Timeliness and Timelessness

7/30/2019 Timeliness and Timelessness

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Timeliness and Timelessness

Denis Hollier; Deborah Treisman

Yale French Studies, No. 93, The Place of Maurice Blanchot. (1998), pp. 99-113.

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D E N I S H O L L IE R

Timeliness and Timelessness1Take ful l advantage of rad io's t imeliness , wri te " the f i rst a la rmsounded half an hour ago," " th e s ta tem ent w as released at th e exactm inu te this program began," "a radio and press conference has beenscheduled for 4 p.m., that 's 17 mi nutes from now."-Paul W. W hit e, Advice on Radio News Wri t ing

Last year I received a phone call th at rem inded m e of the calls th attypically wake up unem ployed private eyes after th e opening credits ina Raymond C handler f i l m n o ir . Th is scene, however, was not set in L.A.An editor w ho had heard I was in Paris for th e year wanted to m eet m e.He had a proposi tion for me, but h e couldn ' t te l l me m ore unti l he sawm e. It was all very m ysteriou s. I went to our m eeting point on rue de S.and he told m e th at t he board had decided to offer me a contract forBlanchot's biography. What did I t h i n k ? I was flattered , of cou rse, alit tle . But also surprised, if o nly by th e con spir atoria l n at ur e of t h escene. Did they lznow s om ething I did n't lznow? Were s tat e secrets atplay here? I tho ug ht of a tit le : T h e B l ancho t F ile . Or, for th e Frenchversion: Dossier secret (like he French version of Mr. A r k a d i n ) .Why m e ? M y first reaction, suspicion ( w ha t trap was being set form e ? ) ,m ade m e realize to wh at ex tent, despite my resistance to s om e ofth e effects of a pu blic acce ptan ce of B lanchot t h at had grow n rapidlyover the last few years, I continued to move in a l iterary space that h ehad "formatted": a space that was too marked, too formatted byBlanchot for me to s eriously imagin e myself w riting any biography, leta lone his.Once I had recovered from my surprise, I became superst i t ious.How old was he ? I had forgotten when he w as born. Would death force

1. A version of th is essay was presented on th e panel, "Hyb rid Genres," organizedby Susa n R. Suleiman a t the 1?95 MLA Co nvention. T he epigraph is from Paul W. White ,Advice on Radlo Ne ws W rit ing ( N e w York: Harco urt Brace & Co., 19471, 79. All t ran sla -t ions thro ugho ut this essay are by the transla tor unless specified otherw ise .YFS 93, Th e Place of Mazlnce Blanchot , ed. Thom as Pepper, Q 1998 by Yale University .


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100 Yale French S tud ieson h im w ha t he had always refused to acknowledge in writing : a life?How m any publishers were s imultaneously bett ing on the l ikelihoodof his im pen din g entry in to biographical space!Th ere were also practical question s: tracking down witnesses, m is-tresses, childhood friends, relatives, seducing the m in to th e intervie w-ing process, etc. N ot t o me nt io n the problem of p hotographs. W hatwould Blanchot leave behind ? W hat would hi s Nachlass be mad e of?Was he himself preparing i t ?Would his dea th liberate suitcases fu ll ofpapers?W hat, for example, wo uld be left of his correspondence, th e primaryma terial of any biography? Th ere had been m any rum ors abo utBlanchot's let ters, su ch as after Bataille's dea th in Ju ly 1962, Blanc hothad destroyed all the letters he had received from h is late friend.Th is remind s m e of the article Blanchot published in Les lettresnouve l les at th e ti m e. It was a strange obituary, a kind of m um blingrequiem, solemn and reserved, almost anonymous, with Bataille 'sna m e appearing only once, in th e middle of a clause, at th e bo ttom ofth e second page. Instead of evoking the life of th e ma n he'd been closeto, Blanchot anticipate d the world of rum or in w hich h e would fade andbe lost. His words stayed with m e for a long tim e. Th ey prophesied,w ith an oddly impo tent s igh, the coming of the "co mplete wo rks." Iquote the paragraph in i ts entirety :

Th e books themselves refer to an ex istence. Th at existence, because i tis no longer a presence, is beginning to convert itself in to history, andthe worst of histories, literary history. An inquir ing, meticulous his-tory in cons tan t search of do cum enta tion , it takes possession of a de-ceased wil l and transforms i ts ow n personal understanding of w hat ha sbeen left behind in to knowledge. It is th e tim e of c omp lete wo rks. Wewa nt to pub lish "everything," we wa nt to tell "everything."LTitled "L 'amitie" ("Frien dship "), he article, printed in italics, laterserved as a coda to the 1971 collection of essays to wh ich it gave it stitle, m ost lik ely the last volume of literary criticism published byBlanchot.The biographical void that Blanchot has been able to maintainaroun d himself m ake s hi m o ne of t he rare literary figures of this c en-tury to have acquired a truly legendary statur e. W ith discreet effi-2. Maurice Blanchot , L ' a m i t i e /Paris: Gall imard, 19711,327 . Blanchot's words werest i l l in my m i n d w h e n I cho se "Georges R ataille, apres tout'! as a title for a confere nceorganized to celebrate the actu al com ple tion of Bataille's c omp lete works.


