THE CALL OF THE DISASTER AT THE BORDERLAND OF SILENCE

Abstract

Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure (second version) and Death Sentence are marked by the imperative to hear the call of night, of darkness, and death. In each work, the ear is enlisted to undermine the prominence accorded to the eye. If sight is essential to measure and confirm the space separating subjects from objects or subjects from other subjects, Blanchot introduces hearing as a way to collapse this protective distance. The border between inside and outside becomes porous, and the subject is no longer protected by vision’s capacity to establish a neutral and demonstrable distance between itself and the object of sight. As vision becomes catastrophic, hearing assumes an ascendant role. Thomas and Anne each hear the call of death, as well as cries, laments and sudden sounds that burst through silence. The characters of Death Sentence also hear and respond to a variety of calls, including the call to yield to death and the open grave. In both works, Blanchot provides a literary space in which sounds of various intensities resist silence, including the noise of the final rattle, the ultimate struggle with silence. In order to further explore the nature of this literary struggle, in the final section of my paper I compare Blanchot’s interrogation of silence to various musical experiments with the limits of sound, including the twentieth-century works of composers such as Anton Webern, Luigi Nono and Salvatore Sciarrino.

Keywords:

• ocularcentrism
• hearing
• catastrophe
• apocalypse
• disaster

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

abbreviations
DE	=	Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought.
DS	=	Death Sentence
FS	=	“Maurice Blanchot: Fighting Spirit.”
IC	=	The Infinite Conversation.
KL	=	“Kafka and Literature.”
ML	=	“Music and Literature: A Chinese Puzzle?”
MS	=	“Modern Silence.”
PN	=	“Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist.”
SL	=	The Space of Literature.
TO	=	Thomas the Obscure (new version).
WD	=	The Writing of the Disaster.

Notes

1 Notable works depicting the dazzling light of grenade explosions include A Star Shell (1916) and Bursting Shell (1915) by English artist C.R.W. Nevinson, and Otto Dix’s The Flare (1917) and Shell Craters with Tracer Flares (1917). Also of note are Max Beckmann’s Shell (1915), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s One of Our Shells Exploding (1915) and George Grosz’s Shell (1915).

2 See page 47 of The Writing of the Disaster for Blanchot’s reference to the Holocaust as the absolute event of history. Blanchot also mentions the Holocaust and the Gulag on pages 82–83 of this text.

3 For Geoffrey Hartman, “the historical specificity of Blanchot’s ‘disaster’ disappears into an immemorial suffering, ‘suffering as an event’” (FS 224).

4 For Badiou, such a unity had always been a deceptive notion, for “[i]t is only insofar as the opposites are heterogeneous or unalignable […] that there exists a dialectical unity, one which does not make any Whole out of what it ties together” (30).

5 DE 552. The reference is to Blanchot’s “La Culture française vue par un Allemand” (La Revue française 27 Mar. 1932).

6 Noticeably, Blanchot wishes to avoid falling into the trap of declaring the two senses as utterly “opposed” to one another (IC 27). Rather, he sees them as existing in a hierarchical relation that he wishes to overturn by elevating hearing and diminishing the power of sight.

7 In this respect, Blanchot’s “awaited speech” differs from Heidegger’s notion of the word as the “ringing light of the event,” which Krzysztof Ziarek describes as “opening into the registers of light and sound, which are aspects of the clearing” (96). Indeed, Ziarek notes that “the ‘sound’ in Heidegger is never simply, nor even primarily, phone but instead lichten (lightening, clearing, lighting) and stimmen (disposing)” (ibid.).

8 Cf. Thomas the Obscure 42–43, 60–61, 70–71.

9 In this respect one can discern a connection between Blanchot’s settings and those of the nouveau roman. On this subject, see Ungar, “Night Moves” 125–26.

10 It is well known that Blanchot was attracted to the idea of narrative as event, writing: “Narrative is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event […]” (The Book to Come 6).

11 Of the illusion of spatial continuity created in realist novels such as those comprising Balzac’s La Condition humaine, Peter Brooks writes: “Fictions have to lie in order to tell the truth: they must foreshorten, summarize, perspectivize, give an illusion of completeness from fragments” (6). Blanchot, unlike these authors, highlights the fragmentary in the setting of his narratives.

12 As Steven Ungar notes in “Parts and Holes: Heraclitus/Nietzsche/Blanchot”: “[f]ragmentary writing delineates an interrogative mode beyond dialectics” (137) as it promotes “the openness of endless questioning” (137–38). Ungar locates in Blanchot’s tales “the implied silence of terminal fragmentation” (138).

