Aminadab 0803213131 Read online

  French Modernist Library Series Editors: Mary Ann Caws Richard Howard Patricia Terry

  BY MAURICE BLANCHOT

  Translated and with an introduction by Jeff Fort

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  University of Nebraska Press : Lincoln & London

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  Publication of this translation was assisted by a grant from the French Ministry of Culture National Center for the Book.

  © Editions Gallimard, 1949

  Translation © 2002 by the Uni versity of Nebraska Press. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication-Data Blanchot, Maurice. [Aminadab. English] Aminadab / Maurice Blanchot; translated by Jeff Fort. p. cm. - (French modernist library) Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN ISBN I.

  0-8032-1313-1 (cloth: alkaline paper)

  II.

  -

  0-8032-6176-4 (paperback: alkaline paper)

  Title.

  III.

  Fort, Jeff, 1966-

  Series.

  PQ2603·L3343 A713 2002 843'.912-dC21 2001053460

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  Experience itself is authority (but authority expiates itself ).

  MAURICE BLANCHOT,

  quoted by Georges Bataille in rexperience interieure But if I am not the same, the next question is "Who in the world am I?" Ah, that's the great puzzle!

  LEW I S CARR 0 LL,

  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

  THIS IS A STRANGE BOOK. For readers familiar with Blanchot's narra tive works, such a statement goes without saying. Strangeness is the very element in which these works move and unfold; it is their single most con stant "effect" and has the status of a deliberate, if elusive, method. Aminadab is Blanchot's second novel. Published in 194 2, it appeared only a year after his first novel, the first version of Thomas l'obseur. With the exception of the latter (which has long been out of print in France) , Aminadab is the last o f his narrative works to b e translated into English; its appearance makes it possible for the reader of English to survey very nearly the entirety of Blanchot's fiction.l One interesting feature that marks this work is the shift from the novel to what Blanchot would later designate as reeits, a term that is difficult to translate and whose ambiguity serves well the "stories" that these later works never quite coalesce into. While not completely devoid of features resembling characters and events, the reeits gradually dispense with all recognizable narrative conventions and constantlY'verge toward the rarefied disappearance of the voice that prof fers them. Aminadab, on the other hand, is very much a novel and insists on being one, as the designation roman (novel) on the cover of the original edition informs us. It focuses on a single character and maintains a more or less linear plot that can be summarized in fairly simple terms: Thomas arrives in an unidentified village, and upon seeing a woman signal to him (apparently) from one of the upper windows in a boardinghouse, he de cides to enter the building and look for her. The novel follows him through the uncanny detours of his search and his efforts to reach the upper part of the building. Such a plot can be seen as altogether conventional and even in a way as very "classic" -the hero on a quest. By adopting it, Blan chot is attempting to confront the familiar genre with his own insistence on strangeness and with a resolutely antirealist aesthetic, which he consid ered more urgently needed than ever, precisely for the sake of challenging and renewing the contemporary novel. We know that Blanchot was meditating a great deal on the nature of the novel around the time of writing Aminadab because we have several articles from this period in which he addresses the question. The situaVll

