‘Literary Responsibility’

Ulysses and Homer

There’s no English equivalent of the French récit, which names a literary genre which tells of a single event. A few dense notes on what this word comes to mean for Blanchot in The Book to Come and elsewhere.

Ulysses journeys; this is what Homer remembers and recounts. The event of the journey is separate from the event of narration. But Blanchot argues the récit does not does not simply recount an event, whether real or fictional, representing it at a distance, but makes it happen. Ulysses and Homer are one. Then, on his account, the event would need the récit in order to occur, and the contents of the récit would allegorise the event for which they would substitute (Breton’s encounter with Nadja, Ahab’s with the whale).

But one should not be misled by what Blanchot apparently indicates about the event. The récit allows the event to complete itself, to be brought to form only as its narrative form is unjoined from itself. One might say (rather pretentiously) it is a kind of non-event that happens as the récit – and the non-event that spreads everywhere, devouring plot, character and the rest, like a black hole that turns at the heart of the book.

But if this is the case, event and non-event must be thought together. The récit allows an event to be narrated, to be limited, delimited so that it can be brought to language. But that limit is also subject to a kind of detour; it is indeterminable, or rather, that what is called delimitation or determination happens by solidifying a reserve that can never, in its entirety, be brought into focus.

The récit, it is true, always has a plot to devour, and characters to disperse; it is exposed to the danger of a kind of erosion or wearing away. At any moment, the limits of the récit threaten to come undone; the récit, especially in Blanchot’s hands, seems to be perpetually on the brink of unravelling itself. But this happens exactly as the delimitation of the récit, and as a trembling of those limits.

This is what gives Blanchot’s récits their uncertain status; they are like nothing else written. Do they bear upon a single event, or even the happening of an event? Or do they return, over and again, to those events which seem to unlimit themselves and are unable to be brought to a conclusion?

The Demand of the Récit

In Death Sentence, for example, the narrator will insist that everything he has told is but a substitute for another event, which he cannot reach. And not even an event – a kind of fall from the event, a drifting without determinacy (or perhaps determination should be rethought, and in a way equivalent to the event).

How should this be understood? The act of narration is divided. Language divides itself from what it is possible to say, to represent in terms of actions, of characters and of what befalls them, and what cannot be said: a kind of opacity in language which tears it from its referential function. Or once again, and the point is not difficult, there is what can be said by way of language – and by way of those characters and milieus language would allow the author to bring to life, and a kind of saying of language itself, its sonorousness, its rhythms, the way it seems to thicken itself into an idiom, saying nothing at all but the fact that it is.

Those compelled to write, according to Blanchot, are as though addressed by this opacity; they experience it, and the récit is one outcome of this experience – the narrative being shaped to figure an encounter with what will not allow itself to speak in terms of characters, plot, etc. An encounter with what remains intransitive in language – it is not simply that I cannot convey what I experienced of this or that day, of the beauty of that vista, of the singularity of that bouquet of flowers, but that language also resists the attempt to convey anything at all.

In this sense, it breaks from that same experience of power and possibility that, for Blanchot, following Heidegger, is the condition of our experience of the world. Higher than actuality is possiblity: the world gives itself as it is given to human powers and possibility; it depends upon that potentiality-to-be for its structure and coherence. But then, as Heidegger allows, that coherency is precarious: what is the Nothing but Heidegger’s name for its withdrawal, when we lose grip on the world, and the world seems to stand outside of our powers, obdurate and unalterable?

As with Heidegger, so with Blanchot – but this has to be thought in terms of language (just as it does in the later Heidegger): there is an experience of language as the Nothing, when it does not speak of the world around us –  or if it does, it is only to redouble the becoming-opaque of the world. But then the world, for Blanchot, is only given through language; there is, in this sense, no redoubling – there is not the world and then language, only their cobelonging in a single experience.

There are times, then, when language and the world become opaque; times – or rather, what breaks the course of time, being those happenings which can never round themselves off into a completed event because they transform we who experience them. It is not just that the récit would represent these incompletable events, for the récit is also one of them.