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DEN IS H O L L I E R 101ciency, he has m anaged to elude all publicity traps. [Blancho t:"All tha twe say only veils the sole assertion: tha t everything m u st fade and th atthe o nly thing we can remain faithful to is the im pulse tha t erases, towhich something in us that rejects all memory already belongs"[L'amitie, 3271).A writer leaves no track s. I a m rem inded again of th eOrson Welles film in which Mr. Arlzadin, amnesiac, hires a privateinvestigator to recon struct his past, and the n destroys, one after theother, the surviving witnesses t ha t th e biographer-for-hire manages toflush ou t .Blanchot c on tinu es his requiem by reworking, once more, th e m o-tif arou nd w hich his literary reflections had been organized since theirinception , twen ty years earlier: the statu s of the first person. T he threevolumes that make up Bataille's Somzne atheologique [L'experienceinterieure, Le coupable, Sur Nietzsche) are pieced together from n ote-books B ataille ke pt d urin g th e Second World War. M ost of their en trie sare writte n in th e first person. But, says Blanchot, it is enough for theword "I" to be utter ed by Bataille for th e first person prono un to ceaseto be really perso nal; carried away by th e impe rson al energy of th ewriting imp ulse, it is constan tly on the verge of becoming no one'spro no un . Bataille's "I," he claims, is never really a n "I," an "ego"; it hasthe ind eterm inac y of a n interrogative "W ho ?" or of a "Who is this m etha t I am ? " or of a "Who a m I ? "

In one of Derrida's essays o n Blanchot, on e of th e voices wonderswhether he lsh e would use the informal "you" [t u )with Blanchot. Howcould on e address as "you" som eone who refuses to say "I," som eonewh ose en tire body of n onfictional w riting has been driven by th e stra-tegic avoidance of th e first person, by the q ue st for a languag e capableof diverting, of eluding th e iden tificat ion s, th e appropriation an d cen-tralization of th e first person? Someone whose invention s are allgeared toward undoing t he gram m atica l person alization of langu age?Literary space is an Arcadia w ith ou t ego, a space tha t cann ot be enteredin t he first person. It surfaces at th e very m om en t t ha t the first personsink s and no o ne is left to keep the ship's log. Call me Ishmael, h e says.

W ill Blanchot's editors or biographers one day discover a personal h and -w ritten diary? A log writte n in th e first person, with daily en triesrelat ing events and memories , what happened to him, w hat thoughtscrossed his m in d ? t is unlikely. It would be surprising. It is not impossible.


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102 Yale French Stud iesT he literary space, Blanchot has always said, is generated th rou gh akind of Copernican revolution, a pronom inal decentering th at turn s

sentences writ ten i n the f irs t person into sentences in th e impersonalthird, converting "I" in to "H e" or "It" [w hic h is the ground of w ha tBlanchot called the right to die!. At a t im e w hen linguistics was focus-ing m ore and m ore on wh at Benveniste calls "Man w ithin language,"Blanchot, un der th e aegis of literary space, contrived a strang e lin-gu istic desert, a space of u nin hab ited language, of language w ith ou tspeech, a language m an cann ot enter. It evokes the strangely selectiveaphasias that, according to Jalzobson, deprive the schizophrenicspeak er of a single fu nc tio n: the use of th e first person. T he b irth ofliterature is correlative to a lingu istic disengagem ent, a withdrawal, asubtract ion (defacement)of man from language.-Accordingly, th e personal diary, like letter writin g for tha t m atter,is no t a literary g enre. It is, at best, a n exercise in resistance to litera -ture : a means of binding w riting to external tim e, of imposing o n it them eas ure of tim e, of tying it to both a chr on om etry and a chronology, amean s, th at is , of writing w itho ut facing the risks associated w ithwrit ing. For i t is important here not to misunderstand w hat P roustm eant by "temps retrouve": wh at is recaptured is not th e com m ontim e, the shared ti m e of historical "lieux d e m em oire ." Proust's proj-ect, according to Blanchot, exemp lifies the radical inco m pat ibility ofth e writin g of th e novel and th at of th e diary: "Th ere is no writer m oreremoved from th e daily recording of hi s life." Or, as he says in referenceto Benjamin Constant's Adolphe, the novel begins by talzing one farfrom the "m ovem ent of h o u rs ." W r again, in reference to Mallarme:"T he work m us t embo dy the awareness of the conflict between ' th etim e' [l 'heure) and th e literary gam e" (LaV,282) .Th us, keeping a personal diary very well, to use Blanchot's cond e-scendin g expression, can provide its keeper with th e "illu sion of w rit -ing." But i t is on ly an i l lusion. I ts w ri t ing is i l lusory to the preciseextent tha t i t is wri t ten in real t im e: the calendar spares i ts keeper thetest of the right to die, it allows him even to fantasize tha t writingcould end up providing a right to live. Even when the diarist feelslonely, even wh en he h as no on e to talk to, he can still say "dear Diary."His s olitu de is no longer esse ntial so litud e. "Clearly, th e diary worlzs asa safeguard against the dan gers of w riting" ( L a x 22 7).Or: "T he diary

