There is a kind of fiction where the fictional world wears through - the characters leave it, perhaps, to go in search for the author; or they hear the clatter of the typewriter used to write the novel, as in one of Spark's books. There are novels where authors become characters, and characters authors - why not? But what about a fiction where it is language, that of which the story is made that is allowed to tell its tale?
The concern of French genre of the récit is retrospective - it does not follow the unfolding of events like the novel, but looks back musingly upon them, allowing what has occurred to return in various ways, to the extent they can never be said to be completed at all. It names, thereby, a genre characterised by reflection rather than action, bearing on a single episode, or group of episodes as they present themselves as an occasion for meditation.
Blanchot's récits muse on past events, to be sure - we think of Death Sentence ('these things happened to me in 1938') and When the Time Comes, which seems obsessed with an incident that occurred at some point in the past, in the South, even as it unfolds novel-like in the present - but it is a certain experience of language to which they are directed.
A few loose, casual notes on this experience.
Language and Death
The old prejudice: words written down are dead, poor proxies for real presence. Better speech as it is animate, as it is brought close to the animating voice or presence of a speaker. A kind of detour, then, as if the flat surface of the page were an open doorway. Only it is language that now leads into itself - that, even as it refers to the things, to the world as a horizon of intelligibility, suspends the capacity to refer, allowing the words themselves to become heavy, impenetrable, rendering opaque the communication they were supposed to let happen.
Unless it is what is communicated is that heaviness - the impenetrability of words is now rendered present not because the text is written in an invented language, a kind of gobbledegook, but because it pulls apart, in itself, sense and nonsense, sense from nonsense, not in order to divorce them altogether, but to show the latter is the material support of the former; that the heaviness of words must bear even the lightest of messages.
But what of the communicator of the words? Alongside what the writer wants them to say, there is a second message. This is nothing to do with the style of the writer. Or rather, it is what, by way of that style, turns what is said in another direction. Communication depends upon the material base of this style - upon what words are used, what phrases, and how. It depends not only on the way words are animated - the way the impersonal forms of language are given life - but by the way they deanimate what is said.
Language entails a detour from sense, from intended sense. Words slide - and with them, whole phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Nonsense bears sense away even as the words remain on the page, making sense. And what of the one who would receive the communication? What makes sense to her depends upon the materiality of words, their sense. It does so by way of what also deanimates words. The life of what is said depends upon death. That is the condition of writing.
And what of speech? Does that heaviness not bear what is said in that case, too? Isn't speech likewise divided, linguistic sense and nonsense held in a kind of tension that reveals itself only in limit-situations? When is the grain of speech revealed? In particular ways of singing. In cliches, perhaps - when words are on the edge of meaninglessness. In that passing of words along that receives Heidegger's approbation. Words of which no one really takes possession. Words spoken by no one and by everyone.
In what form does the struggle between sense and nonsense reveal itself? Is it a tragic diremption? A version of the tension between freedom and necessity, the former rising heroically up against the latter, and then falling back? Or is it comic, ludic - does a kind of laughter mark this detour from sense - is it accompanied by pratfalls and horseplay? Do we laugh at it as it passes between idiots who always come in pairs, better to lighten speech and let it play: Bouvard and Pecuchet, Vladimir and Estragon?
Or does it happen negligently, in the carelessness in which Duras began The Lover, in that wandering writing that, she said, no longer belonged to Literature? And what about that careless speech, in that gossip everyone passes on without forethought; in the impersonal wave of rumour which crashes through the everyday?
Survivors
In a strange way we are all survivors of what we say and write. That language asks from us that we animate what in the end remain empty, abstract forms. I speak, I write, by laying claim to the personal pronoun. Does it let me speak in the first person as though stood outside language and used it as a tool? Or does the first person pronoun whose position is presupposed in what I say, allow me to apprehend myself?
It is an open, empty form I animate and bring to life. But it, too, can sometimes stir and be said to awaken. It stirs and wakes up - but as what deanimates speech, what drives it deeper into death. It clouds the surface of speech; it clouds the transparency of what is to be said. Until that said does not let itself speak by way of it, and its sense is sent on a kind of detour.
What is like, the sound of death? How does it let itself be read? By means of language, and by way of it, even though death cries sometimes, and death rumbles. Even though, on the page, it looms upward through the surface of the text. By way of language, of the horizon of sense, operating alongside the fiction, accompanying it and returning, kraken-like to darken its surface.
What does it return as? What returns? Language as it breaks itself from the task of referring. Language that loses itself in itself - but now as it engages what happens in the incidents of the narrative - as it draws them into its own happening. A happening, though, in which nothing happens. In which something dark swims up and darkens the surface - and that's all.
Language as it presents itself in its withdrawal from sense. That is there, but not there. There, but subtracted from itself, language minus sense, language minus the capacity to mean. As it engages the ordinary course of language in the narrative, but exceeds it - or falls below it - and takes a direction into the heart of the page, directly away from the reader. Rising to the surface only to flee, and drawing something of your experience, as reader, with it.
What is that has reached you? What caught you? Not this book, nor these pages bound between covers. But the work as it is more than the book - as it names the narrative at the heart of narrative, the récit in the récit. The work as what laps up to refuse your gaze. That looks at you by turning away.
Then refusal is the contact with the work. It darts back into the darkness like a startled fish. But it is also that darkness; it is what, in the pool is not transparent to meaning. And yet what you want as you read. Yet is also that lack, that excess, that more than meaning that never happens once and for all in the narrative, but returns in it, over and again.
