CHAPTER 40
“I said to her: ‘Come to the South with me.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s impossible.’ ‘Come!’ ”1
It’s impossible. For her and for him, alike. Sharing in this refusal by restating it makes the narrator of When the Time Comes into a writer, one who has withdrawn to his house in the South, an empty house containing only the presence of the woman whose apparition he will hallucinate at the foot of the stairs (as the author had previously). He meets Claudia in a Parisian apartment, unexpectedly, on a visit to a Jewish woman he once loved, Judith. The two women are now living together in a relationship. Every kind of jealousy will be provoked. This jealousy will lend violence even to apparently minor events, leading to brusque gestures, unexpected appearances, sudden about-turns, cries. It will be a question of listening to them, at the limit of what cannot be perceived.
The woman appears, possessing and dispossessing. Her image at the foot of the stair illuminates the suffering and the jouissance of her absence.
I cannot say that I am always conscious of it, of this glimmer, I would probably have to admit that it often leaves me free, but, how shall I put it, this glimmer is freedom in me, a freedom which destroys all bonds, which abolishes all tasks, which lets me live in the world, but on the condition that there I be almost no one. So if I have now seen myself reduced to the transparency of a being that one does not encounter, it is because little by little the glimmer has relieved me of myself, of my character, of the serious and active affirmation that my character represented. (72–73)
She holds the authority of transparency, her law is the effacement of the person. She has pushed so far as to encounter the creative joy of sacrifice.
When he gave Denise Rollin a copy of When the Time Comes, Blanchot wrote these words on the title page: “this book, written for you in proximity to danger.”2
“I burned, but this terrible fire was the shudder of the distant to which no task corresponded. I grew more silent (and since I was alone, that meant silent toward myself)” (63). In the dispossession that makes desire possible, each character retains an element of creativity and beauty. Claudia is a singer, the narrator writes. Their meeting at a point of annihilation will be experienced as a demand to annihilate everything leading up to this point. As a demand for the disappearance even of what has already disappeared, even of appearance itself.
How terrible things are, when they emerge from within themselves into a resemblance in which they have neither the time to become corrupted nor the origin to find themselves and in which, eternally their own likenesses, they do not affirm themselves but, beyond the murky ebb and flow of repetition, they affirm the absolute power of this resemblance, which is no one’s, which has no name and no face. That is why it is terrible to love and why we can love only what is most terrible. To bind oneself to a reflection—who could agree to that? But to bind oneself to what has no name and no face and to give that endless, wandering resemblance the depth of a mortal instant, to lock oneself in with it and thrust it along with oneself to the place where all resemblance yields and is shattered—that is what passion wants. (71–72)
Passion leads from empty resemblance to the smashing of resemblance, by a movement that is the movement of death.
A figure appears, in order to disappear. It only appears because it has already disappeared, and in order once again to take everything away. “Something is happening” (64). “Someone is there who is not speaking, who is not looking at me” (72–73). In “The Essential Solitude,” Blanchot would use the same words to refer to the depths of being, the neutral presence that imposes itself on the writer: “Someone is there, where I am alone. . . . Someone is the faceless third person.”3 When the Time Comes has the task of describing how this writer comes about, how his personality is effaced in the withdrawal of writing, which allows it access to the “unraveling of time.”4 In this sense it is the first Èze récit, that of the passage from “I” to “He/It,” from subjective speech to anonymous rustling; that of the oblivion of the café terrace or the room as they are converted, flattened, and incorporated into the night of literary space. It represents real space, which has become the site for a graceful, joyful, dignified encounter with distress. It recounts the appearance of the neuter.
