a few years later, and with whom he would establish contact.
This critical discourse, however, gained recognition only in the spheres Blanchot moved in. It is unlikely that many bought L’Insurgé for its literary column alone, unlike the Journal des Débats in the 1940s or the Nouvelle Revue Française in the 1950s and 1960s. Much later, Claude Roy stated, “Maurice Blanchot used to write enigmatic, fascinating, and suggestive texts on Maurras and Kafka, as well as obscure, elaborate narratives” (this memory is debatable, because Blanchot had written no text on Kafka at that point; and the two writers do not seem to have been so friendly that Blanchot would have shown Roy any prepublication texts).2 Pierre Monnier seems to be more credible in conceding that “his 42 installments of literary criticism were a stimulant for me, a drug.” “Between January and October 1937 he weighed up, dissected and judged everything in a way that seemed original and invigorating, with a mixture of seriousness and ease that left me breathless with admiration.”3
Where would Blanchot therefore fit in on the critical scene of the far right? Where would his judgments, tastes, and preferences take him? Maurras’s authoritarian intransigence was well known, having led him to censure Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Gide, Proust (authors nonetheless respected by Daudet), to admire the classics and detest the romantics. He preferred starchy, pompous writers to those of the avant-garde, and he even avoided discussing foreign works. Brasillach, who wrote the “literary chat” column for L’Action Française from 1931 to 1939, broadly followed these trends. He was lethal in his views of Gide and Flaubert, censured Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan but praised Bagatelles for a Massacre. He took a reserved view of Morand, a slightly more critical one of Chardonne, and was violently opposed to Drieu. He liked Aymé, Claudel, Colette, Alain-Fournier, Giraudoux, and Pirandello. He was less favorable toward those he was supposed to favor: Barrès, Péguy, Bourget and, closer to home, Bainville, Maurras, Daudet. He admired the fascist writer in Corneille, and the “great dramatic poet” in Mussolini. He thought The Magic Mountain was full of “endless chatter.” Claude Roy, at Je Suis Partout, was interested in Nerval, Kipling, Supervielle, Giraudoux, Anouilh, La Tour du Pin, and Margaret Mitchell. Overall, there was criticism of the tendencies for psychologism, misplaced introspection, pronounced individualism, the perverse demonstration of mental or sexual intimacy, the affirmation of pleasure, the search for vivid description, for the exotic or the monstrous, and surreal delirium (surrealism was an antimaterialism, a critique of decadence that had gone astray). It was underlined that the only surreality deserving of any attention or grandeur was that of spirituality.
We do not need to point out that these judgments rely on blind spots, prejudices, constraints, and prohibitions; this is often the case with their form, which alternates between scholarly and irreverent. We do not need to dwell at length on the conception of literature and of literary criticism that they presuppose. They merely show the limitations Maurice Blanchot’s criticism had to overcome and the milieu it was initially confronted with.
It seems highly probable that Blanchot, whose university education had been primarily in philosophy, should initially have adopted the literary references of his milieu. He would confirm this: “I remember (it is only a memory and perhaps false) that I was astonishingly cut off from the literature of the time and knew about nothing except so-called classical literature, with nevertheless some inkling of Valéry, Goethe, and Jean-Paul.”4 A false memory? We have our doubts about this. The classical literature would probably have been down to his symbolic father, Maurras, and his inflexible tradition. Goethe and Jean-Paul would have been due to his study of German literature at Strasbourg. Valéry and Goethe would be quoted in the columns for L’Insurgé. We can add Barrès to their number: this was the era when it was only really the Surrealists who did not admire him. When he would think back to the authors of his youth, in “After the Fact” or “Intellectuals under Scrutiny,” Blanchot would often mention Barrès and Valéry, the first in terms of lucid intransigence, the second of sympathetic disagreement.5
Blanchot’s criticism, in the 1930s, is a criticism of judgment. It can take the form of warm, affective homages, or of coldly disparaging sarcasm (but still less so in L’Insurgé, even if the first installment of the column closed by formulating the desire to “judge”).6 We also see Blanchot celebrating “Maurras’s genius” and the Platonic power of his dialectic,7 the “exemplary style” of Daudet, “which glides easily and with unparalleled variety and movement”;8 he placed similar store by the works of Massis, Maxence, and even Drieu, with whom he had begun corresponding.9 A third of the articles in L’Insurgé are dedicated to writers clearly situated on the right, and half of the total take on a political bent if we add the often devastating—as if on principle—critiques of communist authors. The references to Francis, Brasillach, and Haedens are full of praise. Blanchot is not without admiration for Arland and even Alain, whose soul he declares superior to his thought;10 there is also admiration for Mauriac, Jouhandeau, and Maeterlinck (“a marvelous music that proceeds, beyond grace, to Being,” “a demanding philosophy that takes us to the outer edges of the mind”).11 There is nothing, not a single text on the classical culture so dear to Maurras or Maulnier—except, for almost political reasons, for a vigorous defense of “French culture,” taking issue with the views “of a German” (Curtius).12 The present day is what preoccupies him, to the point of paying great attention to texts that we might view as insignificant.13
