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Abstract
Blanchot often evoked the silence required for literary writing, a silence which he says must “be imposed” on a pre-existing and indistinct murmur of language. Likewise, he evokes this murmur itself as an originary ground of all speech, including literary speech. Less often recognized are the ways in which he also locates this murmur in the realm of public speech and everyday language, the rumor of speech spoken by no one and by everyone, a realm which he in turn links with the exigencies of publication and publicity that bear on the literary work within modern societies marked by mass media and technically mediated communication. Blanchot himself thus points to an unexpected convergence, in these sonic images of impersonal murmuring flows of language, between literary language per se, and a language that is traditionally considered inauthentic, empty, superficial, a chattering nullity. This essay attempts to press on this border by showing Blanchot’s anxious, and probably futile, attempts to maintain the distinction he so profoundly and rigorously effaces. As literature is threatened by the indistinction of language from which it originates, it reveals an unexpected convergence with the leveling modes of language marked by mass media and by technicity in general.
Keywords:
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
abbreviations
| A | = | L’Amitié. |
| AM | = | L’Arrêt de mort. |
| BC | = | The Book to Come. |
| DS | = | Death Sentence. |
| EI | = | L’Entretien infini. |
| EL | = | L’Espace littéraire. |
| Fr | = | Friendship. |
| IC | = | The Infinite Conversation. |
| LV | = | Le Livre à venir. |
| SL | = | The Space of Literature. |
Notes
1 My emphasis. The sentence is on page 109.
A look is very different from what one might think, it has neither light nor expression, nor force nor movement, it is silent, but from the heart of strangeness its silence crosses worlds and the person who hears that silence becomes other. (DS 68; slightly modified)
2 This statement was made in an interview from 1968 (Juliet 13).
3 Insofar as my concern is the specific moment of indistinction as related to sound, what I propose here takes a somewhat different approach from the commentaries presented in two studies on a similar and overlapping topic: the “disappearance of literature.” Aaron Hillyer takes up this question in his penetrating book with that title, as does Anne McConnell in her Approaching Disappearance. I would add that, rather than disappearance, I rely more on the notion of effacement, an erasure that is never complete, thus one that leaves indistinct traces of the border in question – or, as with Kafka’s Great Wall of China, fragments and remnants of its now illegible past.
4 A field that, of course, now includes the internet and every form of digital media. This immense murmur is the outer horizon of the present, much more restricted, discussion. A rough way of posing the question at issue here in view of this horizon would be to ask how “literature” sounds there, and how long it can survive as such – assuming it still does.
5 See especially Sartre’s L’Imaginaire. On this front, Blanchot is very much in league with Levinas, who offers a strong critique of Sartre at around the same time, to which we will return in a moment. See especially Levinas, “La Réalité et son ombre.”
6 The text was published as “Lettre à un jeune cinéaste,” a title added by the editors. This letter is also accessible on the Espace Maurice Blanchot website (http://blanchot.fr/fr/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=73&Itemid=47).
7 Here is the remainder of the letter. This astonishing document calls for extended reflection:
Quant à mes livres, il y a eu des exceptions mais non autorisées. Ainsi l’ORTF a tiré un petit film de Thomas l’obscur (La Mort d’Anne) avec des images en couleur et la voix de Lonsdale. J’ai protesté en vain. A partir de là, je me suis rendu compte que je n’étais pas “propriétaire” de ces textes, et qu’en tant qu’auteur, je n’avais aucun droit, à condition précisément qu’on ne me demande pas d’autorisation.
Donc, ne m’en demandez pas. Faites comme si j’étais mort depuis fort longtemps et donc incapable de vous donner un avis d’outre-tombe.
Autrement, il faudrait passer par Gallimard qui détient le “copyright,” donc la moitié des droits d’auteur. Passez donc outre. Agissez comme si j’avais, sinon les dons, du moins l’âge d’Homère.
Maurice Blanchot
As for my books, there have been exceptions, but they were not authorized. Thus the ORTF shot a small film based on Thomas the Obscure (The Death of Anne), in color and with the voice of Lonsdale. I protested in vain. This made me realize that I was not the “owner” of these texts and that, as an author, I had no rights, precisely on condition that no one ask me for authorization.
So do not ask me for any. Act as if I had been dead for a very long time and were therefore incapable of giving you a response from beyond the grave.
