‘Make It So That I Can Speak’

Terror

Who better than Philip K. Dick has presented the terror of worlds that fall apart? In his most terrifying books, it is our world, the real one, that crumbles. Palmer Eldritch’s face in the sky – even here, in our world. The sign of the Fish which attests to the survival of the Roman Empire and to its secret resistants.

In Blanchot’s récits, the fictional world is, in a different way, subject to a wearing away, an erosion, which terrifyingly, seems to carry itself over to our real world. But now the face of Palmer Eldritch is everywhere, he looks at us from everything, and when we look in a mirror, his eyes look out from our own.

In the récits and the fragmentary writings, it is our world that is being presented – our world, but doubled; it is not just the field that opens itself to our grasp, but a great still opacity. And so it is with the narrators and protagonists: they, too, are doubled; their actions, their intensions are ghosted by what they cannot do and cannot have. Who are they, the ones who have lost their hold on life?

The setting of Blanchot’s fiction is mundane, the prose is calm; what is monstrous is what is made to present itself by way of that tranquility. True, there are sometimes sudden leaps – Judith dies in the narrator’s arms, J. is brought back to life – and moments where the prose leaps into a strange abstraction: words like fascination, image, return, are used as a telegraphic shorthand.

All this is odd enough, but Blanchot goes further still. What if the events of the narrative are not what matters at all – or rather, that what matters does so by way of them. In Death Sentence, the narrator says what is important is not what is told, but something else, as if the events of the book come to stand in for another happening, as though they sacrificed themselves to a greater demand.

The récit, Blanchot claims, bears upon its own happening, its own event. Indeed, the récit is just a name for this event, even as it needs to give itself body in terms of a specific narrative, and is nothing apart from what is given to be read.

How difficult this is! But I will not take the long detour that would be required in order to make sense of this claim. Let me ask, more simply, about the demand of the récit, of Blanchot’s récits.

Fascination

For Blanchot, there is the faith in a kind of reading that sets you back from yourself, allowing an experience which does not have, as its measure, the ‘I’ of power and possibility. To read is to experience the ‘I’ as profoundly cracked; it is to open the fissure that, in truth, was always there, and which closed only as you, as a child, learned to speak.

For what comes with speech? The world is lifted from its hinges – or it seems to double itself; to speak is to speak of an ideal world, to know this table through the idea of a table. But then this table, the immediate, the here and now, is passed over in favour of the idea. Infancy, Blanchot says, is a time of fascination; the world is measureless, and does not hold itself at that distance that would allow it to be known (think of the boy Alexander in Bergman’s film, or of the very young children of Woolf’s The Waves).

But then comes the transition; language divides the speaker from what is spoken; this division is ideal, separating out what was joined to itself in the infant’s fascinated embrace of the world. Now comes the Fall. There is nothing immediate; or if it is experienced, it is as though in the past tense; it reaches me before me, or in that place where I am still an infant, where infancy continues to accompany me.

And it is because of that infant, that continual infancy, that I am cracked and always cracked. This is what I forget. But I am made to remember again (or, at least, the infant ‘inside’ me, the outside inside, wakes up). What carries itself over to my ordinary, everyday world is the chance of an alteration that would make the world fascinating again. Fascinating – but also terrifying, for the adult is frightened, unlike the child, of losing control.

And now each thing, like a comet’s head, bears a ghostly tail; the determinacy of the world is joined to the indeterminable; and it is as though space could at any moment give upon fascination and time upon the absence of time: themes explored at length in Blanchot’s The Space of Literature.

But there is something missing from this book that is not missing from his fiction, which I now I understand to roamed always ahead of his critical reflections, like a scout. Rereading Thomas, I shook my head: everything is here, already. Everything, and already developed.

Then Blanchot had to refind what he had found by literature in his critical writings. To refind it, and then to discover its philosophical stakes. This in dialogue with Levinas, who wrote beside him. Perhaps it is in the essays written in the wake of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, which bear on the status of the relation to the human Other, that Blanchot reaches theoretically what was already found and by way of his récits.

True, Blanchot’s fiction was always concerned with the relation to the Other, and in a startling way. What else at issue in the exchanges of the unnamed man and woman who are together and apart in the hotel room in Waiting, Forgetting?

Reading ‘The Sirens’ Song’, one might suppose these dialogues are only a way of allegorising or redoubling the happening of the récit. The relationships between the characters in Blanchot’s fiction would not matter so much as the relationship of the writer or the reader to the récit itself. Everything – plot, character development, the ‘interest’ of the narrative – would have been devoured by the black hole of the récit.

But this is misleading, as becomes clear when those récits are read alongside Blanchot’s insistence on the absolute singularity of the relation to the human other.

Conversation

‘Make it so I can speak to you’, entreats the young woman of Waiting, Forgetting. She wants the man who she is with for a single night to write, to record their conversation, to write about the anonymous hotel room in which they find themselves. He writes; she reads what he writes, but she’s not satisfied. They speak; he writes, but she does not believe she has spoken. It is his responsibility; he must help the one who came to his room when he made a sign to her from his balcony.

Sometimes she looks to him as one stronger than her; sometimes, it is clear she is stronger. Sometimes they are both weak, and their exchange becomes a litany. But he has been told, and more than once, what his responsibility is. And what of the narrator, who stands apart from both characters?

They are waiting for speech, all of them, but speech never comes. But what would it mean, speech? Is it analogous to what Blanchot will call the book to come – the way in which the artwork is never yet itself, as it recalls that infancy when the world becomes fascinating, when everything is made strange, and by way of the work.