Returns - not as itself, but as something happening slightly away from the narrative events, and from the voice of the narrator. Away, because it cannot give itself all at once, cannot be made complete, or even to begin. Does it even happen? Can it be said to do so? Or is it rather what undoes itself in any narrative event, and undoes those events, streaming, incessant, and never happening in the instant?
In the end, it escapes chronological time. Escapes, and draws within the events that happen in the time of the narrative. Not an event so much as a way things do not happen. That fall back, incomplete, into the darkness. And this is other drama to which the récit also answers. What happens by not happening, and divides the event from what does not round itself off into an event.
Not the voice of the narrator, then, but the narrative voice. And not even the author's voice, if this is still understood according to the measure of the 'I' in charge of language. For the author, too, is engaged by the narrative voice - not understood according to the old cliche, where the characters run away with you and live their own lives, where the plot does not pan out as you planned it, but rather that the telling of the narrative itself, its narrating, seems to veer, seems to be drawn into another, stronger channel. And, following it, engaged by it, this voice speaks of more than the author intended to say.
Such is the narrative voice as it draws what is said like a ship into shipwreck. But nothing is wrecked, not really. The ship sails on; it reaches port, a story is told and a book finished. But then too, at the same time, the boat is wrecked at each moment; as every event of which it tells is seized by what does not close itself into an event: the interminable, the incessant, in its perpetual storm.
And so too is the author wrecked - and this is the only way he can come into contact with the work. It is the way he lives it, or that it is brought close to a life. The story is told; the book was finished, but the author is lost in contact with the work, for loss is this contact, and he will sink by this contact to the bottom of the sea.
That's what it is to tell, really to tell. And to tell today, as older forms of telling have fallen away. Of what is there to narrate? what stories? Only a handful, says Goethe, who charts, for our benefit, all possible plots. A handful - but it is what that is told by way of them that matters now. By way of them, with them, and even as though using them, living from their life like a vampire bat. And isn't there another in the author, too, who is like a vampire? Another engaged by the work as the work - who lives as the companion to the author, in that intermittent becoming by which he is substituted for his living double?
The Other Side of the World
But what is told? What speaks with the narrative voice? The other side of language, I said. Language in its thickness, its heaviness, all of that. The material bearer of language, all that. Blanchot says more. For him language is also the relation human beings have with the world. Scarcely a relation, really, so deeply is language lodged within us. But that is the condition of experience, that does not merely answer to the order and structure of the world, but constitutes it.
Then what the récit shows in Blanchot's hands is not merely an aspect of language: it is also, in some sense the world - or rather, what is not disclosed as the world discloses itself. What does not appear in the light of that appearing - as the phenomena that are first of all linguistically given. That come with their names, that bring them with them. No, the récit narrates what is on the other side of our experience, and of the brightness and visibility of the world. Or, if it can still be called experience, then it reveals what is hidden by that same brightness, just as what is told by the narrative voice is hidden (but only partially hidden) by the voice of the narrator.
There is also a way the world can be said to happen, but beyond chronology. A way that it can also be said to occur, as it is engaged by the interminable, the incessant. The récit is peculiarly suited to speaking of this hither side. It does so by way of the narrative voice, as it breaks into the narrative. But how does it break? Via particular incidents. By deforming, transforming those incidents and the characters who endure them. This is why the events of the récits are as though captured - why the task of walking down a corridor or fetching a glass water becomes impossible. Why it is difficult to tell what happened in any of these narratives.
These incidents are the double of what could happen to us, according to the implicit phenomenology in the récits. They are, in their telling, endlessly strange - but they are not so in the manner of a fantasy. They could happen, and they are recorded to bring the reader into the sense of their happening. Receptivity to the récits will depend upon whether you can make sense of their occuring - whether you can relate it to something that has happened to you or to others. To make sense of it enough to follow them as they wind their way into obscurity.
And it is in this sense, I think that these récits are elective: only some will be engaged by them. And only a few of them who'll read to the end. For they also constitute a kind of research; they adumbrate a phenomenology of our ordinary lives; they depend on it, for the life of the narrative. And it is of this that they tell, however strangely. It is of this they attempt to find an idiom such that they might tell.
The calmness of that telling is, I think, eternally surprising. Not that it is tranquil, or at ease with itself, but rather that it speaks with an everyday speech, with ordinary words. Words, it is true, that quickly become strange. But still, the speech is calm, quite unobtrusive. But then, all of a sudden, it is swept up by an abstract storm. The sentences seem to fall faster; the tempo of the story speeds up ... these paragraph flurries happen characteristically towards the end of the récit. I picture them as great banks of cloud swept by great internal winds and flashing lightning.
How to read these passages that take up a large part of the last part of most of the récits? There's narrative momentum, to be sure - the sentences are short, forward moving, urgent. But what is happening? What's going on? An abstract storm, like I said: ordinary words used oddly, their sense strained, buckling, having already been put under pressure earlier in the narrative. Tense becomes uncertain - what's happened/happening/about to happen, and to whom?
We have lost our hold on time - how many hours have passed? Days? And the characters themselves seem to come apart - what are they undergoing? Narrative momentum, certainly, but to what end? Can the récits really be read for themselves, by themselves? Don't they require a theoretical supplement - the literary criticism? In what sense can a récit like The One Who ... be enjoyed for itself, by itself? But I will leave these questions open, rather than address them here.