CHAPTER 3
In 1922, at the time of his baccalaureate exams and just before his sixteenth birthday, Maurice Blanchot had surgery on his duodenum. A medical error affecting his blood would cause aftereffects for the rest of his life. The first of these was that he had to wait for nearly a year to recover and leave for Strasbourg, where he began university study.
This medical mishap is discreetly referred to on several occasions in his work. He would write of Henry James:
It is tempting to think that that is his way of constantly alluding to the accident of which he was a victim when he was about ten, and about which he has spoken only rarely and obscurely: as if something had happened to him that brought him as close as possible to a mysterious and exalting impossibility.1
In fact, the few descriptions of this fateful mistake, for instance in Death Sentence or The Madness of the Day, count less than the proximity to death that such an inner experience causes, when one lives through such an internal and organic repetition of the “primal scene.” Illness would remain for Blanchot a fact of the body, a facet of the world, and he would share its pain and its ecstasy with his friend Georges Bataille. It is not irrelevant that he should evoke this in an article on Madame Edwarda:
The efforts we make to theoretically isolate the point where scandal touches us (calling, for instance, on what we know of the sacred, object of desire and horror), are like the work of blood cells to restore the wounded part. The body returns to normal, but the experience of the wound remains. The wound is healed, but the essence of the wound cannot be healed.2
The essence of the blood remains at work in the perception of the body and in the work of memory. The unending metamorphoses of the first version of Thomas the Obscure will speak to this, as will the hospital-based world of various récits, or at least some sections of them.
Illness would affect Maurice Blanchot for his entire life. He would rarely be spared the attentions of recurrent asthma, chronic influenza, pleurisy, tuberculosis, vertigo, constricted breathing, and nervous conditions. He generally ate very little.3 His fatigue was extreme, his sense of exhaustion almost permanent, his insomnia—this “nocturnal wandering,” this way to “make the night present”—exceedingly tenacious.4 The death sentence was to be confronted regularly. Demourance places it as if outside of time. Each of Blanchot’s correspondences would be undertaken in a spirit of friendship, as “a prelude to the silence from which calm issues.”
It is striking, as if paradox were written into this man’s very flesh and bones, and as if it condemned him to endlessly confront dying, that someone living with this permanent fragility should have lived so remarkably long. A large factor was hereditary (Maurice Blanchot’s father died at seventy-six, his mother at nearly eighty-three, his aunt Élise at ninety-five, his brothers at seventy-seven and ninety-one, his sister at ninety-five).5 Of sickly appearance despite his height, Blanchot would rarely show his suffering; although he often discussed his illnesses, it was to reflect as if in a mirror those of others, of his friends, with a disabused rather than elegiac fatalism. This real concern passed beyond mere charitable pity, moving into true attentiveness, a gentle attitude sometimes showing lightheartedness and even humor. While friendship might have suggested that he should relay news of his health, he was not able to do so for the simple reason that there was never, as it were, any news; illness would have condemned him to repeat the same unending avowals, to trouble his friends, to continually worry them and make them feel obligated. However, friendship was precisely the place where he was able to soften the avowals he did make, and to downplay any drama, as a way to inhabit a culpability marked by tragedy. In the moments of exhaustion when illness isolated him, as if on the far side of time, friendship made possible this particular mode of presence that is “absence etched by writing.”6
He would often let it be known, from the 1930s or 1940s on, that he was writing the final book or the final letter of his life. “We used to wonder how, with all his pills and always in ill health, he managed to pull through and get better,” declared Emmanuel Levinas.7 Xavier de Lignac confided that “he always seemed to me to have survived something,” and Michel Butor stated that he “had been surviving since his childhood, which seemed to me to retreat into a mythical period before the war, but one didn’t know which war; he seemed ageless and unable to age.”8 A fighting spirit was allied with family longevity—adversity stimulated him. Suffering, out of breath, and walking with difficulty, he nonetheless took part in all the protests in 1968, including clashes with the police. At nearly ninety, almost totally isolated from the world and extremely weak, he was given a dose of vigor by the Bruno Roy affair and intervened publicly (denouncing by letter the publisher who had allowed a book by Alain de Benoist to appear); this vigor improved his health for a time. Between despondency and ardor, the man knew his limits.9 “To ask for more would be to ask too much,” he once wrote from Germany to Dionys Mascolo.10 He would have to face long years of silence, crisscrossed with periods of intense activity. During these periods, when he was able to work at the same time for numerous newspapers or journals and to continue writing his books by night, he expended a kind of reckless energy. The rhythm of writing, of producing writing and prose, was partly reliant on the rhythms of the body. Gilles Deleuze would make this point, bringing Blanchot together in a community of thought with Samuel Beckett and Henri Michaux:
Literature therefore appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would necessarily be in good health (there would be the same ambiguity here as with athleticism), but he possesses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible.11
