CHAPTER 18
However much we explore the influences on or the imperfections of the first version of Thomas, they will not convey the striking quality of this first novel, already so charged and so “Blanchotian.” Critics have often pointed out, with more or less justification, the influences of Giraudoux (metaphors that are hyperbolic, twisted, antithetical, contrasting), Kafka (concrete spaces from which all certainty is removed), Thomas Mann (more spaces, in which the ill keep each other company, and the same solitary quest, casting one into the unlikely, the limitless, the mysterious), Proust (a certain conception of set pieces, the sometimes fluctuating, alternating, swaying, always precise rhythm of the phrasing), Bernanos (characters who are clearly divine or satanic, the dissolution of subjectivity, normalization of the unlikely, the nocturnal, abyssal, diabolical experience of doubleness), Bloy, Barbey D’Aurevilly . . . or even Dostoevsky, Lautréamont (the excessiveness of metamorphosis), and Sade (a certain form of nakedness and of scandal, a certain refined syntax). To these could be added the influences of Nietzsche (a period of great mourning, an exposure to collapse), Malraux (the Self’s obsessive, adventurous and fearful gaze over natural abjection, animalistic devouring, monstrous squirming), surrealism, for example Leiris (syntactical drought with occasional oases, description through images and adjectives, the unlikely certainty of a magic or marvelous world). The writing in the novel contains unnecessary repetitions (of adjectives, adverbs, syntax), an abundance of adjectives, deliberate attempts to be superlative, a certain wallowing in metaphors, oxymorons, and even allegories. These characteristics are often referred to as “stylistic defects,” as baroque exaggerations contrary to the French “temperament.” They are present in abundance in Blanchot’s novel, demonstrating that he has been seduced. These indulgences will be removed in the “new version” and excluded from his future narratives.1
No one has described the style of Thomas the Obscure better than Blanchot himself: As he would often do, he analyzes his own writing by commenting on someone else’s (the main role of the critical texts thus seems to be that of an aesthetic autobiography). Published in April 1940, the article in question, on Lautréamont, gives him the opportunity to list a series of “qualities singularly lacking from the novelistic literature of today, at least in France” (except in Giraudoux, he adds).2 Thomas the Obscure, sent to Gallimard a month later, clearly attempts to fill the necessary gaps: “a deeply felt horror that steadily distances itself from the natural course of things”; “the refusal of psychology, the cancer of the French novel”; “the artificial quality of human emotions”; “an effort to conceive and create time in a way like no other”; “the time of a superior action in which creation takes place under conditions of efficiency and promptitude for which no human equivalent can be found”; an action with unpredictable consequences, “more because it can annihilate itself than because it can create anything”; evil, “that irremediable deterioration of all things, of which animal metamorphoses are the powerful image,” associated with a creative force “that is like an excess of the real”; and all of the above taking place within “the seeming discontinuity of the text” and “the extremely interlinked quality of the prose . . . that syntax directs by arranging the way it moves, thus creating a progression which meaning never forgets to follow, but only from a distance and with an ironic delay.” This is to say that the reader’s unease cannot tear him or her away from the work: “To tear oneself away from it is to tear oneself away from necessity itself. To follow one’s path within it is to continue within the impossible” (something that Blanchot would also say of Sade, and something that he would soon evoke with Bataille).
Aesthetic (novelistic) choices are also life choices. Long before the critical language comes to bear, they become the life choice for Blanchot. This is a way of prolonging his nocturnal interrogations, of offering identity another chance, of bearing the possibility of his own identity. A way of effacing oneself even while narrating oneself. And of giving form to the experience of being suffocated by the loss, mourning, illness, and deaths that gave rise to it all. It is not a question of recounting anecdotes or events, even extreme ones, nor of recounting the consequent suffering; but rather of opening up to the space of writing, to the time of fiction: like a joyous askesis, a voice is proffered which is sometimes hesitant, sometimes full-throated. It sketches out various gestures, it tolerates weight, breathing becomes a daily possibility once more. A long time would be necessary before the right form for this unsuffocation could be found. A long time will always be necessary. And perhaps it never will be found: This is a writing constantly undergoing metamorphoses.
