hill, blanchot and mallarmé

Blanchot and MallarméAuthor(s): Leslie HillSource: MLN, Vol. 105, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1990), pp. 889-913Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905160 .

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Blanchot and Mallarme

Leslie Hill

La poesie toujours inaugure autre chose Le Livre a venir

Maurice Blanchot is undoubtedly one of France's most fascinating and influential literary figures, and it is for these qualities that his work as a critic is perhaps best known. In this paper I want to look more closely at one small, but nonetheless significant aspect of Blanchot's writing, his reading of the work of the poet Stephane Mallarm6. Indeed, to read Blanchot's literary essays or non-fiction, if I may be allowed the naive terms at this stage, is repeatedly to encounter not so much a repertoire of critical concepts as a config- uration of proper names. The names are familiar ones: Kafka, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Rene Char, and, perhaps best known of all, Mallarm6 himself.'

What these names have in common is that they recur in Blan- chot's work with a certain force of repetition and excess. Each signs, for Blanchot, a text or a writing that enacts a moment of crisis in the exploration of the space of literature. But literature is not so much challenged as constituted in such moments of aesthetic questioning and doubt, and the source of the crisis lies less in the individual works of the authors Blanchot cites than in the ex- orbitant logic of literature itself, which such texts serve to exem- plify or instantiate. Yet while the texts Blanchot names are in this respect paradigmatic, they display essential traits of literature without being themselves constituted as examples of anything other than themselves. As names in Blanchot's writing, they do not represent models to be emulated or norms to be followed. They are constituted rather as a series of singular protagonists in the

MLN, 105, (1990): 889-913 C) 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press



890 LESLIE HILL

unfolding of the strange, paradoxical drama called literature, figures whose status is as much fictional as it is historical, and for whom-in Mallarmes phrase-the 'seul acte d'6crire' (EL, 30) turns into an experience of the uncertain and fragile borders between name and namelessness, affirmation and dispossession, ex- emplification and excess.

One begins to see here how for Blanchot what is at stake in writing on literary works is not the need to elaborate new and more accurate methods of textual explication or interpretation. More ambitiously and radically, Blanchot's project is to bring to light-while remaining alert to the ethical dilemmas these meta- phors of clarity and insight imply-the peculiar logic of oscillation, the syntax of fundamental paradox and unresolved or unre- solvable duplicity which, Blanchot suggests, is what makes literature possible, while simultaneously and necessarily depriving it of secure foundation and of any stable or determinate relation with being or truth.

Of all the proper names Blanchot cites in his essays, that of Mal- larme is arguably the one that recurs with the greatest regularity and frequency. This it does from the very earliest published texts on literature, dating from the 1940s, up to and including some of the more recent books of the 1980s. Thus Faux Pas (published in 1943) contains three pieces on Mallarm6 that first appeared in Le Journal des debats during the Occupation. La Part dufeu, Blanchot's next collection of essays, published in 1949, has one major piece on the theme of Mallarm6 and language, while L'Espace litt1raire (1955) and Le Livre a venir (1959) contribute between them three more important essays.

After 1959, the reference to Mallarm6 is less specific but remains nonetheless insistent. L'Entretien infini (1969) closes with a series of propositions on the theme of 'l'absence de livre'; these begin by invoking Mallarme and pursue several motifs already ex- plored apropos of Mallarm6 in Le Livre a venir. Similarly, L'Amitid (1971) pays homage, in passing, to Mallarmes 'bilingualism', while, more recently, L'Ecriture du desastre (1980) derives its title (and other fragments of text) from Mallarm6, notably from the famous poem on the death of Edgar Allan Poe (in which Poe's tomb-poetry itself-is described as: 'Calme bloc ici-bas chu d'un desastre obscur' [E.c., 70]). In 1983, the name of Mallarm6 is again invoked by Blanchot at the beginning of his postface to the volume Apres



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Coup, a new edition of two early stories from the 1930s which first appeared in print together as Le Ressassement 8ternel in 1952.

In the light of this lengthy engagement of Blanchot with Mal- larme's text, I want to consider three main issues. First, I shall be looking at the place of Mallarm6 in Blanchot's critical writings; second, I want to explore Blanchot's particular interpretation of Mallarm6; and, finally, I shall be saying something about the importance of Mallarm6 as a writer from the perspective of Blan- chot's own literary practice.

The reference to Mallarm6, as I have implied, is rarely absent from Blanchot's critical writing. But more remarkable than the longevity of Blanchot's interest in the poet is the extent to which the name of Mallarm6 persistently fulfils the same structural role in respect of the internal composition of Blanchot's collections of essays. In the earlier books mentioned, the essays on Mallarm6 fall consistently at, or towards, the beginning of the volume (or, as with Faux Pas, which Blanchot divides into sections, at the head of the individual sections). Thus, in La Part dufeu, the Mallarme essay follows two opening chapters on Kafka and in L'Espace litMraire a piece on Mallarm6 immediately follows the initial section on 'la solitude essentielle'. Mallarm6's place is thus that of the second figure to appear in the text. Conversely, in Le Livre a venir, the essay on Mallarm6 comes second to last, and 'Un Coup de des' operates as the penultimate point of reference. As a result, whether as second from the beginning or as second-to-last, the name of Mallarm6 in Blanchot's text has the function of a limen, that is, a threshold, a limit, a margin, opening and closing the space of writing, existing as part of that space but at a distance from it.

This liminal place of Mallarm6 is difficult to explain by recourse to literary history or to the dates of composition of Blanchot's essays. In his writing Blanchot shows scant interest in chronolog- ical progression, and history itself is hardly ever invoked as an ade- quate structural framework for Blanchot's analysis. But it no doubt could be said that Mallarm6's appearance on the limen is little more than a chance occurrence, a random effect lacking real signifi- cance. Since many of Blanchot's texts began as reviews or pieces in journals (notably La Nouvelle Revue francaise and Critique), the ob- jection might be that the shape of Blanchot's individual collections of essays is more indicative of the occasional and haphazard nature



892 LESLIE HILL

of Blanchot's activities as a literary journalist than of any enduring commitment to the same repeated architectural design. But to do this would be to disregard the persistent and seemingly necessary way in which certain names, like that of Mallarme, do recur in Blanchot's critical texts, and recur-as does Mallarm6's-in pre- cisely the same position.

This alternative between chance and necessity, it can be said, is in some ways a false one. Blanchot discusses at some length in Le Livre a venir the paradoxical implications of the phrase (from Mal- larme's poem, 'Un Coup de des') that 'un coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard'. If chance cannot be eliminated by the throw of the dice, it follows that chance, denying itself, becomes, as a result, a form of necessity. But if necessity remains necessary, the poem has no chance of being written. In this oscillating logic of writing, chance and necessity defeat one another in reciprocal fashion and Mallarm6's poem, Blanchot argues, approaches a space in which 'ce qui est necessaire et ce qui est fortuit seront mis l'un et l'autre en 6chec par la force du desastre' (LV, 284).2 The principle of disaster, as L'Ecriture du desastre makes evident, though Blanchot here adduces it with regard to Mallarme's poem, holds for all writing and all composition. What is true of 'Un Coup de des', therefore, is also the case in respect of the essays of Blanchot. Disaster defeats both the mastery of the author and the closure of the book. Writing obeys its own unpredictable but rigorous logic and the place of Mallarme on the limen verifies and confirms the rule. Just as it is not possible to divide the texts of an author like Blanchot into occasional pieces dictated by chance and essential ones deter- mined by philosophical necessity, so Blanchot's essay collections have a coherence that is both contingent and irredeemable, alea- tory and inescapable. As Blanchot's much-discussed re'cit, La Folie du jour, makes clear in its own strange and duplicitous way, the clarity of exposition and argument suffers from its own diurnal madness and its own haphazard necessity.