  tion in which these articles were written was remarkable, to say the least, and its contradictions shed light on Blanchot's thinking concerning the novel, as well as on the composition of Aminadab: Between 194 1 and 1943 Blanchot, living in occupied Paris, was employed to write a weekly column for a pro-Petain paper called Journal des debats. Having disengaged from his shrill pamphleteering of the 193 0S, however, Blanchot did not write political articles (and had no interest in doing so); rather, his column fell under the rubric Chronique de la vie intellectuelle (Chronicle of intellectual life) and was devoted entirely to literary matters.2 Oddly, he seems to have tried simply to ignore the political context of his venue (though it must have seemed very odd to see these often extremely refined literary medi tations printed next to the crude political propaganda that characterized the paper) . It is often said that the beginning of World War II, especially the surrender of France, marks for Blanchot a period of withdrawal from the political into the literary, and there certainly are grounds for locating here an important transformation in Blanchot's thought and writing. (It was also the period in which his friendship with Georges Bataille began, an event of great significance in Blanchot's life and work.) Indeed, the para doxes of this situation are further sharpened by the extreme refusal of en gagement - and of all forms of verisimilitude and realism - as well as the vindication of the novel's radical autonomy that Blanchot puts forth in these articles.3 Attacking "the facilities of realism" on the one hand and the servile ob servance of traditional forms on the other, Blanchot advocates a tradition alism (if it can be called that) that would remain faithful to the disruptive and creative aspects of tradition.4 The tradition itself is not simply given but something that must be sought, and this search necessarily involves experimentation and risk - for example, the risk of arbitrariness that realism . would avoid by depending on external circumstances for an appearance of necessity. But verisimilitude, Blanchot argues, cannot provide the ne cessity required by the inner workings of the novel, for, he says, the world itself cannot provide this. In one article entitled "The Pure Novel," Blan chot sums this up revealingly: " [T]he world, which should provide the creative self with raw material, today seems itself to be exhausted; it has lost its originality and its objective truth, it imposes itself only as an in consistent and impure system whose appearance the mind feels tempted, even obliged to reject in order to reestablish its own interpretation of it

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  and to express its own original experience." In this respect, Blanchot con cludes, "the pure novel, whatever its failings, may deserve more attention than the accomplished works of objective narrative. It is in search of the unknown. It demands the inaccessible." 5 This search -which may well re call the one undertaken in Aminadab- is Blanchot's justification for with drawing from, even "rejecting," the world when it comes to artistic cre ation and artistic experience. In search of the unknown, it sets up a world of its own. In the same essay Blanchot elaborates on this movement in terms that resonate clearly with the project pursued in Aminadab:

  Since the rule of verisimilitude has no value, the novel is free to transform reality; not just color it differently but change its structure, overturn its laws and extinguish the light of understanding. It secretes its own world. It is mas ter of its own appearances. It arranges its figures and incidents into a new ensemble, around a unity of its own choosing and with no need to justify its frame of reference. This freedom can seem absolute, but it is none the less bound by a fundamental necessity to harmonize, without trompe-l'oeil effects, the inside and the outside of the novel's creation.6

  The language of the novel leaves the world behind in order to search for its own reality and its own laws, which are not those of the familiar world that surrounds us. But in this separation from the world, it nevertheless maintains a strict relation to the "outside" of the novel - not a relation of representation, however, rather a linguistic relation, one which assumes, enigmatically, that the nature of the novelistic world, however "unreal," and the nature
of the "real" world both have their common source in the most essential operations of language. The shadow of Stephane Mallarme falls heavily over these ruminations (one of the essays is entitled "Mallarme and the Art of the Novel"), and the "purity" they invoke is closely related to the one sought in the poet's work. The refusal of the world, Blanchot claims, means attempting to find in language not a depiction of the world but "the essence of the world," the very principle of its constitution as a world? Mallarme, he says, takes seriously the notion that "language is an absolute, the very form of tran scendence, and that it can none the less find its way into a human work." Blanchot the novelist, however, takes the poet's work as a precedent that "allows us to dream of a writer, a symbol of purity and pride, who would be for the novel what Mallarme was for poetry, and to envisage that work with which Mallarme sought to match the absolute."8 With this dream in

