The author’s opening note in the second version of Thomas the Obscure indicates that the book was written between the summer of 1932 and May 1940, whereupon it was sent to Gallimard, probably addressed to Jean Paulhan. Perhaps it is no accident that this period coincides with the tumultuous decade that ran from the economic crisis in France to the debacle of defeat by Germany. Several hypotheses are possible: that in May 1940 Blanchot wanted to save his manuscript, to have it at least recognized, having already written (and perhaps destroyed) a lot without publishing it;1 that he wanted to save what he would indeed be unable to preserve at the end of the war, when soldiers from the German army took away several manuscripts, having searched the house at Quain; that urgency stemming from the atmosphere of fear led him to move more quickly to hand over the manuscript; or that inversely the impending war actually provided the cover if not of anonymity, then at least of discretion, and thus led to the first appearance of a new countenance—these hypotheses are all likely in their own way. And we can add one more to the list: that following his father’s death in 1936, after betrayals by successive governments and the ever-weakening power of diplomacy, after the step forward represented by the publication of his critical research in L’Insurgé, after the illness and perhaps the mourning of 1937–38, after a significant reduction in journalistic activity, his work on the novel must have become more intensive and moved toward its conclusion. What’s more, Blanchot had spoken of his novel in the preceding years and perhaps allowed sections of it to be read by writers and journalists in his political milieu.2
In 1932, Blanchot was twenty-five years old. Whether it was a rational decision, a mystical illumination, or a stepping-up of some unknown previous writing practice, all hypotheses about how he started to write are possible, because none is discussed by him, apart from the mention of the long period over which the novel was prepared. Eight years of apprenticeship and research, marked as we can imagine by doubts and fruitless searches, by joys and disappointments, abandonments and new beginnings, all of which led to the lack of satisfaction that one can imagine by recalling that once the second, drastically shortened, rewritten version was published, he never allowed the first to be reprinted. These eight years also saw Blanchot engaged in a writer’s life, which he would not abandon—the only one of his various lives, perhaps, to have that status. These years saw writing engaged in a subterranean task, extending his fidelity to Levinas, to readings that remained secret, the happily accursed share of a journalist still engaged in the name of perfidy, with the absence of shadow, the absence of thought. “Thomas the Obscure was never-ending,” Blanchot would write in 1983, and “in the search for annihilation (absence) it encountered the impossibility of escaping being (presence).”3 These were therefore eight years during which he attempted to think—through writing—a fidelity to the unknown, the account that needs to be given of the inexpressible, and ultimately the certainty of having grasped the only demand on being, the real vocation, that which responds to the “primal” call: that of the opening of the sky, that which already and forever takes place in the name of the other. They were eight years in which a strange narrative was created, surreal without being surrealist, mythical without edifying myth, poetic without fetishizing words or the spaces between them, loyal to the community of the there is without making it the dwelling of concern. There is nothing equivocal here, but there is a desire to listen to what is indistinct and to find an equivalent in words that would respect its silent indifference. Annihilation within words becomes an image of suffocation. The vertigo or collapse whereby the author, character, and plot are effaced are the prose narrative of an ephemeral fate. It took eight years for Blanchot to annihilate himself little by little, annihilating the face that was being presented to the world, maintained in public. It took eight years to give “death another chance.” To rid oneself slightly naïvely of one’s youth, which was still naïve (even more so), as Valéry said of his own:
Youth is a time when conventions are, and must be, ill understood; either blindly rejected or blindly obeyed. It is impossible to conceive, at the beginnings of the reflective life, that only arbitrary decisions enable man to found anything at all: languages, societies, knowledge, works of art. As for me, I could so little conceive it, that I made it a rule secretly to see as null or contemptible all opinions and habits of mind that grow out of life in common, out of our external relations with other men, and which disappear in voluntary solitude.4
But for Blanchot these eight years are the ones during which he eventually distances himself from this romantic naivety (for which he would long reproach Valéry, tenderly and yet harshly, in that he also aimed this reproach at himself). They are the years during which, insubordinate to himself, he would refuse to turn his mistakes into his destiny (to create a Monsieur Teste), during which he would set himself the task of thinking through conviction and its limitations, its inner shadow, and the annihilation that constantly threatens and accompanies it (as it does the character of Thomas). We can imagine Blanchot thinking he might sink into its abyss. We can also imagine how important readings such as those of Rilke or Kafka were, even if Blanchot as yet remained totally silent regarding the latter. It is difficult to prevent ourselves thinking that all these influences must also have touched Sartre, who also set himself the task, at the same time, of a long journey toward narrative, having begun Nausea in 1931 and only completing it in 1938. Theirs were different voices and they had greatly divergent politics, but their concerns for fiction converged. Each writer would comment on the early work of the other, with a mixture of reticence and respect, of fascinating proximity and clear differences.
