Reading The Space of Literature (iv)

This series of posts came to an abrupt halt in the middle of my engagement with the opening essay, in part because of the very struggle I was having with it, which in part took me to Heidegger's Poetry, Language, Thought. And it needed quieter time than I have had, in which to both read the book and to think and take notes. But I had some moments more recently, and I return here, then, to "The Essential Solitude" after a lengthy absence. Turning the pages, I noticed that I had already marked off a passage that has direct bearing on the issues being discussed in the wake of Zadie Smith's recent essay (well, really the whole project has direct bearing, but this passage speaks to it in some of the same terms). Here is Blanchot:

The writer we call classic--at least in France--sacrifices within himself the idiom which is proper to him, but he does so in order to give voice to the universal. The calm of a regular form, the certainty of a language free from idiosyncrasy, where impersonal generality speaks, secures him a relation with truth--with truth which is beyond the person and purports to be beyond time. Then literature has the glorious solitude of reason, that rarefied life at the heart of the whole which would require resolution and courage if this reason were not in fact the stability of an ordered aristocratic society; that is, the noble satisfaction of a part of society which concentrates the whole within itself by isolating itself well above what sustains it.

When to write is to discover the interminable, the writer who enters this region does not leave himself behind in order to approach the universal. He does not move toward a surer world, a finer or better justified world where everything would be ordered according to the clarity of the impartial light of day. He does not discover the admirable language which speaks honorably for all.

The bourgeois novel, the "classic" novel, presents an ordered world, an ordered world where a universal Truth is accessible. But the writer who writes in his proper idiom does not have access to this, "does not discover the admirable language which speaks honorably for all".

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I'm going to deal very loosely with the rest of this essay. I promise nothing. Quoted passages are, as always, from the translation by Ann Smock.

Blanchot writes about the writer's journal: not a confession, not the writer's story, but an act through which the writer remembers himself. Does this mean this is how the writer grounds himself? That route by which he staves off getting lost in the dangerous solitude? Lost in the fascination?

". . .fascination is solitude's gaze. It is the gaze of the incessant and interminable."

some (dictionary) definitions:
incessant: ceaseless, ongoing, without interruption
interminable: without end; connotes "endless", tedious even; dictionary includes "monotonously or annoyingly protracted or continued; unceasing"...

So, then, there is something potentially negative about it? About this gaze, this solitude? Or is negative not quite the right word? (Meanwhile, the section under the heading The Interminable, the Incessant I return to again and again, because I don't understand it, though it includes the clarity of the excerpt presented at the top of this entry. And again I am struck by how elusive much of Blanchot can be. I struggle to retain his meaning in my head, over time. Just as I've managed, I think, to nail down a phrase, or a term, he moves on to something that seems to rely on that term or phrase, and my understanding dissipates. But then, as I have described before, in relation to Benjamin, there are those wide open spaces, like the passage above, where I find myself breathing easier. Even the elusive passages keep me coming back. Not just because I'm trying to understand it, but because something just under the surface, or rather just beyond my ken, seems real in what he is saying. I struggle the same way with Poetry, Language, Thought, in which I also sense something just around the corner, coming into view, aided, this sense, by those observations that feel so right, that tell me that it must be worth struggling with.)

Working through the rest of this opening essay, words take on new meanings. No, not new meanings, that's not right. Words used with a greater precision than usual, words taken seriously, in all their weight. (When I wrote about my problems with certain writers, I skirted this point. We are used to a lazier writing. This is perhaps the hallmark of utilitarian writing, of everyday journalistic writing--use whatever seems to work, to get the general point across, then move on--not that journalism can't be more precise than it often is. But if the general point isn't enough?) On the one hand, then, words are used with greater precision; on the other, some of these words appear to serve technical functions, are part of a technical language distinct from everyday usage (perhaps the technical language of philosophy--part of the importance of Hegel and Heidegger here, I have no doubt) (though, perhaps even some of these are instances of a precision, becoming technical in our specific encounter with them). One such word here is "fascination" or "fascinating". I use the word a lot, casually, but when I do, it rarely quite means what I mean for it to mean. I employ it as a substitute, an elegant variation, when I don't want to say interesting or brilliant or engrossing or affecting or whatever. Of course the same is largely true of those words (not that I use them exactly interchangeably).