The pertinence of the figure of the limen with regard to the place Mallarme holds in Blanchot's text convinces also by the regularity with which it occurs in metaphorical terms. Mallarme for Blanchot rarely represents a pure beginning or end, but his name seems closely related to the possibility of speaking about begin- nings or endings and of dramatising these moments in his own discourse. In La Part dufeu and L'Espace littraire Mallarme is used to raise the question of how it might be possible to begin to analyse



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the language and experience of poetry according to a strategy that is not dialectically reductive, while in Le Livre a venir his name is evoked to mark the possibility of an end to the totality and closure of the book. The pattern repeats itself, though more discreetly, in several of Blanchot's later texts. In L'Entretien infini, for instance, the reference to Mallarme opens the final essay in the book (dealing with 'l'absence de livre'), while in L'Ecriture du desastre it is noticeable that Mallarm6 is mentioned by name on pp. 14-16 of the French edition and cited again (without being named) on p. 190, that is, at the beginning and towards the end of the volume, as though to frame the book as a whole but from a place which is already contained within the book. The name of Mallarm6 seems to trace a limit enclosing the text while being also enclosed by it, in the same way that the title of the text, itself, as I have observed, a partial quotation from Mallarm6, both contains Blanchot's book and is contained within it.

A paradoxical indeterminacy affects the place occupied by Mal- larme in L'Ecriture du desastre. The phenomenon seems to be a general one. For something analogous is also at work within the text of L'Amitiz. In this collection of essays dedicated to Blanchot's friend- ship with Georges Bataille the reference to Mallarm6 takes the form of an untitled page, belonging neither to the chapter which precedes it nor the one that follows, describing how Mallarm6's 'division violente' of language into two separate modes-ordinary language and poetic language-institutes a kind of literary bilingualism. Writing itself, Blanchot suggests, gravely compromises the writer's belonging to any native tongue. To write is to be ex- posed to an essential otherness in language, and as though to dem- onstrate both the efficacy and the uncertainty of the division of tongues which Mallarm6 enacts in this way, Blanchot's remark in- tervenes in the middle of the text of L'Amiti&, in such a way that it belongs to neither of the two essays that surround it, but marks an invisible limit appearing to separate the book from itself.

I shall say more about the role of Mallarm6 in these two texts later. For the moment, it is enough to note that by coming second, or second-to-last, Mallarm6 functions as a figure of mediation or passage within Blanchot's critical discourse. Consequently, Mal- larme's name, in Blanchot, is like an internal frame, partly turned towards the outside of the book that precedes or follows its occurrence, partly facing towards the mobile centre of the work itself. As such his place is double, as befits a threshold, and it is possible



894 LESLIE HILL

on occasion to find Blanchot viewing Mallarm6 with some aloof- ness, while at other moments he affirms Mallarm6's absolute importance with extraordinary conviction. Thus, in La Part du feu, Blanchot speaks with sceptical diffidence of the poet's faith 'dans l'art place au-dessus de tout' or of his commitment to a 'religion de la solitude du po&te' (PF, 35), while, ten years later, in Le Livre a venir, Blanchot declares with remarkable bluntness that Mallarm6's last poem is the embodiment of the hope the title of his own book allows him to envisage: 'Un Coup de des', he says, 'est le livre a venir' (LV, 291).

In Blanchot's various discussions of Mallarm6 two major themes constantly recur. The first is a concern with poetic language as such and its relationship to so-called ordinary or common language. This provides the principal focus of Blanchot's writing on Mallarm6 in the years up to about 1955, when L'Espace litt1raire was published. After L'Espace 1itteraire, Blanchot's main interest, by way of a prolonged commentary on Mallarm6's 'Un Coup de des' and other late texts, is with the question of the book, with the art of worklessness and fragmentation, and with the nature of writing as an affirmative disaster. The shift in emphasis was no doubt prompted in part by the publication in 1957 by Jacques Scherer- under the title Le 'Livre' de Mallarme-of the few scattered notes and drafts that survived destruction at Mallarm6's death.3 How- ever opaque and conjectural they remain, these confirmed at least the possibility of the radical project at which Mallarm6 was working throughout his final years, the all-inclusive originary Book.

During the 1940s and early 1950s Blanchot's main interest lay in Mallarm6's efforts to found the rationale of his own writing practice by elaborating a general theory of poetic language. In the essay, 'Crise de vers', in a passage first published in 1886, Mal- larme describes, in famous terms, how, for himself and his con- temporaries, language is no longer simple, but double: 'Un desir indeniable 'a mon temps', Mallarme writes, 'est de separer comme en vue d'attributions differentes le double etat de la parole, brut ou immediat ici, la essentiel' ((E.c., 368).4 Language, therefore, splits into two. On the one side is what Mallarme terms the raw or immediate state of language. Outside of literature, or poetry, he contends, words serve as a vehicle for the exchange of ideas or information (what Mallarme calls 'reportage'). The metaphor here is of communication as a speechless exchanging of coins, with the



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words operating as an abstract general equivalent of thought, their presence entirely subordinate to the ideas they are held to convey.

When language becomes essential, however, we enter into the very different realm of the aesthetic. Here, words lose their functional character and the language of poetry challenges the facile automatism and instrumentality of ordinary discourse. Essential language does not deliver real objects but an absence, a pure notion. In place of the absent object, as Mallarm6 puts it, writing creates an entirely new entity which is virtual rather than actual, fictional rather than real and which vibrates musically in the empty space of its own dissolution. Mallarm6's own description of the process is by now canonic:

Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l'oubli ou ma voix relegue aucun con- tour, en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicale- ment se 1eve, idWe meme et suave, l'absente de tous bouquets.

Au contraire d'une fonction de numeraire facile et representatif, comme le traite d'abord la foule, le dire, avant tout, reve et chant, re- trouve chez le Poete, par necessite constitutive d'un art consacre aux fictions, sa virtualite. ((E.c., 368)5

These words form the basis for what is now a powerful modern vulgate. Though it has its origins in German Romanticism, it has continued to dominate modern literary theory since the Symbolists and has taken on numerous different guises. In Russian Forma- lism and the work of Roman Jakobson, which later provided the foundations for the Paris structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s, it is a claim that poetic language and ordinary language are subject to divergent, even antagonistic conventions. Whereas the communicative or referential function predominates in ordinary discourse, poetic discourse, it is argued, has its end in itself. As such, it has the capacity (in Shklovsky's phrase) to 'break the glass ar- mour' of habitual, automatic perception and thus renew the experience of the world by the reader.

