CHAPTER 22
On April 16, 1941, Blanchot began his “Chronicles of Intellectual Life,” which were essentially literary, at the Journal des Débats.1 They would continue uninterrupted until August 1944, totaling 171 articles, to which should be added two texts he published on the newspaper’s front page. Slightly less than a third (54) were reprinted in Faux pas, Blanchot’s first wide-ranging collection, which appeared at the end of 1943.
This newspaper, which overtly supported Pétain, had only begun to appear regularly again in March 1941. Of course, it was still just as little read, just as pompous and boring, just as incapable of satisfying readers on the far right. Blanchot’s elegant, arrogantly indifferent articles were printed alongside intolerable propaganda, whether in the form of articles or advertisements. This was a strange object, a conciliatory invective, which seemed to lack any feeling for history: how was this column possible? How was it tolerated by the editors and by those in power? How did Blanchot experience its publication? Did he think at this time that authors were not judged by the platforms they wrote for? Did he badly need the money, as he would later say to Roger Laporte? That at least is not entirely true: he was receiving a salary from Jeune France. But it is true that he was expecting this salary to soon stop being paid, and the precaution of undertaking this column at the Journal des Débats would quickly show how financially useful it was.2
Although they are of extremely varying quality, these chronicles contain the first high points of Blanchot’s critical work. While this might have represented—as Bataille put it—a “wholly accidental origin,” Blanchot would transform this accident into a calling and follow through the logic of even the most sovereign critic, as well as the author in question, expiating or atoning for his authority.3
The title “Chronicles of Intellectual Life” recalls to some extent “Les lectures de L’Insurgé” (“The Readings of the Insurgent”) owing to its weekly publication, its length, its position at the foot of the page, sometimes its choices of authors, and finally (and above all) the way its subjects are given renewal: Even classic authors are presented in the light of reissues, critical editions, secondary works, putting them in a contemporary setting . . . inciting one to write. Blanchot imposes his authority, his style, his erudition, his quality of judgment. The varied roll call of authors addressed is a curious one, mixing together those admired and those hated by the far right. It gives rise to papers on general theory; to texts on classic authors, most commonly from the seventeenth century (Racine, Molière, Madame de La Fayette); an increasing number of articles on nineteenth-century authors (Lamartine, Balzac, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Maupassant), great foreign literature (Dante, Machiavelli, Goethe, Blake, Melville, Joyce, Rilke), contemporaries who were already well known (Claudel, Valéry, Gide), were becoming so (Sartre, Camus), or would become so (Des Forêts, Bataille, Michaux). There are also a few texts on literary criticism or philosophy (Thibaudet, Paulhan, Parain, Alain, Dumézil, Kierkegaard, Bergson); even articles on his far-right friends (Maulnier, Haedens) or on authors of the right, including some associated with collaboration (Benoist-Méchin, Montherlant, Chardonne, Jouhandeau, Drieu); regularly, his texts look jointly at several novels or collections of poetry as a way of giving an updated view of the genre (interests for Duras or Leiris, Fardoulis-Lagrange, Claude Roy, or Henri Thomas also begin to be apparent). There is something surprising about the often considerable inconsistency of tone between one article and the next; one will address an important work inventively, loftily, demandingly, then another will look at a completely worthless novel in a superficial, accommodating, complacent way (as if the critic were giving in easily to indifference).4 This inconsistency can be explained by the genre of the press article, which is often closer to a review than to commentary, even if sometimes Blanchot moves close to a true essay. Such inconsistency does not change over the four years. Overall, the authors most often addressed will be Valéry and Mallarmé (four articles each) and Montherlant (five articles). There are three articles on Michaux, to whom Blanchot would subsequently return too rarely, and three on Paulhan.