Now the determinacy of the world is joined to the indeterminable, now there is the chance of an alteration that would let the world become fascinating. But the chance of that chance depends on the human other, and upon that communication that would reach the other. Not what is said – a determinable message, a clear communication, but the ‘that there is’ of communicativity, the saying that lets speak the indeterminable by way of the indeterminate; the ghostly tail that burns behind the world; the terror of the adult who has lost control of things. And this by way of the other, this shared – this ‘that there is’ of language, as it speaks by way of what is said. This is the narrative voice of the récit, which depends on the Other.

This is the voice that would resound for us, Blanchot’s readers. But it also figures itself as what speaks between the characters of his narratives . Between – and as a kind of background, a murmuring that each side of the dialogue encounters, and in his or her own way. But can it be called a dialogue, an exchange in which nothing is communicated?

Conversation, entretien, that which is held between, that which holds itself between: this is the relation that the reader should have with the récit. And it is the relation, too, that is held between those who speak in Blanchot’s récits. ‘Make it so that I can speak’: let speak in me what is held between us. Let speak that which burns behind all things, the fiery trail, the absence of the world in the world, and via what I say. What I say – what it says, this burning tail, this murmuring reserve that recedes as soon as speech is transcribed.

It speaks between them, the characters of Waiting, Forgetting, but speaks as it says nothing, as it conveys nothing. This is what they would like to capture. The male character writes; the narrator writes; and the woman, calls for that transcription which would show fidelity to the event that was happening between them. Calls, then, for that narrative, that act of writing which would let speech resound.

But there can be no transcription – you cannot write of that speech which is only indeterminable. The male character writes of the room, of the details of the room. He sets down what is said, and passes what he writes to her. But has he made it so that she can speak? And what of the narrator, who remains on the side of the male character, knowing more than him? He, too is a transcriber; he records, he remembers. Further still: what of Blanchot, who writes of this male character, this female character and of the narrator?

No transcription. But the récit, as a whole, is still an attempt to transcribe, to redouble, the relation of speech. The récit does not bear, simply, upon its own event, its own happening, but upon the happening of speech. In one sense, this is perfectly consistent with ‘The Sirens’ Song’: what is exchanged between the conversationalists redoubles something of the relationship between reader and récit. Of course, reading is unilateral – but what if the book was altered in its encounter with you? Imagine that the relation of reading were redoubled, and both sides, now without common measure, responded to each as to the other. That is what is at stake in the doubly dissymmetrical relation to the Other, where both ‘terms’ of the relation are altered in turn.

Responsibility

No chance that his account of the relation to the human other parallels what Blanchot has already called ‘literary responsibility’, that is, the way in which the author determines a récit in his response to the murmuring of the indeterminable. Now, however, responsibility is doubled; it becomes communal, in Blanchot’s understanding of the world, as the relation in question works in two directions.

Responsibility redoubled. The encounter with the Other. Do not think Blanchot has become Levinasian. For the encounter happens by way of the Other, at issue is a relation that is redoubled and to that extent shared – a community without common measure, that is, which no longer depends upon the primacy of what is said in the first person. What matters is the background of speech, its lack of determination, rather than the Other whose address would awaken me to speech. Or rather, that address is only the lack of determination, the reserve.

When, in the years aurrounding the publication of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, Blanchot also maintains the human Other is more other than anything else, this does not mean Blanchot has separated literary responsibility from that which awakens in the relation to the murmuring of language, to communicativity that happens by way of the relation to the Other. Blanchot has not turned from literature to ethics; nor does he rank the alterity of the Other (speech) and the alterity of the work (writing) with respect to one another.

The récit figures the redoubled relation to the Other, community. As such, it does not bear simply on its own happening, the happening of writing, but also upon the happening of speech. Both are relations to language (to communicativity, to the fact of language); both are ways in which which language gives itself to be experienced. The récit is only a particular folding of this experience – an implication of speech in writing, even as speech and writing are never separable. Speech and writing, as both are thought from the experience of language, are not distinct in kind.

Still, by emphasising the relation of speech in the period of The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot does indicate something like the ethical or the political stakes of the experience of language in question. This is not an ethics or politics of literature – not a way, that is, of showing the specific commitments that attend upon the act of reading or writing, but, in keeping with the broadening of Blanchot’s concerns in this period, a more general reflection, alongside Levinas, but distinct from him, on language.

A reflection that continues to pass by way of a practice of literary writing, and by way of Waiting, Forgetting. It is not that this récit is different in kind from those that precede it, nor not even that it outplays the theorisation of the récit Blanchot provides in ‘The Sirens’ Song’. But there is a change of emphasis in Blanchot’s writings in this period – a concern with the redoubled relation to language that occurs in what he calls community, that is, in the relation between two or more people such that each, in relating to another, is brought into contact with an experience of language.

Freedom

Terror: Palmer Eldritch’s face appears in the sky, in our world. Terror: with Blanchot our world is no longer our own, and who are we, who wander like dazed oxen in the time of the récit? But with The Infinite Conversation it becomes clearer that this terror is also a liberation, that infancy’s return as the experience of language, is the chance of freedom. A freedom, now, that I do not possess, that is not that ‘ability to be able’ in league with the unfolding of the world, but that possesses me, returning as speech or as writing.

Simplistic indeed to link freedom to indeterminability, to the experience of language. But let me leave this thought here, rather than take it further in an already overlong and convoluted post.