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Jan. 6th, 2005 11:24 amBlanchot's Death Sentence: I read most of the way through with only small admirations and small disgusts, laughing aloud at the line "I imagine she came with me because of the irremediability of all things". That goes down with "Guilty feet have got no rhythm" and "the smile on her mouth was the only thing alive enough to have strength to die" among perfectly silly unforgettable sentences. Before the change reality is a little loosened; it's a bit like early Kafka where people do things for no reason and then take stock at length before doing them again. Blanchot seems to mean something by it. This, maybe: perception, memory, and mindset all create for you a world a ripple away from the actual one, yet that world, since you can't shake it off, is the actual actual one: hence new information from the true but absent world often comes across as an inexplicable transformation in your own world. I.e. nature seems like a supernatural force to the unnatural. In the story this comes across through apparent contradictions of the narrator, strange emotional about-faces, a dozen inexplicable actions and occurrences.
The other author Blanchot shows evidence of having read is of course Proust (I sometimes think the whole of contemporary French literary culture lives, squabbling, in just one of his great muddy footprints, and that the least of those). From him he borrows the method of stepping sideways between novel and essay, as well as a certain stance toward the narrator. In both authors the narrator is generally transparent and wise as our tourguide, but as a character keeps on saying or doing the damnedest things, often quite caddish and mean. I'm not entirely sure this is a technique or just my own horror at what's taken to be matter-of-fact behavior by the French.
Ten pages from the end the change comes, and this happens--
I will say very little about what happened then: what happened had already happened long ago, or for a long time had been so imminent that not to have revealed it, when I felt it every night of my life, is a sign of my secret understanding with this premonition. I did not have to take another step to know that there was someone in that room. That if I went forward, all of a sudden someone would be there in front of me, pressing up against me, absolutely near me, of a proximity that people are not aware of: I knew that too. Everything about that room, plunged in the most profound darkness, was familiar to me; I had penetrated it, I carried it in me, I gave it life, a life which is not life, but which is stronger than life and which no force in the world could ever overcome. That room does not breathe, there is neither shadow nor memory in it, neither dream nor depth; I listen to it and no one speaks; I look at it and no one lives in it. And yet, the most intense life is there, a life which I touch and which touches me, absolutely similar to others, which clasps my body with its body, marks my mouth with its mouth, whose eyes open, whose eyes are the most alive, the most profound eyes in the world, and whose eyes see me. May the person who does not understand that come and die. Because that life transforms the life which shrinks away from it into falsehood.
(translated by Lydia Davis)
--which I was not at all expecting from this tale of strange ordinary women in ill-lit hotels. Love, death, certainty, the unknown, inertia, writing and a Buberesque relationship with an unspecified Thought all seem to be involved in this gnosis, which we come to understand has somehow resulted from a sort of mark put on the protagonist by a woman he knew. It's hard to untangle but I think the argument is something like, death (as it pervades and/or represents about a billion other things) is what defines us, and only by approaching our own edges (hard to do because these shift) can we locate it and thereby our own truth (or own whatever). Illness and especially love affairs are methods of approach. Torrents, really.
I'm not sure I understand all this properly (depending on the French text, this translator should either be hanged or knighted) but it's interesting and the end at least was very moving. Was Blanchot being deliberately blah in what led up to the breakthrough so as to enhance it, or was I just unable to overlap with him in the other areas? I mostly found myself arguing, and with something like soup.
The other author Blanchot shows evidence of having read is of course Proust (I sometimes think the whole of contemporary French literary culture lives, squabbling, in just one of his great muddy footprints, and that the least of those). From him he borrows the method of stepping sideways between novel and essay, as well as a certain stance toward the narrator. In both authors the narrator is generally transparent and wise as our tourguide, but as a character keeps on saying or doing the damnedest things, often quite caddish and mean. I'm not entirely sure this is a technique or just my own horror at what's taken to be matter-of-fact behavior by the French.
Ten pages from the end the change comes, and this happens--
I will say very little about what happened then: what happened had already happened long ago, or for a long time had been so imminent that not to have revealed it, when I felt it every night of my life, is a sign of my secret understanding with this premonition. I did not have to take another step to know that there was someone in that room. That if I went forward, all of a sudden someone would be there in front of me, pressing up against me, absolutely near me, of a proximity that people are not aware of: I knew that too. Everything about that room, plunged in the most profound darkness, was familiar to me; I had penetrated it, I carried it in me, I gave it life, a life which is not life, but which is stronger than life and which no force in the world could ever overcome. That room does not breathe, there is neither shadow nor memory in it, neither dream nor depth; I listen to it and no one speaks; I look at it and no one lives in it. And yet, the most intense life is there, a life which I touch and which touches me, absolutely similar to others, which clasps my body with its body, marks my mouth with its mouth, whose eyes open, whose eyes are the most alive, the most profound eyes in the world, and whose eyes see me. May the person who does not understand that come and die. Because that life transforms the life which shrinks away from it into falsehood.
(translated by Lydia Davis)
--which I was not at all expecting from this tale of strange ordinary women in ill-lit hotels. Love, death, certainty, the unknown, inertia, writing and a Buberesque relationship with an unspecified Thought all seem to be involved in this gnosis, which we come to understand has somehow resulted from a sort of mark put on the protagonist by a woman he knew. It's hard to untangle but I think the argument is something like, death (as it pervades and/or represents about a billion other things) is what defines us, and only by approaching our own edges (hard to do because these shift) can we locate it and thereby our own truth (or own whatever). Illness and especially love affairs are methods of approach. Torrents, really.
I'm not sure I understand all this properly (depending on the French text, this translator should either be hanged or knighted) but it's interesting and the end at least was very moving. Was Blanchot being deliberately blah in what led up to the breakthrough so as to enhance it, or was I just unable to overlap with him in the other areas? I mostly found myself arguing, and with something like soup.