We also know that the rhythm of these eight years of work was interrupted by the production of two récits, “The Last Word” (1935) and “The Idyll” (1936). Perhaps we ought to see these interruptions as a necessary crisis and one that benefitted the work on the novel. Blanchot states as much: “The récit [“The Last Word”] was an attempt to short-circuit the other book in progress, in order to overcome the interminable.” “It was not a text intended for publication.”5 We shall probably never know anything of the initial form of these two récits, which Blanchot would only publish ten years later, in spring 1947, in two different journals and at two months’ distance from one another, and which in 1951 he would place together in a book, Vicious Circles, and then again in 1983, this time with an additional afterword, “After the Fact,” in which he commented on the conditions in which they were created. The only extra piece of information is provided by La Licorne, Caillois’s journal: the month “The Idyll” was written, July 1936. This information invites us to think that the crisis in the writing of Thomas the Obscure was not the only factor explaining why the récits were written, and that there was in fact a double motivation at work, a historical and family one. In July 1936, four months after the death of Blanchot’s father, his récit depicts a wandering character without any family, constantly confronted with authority figures (a hospice director, an old man, an executioner). These are so many figures of substitution: in offering him his daughter in marriage, the old man offers to be the protagonist’s new father; according to the protocol for the ceremony that has been arranged, the director will be “like his father”; but ultimately it is the executioner who officiates, since the wedding is replaced by the character’s execution. The biographical roots of the récit go even deeper than this, however. The old man, the tenderest of substitute fathers, recounts his origins: “I was born in the neighboring département, in Samard.”6 Blanchot’s father had come to Quain from the neighboring canton, specifically from the parish of Devrouze, whose priest for a long time had been the uncle on his father’s side, and which was situated a few kilometers from that of Simard, to which it was attached. Another link can be found in the name of the character: Alexandre Akim evokes the first name most often used for Blanchot’s mother, Alexandrine. His maternal aunt is also present through her first name Elise, who is the Alexandre’s fiancée in the récit. Last, the difference in age between the director and his wife recalls that between Blanchot’s parents; it is even addressed in one of the director’s first statements to Akim, evoking both conjugal joy and conflict.7
July 1936 was also the date when Blanchot interrupted his contributions to Combat for several months, after having written “Terrorism as a Method of Public Safety.” This date reminds us of the potential historical and political justifications for the récits, not because they receive their legitimacy from politics and history, but because they attempt to frame, align, and sublimate a strategic demand and a supposed political thinking. In so doing they allow us to think about how the certainty of convictions and the search for what was less certain might be related: this too is their origin. These récits are most often seen as omens: the camps described by “The Idyll,” including the incredible detail of the shower rooms into which new detainees are rushed (“we’re very concerned about hygiene here,” states the director’s wife),8 and the disappearance of the library and the apocalyptic ruin of “The Last Word” today seem charged with premonition.9 Blanchot was the first to have been at once struck and sickened by this. He would write of “The Idyll” that it was “also prophetic, but for me (today) in a less easily explainable way, since I can only interpret it via events that came afterward and were not known until much later, meaning that this later knowledge does not illuminate the récit, but withdraws comprehension from it.”10
