PART IV
Some beings have a meaning that eludes us. Who are they? Their secret comes from the deepest secret of life itself. They approach it. Life kills them. But the future they have thus awakened with a murmur, in foretelling them, creates them. O labyrinth of sheer love!
RENÉ CHAR, The Word as Archipelago
CHAPTER 38
Maurice Blanchot’s life is not only a story of withdrawal. However, two periods do correspond to the image of a writer who was solitary, withdrawn from the world, devoted to literature. The first of these periods began in fall 1949, when Blanchot returned to Èze after having given up his apartment in Neuilly. It lasted eight years.
To withdraw was not to be a recluse, and Blanchot continued to be a public man. He published regularly: books for Gallimard (at a steady rhythm of one every two years)1 and, beginning in 1953, an article per month in the Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française. In this decade, during which he gained considerable notoriety, the absence of any face, voice, or body on the social or media scene created an image of mystery.
Blanchot did not remain permanently in Èze. His life there was punctuated by several periods in Paris at his brother René’s apartment on the Rue Violet, or in Chalon with his sister and mother, or in Quain, often alone.2 When his health allowed, he liked to go to Germany to start his récits there. But being away from the literary circles of Paris also meant that he was far from his friends, removed and often exhausted, as is shown by his 1953 dedication of The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me to Georges Bataille: “the only one who is close in extreme distance.”
Bataille was no longer in Carpentras: in June 1951, he got a job at the library of Orléans. He and Blanchot sometimes went a year without seeing one another. From Èze, one June, Blanchot wrote to him that:
Yes, all winter I have felt sadness and anxiety at the silence that seemed to be between us. I was responsible for it, but beyond my responsibility was perhaps that of the silence between me and myself, as well as a difficult period of waiting, accepting a time without future. Even now I cannot begin any projects. To live from one day to the next is all that I am permitted to do, and even that is a struggle.3
Blanchot was indeed most often ill and exhausted. Fatigue, weakness, physical strain would become the major themes of his récits, sometimes even their origin. Illness undermined his everyday vitality, his attentiveness to friendship, and even his ability to write. Blanchot regretted not being able to write as much as he wanted to. He could not manage any articles beyond the monthly column for Gallimard, for which he was paid. “I would like to be able to give something to Critique too. Unfortunately, my activity is severely limited,” he wrote to Bataille around 1953 or 1954. Death entered every part of his existence, his concerns, his readings. He read a book by Paul-Louis Landsberf, Essai sur l’expérience de la mort, and another by Camille Schuwer on La signification métaphysique du suicide.
This despair passed through—and passed away because of—his correspondence. He managed to disappear into his relation to friendship, which provided a measure of this despair. The community of friendship went further even than a shared relationship with illness (in this, Blanchot was close to Bataille, whose health declined irreversibly from 1955 on). Time became the exhausting framework of a mortality remedied by letters, by the painless and sometimes even joyful presence of a faraway face. Blanchot’s letters were countless. They exhausted their already exhausted author, but gave a meaning to this exhaustion, measured it, defied and subjugated it. Most often, his letters were sent to Emmanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, Denise Rollin, Jean Paulhan, René Char, and Roger Laporte. He asked Pierre Prévost for news of his friends from Jeune France, even if they had not followed his political journey: Lignac, Ollivier, Petitot.
In 1955, René Char wrote the first of his poems for him, ending with these lines:
Some beings have a meaning that eludes us. Who are they? Their secret comes from the deepest secret of life itself. They approach it. Life kills them. But the future they have thus awakened with a murmur, in foretelling them, creates them. O labyrinth of sheer love!4
The deep friendship that linked Char to Blanchot is expressed in poetry here in a way that resembles the future thinking on friendship, effacing all arbitrary boundaries between the public and the private, between the political and the personal. It also evokes conceptions of friendship based on presence (attentiveness, listening, generosity) or based on correspondence (density, murmur, forgiveness). Through the poem, friendship once again is revealed as a gift, the metamorphosis of disenchanted despair into an even deeper version of itself, a despair that offers no salvation but makes one complicit and frees up the force and energy of the work. “Consenting to a time without future” becomes a creative future, a childhood, “innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, play, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes.”5 The friend is the witness, the guide, and the authority providing this power. He acts as the source of expiation. The friend is the future, an awareness of the murmur. He is named “the moral partner” since such a friendship possesses and excuses the languages of knowledge and desire; it is created by the fact that two voices are equal to one another, the fact that they wait for one another and challenge one another to remain at the same high level: namely, that of death, of what death enjoins us to think, to defy, to refuse. “Dying,” writing the interminable and incessant process of “dying,” is therefore the essence of friendship. The poem recalls the poet’s partner to the “blank surface” of his name, to the power of the struggle with death, to the inexorability of a bodily struggle. Char paints Blanchot as a “well-toned boxer, imposing and powerful at the center of his legs” with their aggressive and defensive geometry.”6 Death’s opponent “challenges it, advances toward its heart.” This unrepentant opponent, who is the only one who knows which words could harm death (“words so perfectly offensive, or appropriate, or enigmatic”), only fights, only establishes an advantage in order to withdraw. This withdrawal, more than any fight, is what awakens the future. In this way Char allows us to understand the withdrawal of “the incomprehensible combatant.” He makes visible the partner who is thunderstruck, brought down to earth: He gives the invisible its visibility.