Nothing Must be Illustrative
What lets itself be discovered by way of Blanchot's fiction? The setting of his récits is mundane, the prose is calm - but the mundane is allowed to double itself, and the prose becomes thick and strange. Sometimes in his fiction an ordinary action will suddenly detach itself from linear continuity and turn upon itself, as if it had broken time into a separate eddy. Such breaks involve a sudden profusion of moods - affliction gives way to lightness, lightness to anguish, where each time it is the mood that seems to bear the protagonist instead of the other way around.
Sudden shifts in the relationship between characters occur, as though (Blanchot's metaphor) the relative levels of water had been changed, as in a lock. And there are moments when the prose leaps into a strange abstraction: words like fascination, image, return, are used as a telegraphic shorthand, ordinary words that have been made to sound strangely, substituting for an experience which has no name, but that is like the double of any and all words, nonsense rumbling in sense.
'It may be that all these words are a curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening': the narrator of Death Sentence hints that what is important is not what is told, but something else, as if the events of the book come to stand in for another event, as though they sacrificed themselves to a greater demand. In a sense, the events of the narrative are not what matters at all - or rather, what matters does so by way of them.
In his biography of Kafka, Stach notes that his subject 'demanded much more from his texts than formal unity; he sought a seamless linking of all motifs, images and concepts'; with 'The Judgement', Kafka's stories 'leave no narrative residues or blind alleys. Not one detail of Kafka's descriptions, whether the colour of a piece of clothing, a gesture, or simply the time of day, is merely illustrative. Everything carries meaning, refers to something and recurs.'
With Blanchot, what recurs does so by way of the narrative details - 'it is made of events, details, gestures' and nothing else, and as such are 'particularities, worthless moments, dust of words'; but then, too, surpassing these details, but being no more than these details as they are taken together, a kind of 'emptiness' appears, a 'lacunar immensity' or 'infinite distance', such that the subject of the story is the lack of its story; 'it tries to realise in it this lack that always infinitely surpasses it'.
What Cannot Be Told
The Blanchotian récit bears upon this lack, figuring its inadequacy to itself in its own recounting. Let us follow the opening lines of his récit, The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me to see how this works.
The récit begins: 'I sought, this time to approach him': as though it were only now the narrator wants to confront the one who allows him to write. Now is the time for the encounter. But how can it be brought about? Can it be forced? The next lines:
I mean I tried to make him understand that, although I was there, still I couldn't go any farther, and that I, in turn, had exhausted my resources. The truth was that for a long time now I had felt I was at the end of my strength.
"But you're not', he pointed out.
At the end of my strength: to have run out of ability, or to have known the ability to be able the ability to be, fail you. But this is bad faith. To seek to approach him already betrays this inability; you are capable of something; you have a plan; clearly you haven't yet exhausted your resources. And isn't the fact that you're writing these lines testament to precisely the surplus of your strength over your exhaustion? But who is the he, the 'il' that answers back? With whom is the narrator conversing throughout this récit?
'I would like to be.' A manner of speaking which he avoidied taking seriously; at least, he didn't take it with the seriousness that I wanted to be put into it. It probably seem to him to deserve more than a wish.
Whoever it is, he seems to have been granted a whole personality, an ability to think, to converse: what mystery! And the whole récit consists of their exchanges, and the long passages in which the narrator reflects on the situation in which he finds himself.
The other with whom the narrator converses is a personification of the condition of possibility of narrative. He is no one apart from the narrator, being only the one who endures in his place when he is claimed by the fascination with which writing is bound up, for Blanchot.
If he is its condition of possibility, he is also narrative's condition of impossibility - he stands outside what can be narrated, set back from it, soliciting the movement of narration, but at the same time stepping out of its way, until the narrator, in this case, says firmly to himself, 'I sought, this time to approach him.' Him, il: in the case, the condition, the uncondition of narrative, that which gives and withholds the possibility of telling.
In the case of this récit, the 'il' is personified; the refusal of the event to give itself to narration is given a part in the narration. And yet it is made by the narrator, and by Blanchot, to appear in its refusal.
Writing in his diary, Kafka expresses surprise that writing is possible at all.
I have never understood how it is possible for almost anyone who writes to objectify his sufferings in the very midst of suffering them; thus I, for example, in the midst of my unhappiness - my head, say, still on fire with unhappiness - sit down and write to someone: I am unhappy. Yes, I can even go beyond that and with the various flourishes I might have talent for, all of which seem to have nothing to do with my unhappiness, ring simple, or contrapuntal or a whole orchestration of changes on my theme. And it is not a lie, and it does not still my pain, it is simply a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being and plainly exhausted all my strength. But then what kind of strength is it?
What, in the midst of unhappiness, allows one to write ‘I am unhappy’? A peculiar strength – a merciful one, in which I am permitted strength enough to report my unhappiness. But what does it mean to invoke mercy here? Does the capacity to write mean my unhappiness is any less complete? That I am less unhappy than I thought?
A surplus of strength: at least, now I can ring changes on my suffering, at least, using my talent, I can begin to write. But does it alter my basic situation? Does it offer therapy or cure? Writing allows me to take distance from my suffering – but it is the same distance which causes me to lose my suffering anew.