3. Blanchot, Le hvre a venir (Par is : G allimard, 19591, 226. Hereafter referred t o asLaV in th e body of t he text.


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roots the wri t ing impulse in t im e, in the hum il i ty of the quotidian,wh ich is dated and preserved by its date. . . .T he date marked is tha t ofcom m on t im e where wh at happens really happens."4From this fol lows the idea tha t wri t ing in real t i m e is unreal w ri t-ing. Th e t im e "where what happens real ly happens" can do no m oreth an give the il lusion of writing . One m ust , thus, choose between twotruth s, tha t of writing and th at of th e event; one m us t choose betweenliving for real an d writing for real, betw een participa ting in things th atreally happen and "really" writing, th at is, producing writing th at isinspired by things th at never happe n in reality.

I would lik e to stay a litt le longer at th e border of this space w ith ou tborders, to prolong my reverie as to what Maurice Blanchot's diarywould consist of, a diary in which Blanchot would have inscribed,daily, in accordance wi th the da ting of calendar tim e, wh at, because ithappened in shared, comm on t ime , really happened.W hat could i t conta in?W hat, according to Blanchot, really happens wh en a writer decidesto go on bo ard? To board real t i m e? W hat events are recorded in theselogs w he n a wr iter, terrified of t h e prospect of liter ary sh ipw reck , de-cides to clim b aboard and be part of th e actio n?T he diary ques tion never stops coming back in Blanchot's crit icalwriting s. But its mo st striking aspect is the way, each tim e, Blanchotreduces wh at supposedly really happens to nothing. Th e diarist , onewould th ink , abandons h is creative writing in order to give events achance. Blanchot, however, seem s to be com m itted to preventing suchan o utc om e at any cost. By giving up the novel for the diary, the writerpasses from a space where nothing really happens to a time wherenothin g really happens. W hether it 's Maurice de Guerin , or Amiel, orJoubert, wh at h appens, a t least according to Blanchot, wh en a writerstar ts keeping a diary is th at the world freezes, everything stops hap-pening . Their diaries record lives caugh t betw een two fears, the fear ofwr iting a nd th e fear of living; they com pulsively perform in finite varia-tion s on th e the m e of n othing to report. T he diarist , Blanchot c o m -

4. Blan chot, L'espace littd raire (Paris: Galli mar d, 19551, 21. Th ese sen tence s apply,beyond the limits of the diary, to any form of dated personal writing, correspondenceincluded: "Similarly , Van Gogh has his le t ters and a brother to write th em to" (Le iv re avenir, 2271.


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104 Yale French Stu die sm en ts, " lets himself be distracted from w riting by th e futilitie s of th eday, savors hi s trivia i n order to retell it " ( L a y227).Blanchot's un com -promising resistance t o the idea th at som ething could really happen toa diarist becomes particularly clear when we realize th at , contrary tow hat I said too hastily in m y book on Sartre, wh en B lanchot uses theword "journal ," he is think ing exclusively of personal, in tim at e jour-nals. The word in French, however, has another meaning. The dailyrecording of events is not prim arily ascribed to dom estic space. Th ereis the journal (diary) that one writes , bu t there is a lso the journal(newspap er) hat one reads. And i t can happen t ha t th e two overlap.