The first book, the first text in which Blanchot agrees to give himself over, to give himself permission, Thomas the Obscure marks the first absolute engagement of the self by fiction, in fiction, in the confrontation on the title page between a surname—that of the author—and a first name—that of Thomas—a surname and first name that would remain associated in several later novels. The two are fused together from the outset: The first letters of Thomas are similar to the last of Blanchot, and Thomas ends as Maurice begins; indeed the book’s title almost forms an anagram of Maurice Blanchot. This Thomas who dwells in a sanatorium is also Thomas Mann—whose surname has the same assonance as the novel’s female character, Anne, and also means “mankind,” therefore representing a sort of “first Adam.” This character with the biblical first name is also Thomas Jude the apostle, or perhaps Jude the Obscure;3 this christic Thomas (Hegel’s second son was called Thomas Emmanuel Christian) is the dialectical confrontation of nonbelief and Christianity, “the fusion of the extremes by friendship and by philosophy”; and finally, this hero of the obscure is Heraclitus the obscure, the paradoxical philosopher of matter.4
What questions do these names raise? The capacity for an individual to live through the loss of love; the capacity for a body to represent all others, to give space to their movements in the air, to their gestures in space, even as it brings them back to itself; the capacity for a name to leave space for its shadow, its dark or sacred side, to recognize and almost to prepare its own abyss. For Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure will be if not an entry into the silence of poetry, then at least the marker of a predominant nocturnal demand, over and against “the madness of the day,” that of the world, and not least his own. It will be the creation of a creature that comprehends its creator, which is to say includes him and turns him inside out, giving him an identity. Blanchot is Thomas, not that the text is strictly autobiographical, or that it sketches out his fate or cycles through changes in the manner of Madame Bovary. Blanchot is Thomas in the sense that Thomas is no one, or is everyone at some point in his metamorphoses, providing a figure for the body’s permanent encounter with death; this novel of the fantastic, which is nonetheless extremely intimate, cannot be reduced to any physical or psychical figuration, or to any anecdote. The events of the narrative are as impossible as the author’s life-as-mysticism had become, and they try to extend, via the creation of a novelistic world or what we could name an exobiography, an externalized, dismembered, exploded biography, one which exposes its own ruins as part of the megalomaniac adventures of an impossible, divine destiny. These adventures are tirelessly adumbrated by a narrator who still believes in them and is alone in doing so, for we read this illusory construction with the greatest skepticism, even as it is extended, unfolded, and extrapolated. This is an exobiography that is an endobiography on a large scale, giving form to the author’s intimacy by enlarging its dramatic changes of course, its sanguine itinerary, the breadth of its gestures; and exposing the inside to the outside, somewhere between psychology and cosmogony (without either ever being understood as pure or self-contained), between humanization and pantheist divinization.
