CHAPTER 41
It is tempting to attract the unknown to oneself, to attempt to bind it by a sovereign decision; it is tempting, when one has power over the distant, to stay inside the house, to summon it there and to continue, during this approach, to enjoy the calm and the familiarity of the house.1
The house in Èze offered Blanchot a double possibility. On the one hand, “the little garden—hardly a garden, a few feet of earth enclosed within walls,” this “reservoir of space and of light,” was the space for the day, a way of drawing on the rich, peaceful outdoors, of making time for breath, recovery, the horizonless spread of suffering. On the other hand, “the small room” had a clear view onto “the splendor of the limitless” and, even as it retained the calm familiarity of the indoors, in other ways “made [one] think of it as the unique moment and sovereign intensity of the outside” (298–299). The house in Èze frames the récit from beginning to end and, apart from the explicit mention of the “regions of the South” (274), is described in a way consistent with the descriptions in When the Time Comes, A Voice from Elsewhere, and several other autobiographical texts. The description of the copious light entering the “small room,” a kind of “watchtower open on two sides” (284), filled by the presence of nothing more than a table, chair, and sofa, chimes with the description which opens the book on Louis-René des Forêts. This is the room where Blanchot “most often stayed.”2 It is the site where the narrator, again a writer, comes to sit in order to write, where he is “offered the right to speak of [himself] in the third person” (318). It is the site where true silence can be listened to. Down below, at the foot of the stairs where the narrator often places himself, in the place where in the previous récit he saw Claudia’s apparition, the room offers a “poorer, more desolate” silence (286). The room creates a true space for writing only by filling itself with the apparitions glimpsed through the three large bay windows.3 The house in the récit is even more truly the house in Èze in real terms in that it is also its imaginary form, which was probably the way Blanchot saw it, recreated it, loved it. In When the Time Comes, it condenses other spaces dear to the author, certain windowpanes, a kitchen, a storeroom that recall the rooms of the apartment in the Rue de la Victoire.
The house in Èze was not the site that created Blanchot’s solitude, but it did allow it to be made “essential.” “Little by little and under the constraint of this concealment,” which made him abandon a certain kind of political public relation and offered him the suffocating shelter of literary creation, “I had withdrawn from everything,” explains a narrator whom we are encouraged to confuse with Blanchot by the first person of the title, “so that now I no longer lived in the world, but in concealment” (302–303).4 From simulation to dissimulation, from semblance to dissemblance, fiction gives the author’s political and literary itinerary the shape of destiny, in which the end refers back to the beginning, as if under the intense authority of the “primal scene.” The triptych of southern récits prolongs the movement of contradictory and even paradoxical introspection that defines Blanchot’s relation to the act of writing; it prolongs the movement in which journalistic responsibility is abandoned in favor of the abyssal commitment of the narrative form adopted. The triptych prolongs and accentuates this movement. Little by little, the characters become fewer. Ultimately only the narrator remains, alone face to face with himself, with the charged power of the work he is writing: with writing, with dying. There has to be an end to this return to the origins of the possibility of writing. Blanchot’s récits revolve around a confrontation with a single subject, namely, how the possibility of writing comes about. This mythical récit of a solitary adventure, this fiction of fictitious happenings, is the sole witness to the experience of writing. It is lucid about its appearance and its language, and ultimately makes a point of returning to the world, of trying to set what is extremely personal (the genesis of creation) in relation to what is extremely public (the demand of refusal and the possibility of community). Ultimately it meets its own first—and thus final—demand: the fragmentary. The completion of the cycle of récits can now be envisaged.
The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me is the first of Blanchot’s récits directly to confront the figure of the neuter, an unnamable figure (as the title indicates in its exhaustive efforts not to name it). Inscribing in language what precedes all speech and all writing, describing the writer’s solitary confrontation with the work, shutting oneself in one’s writing room and removing all entertainment: the récit is formed around such objectives. Starting from such thoughts, the narrator engages in a fantastic dialogue with this “He/It [Il],” this other self, the anthropomorphic work or apparition against which he protected himself during the “extraordinary” time of the novels, and that now must be brought to the presence of the image, made to emerge on the surface of language, the essence of dissimulation.5 “I sought, this time, to approach him [le]” (263): the decision is made, as is thus indicated with the opening words of the récit. While this “he” or “it” seems to be a divine figure, and while openly going to meet him or it does not come down to defying satanic temptations but instead to “erecting the tent of exile” (299), envisaging the apparition does not allow for any imagery (with the ethical exception of an invisible, Judaic God). Such an envisaging attempts to open itself to everything that has disappeared and disappears anew with it, and it must raise itself to the level of infinite attention required for the fate of ghosts returning from the dead, of the last men, who have been—as it were—rendered godly by their astonishing return from the death camps, from the impossibility of dying.
