CHAPTER 39
All the evidence suggests that Blanchot’s two new récits were conceived between 1949 and 1951, for When the Time Comes (which appeared in December 1951), and around 1952, for The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me (published in spring 1953). Both were announced by the prepublication of an excerpt in Botteghe Oscure, and both come from Blanchot’s most secret and certainly most painful period of withdrawal, during which he published very rarely: a dozen critical articles in four years. The two récits are all the more unusual insofar as they complete a period of intense literary activity: after a novel and five récits written in seven years, the next récit would come four years later with The Last Man in 1957, and the one after that five years later—Awaiting Oblivion with which, in 1962, Blanchot brings his fictional work to a close.
Written in the solitude of Èze, and themselves solitary within his work, these two récits emphasize the author’s image as faraway and exhausted. They depict him in withdrawal and absence, in an apartment that he might have inhabited, in a house in which he wrote, before the beings he might have loved, before the apparitions that occupied his dwelling (demeure). The prière d’insérer of The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me publicly signaled this solidarity in solitude, asking that the new books share it with the first of them, Death Sentence, which like them mentions its own genre, its nature as récit, on the title page. The prière d’insérer reads: “The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me is the third panel in the triptych following Death Sentence and When the Time Comes. They are three distinct récits, but they nonetheless all belong to the same experience.” This shared experience gave the new narrative voice the stubborn autobiographical status already tested in Death Sentence and The Madness of the Day. The autobiography in question is the adventure of the writer, and this is how Bataille presents them, in a formulation that is curiously similar to that of the prière d’insérer: these three récits (this “triptych,” he wrote) relate to the same experience, that of the writer, and “in this way they form a myth of literary creation.”1
“The essential solitude” was being carved out at this time. It is not unimportant that Blanchot marked his return to regular criticism, in January 1953, with an article that, written as early as June 1952, evokes his solitude in Èze, and which supplies something like the theoretical argument behind his récits. Blanchot placed it at the start of The Space of Literature. This article invites us to perceive how private space morphs into literary space. That this space is initially that of the room and more generally of the house in Èze, opening onto the sea, is something that we must recall before immediately forgetting again: This movement of distancing guides the author. Even if the site of writing cannot be reduced to this site of existence, at the same time not just any living space can become a space for writing, and this was a space that counted—Blanchot must have grown attached to it. Duras’s remarks about her ten years of solitude in her house in Neauphle might stand in for Blanchot’s ten years of residence in Èze: “It is only in this house that I am alone. In order to write. In order to write differently to how I had done up to then. But to write books as yet unknown by me and never yet determined by me and never determined by anyone.”2 We see that Blanchot wanted to evoke the house in Èze in The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, just as Duras more pointedly but with the same impulse, would immortalize the one in Neauphle.
“The Essential Solitude” speaks volumes about the source of solitude, the notion of solitude, and the solitude of the work.3 The essay is presented as a general reflection on the modern writer and their relation to their work, a reflection that, despite its references to Valéry, Kafka, Rilke, and Rimbaud, is largely inspired by Blanchot’s experience. The “essential solitude” is first of all his own. But here, speaking of himself only serves to move toward effacing himself. While still founded on Hegelian or Heideggerian positions, the critical discourse moves away from them to translate an aesthetic thinking close to myth and poetry, in a narrative tone visibly influenced by the experience it theorizes. Of course, the figure of the ideal writer (whose activities are glossed in various ways: “Writing is the interminable, the incessant” (26), “writing is making oneself the echo of that which never stops speaking” (26), “writing is to surrender to the fascination of the absence of time” (30) also comes from a controlled interpretation of certain journals or correspondences of writers he admires, beginning with Kafka and Mallarmé. But the article is also informative about the way Blanchot lives his own experience as a writer: It is like a fragment of the Journal that he did not write. It seems important that it was written at the same time as the triptych of Èze récits. “It is perhaps striking that from the moment the work becomes the search for art, from the moment it becomes literature, the writer increasingly feels the need to maintain a relationship with himself” (28), writes Blanchot. But “maintaining a relationship with [it]self” is what the article does, with the single difference that it does so in the name of the other, in the name of the ideal writer it describes. Blanchot’s critical work is this other journal written in the name of the Other. It accomplishes, term by term, the destiny of the writer’s journal as Blanchot conceives it: “The journal represents the series of reference points that a writer establishes so as to be able to recognize himself when he begins to suspect the dangerous metamorphosis to which he is exposed” (29). From the 1930s, Blanchot’s critical work embodies the displacement of these points, of these axes, of these stakes of recognition. It is “the Chronicle” of the choices made and all that was left behind on his itinerary.
