On June 26, 1937, Maurice Blanchot, editor-in-chief of Aux Écoutes, paid tribute to the journal’s secretary, Claude Séverac, who had just passed away.1 The previous week, Paul Lévy had also paid his respects.
A text in Aux Écoutes bearing Blanchot’s name is sufficiently rare to slip under the radar. The article in question was exceptionally warm. It began in friendly terms, declaring that he would miss the late woman’s attentiveness, charm, and simplicity. “In Claude Séverac there was a mysterious sensibility that was in intimate and violent agreement with every human thing, and even more in agreement with the secret life of the world, a rare proof of extreme generosity.” The portrait resembled, to a surprising degree, Blanchot’s later descriptions of characters. Of fragile health, like them, Claude Séverac had demonstrated courage, dignity, and great strength of character in her struggle against the fatal illness that struck her down.
Sometimes, when her condition—which she struggled against with astonishing willpower—allowed her a premonition of her unjust fate, she would become regretful for the oeuvre she could have accomplished and which she sacrificed to the tasks of her day job. But these regrets only lasted an instant. These tasks, due to the value imbued by her devotion, ultimately seemed to her to be most deserving of her efforts.
A year later, on June 11, 1938, Blanchot would once again pay homage to his late friend, in the form of two short texts, one written as editor-in-chief and on behalf of all contributors to the journal, and the other more personal.
The first, which consisted in around thirty lines bearing the signature M.B., gave a foretaste of his future thinking on community:
[Claude Séverac] is present not only in what she did, but in what they are doing. She was on the margins of the venture and part of that venture too. She introduced into the loud noise of our common efforts a large degree of silence. . . . She who was anxiety itself established a higher zone of certainty and calm.
Blanchot finished with these words: “This year spent without her has been a year of work in which she has shared and which she has led.” The community of work and of friendship thus appeared first as part of the editor’s role at Aux Écoutes.
The few lines of the personal homage did not appear in isolation; several other contributors also provided texts. Yet Blanchot’s tone was much more intimate, and he spoke of the novelistic mystery of this character:
It is impossible to know whether those with whom she shared every working hour have not irreparably misunderstood this hidden person. And this uncertainty, for some of those who knew her, but do not know whether they knew her, adds to her absence, which is a deeper absence and the very image of regret.
This public expression of mourning bore witness to a developed sensibility, one of infinite concern, whose authority would be clear when thirty years later it led to a book (and almost a genre): Friendship. Nothing allows us to see Claude Séverac’s death as wholly irreparable for Blanchot. However, the regretful tone and the insistency of his homages, in addition to several troubling coincidences between his biography and his novels, give us cause to wonder about several real traces. These traces shine a little more brightly than others among all the tales of encounters with death that would mark, even in his flesh, the person who was no longer entirely a journalist and not yet entirely an author. The death of Claude Séverac, in summer 1937, coincided with Blanchot’s first withdrawal from politics. Her dignity would be shared by the dying woman J., in Death Sentence, and by Claudia in the three-person drama of When the Time Comes.
We shall largely avoid inferring from Blanchot’s fictions precise events that enhance the narrative of his life. Death Sentence, however, repeatedly grabs our attention. A short, retrospective narrative published in 1948, it has all the features of an autobiography, except that it does not allow us to collapse the distinction between the narrator and the author. An astonishing amount of narrative information is present, at times making it almost a realist novel: The narrator, like Blanchot, is a Parisian foreign-affairs journalist with considerable responsibilities who later becomes a novelist in fragile health who confronts the experiences of death in the most extreme ways. These tempting parallels, however, do not usually allow the reader to progress, given that the author’s whole life remains concealed. There is an intensity to his ordeals with women and with death, coming and going and always in a state of violence and fright; there are obsessions that return again and again, whether as central scenes or marginal episodes, in other récits; there is a way of relating events that foreshadows the allusive, stripped-down quality of The Madness of the Day (the first narrative published after Death Sentence, only a year later, in a journal that was more confidential, less exposed, and allowed discretion to be maintained). All of this represents a cunning way of muddying the waters even while also referring to facts, of recounting things precisely and concisely, even while sheltering behind the fictional status and the theory of authorial effacement, the latter distancing the reader from the idea that such a writer could be speaking about himself. Today, everything suggests that the récit revolves around the author as a person, though nothing allows it to be proven, with the narrative incessantly wandering between autobiographical suggestion, more or less in novel form, more or less close to autofiction, and an autonomous and sovereign construction of the imagination.
