by Unknown
books that no one reads and that may not even exist. The result is that, together with this obscure and ubiquitous law, it is "carelessness that reigns in the house." No one knows who is part of the staff and who is a tenant, who is a servant and who is to be served. But this scrambling of relations does not do away with hierarchy; on the contrary, it makes of hierarchy a principle of delirium. For Thomas, the law points upward and is neces sarily the law of ascent. Everything depends on reaching the upper floors. Along the way he encounters characters who both forbid him and bid him on, and each point he reaches is one to be passed, leading on and upward to the next one. In his long discussions with these characters, the law simul taneously opens and blocks his way, and each encounter throws up ob stacles and points beyond itself. Thus the law invites its own transgression and transcendence, a passing beyond that leads, it would seem, to the dis tant origin of the law in which all these encounters would converge. But Thomas's upward trajectory is also, in another sense, a downward move ment. At the end, Dom, his erstwhile companion, says to Thomas: "Your ambition was to reach the heights," but this is only to proclaim his fail ure. If he reaches the upper floors, it is only after falling into a vertiginous illness, after which he wakes to discover that he is treated as - and there fore effectively is - a servant.19 If he approaches the uppermost point of the house, brilliant but invisible, it is only because he has been ordered to clean it. If he has reached his goal, it is only in order to expire in a twi light of weakness and debility that will never quite come to an end. In this regard one might recall Samuel Beckett, who wondered whether "the as cent to heaven and the descent to hell might be one and the same. How beautiful to believe that this were so." 20 But if this were so, then it might be that the movement of transcendence, leading into the upper regions, en joined and forbidden by the law, is indistinguishable from a transgression, a stepping beyond, that lands one in an inexpiable hell of language. If there is one thing that the characters in Aminadab do, it is talk. Their endless commentaries, their unreliable and conflicting clarifications, their meandering stories and legends -especially the long and remarkable monologue placed near the center of the novel - open within the narra tive a series of impassioned and delirious voices. I would hazard to say that with these voices, carried away by forces that far exceed the fictional situation of which they speak, this novel enters into its most singular and proper mode. In them, Blanchot's prose takes on the mixture of rigor and
XIV
lyricism that is characteristic of his most beautiful, enigmatic, and chal lenging writing. At the same time, these passages make it more clear than ever that we are dealing, in some sense, with an allegorical text, for they reveal the far-reaching dimensions of the experiences being related, reso nating with broad domains that are equally historical, political, religious, and of course literary. But in their indeterminacy, they evoke allegorical associations that cannot be reduced to a single alternate set of meanings or to a particular, discernible referent. They introduce a "saying otherwise" (aIle-gory) that overflows the fictional parameters and exceeds all refer ence, threatening to resolve, literally, into nothing. If Aminadab is an alle gory, it is an allegory of nothing, and Thomas is told that if he were ever to reach the upper floors, he would find nothing because there is nothing.21 In his ambiguous relation to the law, he strives upward toward this noth ing; the voices that throw up their elaborate detours in his path also move toward the nothing that inhabits them as their most obscure compulsion. Driven beyond all figuration, they speak from an enigma located at the juncture of two questions that are repeated throughout Aminadab: Who are you? What do you want? If Aminadab's allegorical associations cannot be reduced to a single ref erent, the title itself does evoke one particular and very important set of associations. Blanchot's biographer, Christophe Bident, informs us that Aminadab was the name of Emmanuel Levinas's younger brother, who had been shot to death by the Nazis in Lithuania not long before the novel appeared.22 In Hebrew the name means "my people are generous" or "wandering people."23 These references are nowhere explicit in Blan chot's novel, in which Aminadab is not, properly speaking, a character but a legendary underground figure who is mentioned only toward the end. But one could claim that this peripheral position actually places the name and what it designates even more centrally within the texture of the novel, as though it were literally encrypted. In fact, it is not difficult to see at least a suggestive, if not necessarily very clear, relation between the concerns of the novel and the Jewish existence to which its title points. Here again, Blanchot's critical writings are illu minating. In an essay written twenty years later entitled "Being Jewish," Blanchot speaks of the meaning of Jewish experience in terms that reso nate clearly with some of his most constant preoccupations concerning literature and literary language. In this essay, Blanchot wants to insist that
xv
the apparently negative forms of Jewish experience, such as exile and up rootedness, are not merely negative. To the questions (attributed to Boris Pasternak) "What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?" Blanchot responds: "It exists so that the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initia tive that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak." Emphasizing the radical exteri ority of this experience and of the speech that it would teach us, Blanchot elaborates on the nature of this speech:
To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognize him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with this difference. Speech, in this sense, is the Promised Land where exile fulfills itself in sojourn since it is not a matter of being at home there but of being always Outside, engaged in a movement wherein the Foreign offers itself, yet without dis avowing itself. To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all "positive value."24
If the name Aminadab means "my people are generous," Blanchot points out that "the great gift of Israel [is] its teaching of the one God." But he hastens to qualify this: "But I would rather say, brutally, that what we owe to Jewish monotheism is not the revelation of the one God, but the reve lation of speech as the place where men hold themselves in relation with what excludes all relation: the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Foreign." 25 The Distant and the Foreign cannot be equated with God as a transcendent reality occupying another superior world; they are rather names for the alterity and strangeness of what is always already in our midst, a strange ness closely bound up with language and with the partly unbridgeable rela tion to the other through language. To speak this strangeness (Paul Celan: "the poem has always hoped . . . to speak on behalf of the strange . . . on behalf of the other") is to address the otherness that makes familiarity, and speech itself, possible; it is to approach the place where we are already but which we cannot ever quite inhabit. As Blanchot puts it, in reference again to Jewish experience: "The Jewish people become a people through the exodus. And where does this night of exodus, renewed from year to xvi
year, each time lead them? To a place that is not a place and where it is not possible to reside." 26 Within the parameters of a novelistic fiction, Aminadab attempts to ap proach and to explore this place that is not a place. Like The Castle whose author may well have had similar reflections in mind- it is a novel of wan dering and speech, endless error and passionate commentary. Thomas is an exile with no abode who finds himself, however, in the promised land of speech. In this sense, Aminadab remains true to the exigency of exteriority and strangeness that Blanchot attributes to literary space, in which all movement is wandering and where speech bears the weight of the law- not as a l
egal corpus but as an ontological principle - the impossible but always shimmering mirage of a destiny and a destination. The task of literature, which Blanchot implies must in some sense "be Jewish," 27 and which Aminadab emblematizes and enacts in its excessive allegories, is to maintain this passionate movement toward an intimate strangeness opened by language at the heart of the ordinary and familiar and to speak the language that would keep it open.
-
I would like to thank the editors at University of Nebraska Press for their support of'Blanchot's work and of this novel in particular. I would also like to thank Susette Min for her encouragement and companionship. Lastly, I am pleased to have the occasion to express my gratitude to two impor tant translators of Blanchot who have preceded me. Lydia Davis has been an inspiration and a generously supportive interlocutor. To Ann Smock I am especially indebted; her help as a teacher and a friend have been indis pensable, and without it I could not have carried out this work. Both were among the first to recognize the importance of Blanchot's writing and the necessity of translating it; for their groundbreaking work they deserve our praise and thanks.
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1. The first version of Thomas l'obscur was written throughout the 1930S and appeared in 1941. Later Blanchot excised almost two-thirds of this text and published it as a "second version" in 1950. Thomas the Obscure was one of the first texts of Blanchot's to be translated (trans. Robert Lamberton [Barrytown
NY:
Station Hill Press, 197 3]) and was followed by the admi
rable translations by Lydia Davis of the largest part of Blanchot's fiction. These in turn were followed by others, including most recently Le Tres
haut, published in 1948 (trans. Allan Stoekl as The Most High [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996]), and L'attente l'oubli, Blanchot's last fictional work, published in 1962 (trans. John Gregg as Awaiting Oblivion
[Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997]). 2. Roughly one-third of the 17 1 articles were later published as Blanchot's first collection of literary essays, Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943). 3. Several of these articles - those with the most general programmatic state ments-can be found in English in The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Hol 4. "In Se;rch of Tradition," Blanchot Reader, 31. 5. "The Pure Novel," Blanchot Reader, 42. 6. "The Pure Novel," Blanchot Reader, 39. 7. "Mallarme and the Art of the Novel," Blanchot Reader, 44. 8. "The Recent Novel," Blanchot Reader, 37. 9. "Mallarme and the Art of the Novel," Blanchot Reader, 47. 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Aminadab ou du fantastique considere comme un lan gage," in Situations (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 1: 122-42. 11. It is striking to note that there are no articles by Blanchot on Kafka before land (London: Blackwell, 1995). I will be citing these translations.
Aminadab, though several of his most important literary essays would later
be devoted to Kafka's writing. 12. La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), 22. 13. Readers can find these for themselves. One unmistakable instance will suf fice here: At one point Thomas's interlocutor says to him, "The house does not need the interest of those who inhabit it. It receives them when they come; it forgets them when they go." Such sentences appear like recogniz able markers standing in territory that is being rediscovered from another direction.
