Maurice Blanchot

Ullrich Haase, William Large

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9781134565214
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Without Maurice Blanchot, literary theory as we know it today would have been unthinkable. Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze: all are key theorists crucially influenced by Blanchot's work.
This accessible guide:
* works 'idea by idea' through Blanchot's writings, anchoring them in historical and intellectual contexts
* examines Blanchot's understanding of literature, death, ethics and politics and the relationship between these themes
* unravels even Blanchot's most complex ideas for the beginner
* sketches the lasting impact of Blanchot's work on the field of critical theory.
For those trying to come to grips with contemporary literary theory and modern French thought, the best advice is to start at the beginning: begin with Blanchot, and begin with this guide.

KEY IDEAS

1

WHAT IS LITERATURE?

If you are someone who enjoys reading fiction, then the question ‘What is literature?’ will probably one day come into your mind. This question seems fairly clear and no more difficult than ‘What is a dog?’ or ‘What is a tree?’ We might suggest, for example, the following definition: literature is a form of writing, whether in prose or verse, that is recognized for its creative and imaginative value. Not everyone will agree with this and some might suggest alternatives, but in arguing about definitions in this way, we are assuming that it is actually possible to define the term ‘literature’.

It is this assumption which Blanchot would wish us to question. The uniqueness of his critical work is that he does not offer us one more definition of literature, which we might compare favourably or not to others, rather he argues that the process of defining this term is fraught with difficulty. A good example of this would be his debate with the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). In 1947, Sartre published a highly influential book called What is Literature?, which argued that the function of the writer was to engage in the political struggles of history. Blanchot’s response, in his essay ‘Literature and the Right to Death’ (originally published in two parts in 1947–8; in SBR 359–99 and WF 300–44), which perhaps marks the beginning point of his own literary criticism, is highly ambiguous. He seems, first of all, to be offering an opposing definition of literature: literature has its own meaning that has nothing at all to do with morality and politics. We should, however, be wary of such simple oppositions. For even the critic who asserts literature’s aesthetic independence is still giving a general definition of literature. Is this not what our own definition proposes? And what we have already said that Blanchot would reject? His approach is less ambitious and more uncertain. He does not deny the possibility of literary theory, which explains why he does not get involved in polemics, but argues that the experience of reading escapes any theory or definition, whatever form these might take. For this reason, we should not be so ready to directly attach literature to a political movement (although this does not mean that literature has no relation to politics, as we shall see in Chapters 6 to 8). This idea of constant ‘escape’ from definition leads Blanchot to write with some irony that the essence of literature is that it has no essence:

But the essence of literature is precisely to evade any essential characterization, any affirmation which would stabilize or even realize it: it is never already there, it is always to be rediscovered or reinvented. It is never even certain that the words ‘literature’ or ‘art’ correspond to anything real, anything possible, or anything important.

(BR 141)

We say ‘with irony’, because to say that literature has no definition is still to define literature. Rather than simply accepting this contradiction at face value, thereby believing we have somehow refuted Blanchot, we need to look more closely at the problem. This chapter will turn first to the general problem of defining literature. In order to understand Blanchot’s position more fully, we will then consider three types of theory, in each case contrasting these with Blanchot’s ‘anti-theory of literature’.

Definitions

When we define something we usually do so through differentiation. This means simply that we try to pick out the characteristic or characteristics of a thing that make it different from every other thing. For example, we say that the human being belongs to the genus animal, but has the particular mark of rational thought that differentiates it from any other animal. Blanchot’s argument would not be that it is impossible to classify literature in this way. It would be quite absurd to say that we cannot identify different kinds of literature (romance, detective story, crime thriller and so on), and similarly absurd perhaps to deny that there is no difference between literature and other forms of writing, such as police reports or newspaper articles, for example. Rather his position is that while we have little difficulty in producing definitions, the generalization that the act of definition seems to demand misses what is peculiar to the experience of reading, and, more importantly, misses what is literary about the literary text. The general philosophical definition of literature, whether defined intrinsically in terms of artistic value or extrinsically in terms of moral purpose, has nothing to do with reading. Both define literature, so to speak, from the outside. We do not read literature in general, but a particular work: Blanchot’s own Death Sentence, say, or Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. We can say all manner of general things about these texts. We can compare and contrast them with other books, talk of them being revolutionary or conservative, belonging to this or that movement, and even label them as being included in one genre or another. None of this talk is false for Blanchot, but it skews us away from the specific experience of reading Death Sentence or Wuthering Heights, where each novel, in its own way, resists any attempt to be comprehended completely. Thus I can say, for example, that Blanchot’s Death Sentence evokes the unsettling atmosphere of Paris during the German occupation, where all the moral certainties of French society are threatened, and yet at the same time I have the nagging doubt that I have not said anything about the novel at all. In the end we cannot say what each of these works is. Such opacity belongs intrinsically to the experience of reading a work and it is this singular experience which, Blanchot argues, escapes definition. It is not enough to say that literature in general repels comprehension, but that each work does so in its own manner, and thus must reinvent literature for itself.