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  mind, Blanchot sketches out a pressing task for the novelist in which "he heads towards those strange tenebrous regions where he seems to awaken in the deepest sleep, towards that pure presence where things appear so bare and so reduced that no image is possible, towards that primordial spectacle where he never tires of contemplating what can be seen only after a complete self-transformation."9 I have dwelt on these essays and their extreme statements because of their unmistakable resonance with Blanchot's project in Arninadab. How can we not see the boardinghouse as an attempt to figure "those strange tenebrous regions" into which the novelist must sleepily tread? Is not Thomas's striving toward the heights, his search for the upper floors and for the woman who may have waved to him, not strictly analogous to the search for the law that dictates the inner necessity and coherence of the novel itself? This is true especially in that so much of Thomas's time is spent discussing and interpreting the law, attempting to position himself in relation to it, and trying to assume for himself its singular application to him and his destiny. Finally, where is it more obviously the case that a world is constituted by the risky fiat of language than in a novel? Indeed, it is difficult not to see the novelistic world conjured up in Arninadab as an allegory that is strangely coextensive with the adventure of writing that it would allegorize. Of course, it is not solely in the wake of Mallarme that Blanchot attempts to take up this challenge. The tradition of the novel itself had already con fronted it, at least implicitly, in what I referred to above as its most "classi cal" structure: from its roots in narratives like The Odyssey, to the medieval romances and quests, to Don Quixote and Moby-Dick, the novel form has always put into play, often ironically, the drifting and wandering search for the distant, the unknown, the inaccessible, and the otherwise enigmatic. It is clear that if Blanchot took on this form, it was in order to undo it from th inside, or rather to continue the undoing that was already well under way - a process that involves bringing more and more manifestly into the sphere of the narrative the linguistic origin of its existence. One absolutely inevitable reference in this respect is Franz Kafka, whose work Arninadab resembles in ways that are surely meant to be obvious. The Castle, which it most closely resembles, falls (however obliquely) within the tradition of the novel as search, and Blanchot, in this early novel, is as it were taking up the thread left by Kafka's last great work. In his review x

  of Aminadab, Jean-Paul Sartre reports that Blanchot claimed not to have read Kafka when he wrote the novel; but of course Sartre doesn't fall for this ruse and proceeds to accuse Blanchot of turning Kafka's effects into a cliche or commonplace (we hardly have Blanchot to thank for that) .l0 And yet, in a sense, we could say that it is true he had not yet read Kafka and that Aminadab itself is Blanchot's (first) reading of Kafka.ll Perhaps we could also apply to Blanchot the statement he himself used to describe Kafka's diary writings: "il fait son apprentissage," he is carrying out his ap prenticeship.12 In his diaries Kafka apprenticed himself to "masters" such as Goethe, Kleist, and Flaubert. In Aminadab, Blanchot (at thirty-four still a young writer) openly and unabashedly apprenticed himself to Kafka, not only by borrowing certain forms (the novel as wandering and as a series of conversations) and addressing some of the same essential con cerns (the law, error, fiction itself) but also by actually repeating, practi cally verbatim, certain phrases from Kafka, and sometimes not the least well knownP It is clear that Blanchot more or less explicitly set out to write a novel under the guidance of an exemplary predecessor and, in his search for the unknown, to enter into the uncanny space in which the land sur veyor had lost his way. Blancho later wrote of The Castle that its entire meaning might be carried by the wooden bridge where K. pauses to "stare up into the illu sory emptiness" before crossing it into the village and initiating the novel's ambiguous adventure.14 What he meant, I think, was that this movement of arrival and beginning enacts the radical leave-taking that the novel, in Blanchot's extreme conception of it, must perform. Even more than K., Thomas is a figure without a past, and his entry from the "broad day light" of the village into the obscure spaces of the house seals his separa tion from the world of the familiar day. Blanchot would eventually speak a great deal about "literary space";15 in Aminadab, the entry into this space is in some measure taken literally, in the sense that here this space is fig ured as a fictional place, enclosed by walls. The writer's entry into a literary space, a space made of letters, is thus doubled by the character's entry into a microcosm that takes the form of a house, and it is this doubling that gives Aminadab the aspect of an allegory and that causes it to resonate far beyond the fictional situation depicted. This movement is an exit into an outside that can never be inhabited and in which things are seen from across an irreducible distance even as they threaten to suffocate with too

