TH E BOOK TO COME MERIDIAN Crossing Aesthetics Werner Harnacher Editor Translated by Charlotte Mandell Stanford University Press Stanford California 2003 TH E BOOK Ta COME Maurice Blanchot BM0679642 Stanford University Press Stanford, California English translation © 2003 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University AlI rights reserved Originally published in French in I959 un der the tide Le livre à venir, © I959, Editions Gallimard Assistance for the translation was provided by the French Ministry of Culture Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blanchot, Maurice. [Livre à venir. English] The book to come / Maurice Blanchot; translated by Charlotte Mandell. p. cm. - (Meridian) ISBN 0-8°47-4223-5 (cloth : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-8°47-4224-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Literature, Modern--20th century-History and criticism. 2. Literature-Philosophy. I. Mandell, Charlotte. II. Tide. III. Meridian (Stanford, CaliE) PN773 .B5I3 2002 809'.04-dc2I 2002°°9244 Original Printing 2003 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 12 II IO 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 Typeset by Noyes Composition in IO.9 / I3 Adobe Garamond Contents Translators Note Xl 1. THE SONG OF THE SIRENS § 1 Encountering the Imaginary 3 § 2 The Experience of Proust II II. THE LITERARY QUESTION § 3 "There could be no question of ending weIl" 27 § 4 Artaud 34 § 5 Rousseau 41 §6 Joubert and Spa ce 49 §7 Claudel and the Infinite 66 §8 Prophetie Speech 79 §9 The Secret of the Golem 86 § 10 Literary Infinity: The Aleph 93 § II The Failure of the Demon: The Vocation 97 III. ON AN ART WITHOUT FUTURE § 12 At Every Extreme 107 Vill Contents § 13 Broch III § 14 The T urn of the Screw 126 § 15 Musil 134 § 16 The Pain of Dialogue § 17 The Clarity of the Novel § 18 H. H. § 19 Diary and Story § 20 Story and ScandaI IV. WHERE IS LITERATURE GOING? § 21 The Disappearance of Literature 195 § 22 The Search for Point Zero 202 § 23 "Where now? Who now?" 210 § 24 Death of the Last Writer 218 § 25 The Book to Come 224 § 26 The Power and the Glory 245 Notes 253 Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic, was born in 1907. His lift is wholly devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it. Translator's Note Through the ever-subtle (and never more so than when, as here, dealing with the subtlest verbal registers of Mallarmé, Proust, Beckett) syntactic music of Maurice Blanchot, there flourish two much-beloved groups of words, whose ambiguities in fact pervade ordinary French usage, but which are here frequently and trenchantly put into play. First is the simple-seeming word expérience. A good deal of the time it serves the same purposes and covers the same terrain as the word it looks so much like in English. The word however also means, in ordinary French, "experiment" in the scientific sense-but also (and here the reader is warned to be wary) in the literary or artistic sense, as when one speaks of an experiruental novel. There are more than a few sentences in this book in which the translator has candidly had ta guess which hand of the word was gesturing in the text. "The Experience of Proust" is also "Proust's Experiment." And a sentence that plausibly reads "The experi­ ence of literature is a total experience" might suddenly seem far richer a statement if read as "The literary experiment is a total experience," or "The experience of literature is utterly an experiment." To rescue my au­ thor trom my own opinions (which seems decent chivalry for a transla­ tor), 1 have usually chosen the simples t, if perhaps least imaginative, way of handling this issue, that is, construing what seems most obvious at the moment, and alerting the reader, herewith, to the problem of the word's surprising range of meaning. The second group of words is that built around the Latin verb errare and its reflexes and various French descendants. Errare meant ta wander around, as lost travelers did. When this wandering was intellectual as well Xl- XlI Translators Note as ineffectual, one was said to be in error, not knowing one's location, or just being wrong. 