Language cannot appear as what it is; it cannot speak itself, the fact of its own communication; it cannot reach back into its own origin. It comes in every other guise than itself – in a fiction, for example, in the form of incident, of character. But how, nevertheless, to join writing to writing? How to let a fiction speak – provisionally, hintingly – of what language is?
By doubling, in the narrative, the what-it-is of the world – for the same dissimulation rules its coming-to-appear. By affirming the erosion of the world as it would double the erosion of representational language. The origin of the world – the fact that it is, and the fact that this fact is irreducible to what is experienced – finds its correlate in the origin of language. Both origins are entwined in the passion of narrative, in the fraying of a fictional world.
What is meant by world? That contexture of relations that gather things into a meaningful whole. A contexture ordered by a sense of the possible, of the future that is possible there, even when it takes the form of a fiction. Mr Darcy can propose to Miss Bennett; it is eminently possible. Alice can shrink and grow. What of the origin of the world? The collapse of the sense of the possible, of the possible as sense. It becomes impossible even to cross a room. Can this impossibility be spoken directly in fiction? Only in terms of the possible – only as it breaks the measure of the self for whom things can be done. Narration, say. Crossing a room, say. Thus the kind of paralysis that seems to strike the narrators of Blanchot’s récits.
What is meant by language? In one sense, what enables communication; what allows things to be expressed. It overlays the possibility that governs the sense of the world. But in another, and understood as origin, it is what the first sense of language cannot communicate as its condition, as its possibility. Language, that is to say, cannot speak that it is; it cannot speak the fact of its own existence. Or if it is to do so, it is only by way of the possibility that language affords – that is, by way of that faith in sense upon which language depends.
The prose of Blanchot’s récits is clear, pellucid at the level of the phrase. But at the level of the sentence, the paragraph? Who understands what’s going on? How would you paraphrase the ‘action’ of the second half of The Last Man, or The One Who …? It is not that Blanchot abandons clarity, but he lets it speak of what is too great to communicate. And this takes the form, in his narratives, of the impossibility of action, of clear thought, of the endurance of the form of the ‘I’.
Likewise in his essays on writers. He is concerned not only with the accomplishments (and unaccomplishments) of a particular fiction, but the life of those authors who sensed the demand of the fact of language. The reading of Kafka, say, passes by way of a review of his hesitations about writing, his dreams of leaving it behind for Palestine, for marriage. The reading of Rilke of the search for the ‘proper’ death writing deprived him. These essays, like Blanchot’s fiction, speak of the origin of language – they let it speak. And in this sense, there can be no absolute generic difference between the essays and the fictions, and it should be no surprise that they eventually come together in fragmentary works.
Each time, it is a matter of the récit, of that French genre concerned retrospectively, musingly with a past event. Each time, with Blanchot’s writings, the origin of language, as it is entwined with the origin of language, of the world that takes the place of that event. The origin of language speaks by way of the origin of the world. And does it work the other way around? Isn’t there a kind of mirror play between both senses of origin, as each can only substitute for the other? It is not ultimately with reference, with the meaning-to-say with which his writings are concerned, that should be clear. Unless there is sense of reference that points to what cannot be said, and of a meaning-to-say that no longer refers back to narrator or author.
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