CHAPTER 35
Published in early spring 1950, the “new version” of Thomas the Obscure opens the way to the récits that would follow. It shows that a tightening of narrative is under way, as a note to the reader makes clear:
The present version adds nothing to the pages entitled Thomas the Obscure begun in 1932, delivered to the publisher in May of 1940 and published in 1941, but as it subtracts a good deal from them, it may be said to be a different, and even an entirely new version, but identical at the same time, if one is right in making no distinction between the figure and that which is, or believes itself to be, its center, whenever the complete figure itself expresses no more than the search for an imaginary center.1
Perhaps the first, heavy, novel version was already on the path toward this central episode, even if it is a shifted, displaced center, just as the pages on the gaze of Orpheus would form the decentered center of The Space of Literature. Anne’s death here becomes the “imaginary center” of the récit, which itself is the “imaginary center” of the novel. Blanchot’s concern, paradoxically, is to insist that the two works are as one, underlining only the perspectival difference between them, even as he feels it necessary to point out that the difference in the writing is such that the second version now replaces the first, annulling it and establishing it as a secret, thereby creating a death scene. (Indeed, the latter stopped being reprinted, comparison between the two versions therefore becoming the reserve of the original readers, curious admirers, and university researchers.) The whole withdraws behind its center, becoming that center.2
Anne’s death now took up twenty pages across two chapters of the 130 in the book (instead of twenty pages in a single chapter of 230 pages in the first version). There was considerable reduction of the book overall (a hundred pages fewer, but that does not tell the whole story: The format of the first book was much larger and its type smaller). Among the elements removed are Irène and the keeper of the village hotel; the precise references to a vividly colored universe, to profuse nature, and to a metropolis. There are fewer scenes of social life. Anne is now Thomas’s only companion, is closer to him, takes over some of Irène’s lines and never now leaves the hotel; she becomes much more untimely as a character. The chapter on Thomas’s mourning for Anne takes up more room proportionally. The beginning (the sea, the wood, the hotel, the room) and the ending (the march through the countryside) are retained. The récit is tightened around Thomas’s journey of initiation. The passage on his childhood is removed. As in Death Sentence, the récit seizes (somewhat brutally) our attention and directs it to the nakedness of his solitude, his anguish, mourning and death. Around Anne’s bedside, as around J.’s bedside, ignorant people busy themselves, a hurried mother overladen with pathos grows tired, all of them infinitely less close to the dying woman than the narrator or Thomas are, who however do not know them or refuse to do so, while deeply experiencing in the final moments intense death rattles and death appearing via the bodies of the dead. This wholly precarious narration relates an extreme confrontation with inner experience. For instance, Blanchot formulates this recurring preoccupation: “What, then, calls me into question most radically? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being-to-death or being-for-death, but my presence-for-another who makes himself absent by dying.” He imagines that the dying person’s caregiver might reply:
You not only distance yourself, you are also still present, for here you grant me that dying as the granting that surpasses all suffering, and here I tremble softly in what rips things apart, losing speech as you do, dying with you without you, letting myself die in your place, receiving that gift beyond you and me.3
But the anguish derives as much from the impossibility of dying as it does from the imminence of death.
Anne’s final throes are oblique, unspectacular, lacking in events or images, forgetful of the ecstatic and metamorphic landscape that had previously gripped her visions. The récit is therefore only able to provide a commentary on the impossible journey toward what it is to be present at death. It follows the movement whereby Anne withdraws from the world without conveying how she comes to see things. Her dreams are pure dreams of dreams, without content, without a home, “no palace, no constructions of any sort; rather a vast sea, though the waters were invisible and the shore had disappeared.” Her consciousness has lost its humanity, and it only remains for it “to be, to marvelously be.” Anne is given over to a death without false image or pretence, including that of saintliness. While a few monsters still inhabit this pure horizon, “there is no way to express what they are, because, for us, in the midst of the day something can appear which is not the day,” something like a primordial dawn? The récit denies all novelistic development, all possibility of action and even of imagery, such is now its law. It offers “a world stripped of artifice and perfidy.”4
As he who is always a neighbor, Thomas belongs at once to “two shores” consisting of a “real body” and a “negation of the body,” his gaze stemming from one lucid eye and one blind one, and representing both “living Thomas” and “nothingness Thomas,” “obscure Thomas,” he alone is able to move close to Anne, and beyond her, to the death within her, “the eternal man taking the place of the moribund,” he who “dies alone in place of all.”5 The author’s twin, he brings to completion what Blanchot had only ever been able to sense when confronted with the deaths of those close to him, of loved ones. His Christic name is now effaced behind other figures, atheist ones, of generosity. They would be called the last man, or the friend.