However, nothing is withdrawn, least of all from the historical comprehension of the récit, if we recall that in 1933 Blanchot and his fellow contributors were among the first to denounce tirelessly Hitler’s regime, the concealment of the work camps, and the violent acts against Jews. What Blanchot denounced in the press, namely the growth of the state and the deprivation of liberty, provided the major themes for the dialogues and narrative conception of “The Idyll.”11 What he could not bear, namely the aura of mystery around collective ceremonies and mass events, gave rise to the descriptions of “The Last Word.” He also made allusions to the Soviet camps via the Russian aspect of the names chosen (the first names of the characters of “The Idyll” are those of the Russian tsars: Pierre, Alexandre, and Nicolas Pavlon, whose two names recall the “Iron Tsar” Nicholas Pavlovich, who annexed Poland and suppressed the Hungarian revolution)—this is no surprise when we recall Blanchot’s anticommunist positions of 1936. Although these realist considerations never win the day, because they clash with all the aesthetic notions that the articles in L’Insurgé would soon set out, they nonetheless act as so many points at which the récits touch history, mixing Germanic and Russian references, gathering together the two hated regimes of Nazism and Communism in the same critique of a totalitarian figure. Thus they give cultural signs and national resonances a referential function that, thanks to its extreme clarity, sets in chain the movement of a narrative prose that until then had been lost in the obscure abyss of the secret novel. This public presence (albeit in two récits destined to remain private, for the time being) bears witness to this role and to this way of managing novelistic writing, which was still not based on any substantial or consistent thinking. While after the fact Blanchot seemed to suggest that he had foreseen the extermination camps, he did not for one second imagine any systematic link to Jewishness. Jews are addressed only marginally in these texts, not being the objects of any omens or any thinking of the time, whereas Blanchot in his links to the community in question seemed convinced that passive defense was the best strategy. Although among those deported in “The Idyll” figures a certain Isaïe Sirotk, who brings together Judaism (first name) and Trotskyism (an anagram of the surname) and thus reproduces the associations that Blanchot occasionally made in the press, he is more an unpleasant character than a victim. Twice he “attacks,” impulsively and violently, a fellow prisoner (first Akim then the strangely Kafkaesque Grégoire), on both occasions accusing the other of spying (we find here the clichés of anti-Semitism, the anti-Jewish judgment of a people of sacrifice and, having almost neurotically become its own opposite, the national-capitalist judgment of a “Jewish plot”).
That the récits play a role as the still unfulfilled but henceforth possible underside of journalistic rhetoric, as the literary shadow that would end up (almost) totally obscuring this polemicist’s frenetic engagements; and that they should momentarily take over in 1935 and 1936—both from the novel that was not managing to give ethical force to obscurity, and from journalism, which was continuing to lose its way through ill-considered eloquence (and all the more so because its views on diplomacy and on revolution were so desperate)—all of this speaks volumes about Blanchot’s lack of personal tranquility and about the necessity of a literature allowing him to enter into a different relationship with history—beginning with his own history.12 The literary imposes itself here, as it distances itself definitively from realism, as a way of giving shape to the political imaginary and to the process of making judgment less blind. Whatever the faults of these first two récits (the structural accumulation of mythical episodes in “The Last Word,” which limits the text to an enigmatic allegory; and in “The Idyll” the system of symbolic totalization, which overlays it with a kind of dictatorship of meaning), these very faults carry within them the grandeur of the demand being responded to. For example, the mythical structure of “The Last Word,” emptied of any divine presence, provides an echo chamber to Kafka’s narratives by the imposition of striking theatrical or choreographic figures. They stem from an original perception of the possibilities of writing, and from deadening habits being mercilessly discarded, which leads to all behavior appearing as immediately reversible, spaces being altered in surprising ways, new doors constantly being opened onto what is possible, death being announced in brutally banal ways, or even the appearance of formless, abject, or monstrous presences.