There are other ways of articulating this dichotomy between the prosaic and the poetic, the representational and the autotelic, the mimetic and the self-conscious. In American New Criticism, for instance, it is the idea that poetic language is inherently more am- biguous and more suggestive than communicative prose, and that in poetic writing indirect connotation counts for more than explicit naming. In France, meanwhile, Paul Valery, who had been one of the first to be shown the corrected proofs of 'Un Coup de des' in



896 LESLIE HILL

1897 and subsequently remained the major claimant to Mallarmes literary and spiritual heritage, explained the distinction between prose and poetry by comparing them, respectively, to walking and dancing.6 To walk, for Valery, was to be employed in an entirely functional activity, whereas to dance was to be engaged in movement for its own sake and to take delight in rhythm, music, and gesture as forms that had their end or justification in themselves.

For Valery, the difference between Mallarmes immediate language and essential language is the difference between a transitive and an intransitive activity. The formula is a powerful one, and has borne some repeating. Indeed, it was in the same terms exactly that Roland Barthes, pausing to theorise his own writing practice in 1960, was to describe the relationship between the activities of an '6crivain' and those of an '6crivant'. Whereas the latter, Barthes suggests, is a journeyman purveyor of meanings, committed to using language as a tool for communication and intervention in the world, the former has only one object: language itself. 'L'Ucri- vain', Barthes writes, 'est celui qui travaille sa parole ... et s'ab- sorbe fonctionnellement dans ce travail.'7 Writing literature, Barthes adds, has itself as its own end: it is an activity which is essentially tautological.

This historical sketch is admittedly all too brief. But it does re- veal something of the impact of Mallarmes formulation on modern literary theory. In effect, though it may be hedged with irony and self-conscious detachment, Mallarmes separation of language into two divergent and antagonistic states is a founding act, albeit an oddly belated one. What it constitutes, or reconstitutes is the possibility of poetic language as such. The language of literature is posed by Mallarm6 as a distinct, autonomous object that can seemingly be dissociated from the language of ordinary discourse. It can therefore become an object of theoretical reflexion in its own right. So when Blanchot, in his early essays on Mallarm6, returns persistently to the relationship between immediate and essential language in Mallarmes writing, it is clear that what is at stake is not only a problem in the interpretation of Mallarm6, but more a question as to the status not only of poetic language itself, assuming such an entity to exist, but also of literary criticism as a project whose legitimacy as a discourse depends on the specificity and autonomy of poetic language.

It is against this background that Blanchot's interest in Mallarm6 can be understood. But it is important to remember, too, that Blanchot does not read Mallarm6 in isolation. Indeed, in a number



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of essays (which often began as book reviews), one can observe Blanchot in argument with other influential commentators on Mallarm6. These include Charles Mauron, the author of a psycho- analytic account of Mallarm6's writings, Henri Mondor, who was responsible for editing much of Mallarm6's work and correspon- dence and published a Vie de Mallarme in 1941, as well as Valery, whose numerous tributes to the poetic mastery of Mallarm6 were collected in the second and third volumes of VariWtM in 1929 and 1936. One also detects in Blanchot's texts of the 1950s signs of an implicit polemic with Sartre on the nature of the relationship between the language of poetry, negativity, history and consciousness. Already in 1949, the concluding essay in La Part du feu, 'La litterature et le droit a la mort', was a pointed rebuttal of Sartre's position in Qu'est-ce que la lithfrature?, and it is worth noting at this stage that in 1952 Sartre was also at work on a manuscript on Mal- larme, substantial parts of which were not published till 1979.

Faux Pas, Blanchot's first collection of essays, contains three short pieces on Mallarm6. The first is a review of Mondor's Life of Mallarm6, the second a critical account of Mauron's Mallarme l'obscur. They are an opportunity for Blanchot to reject any reading that fails to take Mallarm6's language as absolutely central. Of Mondor, damning the biographical approach with something less than faint praise, Blanchot writes: 'H61As! Le livre est complet et l'essentiel lui manque' (FP, 121). Mauron, for his part, betrays the reductive nature of his project in Blanchot's view by electing to write about Mallarme s poems by explicitly paraphrasing them. Mallarm6's poems, however, are entire in themselves and the reason for this, Blanchot writes, is that poetic language is not a tool for the expression of practical ideas. The thesis no doubt owes something to Heidegger, as the allusion in the following passage to Holderlin's naming of the gods seems to suggest. This, any way, is Blanchot's version in 1942:

Dans l'usage de la vie pratique, le langage est un instrument et un moyen de comprehension, il est la voie qu'emprunte la pensee et qui s'evanouit au fur et a mesure que s'accomplit le parcours. Mais, dans l'acte poetique, le langage cesse d'etre un instrument et il se montre dans son essence qui est de fonder un monde, de rendre possible le dialogue authentique que nous sommes nous-memes et, comme dit Holderlin, de nommer les dieux. (FP, 128_9)8

Here, it seems as though poetic language is a turning aside from the norms of practical life, but later in the book, in an essay that



898 LESLIE HILL

first appeared in 1943, this move is reversed. In 'Mallarm6 et l'art du roman' (the title of which needs to be read with the knowledge that in the early 1940s Blanchot was beginning to publish his own first texts as a novelist), though he makes substantially the same point, Blanchot argues that it is the belief that language can be reduced to instrumentality that is an illusion and an error: 'cela signifie', he notes, 'que la poesie et le discours, loin de constituer des moyens subordonnes, des fonctions tres nobles, mais soumises, sont a leur tour un absolu dont le langage banal ne peut meme apercevoir l'originalit&' (FP, 191-2).9

The poetic act, then, is itself the original event; it founds a world rather than giving voice to an already extant universe. Thus poetic language, for Blanchot, provides the only radical and authentic relationship to human reality. Language is not a subordinate tool for expression in the hands of human agents; it is originally constitutive of human existence and experience themselves.

In 'Le mythe de Mallarme, the essay collected in La Part dufeu, Blanchot goes on to extend and develop this last point. The discussion takes the form of a critique of the reading of Mallarme by Paul Valery. As I have said, Valery draws much of his own prestige and authority as a commentator of Mallarme from the close relationship he enjoyed with the poet during his last years; and, in numerous prose texts devoted to a consideration both of Mallarme and the art of poetry in general, Valery undertakes the task of expanding Mallarmes remarks on poetic language into a more co- herent and more articulate whole. In the course of the discussion the picture of Mallarme that emerges is that of the poet as the supreme master of the instrument of language. In 1931, for instance, Valery writes that

Mallarme a compris le langage comme s'il 1'eut invente. Cet ecrivain si obscur a compris l'instrument de comprehension et de coordination au point de substituer au desir et au dessein naffs et toujours particuliers des auteurs, l'ambition extraordinaire de concevoir et de dominer le systeme entier de l'expression verbale. (I, 658)10

The lesson of Mallarme lies in this notion of the poet's mastery over the means of expression; for Valery, Mallarme's work is the embodiment of 'la possession consciente de la fonction du langage et le sentiment d'une liberte superieure de l'expression au regard de laquelle toute pensee n'est qu'un incident, un evenement parti- culier' (I, 660)."1