He agrees with André Rousseaux who sees in Cocteau an “intelligence which usurps the role of the mind.”14 Gide is said to have “perverse aesthetics”;15 for him, as for Rilke or Dostoevsky, “anxiety alone gives our lives a meaning,” something that Blanchot underlines with irony. Anxiety and “the dissociation of the self” were the “commonplaces of ‘young’ literature,” falling under the malign influence of Freudian psychology:
Despite its claim to be renewing the study of the human soul, this psychology is still only scraping the surface. Is giving oneself over to literary variations on the topics of schizophrenia or mythomania really the way to look for the underlying meaning, the true movement of the lost soul that is excluded from the real and from itself? In order to address the principles of personality, one needs to have principles—and rational principles—; and in order to understand its profundity, the science of the mystics is indispensable.16
Despite the limits of such a judgment and the blindness that is necessarily part of it, despite the dated and starchy terminology, some preoccupations do appear that would remain those of Blanchot’s literature, starting with Thomas the Obscure, which was being written in this period.
Whether it is due to writing, or experience, or writing as an experience, Blanchot’s critical discourse changes palpably over the decade, notably with the columns for L’Insurgé. While there is undeniably a real consistency, and while some positions even become more radical in 1937 (for example the condemnation of “the dangerous confusion spread by the acrobat-thinkers of the journal Esprit” or the panning of a book by Daniel-Rops that is said to be “inhabited by doppelgangers of the truth that we recognize and which we are extremely unwilling to accept,” a final twist regarding this “unflustered short-term borrower of truth”), a change nonetheless seems to set in, to be at work beneath the surface and to show itself most clearly in the very final columns.17 The articles are sprinkled with kind or praising references to authors not usually appreciated in his milieu, some of whom had been criticized by Blanchot himself several years previously; the names of Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Poe, Joyce, Nerval, and most of all Mallarmé, thus draw our attention.18 Rilke was said to be shaking up “some of the most important problems in thought”; “Joseph and His Brothers will later count among the most important and significant works of contemporary literature”; “Virginia Woolf’s works will one day appear as some of the rarest creations of our time.”19 Blanchot places these clear signals in the first lines of each article, to grab the attention of readers who would probably have been suspicious. Apart from the April text on Thomas Mann’s novel and several others on Francophone (Belgian or Swiss) authors, for a long time the columns in L’Insurgé only address French writers. Yet four of the final five articles look at foreign writers, albeit often from an aristocratic background or existence (some were already well-known or even universally recognized, for instance Rilke or Huxley); this was not without intellectual and aesthetic risks for the author of the articles, whose stubbornness provided one more reason for conflict or at least tension with the newspaper’s editors. It remains significant, symbolically at least, that Blanchot’s column should close with a series of articles addressing foreign works, having moved so far from the spirit of the “Mahatma Gandhi” piece with which it began.
A few elements or words filter through from the still-secret novel writer, from the critic to come. The thinking of effacement begins with Roger Martin du Gard, who is celebrated for “an indifference to the solicitations of publicity, an aptitude for ceding only to the injunctions of the art of writing.” The final two volumes of the Thibault series had been in circulation for eight years before Blanchot wrote of their author: “His silence has been his best chance to express himself.”20 On the other hand, he denounces the “fairly deep confusion” of Mauriac, the “strange equivocality” that consists in “understanding the destiny of the artist as inseparable from the destiny of the man,” in “claiming to see as a single being the man who created the work of art and the man who can be inferred from this work.” The distinction is already clearly set out: “Between the creator whose adventures are played out in the depths of his mind and the man who is devoured by anecdotes, there lies an abyss that cannot be crossed. The author becomes tenaciously irreducible to the man.” Racine’s way of “radically expelling himself from his work” sets up the critical terminology of Faux pas. Blanchot even hijacks an expression of Mauriac’s to let it be known that between author and work there is something like an . . . “arrêt de mort” (death sentence/stopping of death).21 With reference to Mallarmé, he already discusses the “abolition,” “annulation,” or “annihilation” of the author.22
Above all Blanchot appeals for cultural and historical responsibility, even for militant activism on the part of writers: “In an era when spiritual values are under threat, at the same time as what we value more concretely, the interest in politics demonstrated by intellectuals is an interest in their fate and a reminder that stability and order are basic conditions, without which the finest works of the mind are in vain.”23
His approach to what, when commentating on a book by Denis de Rougement, he calls the writer’s “commitment,” is spiritual, cultural, national, and revolutionary.24 For Blanchot, literature is political, from the start. This does not mean that it depends on a party mindset or that it attempts to respond to new internal or external criteria. Literature is political because “in an era when revolution is desirable” its task is to demonstrate an exemplary, magisterial power of refusal. The title of the inaugural piece in L’Insurgé underlines the links between revolution and literature (just as the exigency that passes “from anguish to language” would be recalled at the beginning of Faux pas). “How can the destiny of art intersect with and perhaps assist the destiny of the man who refuses”—that is the question.