"Seeing pre-supposes distance, decisiveness which separates . . . Seeing means that this separation has nevertheless become an encounter." The gaze: one doesn't touch but is held by the gaze, this holding is a contact.

"What is given us by this contact at a distance is the image, and fascination is passion for the image." I catch myself lost in a gaze, fascinated by something, time seems to stop. Better: I watch my daughter, staring, the absorbed look in her eyes, but it's less a stare than a gaze (they talk of mother and nursing baby gazing into each others' eyes); she is fascinated, and though she may smile, it's usually not in the moment--not as she gazes--the smile interrupts the gaze, punctuates it. Interestingly, Blanchot calls childhood "the moment of fascination":

Perhaps the force of the maternal figure receives its intensity from the very force of fascination, and one might say then, that if the mother exerts this fascinating attraction it is because, appearing when the child lives altogether in fascination's gaze, she concentrates in herself all the powers of enchantment. It is because the child is fascinated that the mother is fascinating, and that is also why all the impressions of early childhood have a kind of fixity which comes from fascination.

Ok, time to finish up this round. I've taken some incoherent stabs at different parts of this essay. And clearly this essay leads into the next ("Approaching Literature's Space"), and so on. (And as Blanchot remarks in a note in the front of the book, the whole thing revolves around the center that is the essay "Orpheus' Gaze".) So it's perhaps a mistake to draw any conclusions from just the one essay. I note for now some recurring words: interminable, incessant, fascination, gaze, time's absence, solitude (of course). "To write is to enter into the affirmation of the solitude in which fascination threatens. It is to surrender to the risk of time's absence, where eternal starting over reigns." Why? He leaves the question open, at least for now . . . but what does this mean? Threatens? This sounds as though fascination is dangerous for the would-be writer. Again a negative connotation. No peaceful process, writing. Perhaps it starts to come together here: Writing is a risk. For the writer to write what is properly his or her to write, without an eye on so-called universal truths, the writer must be willing to take risks, willing to risk being lost in fascination. In the space where this fascination looms, this is where the writer enters, surrenders. . .

Reading The Space of Literature (iii)

I realize that if I were to continue to post about The Space of Literature at the same pace as reflected by the first couple of entries in the series, I'd have more than 100 posts about the book by the time I finished reading it. I don't see that happening. (It's also possible that the fine folks at the University of Nebraska Press may object to the preponderance of quotations in such a large number of posts, at some point, in theory.)

For here, just a couple of notes about what I appreciate about Blanchot's method (having not yet made it any further into the book). He makes what seem like statements, but which are elusive. He's working on something, with us. Just as the book opens with "It seems. . .", then subsequent sections begin again: "In order to examine more closely what such statements beckon us toward, perhaps we should try to see where they originate." And: "Perhaps this ordeal points us toward what we are seeking." And: "We must start questioning again." If on some level I fall back on wanting to be told something, told how to read something--if I want to be spoonfed meaning--Blanchot refuses to do that work for me, refuses to be that authority.

These elusive statements, which at times seem like they're about to resolve into a meaning that can be nailed down, but which don't--in a sense, they remind me of those ideas that I myself have had difficulty articulating. It's tempting--coming from a utilitarian perspective--to see this elusiveness--in Blanchot and in certain other writers--as willful opacity. But I don't think it is. Something is being explored that is difficult to explain, that cannot be confined or reduced, and language is unequal to the task. This very unequalness being part of the thing being explored.

Reading The Space of Literature (ii)

Notes on "The Essential Solitude" - continued (all quotations are from the translation by Ann Smock).

b) The Work, the Book

The writer writes a book, but the book is not yet the work. There is a work only when, through it, and with the violence of a beginning which is proper to it, the word being is pronounced. This event occurs when the work becomes the intimacy between someone who writes it and someone who reads it. One might, then, wonder: if solitude is the writer's risk, does it not express the fact that he is turned, oriented toward the open violence of the work, of which he never grasps anything but the substitute--the approach and the illusion in the form of the book?