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Here, Blanchot protests. He does so on two counts. First, Valery systematises Mallarm6's theory of poetic language, and in so doing plays Plato to Mallarm6's Socrates (PF, 35). The phrase suggests that Valery not only codifies but also distorts the authenticity and radical originality of what Mallarm6 said. (There is, in Blanchot's account here, a neat chiasmus around the topic of writing and speech. If Socrates distinguishes himself as a philosopher by never committing oral dialogue to writing, the same is far from the case with Mallarm6, despite his reputation as a conversationalist. Yet it is Valery who is seen later by Blanchot to prefer the immediacy and presence of the voice to the disturbing 'mobility' of Mallarm6's script [PF, 42-3]). For Blanchot, the crucial point is that Mallarm6's remarks on poetry do not add up to a generalisable theory of poetic language; they share with Mallarm6's other texts a fundamental dispersion and fragmentation. To ignore this is to con- struct a false totality of doctrine. Blanchot points this out as follows:

Le manque de coherence des textes, un souci tout autre que logique, 1'6clat de certaines formules qui n'expliquent pas mais qui montrent, rendent les meditations de Mallarm6 peu reductibles a 1'unit6 et a la simplicit6 d'une doctrine. (FP, 37)12

Valery also takes the view that Mallarm6's poems can be ascribed to an aesthetic of conscious mastery. For Valery, the poetic act is a heightened moment of self-presence and possession (in which, in the famous words of the heroine of his poem, 'La Jeune Parque', 'toute a moi, maitresse de mes chairs, / ... je me voyais me voir' [I, 97]). Valery contrasts poetic language and practice with prose by arguing that poetry falls subject to different prosodic or musical conventions. 'Prose et poesie,' he writes, 'se servent des memes mots, de la meme syntaxe, des memes formes et des memes sons ou timbres, mais autrement coordonnes et autrement excites' (I, 1331).13 In this way, Valery thematises prose and poetry as two differentiated but symmetrical activities. In the one, words have only a shortened lifespan and rapidly give way to the exposition of ideas and the exchange of mental images; in the other, words live on as musical elements irreducible to simple ideas, during which time poetry takes part in the purely self-legitimating pursuit of itself. But in Valery's analysis of both prose and poetry, there is the common unquestioned assumption that it is possible for the speaker to exercise conscious mastery over language as an instru-



900 LESLIE HILL

ment, musical or otherwise. This belief is fundamental to Valery's position. For it is what allows prosaic language to serve the purpose of expressing ideas and it is also what makes it possible for the poet to comprehend the materials from which poems are made. And in both cases what is obfuscated is, in Blanchot's terms, the original or founding role of language as well as the experience of dispossession amply documented by Mallarm6 as the condition and object of the poetic enterprise.

In writing 'Le mythe de Mallarm&, Blanchot's purpose was evi- dently to destabilise this dialectical symmetry or parallelism between prose and poetry that Valery accredits in many of his remarks on Mallarm6. This is the myth referred to in Blanchot's title. By undermining that binary relationship, the aim is also to challenge the violent-dialectical-hierarchy that privileges lin- guistic mastery over poetic experience, and, ultimately, endorses prosaic norms and treats poetry as a deviation which, as in Valery's account, is logically dependent on principles of mastery of which it is the application or product.

Blanchot achieves this unbalancing act by pointing simply to the double role of silence in Mallarm6's poetic theory. Oddly, Blanchot explains, silence is the terminus or end-point of both the immediate and the essential regimes of language in Mallarm6. The language of reportage delivers only empty abstractions which, as Mal- larme notes, might just as well have remained mute. But poetic language, too, destroys its real objects and ends in silence. It lib- erates no spiritual or real presences, but an absent fiction, the bloom which is 'l'absente de tous bouquets'. As Blanchot points out, there is a crucial discontinuity here, and the critic expecting to be faced with two securely contrasted regimes of language is left having to decide-aporetically-between two equally self-effacing modes of silence.

Mallarm6, then, does not provide a stable, empirical criterion for distinguishing between essential language and immediate language. The distinction cannot readily be reduced, as Valery and others seem to imply, to the distinction between poetry and prose. After all, in 'Crise de vers', Mallarmes remarks on language were prompted by the current vogue for the 'vers libre' and the aban- donment by some poets of standard forms of versification, all of which caused major problems in distinguishing between what now was and was not verse. And though on one level Mallarme appears to be evoking the division between essential and raw language in



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an attempt to reassert some theoretical control over these changes in prosodic convention, it is plain that codifying the crisis did little more than defer it. As Blanchot's account implies, the reader of Mallarm6's text looks in vain to find any essential difference between the essential and the immediate.

But for Blanchot if there is no dialectical symmetry in the relation between poetry and prose, this does not imply the two are identical nor that Mallarm6's argument necessarily needs to fall by virtue of its circularity. If poetic language culminates in the embodiment of silence, it does so in a more radical way than the language of mute social ritual. This is because poetic language is de- structive of the world of two counts, first because it reduces the world to an abstraction, like all language, then second because it destroys abstraction, the presence of the idea, by the sensual echoing of the word. What is crucial, Blanchot argues, is that 'l'in- teret du langage est ... de detruire, par sa puissance abstraite, la realit6 materielle des choses, et de detruire, par la puissance d'Yvo- cation sensible des mots, cette valeur abstraite' (PF, 38).14 To this extent, for Blanchot, poetic language does not extend mastery (as it does for Valery), but enacts and records loss and destruction. What is lost or destroyed is the intuition of being, and poetry becomes an experience of this loss of being, that is, an experience which is consequently without essence or subjective truth, and which Blanchot describes in La Part du feu (and later in L'Espace littt'raire) as 'une sorte de conscience sans sujet, qui, separee de l'etre, est detachement, contestation, pouvoir infini de creer le vide et de se situer dans un manque' (PF, 48).15 (And readers may re- cognise here in the terminological complexity of Blanchot's text the syntax of 'sans' described by Derrida in his Parages.)'6 Poetry, for Blanchot, like Mallarm6, becomes synonymous with the exploration of this empty, vacant space. It may be that language founds a world, but what it founds is a world without foundation.

For Valery, the radical negativity of Mallarmean experience is purged of all heterogeneity and transformed into a demand for poetic purity. For Blanchot, however, experience remains an important though paradoxical point of reference, and his next essay on Mallarm6 has as its title: 'L'Experience de Mallarm&'. (The essay first appeared as an article in Critique, in July 1952, under the heading, 'Mallarm6 et l'experience litteraire', before being repub- lished, with revisions, in L'Espace litWraire.) The chapter begins largely where the preceding essay had left off. Blanchot again em-



902 LESLIE HILL

phasises the unstable character of the relationship between Mal- larmes two modes of language. They do not provide a secure foundation for literary theory or doctrine for some of the reasons already given. What distinguishes the one from the other is not poetic convention or essence, but the criterion of use (on this point Blanchot's position seems unchanged since the essays of the early 1940s). But Blanchot also declares Mallarmes formula a mis- nomer. In reality, he argues, the immediate or unrefined state of language is neither of the things it purports to be. Ordinary language is heavily mediated by history and convention; the world to which it gives access is the very opposite of being immediately present: 'La parole brute', he writes, 'n'est ni brute ni immediate. Mais elle donne l'illusion de l'etre' (EL, 32).