What is more important is the oppositional strength expressed in the work and which is measured by its power to suppress other works or even to abolish part of ordinary reality, as well as by its power to call for the existence of new works, just as strong or stronger than it, or to affect a higher reality. There is also value in the strength of the resistance with which the author has opposed his work through the freedoms he has refused it, the instincts he has dominated, the rigor with which he has subjugated himself.25
Blanchot’s articles of the 1930s track these possibilities, these liberties, these conventions—those of the “atmosphere novel,” of the realist or allegorical novel, and above all those of the psychological novel—doing so more and more systematically with the L’Insurgé columns.26 This aesthetic vision, which was a constant for right-wing criticism, becomes a demand, a dominant leitmotif, the shrill proof of a thought penetrating only its own depths. Blanchot sets in opposition, on the one hand, reductive character analysis, which he sees as falsely realist (and realism itself is a falsehood), objectively moralizing (objectivity itself being a moralistic idea), always superficial and ultimately sterile; and on the other hand, the necessity of grasping the “depths” of our “obscurity,” of “our true abysses.” Psychological discourse seems facile to him; it prevents us from “ruining ourselves dangerously within our depths” in this “obscure, incoherent life inhabited by monsters and lethal powers.”27 This language of the abyss and the obscure, not lacking in Baudelairean romanticism, is threaded through the critical texts in L’Insurgé. It sketches out the search for a novelistic world that Blanchot calls in turn unreal or imaginary, mythical, or symbolic: loose and outdated notions that he does not really attempt to think through again. This is a world that novelists had approached without ever really entering into. It is a world belonging more to the Blanchot of Thomas the Obscure than to the authors studied. Each author therefore serves imperfectly to develop this hesitant, public research, which allows another type, creative and secret, to advance. This leads to the necessarily paradoxical turn taken by many of the pieces in L’Insurgé, a turn that sees Blanchot judging works that are able only to approach the obscure, but that succeed by way of their ultimate failures.
Faced with this demand, which he forces himself to recognize more and more often, Blanchot finds its paradoxes at work in the novels of Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf.28 He praises The Waves as “a fiction from which all psychology is excluded” and whose “sole character,” the “absolute character,” is Time “in its metaphysical nudity,” in its foundational essence (“the time that founds all consciousness,” “the time within which history is made”). The dissemination of the characters, their various modes of relating to time, their final, joyous, saving failure in relation to this supreme character who is ultimately death itself, all of this contributes to the loftiness of their existence: “For Mrs. Virginia Woolf, it is a question of expressing not what a person has thought in actuality, but what they must think in order to really exist,” in order to “produce a sentiment of authentic existence.” Thus “rarely has a work so foreign to the ordinary novel form so closely touched the essence of the novel.” In Joseph and His Brothers he sees “the novel of Time,” “the very novel of Myths,” “the festival of Narration,” “the novel of the novel.” It is also said to be “an investigation into duration” that refuses to see time simply as an “inexhaustible improvisation of events.” To question myths in this way is to uncover how beliefs arise, to consent both to the pure and the impure, and to give shape to “what remains most formidable in the most authentic saintliness and what is saintly above all saintliness.” All in all, this is “the good fortune of a great personal thinking.” This critical discovery also makes up part of the matrix from which Thomas the Obscure emerges, as do the encounter with Bataille and the reading of Sade and Lautréamont. The time of myth also announces the time of “the other time.” With these influences acting upon him, Blanchot chooses “the novel of the novel”: the absolute vigilance of language as a way to approach “the obscure.”