The judgments made had changed significantly since the articles of the 1930s. There is no better way of seeing this than by looking at the column of September 22, 1943 (Blanchot’s thirty-sixth birthday) on Kléber Haedens’s History of French Literature. Blanchot confides under the cover of the impersonal that Haedens “always displays a striking love for other authors that have come to be hated.” He argues against the weight of traditionalist readers’ conventionality: “One admires those whom one has got into the habit of admiring, one expresses violent disdain for those whom it has been agreed to disdain.” In order to discover Blanchot’s preferences, we can simply read the article against the grain. “For Kléber Haedens, the outstanding seventeenth-century novel was not The Other World by Cyrano de Bergerac, but The Princess of Clèves, and the strongest eighteenth-century writer was Laclos and not Sade.” Blanchot does not waste time with Musset or Fénelon, expresses disdain for Voltaire, neglects Verlaine, rates highly Hugo, Stendhal, and Flaubert, and admires Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont. A year later he will discuss the areas of interest opened up to him by “these nonclassified minds that in France form the tradition of those beyond the tradition.”5 He rehabilitates Freud, praises the “edicts of French surrealism,” quotes Breton as well as Gide several times, always gladly, and sometimes even in the knowledge that he is making good one of his most serious past errors.6
This means that Blanchot can now be found expressing scorn for Bernanos, Drieu, and even those he has previously been close to, such as Francis. Of these previous relationships, only the attachment to the critical gaze of Thierry Maulnier remains. Blanchot produces unfriendly judgments on Mauriac (in an article that would not be collected in Faux pas) and on Chardonne (this was in July 1941, just after the publication of what would be called “a small mystical, pro-Hitler essay in Drieu’s NRF.”7). He still finds psychologism as well as moralism as violently unbearable as ever. This leads him to condemn Montherlant for the latter’s “poor quality” moral hyperinflation: “There is nothing more lowly or more guilty than the man who preaches in the name of silence and who makes the enigma of the summits into a commonplace.”8 At the empty heart of silence, at the noontide of the summit (even he would lose his way there), Blanchot henceforth is in the company of Bataille and Nietzsche.
Blanchot’s literary culture is now in broad daylight, without anything being secret or reserved.9 Here, “culture” means that Blanchot cites as real role models for his creative thought authors in whom he has been immersed for years. They secretly (begin to) act as reference points, the models in relation to which he begins to construct his own critical and novelistic oeuvre. Only those who have acted as architects for a palpable universe manage to survive among all those, almost exclusively on the Right, who make up “past culture”: Péguy, Claudel, and above all Giraudoux, with the “furrow he ploughed so astonishingly,” his “unbearable perfection,” his “sense of what is unique.” But even with these authors, Blanchot tones down such excesses of lyricism when reworking the articles for Faux pas.10 The three authors who count, those who set in motion the movement of palpable intellectual creation that marks Faux pas, are Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and Valéry. Their names appear dozens of times, as do longer references to their texts or their theories.
In the wake of Lautréamont and Mallarmé there follow something like waves or flurries of names: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nerval, and the German romantics Novalis, Hölderlin, and Jean-Paul. For contemporaries, the preference is for Michaux, Ponge, Parain, Leiris, or Queneau. Beyond Thomas Mann or Virginia Woolf, in whom Blanchot had already taken an interest in L’Insurgé, the greatest novelists of the era are said to be “Sade, Melville, Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka, Joyce, Malraux, Faulkner,” a list that is already close to the names that will be chosen in the future; it is also knowingly constructed, featuring as it does authors impossible to address at greater length in the Journal des Débats.11 Kafka, Sade, and Malraux are cited only once or twice in four years, and we can see why, when we recall what sort of newspaper the articles were being published in. In a significant gesture, Blanchot would dedicate one or two important texts to each after the Liberation.
It should be clear that Blanchot’s concern is not to account for contemporary literature (this was simply his role as a journalist), but instead to put in position what is necessary for contemporary creation. His concern is to forge a path toward what he calls the “young novel,” doing so via a criticism that is more anticipatory than explanatory—a new rhetoric setting up laws of construction and deconstruction.12 Little by little, journalism serves the strategy of conquering not literature but fiction. This leads to a reorganization of critical discourse, which is also a different way of presenting a public persona politically and ideologically, a way of exposing the intimate that is both overt and obscure, palpable and neutral. It is still a question of returning to oneself, but now it takes place via a nascent thinking carried out in the name of the other.
