26.MAURICE BLANCHOT IN

‘NOUVELLE REVUE FRANÇAISE’

October 1953, 678–86

Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907), French novelist and critic, haspublished several novels, the best known, ‘ThomasL’Obscur’ (1941); but he is particularly influential for suchcritical works as ‘La Part du feu’ (1949), ‘L’Espacelittéraire’ (1955), ‘Le Livré à venir’ (1959), ‘L’Entretieninfini’ (1969).

Who is doing the talking in Samuel Beckett’s novels, who is this tireless‘I’ constantly repeating what seems to be always the same thing? Whatis he trying to say? What is the author looking for—who must besomewhere in the books? What are we looking for—who read them? Oris he merely going round in circles, obscurely revolving, carried alongby the momentum of a wandering voice, lacking not so much sense ascenter, producing an utterance without proper beginning or end, yetgreedy, exacting, a language that will never stop, that finds it intolerableto stop, for then would come the moment of the terrible discovery: whenthe talking stops, there is still talking; when the language pauses, itperseveres; there is no silence, for within that voice the silence eternallyspeaks.

An experiment without results, yet continuing with increasing purityfrom book to book by rejecting the very resources, meager as they are,that might permit it to continue.

It is this treadmill movement that strikes us first. This is not someonewriting for beauty’s sake (honorable though that pleasure may be), notsomeone driven by the noble compulsion many feel entitled to callinspiration (expressing what is new and important out of duty or desireto steal a march on the unknown). Well, why is he writing then?

Because he is trying to escape the treadmill by convincing himself thathe is still its master, that, at the moment he raises his voice, he mightstop talking. But is he talking? What is this void that becomes the voiceof the man disappearing into it? Where has he fallen? ‘Where now?Who now? When now?’

He is struggling—that is apparent; sometimes he struggles secretly,as if he were concealing something from us, and from himself too,cunningly at first, then with that deeper cunning which reveals its ownhand. The first stratagem is to interpose between himself and languagecertain masks, certain faces: ‘Molloy’ is a book in which characters stillappear, where what is said attempts to assume the reassuring form of astory, and of course it is not a successful story, not only because of whatit has to tell, which is infinitely wretched, but because it does notsucceed in telling it, because it will not and cannot tell it. We areconvinced that this wanderer who already lacks the means to wander(but at least he still has legs, though they function badly—he even has abicycle), who eternally circles around a goal that is obscure, concealed,avowed, concealed again, a goal that has something to do with his deadmother who is still dying, something that cannot be grasped, somethingthat, precisely because he has achieved it the moment the book begins(‘I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now.’), obliges him towander ceaselessly around it, in the empty strangeness of what is hiddenand disinclined to be revealed—we are convinced that this vagabond issubject to a still deeper error and that his halting, jerky movements occurin a space which is the space of impersonal obsession, the obsessionthat eternally leads him on; but no matter how ragged our sense of him,Molloy nevertheless does not relinquish himself, remains a name, a sitewithin bounds that guard against a more disturbing danger. There iscertainly a troublesome principle of disintegration in the story of‘Molloy’, a principle not confined to the instability of the wanderer, butfurther requiring that Molloy be mirrored, doubled, that he becomeanother, the detective Moran, who pursues Molloy without evercatching him and who in that pursuit sets out (he too) on the path ofendless error, a path such that anyone who takes it cannot remainhimself, but slowly falls to pieces. Moran, without knowing it, becomesMolloy, that is, becomes an entirely different character, ametamorphosis which undermines the security of the narrative elementand simultaneously introduces an allegorical sense, perhaps adisappointing one, for we do not feel it is adequate to the depthsconcealed here.

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‘Malone Dies’ evidently goes further still: here the vagabond isnothing more than a moribund, and the space accessible to him nolonger offers the resources of a city with its thousand streets, nor theopen air with its horizon of forests and sea which ‘Molloy’ stillconceded us; it is nothing more than the room, the bed, the stick withwhich the dying man pulls things toward him and pushes them away,thereby enlarging the circle of his immobility, and above all the pencilthat further enlarges it into the infinite space of words and stories.Malone, like Molloy, is a name and a face, and also a series ofnarratives, but these narratives are not self-sufficient, are not told to winthe reader’s belief; on the contrary, their artifice is immediately exposed—the stories are invented. Malone tells himself: ‘This time I knowwhere I am going…it is a game. I am going to play…I think I shall beable to tell myself four stories, each one on a different theme.’ Withwhat purpose? To fill the void into which Malone feels he is falling; tosilence that empty time (which will become the infinite time of death),and the only way to silence it is to say something at any cost, to tell astory. Hence the narrative element is nothing more than a means ofpublic fraud and constitutes a grating compromise that overbalances thebook, a conflict of artifices that spoils the experiment, for the storiesremain stories to an excessive degree: their brilliance, their skillfulirony, everything that gives them form and interest also detaches themfrom Malone, the dying man, detaches them from the time of his deathin order to reinstate the customary narrative time in which we do notbelieve and which, here, means nothing to us, for we are expectingsomething much more important.