The demand of the obscure imperceptibly becomes the revolutionary demand, which refuses to be subjugated to psychology or realism, and sets in chain the characters’ forceful journeys to their own limits. Escaping history, the better to return to it; exiting time in order to irrupt into mythic time: the novel can be revolutionary, for instance in regarding and rethinking itself, in thinking about how it is constructed, in becoming “the novel of the novel.” It is not a question of technique (Woolf’s interior monologue is not the same as that of Settanni), but of sovereignty.29 In Bernanos Blanchot likes the refusal of servile sentiments (such as those of a Mauriac) and of “horrific abstractions” (those of a Jouhandeau), as well as the fact that these are literary or antiliterary tours de force. His writing is designed to bring literature, via a “sovereign constraint,” to expose what Blanchot cites as “the faceless beings without origin to whom all attempts at a cosmos relate, and on whom they depend.”30 It is necessary to push toward the extreme, to carry ideas “to their point of extreme tension,” not to “fear being carried further than one would like.”31 It is necessary, over and against works whose attempts remain insufficient, to allow there to be “another chance against death,” and to “seek out [this chance] through the demand of indefatigable spirit.”32 The mask of spiritualism continues to cover the face of death itself. “The inexpressible” often remains linked to “the question of God.”33 Blanchot is unable to name this “obscure” element except by using the usual terms, those belonging to the spiritual or philosophical language he had inherited: the soul, Being, the profundity of Being. And yet, occasionally he also calls it . . . “the impossible”; for the rule of rules, the golden rule of the refusal most often set up in opposition to realism, psychology, and moralism, is that one must avoid “overdoing the possible.”34
In 1938, in the only literary-critical text he signed in Aux Écoutes, Blanchot praised Sartre’s La nausée without any political reservations.35 The language is similar to that employed in the articles on Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf: wanting to form a myth “with the very source of myths,” Sartre “has shown an interest in the fundamental drama”; “he has placed himself close to Being itself.” “He takes the novel to a place where there are no more episodes, no more plots, no more individual characters, to this place where the mind survives only by relying on philosophical notions, such as existence and Being.” “Nausea is the overwhelming experience that reveals to him what it is to exist without being; this is the pathos-laden illumination which, in the midst of existing things, puts him in contact not with things, but with their existence.” Blanchot expresses no reservations, except to say that this attempt is “incomplete” because it retains realist and psychological elements and because it is reticent about the use of symbols; otherwise he praises this “undertaking, which is so rare, so important, so necessary.” The demand of literature seems to definitively impose its primacy in the shadow of the there is and in underlining the importance of Heidegger (who had recently been translated into French for the first time and on whom the article closes); this thinker who “offers art a new viewpoint from which to contemplate its necessity.”
It is a happily troubling fact that we do not have to wait until 1937 or 1938 and the texts on Mann, Woolf or Sartre to find this “new viewpoint,” this search for the “true movement of the lost soul which is outside the real and outside itself,” in which the sentiment of the disaster and the outside can already be seen at work. Indeed, it appears as early as 1931 in an article by Blanchot on François Mauriac’s final novel, Ce qui était perdu.36 Beyond all the obvious reasons, what attracts Blanchot to Mauriac at this time is the sadistic, violent, unwell nighttime into which the characters “with hearts full of mud” are thrown. How can we not find foreshadowings in this commentary of what Blanchot would later call the neuter, of Levinas’s there is, of what Bataille and Blanchot would impose as the authority of an unnamable “inner experience”?
Everyone, among these shadows, is confronted with a presence that is obscure, hidden, but sensed avant la lettre, against which everyone comes up short. Not everyone will recognize its ineffable power, not everyone is able to name it, but we can hear its terrible crashing against all these mediocre or monstrous souls.
How could we not also glimpse here an obsessive and tormenting biographical echo? Irene’s “injured soul,” “utterly within night,” struggling against death and giving into it when “it can uncover nothing more for us, nor bear witness to this final encounter which carries her, victorious, beyond the shadows”—this is already, in a spiritual, confessional form, Anne’s combat in darkness in Thomas the Obscure. “Such a community is established despite bodily hatred, despite divergences of sentiment, and it introduces us into regions of the soul that ordinary psychology does not touch”: Blanchot always holds psychological discourse, that of his studies, at arm’s length, preferring instead an experimental, more literary and philosophical “non-knowledge.” Of course, experience is not yet naked enough or, as Bataille would say, sufficiently “free of ties, even that of an origin, to any confession whatsoever.”37 Nonetheless, Blanchot does not hesitate in bearing witness to its intimacy, concluding that these characters “do not remain strange to us, because we are engaged in the same debate, and because they are wholly human, made of the poverty of flesh, with troubled heart in their defeats and their new beginnings, they are fraternal to us like those who seek through their groans.”