That I should descend so far from myself into a place one can, I think, call the abyss, and that it should only have surrendered me to the joyful space of a festival, the eternal glitter of an image, I would be surprised by this too, if I had not felt the burden of this untiring lightness, the infinite weight of a sky where what one sees remains, where the boundaries sprawl out and the distant shines night and day with the radiance of a beautiful surface. (71)
The autobiographical mode of narration would impose itself as a violent, precise, persistent, rigorous rumination on lived experience.5 Sometimes only the portrait of a character is torn away from life like a citation from a text. “There is, in my need to name her,” the narrator warns early on in speaking of Judith—there is, in the need to name her and “to make her appear in circumstances which, however mysterious they may be, are still those of living people,” “a violence that horrifies me. That is the reason for my desire to abbreviate; at least that is the noble part of this reason.” (5) With a tone that calls to mind the beginning of Death Sentence, Blanchot makes the mystery more plausible and credible, legitimizes its autobiographical borrowing by this concern for conviction, justifies its oblique and partial treatment as a matter of discretion. It is a question of producing a new image of fantastic conviction, of reinforcing literature’s terrible right to death, to give shape to the emergence of death (Judith greatly resembles J.), to expose the ravages of the personal. This implies that a less noble element is at play, to which the text alludes without comment. The “desire to shorten” that belongs to the nature of the récit is the desire to cut into the event, the desire for language to remain untouched by bareness, the necessary collusion of language with destitution. It is a way in which the sentence can work as if with a scalpel, with a refined sense of sacrifice which, as Blanchot said about Lautréamont and Sade, is the best guarantee of the consciousness, gestures, movement, fear, offerings, and desire that are present between the characters, the true performers of the récit. Blanchot’s particular narrative dramatization stems from here; as does his almost technical mode of listening to the varying movements of the body, his attentiveness to the smallest gestures of unveiling and turning, his rhythm of slowing down time in order then to jump forward quickly and suddenly move to the dénouement, and—particularly in When the Time Comes—the theatricality implicit in the dialogues, the scenography always invented by the gaze.
The spaces disarticulated by this mise en scène are those that best capture our attention. They are the ones that reveal how the personal is shared, how torn-apart immanence and real but ultimately impossible encounters are shown. There is intense and almost telepathic communication between the narrator and Judith but the latter, unlike previously, violently rejects any bodily relationship. Judith’s defeat by Claudia, whose fraught relation to the narrator mixes eroticism and suffocation, is compensated by lucid knowledge, by the presence of emptiness, and is lightened by the knowledge that the other two bodies will also in turn separate. “I was there in flesh and blood, but Judith continued to watch me in a sterile way through the window” (41). In itself, this sterility is only meaningful insofar as it provokes Claudia’s unhappiness. Between the disaffection of the past and the destruction of the present, the narrator realizes that he is simply a pawn in the two women’s desire for one another: “calm in the midst of furious desire” (35). “And what about me, was I in on the secret? At the very most, I was the secret, and for that reason quite far removed from having anything to do with it” (42). In making the narrator the blind spot of the narration, Blanchot traps the reader in the same way he had announced in The Most High and Death Sentence. He closes the door on the autobiographical idealization he had previously suggested. This narrative detour is just one more fictional illusion, part of the autobiographical game of fiction. While he protects what is secret and brings all biographical readings into his game, that of fiction, he makes this fiction the very place, the literary space in which the truth of the secret can be grasped with its layering. Perhaps he therefore forces us toward a new kind of biography, an invisible partner not wholly accompanying its subject, remaining ignorant about the man in question but not about his genius, recognizing the way in which this man did not know himself and created the writer-character that he became.
Maurice Blanchot was always highly attentive to the men and women he knew and loved.6 He makes use of the same nocturnal, profound and exhaustive capacity to listen with his fictional characters, in the circumstances he creates for them, which, “however mysterious they may be, are still those of living people,” (5) and which were often those experienced by friends in real life. Such listening can seem cruel at first, although ultimately it is fascinating, dazzling, prone to fill one with joy. This is what is staged by the opening of When the Time Comes, with Judith opening a door, which immediately becomes her opening to an absence—a divine absence.
The familiar figure (connaissance) immediately becomes a figure of recognition (reconnaissance) in the following extract:
I was extremely, inextricably surprised, certainly much more so than if I had met her by chance. My astonishment was such that it expressed itself in me with these words: “My God! Another familiar figure [encore une figure de connaissance]!” (Maybe my decision to walk right up to this figure had been so strong that it made the latter impossible.) (1)
The narrator recognizes Judith, a Jew, as his God from the beginning of the récit (he will later say that she is detached from the passage of time). It is in the gap provided by this recognition, in the distance from the expression “my God” to Judith, that the relation to the divine and the feminine is sketched out, and that the possibility of the gaze arises. Judith, a woman, a body, is negated as soon as she is perceived, and the narrator’s gaze focuses on the horizon, like the gazes exchanged between Dorte and the “Most High,” like the other visions that characterize the Èze récits, those from behind a window or from the foot of the stairs. The narrator’s gaze immediately settles not on Judith but on a figure of Judith, just as later it will settle on Claudia’s apparition. The doubled figure that Judith helps to set up from the beginning of the récit, to which she gives form, belongs to a fantastic or mystical type of vision.