What is at stake is the very possibility of conversation, of the attentiveness necessary in order to listen to the other, once one has reached a level of exhaustion that makes language—producing language, analyzing or deconstructing it—difficult. How can one find a path through words, how can one remain open to what remains unsaid in dialogue, how can one make one’s words immediately accessible to others; the récit surveys these forms of vigilance, weighing up, dissecting, providing commentary on each expression chosen, without ever totally aligning itself with an institutional listening, whether that of the Socratic dialogue, the confessional, or psychoanalysis.6 The other: the “he/it,” the neuter, the absent party: all of these embody vigilance regarding one’s own language. Thus, writing imposes itself as “the best way of making our relationships bearable” (264). Writing is the platform for an infinite listening that could never really “limit and circumscribe the void” (the ordeal of dying) (267), and that is therefore forced to reach such a limit. Writing leads us to endless forcing of and regular denials of the presuppositions of any speech that takes itself to be homogeneous. In a sense, the récit has no object except to deconstruct, unfold, explain its own beginning: “I sought, this time, to approach him” (263). What does it mean to take this risk? Why now? Why does such an attempt seem to be destined to fail, ruling out in advance any catharsis? Is it possible to see this phantom, this invisible partner of writing, to which Blanchot is giving form here (and doing so in a unique exception in his work, as the main character of a récit)? Or is it even possible to hear it, to hear “some of his words which I could not distinguish, once they were said, from my own” (320), that is, to hear these words that register writing as a distancing, as an equivalent to the visions with which it seduces us and to the movements to which it condemns us, by which it causes an abandoned body to be listened to?
If the narrator’s absence from himself, registered by an abundance of narrative omissions, sometimes makes him unaware of how he moves in space—so much so that he finds himself unexpectedly and almost instantly a few steps away from where he thought he was—and if he thus gives the impression of having been lifted up and swept along by an unknown force, he owes this to what, describing the apparition of the neuter in When the Time Comes, he calls “the burden of this tireless frivolity.”7 Such spatial breaks are experienced as a doubling of bodily perception, accompanied by cries and falls. It is the experience of the withdrawal of Judith’s face applied to oneself, as it were, experienced as a painful force within the body that shares and alters it in a void charged with presence.8 Such unexplained movements do not render any less mysterious the apparitions of a third party behind the window panes or on the staircase, described as they are in the manner of Henry James, a third party who will be shown to be the narrator himself, or rather the element within him that escapes his power, challenges his capacities of recognition, and calls for writing.9 These visions are sovereign and frightening,10 and it is impossible to coexist with them, as Blanchot would often put it via a Cratylic play on words.11 They give the sensation of having one’s body operated on, of a vertiginous movement being opened up within it, and also of making it not into a “metaphor” (as had already been ruled out in Thomas the Obscure), but into the work itself.
Bearing an attentiveness to dying that Blanchot redefines here as “the uninterrupted and the incessant” (317), another proof (as if it were necessary) that the critical essays indeed derive from a shared experience, the narrator can hear words which seem to him to come from outside and therefore to pass through him, confirming his dying, but without yet being writing. The thirty or forty last pages of the récit recount precisely the move from dying to writing, in an address—beyond the mirror—to words themselves, with the pronoun “they” [elles] that replaces the “he/it” [il] and lyrically imposes itself on the narrator’s fascinated attention. “Risen, as if from their graves” (324), words bury the dead body of the subject, who has disappeared into writing. They are the tomb of his desire, the forgetting of his secret, the unlocatable site of a prophet now without prophecy. They dispossess him of what he did not yet have, of what they had promised to him. They provide him with shelter.
Literary space becomes the space in which the subject can advance, sheltered from the world, but also, at the same time, the space in which the world of shelter can take shape. In the very depths of solitude, it is charged with the community to come. “In this space, there were still knots and tensions, strong areas where everything was a demand, others where everything leveled out, an interlacing of waiting and forgetting that incited one to continuous restlessness” (303). How can community with the last man be founded? The next récit will address this question.
Little by little, writing returns to gaiety, to “a joyful pleasure, a strange enthusiasm” (271), to the strength of sand and the power of wind. This does not mean that there are not endless reversals, from the “anxiety of the void” (305) to the “pleasure of having broken out of the depths” (306). In the disappearing absence toward which he is led, the subject always seems to be waking from a dream or from an exile, from suffocation or from insomnia, and to hear this pressing question: “Are you writing, are you writing even now?” (307).
This question, the leitmotif of the récit, is the enveloping force of night.12 It gradually takes over the space and time of this house in the south, as if it were a matter of showing that the narrator is doing precisely nothing other than writing; as if it were a matter of constructing an image that hides life in the sometimes anguished, sometimes delicious ordeal of writing; as if it were a matter less of giving shape to the image of effacement than of effacing a terrorized subject. This total projection of the narrator in literature onto the very site of fiction is itself a fiction. Ultimately, it speaks to the very power of fiction itself, which is real, and which invites us to resist being taken in by the immediate circle of fascination. Being no one has no meaning unless someone is no one, even if this someone is the last man.