The book is just a thing, but the work is where the solitude is, where being is.

I have to admit it: the word being trips me up--inevitably makes me think of Heidegger, not any actual experience I've had with Heidegger, of which there are none, but those few times when I've leafed through Being and Time and been unable to understand the first thing, where it seems that the word being itself disables me. There is something disarmingly simple about it. Being. Yet I cannot access it. (I should take philosophy courses.) But I gather, from limited biographical data, that Heidegger was important to Blanchot. Does this mean I need to read Heidegger first?

But this distinction between "the work" and "the book": I discern a kernel of comprehension amid the fog surrounding this in my mind. I use the word "fog", not to dismiss Blanchot, but to point to my own inarticulateness. I want to hang this on something, but there are no hooks.

Can I see this distinction? The writer risks this solitude in creating his work, but in the event, a book is produced, which "is almost vain"--one can think of the publishing contracts, the editing, the interviews, the book tours--all of the extra-literary effluvia that have nothing to do with the work itself. But is this what Blanchot refers to? The book is a product which can be shown to "the world"--but the work can only be found by the reader, in that isolation.

c. Noli me Legere ("do not read me")

The same situation can also be described this way: the writer never reads his work. It is, for him, illegible, a secret. He cannot linger in its presence. It is a secret because he is separated from it.

Wow. It strikes me that this is precisely what I was trying to say, some months back, when I spoke about Proust being unable to read Proust, Beckett being unable to read Beckett. Interesting. I didn't elaborate--I hid behind the dismissive "this is a ridiculous question" frame--but I was trying to say something about this "secret" aspect. In Search of Lost Time is not made for he who was Marcel Proust.

Is there a way in which I can comprehend Blanchot better if I think of him as a reader, like myself, struggling to articulate the inarticulable? Struggling to ask the unaskable about literature?

Is it the struggle I experience with reading Blanchot--is it this struggle that renders other passages more lucid? Passages like this one?:

The writer's solitude, that condition which is the risk he runs, seems to come from his belonging, in the work, to what always precedes the work. Through him, the work comes into being; it constitutes the resolute solidity of a beginning. But he himself belongs to a time ruled by the indecisiveness inherent in beginning over again. The obsession which ties him to a privileged them, which obliges him to say over and over again what he had already said [...] illustrates the necessity, which apparently determines his efforts, that he always come back to the same point, pass again over the same paths, persevere in starting over what for him never starts, and that he belong to the shadow of events, not their reality, to the image, not the object, to what allows words themselves to become images, appearances--not signs, values, the power of truth.

For Blanchot, it seems, the artist is one who returns to certain themes, because the work is never complete. The artifact that is made is only a single manifestation of that work. Is this right?

Reading The Space of Literature (i)

Beginning at the beginning: "The Essential Solitude". The opening words of the book (all quotations are from the translation by Ann Smock):

It seems that we learn something about art when we experience what the word solitude is meant to designate.

It seems. From the start, Blanchot is not simply telling us something. How do we experience what the word designates? We don’t experience the word—what it designates—that is a thing, which we experience. But, anyway, back to solitude. He is referring neither to that melancholy solitude that is "a hurt" nor that solitude required by the writer in order to concentrate. It is something else.

a. Solitude of the Work
"He who writes the work is set aside; he who has written it is dismissed."
What does this mean? That he who writes is not to be found in the text that is written? An alternative "I" ("writer", or "author") emerges, not the physical writer, but an entity outside the body. The writing is independent of the writer, regardless of what of the writer (in the sense of biographical material?) goes into it? Is that it? If writing is an utterance, that utterance exists on its own?

The literary work simply is:

Whoever wants to make it express more finds nothing, finds that it expresses nothing. He whose life depends upon the work, either because he is a writer or because he is a reader, belongs to the solitude of that which expresses nothing except the word being: the word which language shelters by hiding it, or causes to appear when language itself disappears into the silent void of the work.

