CHAPTER 36
Perhaps friendship was already what authorized Death Sentence.
The strange similarity has often been noted between the death of J., in the first part of Death Sentence, and the death of Laure as witnesses have passed it on to us, not least among them the pages removed from Bataille’s Guilty. “A death tore him apart in 1938,” wrote Bataille for an autobiographical note: Blanchot, at the time, did not know him.1 But while the first sentence of Death Sentence: “These events happened to me in 1938” is misleading regarding the year in which Blanchot himself began his mourning, perhaps it also served to bring him closer to a different truth, that of similar events experienced by Bataille.
If it is true that the first part of Death Sentence is among other things the récit of Laure’s death, then the alteration and the fictionalization of such an extreme event give considerable value to friendship; such staunch tenacity can be seen to work in the name of a twin suffering, of a concern for a shared discretion, and of an agreement over aesthetic convictions. When friendship becomes clear with the strength, the suddenness, and the good fortune that marked the meeting of Bataille and Blanchot, when it shows itself to be a fascinated and brutal coincidence, friendship receives the grace of memory and the hauteur of gratitude by erasing any difference between two names, by delegating and authorizing fictional récits, written or cited in the name of the other. One friend takes on the other’s mourning, and it is by friendship alone that this pass, this veronica, this wiping of the Other’s Holy Face, takes place; even if—in Blanchot’s version—its absence remains present on the cloth. Via this superimposition, introducing “only the shadow of a bull’s horn” in the récit, friendship offers to literature the sovereign authority of effacement, of the neuter, of the universal. Bataille does not sign this récit with a pseudonym, as he often does with his own, but with a heteronym, the name of a friend, “Blanchot,” the “Blanchot” of Death Sentence, who is cited in the foreword to Blue of Noon as one of the very rare authors who forced him to write, to write an “intolerable, impossible ordeal.”2 Without Bataille, Blanchot would perhaps have been unable to undergo such a forcing of the récit; we should remember that he would cease writing récits after the death of his friend.3
In an article on Kafka written less than a year after Death Sentence was published, Blanchot states:
he writes narratives about beings whose story belongs only to them, but at the same time about Kafka and his own story which belongs only to him. It is as if the further he moved away from himself, the more present he became. The fictional narrative puts a distance, a gap (itself fictive), within him who writes, without which he could not express himself.4
Blanchot embodies then erases in his friend this distance, this absence, this fictitious interval.5 With this superb, reserved point of coincidence, he becomes the invisible partner of Georges Bataille.
With this text, which proves troubling for readers, transgressing the normal limits of individual lives and works, it is ultimately of little importance to discover what precise level of condensation of or transference between two men’s thinking we are dealing with. For this at least is certain, and supports our hypothesis: writing Death Sentence during the war or after it, completing it in 1947, and publishing it in June 1948, Blanchot—unlike in 1940 when he perhaps wrote an initial version of it—was certainly aware of the narrative of Laure’s death. He was certainly aware of the concern, the new developments, the historical climate (the aftermath of Munich), he was certainly aware of the key stages, the remorse of the lover who had stayed away too long from the dying woman and blamed himself for running away, the couple’s incompatibility with the family group, the vision of the rose. And knowing all of the above perhaps led him to attempt the impossible: “reconstructing death,” as Claude Rabant writes.6
It is a triple wager. To reconstruct death on the authority of friendship is to confront at once History, love, and literature. These are the stakes that give life to Death Sentence. This tale of friendship past and to come stands in the shadow of Bataille, Laure’s lover; in that of Levinas, the Jew who had suffered during the war; in that of Antelme, who had survived the concentration camp. Reconstructing the death disfigured by the aftermath of Munich and the “final solution” is the task of the récit’s first part, which attempts to restore its singularity and extremity without making it exemplary. A récit of friendship, Death Sentence would be even more so in Bataille’s footsteps, because it is also a passing on of Denise Rollin, who is sometimes said to have met Laure, and who is often said to have been fascinated by her; such a passing on also transmits “the suffocating, impossible ordeal” of mourning. The book’s second part is triggered by reconstructing the death that was always betrayed by the resurgence of love, by the ensuing series of love stories. These stories are as if justified by N.’s fidelity to J. (N. is a translator), by Denise’s assent to Laure, by Prince Myshkin’s approval of all women as of their absence, his “excessive, endless Yes,” his always sovereign words of welcome: “ ‘Come,’ and eternally, she is there.” Reconstructing the death would thus also be to attempt to make it available once again to poetry, to narrative: Death Sentence would be written with other debts to death, too, with debts to other moments and forms of death—for instance, Ligeia’s eyes in Rowena’s face, Nastaysia’s eyes in Rogozhin’s face—J.’s eyes and the mask of death in N.’s face.7
We can understand how Blanchot saw it as necessary to construct this récit, to superimpose dates, experiences, and history. We can also understand that it was impossible for him to write it, at least in its final form, before the years when he knew Denise Rollin and Georges Bataille.
Having been diverted, and as if trapped, the autobiographical can only be revived by imagining that the nonbiographical was plain for all to see. A guide to the body of the fiction, it is the shadow of that fiction, or what lies in that shadow. Because the second death is only ever a citation of the first, because every event is double, repeated, only becoming pure when altered, the autobiographical regains its ability to create pressure, to cause terror. It is not to be found in the small facts of life, but instead allows one to grasp bodily powers, capacities for listening, sensitive zones of communication. Thus it tells us much more about what people like to call the writer’s body than any other self-portrait or any other récit (“never again”8). We must simply accept the rhythms imposed by disordered time, which allow the distancing necessary for the requisite attentiveness and acclimatization to night, and allow the there is to become available in the darkest space (“I saw it distinctly, that dead and empty flame of her eyes”). “A great deal of patience is required if thought, driven down into the depths of the horrible, is to rise little by little and recognize us and look at us.” A great deal of patience is required if the event is to be welcomed without fear, the new intensity of perception, the enormous movement of the infinite, the choreographies of desire, of the blood, of breathing. Regarding the silence of the gaze, “he who hears it becomes other.”9 The few singular, violent, mad events that traverse the narrative only tolerate being read in this single, withdrawn mode, and readers will be able to appreciate this according to how able they are to give themselves over to this listening, which is infinite, eroticizable and empty, insane and delicious, warlike and monstrous. The violence of certain scenes, of gestures and cries which seem unlikely to deliver up their meaning except through discretion, a discretion that will be commented on infinitely, will henceforth punctuate Blanchot’s récits, beginning with When the Time Comes.