Otherwise, it would be necessary to pass through Gallimard, who holds the “copyright,” and therefore half of the author’s own copyright. So then just go ahead. Act as if I were as old, if not as talented, as Homer.
Maurice Blanchot
It is quite ironic that, in the name of the silence of the purely written text, Blanchot here evokes Homer, who of course recited poems orally to a public audience. But then Homer was also blind, and never saw any movies.
8 Presented under the rubric “Silence!,” a four-part series broadcast as part of the regular program “Les Chemins de la philosophie” hosted by Adèle Van Reeth, the episode on Blanchot was aired on 2 March 2017. A podcast of the episode is available online: <https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-chemins-de-la-philosophie/silence-44-blanchot-limpossible-silence> (accessed 23 July 2017). I would like to thank Patrick Lyons for bringing this program to my attention. The web page also includes a color photograph of Blanchot reading a book, one of many photographs of the writer that have appeared in the last few years. See especially the Cahiers de l’Herne volume devoted to Blanchot, published in Paris in 2014, co-edited by Eric Hoppenot (not coincidentally, Van Reeth’s interlocutor for the radio program) and Dominique Rabaté.
9 The reading begins a little over fourteen minutes into the program and lasts for about two and a half minutes. After listening to the recording, both host and guest praise the actor’s reading for its clarity in presenting a very dense text with complex syntax. One could be excused for also finding it a touch melodramatic – and thus for empathizing, after all, with Blanchot’s sensitive refusal years earlier. From my point of view (as a reader/listener), the trouble can be stated simply: what I hear is not Blanchot’s writing as I read it, which is in fact different every time, and even within each time, but the actor’s recorded voice, its rhythms and intonations, which inevitably distort the written text as such, and so fix it, stabilize it in a statue of sound, always ready to step in and take over – a disturbing sonic image, a persistently resounding echo. This is, of course, also the power of sound, which from Blanchot’s perspective is surely part of the problem. In any case, it is a question of interpretation, in every sense. One is reminded here of Adorno’s praise for the silent reading of music, which was also directed at the tyranny of mass media and technical reproduction (see Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction). Likewise, anyone closely familiar with the texts of Beckett’s plays is all the more sensitive to the facile betrayals readily summoned by the expressive demands of humanizing interpretations. Needless to say, it’s inconceivable that Blanchot would ever have written for the theater.
Finally, I can’t help referring in passing to a public event I attended in Paris in September 2007, for Blanchot’s centenary, at which, among other speakers, Jacques Dupin (not an actor but a poet, aged 80 at the time) read a long passage from Au moment voulu, the section where the narrator knocks his head while walking in the dark down a hallway in the apartment. It was very impressive, an extremely beautiful and memorable reading, sounding as though called up by and from within the text, not imposed upon it.
10 A compromise that can be read in Blanchot’s own work. As Christophe Bident remarks, in a biographical commentary on “La Solitude essentielle”: “La véritable autorité du discours, son véritable ton, Blanchot l’emprunte à une expérience qui, fût-elle de dépossession, demeure radicalement personnelle”/“Blanchot draws the true authority of discourse, its true tone, from an experience that, be it one of dispossession, remains radically personal” (Bident 308; author’s emphasis). The nature of this deep and inevitable “personal” residue is highly complex; I have offered some comments on its paradoxes in The Imperative to Write: Destitutions of the Sublime in Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett.
11 “La Parole vaine” was reprinted in L’Amitié/Friendship (A 137–49/Fr 117–28); Le Bavard was first published in 1946. Blanchot’s essay first appeared in a 1962 re-edition of the novel. Eleanor Kaufman comments insightfully on the relation between speech and silence in Blanchot’s essay, and on the key passage on chatter that I cite here, in “Chattering Silences” (see Kaufman 24). McConnell devotes a helpful chapter to Le Bavard in Approaching Disappearance (116–44). See also Ann Smock’s broader discussion of des Forêts's work, which intersects with many of the questions posed here: “‘Whatever Do We Need a Tongue For?’ Des Forêts” in What Is There To Say? (73–113).
12 “L’Expérience originelle”/“Original Experience” (EL 313–33/SL 234–47). Here too Blanchot uses the term “renversement radical”/“radical reversal” for the reconfigured understanding of death articulated in this essay. See especially EL 321–24/SL 240–41.