His narrative manner was finding its way. However different they might be from the novels and notably from the récits that would follow, “The Idyll” and “The Last Word” lay the groundwork for the later physical apprehension, corporeal breathing, stretches filled with light, and perception of space. Their light without shadow infinitely underlines how violent totalitarian space is. Sun and heat assail the penal workshops in “The Idyll.” In “The Last Word,” it is invariably the case that “the sun bathes [the esplanade] in a true light,” the esplanade where children who have gathered to play on the sand throw stones at a passer-by, “squawking hideously.”13 When the narrator dreams of dying from blindness, “the worst” remains still to come, with the return in inverse form of the childhood “primal scene”: “At the back of my sightless eyes the sky that saw everything opened up anew, and the vertigo of steam and tears which obscured them rose to infinity, where it dissipated among light and glory” (52). Space has been obscured to an extreme degree, or illuminated without end, has in either case violently opened out, leaving no space that is not immediately expelled, not shown to be impossible to occupy. The death of this “primal scene” lies as if at the origin of this measureless violence encountered in all public domains, which appears as early as childhood. This violence appears whenever a space is constructed for struggle and power, for illumination and glory. Such illumination is lethal. It kills twice in “The Last Word,” with the narrator’s body ending up fallen, downfallen, “face to the floor,” “face in the dirt.” While his work is so often read as being inaccessible to childhood, we can wonder whether Blanchot’s narrator will always remain a child, both refusing and not knowing how to refuse what in “After the Fact” he would name the “contentment of the masters” (67). This is already the Sadean question of an idyll that is also an idyll of death, a consenting to loss, a permanent threat of intimate violence, hysterical unleashings and paranoid fear always being present. The attackers can become the attacked, torture can lead to soft pleasure, the powerful can be isolated and smothered, having become the pitiful, humiliated victims of state centralization, the violated cogs of an infernally cruel machine. The violence between the masters (the director of the hospice-camp-prison and his wife) is what is intriguing about “The Idyll,” even more than the violence exercised on the detained tramps.
How can space be explored, how can one still move and breathe within it (“breathing something foreign,” 16), how can one still remain attentive to equivocal despair and to the unhealthy joys of the other? Answers to these questions are attempted by the “theory,” the procession, the advances, the prose of the narrator, of the character Akim, whose viewpoint we adopt. How can one retain one’s bearings when the configuration of buildings and streets is constantly changing? How can borders be pushed back when the only maps are town maps, when the only unchanging spaces are the cemetery at the centre and the hospice in the margins (these imperious, devouring margins)? Where can one go when space itself is empty, when there are no more books on the “empty shelves” of the library, when one is the last reader in a library that will disappear when one leaves it? In this public space abolished in favor of an agonizing neutrality, which leaves no exit, Blanchot gives shape to political dead ends, to the absolute closure represented by conviction. The experience of the political, historical world, the experience of the world such as he had forged it for himself, such as he had acquiesced to it—even in refusing it—this experience was one of suffocation. “I have no air, I am choking,” says Akim (21). “The smell was becoming suffocating” (23). The pestilential indoor smell invades the outdoors; the hospice invades nature, which is definitively corrupted by this action. “At night, a kind of poison came out of the earth, heavier and more loaded with stench than that of the big swamps” (28). In “The Last Word,” an old woman takes the narrator to his house: “When we arrived in front of my house, she opened the door for me, forcing me to follow a long corridor which went down into the earth. Walking into this cellar, I became short of breath and I begged her to take me back outside” (43–44).
Limits are erased in this putrid indistinction of inside and outside, in which no space with breathable air remains. Nothing aligns with anything else: “In my own house, I’m no more than an intruder” (44), a formulation which has its counterpart in the condemnation to exile in “The Idyll,” pronounced by Akim when he addresses the new detainees: “You will learn in this house that it is hard to be foreign. You will also learn that it is not easy to cease being so” (25–26). The state is a machine that produces exile (suffocation); the hospice holds on to you if you do not make a good impression, “but if you manage to come to terms with your new surroundings, you will be sent back to your home where, differently disoriented, you will begin a new exile” (26).
Against this threat of suffocation, one can only draw on relation and on language. Over and against the fear of “dying of suffocation,” there are the possibilities of “exchanging words,” “speaking to someone,” “moving beyond one’s thoughts” (20). How can communication take place in a world where the tower of Babel has collapsed, and where the meaning of relation and the relation of meaning have been lost? How can one communicate this impossibility itself? “ ‘O city,’ I prayed . . . ‘soon I will not be able to communicate with you through my language’ ” (44). How can one communicate in a world where the words until such time as and not take precedence over the there is? Blanchot imagines a world of slogans where totalitarianism ruins even language.