Well, ok. This is the kind of language that I find very difficult to parse. What is he saying? What might this "more" be, that is sought by some, who instead find nothing? Social concerns? Biographical data? Sentiment? A political program or philosophical system? A coherent fictional world? Possibly? So the reader who tries to make such claims on the literary work, if he or she reads the work in its solitude, will find that those claims cannot be filled? It "expresses nothing except the word being"? This last sentence seems like a restating of: the work is.

Language shelters the word being, by hiding it? What does this mean? Language, being a social mode of communication, points outside the work, and thus shelters being, hides it. Truth or renown might "demonstrate" the existence of a text, but this does not concern the text.

Why does the reader’s life "depend upon the work"? Because the work provides something the reader needs? Why does the reader need this? Does Blanchot mean "the reader" as a person who approaches the work—who exists independent of the work—and thus "needs", as he or she might need food--what the work might have to offer? Or, does he mean that the reader does not exist until such time as the reading is taking place, until such time as he or she experiences the work? Does the writer's life "depend upon the work" in a similar fashion? If there is no work, the writer ceases to be?

The work is solitary: this does not mean that it remains uncommunicable, that it has no reader. But whoever reads it enters into the affirmation of the work’s solitude, just as he who writes it belongs to the risk of this solitude.

What is this risk? The writer risks letting the work dismiss him? (But what is this dismissal?) The writer risks…risks unknowing, uncertainty…risks the existence of the work in its solitude, risks allowing the reader to create the work in the writer’s absence? It feels as if I’m writing in circles. What do I mean in the words I write trying to understand Blanchot?

I mean: something is created, some lonesome thing, in the work itself, which speaks to the reader (to a potential reader). Is this the writer? No, this is the work. The reader approaches the literary work with apprehension: will the work speak? Will I hear it? Doing so, the reader affirms the work’s solitude.

There is that moment, when reading, when pleasure occurs—at times, something like the Nabokovian tingle, perhaps—and this moment happens in communion with the text. This communion is a solitude. You can say to another—here, read this—but the other must find that communion again, alone.

Reading The Space of Literature (i-1)

I've written a few times about my uneasiness with certain kinds of texts, certain critical writings, for example those written by Benjamin, Barthes, Blanchot. I am uneasy, yet I insist on approaching these writers anyway. I want to grasp what it is they say, what it is that others appear to find in them. Though I am wary of a tendency on my part to want to reduce what they say, to capture it, to positively re-state it.

In his recent post "against science", Steve Mitchelmore writes of this tendency. He notes that Jonathan Gottschall's attempted "scientific" refutation of Barthes' notion of "the death of the author" "relies on a reduction of a complex essay to a 'statement'". Later in the post, Steve quotes at length from Blanchot's "The Essential Solitude"--at length, he says, because

Blanchot's writing - its unique and relentless patience - is performative rather than didactic. Neither information or wisdom is being imparted but, as Barthes says, it is writing "borne by a pure gesture of inscription" tracing "a field without origin - or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins".

Performative rather than didactic: I quote this in order to help myself keep this in mind. When I've spoken of my difficulty with these texts, I realize that this is the primary difficulty I've had. I want to force the text to teach me something, as an authority. I want it to impart information, for this is the mode of writing I have been accustomed to. But if Blanchot's writing is not giving me information, if it is performative, how do I approach it? I'm a notoriously poor note-taker, but it strikes me that, though with some sorts of text this is ok (the lack of detailed notes), with Blanchot, instead, I must take notes, I must attempt to scrupulously record my questions, my confusions, my reading. I must write alongside of Blanchot's writing.

Which is a long preamble to the point, which is that--in the spirit of the blog as common reader and reading log--this post hopes to inaugurate a series of posts documenting my reading of Blanchot's The Space of Literature. I don't know how this will go. I may write some foolish things. I will likely state and re-state the same things in different ways; I may well lapse into incoherence. I hope to be able to articulate something of what I find in the text. I can't predict how long I will be able to maintain the series. Nor can I say how often posts will appear.