Let's retu rn once m ore t o Blanchot's cla im : a diary is th e record of aco m m on tim e when w hat happens really happens. In th e middle of hermemoir, La force de l'd ge , som ething, says Sim one de Beauvoir, h a p -pens. (She uses th e same verb as Blanchot.) T he scene is set in the la tesum m er of 1939. "Th en one morning i t happened. It was now, in anagony of lo nelin ess, th at I began to keep a diary. Its entries str ike m e asm ore vivid and accurate th an any narrative I could piece together o ut ofthem , so I give the m h ere: . . . . " 5 Colon. Followed by som e hund redpages of the diary she kep t con tinu ou sly over th e course of abo ut a year.T he first entry is dated 1 September 1939. Th is date refers to a c om m ontim e, wh ere wh at hap pens really happened. France and England havejust declared war on Nazi Germ any. Th is dram atic rupture in daily lifechanges her writ ing ro utine:

September 110 A.M.: the papers print Hitler 's demands, without comment. Thedisturbin g na ture of the news is not overempha sized, but no one anylonger takes a hopeful line, either. I go to the D6m e, unsettled an d atloose end s. No t m an y people there. Have hardly ordered a coffee beforea waiter announces: "They've declared war on Poland." A customerinside h as a copy of Paris -Midi . Oth ers mak e a rush for him , and also fornearby newsstands, but Paris -Midi hasn't com e in. I get up a nd go backto m y hotel. People in the street don't know an ything yet, they are stillas cheerful as they were a while ago. One or two people along theAvenue du M ain e are carrying copies of Paris -Midi , and passersby sto pthe m to read the headlines. I find Sartre. . . .5. Simone de Beauvoir, T h e P n n ~ eof Life, trans. Peter Green (New York: ParagonHouse, 19921, 302-3.


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Sim one de Beauvoir, in the m iddle of w riting L'invitee, puts hernovel asid e. T h e dec laratio n of w ar hav ing deprived her of th e freed omof m ind she needs to w rite a fiction, for the first t i m e in her life, shestar ts to keep a diary. But the im pulse here owes nothin g to th e mo tivesBlanchot disc usses. She is no t defending herself against th e totalita ri-anis m of fiction, nor does she fall ba ck on the trivia thank s to wh ichlife can be everyday. Th ere is n o withdrawal in to a m orose and analyti-cal celeb ration of th e fu til ity of rea l life. Sim one de Beauvoir is very farfrom A miel. Indeed, she is not threa tened by writing ; it 's her w ritingth at is threatene d by history. What happened to her, one among m il-lions of other individuals, on l September 1939 shows tha t, at certaintim es in history, a writer can become submerged by som ething othe rthan wri t ing.

In Sim one de Beauvoir 's l ife and m em oirs, 1 September 1939 is th eprototyp e of an imp ressive series of n arrative inte rrup tion s. First, thecom position of L'invitee is interrup ted when the war causes her to putthe novel aside and keep a diary instead . Then , some tw enty years later,in La force de l'dge, she susp ends the retrospective narrative of h erme m oirs t o quo te directly from her 1939 diary. But then the com posi-tio n of La force d e l'dge itself, w hich took place around 1958, is inter-rupted in i ts tu rn by a new French political crisis, a crisis alm ost asserious as the on e in 1939. Simone de Beauvoir will evoke it in thefollowing volu m e, wh ich covers th e period of t he cold war and of d ecol-onizat ion, La force de s ch ose s. When h er narrative arrives at the coupin Algiers, the memoirist becomes a diarist for the second time. Interm s of th e event as well as of t he writing, May 1958 repeats S epte m -ber 1 939. Beauvoir herself p rese nts i t tha t way. "M y s ta te of id lene ss,"she writes, "and th e general anxiety led me, as in September 1940 [sic:she is confusing 1939 and 19401, to s tar t writing m y diary again. . . . Ishall transcribe it here, as I have d one before: . . ." And th e diary be-gins: "May 26. Strange days, in wh ich we listen h our after hour to t heradio and INF. 1, and buy every ed itio n of th e newspap ers. ""Ca n we call this a personal diary?On e could say (w itho ut necessari ly diminishing the historical im -portance of thes e even ts) that, i n a way, the diaristic im pu lse was partand parcel of w h at " hap pen ed" to a lo t of people du ring th e cours e oftho se days. Sim one de Beauvoir was certainly n ot alone. Sartre, for one,

6 . Beauvoir, Th e Azltobiography of Simo ne de Beauvoir: Hard Tim es, Force of C ir-cumstance , I I , trans. Richard Howard /New York: Paragon House, 19921, 112.