13 In the penultimate paragraph of the essay, Blanchot does attempt to say the specific difference that is legible in Le Bavard as its peculiar literary illumination, but this difference is precisely one that effaces specificity, in that he describes it in terms of an “immense vision” and ultimately evokes it as “l’équivalent spectrale du silence et peut-être de la mort”/“the spectral equivalence of silence and perhaps of death.” The entire paragraph calls for a commentary that would test it against the text under discussion; let it suffice for my purposes to point out that in the end it explicitly returns, compulsively if also compellingly, to “the gaze of Orpheus,” and so repeats the mythical schema of Blanchot’s most cherished tropology.
14 This strangeness persists even when we acknowledge the peculiarities of the case (a small-scale cultural program often devoted to well-known figures, often no longer living – a more familiar phenomenon in France, to be sure), and instead draw a more proportionate comparison between, say, any number of moderately well-known contemporary writers and a daily radio announcer at a major station in a large city. In that respect, Blanchot’s point holds well enough – though, in his terms, it then resolves into the dwindling notion of “intellectual power,” as though, whatever this might be, it would have nothing to do with mass media.
15 Hillyer devotes some thoughtful pages to this essay in The Disappearance of Literature (see especially 52–56).
16 This is an enormous statement that cannot be fully defended here, but we have some sense of its parameters in Foucault’s work in general, and most directly in “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?”/“What Is an Author?” which can be read, at least in part, as a critique of Blanchot. This article pays homage to Blanchot in much of its language, as when it refers to an “anonymat du murmure”/“anonymity of the murmur” (Foucault 812). But it says much more squarely (in a textual variant) that “la fonction-auteur va disparaître”/“the author-function will disappear” (811). It also expresses a concern which may well be aimed at Blanchot: “Une autre notion, je crois, bloque le constat de disparition de l’auteur et retient en quelque sorte la pensée au bord de cet effacement; avec subtilité, elle préserve encore l’existence de l’auteur. C’est la notion d’écriture”/“another notion, I believe, blocks the acknowledgment of the author’s disappearance and in a way holds thought back at the edge of this effacement; with subtlety, it still preserves the existence of the author. This is the notion of writing” (795). The concern is that this notion may transcribe the author into “transcendental terms” and risks preserving a theological dimension (ibid.). While this reservation cannot fail to evoke Blanchot, it is all the more clearly aimed at Derrida.
17 See William S. Allen’s commentary on this essay, under the heading of “The Language of the Everyday,” in Aesthetics of Negativity 14–26, and especially 20–21, where Allen writes of the surrealists’ automatic writing and the “swirling commotion of unrealized significations,” a fitting formula for what Blanchot calls the murmur.
18 The notion and figure of an “inner voice” and its relation to the murmur and to literary writing deserve to be integrated more directly into the analyses offered here; I have left them to the side for the moment out of concerns for simplicity and length. Such a discussion would bring out a number of specific issues, but its main thrust would be to locate the murmur of the inner voice, as “heard” by the writer, no less in the element of an “outside,” as an always prior exteriority, than the phenomena that Blanchot figures under that term.
19 Such a mirroring is suggested in “La Parole vaine,” cited above, and even more explicitly in the section of “Mort du dernier écrivain” titled “Le Dictateur”/“The Dictator”: in the imagined scenario, it is the dictator’s commandment that supplants the writer’s imposed silence, as a response to the “murmure sans limite”/“limitless murmur” and in opposition to “le danger de la parole étrangère”/“the danger of strange speech” (LV 299; BC 220). At another level, consider the strange situation of dictation staged in the récits, especially in Le Dernier Homme/The Last Man and L’Attente l’oubli/Awaiting Oblivion (though the gesture of an imperious dictation is also evoked in L’Arrêt de mort): a feminine companion speaks to the narrator, a writer-figure whose writing appears to depend intimately, and yet disjointedly, on the reception of this speech. It is interesting to note that in Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas/The One Who Stood Apart From Me, the male companion does not appear to dictate but rather only to converse (although the many verbatim repetitions and echoes complicate this question there too). For these and other reasons, a thorough interrogation of listening, writing, and literary speech in Blanchot would have to take the récits into account, for it is there that his writing comes closest to the murmuring outside so often evoked in the critical essays.