A stranger (étranger), Thomas, arrives in a village and, on a woman’s invitation, enters one of the houses. The reader knows nothing of his intentions, does not even know whether Thomas has been looking for this woman. A caretaker shows him, not entirely enthusiastically, into a room with paintings representing the rooms of the building. He asks him to choose one to rent. This is how the prose begins: It is the beginning of the endless visit in the building, which proceeds ever onward, with no point of return. Assigned to an inmate, Dom, Thomas meets servants, a maître d’hôtel, and a young woman, Mademoiselle Barbe (Miss Beard), who takes him to visit the upper floors, the game room, the former information office, and the sick bay, which is serving as a court of law. Thomas enters a long discussion with two new characters, Jérôme and his friend Joseph; loses Dom; loses Barbe, and then finds her again. Barbe explains to him that he has “walked the wrong way.” At the end of the conversation, Thomas collapses on the ground; he will begin a long convalescence. Lucie, who has the neighboring room, takes him for a servant. Ultimately she embraces him and asks him to sign a form confirming that he entered the house willingly and that he has been well received there. Having returned, Dom explains to him in turn that he has gone the wrong way: To find true freedom, he ought to have gone below ground. Lucie begins to resemble the house. Night falls on the three characters. Thomas still has not “clarified” anything: These are the last words.
When was Aminadab written? In less than two years, after Thomas the Obscure had been given to Gallimard? In less than a year, after Blanchot had met Bataille? Was he reusing passages written in the 1930s (we can recall how close some are to “The Idyll” and “The Last Word”)? If we are to believe Paulhan’s letter to Drieu, the work was completed in December 1941 or February 1942, which is to say shortly after the publication of the first version of Thomas.
Aminadab came out the following fall. Printing was completed on September 24, only two days after Blanchot’s thirty-fifth birthday. Paulhan called the book “a second Thomas.” He was aware of it early on, at manuscript stage, and in January 1942 recommended that Drieu publish a chapter of it in the NRF. He added: “What [Blanchot] has written is almost unbearable over 400 pages but perfectly good over 10 pages. He seems to me the sort of writer who comes across best in a journal.”1 Was it really unbearable? Probably, but we can understand this differently to Paulhan. Namely, in the sense suggested by Bataille—another one of its first readers—of Aminadab bringing us “knowledge and manifestation of the destiny of man as a whole.”2
The publication of Aminadab further developed Blanchot’s reputation—whether good or bad—in literary circles. Numerous articles appeared, including some weighty ones: their authors were Bousquet, Sartre, and Maulnier. Bataille quoted the novel several times in Inner Experience, which he finished in summer 1942 and published in spring 1943. Although they remained silent at the time, a number of readers took note of it and were just as impressed, among them Roger Laporte and Louis-René des Forêts. Albert Camus already saw this second metaphysical novel as “a new form of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.”3
Bataille, Camus, and Paulhan were not alone in comparing Blanchot’s first two works of fiction—although the differences between them are considerable. Aminadab is the first récit published by Blanchot; its itinerary is linear, proceeding via tableaux that uncover the characters, keep up their hopes, increase their stupefaction. It has the language, framing, and aesthetic forms of the récit, with its unplaceable and almost fantastic world, its characters who come up against nonsense, and themselves perform unexplained acts. The reader is initiated into the obscure little by little, instead of it utterly overwhelming him or her. The novel provides a foretaste of Blanchot’s narrative rhetoric, being something like the concentrated version, the literal clarity, the embryonic law of that rhetoric. In its stripped-down quality we can see the influence of Bataille and Kafka.4
Aminadab also bears the memory of Emmanuel Levinas (its title being the first name of one of his younger brothers, who had recently been shot by the Nazis in Lithuania) and, beyond this, of the Jewish people (as a first name Aminadab means “my people are generous” or “wandering people”).5 But its main debt is to Georges Bataille. Whether failure, stupor, jouissance, or mortification, the experiences related allowed one to travel to the limits of Being (the ipse), and out the other side. The Thomas character obeys this logic, or rather this “nonlogical difference” of identity. Joë Bousquet’s comment was: “a being is born: his task is to search for what kind of being he is, precisely. He therefore has to learn painful lessons everywhere where what he is searching for is not.”6 In Bataille’s terms, “agreement with oneself is perhaps a kind of death”; he was considerably touched by the ending of Aminadab.7 This ending dares to remain, risks remaining suspended in nothingness. The entirety of human destiny is at stake through Thomas and his new epic of inner experience, “the human odyssey finishing with Aminadab.” Is this a song of the sirens? Aminadab is already the récit of navigation, this pure récit or “movement toward song” that in The Book to Come Blanchot would set in opposition to the novel. It is the approach to the event: “the opening of this infinite movement which is the encounter itself,” the encounter as “imaginary distance in which absence is realized and only at the end of which does the event begin to occur.”8 Aminadab is the récit of Bataille and Blanchot’s experience, their chance, their encounter. “No one arrives at this point except those who are exhausted,” Bataille would say. Ultimately, “there is nothing,” “there is the night,” “there is nothing but night.”