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106 Yale French Stud iesalso began keeping a diary in September 1939 (w hic h became h is Car-ne ts de la drdle de guerre). On e could mak e a list of the diaries tha tbegin on 1 September 1939: There's Guehen no's Journal des an neesno ires, Bataille's Le cou pab le, Lise Deha rm e's diary, D rie u la Rochelle's,Fabre-Luce's, Braibant's, R amuz's, etc. Th e diaristic im pu lse w as itselfa fun dam ent al dimensio n of th e events of th e tim e. W hat "hap pened "was not only the events recorded in the diaries, bu t also the impu lsetha t drove novelists to transform them selves int o diarists in order torecord them.But this diaristic imp ulse is one tha t no longer obeys the separationof p rivate and public th at is essen tial to Blanchot's de finition of th egenre. N ot only does September 1939 ma rk the first time th at Simon ede Beauvoir has k ept a diary. It also m ark s th e first tim e in her life, or atleast in the n arrative of her life as told in her m em oirs, tha t she hasshown enough interest in the news to m ention wait ing for the new s-papers, or buying the m , let alone reading the m or listening to the n ewson th e radio. In the se two insta nces, in 1939 and 1958, the journal spaceis doubled. Her personal entrance in to the space of th e diary is at thesam e tim e th e entr anc e of th e collective diary in to her private space,th e inscription of th e quotidian th at is read with in the quo tidian tha tis writte n; th e invasion of outside events in to Simo ne de Beauvoir'sinn er life. T he indexical sign always rings tw ice: th e w ritin g of th e"journal" (private diar y) is prom pted by th e reading of th e "jo urnal"(public diary).This connection is al l the more s triking given that , as I said, ou tsideeven ts had never previously captured de Beauvoir's att en tio n. History,she writes, never interested her u nt il i t was already over, un til i t hadbecome historical, un til i t was History. "I wasn't interested in eventsun til they were already a year old," she writes ( 17 1 . And, speak ing ofSartre and herself: "P ublic affairs bored us" (T he Prim e of Life, 19 ).Atruly d utiful d aughter does not read the papers. W ith only tw o excep-tion s: she tells how at one tim e, during the '30s, sh e spent several daysreading newspapers in the public library in Rouen, but those news-papers were already ten years old, she had t o research th e '20s for th enovel she was then w riting. Th e other exception: she confesses to aweakness for Detective, but this tabloid magazine specialized exclu-sively in crimes, especially the gorier ones. "While books and enter-tain m ent s m ean t a good deal to us, public ev ents touch ed us scarcely atall" (T he Prime of Life, 45 )Th e repeated n arrative structure , chapter after chapter, throu gho ut


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de Beauvoir 's me mo irs, is dictated by th e par titio n between private lifeand pu blic space, by th e segregation of the individ ual and th e collec-tive, of th e psychological and th e political. Because no thin g affectingthe collective fate penetrated Mademoiselle de Beauvoir's existence,the his tory-in-the-malt ingof the early '30s left no trace in her m em ory.She is incapable of speaking of it in the first person. Ch apte r afterchapter opens with a brief, objective, historical reconstruction ofevents she paid n o atte ntio n to at th e tim e. On ce this baclzdrop hasbeen set, she enters the stage and then moves on to the scenes ofperson al me m ory : her hopes, her joys, her life, her self. But th e baclz-ground never encroaches on the personally experienced, the heroinepays no atte ntio n to the decor in wh ich her existence is taking shape.Collective history and individual psychology are separate acts, set ondifferent stag es.At least un ti l Sep temb er 1939, wh en th e declaration of war, chang-ing her narrative routin e, end s their separation . U nt il this date, worldhisto ry alte rna ted w ith th e life of Sim one de Beauvoir, parallel yetindepe nden t. Suddenly, they collide ("Histo ry burst over m e," shewrites) . Th e diary is w itness to this coll is ion, in both i ts form and i t scon ten t. It is both its index and its icon, both its effect and its recou nt-ing, w hic h is wh y i t can no t be called a personal diary. W hat triggersi t is precisely th e historical violation of the personal, th e vio lent int ru -sion of h istory in to subjectivity.T h e 1938-1940 crisis induce d a change in Blanchot as well. Ittriggered Sartre's and Simone de Beauvoir's conversion to newspaper-reading and d iary-w riting. For Blanchot, i t triggered t he o pposite co n-version. It made h im move away from newspapers int o literature, driftout of com m on t i m e where the things that happen real ly happen.Opposite journeys: at the very moment Sartre and de Beauvoir dis-cover the world of new spapers, Blanchot begin s to detac h himselffrom it.7

Blanchot, who may or may not have lzept a diary at some point,returned again and again, in his critical writings, to the literary sta tusof diaries. Curiously, his active career as a fu ll- tim e journalist in t heextrem e-right newspapers of th e '30s never led him to ask sim ilar ques-t ions about a w riter 's involvement w ith nonprivate diaries . Th is not-w ithsta nd ing , it was clearly on th is activity-which was Blanchot's7. As many cr itics have pointed out, L'arr i t de mort opens with the Munich crisis(date n text: Wednesday, 13 October 1938). t is the only Blanchot narrative in which the"action" is "dated."