Ordinary language, therefore, deceives. This, writes Blanchot, is the source of its extraordinary power:

La parole a en elle le moment qui la dissimule; elle a en elle, par ce pouvoir de se dissimuler, la puissance par quoi la mediation (ce qui donc detruit l'immediat) semble avoir la spontaneite, la fraicheur, l'innocence de l'origine. (EL, 33)17

Poetic language, on the other hand, has the capacity to annihilate the illusion of presence and immediacy sustained by this instru- mental exchange of meanings. 'En elle', Blanchot argues, 'le monde recule et les buts ont cesse; en elle, le monde se tait, les etres en leurs preoccupations, leurs desseins, leur activite, ne sont plus finalement ce qui parle' (EL, 34).18

But though this capacity of poetic language to neutralise use gives rise to the possibility of the work of art, it, too, deceives, but in another way. The particular work of art simulates being, but has its principle not in the intimacy or proximity of poetic language with the origin or the truth of being, but in the absence of being that gives the work of art its paradoxical possibility. The origin of the work of art lies, for Blanchot, in worklessness, in what he describes here as 'la profondeur du desceuvrement' (EL, 39), the absence of work that ruins any work and gives it the appearance not of unity but of dispersion. Worklessness is not a foundation; it takes more the form of a flickering otherness that is articulated by Blanchot as if it were both an absence of being and the indeter- minate generality of being. The logic of this position-or lack of position-is not contained in any dialectic of being. It is presented more as a series of paradoxes or rhetorical shifts than a set of



M L N 903

propositions; as such it figures in the text-that of Mallarm6's poem as well as Blanchot's commentary-as a rhythm, a movement of fundamental oscillation affecting both the terms and syntax of the writing. Time and again, oscillation is the figure Blanchot also uses to name the underlying structure of Mallarmes poetic enterprise and poetic experience. Glossing the short fragment, Igitur, in its ability both to fall short of literature and exceed it, Blanchot writes that:

On voudrait dire que le poeme, comme le pendule qui rythme, par le temps, l'abolition du temps dans Igitur, oscille merveilleusement de sa presence comme langage aI l'absence des choses du monde, mais cette presence elle-meme est a son tour perpetuite oscillante, oscillation entre l'irrealite successive de termes qui ne terminent rien et la realisation totale de ce mouvement, le langage devenu le tout du langage, la ou s'accomplit, comme tout, le pouvoir de renvoyer et de revenir a rien, qui s'affirme en chaque mot et s'aneantit en tous, 'rythme total', 'avec quoi le silence'. (EL, 38)'9

Experience, then, in Blanchot's account, is not a pure moment of inwardness, nor does it conform to a totalising existential project. It is here that there is evidence of an exchange with Sartre.20 It is difficult to tell whether Blanchot was aware of Sartre's short preface to Mallarmes poems, published in 1954, but in it Sartre quotes approvingly from Blanchot's 1952 article to the effect that poetry

sera, comme le dit fort bien Blanchot, 'ce langage dont toute la force est de n'etre pas, toute la gloire d'evoquer, en sa propre absence, l'absence de tout'. ... En se risquant tout entier, Mallarme s'est decouvert, sous l'eclairage de la mort, dans son essence d'homme et de poete. I1 n'a pas abandonne sa contestation de tout, simplement il la rend efficace. Bient6t il pourra ecrire que 'le poeme est la seule bombe'. (MLF, 157)21

I shall return to some of the detail of these remarks later, but there is here, it would appear, something of a misunderstanding of Blanchot by Sartre that has to do with the function and status of negativity in Mallarmes text.

Together with his essays on Baudelaire and Genet, Sartre's work on Mallarme represents a stage in an attempt to lay the foundations for a historical anthropology and to develop an account of literature founded on an existentialist ethics. Already in Qu'est-ce que la littrature?, Sartre had relied on a crude version of the Mal- larmean dichotomy between poetry and prose to establish prose as



904 LESLIE HILL

primarily a vehicle for communication and commitment. Poetry, for its part, figures in that book as the impoverished other of prose, its success predicated on the failure of prosaic communication. In a long footnote, Sartre has it that:

le langage poetique surgit sur les ruines de la prose.... Ce n'est pas qu'il y ait autre chose a communiquer: mais la communication de la prose ayant %chou, c'est le sens meme du mot qui devient 'incommunicable pur. Ainsi 1'kchec de la communication devient suggestion de l'incommunicable; et le projet d'utiliser ces mots, contrari6, fait place a une pure intuition desinteressee de la parole.22

'La poesie', Sartre continues, 'c'est qui perd gagne'. As a result, following the dialectical logic of this game of 'loser wins', Mallarme ends up acting out in Sartre's text a philosophical and historical drama in which negativity is converted into a variation on its own opposite: 'le Negatif', writes Sartre, 'est le symbole du Positif' (MLF, 30). Mallarme's role is to double as a Hegelian 'Conscience malheureuse: en lui vont s'affronter, pour le compte de tous, le Singulier et l'Universel, la Cause et la Fin, l'Idee et la Matiere, le Determinisme et l'Autonomie, le Temps et l'Eternel, l'Etre et le Devoir-Etre' (MLF, 136). Mallarmean experience is understood in this historical frame as a sociological drama and Sartre concludes that the theme of shipwreck in 'Un Coup de des', for instance, tells a tale recounting the historical nightmare of the bourgeoisie, 'la terreur de la classe possedante qui prend conscience de son inevitable declin' (MLF, 89).23 Negativity is incorporated into a project that unifies dispersion and allows poetry to take place as an event only to the extent that its place and position is controlled in ad- vance by a prior philosophical and historicising dialectic. If Mal- larme's poetry is predicated on the problematic sense, in the words of 'Un Coup de des', that 'rien n'aura eu lieu que le lieu', then Sartre's analysis sees its task as determining the meaning of the place occupied by Mallarme's poem in a teleological and mora- lising history of literature in the nineteenth century. Put back in its place, so runs Sartre's verdict, Mallarme's poetic work reveals itself as an essential embodiment of terrorism, suicide and death.

Despite Sartre's citation, Blanchot in fact offers a very different account of negativity in Mallarme's text. For Blanchot, a dialectical approach fails in face of the oscillating logic of worklessness; the power of the negative cannot be recuperated into actuality or presence and there is therefore no foundation to its movement, no



M L N 905

essence to be revealed at its core, and no historical teleology to be derived from it. The future perfect is a tense that eclipses presence and position. As Blanchot writes of the role of Midnight in Igitur, in terms that not only echo Mallarm6 but also anticipate much of what Derrida has to say about Mallarm6 in La Dissemination,

La Nuit est le livre, le silence et l'inaction d'un livre, lorsque, tout ayant 6t6 profer6, tout rentre dans le silence qui seul parle, parle du fond du passe et est en meme temps tout l'avenir de la parole. Car le Minuit present, cette heure oii manque absolument le present, est aussi l'heure ou le passe touche et atteint immediatement, sans l'intermediaire de rien d'actuel, l'extremite de l'avenir, et tel est ... l'instant meme de la mort qui n'est jamais present, qui est la fete de l'avenir absolu et oiu l'on peut dire que, dans un temps sans present, ce qui a ete sera. (EL, 114-15)24