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  great a proximity. As Michel Foucault emphasizes in his beautiful essay on Blanchot, "The Thought from the Outside," which refers a great deal to Aminadab, it is a distance opened by language and located in the simple but vertiginous "I speak" that has been deprived of all bearings and con tinues in a perfect coincidence with its own unmoored taking place.16 For his part, Sartre referred to Aminadab as "fantastic," but it is not at all certain that this term applies to Aminadab. If so, it is in the manner of a work like Don Quixote, that is, as the disenchanted space of a simula tion sustained entirely by language. Aminadab begins and ends as a mirage of signs and significations, from the sign in the window to the enigmatic aphorisms on the lamps glowing in the endless twilight of the final scene. Blanchot makes it very clear in the opening pages that the strange world of Aminadab is constituted by signs whose manipulation it is. When Thomas first enters the building, he searches up and down a long corridor for a stairway, but in vain; until, that is, he suddenly notices a curtain with a sign above it on which is "written in crudely traced letters: The entrance is here." The conclusion is simple and direct: "So the entrance was there." If this is "fantastic," it is nevertheless far from magical and is closer to a mere manipulation of words whose only effects are empty simulations. One is reminded of Alice, whose fall down the rabbit hole is accompanied by a sleepily murmured interchange of letters ("do cats eat bats? . . . do bats eat cats?") and who upon landing finds herself in a situation strikingly similar to that of Thomas -searching a hallway for an open door, she's given in structions by signs that appear out of nowhere ("drink me" ) . Just as Alice's wonderland is not ruled by magic (not even within her "reality"; she has to take drugs to bring about her transformations) but rather by linguis tic play, Thomas's adventures in the boardinghouse proceed according to laws that are first and foremost textual. The "fantastic" here does not con sist in the immediate realization of thoughts or a dreamlike alternate world but in the empty effects of nomination. In this sense, literary space is one in which the name in no waycreates the thing but rather, as Blanchot asserted in an early essay, the absence of the thing, its shimmering emptiness (an absence and emptiness that are prior to, and constitutive of, any presence and fullness)P Here enchantment is disabled by the rigor of fiction itself, the recognition that this gesture - creati
ng something by naming it- re mains empty and leaves only the residue of the name. Here everything is possible, but nothing actually happens except a fictional speech in search of its own law and origin. xu

  One of the most important effects of this speech is precisely that of simulation and mimesis. Like K.'s "illusory emptiness," the space through which Thomas wanders is full of illusions and is itself an illusion. It is a world made up of crude but fascinating images that double the already artificial world containing them. This is made clear from the beginning with the proliferation of paintings and other types of doubling whose rela tion to - or difference from - Thomas's "reality" is disturbingly indistinct. He himself is painted not long after entering the building, and the artifice of the building is doubled in paintings that depict the rooms exactly. He is soon attached, by handcuffs, to a companion who remains his distorted double throughout most of the novel and whose voice in the end replaces his own. In an early scene this companion is described as having a tattoo on his face that duplicates the face itself. Thomas's intimate embraces of his tattooed companion present a mimicry of earlier literary adventures, a malodorous parody of Ishmael's affectionate encounter with Queequeg in the early chapters of Moby-Dick (a novel that has an important place in Blanchot's criticism) . It is thus at every point and on multiple levels that the fictive nature of the novel is incorporated into the novelistic world itself, not as a narrator's ironic reflections but as the very law of the world that is in the process of unfolding. Thomas thinks at one point: "Was not everything here play-acting?" This question is echoed throughout Blan chot's fictional work, most explicitly in the recit entitled The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me where the first-person narrator asks several times: "Here where we are, everything is dissimulated, isn't it?" 18 Literary space presents itself as a "here" that is pure dissimulation, pure fiction and arti fice. In this regard, the suspension of disbelief required by the fantastic is not relevant here, because belief is never solicited. Thomas himself does not believe, and in this he is the "doubting" figure his name evokes; indeed, he does not even believe in the illusoriness of the illusions: "I have rea son to think that there is a bit too pronounced a tendency here to explain everything in terms of illusions." And yet he is irretrievably caught up in a movement driven by the attraction of this false world. His "quest" passes through illusions in search of an illusion and through a textual space that seeks its law in speech as a simulation of speech. To carry out his search, Thomas must know the laws of the house. Every one he encounters is deeply preoccupied with these laws, but no one really knows what they are. They remain inscrutable and arbitrary, contained in xiii