When in 1994 Blanchot would publish The Instant of My Death, its title’s mention of the first person and our previous knowledge of some of the events recounted allow us to identify the narrator and to authenticate the récit, thus producing a broad consensus that it is autobiographical. However—as we shall see—the way in which certain facts and dates are altered demands greater vigilance. Blanchot’s récits are never more cunning than when they openly draw near to the author’s life. In a similar but inverse way, the first lines of Death Sentence provoke the reader to a large extent. “These events happened to me in 1938”: Such a beginning raises all sorts of temptations. It suggests doubt even as it creates a semblance of certainty, but if our mistrust is valid, it is not for the reasons we imagine. Nothing is less certain than these events having taken place in 1938. When Blanchot has the narrator add: “I will write freely, since I am sure that this story concerns only myself,” this freedom concerns first of all the dating of the récit and therefore makes an even greater intervention in the question of autobiography. Simply checking the calendar allows us to realize that Wednesday, October 13, the date the narrator presents as the only certain one, did not occur in 1938 but . . . in 1937.2
It is of some interest to hypothesize that Blanchot really experienced in September and October 1937 the events related in the first part of Death Sentence. It is a fruitful hypothesis. Indeed, it will be remembered that after Claude Séverac’s death, Blanchot suspended his political column in L’Insurgé in July, gave up his literary column at the end of September, and would only start writing articles for Combat again in November. We also know that around the end of the 1930s, tuberculosis forced him to take a long sojourn in the southwest of France, in the sanatorium at Cambo-les-Bains near the Spanish border, around 9.3 miles (15 km) from Bayonne. Was Blanchot there in the summer of 1937, and more precisely in September, so that in the fiction Arcachon would stand in for Cambo? Or was he really convalescing in Arcachon in September, as the récit states? The number of coincidences is troubling enough for us to be able to imagine things as follows: It is there that he receives word that his friend is dying. He does not return to Paris immediately, in order “not to interrupt [her] repose.” But the sense of guilt created by his absence becomes unbearable: “Today I am trying in vain to understand why I stayed away from Paris then, when everything was calling me back.” He returns on “a Monday evening” (this would have been October 11). J. is pronounced dead that night. After the miraculous event that brings her back to life, she dies on Wednesday, October 13.
However unjustified the hypothetical narrative we have just outlined, it nonetheless allows us to understand, like a myth might do, some of Blanchot’s profound changes—even if they were spread out over a longer period—at the end of the 1930s.