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108 Yale French S tud iesbefore he entered th e space of litera ture , before he mo ved fro m "I" to"He," before he abandoned the timeliness of hours and days for thetim eless nes s of th e literary space-it was o n th is sti ll litt le exploredactivity as a journalist th at an editor was betting, as he tried to laun chth e prod ucti on of a book t ha t would go so definitely against the grain ofit s subject ma tte r as would a biography of B lancho t.

In Apres cou p 1983),one of th e few texts in wh ich he allows himself tolook back and reminisce about the period before the war, Blanchotcon tends tha t, w hile a professional journalist, he w as, to q uote PaulAu ster's tra nsla tion , "astonishingly cu t off from th e litera ture of th etime.I1sHow to characterize this lite ratu re? I would like t o evoke brieflyexpe rimen ts th at were carried ou t by th e avant-garde of th e '20s and'30s and w hi ch probably never figured in Blanchot's literary horizo ns;wh en he was a journalist, h e did not pay any atten tion to the m , andlater, hi s rejection of journ alism w ould have excluded the m from th eliterary field in an y case.

Sim on e de Beauvoir's grafting , on th e occas ion of t h e onse t of t h ewar, of h er diary, and thro ug h i t, of n ewsp apers, on to th e narra tivefabric of La force d e l 'i ige evolzes, if in a tone d-d ow n form , variousexpe rime ntations wit h th e hybridization of the novelistic and jour-nalis t ic narrat ive tha t were carried out no t only by the m il i tant m em -bers of t h e pro letaria n avan t-garde of th e '20s and '30s (fro mDos Passosto Ehrenburg via Dob lin e t al.), bu t also by the surrealists (B reton inN a d j a or Aragon in Le paysa n d e Paris) . These experiments werem eant to blur the border between narrat ion and information. T he presswas a key factor in t he n ineteen th-cen tury red istribution of th e rela-tionships between the real and the imaginary. The worldwide com-m odification of in form atio n required a narrative code of e th ics thatwould allow the reader to distinguish reality from fiction .Th ese experimen ts are th e literary equivalent of th e collage in th evisual arts, sharing with it a taste for the newspaper's headlines-and-col um ns layouts, to the po int of reproducing t he m in facsimile. Theytes t the po ssibilit y of sh ifting , w ith in th e fram ewo rk of a single wo rk ofart, from a space of ico nic represen tation to th at of ind exical happ en-

8. Blanchot, "After the Fact," in Vicious Circles, t rans. Paul Auster (N ew York:Station Hill Press, 19851,64.


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ing, of sh ift in gf ro m the space of signs to th e space of eve nts. How ca n anewspaper break in to th e space of the w ork (ho w can one expose th ework of art to a tru th t ha t is no t, as in Rene Girard, nove listic, bu tjournalistic, the journalistic tru th in pai ntin g)?How can one incorpo-rate a n event, a real event, in to a novel? And make that novel notmerely the narration of an event, but a n event in itself? All theseexperiments are supported by a profoundly anti-Pro ustian inspiration :they aim at reintroducing " l e t e m p s p e rd u" ( lost t im e) back into " l et em ps re trouve" ( t im e ecaptured). Th is operat ion requires a sharpen-ing of th e heterogeneity of th e two narrative m edia involved, themetonymical, transgressive contact between high and low, lost andfound, sign and event, icon an d index.

VIII'ervasive in Blan chot's c ritical w ork is a philosoph y of th e histo ry ofliterat ure. Like all philosoph ies of history, his is teleological: lite ratu reaims toward its en d. It reaches this end w ith M allarme. A ccording toMarx, th e history of m an is th at of class struggle, and m an w ould ceaseto be his torical when Co m m unism had inst i tuted a class less society.Similarly, Blanchot's histo ry of lite ratur e, coex tensive to the divisio nbetw een p rose and poetry, w ill last as long as this difference does. Itwil l reach i ts conclusion o n the day tha t the ( interna l)difference be-tween verse an d prose is overthrown by the (extern al)difference be-tween literature and non literature. W hich is MallarmC1s messagewh en he anno unces: Th ere is no prose. The re is no prose, th at is , unlesswe mov e prose ou t of lite ratu re, unless we decide to call prose wh atbelongs in reality no longer to liter atur e but to universal reportage. Inoth er w ords, framed betw een a restricted poetry and a generalized tex-tuality, Blanchot's literary space is not a space without external bor-ders. Literature is not a space without exterior. There remains oneboundary, and i t separates the novel and journalism.Blanchot, thus, reshuffles the Mallarmean legacy. The first post-symbolis t generat ion (th at of Valery), as a defense reactio n t o th e co n-tam in ati on of litera ture by journa lism and politics, fell back on poetry,abandoning the novel, in its retreat, to th e indistinct realm of wh atM allarm e called universal reportage. As if poets, having secured th eirhold on words, let the novelists deal with things. With his famoussarcast ic com m ent about a genre tha t t r ies to interest the reader in"th e fact th at th e marqu ise we nt ou t at five o'clock," Valery was th e