Once history [l’histoire] is complete, mankind’s existence would enter into animalistic night. Nothing is less certain. But does night demand this first condition: that one be unaware that it is night? The night that knew it was night would not be night, would only be the decline of day. . . .
This forgetting, the world’s forgetting to know that it carries mankind’s destiny, is “the extreme lucidity” given “in the collapse of lucidity”: “what falls is the night of Aminadab.”
Blanchot’s writing closes over, like this night, a world belonging to it alone, belonging to literature alone. It forces the simulacrum’s unhappy consciousness to take written form (a simulacrum that, whether erotic or bookish, is always that of death). It also forces its sovereignty upon one. It permits meaning only after an effacement of the habitual world of signification, via a practice of in-significance. Language’s referential capacities collapse. Its power to signify is neutralized. The house in Aminadab so little resembles a house that the reader asks himself or herself whether the word “house” still refers to the same concept. This is precisely Thomas’s situation when he enters a room and thinks “that he [has] stepped into a café”; he has a language applicable to things, but this world neutralizes it.9 The same word can change meaning several times; the sign advancing on the chessboard of narrative is impeded by this lack of self-identity. The narrative is full of logical operators (“similarly,” “thus,” “this is why” . . .), but this logical operation is never integrated into any reasoning.10 Last, the first-person narration refuses the task of creating meaning. The narrative’s frequent slippages into free indirect discourse bear witness to Thomas’s interruptions, hypotheses, reasonings, and attempts to piece the facts together. “Was it true? Was it simply a word of encouragement? . . . Was it possible? There was certainly a misunderstanding” (50); “the plan itself must have been interrupted” (51); “he had certainly been very ill” (155), and so on.
Thomas is a neutral sign, without a past, a face, a family; beginning with his first description, he is stripped bare: “alone,” alone in his perplexed questioning, in his solitude linked to “the anguish of his own destitution” (6). He has no choice except to go on, decisively, stubbornly, sometimes blindly, so much so that the quest takes him into narcissistic vexation, the ambition for power, and the desire for knowledge. Death constantly forces him to confront the anguish of the present, leading him to the dead-end of his illusory desire, that of “clarifying every-thing.” He is faced with a coercive, explicitly authoritarian universe, or one most often silent, and whose silence is terrible, suffocating, full of negation (“nothing is happening, there is nothing” says a young man, 75); faced with a passive voice, an anonymous, unplaceable power that disallows freedom all the more through its claims to dispense it, Thomas—this Bartleby who moves forward—only continues to progress thanks to the desire to see what alienates him in the moments he is captured by images. However, faced with a world full of virile characters, who all seem to know more about it than he, a world in which the few women turn out to be instruments of power, Thomas fails to be initiated. He is ignorant, constantly threatened or locked up; he suffers or becomes depressed, is tossed around in the masculine universe only to end up facing an authoritarian woman; a laughing stock, loved by no one, “Thomas” incarnates the motifs of a guilt anxiety, a castration anxiety.
The narration invents a closed world devoid of external references, one that is not believable, not defined by tasks or by individuals, but is a world of play around a character who—unaware of the comic illusion and of its ability to be protective—becomes afraid, tries to understand but does not, and gives in to anguish. Baroque illusion takes the place of the world as a stage. Like Sade’s château, the house in Aminadab does not belong to the world of production; only luxury and play make it possible. The Sadean world, where everyone is yoked to a task, produces only jouissance. The Blanchotian house, where everyone pretends to have a task, produces only anxiety, an endlessly risible anxiety.
