CHAPTER 33
Having moved to Èze at the end of 1946, Blanchot remained there almost all the following year.
He would say that he needed time to get over the past, the war—death. But even as he looked the latter in the face that year, writing or finishing Death Sentence, his Mediterranean sojourn would nonetheless be one of ease: one of consolation, repair, the calming of nerves, happy tears, sun, blue sky. Later he would speak of this place in pacific, miraculous terms, offering the utopian site to Salman Rushdie and to Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor, stating that it was the only place the fatwa could be overturned and a dialogue constructed.1 And yet not everything was idyllic. In 1947, he would say that his situation reminded him of being confined in Neuilly and that the unexpected poor weather was bothering and upsetting him. Such weather would regularly interrupt a happy, relaxed period. This alternation would also give a rhythm to writing, between anguished fixity (interiors, night) and external freedom (the outside, sunlight). The walk-way along the Mediterranean would be the site of isolation and respiration. The benefits of silence would define another way of being in the world, in the community. Blanchot would write humorously in a letter to Prévost:
Here, the political struggle is very important. It is between the people from down below, Èze-mer, who are separatists and would like their own mairie, and the rest of us, men of hauteur, who look down upon them with disdain from our 500 metres in height and 2,000 years of existence.2
In the village of Èze, Blanchot resided (demeure) in the Rue du Bour-Nou, an alleyway at the top of the promontory looking over the Mediterranean. He would later describe the interior of his room:
When I was living in Èze, in the little room (made bigger by two views, one opening onto Corsica, the other out past Cap Ferrat) where I most often stayed, there was (there still is), hanging on the wall, the likeness of the girl they called “The Unknown Girl from the Seine,” an adolescent with her eyes closed, but alive with such a fine, blissful (veiled) smile, that one might have thought she had drowned in an instant of extreme happiness.3
Whether the “little room” in Èze or the “high-up room” in Quain, the writing room was always a site of elevation. Here it looked over the path that saw Nietzsche write part of Zarathustra. It was filled with imaginary presence, the feminine presence of the récits, the young woman and death.
Èze then stood for night, the writing of the night. “A writing in which the intensity of night is also the violence of silence.”4 Pierre Fedida speaks of it as follows:
I am evoking the night-time writing, I am evoking not simply a nocturnal rhythm of writing, but this intense entreaty to night, including its anguish and its discouragement, its fatigue; I am evoking this because I believe that the most controlled fragility comes at this moment. This writing which takes place at night is certainly . . . it comes instead of sleep, instead of dreams. We cannot say that it replaces dreams, it does not replace dreams, but it relates to the day in a similar way, and in that relation one touches the dead, to use Heraclitus’s fine expression, as if the intensities that one might take for the intensities of life are certainly that, but are probably what they are because death is there.
Writing moves into heavy, weighty, intense night, that of 3:00 or 4:00 a.m., with its absence of forms, or their fantastical presence. The visions from Henry James, the windows and the staircases will feature in The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me. An imaginary and monstrous child, who is necessarily someone else’s child, wanders around the house, charging it with its presence. The attentiveness to the child, as marked as ever, becomes something of a phantasm here. Blanchot wrote as much to Bataille: “I sometimes evoke the figure of Julie in a shadow in the corridor.”
The move to the récit, in the heavy presence of the images of death, therefore took place in Èze, during the Èze night (still sometimes followed by that of Neuilly). His first récits were published this year: “The Last Word” heading up the May issue of the journal Fontaine, edited by Max-Pol Fouchet, and “The Idyll” in the ephemeral Licorne, also in the spring. Above all, it was the year when two new récits were completed. Death Sentence and the new version of Thomas the Obscure were written at precisely the same time, have similar aesthetics and perform a double, decisive, irreparable turn of the screw on Blanchot’s writing. If we are to believe the récit itself, Blanchot began or rather began again Death Sentence on October 8 (not an unlikely date). He would therefore have been rewriting both Death Sentence and Thomas the Obscure at the same time—we know from a letter to Bataille that he finished fine-tuning the latter in Neuilly in early January 1948 (a few months after the publication of Existence and Existents, in which Levinas cites the book’s first edition). However, the second version of Thomas would only appear two years later.
Rewriting is the path that the writing of the two new récits has to take. It is something more than simple churning-over (ressassement), instead imposing its necessity as a return, a strengthening, and a pure creation that expose the narrative event to a new status, to a new way of saying truth and of creating fiction. Blanchot wrote in the cover blurb for Death Sentence (which was presented there as a récit) that novels “are born at the moment when words have begun to withdraw from reality,” and language was now pushed further, having no reason to fear. “I do not fear that I am revealing any secrets” he adds, accentuating the autobiographical impact of the récit, for the fear of exposure gives way to the anguish created by the force inherent in relating the event. In this way, all images of reality are masked, even as they are exposed. The récit conveys autobiography in the form of a photographic negative, like Blanchot’s holy shroud on which the author’s face can be glimpsed. This unstable superimposition between autobiography and fiction, the undecipherable exposure of this border, makes up the event, the experience of the reader.5
He needed time and a place to gather his thoughts and once again to feel, but now so differently, invulnerable. This was now the period of a confrontation with the Law. Blanchot kept silent because it said to him: “now you are a special case; no one can do anything to you. You can talk, nothing commits you.”6 He refused to do so, and spoke without implicating anything except the way language is attributed to a subject, in doing so taking the decision for literature. In less than a year, there was a new version of Thomas the Obscure, The Most High completed the cycle of novels, and a condensed version of it began that of the récits. This at least was how Blanchot presented things, in the prière d’insérer of the first edition of Death Sentence:
Doubtless there is nothing in common between these two works, The Most High and Death Sentence, which are being published at the same time. But, as the person who wrote them, I believe that one is as it were present behind the other, not in the manner of two interconnected texts, but like two irreconcilable and yet always concordant versions of one reality, which is equally lacking from both.
Composed of a short, brief, naked récit followed by a second part which shatters it and scatters the pieces, the structure of this death sentence poses the question of who language is attributed to, and that of a biographical reserve; like The Madness of the Day, which appeared in a journal, it already sketches out the last of all récits, in light of which all others would be unwritten.