This is difficult! The events in question, Claudia brushing Judith’s hair, the attempt of the nameless narrator of Waiting, Forgetting, to make it so his companion could speak, transcribing their exchanges, and allowing her to read them, Thomas letting himself fall into an open grave seem to be such that, although in some sense incompletable, unlimitable, are nonetheless reported, represented, in the récit.

But to write a récit, to read one, is to undergo just such an experience; therefore, the experience of reading Blanchot is doubly strange – both for those events, those non-events that are narrated, and for the form of narration itself, when everything becomes uncertain. But in a sense, it is not simply that the narrative form is fitted to what occurred, even when it seems to be the case, as in the opening paragraphs of Death Sentence, where the narrator seems to want to tell us something immensely important, and that he has struggled to write a number of times.

No, the récit is not simply where what is told is allowed to happen, in the manner of a repressed experience that is allowed to be spoken at last. It is itself a happening (inverted commas around the word happening) – it is already an event. That is why the narrator of Death Sentence will say, in effect, that it does not matter what he writes, he is trying to speak of something for which the narrative he has written is a paltry substitute.

It is as though the récit, wanting to be written, wants to draw, phantom-like, on the life of its narrator, on the events (inverted commas around this word) he would report. But the récit is never satisfied with any of these events, knowing each of them comes undone. In Blanchot’s hands, the récit is unappeasable; it demands too much. This is because it can never finish trying to bring itself into existence – even as it can never be brought forth thus, depending, as it does, on what makes language opaque and withdraws it from meaning.

Ulysses does not precede Homer; Homer is also Ulysses in the telling of the récit; both men are one, and the writing of the récit is the adventure that shipwrecks both of them. Homer writes; Ulysses tells of what happens to him. But Homer is a name for the demand of the récit; he wants to speak of that demand, wants to let it resound through everything that is said. Is there a struggle between the two parts of the author? Either way, what was written stands in for what can never bring itself into the light of meaning. Every reported event is substitutive; it only stands in for the happening, the non-happening of the récit itself.

The Passion of Determination

To write, Blanchot argues, is bring oneself into contact with the indeterminable, or it is to experience something like the passion of determination and delimitation. It is this experience for which any particular narrative would substitute itself: the narrative voice speaks of what resists power and possibility; it is an experience of language as it loosens its capacity to refer, to speak of the world in which we are capable of understanding and of action.

But then, at the same time, the récit needs words; it needs narrative – the author must be able to complete a written text, if only as a substitute for experience in question. The author, coming into the experience for which the récit is one name, must determine this experience, lending it form. It would be possible to sketch a history of narrative in terms of these forms, but what distinguishes our time, in which Blanchot writes his récits, is that this determinacy is understood in its passion, its trembling.

Higher than possibility stands impossibility; in place of actuality, there is an absence of world – or the world is given as what resists our powers: this is what presents itself in Blanchot’s fiction. Once again, this is prefigured in Heidegger – in the idea (in The Origin of the Work of Art) that earth is what would resist world, struggling with it: that the earth resists human powers, human potentiality, and the open dimension of the world.

Even as it opens the world, the earth turns it aside from that opening, so that what seems to bestow itself – the brightness and brilliance of a world in a particular epoch – does so via a kind of withholding. Earth gives the world as what resists the dimension of light; it appears, but only as it is turned from us, its titanic face facing out into the night.

Above all, for Heidegger, it is presented thus – as a struggle with power, with light – in the work of art. He will even permit himself to dream of a great work of art that would found a world – a great inauguration whose chance is not closed to us yet, though we are deep in the epoch of technology. That is the dream of the ‘other’ beginning – the inception we cannot bring about through an act of will, but that may occur, perhaps thousands of years in the future.

With Blanchot, there are no such dreams. If one can speak of the earth with respect to his recits, it can never be foundational: it can never, by struggling with the world, tear wide a new beginning. Rather, it shows the limit of any possible world – the limit, but as it becomes limitless, as it unlimits any attempt to impose boundaries on the given in terms of human power, human potential.