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14. "The Wooden Bridge (Repetition, the Neutral), " in The Infinite Conversa
tion, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1993), 463 n·3· 15. Especially, of course, in The Space ofLiterature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982). 16. "Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from the Outside, " in FoucaultlBlanchot, trans. Brian Massumi and Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987). 17. See "Literature and the Right to Death, " in The Gaze of Orpheus, ed. P. Adams Sitney (Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 1981), 21-62. 18. The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me, trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown
NY:
Station Hill Press, 1993), 50. I have slightly altered the translation to
make it more clumsily literal. The published translation is also revealing: "Where we are, everything conceals itself, doesn't it?" 19. Recall K., who after all his tireless striving to reach the castle, ends up ac cepting an invitation secretly to inhabit the lowliest maid's quarters in the basement of the Herrenhof. 20. Samuel Beckett, Disjecta (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 17 2. 21. We may recall the passage in The Writing of the Disaster (trans. Ann Smock [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986]) in which Blanchot writes (apparently autobiographically) of a child's shattering experience of real izing "that nothing is what there is, and first of all nothing beyond. " 22. Christophe Bident, Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1998), 206. 23. Bident also points to other associations: Aminadab occurs in the Bible as the name of the father-in-law of Aaron (Exod. 6:23) and in the Davidian genealogy (1 Chron. 2:10, Luke 3:33), and it is the name of a demonic figure portrayed and commented on by St. John of the Cross (in Spiritual Can ticle). It also appears in a story by Nathaniel Hawthorne entitled "The Birth-Mark. " In Arabic, Adab is the term for a literary genre meant to enter tain and instruct, emerging with the expansion of the Islamic empire and evoking the diversity of peoples and cultures. 24. "Being Jewish, " Infinite Conversation, 128. 25. "Being Jewish, " Infinite Conversation, 127. 26. "Being Jewish, " Infinite Conversation, 125. 27. It is interesting to note that an anonymous reviewer of the first Thomas
l' obscur accused it of being "as outmoded as the Jewish art that inspired it. "
Cited in Bident, Maurice Blanchot, 200 n.2.
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Thomas, who had been alone until now, was pleased to see a robust-looking man quietly sweeping his doorway. The shop's metal curtain was raised halfway. Thomas bent down a little and saw a woman inside lying on a bed that took up all the space in the room not occupied by the other furniture. The woman's face was turned toward the wall, but it was not completely hidden: tender and feverish, tormented and yet already suffused with calm - that's how it was. Thomas straightened up. He had only to continue on his way. But the man who was sweeping called to him. "Come in," he said, extending his arm toward the door to show him the way. Thomas had no such thing in mind. Yet he approached to look more closely at this man who spoke to him with such authority. His clothes were especially remarkable. A black morning coat, gray-striped pants, a white shirt with slightly crumpled cuffs and collar: each item of his out fit deserved lose examination. Thomas was struck by these details, and so as to linger a little longer with his neighbor, he reached out to shake his hand. This was not exactly the gesture he had meant to make, since he still intended to leave this place without forming any closer attachments. The man probably sensed this. He looked at the hand held out in front of him, and after addressing to him a vague sign of politeness, he took up his sweeping again, this time paying no attention to what was happening around him. Thomas was cut to the quick. Soon the house opposite began to stir; the shutters banged, and the windows opened. He could see small rooms bedrooms and kitchens apparently -that presented a filthy and disorderly sight. The shop seemed infinitely better maintained; it was pleasant and attractive and seemed to be a place where one could rest. Thomas walked directly toward the entrance. He looked around, then fastened his gaze on an object in the display window that had not caught his attention. It was a portrait with little artistic value, painted over another image that was still partly visible on the canvas. Its clumsily represented figure disappeared behind the monuments of a half-ruined city. A spindly tree on a green
IT WAS BROAD DAYLIGHT.
lawn was the best part of the picture, but unfortunately it ended up inter fering with the other image, which - to the extent that one could imag ine it by prolonging the constantly interrupted lines -was supposed to represent the beardless face of a man with common features and a schem ing smile. Thomas examined the canvas patiently. He was able to make out some very tall houses with a great number of small windows, situated artlessly and with no attempt at symmetry, some of which
were illumi nated. There were also, in the distance, a bridge and a river, and perhaps but here it became completely vague - a path leading into a mountainous landscape. In his thoughts he compared the village in which he had just arrived with these small houses, built so densely on top of one another that they formed one vast and solemn construction, rising up into a region through which no one passed. He pulled himself away from the image. On the other side of the street, shadowy figures approached one of the windows. It was difficult to see them, but someone opened a door leading into a more brightly lit vestibule, and the light shone on a couple of young people standing behind the curtains. Thomas watched them discreetly; the young man noticed that he was being scrutinized and leaned his elbow on the windowsill: he studied the newcomer openly and candidly. His face was youthful; the top of his head was wrapped in a bandage that covered his hair, giving him a sickly air that clashed oddly with his adolescent ap pearance. With his smiling look, he dispelled any suggestion of discourag ing thoughts, and it seemed that neither pardon nor condemnation could touch anyone who stood before him. Thomas remained motionless. He enjoyed the restful atmosphere of the scene to the point of forgetting all other plans. But the smile did not satisfy him; he was waiting for something else. The girl, as if suddenly becoming aware of this expectation, made a quick sign with her hand, like an invitation; then she quickly closed the window, and the room was submerged again in darkness. Thomas was quite perplexed. Could he consider this gesture truly as a call to him? It was rather a sign of friendship than an invitation. It was also a sort of dismissal. He hesitated. Looking again in the direction of the shop, he realized that the man who was sweeping had gone back inside as well. This reminded him of his first plan. But then he thought that he would always have time to carry it out later, and he decided to cross the street and enter the house. He stepped into a long and spacious corridor and was surprised not to 2