After L'Espace litteraire, in a slippage that may be understood as corresponding to the need to abandon the privilege attached to the concept of experience, too easily recuperable within a time-based dialectic of consciousness, Blanchot shifts the emphasis of his reading. Le Livre a venir turns its attention to the problematic of textual space in Mallarme's writing. Mallarmes 'Un Coup de des', the book argues,

est ne d'une entente nouvelle de l'espace litteraire, tel que puissent s'y engendrer, par des rapports nouveaux de mouvement, des relations nouvelles de comprehension.... On ne cree rien et on ne parle d'une maniere creatrice que par l'approche prealable du lieu d'extreme va- cance oiu, avant d'etre paroles determinees et exprimees, le langage est le mouvement silencieux des rapports, c'est-a-dire 'la scansion ryth- mique de l'etre'. Les paroles ne sont jamais lIa que pour designer l'etendue de leurs rapports: l'espace oiu ils se projettent et qui, a peine designe, se replie et se reploie, n'etant nulle part ou il est. (LV, 286)25

Space in Mallarme is not homogeneity; it is, according to Blanchot, an oscillating force of dispersion and unification which suspends present time and the presence of time. Space in itself is not an origin, for what it is in Mallarme's text is an unceasing movement of figural articulation and effacement. Space is like a mode of language, but a language in which words cease to be identical with themselves, and are more like a series of flickering or oscillating traces. Language in Mallarme, Blanchot writes in a note, 'n'est pas fait de mots meme purs: il est ce en quoi les mots ont toujours deja disparu et ce mouvement oscillant d'apparition et de disparition' (LV, 286).26 Space, therefore, provides no shelter for being; and



906 LESLIE HILL

on this point Blanchot dissociates himself specifically from Hei- degger's reading of H6lderlin.27 In Mallarm6, writes Blanchot, drawing on the figures and themes of 'Un Coup de des',

ce que fondent les poetes, l'espace-abime et fondement de la parole -,est ce qui ne demeure pas, et le sejour authentique n'est pas l'abri oui l'homme se preserve, mais est en rapport avec l'cueil, par la perdition et le gouffre, et avec cette 'memorable crise' qui seule permet d'atteindre au vide mouvant, lieu ou la tAche crBatrice commence. (LV, 289)28

By now, Blanchot begins to move beyond many of the issues posed by Mallarm6's putative contrast between the essential and the immediate. What may have begun on Mallarm6's part as an attempt to found the rationale of his own artistic enterprise by iso- lating poetic language and practice from that of 'l'universel reportage' ((E.c., 368), culminates, in Blanchot, in the realisation that no such gesture of stable separation is possible, that poetic language is conceivable only in terms of a logic of oscillation that de- prives the act of writing of any foundation and signals the ruin of the book-and of poetry-as an activity with its own autonomous logic or conventions.

In some respects, Blanchot's reading of Mallarm6 does not pro- ceed much further beyond this point. From now on, Mallarm6's name becomes synonymous in Blanchot with the question of the absence of the book and the theme of the fundamental dispersion of writing. It would be wrong to assume, however, this implies a decline in Mallarm6's importance after 1959. Rather, the status of Blanchot's own text changes, and with it the nature of the relationship between the two writings. As the dichotomy between poetry and prose is abandoned, Blanchot's own work undergoes a radical transformation, marked by the appearance of L'Attente L'Oubli in 1962. This work, with its odd bifurcating title, is the first by Blan- chot not to present itself as a fiction (as a 'roman' or 'recit') or as a book of critical commentary. It contains numerous fictional fragments, but also sustains a complex meditation on several themes that carry over from Blanchot's other work, including Le Livre a venir itself. L'Attente L'Oubli thus becomes both continuous and dis- continuous with itself, and its unity-or, equally, its dispersion- lies in this non-dialectical oscillation in its structure. The text no longer belongs either to the fictional or the non-fictional; what it describes is how the coming of the text is an event irreducible to both. 'Plus tard', the text says of an unnamed protagonist, 'il pensa



M L N 907

que levenement consistait dans cette maniere de n'etre ni vrai ni faux' (AO, 13). What the text gathers it also disperses; what it disperses it also gathers: 'Loubli, lattente. L'attente qui rassemble, disperse; l'oubli qui disperse, rassemble. L'attente, loubli' (AO, 64).29

When Blanchot returns for the last time, in L'AmitiZ, to the theme of the division of language in Mallarm6, it is from a position that is irreducible either to poetry or prose and can no longer be enclosed within that opposition, or fall subject to the contrast between transitive and intransitive. Language itself is synonymous with its own dispersion and figural movement, and Blanchot's concern now, in the words of L'Attente L'Oubli, is to give voice to that internal difference of language with itself: 'Et donc en un seul langage toujours faire entendre la double parole' (AO, 15).3 More important than legislating on the nature of poetry or prose is the abrupt separation of language from itself into two incommensu- rate and unequal doubles. Mallarm6 is no longer, then, the source of a theory of poetic language; he is a witness to the uneasy duplicity of language and it is this that qualifies him as a bilingual writer whose abode is nowhere, except in the relation without relation that binds and separates one singular-yet curiously dif- fracted-act of speech with and from another:

Par une division violente, Mallarm6 a separ6 le langage en deux formes presque sans rapport, l'une la langue brute, lautre le langage essentiel. Voila peut-etre le vrai bilinguisme. L'ecrivain est en chemin vers une parole qui n'est jamais deja donnee: parlant, attendant de parler. Ce cheminement, il l'accomplit en se rapprochant toujours davantage de la langue qui lui est historiquement destinee, proximite qui met en cause et parfois gravement son appartenance a toute langue natale. (A, 171)31

Mallarme in Blanchot's work is a figure of writing as a mode of fragmentation and disaster. As I have noted, the title of L'Ecriture du desastre contains a silent homage to Mallarme and in the opening pages of the book Blanchot attributes to Mallarme the phrase: 'Il n'est d'explosion qu'un livre' (ED, 16). The remark, which recurs later without Mallarmes name, is almost certainly apocryphal, though it has an extensive doxology. Its own fate, like that of all books, lies perhaps in this dispersion. That it lacks any precise historical origin is like an allegory of what it communicates within Blanchot's text. But, whatever its source, the phrase comes from afar. In 1894, in an interview with Le Soir, given in defence



908 LESLIE HILL

of his anarchist friend, the writer Felix Feneon, who had just been arrested for his alleged involvement in a bomb outrage (and in 1944 was to be nominated by the journalist Maurice Blanchot as his candidate for the title of the most astute literary critic of the age), Mallarme pointed out to the newspaper that 'il n'y avait pas, pour Feneon, de meilleurs detonateurs que ses articles'. 'Et je ne pense pas', he added, 'qu'on puisse se servir d'arme plus efficace que la litterature'. Some years later, in L'Art en silence, published in 1901, Camille Mauclair comes nearer to Blanchot's formulation and attributes to Mallarm% the phrase: je ne sais qu'une bombe, c'est le livre'. Henri Mondor, in his biography of 1941, though he does so without indicating his source, has the poet declare, in similar terms, that lje ne connais d'autre bombe qu'un livre'. This phrase, in its turn, is taken up, as we have seen, by Sartre and reproduced from memory as evidence of Mallarme's own political sympathies, though Sartre's Mallarme drops the literary flourish and puts it more pugnaciously: je ne connais pas d'autre bombe', he says, 'qu'un livre'. 32

