On Blanchot's Fiction

Marie-Laure Hurault, Maurice Blanchot: Le Principe de fiction. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1999. 235 pp.

This study is the latest in the recent spate of French critical activity devoted to the writings of Maurice Blanchot (Schulte Nordholt 1995; Mesnard 1996; Michel 1997; Bident 1998; Derrida 1998; Miraux 1998). Unlike these works, however, Hurault takes as the sole subject of her study Blanchot's fiction, spanning the whole of his literary career from 1935 to 1994. Hurault resolutely sets out to separate Blanchot's theoretical writings from his fictional output in order to show that the "principle of fiction" is a purely internal affair and needs to be read on its own specific terms, rather than as an accessory to or illustration of Blanchot's theoretical ideas. On the whole, this proves to be a fruitful means of investigating what many readers find impenetrable in Blanchot's fictional world. Hurault's main argument is geared toward disproving the common belief that Blanchot's texts share with other modernist texts a specular concern with self-reflexivity. She suggests rather that the specularity in question should be read as "feinte," ruse or dissimulation. Her introductory programmatic declarations, though, are not free from rehearsing familiar Blanchotian territory, such as that the récit is the event of the impossibility of recounting, that Blanchot's fiction is the progressive reduction of the fictional to the point of disappearance, or that his fictional space "ruins" the ontological.

In the first of two equal parts, Hurault shows how the Blanchotian figure is not a representation, that the mimesis concerns not the real, but the reality of language which characterizes Blanchot's figures by their indeterminacy, impersonality, and lack of identity. The initial impetus behind the principle of fiction is the double movement of giving and taking (appearing, disappearing), Blanchot's figures sharing an essential "poverty" with the beggar figure in Marguerite Duras's fiction and in Samuel Beckett's pared down theatrical creations. The figure is neither present nor absent, neither figurative nor abstract, but an equivocality reinforced by the voice that institutes a neutrality or an estrangement. Thought is the third crucial figure in Blanchot's dis-figuration. This preliminary analysis allows Hurault to examine the violence of relationships in Blanchot's fiction under the rubric of the impossible or thwarted encounters and conversations. Sexual encounters in particular (though these are largely confined to Le Trés-Haut), bestial, never erotic, are moments of separation, not union. Hurault likens the sexual in Blanchot to his predilection for oxymoron, while the proximity and distance instituted in encounters with the Other (encounters which Hurault rightly points out are not conceived of by Blanchot in Levinasian terms of face-to-face, transcendence, and height) merely emphasize solitude. The time in which Blanchot's figures, voices, and thought move (not moving) is one of lack and forgetting, an essentially discontinuous, static time precluding any notion of progression. Hence, in this nonteleological, noncircular time, there is no duration, no realization of events, and the subject is ultimately deconstituted. Nor is space what we think it is. In Blanchot's fiction, space is located at the limits of its own dispersal, spatiality a displacement. Blanchot's infamous and infinite dying thus takes place as the disappearance of being in discontinuous space. Judicious comparisons to Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Joë Bousquet, Michel Leiris, and Antonin Artaud conclude this first part of Hurault's study, as detours to a brief reading of Blanchot's most recent fiction, L'Instant de ma mort.

Having established her framework, Hurault proceeds to deploy notions such as ruse and dissimulation, the simulacrum, the alterity produced by the fictional—which in almost one breath brings the real into question, recuperates the real, dissimulates the real, does not refer directly to the real, inscribes the real, extends the real, and exhausts the real (135–36)—in order to demonstrate that the apparent self-reflexivity of Blanchot's fiction is...