1. First of all, there is the withdrawal from politics. After the final three articles for L’Insurgé and Combat (which can almost be considered as two articles, as we have seen), Blanchot did not put his name to any political text among the circles of the far right. Although he continued to write for the Journal des Débats and for Aux Écoutes, he henceforth refused to take intellectual or personal responsibility for signed articles on the country’s foreign policy. Such a gesture of withdrawal is depicted in Death Sentence, when the narrator twice refuses, the same day, to respond to urgent demands from his newspaper. This is the reason why there is no stance taken by Blanchot on the Anschluss, the Sudetenland, or on the general atmosphere of growing danger. We can debate over which factor was ultimately decisive: the proximity of the Spanish border to Cambo, the ever-shrinking margin for diplomatic maneuver, the profascist and anti-Semitic radicalization of certain journalist colleagues, or the personal upheaval provoked by his recent experiences. But over and above all of this, it remains the case that Blanchot would henceforth constrain himself to withdrawal. Events “were becoming more serious: living and thinking no longer went hand in hand.”3
2. Then there is the plunge into personal matters. At this time, Blanchot’s life was sufficiently marked by illness for him to be tempted to transfer this experience into writing (let us also recall the literature he loved: Kafka, Mann, Proust). Tuberculosis would discreetly invade his récits.4 In Death Sentence, J. herself suffers from choking and coughing; and in the same way that Thomas sometimes becomes Anne, can J. not also become Je, the author, the subject? This hypothesis is made less impossible by another secret avowal by Blanchot contained in the récit: that he had almost met his own death, almost received his own death sentence. The event experienced as he was taking his baccalaureate—the mistaken diagnosis, the surgery, the damage to his blood—is thus related here. “My blood became ‘atomic’ avant la lettre, which meant that it became as unstable as if it had been exposed to radiation. I rapidly lost three-quarters of my white blood cells and became frighteningly ill.” After “two days of a peculiar struggle” against imminent death, the narrator-author is saved; but he still has “enigmatic blood, so unstable that it confounds all analyses.”5
3. There is also the decisive withdrawal into writing. It was probably at this time that the author, being both detached from political narratives and plunged into an abyss of personal matters, found a form for Thomas the Obscure, in which novelistic notions (le romanesque) play the role adopted by myth in the first two narratives, written two or three years earlier, The Idyll and The Last Word. We can understand how Blanchot began writing narratives of aimlessness and metamorphosis, in which the figures of incredulity and resurrection are important, in which there are multiple scenes depicting death throes, especially for the strangely similar female characters, in which death rattles—that intimate external expression of death—provide the form of a being-for-others (pour-autrui) that cannot be assimilated, a terrifying version of the there is. Blanchot would say it again in The Madness of the Day, placing these deaths before the war chronologically: “I have loved people, I have lost them. I went mad when that blow struck me, because it is hell. But there was no witness to my madness, my frenzy was not evident; only my innermost being was mad.”6 Writing, narrative split between autobiography and fiction, would be this impossible witness of terminal illness, of death, and of mourning; in it autobiography would be the nighttime of fiction, in the very image of its author. (Blanchot indeed continued: “People said to me, ‘Why are you so calm?’ And yet, I was burning from head to foot; at night I would run through the streets and howl; during the day I would work calmly.”)
4. The final change concerns the historicity of lived experience. Once again, Blanchot would give a historical dimension to his personal narrative. Mixing the individual narrative of 1937 and the historical narrative of 1938 allowed personal and collective history to be brought together (a similar transaction would take place, as we shall see, in The Instant of My Death). Death personally experienced would be inscribed as if sacrificially in the death of History (the Munich Agreement). A narrative such as Death Sentence attempts to explore unhappy consciousness, unhappy owing to the impossibility of dying to which such a civilization condemns one; it thus uncovers or discovers death as never before. Retrospectively and symbolically, the complex late 1930s mixed together for Blanchot political renunciation and personal depression, setting in around his thirtieth birthday. If the events of the narrative are reconstructed chronologically, September 22 is the date on which J. signs the form indemnifying the doctor in case of an accident. She signs her own death sentence; it was also the date of a historical collapse (the meeting of Chamberlain and Hitler in Godesberg on September 22 made the Munich agreement of September 29 inevitable).
For further reasons still, to mix Munich together with Cambo and Paris was to make public some trace of a private narrative. For Germany had married into the family, something that cannot have been without its tensions. On February 22, 1938, René Blanchot married Anna Emilie Elisabeth Wolf at the prestigious town hall of the fifth arrondissement in Paris. From a very rich family, Anna Wolf had fled Nazi Germany several years previously. Until her death she would remain very close to Maurice Blanchot.