In its oddly negative but affirmative syntax, Blanchot's version of the phrase repeats fragments of both sound and sense as they echo from other reports. But if the phrase assembles these earlier sayings, it disperses them, too, and it is noticeable that Blanchot's wording shows more concern for the repercussions of the event than its alleged source. He thus substitutes a process for an object, an explosion for a bomb, an act of fragmentation for one of single-minded destruction, and the writing of disaster for a gesture of militant commitment. In this way Mallarme's phrase-if ever it was the poet's phrase-is translated by Blanchot into a fragment of his own idiom. In the last, he thus becomes one of Mallarme's co-authors and the phrase enacts not just the explosion of a book but of a signature, too.33

At the end, within the volume of a book-the book of Blan- chot's phantom quotation as well as the Book of Mallarme's last years-there occurs something like a merging of the names of Mallarme and Blanchot. Prose and poetry, the occasional and the essential, the transitive and the intransitive merge, too, in Blan- chot's writing, in the same way as do critical text and literary fiction. The rule is of disaster and fragmentation. Regulated forms lose their distinctness but only in order that each may display the fundamental oscillation that makes each different from itself as well as from its fellow. No legislation is possible on the topic of



M L N 909

prose and poetry, only a movement of constant transgression. But it is, Blanchot points out, a movement of transgression that is not contained by canonic norms and recognises no law: 'Ecrire', he writes in L'Entretien infini, 'sous ce point de vue, est la violence la plus grande, car elle transgresse la Loi, toute loi et sa propre loi' (EI, viii).34

What Blanchot shares most of all with Mallarm% is a shifting and unsettled bilingualism. Both write in the literary critical or theoretical mode and both write fictions or poems. But the borders that run between the one and the other prove impossible to police. They are limits that are effaced, affirmatively, anonymously, by the force of disaster and worklessness. What Blanchot therefore derives most of all from his lengthy engagement with Mallarm6, one might say, is something like the possibility of conceiving of literature as a space in which language never overcomes or re- solves its duplicitous, double character and remains ever different from its own words, ever fragmentary, an explosion continually awaiting its own event.

NOTES

1 In this paper, references to Blanchot's work will be given directly in the text by use of the following abbreviations:

FP: Faux Pas, Paris: Gallimard, 1943 PF: La Part du feu, Paris: Gallimard, 1949 EL: LEspace litWraire, Paris: Gallimard, 1955 LV: Le Livre a venir, Paris: Gallimard, 1959 AO: L'Attente L'Oubli, Paris: Gallimard, 1963 EI: L'Entretien infini, Paris: Gallimard, 1969 A: L'Amitid, Paris: Gallimard, 1971 ED: LEcriture du desastre, Paris: Gallimard, 1980

All references to Mallarm6's work will be to the one-volume (Euvres completes, edited by Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). These will also be given in the text, with the abbreviation (E.c.. All major quotations from the French have been translated in the notes. These translations are my own.

2 'that which is necessary and that which is fortuitous will be mutually kept in check by the force of disaster.'

3 See Jacques Sch6rer, Le 'Livre' de Mallarme (Paris: Gallimard, 1957). 4 'An undeniable desire of the present time is for it to separate as though with a

view to different functions the double state of speech, raw or immediate here, there essential.'

5 'I say: a flower! and, beyond the oblivion to which my voice relegates any out- line, as something other than the familiar chalices, musically there arises, the idea itself and suave, the one absent from all bouquets.



910 LESLIE HILL

Conversely to a function of easy and representational coinage, as treated primarily by the crowd, speech, above all dreaming and song, regains in the Poet, by a necessity constitutive of an art devoted to fictions, its virtuality.'

6 Paul Valery, (Euvres, edited by Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), I, 1329-30. All further references to Valery's essays on Mallarm6 will be to this edition and will be given directly in the text.

7 Roland Barthes, Essais critiques (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 148. 'The kcrivain is someone who works at the act of speaking ... and is functionally absorbed into that work'. Some of the recent history of the dichotomy of essential versus immediate language is retraced by Tzvetan Todorov in Critique de la critique (Paris: Seuil, 1984). It must be said, however, that Todorov's discussion of Blanchot in that context (66-74) remains largely superficial. Todorov's view that Blanchot na- ively endorses a 'romantic' account of the autotelic nature of poetic language is one which, as we shall see, is difficult to sustain.

8 'In practical everyday life, language is a tool and means for understanding, it is the path followed by thought and one that gradually disappears as the necessary distance is covered. But in the poetic act, language ceases to be a tool and dis- plays itself in its essence, which is to found a world, to make possible the authentic dialogue that is ourselves and, in Holderlin's phrase, to name the gods.'

9 'This means that poetry and discourse, far from being subordinate means, functions that are most noble but have been subjugated, are in their turn an absolute whose originality is entirely beyond the grasp of ordinary language.'

10 'Mallarm6 understood language as well as if he had invented it. This most ob- scure of writers had such a fine understanding of the instrument of understanding and co-ordination that rather than the naive and always particular intentions and wishes of other authors he conceived the extraordinary ambition of articulating and controlling the entire system of verbal expression.'

11 'the conscious possession of the function of language and the feeling of a higher freedom of expression in respect of which all thought is incidental, a passing occurrence.

12 'The lack of coherence of the texts, a concern for something other than logic, the brilliance of certain formulations which show the way but do not explain, all this makes it difficult to reduce Mallarm6's meditations to the unity and sim- plicity of a doctrine.'

13 'Prose and poetry use the same words, the same syntax, the same forms and the same sounds or resonances, but coordinated and stimulated in different ways.'

14 'What is interesting about language is how it destroys the material reality of things through its abstract power, and then destroys this abstract value through the sensuous evocative power of words.'

15 'a kind of consciousness without subject which, in so far as it is separate from being, is detachment, challenge, the infinite power to create the void and to take up a position within a lack.'

16 Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 35. It is remarkable, though he is never cited in the text, how much Blanchot's reading of Mallarm6 seems to have influenced Derrida's own account of the poet in the essay 'La Double Seance' in La Dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 199-317.

17 'Words contain within themselves the moment of their own disguise; they have in them, by virtue of this power of disguise, the power by which mediation (that which therefore destroys immediacy) seems to have the spontaneity, the fresh- ness, the innocence of the origin.'

18 'In poetic language, the world retreats and goals come to an end; in poetry, the



M L N 911

world is silent, human beings with their preoccupations, ambitions, and activities are finally no longer that which speaks.'

19 'One would like to say that the poem, like the clock that beats out, through time, the abolition of time in Igitur, oscillates marvellously from its presence as language to the absence of the things of the world, but this presence itself is in turn an oscillating perpetuity, an oscillation between the successive unreality of terms which terminate nothing and the total realisation of that movement, language become the whole of language, the place where the power to refer and return to nothing is finally realised, as a whole, affirmed in each word and abolished in all of them, "total rhythm", "with which the silence".'

20 Sartre's preface to Mallarm6 as well as previously unpublished material also written during the early 1950s is now available in Mallarme: la luciditW et saface d'ombre, edited by Arlette Elkaim-Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1986). References to this volume will be preceded by the abbreviation: MLF.