It is true that in ‘The Unnamable’ the stories are still trying to survive:the moribund Malone had a bed, a room—Mahood is only a humanscrap kept in a jar festooned with Chinese lanterns; and there is alsoWorm, the unborn, whose existence is nothing but the oppression of hisimpotence to exist. Several other familiar faces pass, phantoms withoutsubstance, empty images mechanically revolving around an emptycenter occupied by a nameless I. But now everything has changed, andthe experiment, resumed from book to book, achieves its realprofundity. There is no longer any question of characters under thereassuring protection of a personal name, no longer any question of anarrative, even in the formless present of an interior monologue; whatwas narrative has become conflict, what assumed a face, even a face infragments, is now discountenanced. Who is doing the talking here? Whois this I condemned to speak without respite, the being who says: ‘I amobliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never.’ By a reassuring

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convention, we answer it: it is Samuel Beckett. Thereby we seem todraw closer to what is of concern in a situation that is not fictional, thatrefers to the real torment of a real existence. The word experiment isanother name for what has actually been experienced—and here too wetry to recover the security of a name, to situate the book’s ‘content’ atthe stable level of a person, at a personal level, where everything thathappens happens with the guarantee of a consciousness, in a world thatspares us the worst degradation, that of losing the power to say I. But‘The Unnamable’ is precisely an experiment conducted, an experiencelived under the threat of the impersonal, the approach of a neutral voicethat is raised of its own accord, that penetrates the man who hears it, thatis without intimacy, that excludes all intimacy, that cannot be made tostop, that is the incessant, the interminable.

Who is doing the talking here then? We might try to say it was the‘author’ if this name did not evoke capacity and control, but in any casethe man who writes is already no longer Samuel Beckett but thenecessity which has displaced him, dispossessed and disseized him,which has surrendered him to whatever is outside himself, which hasmade him a nameless being, The Unnamable, a being without being,who can neither live nor die, neither begin nor leave off, the empty sitein which an empty voice is raised without effect, masked for better orworse by a porous and agonizing I.

It is this metamorphosis that betrays its symptoms here, and it is deepwithin its process that a verbal survival, an obscure, tenacious relicpersists in its immobile vagabondage, continues to struggle with aperseverance that does not even signify a form of power, merely thecurse of not being able to stop talking.

Perhaps there is something admirable about a book whichdeliberately deprives itself of all resources, which accepts starting at thevery point from which there can be no continuation, yet which obstinatelyproceeds without sophistry and without subterfuge for 179 pages,exhibiting the same jerky movement, the same tireless, stationary tread.But this is still the point of view of the external reader, contemplatingwhat he regards as only a tour de force. There is nothing admirable ininescapable torment when you are its victim, nothing admirable in beingcondemned to a treadmill that not even death can free you from, for inorder to get on that treadmill in the first place, you must already haveabandoned life. Esthetic sentiments are not called for here. Perhaps weare not dealing with a book at all, but with something more than a book;perhaps we are approaching that movement from which all booksderive, that point of origin where, doubtless, the work is lost, the point

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which always ruins the work, the point of perpetual unworkablenesswith which the work must maintain an increasingly initial relation orrisk becoming nothing at all. One might say that The Unnamable iscondemned to exhausting the infinite. ‘I have nothing to do, that is tosay, nothing in particular. I have to speak, whatever that means. Havingnothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. Noone compels me to, there is no one, it’s an accident, a fact. Nothing canever exempt me from it, there is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing torecover, nothing that can lessen what remains to say, I have the ocean todrink, so there is the ocean then.’

It is this approach to origin which makes the experience of the workstill more dangerous, dangerous for the man who bears it, dangerous forthe work itself. But it is also this approach which assures theexperiment its authenticity, which alone makes of art an essentialresearch, and it is by having rendered this approach evident in thenakedest, most abrupt manner that ‘The Unnamable’ has moreimportance for literature than most ‘successful’ works in its canon. Trylistening to ‘this voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent towhat it says, too old perhaps and too humiliated ever to be able to say atlast the words that might make it stop.’ And try descending into thatneutral region where the self surrenders in order to speak, henceforthsubject to words, fallen into the absence of time where it must die anendless death:’…the words are everywhere, inside me, well well, aminute ago I ha no thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no needof a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, I’m in words,made of words, others’ words, what others, the place too, the air, thewalls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me,I’m the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs,flows, like flakes, I’m all these flakes, meeting, mingling, fallingasunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go toward me, come fromme, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray,I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with noground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together tosay, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those thatmerge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yessomething else, that I’m quite different, a quite different thing, awordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black placewhere nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek,like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born ofcaged beasts…’

[Translated by Richard Howard]

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