Thus when Blanchot explores the meaning of the word “solitude” at the beginning of the article, we already know that he was not content with evoking melancholy or stillness, for “there is no need to comment” (21) on these sentimental ramifications of solitude, whether personal or public. “The essential solitude” is that of the body of work, that which removes all protection from the writer as he faces this terrifying, always incomplete work; this solitude beneath all other solitudes, which his own solitude allows him to locate and to complete, by way of a demanding path, is what he would describe in the “southern récits.” The tone is thus all that can still be perceived of the writer’s effacement, “the intimacy of the silence he imposes upon the word, which means that this silence is still his—what remains of himself in the discretion that sets him aside” (27). The tone provides the authority of effacement that can be seen in the tension of the sentences, the fallen block of the text, the decision to begin. The récits provide this tone. They describe how real space (the house, the room in Èze) makes itself absent in order to give rise to an evaded, diffuse, diffracted, disseminated, and sometimes hallucinated space, that of writing, the space of literature, the eternal return and glorious jouissance of the “primal scene,” a space that allows one to enter into “the silent emptiness of the work” and “the absence of time.” This impressionism of personal description (“personal” because although it describes the impersonal forces acting on the person as he writes, here it is the critical voice, attributed to the first person, that exposes, explains, recuperates it) allows Blanchot to develop his thinking of the work’s impersonality and neutrality (its anonymity, its endlessness).4 And Blanchot takes the true authority of his discourse, its real tone, from an experience that, even if it is one of dispossession, remains radically personal. We know how marked he is by the fantastic experience of multiple apparitions, and particularly the apparition of death; Èze is where these events take place; and he takes pleasure from reading about them in Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, or Henry James. In the same way that he makes this link in his récits, in his critical discourse too Blanchot ties together the conception of the work and the fact of seeing apparitions. A vocabulary of the fantastic acts as a paradigm for elaborating concepts. Like an apparition, the work “escapes” the writer, it “always leaves him or her wanting”; it is “what is there . . . but is withheld—the harsh and scathing void of refusal” (24); it makes the writer “the survivor, the idler [désoeuvré], the unoccupied, the inert” (24), who finds himself in “the errant intimacy of the outside from which he could not make an abode” (24). The work that Blanchot would figure via the character of Eurydice, an evanescent apparition over which Orpheus has no power, addresses to its author a Noli me legere that parodies the Noli me tangere of Christ’s apparition. Beyond these equivalences, what is most surprising in the text’s rhetoric is that the final pages, nearly a third of the article, entirely avoid the theme of writing (which Blanchot has nonetheless just glossed with multiple anaphoric phrases: “Writing is . . .”). These pages move away from critical theory stricto sensu and only return to it in the final paragraph, in the meantime developing the themes of fascination and childhood.5 It is as if Blanchot were suddenly describing the nature of the fantastic rather than the nature of the work, as if he only theorizes the experience of writing by borrowing from that of apparition. The absence of time is one of the conditions of the work; Blanchot describes it as the there is, as what allows the appearance of “Being beyond the absence of Being, which is when there is nothing, which is no more as soon as there is something” (30). The being that becomes present in the absence of time escapes any presence; it is a ghost:
What is present presents nothing, but represents itself and belongs henceforth and always to the return. It is not, but comes back, comes already and forever past, so that I do not know (connais) it, but I recognize (reconnais) it, and this recognition destroys in me the ability to know, the right to grasp, making what is ungraspable also the inescapable, the inaccessible that I cannot stop reaching, that which I cannot grasp, but only grasp anew, never to let go. (30–31)
And there is also this, which bears witness to the intensity, the significant presence of this figure of apparition precisely where and when Blanchot has set himself the task of describing the work:
When I am alone, I am not alone, but, in this present, I am already returning to myself in the form of Someone. Someone is there, where I am alone. . . . Someone is what is still present when there is no one. . . . Someone is the faceless third person (le Il sans figure, 31).
When what is seen touches the gaze in this way, the work is not far from imposing itself on the author as his invisible partner, and this is what a récit such as When the Time Comes tries to show.6 For what is then seen “does not belong to the world of reality” (32), no one “strictly speaking sees it” (33), not even the child (“childhood is the moment of fascination,” 33). The abrupt, conclusive, and decisive comparison of the author to a child evokes the world of a writer such as Henry James or the very particular tenderness with which Blanchot himself describes children (starting in Èze, as we have said, with the figure of Julie Bataille). Finally, there is this:
What fascinates us robs us of our power to give meaning, abandons the world, draws back behind the world and lures us there. It no longer reveals itself to us and yet it affirms itself in a presence foreign to the temporal present and to presence in space. (32)
This attraction turns the work into an initiation into a “vision” by which the author himself becomes “the phantom of an eternal vision.”
The greater this fantastic or mythic anthropomorphization of the work, the less the author is neutralized. Such an anthropomorphization demonstrates the turns and condensations that intensify the experience whose genesis Blanchot explores in his three Èze récits. An experience of the fantastic is thus the model for the experience of writing. It is not a question of seeing this as a simple rhetorical strategy, literary convention, an unremarkable belief. Instead, the récits seek to show how real this experience is, how the life that experiences it gradually negates itself as it discovers the law governing the world of the work. The récits contain the genesis of this literary experience, which transforms a man into a writer and sees him becoming a being of solitude and of language.