Then there is something left behind as soon as the narrative is begun. Suffering has lifted itself into an ideal suffering; as soon as one writes, or 'I had exhausted my resources', this belies exhaustion, but it is also, by inscribing the word 'I couldn't go any farther' on the page shows how language lifts itself from the condition of its author. Something has been gained: the capacity, the 'merciful strength' to write. But something has been lost by that same writing - that mood, that attunement that allowed the possibility of writing.
Commenting on these lines from Kafka, Blanchot writes:
The more luck I have, that is to say, the more gifted I am in making my unhappiness felt by description, embellishments, and images, the more the bad luck this misfortune reports is respected. It is as if the possibility that my writing represents essentially exists to express its own impossibility – the impossibility of writing that constitutes my sadness. Not only can it not be put in parentheses, or accommodate it without destroying it or being destroyed by it, but it really is possible only because of its impossibility.
Strange that the task of writing loses what makes it possible and which drew a weary man to write, I have exhausted my strength. 'But you haven't', says the fact of writing on the page. The narrator loses the particular concreteness of his exhaustion as he begins to write. He gains literature, which is also to say, the impossibility of ever returning to his suffering in writing. But what has he gained?
Ordinary speech has, at its heart, the ideal of a pure communication, which would transform ‘the heaviness of things’, in Blanchot’s words, to ‘the agility of signs’, the ‘materiality of things’ to ‘the movement of their signification’; they are nothing in themselves: abstract tokens to be used in exchange. The sentence in the story has another function: it does not seek to become the sign of an absent being, but to present that being to us in language. It is a question of allowing language to ‘revive a world of concrete things’. It is not, moreover, a question of revealing the concreteness of this or that thing, but a world of things.
‘In the novel, the act of reading is not changed, but the attitude of the one who reads it makes it different’, Blanchot writes. The value of words is no longer that of labels attached to particular meanings. Let’s say I hear the phrase ‘The head clerk himself called’; I am able to conjure up a world in which this sentence has meaning: I know the head clerk himself, the office in which he or she worked, and so on. The sentence is unobtrusive; I know what it means. When I read the sentence ‘The head clerk himself called’ in a literary work, the situation is different: it no longer belongs to a world with which I am familiar; the only access to the world of the story I am reading is through the words of that story.
Literary works characteristically strive for verisimilitude by elaborately constructing a world. In the case of Blanchot's récits, however, we are left with something more stark: a sheen of words which present themselves as a vehicle of disclosure, of the opening of the world. A drama is happening at the surface of the text even before we are reassured by the creation of a fictional world.
What is the experience of reading this récit - if we do read it, rather than cast it aside in frustration? We no longer have any distance with respect to the text; the reader is no longer a spectator, since there is no secure place with respect to the narrative from which to grasp its unity, but is, so to speak, enfolded in the very unfolding of a narration. But nor do we feel the reassuring presence of an author who is in charge of the narrative.
This is the uncanny experience of reading Blanchot; there is no point of fixity to which one can anchor oneself. The récit opens as a void or hollow. The events the novel narrates stand out against a kind of nothingness. The reader is more distant from Blanchot's narrative than she might be with respect to a more traditional novelist since she is unable to interpose a context for the events as they occur; they seem to come from nowhere. Yet in another sense, she is closer - too close, perhaps - because all she has are the words which attest, in Blanchot's work, to the void against which those words appear.
No escape: the narrator cannot escape from his exhaustion; he writes, and that exhaustion is transformed. And when we read Blanchot's récit, born from exhaustion and the 'merciful strength' which escapes exhaustion? Fascinated by the texts, close to them, far from them, there is no escape for us. Is this exhausting - a counterpart to the exhaustion of the narrator? Rather, one always reads, Blanchot says, in a kind of lightness, which is perhaps the analogue of that surplus of strength which allowed the writer to begin to write.
The Event Itself
The récit is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold, an event still to come, by the magnetic power of which the narrative itself can hope to come true.
It may appear Blanchot's narrator seeks to write about his encounter with 'him', but his récit refers to another and more fundamental encounter (or, with respect to our reading of the text, something closer to its surface): one that is the condition of possibility of any narration. The event the narrator would narrate is joined by another narration and another event - that of the interruption of his capacities as an author.
Then the récit bears upon its own possibility, even as it needs to give itself body in terms of a specific narrative, and is nothing apart from what is given to be read. It is as if the récit, as it names the event, pre-existed the narrative events that incarnate it; or that what happens in the narrative is only a way of allegorising or redoubling what has already occurred. Everything - plot, character development, the 'interest' of the narrative - would have been devoured by the black hole of the event. Or the event itself would stand over its characters, measuring out their destinies like Fate.
But the precedence of the event cannot be understood chronologically. When Blanchot allows himself in his critical work speak of the past, of recurrence, this is a way of figuring the way in which the récit leads itself back to the question of its own possibility, but also the impossibility of ever accounting for that event in the present of tasks, projects and intact subjects. Narrative incidents, then, must always be poor but necessary proxies for the event at issue. None of them are any greater significance than the others insofar as any of them is liable to fall into the lack the récit would narrate.
But if, in Blanchot's récits, a fall is always imminent; when an incident is always ready to be substituted by the event, some narratives reveal this lability more directly. The step from Blanchot's novels to the récits uncomplicates and focuses his fictional work - it becomes simpler, the story, such as it is, is presented more sparsely, which lets the lack for which it substitutes, or into which it continually threatens to plunge, that much more present.
Still, this is too simple a notion of the récit. See here for a continuation of these reflections.