50 err, error, erroneous (in English as in French) all stem from this root, which means wandering about. Only errant saves this sense in English, and then mostly metaphorically. But French preserves con­ sciously much of the radical meaning, so the words, when Blanchot uses them, work curiously to make error almost a good thing (since wander­ ing, the nomadic, are after aIl forms of research, discovery, mental process, learning), while at the same time calling this very research into question at times, since it is by nature erreur, and getting it wrong seems inextrica­ bly interwoven with the experimental path. The translator wants to express heartfelt thanks to a number of friends and colleagues who have helped her over some of the rockiest steeps of Blanchot's wonderful and at times bewildering stylees). As often before, Professors Odile Chilton and Marina Van Zuylen of Bard College have been immensely generous with their time, vast learning and formidable wit. My friends Lydia Davis, Pierre Joris, Nicole Peyrafitte, Dorota Czerner, and Russell Richardson have helped with idiom and scholarly reference, and my husband, Robert Kelly, who was especially helpful with the chapter on Mallarmé, has spent many midnight hours (happily, he tells me) ransacking French websites. CHARLOTTE MANDELL Annandale-on-Hudson August 2001 TH E BOOI< Ta COME PAR T 1 The Song ofthe Sirens § l Encountering the lmaginary The Sirens: it seems they did indeed sing, but in an unfulfilling way, one that only gave a sign of where the real sources and real happiness of song opened. Still, by means of their imperfect songs that were only a song still to come, they did lead the sailor toward that space where singing might truly begin. They did not deceive him, in fact: they actually led him to his goal. But what happened once the place was reached? What was this place? One where there was nothing left but to disappear, because music, in this region of source and origin, had itself disappeared more completely than in any other place in the world: sea where, ears blocked, the living sank, and where the Sirens, as proof of their good will, had also, one day, to disappear. What was the nature of the Sirens' song? Where did its fault lie? Why did this fault make it so powerful? Sorne have always answered: lt was an inhuman song-a natural noise no doubt (are there any other kinds?), but on the fringes of nature, foreign in every possible way to man, very low, and awakening in him that extreme delight in falling that he cannot sat­ isfY in the normal conditions of life. But, say others, the enchantment was stranger than that: it did nothing but reproduce the habitual song of men, and because the Sirens, who were only animals, qui te beautiful because of the reflection of feminine beauty, could sing as men sing, they made the song so strange that they gave birth in anyone who heard it to a suspicion of the inhumanity of every human song. Is it through despair, then, that men passionate for their own song came to perish? Through a despair very close to rapture. There was something wonderful in this real song, this common, secret song, simple and everyday, that they had to recognize 3 4 The Song ofthe Sirens right away, sung in an unreal way by foreign, even imaginary powers, song of the abyss that, once heard, would open an abyss in each word and would beckon those who heard it to vanish into it. This song, we must remember, was aimed at sailors, men who take risks and feel bold impulses, and it was also a means of navigation: it was a dis­ tance, and it revealed the possibility of traveling this distance, of making the song into the movement toward the song, and of making this move­ ment the expression of the greatest desire. Strange navigation, but toward what end? It has always been possible to think that those who approached it did nothing but come near to it, and died because of impatience, be­ cause they prematurely asserted: here it is; here, here 1 will cast anchor. Ac­ cording to others, it was on the contrary too late: the goal had already been passed; the enchantment, by an enigmatic promise, exposed men to being unfaithful to themselves, to their human song and even to the essence of the song, by awakening the hope and desire for a wonderful be­ yond, and this beyond represented only a desert, as if the motherland of music were the only place completely deprived of music, a place of aridity and dryness where silence, like noise, burned, in one who once had the disposition for it, aIl passageways to song. Was there, then, an evil princi­ pIe in this invitation to the depths? Were the Sirens, as tradition has sought to persuade us, only the false voices that must not be listened to, the trickery of seduction that only dis loyal and deceitful beings could resist? There has always been a rather ignoble effort among men to discredit the Sirens by Hady accusing them oflying: liars when they sang, deceivers when they sighed, fictive when they were touched; in every respect non­ existent, with a childish nonexistence that the good sense of Ulysses was enough to exterminate.