It is as if the ill were chosen in order to allow the limit-experience to pass, in an uncertain and risky way, into thought’s dispossessed relationship with the body, or of the body’s with thought. It is as if their sacred quality lent authority to a cryptic ordeal, to atheological thinking, to fragmentary writing: “illness is divine—but in these conditions divinity is not ‘sufficient,’ which is to say that no ‘completion’ is conceivable starting from the anguish to which incompletion exposes us.”12 It is as if life, illness, and the diabolical chance of writing were one and the same, Blanchot would one day say to Mascolo, remembering their conversation with Robert Antelme.13
All those who knew Maurice Blanchot recall this mixture of fragility and authority, of austerity and gentleness, of attentiveness and effacement. Maurice Nadeau, remembering Blanchot on the judges’ panel for the Prix des Critiques, wrote, “I can still see his tall, thin silhouette, his light coloring, his pale eyes, I hear the words that come from his mouth in a slow and uneven rhythm—one feels that he is forcing himself in order to make them audible—and I hear the authority that they represented for everyone.”14
Madeleine Chapsal, who interviewed him at the shrillest moment of the controversy around the Manifesto of the 121, recalls meeting “the gentlest of men.” Louis-René des Forêts remembers their first meeting: “What struck me about him was an upright quality, the gentleness of his smile, but most of all the authority inherent in his presence, even when silent, for he spoke rarely.”15 Pierre Prévost indicates with a firm, raised set of his chin: “Blanchot was impressive.” In the 1920s Emmanuel Levinas met, according to Marie-Anne Lescourret’s formulation, “the precious, mysterious, aristocratic Maurice Blanchot,” who was “almost twice as tall as him.” Blanchot was nineteen: “Very tall, very thin, very pale, heavy-lidded and with brown-blond hair, sickly looking, he cried whenever he laughed, but was always impeccably turned out. . . . He seems to have fascinated his classmates.”16 In the 1930s, his acquaintances of the far right described him in similar terms: “translucent,” according to Pierre Monnier, “he hides, in a fragile casing, a tough and polemic personality. He expresses himself in a clear voice, with a sharp intelligence and a biting wit.” He intimidated everyone around him.17 The wife of Jean-Pierre Maxence confirms this:
Blond, pale, of already fragile health, for a long time afflicted by tuberculosis, his attitude was always somewhat stiff, but he had an extraordinary, dry sense of humor. [Jean-Pierre] much admired his intelligence. . . . He wouldn’t mystify matters, and types like Maulnier and most of all Brasillach seemed somewhat ill at ease in his presence. What’s more, there was something mysterious concerning his childhood, his past.18
Dominique Aury met him at L’Insurgé. She discovered “a tall thin lad, who walked slowly, and who sat in his office with a blanket over his knees.”19 Claude Roy, during the same period, saw him as “shriveled, bent, sensitive, fragile.” “He was a diaphanous apparition: with light-colored hair, pale coloring, light horn-rimmed glasses, pale eyes, and a clear, blank voice, Maurice Blanchot . . . wore a tartan blanket hiding his shoulders, like Mallarmé in the old photos.”20 Xavier de Lignac, who met him three years later, when Blanchot was thirty-three, confides that “the way he held himself, the beauty of his smile, as well as his sense of irony, all made me think of a particular high-ranking priest I had known in my youth.” On a poetic note, he added: “Blanchot was an Ibsen character. A pastor from the North Pole living very comfortably in the Parisian world. Everything about him was white: his face, his skin tone, and also his speech. But he was dressed in black.” Blanchot would often carry an umbrella, and a hat, that Georges Bataille would describe secretly in a poem:
Blanchot,
the fedora
of death,
a stanza that became, in the published version,
Fedora
hat
of death.21
Sobriety of tone would become the spirit of the age. In 1968, according to Jacques Derrida, Blanchot most often wore a black roll-neck pullover. Another sign of discreet authority. His “gentle smile” opened and prolonged his “silent attentiveness.” Roger Laporte, who in 1959 met a man who was already nearly entirely bald, with a little very pale blond hair, also speaks of an extremely gentle smile, “of a great attentiveness, a great kindness,” which revealed “a genius of the heart at least the equal of the genius of the mind.”22 For all of them, Blanchot most often represented an astonishing mixture of mystery and simplicity, of fascination and openness, of distance and presence. “I did not find it displeasing that he remained a little mysterious. Nothing bothered me about this everyday stranger,” declares Xavier de Lignac, smiling. Even-tempered, rarely melancholy and never taciturn, not lacking a sense of humor, extremely courteous, he was also able to be surprising, changing the tempo of an encounter with a dynamic, creative, insistent remark, exerting considerable pressure on others’ ideas—or doing so via the impact of a look or a short remark, for instance on death or on madness. “For Blanchot, for example, that’s how it is,” Marguerite Duras would say. “He has a madness that tracks him. Madness is also death.”23 Respect must pass by way of this scandal. Pain must pass by way of this refusal.
These portraits, which are coherent and complementary even in their contradictions, expose again and again Maurice Blanchot’s illness as one of the defining characteristics of his appearance. Bataille’s stanzas express nicely how far the question at hand was that of effacing the persona even as one described it, masking the face, poetically muffling a name and a presence bearing the aura of a funereal silence.24 In this text, Blanchot even rhymes with sanglot—a “sob” in English—but the full phrase is “sanglot / gai,” or a happy sob, and the poem goes on, as if an entire demourance of wisdom appeared in it, as if in a tempo without regularity, resources or reference-points, to describe the following:
the absence
of death
is smiling.