His official role was clear: Blanchot was being asked to act as a young scribe (clerc) for the French state, no more and no less. The same impetus led to his literary responsibilities at Jeune France and at the Journal des Débats. In two articles with which the column began, two texts whose interdependence would be interesting to read in greater detail, Blanchot defines his responsibilities, accepting them while contesting and evading them at the same time.13 Initially it was a question of the critic serving readers, to help them perceive “the true movement of minds”; for amidst the uncertainty of war, with the refusal of enemy values (Blanchot was careful not to say which ones) and “tacit consent to all the rest,” the public that was so keen to read found it hard to identify frauds. Subsequently, it was a question of helping writers themselves define their place in public life: how, in an era “given up to disaster and to tempest,” were they not to feel embarrassed by their masterpieces, not to “scorn themselves for simply being themselves?” How could they break the isolation that was necessary without forgetting “that audience which is made up of their entire nation, in whose service they are ready to sacrifice a great deal?” But at the same time Blanchot refuses to subscribe to any form of press-ganging: “save art by restoring to it a public,” “save artists by turning them into educators of youth,” “admit only works conceived in praise of the homeland, the earth, and traditional values,” “[bid] the artist serve, enlist, compromise himself . . . by adhering to political ideas or principles which he is quite incapable of judging”; these are so many ways of distancing artists from their capacities for creation and for breaking with tradition. Thus Jeune France was speaking through Blanchot, but a Jeune France that was no longer itself: its contestatory approach, similar to that of Lignac or Bazaine, whom Blanchot cites in the article in question, cuts through any aesthetics of imitation and indirectly lays claim to “an art of seeking and absence.”14
Blanchot would indirectly quote Bazaine again two months later, on the subject of the exhibition “Twenty Painters of the French Tradition”: “They quite rightly made a point of appealing to tradition, while emphasizing that fidelity to tradition does not consist in being faithful to certain forms, but in searching for a genuine creativity without which nothing can be transmitted and nothing endures.”
Blanchot criticizes the “strange fatigue of the mind” that had taken hold of those commentators unable to understand how tradition could be approached in this way.
When one sees those critics who talk endlessly of a return to classicism reserving their praise for the most mediocre and insipid efforts, the product of unstudied imitation, one wonders what weakness of imagination, what banality of form is to be found, for them, in the works of the great creative periods, which were all periods of great rupture.
Thus can be seen Blanchot’s margin of contestation within a traditionalist milieu: It consists in pushing traditional discourse to a paradoxical point where a claim to modernity is made in the name of classicism. The dominant arguments have to be turned against themselves; what is decadent is to passively accept tradition (or copies of tradition): such eras undergo “a spiritual decline that makes them unworthy of the models they have adopted.”15 In counterpoint, dignity demands the “risk” of “scandal” (that which Blanchot will demand be respected in Sade). This discourse would soon become impossible at Jeune France, although it would always retain some leeway in the Vichy press. A critical way of conceiving the world was being developed, at once undercover and riskily, in the public eye.
Blanchot will insist more and more openly on the independence of art, which is also that of his criticism. As early as November 1941, an era when he was still at Jeune France, he removes his mask and decides to stop speaking with borrowed words:
It is therefore in our interests to repeat today that a writer worthy of the name need not, strictly speaking, take his audience into account, and that it is enough for him to be loyal to himself, this loyalty consisting in squeezing himself into his work, in being faithful to this necessary work. . . . People often speak about art and its audience, about how important it is for the creator to move closer to those for whom he is creating. It must be said that this signifies exactly nothing, if not that those who deal with these serious questions without knowing anything about them are extraordinarily mediocre. Absolutely nothing can be said about, or asked of, the creator. He moves in unknown ways.16
This appeal to “inner necessity,” this divinization of the poet as creator, form the first axis of his critical thinking, which is concerned with locating the necessary conditions for the creation of the contemporary novel. The necessity of the work does not have to come from any naturalist or psychological exterior, nor from any rhetorical concern, but “from the work itself.” Without this “law of inner necessity,” a term and a way of thinking that would mark this period for Blanchot,17 the novel becomes “more and more foreign to the essential demands of literature, which is to say to a certain creative power giving rise to a work, and to the recognition of a certain number of conventions and laws without which creation cannot take on the status of an order.”18 This is all the more so given that “the literary work is constructed according to its own laws, ordered according to its own conventions, asks its consistency of an indestructible form.”19
The influence of Jean Paulhan can be recognized here, one of “those rarest of minds who cherish what is rare.”20 We know how important Blanchot took the author of The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature to be, dedicating three articles from October to December 1941 to this book that significantly complemented Valéry in the area of theories of form. The three articles were collected in a short work published by Corti in 1942, How Is Literature Possible? It was Blanchot’s first critical book. Only the second and third were published in Faux pas, bearing the same title (the first mostly provides a synthetic view of Paulhan’s theory).