I walked with [the old woman] from street to street amidst the debris of a celebration signaled by torches in the middle of the day. A tremendous din of shouting, obeying some subterranean order, suddenly seized the crowd, now in the east, now in the west. At certain junctions, the earth trembled and it seemed that the populace was marching over the void, crossing it via a bridge made from its cries of rage. The great consecration of the until such time as took place around noon. The chanting of a saying that could transpire through any uproar was suggested through the debris of words, as if the only thing to survive were the shapes of a long sentence that had been trodden underfoot by the crowd. This saying was until such time as. (43)
Totalitarianism effaces language. Once she has been seized by the crowd, the old lady speaks “without having to say a word.” “Her cries came from a very deep place, they went through my body, and surfaced again at my mouth. I spoke without having to say a word” (44). Totalitarianism leaves one’s mouth gaping open, being a form of connective scansion (scansion qui abouche), cries that are surprising, arresting, suffocating.
Blanchot wrote “The Last Word” in 1935, a year before Levinas published On Escape. And “the last word” is there is.14 Even though it is contaminated by the ravages of the until such time as, “the word there is was still able to reveal things in this faraway area” (45), at the philosophical hour of dusk. Put differently, the last word is not a word, or is only a word because it draws on reserves of silence.
How can one move toward a greater lightness, such as the one that Thomas discovers? This question can only be asked for the moment, but Thomas does already appear in “The Last Word,” as if the book being written were a nod to the completed récit. He does so in a “fable” that the narrator, who has momentarily become a teacher, tells to his schoolchildren (47). Thomas is a marginal character who is not included in the roll call and who can be compared to someone under siege who escapes into thin air without knowing what has happened to him; “he can only express what has happened to him by saying: nothing happened” (47). This is therefore the last word. The commentary offered by the teacher could be that of “The Idyll”: “no sooner did the inhabitant set foot on free ground than he discovered the walls of his enormous prison all around him” (47).
Thus the dominant figure of Blanchot’s fictions is already present in his first two récits, albeit marginally, inversely, contrariwise. He is present as a double of the narrator and Akim, an eternal and eternally vulnerable double, who is vulnerable and guilty precisely because he is eternal: “I am vulnerable, because no one can condemn me” (46). Here he is a transparent character, neither a teacher nor God, neither the “All-Powerful” (the master of the Tower) nor the Most High.
“Fear is your only master. If you believe that you no longer fear anything, reading is useless. But it is the lump of fear in your throat that will teach you how to speak,” we are taught by the narrator of “The Last Word” (46). Perhaps it is in order to infinitely confront and dispel fear that Blanchot begins writing. Perhaps it is fear that gives him, once again, a way into narrative, and respect for the last word, for reestablishing relation. The dignity that Blanchot assigns to the literary would always find its ultimate source of strength here, even in times of exhaustion or of distress. He would later confirm that for him fear was fear of the city, of communal life, political fear with all that it stood for: the oblivion of insomnia, the sleep of refusal, the inattentiveness of the there is. The first fragment of several on fear in The Step Not Beyond reads thus: “When he was crossing it, the city constantly whispered within him: I am afraid, be the witness to fear.”15 The engagement that the récits represent can be seen to mean a witnessing of fear, political fear. This is a fear that the writer carries but does not appropriate, a fear for the inexorable death to come, “the fear for someone who does not let anyone approach them and whom death already turns away from our assistance, which they nonetheless request and await.”16 When it takes on this familiar countenance, when it confronts this “death sentence,” when it demands a mode of companionship that is without any relationship to the law, that is when fear becomes a weight: we become afraid of fear and it places itself beyond language. The intensity of such a noncathartic fear, experienced at night, is at work in Blanchot’s writing as early as Thomas the Obscure (as when Thomas accompanies the death of Anne), then relayed without intermediaries, or via intermediaries who are ever more effaced, to a confrontation with narrative that is ever more anonymous and bare.