There exists a whole industry of literary criticism and critical theory, but these books about books and words about words never seem to get any closer to the mysterious, opaque and unsettling centre of the experience of reading. The closer you feel you are approaching the centre of the work, its meaning or message, the further the work seems to withdraw from you. You feel that the text has something to say, that it has a ‘truth’ that can be communicated, but when you listen to the experts telling you what it means, it does not seem to capture what is truly singular about the work, for what the work communicates is only itself. For example, you might read in a critical work that the stories of Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett are about the emptiness and senselessness of modern existence, but the critics seem to be saying both too much and too little. Every book demands an interpretation, this is the centre that attracts us, but at the same time the more that we seek this centre the more uncertain and opaque it becomes:

A book, even a fragmentary one, has a center which attracts it. This center is not fixed, but is displaced by the pressure of the book and circumstances of its composition. Yet it is also a fixed center which, if it is genuine, displaced itself, while remaining the same and becoming always more hidden, more uncertain and more imperious.

(SL v)

So how do we relate to or try to comprehend a text and at the same time always fail? Blanchot describes this text as having two sides. On one side, the text is part of our culture, and it is this aspect of the text which is the object of literary theory and it is on this aspect that critics offer their interpretations and judgements. On the other side of the text, which for Blanchot constitutes its claim to uniqueness, it speaks only in its own voice and in so doing resists our attempt to conceptualize it. It invents, so to speak, a new language that exceeds the boundaries of our critical competence. Blanchot uses the biblical story of the resurrection of Lazarus to describe these two sides. The reader is like Jesus who stands in front of the tomb and utters the command‘Lazarus come forth’. The tomb represents the book, and Lazarus the meaning of the book that the reader expects to reveal in the act of reading. There are, however, two sides to the Lazarus who emerges from the tomb: there is the resurrected Lazarus who stands there in the whiteness of the winding sheet,and there is the Lazarus whose body beneath the winding sheet still smells of the decomposing corpse of the tomb (IC 35–6 andWF 326–8). The resurrected Lazarus signifies the cultural side of the text, which allows it to be made part of the general circulation of interpretations. This side of the text is what we call its meaning or its value. The other Lazarus, who is always obscured by the resurrected Lazarus, and who never sees the light of day, depicts the opacity at the centre of every text, what remains after every interpretation,and which,like the secret of the tomb itself,refuses our grasp.

The resistance of the text to interpretation stems from the individuality of its idiom, and it is this individuality that makes the general definition of literature impossible for Blanchot. What is important, however, is not to let the two sides of literature fall into an empty opposition. The irreducibility of the text, its stubborn individuality, is only revealed through reading and through the failure of interpretation, not in opposition to it. But how and why does the text avoid the intention of the reader to comprehend it? To answer this question we can compare Blanchot’s approach to literature with other influential critical positions, if only very briefly. This will reveal more clearly the originality of his stance.

Literary Theories

The development of Blanchot’s thought cannot be separated from the mode of its presentation. Nearly all of his critical works are collections of reviews first published in journals such as the Journal des Débats, Critique and La Nouvelle Revue Française. Journals of this type are perhaps specific to the French intellectual milieu. They are a kind of combination of the literary pages of a newspaper and an academic journal, but what is most important is that they are independent of academia. Their existence not only allowed Blanchot a means of living, but also an independence of thought. Thus, unlike most literary critics, he has written no substantial work in which he presents his own views or criticizes those of others. These reviews, and as time passes they resemble even this form less and less, are almost completely devoid of footnotes, and make hardly any references to his contemporaries, with a few notable exceptions, such as Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas. This form of presentation makes it extremely difficult to reconstruct Blanchot’s thought and to trace the influences on this work. One way of countering this problem is to imagine Blanchot in dialogue with the main strains of literary theory and to imagine, on the basis of the work that we have, the objections he might raise in regard to them. Our intention is not to be exhaustive, but to consider three types of theory in comparison to Blanchot’s approach. Each of these types of theory concentrates on the three main elements of literature:the author, the reader and the text.

Literature as Biography

If you were reading a literary text, you might be tempted to say that the purpose of the text was to communicate what was in the writer’s mind when he or she first wrote it. Let us say you are reading James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). You might want to say that the text was essentially a translation of the inner mind of the writer into an outer, external form. The different characters and situations, then, would merely be different aspects of the writer’s mind. You might even claim that the text could translate the writer’s unconscious. For example, the text of Ulysses might contain unconscious ideological material, such as the class-consciousness of intellectuals in the early part of the twentieth century, of which the writer, James Joyce, was not even aware. This notion of the writer’s unconscious can yield a very broad scope for interpretation, then, from the individual psychology of writer to the mass psychology of a society. The object of this kind of commentary would be to get as close as possible to the writer’s original thoughts and intentions, or, and this is undoubtedly very difficult, to hidden unconscious meaning and its repression. Once such a commentary had located this material it would claim that it had discovered the ‘truth’ of the text, which would have been concealed from more‘naïve’readings.