The way Paulhan attacks the Terror that had seen the doctrine of inspiration reign over literature for fifty years, denying the writer any rhetorical resources and any conformity to rules, can only prove attractive to Blanchot, who seeks the greatest risk available to literature, and the best way to communicate it. Paulhan shares with Valéry the fact of forcing one—to put it simply—to see all ground as form, and impure form. Thus he is able to turn the weapons of the writers of Terror against them by showing that their metaphysical and fantastical conventions . . . are just as formal as openly-declared rhetoric, while being less rigorous. He calls for the return of theoretical and rhetorical necessity, something Blanchot sees as the best guarantor in approaching the impossible: the only way of accounting for the most abyssal “inner experiences.” Paulhan acts as a bridge between Valéry and Bataille, imposing another form of Terror that is rhetorical or post-rhetorical. To respond with excess to the naivety of Terror is to “make theatre a bit more theatrical, the novel violently novelistic, and literature in general more literary.”21
Paulhan casts doubt over all criticism in a way that Blanchot would exploit and benefit from. He casts absolute doubt over the “extreme purity of the soul and the freshness of a communal innocence” which was proper to the romanticism of Terror.22 He is infinitely attentive to the effect of words in language (Paulhan was anything but hostile to language), to their power, their erosion, their effacement, their lack of power, which could still turn out to be a kind of power. In all of this there is a belief in language, which had always raised more concerns for Bataille than for Blanchot.
The latter takes Paulhan’s thinking and the ways it is formulated to their breaking point, even when it is highly paradoxical.23 He takes up the extreme conclusions of this thinking, but always in the name of the other. This allows us to understand why Paulhan repeatedly states that Blanchot’s articles reveal his own text to himself. Thus to call Terror into question is to call into question the entirety of literature, because it is not “just any aesthetic or critical concept whatever” but instead the very soul of literature and of every writer. This posits an extreme demand:
In the heart of every writer there is a demon [a logical demon, the first two versions said] who urges him to strike dead all literary forms, to become aware of his dignity as a writer by breaking free from language and literature; in short, to put into question, inexpressibly, what he is and what he does.
Every writer? The Mallarmean demand is legitimized by such statements. This is a demand that can bring salvation. The new rhetorical tension consists in not allowing the writer any rest: he can neither blindly obey old rhetorical codes nor give vent to Terror’s inspiration. “It is a question of revealing to the writer that he gives birth to art only through a vain and blind struggle against it”—a permanent struggle. Blanchot continues by arguing that the more the writer knows he is subordinate, the freer he is: This awareness that he is under the sway of commonplaces allows him to make them even more common and attempt to dominate them. In this case, for the writer the rules will no longer be received as “an artificial track showing the path to follow and the world to be discovered, but as the means of its discovery and the law of its progress through obscurity.” Paulhan’s work serves to justify and to found the theory of necessity. Blanchot’s conclusion is that “the rigors of the laws found the absolute world of expression, outside of which chance is nothing but sleep”; this amends the first version from the Journal des Débats, which reads “outside of which there is nothing but chance and sleep.” To restore chance to literature is the final throw of the dice for an article that brings things back to the Mallarmean demand—just as it brings them back to Georges Bataille.24
Armed with such confidence in language, on condition that it contest itself and relate playfully to itself, Blanchot extends the Mallarmean poetic demand to all literature, and notably to novels.25 He also draws together Melville and Mallarmé and defines Moby Dick as a “total book,” “the written equivalent of the universe.” Literature is a creative experience, of a spatial, cosmic, divine order, as it is in Joyce, Nerval, Poe, Lautréamont. “This mode of writing attempts, in a vertiginous claim, to return to the word creation the meaning that it has in the expression ‘the creation of the world.’ ”26 Thus the idea of mythical power, which had already been developed in a few articles for L’Insurgé, can be found in Faux pas, consolidated this time by the Mallarmean theory of language (namely that poetic language is not everyday language; it is an “ensemble of sounds, cadences, numbers and, as such, through the linking of forces that it symbolizes, reveals itself to be the foundation of things and of human reality”27). The work is “the full-scale substitute for the universe,” he writes of A Throw of the Dice, or, in reference to Rimbaud’s poetry, the world’s “sonorous equivalent.”28 We must believe that for Blanchot the world has become the double, and indeed the sacrificed double, of literary creation. He is attracted by the way the capacities of perception are extended, the way rhythms and distances are unexpectedly disrupted. He delights in the power of the metamorphoses taking place in Lautréamont and in Jean-Paul, “one of the first novelists to feel that metaphor could be an extraordinary instrument of transmutation,” allowing prose to “recreate the world”; in this way the reader’s gaze is led “from the visible to the invisible, from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the clarity of enigma.”29
“To move, with Mallarmé, toward the principles of language”: Such is Blanchot’s proposal for the new novelist. This is language as “the essence of the world,” revealing mankind to itself, to the world, and to the existence of the world. It is to “suddenly shine forth from amidst cloud”; “to cause one to fall silent by exercising an intelligence caught up in infinite work and by the rigor of a mind constantly discovering chance.” Of course, this novelist is Blanchot himself. Here he is speaking of his own creative anguish in an impersonal way. “The novelist who reflects on the work that he is to compose is immediately faced with such grave and exhausting problems that they must seem impossible. This impossibility must be the secret soul of his work.” And Blanchot adds, perhaps in an attempt to ethically describe his first novels:
The novelist has a destiny quite other than that of making himself understood, or rather he must make the reader grasp what cannot be heard in everyday, inauthentic language. He undertakes to bring into the absolutely continuous universe of events, images, and words the essential dialogue that constitutes him. Thus he heads, by the same path as any other artist, toward those strange shadows whose contact gives him the feeling of waking up in the deepest sleep, toward this pure presence where all things appear so bare and so reduced that no image is possible; in a word, he heads toward this primordial spectacle in which he never wearies of contemplating what he can see only through a complete self-transformation.
Such is the Mallarmean, rather than Kafkaesque, ambition of Blanchot’s first novels.30
The inner necessity of the work, accessed through language, allows one to reach the inner forces of being, the stakes of what can be perceived, between the pained and the exalted body, that of death and that of jouissance, that of oblivion and that of memory. Faux pas is crisscrossed with the adjectives “obscure,” “invisible,” “mysterious,” “strange,” “secret”: they serve to translate the unspeakable and often inaccessible places that such a literature can reach (“an alliance with singular figures,” Blanchot wrote of Michaux’s poetry). For the erudite, delirious creation of a world leads to abysses of annihilation, to mythical struggles of solitude with gods (even invisible ones), to overwhelming exaltations, to the vertigo of the unfathomable. To create such a world is to provide a mythical equivalent for the debates around “inner experience,” namely via the infinite extravagance of forms and via reminders of the almost mechanical rigor of time. To do so is to perceive incredibly shifting spaces, the sudden opening of regions that are emptier than emptiness itself (and nonetheless still full of organic or spiritual presences), the disruptions experienced by a body as if externally aware of its own gaze, a body empty-hearted from wandering and disgusted at its own steps. An infinite paradox is opened up by the disconnect between the profound immanence of experience and the fact that it is rarely visible, and is impossible to formulate. Literary language is able to introduce itself at this site—both concealed and open—of the gaze. Such is Blanchot’s discovery, thanks to his research and his formulations. He never sets down the latter without a certain objective irony, which provides an implicit compensation for what he had previously been involved in, nor—above all—without drawing on his own memories (whether of his body, of death, of mourning, of the “primal scene”). The works of Mallarmé and Lautréamont, the language of Paulhan, the shared experience with Bataille prolongs Levinas’s friendship and allows—even grants—him this access.