13 For a discussion of the Lazare, veni foras in this work, see Hart 10–16.

14 For a discussion of Heidegger’s silent call of Being (from which the call in Blanchot’s texts diverges), see Caputo 661–85. In this article, Caputo writes that, for Heidegger, “[t]he task of thinking is hermeneutic: to heed the message which Being ambiguously sends, to listen to the silent call of Being” (665). Caputo argues that, for Heidegger, thinking is “claimed” by Being (669) and that logos is “the gathering of thought to Being” (ibid.). If Heidegger “turns to acoustical and aural metaphors” it is because “[o]cular metaphors presuppose distance and detachment,” whereas aural terms “stress the belonging of Dasein to Being” (670). In Blanchot’s texts, on the other hand, one is encouraged to heed the call of the Outside, and of death.

15 It is possible to link this “voiceless cry” to what Agata Bielik-Robson describes as the belief that “speech emerges out of pain and that […] lament is the first manifestation of language.” Unlike the Greek notion of “a meaningful speech” that arises from “contemplation,” the lament arises from silence: “being unsayable, dark, and mysterious, it must nonetheless be spoken out” (133).

16 Anne says to Thomas: “The only possibility I would have to diminish the distance between us would be to remove myself to an infinite distance” (55).

17 In writing that Blanchot’s (male) characters “cannot die,” Geoffrey Hartman suggests that they are shown as “deathless” rather than as alive (PN 9).

18 Blanchot asserts: “If all things were reached by it and destroyed – all gods and men returned to absence – and if nothing were substituted for everything, it would still be too much and too little” (WD 2).

19 Prieto also observes that the Symbolist poet Mallarmé was attracted to music for “its ability to signify without naming” (Listening In 8).

20 Prieto writes that “the novel, in its overriding preoccupation with the representation of external reality, has tended to privilege denotation […]. Now music, which has no codified denotational dimension, signifies primarily by exemplification” (ibid. 68).

21 See “The Song of the Sirens: Encountering the Imaginary” 3–10; “Ars Nova,” IC 345–50.

22 See Cage 35–40.

23 Hinson 3. Debussy used “floating chords” for “atmospheric color, free modulation and mood” (ibid.).

24 For Rochberg, this was due primarily to “the composers’ inability to cope with increases in time span, as well as with an ever-increasing number of harmonic variations” (10).

25 Rochberg understands entropy as the “statistical tendency towards disorder in isolated systems where energy remains constant” (ibid. 6).

26 Julian Johnson also refers to tonal entropy in the music of Scriabin, Bartók and Berg (180).

27 In The Infinite Conversation we read: “In the interrelational space, dialogue, and the equality dialogue supposes, tend to do nothing other than increase entropy, just as dialectical communication […] is […] destined to die out in entropic identity” (81).

28 As Spielvogel notes: “By predetermining the order of succession, the composer restricts his or her intuitive freedom as the work to some extent creates itself. […] Serialist composition diminishes the role of intuition and emotion in favor of […] mathematical precision” (942).

29 The difference between serialist and minimalist music is addressed in the following quotation, written by F.D. Leone and published in Musica Kaleidoskopea:

Specifically, Serialism was taken up by the composers of the European continent, most famously at the Darmstadt conferences by composers such as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Karel Goeyvaerts and others. […] There is wide speculation that Minimalism was a response to the complexity of both Serialism and Indeterminate music. Both of these kinds of compositions required special performance skills and sometimes made enormous demands (either technically or interpretatively) on a performer. One reason why a composer like Milton Babbitt moved to writing serial pieces to be reproduced by a computer was precisely because human performers simply could not execute the small gradations in dynamics, e.g. distinguishing between pppp and ppp very quickly, or executing the complicated rhythmic writing often found in music which is written using serialist methods. (N. pag.)

30

The closer one gets to the border, the more the musical materials […] fall apart, as do certain types of silence […]. Sonic fascination also lures the subject into the liminal realm; however, the sounds claimed there, those making up its “sonority,” barely stay intact, existing as shards. (MS 350–51)

31

Like the wispy pencil scratches in a Cy Twombly canvas, the sonic splinters prove insubstantial, a mere trace on the surface of silence – so ephemeral that they, like Twombly’s scratches, have to be grouped together in order to give them, and the silence they signify, a marked presence. (Ibid. 356)

32 When Sciarrino employs a singer’s voice, “[t]he overall effect […] is that of breaking silence, not sinking into it. The voice leaps into the realm of sound and by doing so momentarily dispels the surrounding quiet” (ibid. 365).

33 Noticeably, the scenes in which Thomas enters the sea or the ocean appear as bookends at either end of the tale.