Before literary silence became an issue of genres in “The Song of the Sirens,” it was a subject of a series of articles from 1946 in which Blanchot discussed a very diverse set of writers: Mallarmé, Hemingway, Saroyan, Lautréamont, Henry Miller, Jean Paulhan, and Joë Bousquet. With Blanchot’s typically uniform conclusions about writers with very different styles, themes, and characters, these articles propose that all these authors strive to give silence a literary form by translating it into words. This conclusion is perhaps the least contentious in “The Myth of Mallarmé.” Blanchot’s argument suggests that Mallarmé’s poetry does not merely talk in the absence of things, as if words tried to represent absent objects; Mallarmé’s words try to express, not things, but their absence. They eliminate objects and speak in their absence. Instead of merely killing the object to which the word refers – this happens in any language, not just literary – Mallarmé exposes the emptiness of the word itself. He shows not only that once there is a word, the object is lost, but also that the word never was a plenitude capable of compensating for the eliminated object in the first place. While praising Mallarmé’s insight into the workings of language, Blanchot nevertheless finds his solution problematic. For the same reason as Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero complained about Mallarmé’s reduction of literature to Object, Blanchot finds Mallarmé’s replacement of things with their “vibratory disappearance [disparition vibratoire]” flawed because it makes words “the material emblem of a silence that, to let itself be represented, must become a thing”. For Blanchot, literary narratives, rather than poems, can deal with the paradoxical nature of literary language revealed by Mallarmé. Mallarmé’s relevance is in diagnosis, not in effective treatment.

In “The Paradox of Aytré,” published a few months after “The Myth of Mallarmé,” Blanchot reiterates that Mallarmé, “just as he gives poetry a language of extreme physical density, sees himself finally tempted to attain silence by a simple material emblem”. Mallarmé’s architecture of typographical blanks and odd punctuation is ultimately inadequate for what it pursues because it gives in to the temptation to offer a consummation to the paradox of language. “The Paradox of Aytré” insists that the paradox of language must be preserved unresolved. If a text aspires to be a work of literature, it has to avoid both the strategy of incorporating silence as an expressive means of language and the strategy of creating a material figuration for silence. What literature has to do is to perpetuate the recognition that it “has nothing to say [n’a rien à dire]”. Similarly to “Idle Speech,” language and silence, speaking and having nothing to communicate, are already here presented not only as non-contradictory endeavors, but as inseparable companions. As William Saroyan’s dictum, “do not write with words, write without words, write with silence,” which opens “The Paradox of Aytré” suggests, for Blanchot writing and silence are an indivisible couple, and literary narratives a place where the emptiness of both the word and the object is disclosed – but without turning into a thing, which is exactly what happens in Mallarmé’s poetry.

With regard to the question of how writing with silence functions as a mode of narration, “Mystery in Literature” continues where “The Paradox of Aytré” ends. Characteristically, Blanchot phrases his topic as a dilemma: “if we honor the mystery in literature from afar, calling it secret and ineffable, it makes itself an object of disgust, something perfectly vulgar,” and “if we approach it to explain it, we encounter only that which conceals itself [ce qui se dérobe]”. Even though unrepresentable, the mystery – and this, it has to be pointed out, is what separates Blanchot’s conception of literature from mysticism – exists only in language. As mystery does not exist apart from speech, the notion of mystery is, strictly speaking, an empty word that stands for the paradox of language as it materializes itself in literature. Not only is the concept of mystery unthinkable apart from language and silence, but both language and silence cannot be considered one without the other, nor without the concept of mystery. Silence is the inner contradiction and the outer boundary of language, as well as a point where language speaks the best. If literature has an obligation to reveal the paradoxical nature of language, rather than conceal it, the notion of mystery is nothing more than a word for how literary language works. Blanchot calls the language that reveals the mystery a “silent language [langage silencieux]”, an “impersonal speech [parole impersonnelle]” and “a language that speaks itself on its own [langage qui se parle tout seul]”. Although this line of reasoning is still similar to the abstract and metaphorical language of “The Song of the Sirens,” Blanchot makes a more overt argument here that literature does not articulate anything that precedes it and that would be expressed only post factum. The conception of literature in “Mystery in Literature” offers something more extreme than mystical irrationality. As literature is expressive of nothing but silence and emptiness of both the word and the thing only because of the paradoxical nature of language, this conception asks literature not to express the ineffable, but, as Leo Bersani explains, “not to express it.” Pierre Klossowski adds that what Blanchot demands from literature is not to represent nothing, but to endure it and “maintain itself in it."

Daniel Just, Literature, Ethics, and Decolonization in Postwar France