Some, including Blanchot himself, have attempted to see as mystical, fantastical, or magical this infinite attentiveness to oneself and to Being, in which the other is present as something like a fissure. This can only be done on condition that each of these adjectives be contested as soon as it is suggested, and on condition that they be played off against one another. It then becomes possible to evoke specific parallels between poetry and Hindu thought (the ātman of silence31), or between poetry and Christian mysticism (nonknowledge, St. John of the Cross). But poetry cannot “rely on a preestablished religious certainty”: it is “an inexorable principle of movement, a creative speech that forms its object”; “it supposes that the one who receives it be a man capable, in exercising his gifts, of calling himself completely into question, of constantly considering himself a problem and, each time he touches port, of throwing himself back into the open sea.”32
Such a calling-into-question stemming from “inner experience” would make Blanchot’s journey at the Journal des Débats a decisive one. It became more intensive in fall 1942 (specifically, in November), even if we do not know why (there were no events that stood out, it would not change anything regarding the authority and the necessity of this step [pas], of this passage). One after the other, three articles on authors as varied as Meister Eckhart, Gide, and Camus make resolute statements in which the experience of the other and that of the self are fused together, intensified by the thought of “inner experience,” intensified by everything that Blanchot’s thinking would become.33
The rehabilitation of Gide is not uninteresting. This “impression of sensual presence superimposed on a perceptible absence” in the journal of The Fruits of the Earth catches Blanchot’s eye—as if in a mirror. The attraction of the writer’s journal extends the journalist’s experience: they appear to have nothing in common, and yet there is a precious shared sense of fascination, of capture, an obsession with turning things over (ressassement), with the weight of time’s demands, an infinite perception of the slightest gap in daily routine. The journal is like the still obscure place at the heart of a tree in which the sap rises slowly, secretly, imperceptibly. Daytime is subject to the same weight, the same thickness or stickiness as nighttime, its features become just as blurred. Blanchot reads Gide’s journal like he will read Kafka’s: as being as unjournalistic, as empty of events and even of sensations as possible, but also as charged with empty presence, with disorderly, folded, and cut-down spaces which serve to fix the author’s imaginary in pure perception.
The Fruits is not a journal, even a spiritual one, but an absence of any journal, the void of existence, the narrative—wiped clear of events—of a life that we know through commentaries that often apply to it only indirectly.
Blanchot’s critical work is put together like such a journal, with its commentaries applying first and foremost to their author (to write about others would often mean to write about oneself), a “character lacking in substance” that we only know about indirectly, or more precisely: that we only know as indirectness. In this way, each “subject” becomes the critical, invisible partner of an author who only speaks of himself via the other, the others, in the name of the others.34
Whether it represents extreme pride or extreme modesty, the confrontation with the other always becomes, as the search for points of equivalence, the mirror of movement, of the body, of experience. The critic therefore also becomes the invisible partner of others’ work. Sometimes, as if in an equivocal carelessness, his free indirect discourse is so uncontrolled that it disturbs the way in which the ideas mentioned are formulated, attributed, or even agreed grammatically. For it is not a question of appropriating the other, but of better disappropriating oneself through the other, and of disappropriating the other through oneself. The need for delicacy therefore leads to the figure of the other fading away gently and slowly (in the endless writing of the critical work), behind what is no longer his or her work, but without having become one’s own: neither one nor the other, ne-uter, what Blanchot would name the neuter.
The critical work would therefore become something like the diary of the research being carried out, a fiction about fiction. There are countless passages in which Blanchot seems to comment on his own narratives, particularly from 1941 onwards (recognition by Bataille and Paulhan and the reception of Thomas the Obscure must have played a role in how aware he was of his fate as a novelist). The universe of Thomas or Aminadab—as well as that of the works still to come—is powerfully described, always appearing in the article in unexpected ways, sometimes revealing how unfaithful they are to the work being remarked on because it is deemed preferable to evoke the heights that work could have reached.35 They thus define a more or less secret ideal for the novel. Only a few would be collected in Faux pas.
The biographical approach therefore remains as if necessary for Blanchot, albeit a biographical approach carefully controlled and carried out according to certain criteria. If he writes about Goethe or Vigny, it is in order to evoke their relations with Bettina von Arnem and Marie Dorval. Maupassant is addressed less in terms of his art than in those of his madness. With Baudelaire, he asks questions relating to the interest of his sources, and with The Song of Roland, moves straight to the history of the manuscripts. He is interested in Rilke in terms of Malte Laurids Brigge, and in La Fontaine “without the Fables.” In a less anecdotal and frivolous form, this tendency will mark his entire critical work. Blanchot comments less on the work than the experience that precedes and accompanies it. His interest in biography is located at this intersection of life and creation. Is biography an acceptable form? Yes, if it is a biography of “genius” (understood in terms of the genesis or the creation of the work).