There is something of René Char in the version of Blanchot given by Bousquet: “He has shattered the union of the soul and the body. By hiding from mankind the cardinal points of his habitual actions, he gives an inner centre to each fact, transforms life into a cloud and beyond thought, lifts this fog which is already of the dawn.”11
Bousquet was a poet of the palpable who even in drawing our attention to insignificant elements related them “to emotions in which thought rediscovers its depth.” Bousquet situates Blanchot in the position of a poet out ahead of others. His political reading of the narrative does not prevent him from admitting that Blanchot does not believe in “social solutions.” He recognized Aminadab as the kind of work needed by literature and by a world at war. “It is a question of making one’s own life an instrument with which to explore collective life.”12
More than ever, Thomas represents the fate of his author, ignorant as he is of the world in which he is evolving, blind to the games being played out at his expense, and unwavering in the hermeneutic illusion which removes all thought from him. The house is the site of hygienic, political, religious enclosure: There Thomas undergoes “a long imprisonment in these rooms that are insufficiently ventilated, overheated, and contaminated by the frequent presence of the sick” (184). He eventually discovers that “the earth . . . is a place that fosters one, in which each body finds its subsistence, in which breathing too is a sort of food, and which offers unheard-of possibilities for growth and duration” (186). Heliotropic plants bud from the ends of his fingertips; his eyes grow larger and “their roots extend down the back of the neck to the top of the shoulders” (188). The solar violence of these images, which call to mind Lautréamont and Bataille and are set in opposition to any concrete form of nausea (roots) and any conventional thoughts (on trees), speaks to the sovereign madness of these “storms of visions.”13
Whether they are unplaceable and deformed spaces or faceless subjects, reworkings of presupposed events or the shifting of the things one has invested in (touching both the aesthetics of representation and the functioning of the sign), syntactical alteration or the breaking of the logics of sameness and noncontradiction, narrative incoherence or ellipsis, the lack of dénouement, the main character occupying the focus of knowledge, or the anguish of nonsense . . . the signs of the narrative advance as in a dream sequence, with or without images, they are commented upon and comment upon themselves indefinitely. They advance in the obsessive ritual of isolated speech, bearing traces of the painful process of becoming a subject, and representing the remainders of an inner dialogue with the most remote elements of experience. The impossible does not rely on any conventions to justify itself. Improbable formulations rely on no thematization. The narrative sometimes functions like a dream or a hallucination, only then to immediately cease doing so. If it were presented as a dream, it would protect the reader and would not set free any anguish—or would only set free an anguish that remained make-believe. The narrative forms no “pact” with its reader, simply commentating, commentating freely: by so doing it places every subject in the position of the dreamer unable to comprehend that he is dreaming (an insomniac of the “outside”); or in that of the mourner who gives in to the hallucinatory psychosis of desire (and survives death itself); or in that of the guilty person who constantly sees the face of his misdeed (a victim of torture torn apart by himself). This mode of speech is talkative because it is alert, pays attention to detail, remains on the lookout for the smallest signal, is always keen to interpret, manically keen to explain (via parentheses, incisions, suppositions, alternatives, rectifications, overemphases . . .). It is infinitely polished and given form by a maniacal preciousness that offers a position of relative security (“I tried, by sheltering under this word, to advance further forward”). This mode of speech holds the subject under the sway of an agonizing but explainable exteriority, holding him there by means of a semiotic activity in which he locates the necessity of his existence (there is already something here of what Beckett’s writings would be). This work within language allows us to appreciate how much the subject finds all discourse indifferent, and how much the narrative becomes an excessive simulacrum. “What cannot be, that alone satisfies [writing].”14
Yes, perhaps his political past was becoming something akin to a dream, a past that we can imagine was never experienced, like one of those experiences where one does not recognize oneself. Perhaps it was becoming a past in which language and rhetoric had floated close to an unformed, uncomfortable ideal that must be infinitely condemned, shown no mercy; perhaps in the past language and rhetoric had provided cover amid convictions that were tolerated, self-justified, self-accepted, and then unacceptable, unjustifiable, impossible—but still conceivable, thus imposing on this wandering man the duty of thinking.
So where is the fault? For it does exist; we feel it with no less force than we feel our purity. It is in this world in which we had thought we were so happy. It suddenly fouls the air. We can no longer breathe. (103)