Daniel Wilhem quite rightly says that Blanchotian narration “is the denial that any space is forbidden.” We must take this to also apply to the interdiction of biography (though still without approaching the narrative “in the pregnancy of an avowal”). For here there is no “rarity of the event,” of narrative or of saying, “mapping out the same space”; on the contrary, there is total mobility and constant movement pushing the body of the unsayable ever further back. As Wilhem also suggests, the endless rehearsal (ressassement) of mistakes means that repentance takes on a spatial dimension, which does not find any affirmation or redemption in temporality.5 In this sense, and linking perfectly with the mobility of Thomas, the gluttony of novelistic space constantly carries the memory of error, which is at once unbearable and impossible to convey, except by constantly dying in the name of the other, in the duality of the work. Derrida also invokes the infinite nature of this task: “The narrative is interminable because the force that opposes it, just like attempts to set it at a distance, in fact produces that against which it is acting; it does so without any hope of arriving at a moment of conclusion, a negation of negation, or a denial [dénégation].”6
This is to say that the narrative does not produce any avowal because it is writing itself that is avowal (its “differences of step/of not” [différences de pas], its “step/not of death” [pas de mort]). In this sense, the first line of Thomas the Obscure, “Thomas sat down and looked at the sea,” strongly embodies the desire of what would eventually become a work. It is truly the first line of his entire work. Blanchot returned to it at the beginning of The Step Not Beyond in order to underline how these few words, “words in themselves without future or claim: ‘he—the sea,’ ” signify the “power to rip away, to destroy or to change” that sets the oeuvre in motion.7 These words inscribe “the possibility of a radical transformation, if only for a single person, namely his suppression as a personal existence,” as well as the impossibility of unifying existence “through writing that disunifies.” Blanchot also clarifies that these first words were written “facing the sky,” namely facing the openness, the division of the sky; writing begins with the “primal scene,” seeming to repeat it indefinitely, to disseminate its destiny. This image of death to come is disorientating, linked as it is to the infinitely rehearsed image of death inverted.
What actually happens in Thomas the Obscure? The opening sentence, a measured, calm line, “Thomas sat down and looked at the sea,” is simple enough (even though such banality concretizes the mobile space of the narrative as well as—already—the site of its completion). Hereafter the narrative moves toward a highly unrealistic fate, comprising bodies and spaces in constant metamorphosis and in which Thomas, the main character, who is by turns human and monstrous, dead and alive, meets two young women.8 Anne and Irene enter into strange, impossible, metapsy-chic, and often unspeakable relationships with him before choosing their death and dying, Irene struck in the throat by a sharp object, Anne from simple exhaustion. At this point Thomas imposes a new gaze on a world created anew and sends men into the sea. It remains unclear what motivates all of this behavior, but whatever it might be, it traverses the characters with the clarity of certainty; categories such as willpower, determination, or freedom remain wholly foreign to this immediately aesthetized world, which is absolute without ever being absolved, perfect because it has so many imperfections. Everything takes place under the tutelage of a law according to which things are anything but solid and one comes upon spaces in which a just reciprocity can be established with the other (even in cruelty). Nonetheless, this does not mean that the narrative simply describes a range of behavior, nor that it brings to light spectacular or fantastic events, providing one anecdote of the impossible after another. The narrative exists in order to counter at once the “invisible leprosy” of feelings (43) and “the illusion of light” (301).9 Without the reference points provided by categories, it makes use of concepts habitually tolerated in our readings of the world, but only to deny their capacity for adequate understanding and interpretation. When comparisons open up a distance, they are immediately closed down again (“her movement was not that of a sleepwalker,” 136). It is a question of drowning and then resuscitating the figures used, in an infinite, infinitely open movement, opening up bodies, forms, and gazes.
This refusal to name the particular opens intimacy to the outside, the singular to the universal. Likewise, it is not through identifiable reference points but rather faint traces that Thomas provides an echo to Blanchot’s life. Something is inscribed by this unspeakable intimacy, is set in motion and seeks to be said, to be protected, to be torn away and to be breathed. A 150-year-old lime tree provides a glimpse of the solitude of a faraway, collapsed childhood, one confronted with nothingness. Thomas’s main bodily preoccupation is his stomach, perhaps “the dominant agony in his life” (42), and his illness, this weakness that can reach even the summits of vigor, sometimes takes refuge in sanatoria. Although it is impossible for many, death is reached by tolerating the smile, a terrifying one, of a dying man. These are some of the broken, disseminated elements providing the backdrop for the narrative: so many obscure lines, waves of joy and exhaustion, moments of bodily suffering and of the opening of the gazes, all of which mark life in the porous universe of fear and fascination.10
Fear precedes the appearance of any face, as a condition of the ethical stage. It is a fear of the inside of things, an inside that is always unhealthy, exhausted, masked, disfigured as soon as it is unfolded, liquefied, corrupt, muddily black. It is fear of time accelerating and distending, of light blanching, of space becoming unbound. Over and against the constant threat of suffocation, it hopes to find a way of breathing, the only guarantee that faces might be put back together, a tense ordeal that demands that one bear “breathing in asphyxia” (79).