This was the approach with which Henri Mondor had succeeded regarding Mallarmé. Blanchot’s admiration for this member of the Académie Française was real (and it would last: he would cite him fairly frequently and would send him some of his books, with dedications). The third piece for the Journal des Débats looks at this paradoxical biography,36 which “knows the ‘genius’ and ignores the ‘man,’ ” and from which Blanchot extracts criteria that it seems legitimate to demand of future biographies:
1. That the man in question be spared his “visibility,” his common weakness;
2. That anecdotal tales should not appropriate the work: otherwise “the lines we read are nothing more than the reference points for a story”;
3. Inversely, that biography should serve the work: thus “the most precious documents, the most unexpected testimonies, the rarest letters” make biography into “the reflection of a wonderful intellectual life” (Blanchot recognized that “certain texts, containing the first versions of poems or letters by Mallarmé, are of priceless importance”);
4. That biography should show the mind’s creation at work, that it should “know the ‘genius’ and ignore the ‘man,’ ” because this work is what renders all subjects, all personae absent (“what he has accomplished, what resources he drew on in order to do it, to what inhuman conditions he condemned itself, with what torments he paid for the formation of a world detached from all mortal prestige,” all of this simply leads to an “impenetrable and pure absence”);
5. In sum, that biography efface itself before the work, and not vice versa; that it should remain purely fictitious, that it should disappear as soon as it has been read, that it should return us to the work even as it leaves us to “dream” of what it could have been; that it become the work’s unavowable, impossible-to-circumscribe reverse-side, exposed to the reader.
Blanchot will formulate these demands for a biography in equivalent terms in his commentary on Conversations with Eckermann, which portray Goethe as a “hero of creation.” Eckermann “knew how to be present in the artist’s solitude, seeking to discover what the creator is when he is alone.”37 His interest in Brisson’s book Molière’s Life in his Works, had a similar feel: “It seeks to know Molière in the coming-together of character and creative power, in those tendencies in which it is less a matter of psychological particularities than of the movement of the mind trying to produce something other than itself.”38
Thus Blanchot defends the rigor of certain biographical approaches and, not allowing himself any mythology of pure creation, even calls for them to exist. While the beginning of the Mondor article is “resigned” to authors’ presence or life, still dreaming of them as pure creators who had not lived, “who were nothing outside of their art”, “entirely consumed by their masterpieces,” the Baudelaire article reverses the trend, not without irony, painting what formerly had been dreamt of as impossible:
The hypothesis that definitively separates the man from the author and leaves whoever wants to enjoy a poem with only its bare text, however close it may be to the poetic truth—this hypothesis is also based on certain prejudices and makes creation an absolute that is prodigiously sheltered from chance and accident, against which no man, even divine, has ever been protected.39
The article on Mondor also evokes this “future biographer against whom [writers] defend themselves weakly.” Biography can be revealed as the invisible thread of every body of work, albeit one indefinitely suspended.
Blanchot would always dream of such a biography for himself: a biography following the itinerary of creation, tracking the invisible, the nocturnal torments, the torsion of the work, the search for the impossible. For he will sketch out just such an invisible thread, such an autobiography—albeit disseminated, displaced, altered—throughout his critical work. He will do so through isolated pockets of presence, through holes or absences within the commentary on works and on their creation, in alignments or at times friendships knotted together, in which losing oneself in the other means perceiving distance as proximity. In this sense, the critical work is extremely playful (jouissive): its sentences serve to set up, like the bridge in “The Judgment,” a “literally mad traffic” in which can be perceived, both in common and distinctly, the sufferings of the other, of oneself, and of, say, Mallarmé or Kafka, in their night which resembles a “mystical night.”
Mallarmé, through an extraordinary ascetic effort, opened an abyss in himself where his consciousness, instead of expiring, survives itself and grasps its solitude in a desperate clarity. Having detached himself utterly and unceasingly from all that appears, he is like the hero of emptiness, and the night that he touches reduces him to an indefinite refusal to be anything at all—which is the very definition of the mind.40
There is no doubt that Blanchot dreamed of being this hero of emptiness, empty of all heroism, which he rejoins through the “infinite distance” to and from the other, his friend rather than his brother.