Not a girl and a gun, but a man, a room – that’s how a story might begin. And end. As though that were the most important thing of all: a man on his own, in a room. As though it were through solitude that you reach the essential. Ridiculous, exclusionary myth, and besides, a man is not alone as soon as there is writing, and this is what men in films, in books, tend to do on their own, when they’re looking for the essential: they write.
Is this what is dramatised (is that the word?) in Blanchot’s The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me?
The opening lines: ‘I sought, this time to approach him’: as though it were only now the narrator wants to confront the one who allows him to write. Now is the time for the encounter. But how can it be brought about? Can it be forced? The next lines:
I mean I tried to make him understand that, although I was there, still I couldn’t go any farther, and that I, in turn, had exhausted my resources. The truth was that for a long time now I had felt I was at the end of my strength.
"But you’re not’, he pointed out.
At the end of my strength: to have run out of ability, or to have known the ability to be able the ability to be, fail you. But this is bad faith. To seek to approach him already betrays this inability; you are capable of something; you have a plan; clearly you haven’t exhausted your resources yet. And isn’t the fact that you’re writing these lines testament to precisely the surplus of your strength over your exhaustion? But who is he that answers back? With whom is the narrator conversing throughout this récit?
‘I would like to be.’ A manner of speaking which he avoidied taking seriously; at least, he didn’t take it with the seriousness that I wanted to be put into it. It probably seem to him to deserve more than a wish.
He seems to have been granted a whole personality, an ability to think, to converse: what mystery. And the whole récit consists of their exchanges, and the long passages in which the narrator reflects on the situation in which he finds himself.
How tempting to put on the seven league boots of the philosopher and take great leaps across the text, say, for example: the other with whom the narrator converses is a personification of the condition of possibility of narrative. He is no one apart from the narrator, being only what endures in his place when he is claimed by the fascination with which writing is bound up, for Blanchot.
To say: yes, he is its condition of possibility, but he is also narrative’s condition of impossibility – he stands outside what can be narrated, set back from it, soliciting the movement of narration, but at the same time stepping out of its way, until the narrator, in this case, says firmly to himself, ‘I sought, this time to approach him.’ Him: in the case, the condition, the uncondition of narrative, that which gives and withholds the possibility of telling.
And in this case, this ‘he’ is personified, he is granted a personality, even though, surely, he can be no more than the hinge of a relation, the way in which narrative relates to itself. A hinge – a figure – that detour narrative has to take in order to reach itself. He is no more than that, narrative’s proxy, the one who must be posited by narrative if it is to have a life.
These formulations are easily written – what is more pleasant than to feel you’ve leapt across the text, that in one leap, you’ve reached its end, having understood what took place there. Another temptation is to read this récit alongside others. Think, for example, of the passage a third or so into the récit:
"I spoke of you as a companion. Isn’t that a thoughtless word?"
"I might be your companion? Whom did you say that to
"To myself, while I was reflecting."
"I don’t think I’m behind that word, I think you shouldn’t use it."
And so on. But Thomas of Thomas the Obscure also has a companion, doesn’t he? And isn’t it possible to lay the récits in a single line, to claim there is a movement of literary research that bears Blanchot from one tale to another? Perhaps. But the strangeness remains; the work of reading is, with this text, forever peculiar. Perhaps it’s only possible to approach such a text crabwise, with a specific question in mind.
This one, for example: how is it the companion can speak? How is it he has a personality assigned to him? Perhaps because he is also part of the narrator; he lives from his life, he draws from his strength like a parasitic twin. Or, then, like a time-shadow cast not by the light in front of an opaque object, but what throws its shadow ahead of itself, reaching the future from a past that never existed.
You and the companion are not contemporaries; he haunts you from a time you cannot inhabit. But he haunts you from ‘within’ you; he is only you, or part of you – as if Jesse had survived within Elvis, or Philip K. Dick’s sister within him. ‘Within’ you, but rather that in you that is absorbed by dying, fascinated by it, turning its face to the past in which dying already occurred.
This is what most narratives fail to uncover, and it is what the field of narratology fails to acknowledge: time unjoins itself, it is already division, difference, being inhabited by its own absence. At once, we are each able to be able, and each of us unable; at once, possibility is higher than actuality, and we live the present by way of what will happen in the future, and impossibility is higher than possibility, and it is the past that returns in the future: our prior death, our incessant dying: what sober phenomenology can be made out of this? What philosophy?
Comparing Blanchot to Levinas, Bataille claims the former cries the ‘there is’; for the latter, it is only an object of discussion. How, then, to respond to Blanchot? To cry in turn? And might blogging occupy that shadowy place in which discourse and cry become indiscernible? But then why does Deleuze, alert to all the questions I have raised, feel able to write about death and dying, Chronos and Aion, in The Logic of Sense? And shouldn’t one ask what becomes of what resembles a work of philosophy by Derrida in which the récit is in question (Counterfeit Money)? But I’ve leap far beyond the book, and the reading of the book, and so many of its mysteries remain unexplored.
I sought, this time, to approach it: isn’t this what I want to say? ‘I couldn’t go any farther’: isn’t it this? ‘I’ve had enough; I’m at the end of my strength.’ And then the book, patient of my approaches, laughing at them, soliciting them, says, ‘But you’re not.’
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