In 1943, keeping away from anything that could compromise him, Blanchot again began hoping that the war would end.1 Germany had capitulated at Stalingrad on February 2 and retreated massively from the Soviet Union, beginning that summer. In Algiers, the Committee for National Liberation was beginning to take shape.
In March, Bataille moved to Vézélay with Denise Rollin and her son Jean. Blanchot visited them several times, in spring and in summer; he was also thinking of leaving Neuilly, where he lived. But in October, Bataille separated from Denise Rollin, returned from Vézélay, and moved into Balthus’s studio in the Cour de Rohan, in Paris. At the end of the year, according to Prévost, he proposed to Blanchot, Lignac, Ollivier, and Petitot that they write a manifesto for political action to be sent to Algiers. All declined the offer with “polite skepticism,” and the idea was abandoned.2
In August, Gallimard founded a new literary prize, the Prix de la Pléiade.3 The prize was 100,000 francs and it was open to young writers, with the winners being free to publish their manuscripts wherever they wanted. As a sign of the recognition he had gained thanks to his first two novels, and perhaps also of his strategic involvement in the NRF affair, Blanchot joined the panel of judges alongside Paulhan, Arland, Malraux, Queneau, Bousquet, Grenier, Camus, Sartre, and Éluard.
His presence at Gallimard allowed him to make a new acquaintance, which in other circumstances, fifteen years later, would grow into a friendship: that of Dionys Mascolo. At this time, the two men did little more than briefly acknowledge each other. Blanchot knew little of Mascolo’s life, of his closeness to Robert Antelme and to Marguerite Duras, who were state employees and, from September of that year, the active forces behind a Resistance movement.
A friend of Michel Gallimard (Gaston’s nephew), Mascolo had for several years been tasked with reading difficult manuscripts for the publishing house.4 This is what had led him to read Thomas the Obscure. On January 1, 1942, he officially became part of the reading committee, and a year later, Mascolo passed on to Blanchot the news that Gaston Gallimard wished to collect and publish his column from the Journal des Débats; he himself was to be in charge of editing the collection. The proposal was a “shock” for Blanchot, who had clearly never thought of making the column into a book. Had he even truly decided to construct a critic’s oeuvre? “Faux pas really was a faux pas” and, as he would state in a confused mixture of reproach and gratitude, “I owe it to Dionys Mascolo.” Blanchot came to this view very soon. The wordplay of the title was far from being lost on him. He finally decided on that title in August 1943, thus changing the name of a work that had initially been known to the review committee as Digressions.5
The expression itself is used three times in the articles for the Journal des Débats, but, except for the title, it would not be used in the work itself. The reference is in part to the “faux pas” that is forbidden by Valéry’s vigilant gaze on the world: “He scans its depths, and turns his analyses into an adventure where it is possible to get lost, but not to put a wrong foot forward (faire un faux-pas).”6 Elsewhere, the absence of faux pas is said to describe the aesthetics of Jean Follain, as he moves “from the level of appearances . . . to [the] level of reality.”7 And the faux pas of a character in Georges Magnane plunges him into a ravine: a fatal fall.8
But the “step” (pas) is above all the notion Blanchot uses to refer to his own critical approach. His articles advance jerkily, through successive investigations, deepening lines of enquiry, turning paradoxes on their head: these are so many steps taken in approaching the work (we also read of taking “a final step” at the end of the chapter on Paulhan).9 However, the criticism remains as distant from the work as the work does from experience: one is always the “unfaithful depository” of the other; singular experiences can only move toward one another by carrying out “illusory steps.”10 Each step (pas) by the critic is therefore also a “faux pas.”
Playing on the ambiguity over whether the faux pas of the title is singular or plural, Blanchot allows it to be understood that each of the fifty-five chapters constitutes a “faux pas,” a “flower of evil” of the critical approach. Not all of them are taken from the Journal des Débats. Blanchot also includes two articles on Settanni and Woolf which had appeared in L’Insurgé, one on Lautréamont from the Revue Française des Idées et des Oeuvres, both journals edited by Maulnier.
The book was published in December; Blanchot greatly altered the articles, which he himself had chosen. The opening text, “From Anguish to Language,” which is steeped in Bataille’s vocabulary and experience, was previously unpublished. It attempts to bring the ensemble together, profiling the way in which the other pieces are ordered. The chronological order of Blanchot’s intellectual itinerary is reversed: questions on the renewal of the novel as a genre, creation, and myth are placed below those on the nudity of inner experience and its conflict with language. Even though they were recent (dating from March and May 1943), the texts on Rilke, Bataille, and Proust—which are decisive—head up the collection. “What anger constructs, is destroyed by anguish or fear,” Blanchot writes apropos of Michaux in August 1944.11 We could say as much about his critical itinerary in the 1940s, which was constructed in the anger provoked by the enslavement of young literature by a debased tradition, but then torn apart by the real anguish of inner experience, which now determined how the space of research was oriented within the confines of the book.
Solitude only has meaning in the name of the other. It carries within it an invisible partner.
It is to the intelligent witness that the mute animal appears to be tormented by solitude. It is not he who is alone who experiences the feeling of being alone; this monster of desolation needs the presence of another for its desolation to have meaning.12
At such times solitude comes face to face with its own dying. As for writing, it comes face to face with the silence of such a situation.
The writer finds himself in the increasingly comic condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it. . . . It seems wretched and preposterous that anguish, which opens and closes the heavens, needs, in order to manifest itself, the activity of a man sat at his table tracing letters on a piece of paper. . . . The writer is summoned by his anguish to a real sacrifice of himself. He must expend and consume the forces that make him a writer. . . . He must be destroyed in an act that really puts him in question. . . . Anguish does not allow the solitary person to be alone. It deprives him of the means of being in relation to an other, making him more estranged from his human reality than if he were suddenly changed into vermin; but, thus stripped bare, and ready to sink into his monstrous particularity, it casts him outside himself and, in a new torment that he experiences like a suffocating radiation, it confuses him with what he is not, making his solitude an expression of his communication and making this communication the meaning his solitude takes, and drawing from this synonymy a new reason to be anguish added to anguish.13
Part Pascalian wager, part Kafkaean destitution, part Bataillean expenditure, “From Anguish to Language” is one of Blanchot’s finest autobiographical texts. Lived, physical anguish shines clearly through it. This anguish provides the authority behind the quality of this criticism, and gives it the force of a writer’s criticism.14