Space is in short supply and from the outset, from the endless struggle of Thomas’s swimming, must be created. The body also seems to be missing, both space and the body being detached and as if floating, despite being heavy and coarse; the sensation is one of a projection being given in a very localized form. The body’s absence charges it with a senseless density: the more it is hollowed out by emptiness, the fuller it is of an invisible presence. This struggle with an angel produces the suffocating sensation of the site of an anguishing, monstrous, excessive, incoercible occupation of the body as a site. Thomas’s strength is not to give in or efface himself, but eventually to come to take the place of the other body, assimilating it, taking the place of other bodies everywhere, becoming multiple and therefore dividing himself into so many small abysses with which men will be confronted. He is death in them, the possibility of them replacing their own bodies, of twinning themselves with their abyss. This is christic experience, an experience of friendship, one able to bear the enormous demands on patience, listening, and fatigue; “in death itself, deprived of death” (78). The fluidity of the writing makes this mysterious attentiveness into the blessing and the clarity of consciousness, as well as the clarity of a bodily state. Anaphoras delve into—and paradoxes exhaust—the possible; but the thinking of this leveling-down shows itself to be a happy one, the maintenance of belief (as well as of fear, of paranoia, of strength) as and through the movements of the phrasing.
Thomas reveals Anne to herself. She is “the first dead woman to be there” (290). Their first meeting violently reveals Thomas’s power. Anne is the site where this force that reaches her from behind a partition is explored, where it doubles itself in her, annihilates her. She has encountered her invisible partner, the other body that subdues her.
Her body received from the invisible body wounds which shattered her; a shadow crushed her. At that moment she heard distinctly a powerful heart beating behind the partition, arteries closing and opening in accordance with the pressure from an irritated, hurrying life. She heard a terrible noise: a flash of blood illuminated her; a flood of humors, of broken veins, of tissues hit by lightning struck her. She saw the partition fold before her; she felt the beatings of a monstrous life, she felt ready to die. And she ran away, blind and deaf, until by falling she was restored to liberty. (54)
There are some moments, Blanchot would write in an article for the Journal des Débats, when “night reveals itself as being composed of organs and filled with a physical expectancy.”11 This is Thomas’s night, the night of bodies that are invisible, absent, inhuman, lightweight, consisting of luminosity, divided, ripped away from themselves, neutral (164); the night of constant metamorphoses, of imperceptible but repeated passages from life to death. This night is not without divinity. In turn described as the “first man,” as a creator, destroyer (there are many references to both Genesis and Revelations), Thomas stubbornly strikes into the thickness of matter, as if he had always forgotten what he had created. He strikes into the darkness in order to break down all immanence with the object, clothed by a light that “does not have any fundamental strangeness,” and in order to better rediscover solitude, the alterity of things, the division of jouissance and of sobbing.12 Thomas’s night is this “wound to thought,” this “thought taken ironically as an object by something other than thought.” “It [is] night itself” (33). It is the other night, the other night of essential solitude, the other night of Orpheus. Thomas’s experience here is indeed that of Blanchot, that of the writer caught up in the Hölderlinian world full of divine presences. Who is playing us? Who is playing Thomas, Orpheus, the author? Who returns them to their own nights: the untouchable Christ, the invisible Eurydice, the unreadable work? In this madness of night, which is constantly troubled, carried away, returned, the dice are cast, the space of literature is decided upon.
Just as there are several different nights in space, there are several gods on the shores of day. But they are so spread out that between breath and springing, a life has gone by.
The gods do not decline nor do they die, but with an imperious and cyclical movement, like the ocean, they withdraw. You approach them only among the waterholes, buried.
Best child of the old solar disk, and as near as possible to its celestial slowness. This substantial longing came again, came again, then its spot vanished.
Night freely recircled, which plays us?13