The literary criticism we have in mind here is that inspired by the works of Freud. Blanchot too writes about Freud, but he is not at all inspired to find hidden meanings (IC 230–7). How can we imagine him responding to such a theory of textual meaning? He would probably ask how we are to know what the original intentions of the author might have been. This complication is further compounded if we start talking of the author’s unconscious translated into the text. Even if the author is still alive to attest to the supposed meaning behind the text, how can we be certain that their judgements about their own work are valid? The only way to determine this would be to judge the work for yourself, but this is precisely what is ruled out by saying that the meaning of a text lies in the intentions of the author.

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

A Viennese neurologist who discovered, in treating his patients for nervous disorders, unconscious thought processes and a new method of psychoanalysis in order to analyse them. For the purposes of literary criticism, his most influential idea was the distinction between the latent and manifest content of dreams that he outlined in his major work The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), where the manifest content referred to the surface material of the dream, the apparent illogical associations of images, and the latent content to that which had to be teased out by interpretation. One such example of the relation between manifest and latent content was dream symbolism, where an object in a dream might represent an erotized body part or activity, though one must be wary of overemphasizing the importance of this symbolism for Freud. In his own interpretation of the work of literary authors, Freud tended to interpret in relation to the writer’s life, as though they were his patients. Blanchot does not write directly on Freudian interpretation, but does discuss psychoanalysis in the essay ‘Analytic Speech’ (IC 342–54).

Readers’ Response

It is not at all clear that the writer is the best judge of their work, and when a writer does judge his or her own work, as Blanchot reminds us, he or she is no longer its writer, but merely its first reader. As such, authors have no more direct access to the work than the readers who follow (SL 200–1). Their closeness to the work might blind them to its full significance. Moreover, are we so certain that all the meanings of a text are to be found in the original intentions of the author who wrote it? Does not a text have many more possibilities than this? Just think, for example, of those texts whose authorship is uncertain. Would we say that these texts have no meaning, because we have no knowledge of the people who wrote them? Or, again, imagine the possibility that the name on the front of a book you were reading disappeared, and all knowledge about that author with it. Would you be certain that when you opened that book the pages would be a blank for you, and that you would no longer understand a word?

Maybe it is the case that what you say about the author’s intentions is just your own opinion disguised by another’s name and this is a necessary outcome of every interpretation. This is why we might think that it is the reader who activates the meaning of the text by pouring his or her own life into it, without which the text would be dead and lifeless. Thus, the meaning of the literary text, to go back to our first example of James Joyces’s Ulysses, lies neither in the writer’s mind, nor in the text itself, but in the interaction between the reader and the text. For this reason, we could say that any text has multiple meanings and that interpretations of it will be as varied as the people who read it. Each reader brings his or her own values or opinions to a book, consciously or unconsciously, and what that book means to that reader will be coloured by these preconceived ideas. Readers may not even be aware of this:their social positions might tie them into whole cultural attitudes that they unknowingly express in their interpretations of a book. The object of the literary critic would then be not to find the ‘truth’ of the work, which would somehow mysteriously lie outside of time, but to trace the history of its reception. For example, the themes that we pick out in Shakespeare today would be quite different from those that interested his first audience, but we cannot claim that either response is truer than the other.

The literary school roughly described here is known as reader response or reception theory, stressing in its label the contribution of the reader to the understanding of the literary text. We could imagine Blanchot’s reply to this theory to be that it fails to pay sufficient attention to the way in which the text, just as much as it invites readers in, also dismisses them. However much the reader draws close to the text, it also remains outside them in its own stubborn isolation. The text’s resistance to appropriation by the reader does not signify that the text is meaningless, but precisely the opposite:this resistance is the significance of the text and it is this resistance that makes the text literary. Another way of putting this would be to say that a text is literary to the extent that it says more than we can comprehend, but this ‘more’ is not experienced merely negatively as an absence of meaning, but as excess of meaning. This is what we mean by the strange particular and individual world or style of a work, one that resists any general categorization or label.

Reception Theory

A theory of literature that concentrates on the reader’s role in the production of the meaning of a text and which came out of the University of Constance in Germany. Some of the major names of this movement are Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser and Peter Szondi. Reception theory lays stress upon the historical dimension of literary texts, but concentrates more on the reader than the author as the origin of its meaning. Thus, a text can change meaning across history and across different communities. There is no ultimate meaning of Shakespeare, for example, that would stand above the historical and social context of its consumption. Blanchot makes no specific comment upon reception theory, but, although he would not deny the historical and social nature of reading, he would withstand the reduction of the ‘literary space’ to merely one more item of ‘culture’. What interests him is precisely the resistance of the text to the reader’s response, as for example in the essay ‘The Great Reducers’ (F 62–72). We shall discuss this essay in Chapter 7.

Structuralism

Another way of interpreting literature would be neither to focus on the writer or the reader, but on the text. Such an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Abbreviations
• Why Blanchot?
• PART I. Key Ideas
• After Blanchot
• Further Reading
• Index