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110 Yale French S tu die sspolzesperson for this genera tion. According to h im , ther e is no com -m on groun d between th e poem, wh ich is driven by internal necessity,and the novel, which relies on an anecdotal exterior. Why did them arquise have to go o u t ? And wh y a t five o'cloclz instead of five pastfive, seven past five, or five th ir ty ? If sh e had been u nab le t o go ou t,would an ything have been different?But Blanchot finds Valery's inte rpr etatio n of Mallarmk's lesson to onarrow. M allarm6 did no t spea k only for poets. Moreover, poetry do esnot have a mo nopoly on obscurity and the signifier any m ore tha n th enovel has to make do with transparency and the signified, or, evenworse, th e referent. Th ere is no ground for a division of labor th atrequires a poem to pu t us in touch w ith words while a novel m ust p utus i n touc h w ith things. Th e novel, like poetry, begins w here languageceases to be everyday, wh ere w hat is called co m m on language loses itscommon usage, where everyday words become unusual, untimely,timele ss. What a m istake, Blanchot would say, w hat a m istak e to thinlztha t M allarme cou ld have thoug ht for a second of abandoning th e novelto journalists! On the other hand, i t is t rue th at novelists should onceand for all forget the m arquises and their schedules and explore wh aton e could call, after the m anif esto -like articles Blanchot collected inFaux pas,9 "a Mallarmean novel ." The l i terary part i t ion no longerseparates poetry and prose, poetry and the novel, but two types ofnarrat ion: l e r o m a n ( t he novel) and l e r kc it (t he narrativ e) or, to useBenjamin's term s, narration and inform ation, one of wh ich belongs tol i terature w hile the other does not . A M allarmean novel wil l no longerbe defined by its subject, it w ill no longer call on reality for help. "H owstrange ," think s Blanchot, " tha t in order to justify th e novel's neces-sity we invoke th e fact th at it reproduces events, wh ich are themselvesunnecessary, the ou tcom e of a confused and impene trable sys tem ofchan ce and happenstance."lO Moreover, is there any thing m ore a nt i-esth etic than "making th e necessity of th e work depend on its subjectra ther tha n o n the work i t se l f?"

How to save from cha nce a work in which sentences follow each othe rfor no p articular reason, wh ere alm ost all the words could be replacedby others without harm, which is not more than a combination ofdetails and episodes fortuitously a ssem bled? It is only too na tural forthe writer to justify himself with this answer: My novel, which is9 . Blanchot,Faux pas (Paris:Gallimard, 1943) .10. Blanchot, "L'enigmedu roman," in F a u x p a s , 22 4


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DEN IS H O L L I E R 111made of an uncertain sequence of words and a problematic series offacts in which consequently nothing seems justified, is justified afterall by the image of life it presents; it enjoys a certain necessity to theextent that it appears to be the narrative of events that have taken placeor could have taken place."O ne last word on th e subject of chanc e and necessity, wh ich willtak e us back to th e diary, a form (or a practice) th at is, even m oreradically th an t he novel, unable to escape th e aleatory na tu re of th eworldly referent. Given its fun dam ental heteronom y, given its genericava ilability for the ha zard s of th e law of th e day, for th e acci den ts ofhisto ry and th e rand om events of daily life, l e journal, diary or new s-paper, is the literary fo rm , or lack of form , that m os t radically resiststhe Mallarmean redemptive formatting. If, following both Mallarme

and Blanchot, we identify the Book with the esthetic abolition ofchance, the diary is the literary form tha t cann ot be converted i nt o abook. Th e small am ou nt of necessity it can claim w ill always comefrom life, never from art; it is, by definition, a form of wr iting th at lacksany interna l necessity, that is subject throug hou t to th e heterono my ofcu rre nt eve nts, to th e follies of th e day, or even of t h e hou r.VIII

