The last essay in the series, “Translated From…,” is an allusion to Joë Bousquet’s book Translated from Silence (1941), though the focus is mostly on the issue of stylistic monotony in the American novel. Blanchot interprets the monotonous style of American novelists, such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck, although it is the first one who gets by far most attention, as a literary device that, yet again, makes silence exist through words. Finally, however, he offers an illustration of what this writing looks like. (Similarly to Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero made only cursory illustrations of his notion of neutral writing, Blanchot is evasive when it comes to demonstrating with concrete examples how the récit looks.) Blanchot finds the uniqueness of the American novel in its technique of inhibiting the transmission of meaning by estranging the language it uses. American novelists defamiliarize words, disrupt the transparency of language, and introduce sentences in which both words and the things to which they refer become difficult to identify. In their style of short sentences and slow rhythm of narrating, these works create a prose in which both the narrator and the reader cease to be the focal points of language, and in which the austerity of expressions and the slow tempo of their delivery weaken the role of characters as agents of action. In the fierce sobriety and simplicity of American novels, readers encounter “an ensemble of words or events that we understand and grasp, no doubt, perfectly but that, in their very familiarity, give us the feeling of our ignorance, as if we were discovering that the simplest words and the most natural things could suddenly become unknown”. Literary language in these stories, by emaciating the character, the narrator, as well as the reader, renounces its function as a tool for communicating meaning and becomes utterly impersonal.

What is striking about “Translated From…” is that Blanchot, suddenly and without any explanation, ascribes to the genre of the novel all the attributes that he normally associates with the genre of the récit. The “thin” and “quiet dialogues”, the language that does not draw attention to itself but to “the obstinately silent voice [la voix obstinément silencieuse]”, and interior monologues that “keep the silent nature of words [gardent le caractère muet de paroles]” – these descriptions of American novels are the same oxymoronic expressions that in “The Song of the Sirens” and “Idle Speech” serve to differentiate the récit from the novel. In “Translated From…,” the novel gets all the qualities that are elsewhere given to the récit. Or, more accurately, it is not the novel as such that gets them, but its American version and, even more narrowly, its Hemingwayan strain. Blanchot presents Hemingway’s lethargic and impersonal language as non-novelistic, and his novels as narratives that remain faithful to the mystery of language and literature in the same way as the récit. Referring to “French novels” as the opposite of the impersonality and innerlessness of Hemingway’s novels, Blanchot denovelizes American novels and postulates the French novel as a synecdoche for the genre of the novel as such, a condensation of the novel’s most characteristic traits.

Despite the fact that Blanchot’s conclusions about writers as different as Mallarmé and Hemingway sound oddly alike, the essays from 1946 announce a recurrent theme in Blanchot’s critical and fictional writings: a type of story that exposes and preserves the abyssal nature of language, its unavoidable indeterminateness, and permanent parabasis. Blanchot insists that silence and emptiness cannot be separated from language because they appear only in language and as language. Similarly, language cannot be separated from silence and emptiness, because silence and emptiness are the irrevocable origins of language. It is only when literature lays bare the constitutive role of silence in language that it can speak – and when, as “The Paradox of Aytré” avows, it “speaks best”. Already in these early essays, language that aspires to be truly literary is endowed with attributes of slowness and exhaustion. Only slow and exhausted language can embrace both the emptiness of the word and the absence of the thing, which define literature. Literature, Blanchot suggests, is a way of getting closer to the fundamental void language opens. If literature complies with this vocation and with what constitutes its essence, it has to display the signifier’s emptiness as a positive element and the content as a negative element of the text. The purer the difference between the positivity of the signifier’s emptiness and the negativity of the content’s reality, as Blanchot proposes in “Literature One More Time” (1963), the more the text is a work of literature

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