In fact, without this doubling the narrator would remain in the vertiginous world of appearances. Only this rupture projected by the gaze helps discernment and identification. It is precisely because nothing is yet written in Judith’s “different seeming” appearance, because her face has remained indifferent to time, that the old face projected beyond her, in order better to recognize her and her past, opens a space of memory and oblivion, of divinity and welcome (anything can happen in this space). The apparent otherness created in this way clears the way for the dramatic movements in the récit: between the door and the back of the apartment, or between the door and the window, the space of the studio will be occupied by the récit’s most violent irruptions and by its happiest movements.7 This choreographic opening makes Judith’s divine, defied, deified face, in the words of the dancers, the face of the invisible partner.
The fact that Judith resists this apparent otherness, which manifestly marks both the singer and the writer, makes it necessary—according to the law of this récit which makes itself a récit on the very possibility of récits—to produce this figure, and to do so in a way that is not exactly cathartic. On the contrary, the narrator’s astonishment and distress are effaced before the radiance of a blind power, a neutral power of dispossession, the sudden blaze of an appearance that brings things together as much as it forces them apart, and that ultimately suffocates one. Because he is unable to inscribe this divine, inviolable figure in the real, and due to this nature’s destructive violence, the narrator disappears into the intermediary space he has created, which is named as the space of thought (3). This is a neutral, cold, and suffocating space, which forces the following question, a motif of the Èze récits: “Give me a glass of water.”8 Is that what it means to be a subject? To be for another, to face the other, to face the divine face of the other? This space of thought becomes the paradoxical site of the subject’s intimacy, a way of inscribing one’s body (or the shadow that precedes one’s body) in the other space of the air, a way of beginning to give oneself over to dying.
Judith is abstracted from the space of thought that she has violently helped to create. Scattered everywhere, she is not visible anywhere. She is the possible receptacle for all emotions, a divine, dismembered body made of words, organs, emptinesses. She is invisible, ungraspable, unnarratable. She is the possibility of the récit from which she herself is immediately excluded. She is the possibility of the work, but as Cupid only appears at night, the narrator can never know whether to rely on her is to rely on a word, an organ, or an emptiness. She is the ground of all experience, of all danger to come. She is the ground of space or of the gaze, from which all spaces or all gazes are possible. “I saw certain parts of the room very clearly, and it had already renewed its alliance with me, but I did not see [Judith]” (5). If Judith’s room is the site of exodus, the tent for the new covenant, it is because her face is the neutral, invisible, and dazzling ground through which all other possible faces will be inscribed. All other possible faces, that is, starting with that of the narrator, which takes its meaning from this transfiguring radiance. How could a photograph capture this transformation, this ground of the face? Blanchot already believes that the writer’s face must remain invisible.
This power of figuration, whether it is divine, corporeal, or feminine, explains the narrator’s repeated fainting, his fights and his jouissances, the erotic, suffocating back-and-forth he engages in with Claudia. Claudia thaws the cold, suffocating, uneasy space presented by Judith’s gaze. She is the one who, when suffering a coughing fit, places the narrator’s chilled hands on her hot throat, “to enjoy a colder touch,” a touch charged with Judith’s presence (54). The swelling of her chest, the movement of her suffocation changes its meaning little by little, and eroticism takes over from the choking fit:
I felt a terrible, convulsive storm pass between my arms, and in order to stay (demeurer) with her, I had to respond to the awesome call that rose from the depths of the day at this instant, I was filled with rage, I passionately seized her, and now that I had caught hold of her again in the midst of unsteadiness, the static falling of our two bodies together, I held her firmly out of reach of limitlessness. (54)
The indistinctness retained through these bodily ravages is fueled by an obsessive idea: the fear of the other coming close. There is a risk of something so strong that it immediately provokes apprehension, suffocation. It is as if the characters had no protective skin, and all contact between their bodies were infinitely violent; even the slightest appearance is a confrontation. This coalescence of open flesh makes all images impossible. This perhaps concerns the bodies’ gender: Blanchot’s récits place a man between two women too often for us not to raise this question. Is it simply a way of heightening man’s ability to bear death? For him to know that he is “an arc between two deaths”?9
In his existence, Blanchot had encountered women’s strength in withstanding the work of death.10 This strength is what separates the narrator of When the Time Comes from Judith and Claudia. Blanchot’s inability to withstand dying had lasted too long not to become the timid law governing his character, he who would only find grace and joy in “the essential solitude,” that of writing. After a long, difficult, painful journey through exhaustion, writing would henceforth always be the moment when the time comes.
A few years earlier, Blanchot had cited Nietzsche in an article in L’Arche: “Die at the right time” (au moment voulu). His commentary is that the cruelty of death never allows us to know, once we are dead, what the right moment will have been, “so that finally the choice of the moment of death assumes that I leap above my death and from there gaze down on my whole life, assumes that I am already dead.”11
This gaze has a name: writing.