But nevertheless, this does point to a kind of responsibility on the part of the author, and perhaps of the reader. That unlimiting given in the encounter with language as it seems to turn aside from reference, from referentiality, is preserved in the récit.

Récit and Critique

As Levinas comments, comparing Blanchot and Heidegger, art, with the former, is freed from the chance of offering a foundation, of the inauguration of a new epoch. It is unbound from what Heidegger calls truth. As such, it safeguards a kind of resistance, a distance from which the given can be called into critique. Art attains a critical function. This is not a formulation Blanchot would use. But he will write, as obliquely as always, of a kind of ‘literary responsibility’.

How should this be understood? Simply as the way in which the author, the one compelled to write, gives form to the experience of language in a récit. The way in which the writer – one for whom writing is not an option among others -, elected by that experience, marks that election in his or her work. Examples would include Duras, Laporte, Breton, Kafka and even Melville – but one shouldn’t think the récit presents itself only in literary forms.

In ‘The Ease of Dying’, Blanchot, commenting on Paulhan, can be read as allowing that theoretical works might also constitute récits – that to write philosophy, for example – to be compelled to write – may allow a work of philosophy to be read as a récit. Philosophy (but this is to move to quickly) would become literature, or something like literature; or a kind of research, seemingly specific to literature, would lay claim, too, to that theoretical practice in which writing – in a way, perhaps, unbeknownst to its author – is at issue.

Perhaps the word literature, like the word récit, is substitutive of the more general word, writing – a practice (is this the word?) that gives itself to be spoken (written) in a variety of genres. Then there is the task of attesting to writing – a task of reading, of critical commentary. A task that cannot spare itself from a meditation on the way commentary itself is written, and belongs to writing, that is to say, to the experience of language that writing names.

Commentary, then, is also responsible, and, with modernity, with Blanchot, explicitly so. Explicitly – and as such, unlike the implicit response to the demand of writing that determines the form of particular works in particular genres. Blanchot’s practice of commentary reveals what is implicit; as such, it, too, might be said to be a récit.

It may seem this claim confuses two levels of discourse – there is the text to be commented upon, and then there is the commentary. But the récit, the work, is already a commentary upon itself – it is given form (even though its author may not be consciously aware of this) in response to the experience of language, yes, but a response that is also a negotiation of the laws of a particular genre.

A continual negotation – an attempt, on every page, on every line, to respond to an experience. To respond over and over again. Such a response is already a commentary; it comes after the event; it is a response to the event to which the récit is linked. This response is the condition of what Blanchot calls responsibility, and perhaps it is possible to say that each writer is responsible in his or her own way.

How? By putting the determined unity of the character under pressure; to suspend plot and plotting (Thomas the Obscure); to write not a dialogue, but to stage, in what is said, the impossibility of dialogue (Waiting, Forgetting). And even to dramatise the situation of the writer; to write about writing, or the attempt to write (The One Who …) Each time a negotiation; each time the distinction between narrative and the narrative voice collapses in a new way.

Writing of Heidegger, Blanchot will, on one occasion condemn him as a writer – that is, as one who should have been aware of his responsibility. He was aware (the phrase, the experience of language is also his), but not aware enough; vigilant, but not sufficiently vigilant: how could earth and world be brought into relation with one another such that they would allow the detour of writing to come to a beginning?Above all, how could Heidegger have failed to maintain the passion of determinacy, that wavering which can never be hardened into a beginning?)

In summary, then, the récit does not name a literary genre, for Blanchot, but the practice of responding to the experience of language. Perhaps any piece of writing can be read as a récit. Perhaps, then, literary responsibility is misnamed; it refers to the way in which any author, whether consciously or unconsciously, negotiates the demand of the experience in question, and in whatever form.

A responsibility that reveals itself in and as writing, in the compulsion to write, whether it takes the final form of literature or philosophy. The final form – but there are no final forms. Or writing is what undoes the claim to finality, as it joins itself to the experience that remains on the hither side of what can be said.