I mu st conclude. I will do so by trying to retrace w hat I see as the curveof Blanchot's worlz.To wh om should one at tr ibute the l ines from Faux pas th at I justquoted ? Who is pronouncing these judgments on the no vel?A cri t ic? Ath eo re tic ian of th e worlz of a r t ?O ne can no t exclude any of thes e voices,bu t Blanchot's M allarm ean defin ition of t he novel is first of all a novel-ist 's definition. It is the novelist, even more than the critic, who isspeaking wh en B lanchot invokes M allarme to shield th e novel fromthe folly of th e day and from journalism . It is the nov elist and not t hecritic w ho encourages novelists to follow Mallarme's example rathertha n Z ola's.U nlik e th e great critics of t he French traditio n, from Sainte-Beuveto Barthes, w ho se work is ha un ted by the ghost of a storyteller wh osereality they will never be quite s ure of, Blanchot is a writer, perhaps t heonly one to have practiced w ith equal strength tw o genres, th e aut ho rno t of "criti cal fiction, " to use a term th at was fashionable a few years11. Blanchot, "Le jeune roman," in Faux pas, 2 18


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112 Yale French S tud iesago, but of fiction and of criticism. These simu ltaneou s bu t dis tinc tdiscourses are inseparable. They co nsti tute , in the ir duality, a uniq uedevice.This device gives its structure to what Blanchot called literaryspace. If, som eti m e aroun d 1940, he ceased to be a journalist, he did no tdo so in order to becom e a novelist or a critic. He did so in order tobecome b oth o ne and the other, one through the o ther. He left journal-ism in order (b oth as a novelist and as a cr itic) to force th e novel tofollow hi m ou t of timeline ss.Twenty years later, however, som ew here betw een Le livre a venir(1959)and L'attente l 'oubli (196 2), his bifocal device co ns titu tiv e ofthe literary space fell apart. More or less simultaneously, Blanchotstopped both writ ing narratives and w rit ing on th e narrat ive. Th e con-tract between criticism and f iction brolze down. Writing passed fro mth e "boolz to com e" to th e "absence of th e boolz." And t hi s ruptu retook place, to give it a sym bolic date, in M ay 1958.Th is date is impor tant, doubly importa nt, because of th e eventsth at took place at the tim e, and also because tho se events, it seems,forced Blanchot's writing back in to th e com m on calendar, the collec-tive dateb ook , shared tim e, th e follies of th e day.

In 1939, Sim one de Beauvoir wrote th e date in th e diary th at t heongoing events had inspired he r to keep. In 1958, Blanchot did so m e-thing similar.L'amitie, pub lished in 1971, gathers together essays tha t Blanchothad previously pub lished in various periodicals. Th ey are republishedw itho ut m en tio n of th e date and place of their first publication, w ithone exception: th e article en titled "Le refus" ("T he Refusal"). Blan-cho t adds a footno te at the bo ttom of the page. It reads: "As a n excep-tion , I will note w hen and where this little text was published for th efirst tim e: in October 1958, in 14juillet, number 2 . It was wri tten a fewdays after General de Gaulle returned to power, brought there thistim e, not by the Resistance, but by mercenaries" (131 ).As I have said, soon after, it seems th at, at th e sam e tim e, Blanchotstopped w riting n arratives an d only very occasionally did he go back tow ha t can be called, in the lim ited sense of the phrase, literary criti -cism.I w ill not d well on wh at cou ld have mad e "Le refus" th e occasion ofsuch an in terruption . I would like simply to point o ut th e extent of th ered istrib utio n of discourses tha t accompanied th is retu rn of th e date .Its obliteration around 1938, we recall, is wha t led to t he fo rma tion of


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Blanchot's solid, bifocal but undivided literary space. In th e na m e ofMallarme, the border between verse and prose disappeared, the newfrontier lying between literature and nonliterature, between literarylanguage and com m on language. T he return of the d ate in 1958 ma rkedth e collapse of this second border. W hat disappeared the n was not , as in1940, an intern al dis tinct ion , bu t the e xternal difference of lit eratu re.Literature has ceased to distingu ish itself from its op posite.Now, literatur e follows in th e Marquise's fo otsteps. It's literature'stu rn to go out-it's five o'clo ck:

It is irr ita tin g to see, in th e place of so -called literary works, an ever-increasing mass of texts th at, under the heading of do cum ents, te sti-monials, almo st raw speech, seem to ignore every in te nt io n of litera-ture . We say: this has no thin g to do with the c reation of objects of art;we say: these are w itnesses to a false realism. But what do we know ? . . .Why couldn't these anonym ous, authorless voices, which do not as-su m e th e form of books, w hic h are temporary and wa nt to be tempor-ary, be alerting us to so me thing imp ortant tha t w hat we call l i teraturecould also wish to tell us? [Lay2421

-Translated from th e French by Deborah Treism an

Timeliness and Timelessness

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