21 'will be, as Blanchot puts it very well, "this language the entire force of which lies in not being, and the whole glory of which lies in evoking, in its own absence, the absence of everything".... Risking his all, Mallarm6, in the light of death, reveals himself in his essence as a man and a poet. He did not give up the challenge to everything, he simply made his challenge effective. Before long, he was to write that "the poem is the only bomb".' Misleadingly, an editorial note attributes this quotation from Blanchot to his earlier book of essays, Faux Pas. Sartre is in fact quoting from Blanchot's essay, 'Mallarm6 et l'experience litt6- raire', first published in Critique, 62 (July 1952), 579-91. The phrase Sartre cites is on the second page of the article (this corresponds to p. 31 of the text given in L'Espace litt1raire). It is perhaps worth recalling at this stage that the major part of Sartre's own-unpublished-manuscript on Mallarm6 was destroyed by fire as a result of an OAS terrorist bomb attack on Sartre's Paris flat in 1962.

22 'poetic language arises from the ruins of prose.... There is not something else to communicate; but with the failure of communication through prose, the meaning of the word becomes pure incommunicability. Thus the failure of communication becomes a suggestion of incommunicability; and the project of using these words, if something stands in its path, gives way to a pure, disinter- ested intuition of speech', Sartre, Situations II (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), 86.

23 'the Negative is the symbol of the Positive'. Mallarm6 is thus the 'unhappy Con- sciousness in whom, on behalf of all, the clash takes place between the Singular and the Universal, the Cause and the End, Idea and Matter, Determinism and Autonomy, Time and Timelessness, Being and Having-to-Be'. 'Un Coup de des' we are to believe, expresses 'the terror of the property-owning class rea- lising its own inevitable decline'.

24 'Night is the book, the silence and the inaction of a book, when, after all else has been spoken, everything enters into the silence that alone speaks, speaks from the depths of the past and is at the same time the whole future of speech. For present Midnight, the hour at which the present is absolutely missing, is also the hour at which the past touches and reaches immediately, without the mediation of any actuality, the extreme point of the future, and such is ... the very moment of death which is never present, which is the feast of the absolute future, at which one may say that, in a time without present, what has been will be.'

25 'is born of a new understanding of the space of literature, so that, by new relations of movement, new relations of comprehension may be produced.... Nothing is created and nothing creative is said except by the prior approach of the place of extreme vacancy in which, before being determinate, expressed words, language is the silent movement of relationships, that is, "the rhythmic scansion of being". Words are only ever there to designate the extent of their



912 LESLIE HILL

relationships: the space into which they are projected and which, as soon as it is designated, withdraws and retreats, being nowhere where it is.'

26 'is not made up of words, albeit pure ones; it is that into which words have always already disappeared and the oscillating movement of appearance and disappearance.'

27 Levinas makes a similar point in his book Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975). Levinas writes: 'La demarche qui domine la derniere phi- losophie de Heidegger consiste a interpreter les formes essentielles de l'activit6 humaine-art, technique, science, 6conomie,-comme des modes de la verit6 (ou de son oubli). Que la marche a la rencontre de cette verit6, la reponse donn&e a l'appel, s'engage pour Heidegger dans les chemins de lerrance et que l'erreur soit contemporaine de la verite, que la revelation de l'etre en soit aussi la dissimulation, tout cela temoigne d'une proximite tres grande entre la notion heideggerienne de l'etre et cette realisation de l'irrealite, cette presence de l'absence, cette existence du neant que, d'apres Blanchot, l'aeuvre d'art, le poeme laisse dire. Mais pour Heidegger la verite-un devoilement primordial-con- ditionne toute errance et c'est pourquoi tout l'humain peut se dire en fin de compte en termes de verite, se decrire comme 'devoilement de l'etre'. Chez Blanchot, l'euvre decouvre, d'une decouverte qui n'est pas verite, une obscurite. D'une decouverte qui n'est pas verite!-voila une singuliere maniere de de- couvrir et voir le 'contenu' que sa structure formelle determine: obscurite absolument exterieure sur laquelle aucune prise n'est possible. Comme dans un desert on ne peut y trouver domicile. Du fond de l'existence sedentaire se leve un souvenir de nomade. Le nomadisme n'est pas une approche de l'etat sedentaire. I1 est un rapport irreductible avec la terre: un sejour sans lieu' (21-2). ('The move that dominates the late philosophy of Heidegger consists in inter- preting the essential forms of human activity-art, technology, science, economy-as modes of truth [or its forgetting]. That the march towards the truth, the response to the call, involves for Heidegger taking paths that lead one astray, and that error is contemporary with truth, and that the revelation of being is also its concealment, all points to the existence of a very close relationship between the Heideggerian notion of being and the making real of the unreal, the presence of absence, the existence of nothingness that is what, in Blanchot's view, the work of art or the poem articulates. But for Heidegger the truth-a primordial unveiling-is the condition of all wandering, which is why the whole of the human can be finally spoken of in terms of truth and be described as an 'unveiling of being'. In Blanchot, the work discovers, in a discovery that is not truth, a darkness. A discovery that is not truth! What a strange way of discovering and seeing the 'content' which its formal structure determines: a darkness that is absolutely exterior, on which no purchase is possible. Like in a desert one finds no residence. From the depths of sedentary existence a no- madic memory arises. Nomadism is not an approach of the sedentary state. It is an irreducible relationship with the earth: a residence without place'.)

28 'what poets found, space-the abyss and foundation of speech-is that which does not remain, and the authentic residence is not the shelter in which man is preserved, but has to do with the rock on which one founders, by way of ruina- tion and the chasm, and with the "memorable crisis" which alone gives access to the moving void, that place where the creative task begins.'

29 'Later, he reflected that the event was in this way of being neither true nor false'. 'Forgetting, waiting. The waiting that gathers, disperses; the forgetting that disperses, gathers. Waiting, forgetting.'

30 'And thus in one sole language always make heard the double speech.' 31 'By a violent division, Mallarme separated language into two almost unrelated



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forms, the one being immediate speech and the other essential language. This is perhaps true bilingualism. The writer is on his way towards a form of speech which is never already given: speaking, waiting to speak. He accomplishes this journey by getting ever nearer to that language which is historically destined to be his, and that closeness questions, at times gravely, his belonging to any native tongue.'

32 Blanchot first quotes the phrase from Mallarm6 in an earlier (more extensive) version of the passage that now appears in L'Ecriture du desastre, 190-91. This was originally published as a prefatory note to the collective volume, Misere de la littfrature (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1978), 11-12. The other texts cited here in sequence are as follows: Maurice Blanchot, 'Le Mystere de la critique,' Le Journal des debats, 6 January, 1944; Stephane Mallarm6, Correspondance, vol. VI, edited by Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 287; Camille Mauclair, LArt en silence (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1901), 104; Henri Mondor, Vie de Mallarmn (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 670; Jean-Paul Sartre, Mal- larme': la luciditW et saface d'ombre, 157. I am indebted to Michael Holland and to Deirdre Reynolds for their invaluable assistance in helping me to track down some of these quotations.

33 There is a parallel here, despite obvious other differences, with Blanchot's reading of Hegel, as I am reminded by Andrzej Warminski in his essay, 'Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel', YFS, 69 (1985), 267-75. Warminski writes, for instance, of Blanchot's engagement with Hegel that 'the attempt is not to explain Hegel but to rewrite him in another place' (269).

34 'Writing, in this respect, is the greatest violence, for it transgresses the Law, any law and its own law.'



hill, blanchot and mallarmé

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