The Fact of Language: Recent Secondary Literature on Blanchot

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Notes

1. The récit names a genre in French literature of which Breton’s Nadja and Duras’s The Malady of Death and Blanchot’s own Death Sentence and When the Time Comes are examples: short, novella‐ or novelette‐length fictions that are focused around some central occurrence. As Blanchot writes in ‘The Sirens’ Song’, although ‘the récit seems to fulfil its ordinary vocation as a narrative’, it nevertheless bears upon ‘one single episode’ in a way that does not strive to narrate ‘what is believable and familiar’ in the manner of the novelist (Blanchot 2003, p. 6). The editors of the Power of Contestation add a particularly useful clarification: ‘When he distinguished the roman and the récit in the 1902s, Ramon Fernandez noted that the former shows events taking place in time while the latter presents events that have already occurred. The genre of the récit encourages analysis or meditation rather than action and strictly speaking it is “impossible to prevent the thing being told from being terminated and its representation from having become independent and obeying only the laws of combination of the impersonal mind”’ (Hart and Hartmann 2004, p. 67).

2. I would like to express my thanks to Stephen Mitchelmore, who brought this passage to my attention (Mitchelmore 2005).