This récit was not yet called The Madness of the Day, but simply Un récit or, with a question mark, Un récit? It appeared in the journal Empédocle in May 1949 under this title, with or without question mark (with it on the cover and the running heads, without it in the table of contents and at the start of the narrative).
It takes place in the first person and is presented, whether playfully or awkwardly, as a mixture of fictitious self-portrait and autobiographical fragmentation, sometimes humorous and sometimes obscure, as if such obliqueness were necessary when talking about oneself. The importance, seriousness, and decisive character of the events related give it its weight. It interrupts itself in order to directly address the reader (or strictly speaking, the person being narrated to), insisting that the events are real, however unlikely they might appear: “All that was real, take note.”1 There are clear references to the war; the allusions to Blanchot’s private life are plausible (some of them have since been confirmed). Any reader can recognize echoes of the previous récits. However, nothing guarantees that making such connections will lead anywhere. The first sentence is an early warning: “I am not learned; I am not ignorant” (5), and the narrative voice retains the right to deny anything it might put forward. It shatters any possible spatial continuity, any continuity of the sign. The “I” present at the beginning is not the “I” that, in a long dreamlike, mystical or fabulous passage, dialogues with the Law, and that seems to have divine powers (“To see you was worth one’s life. To love you meant death,” 16). The denouement does not lead to any final event, but to narrative speech itself, which is suddenly brought back to its semblance of a beginning, because the first sentences (“I am not learned; I am not ignorant,” etc.) are repeated in a dialogue with two doctors. This means that the récit seems not to begin or finish anywhere, except in distance, the gaze toward the end, as if the latter were the only thing that makes up the récit presented to the reader, an impossibility of récits, a récit which immediately cancels itself out, stops (s’arrête), signs its own death sentence, its definitive effacement: “A story [récit]? No. No stories, never again” (18). Blanchot circumvents all academic, medical, psychiatric, and psychoanalytical demands and expectations regarding the stories we tell. “To wring out the story like an unavowable secret” is what biographical speech risks doing, i.e. ignoring the (neutral) “narrative voice” and replacing it with a “narrating [narratrice] voice” (which can be thematized, attributed, identified).2 The first autobiographical revelation is that the récit is disfigured even as it is constructed, that it is unwritten at the same time as it is written. Here Blanchot brings to an end the period of his previous novels (even Death Sentence is an inverse version of a drama or spectacle). The Madness of the Day reaches a level of extreme visibility that condemns the récit.3 Self-inscription will henceforth only be possible through self-effacement.
We can recognize this effacement not as an underhand desire to deprive one of what is private, to secrete what is secret, but instead as the least shameful point toward which the exposure of intimacy can lead, following the discovery of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. Adhering to silence, to gentleness, to restrained tones are all gestures that align Blanchot with Robert Antelme. They represent an attempt to take upon himself (which is to say, upon the récit) the impossibility of still simply telling stories, an impossibility that constitutes the aesthetic fate imposed by Auschwitz. This was the only format in which Blanchot bore witness at this stage; he probably considered it the only one of any dignity. “The unknown in other people” (9) was growing “tired of being the stone that beats men alone to death.” In The Madness of the Day, Blanchot evokes a large part of his own political, psychological, medical, and amorous past. And he does so in an oblique, intensely literary way, as if literature had the task of dealing with what no public avowal, even that of the novel, can either compensate for or produce. Literature levels out the differing orders of events within the singularity of an itinerary and a destiny, a singularity both vindicated and taken on as one’s own. This neutrality asks questions of us: It asks questions about the impurity of our avid expectation of an avowal, about our propensity to condemn impatiently and indiscriminately, about our blind faith in our ability to safely categorize the intolerable. It asks questions about our expectations of literature itself, of autobiography, justice, and the secret. Literature is the site where what is public becomes private without being made unavailable, where what is private becomes public without being revealed. It is the site where the relation between “the immensity of others” and the “solid” self decide on the health of the body.4 It is the site where public and private cancel each other out in a mutual bearing (where what is tolerable and what is unthinkable are distinguished), and where, finally, the future of ideas, of engagements, of writings, of passions is decided. Blanchot finds no other site to occupy than this. Literature is the site of insubordination to the Law, beyond all wounds, which he evokes in the final pages of The Madness of the Day.5 Literature smashes all ideals, spins their reasoning around, leaving it close by and always available if necessary, but retains something inflexible, provides another way of looking, often a feminine one, that of death. It magnifies things and loosens one’s grip, and is as scrupulous as the demand to which the death sentence has condemned language.
Literature allows no moment of rest: critical glory has its dignity to maintain, has to appropriate these restless torments, all the more so given that repose, the room’s opening onto Corsica and the headland, is close by, coiled up, only a gaze away. It is as unshifting as the horizon, it tears space apart and allows only disorienting phenomena to appear in its field of activity. Trying to be as inflexible as death, it knows how to recall its ability to tear bodies apart, and accepts nothing from the author if his gaze at the time is not blind (“a wound”), his head “a hole” (a pineal hole?), his body “a disemboweled bull” (17). This was the only sense in which one can talk of the pacification of literature.