Conversing with a Bavard

If nothing else, when confronted with a bavard, or non-stop talker, the listener can feel certain that her or his presence remains a necessary and integral part of the tireless movement of language. Clearly, the listener's role is not entirely engaged or active—a simple feigning of attention provides the illusion of interaction and gives the bavard's chatter a target. Maurice Blanchot explains that a sort of polite and indifferent listener best fulfills the needs of the bavard, since "he who listens excessively reveals the man who only wants to chatter away, that is to say, speak in excess."¹ The listener is ideally as carefree and distracted as the bavard when it comes to "meaningful" communication; "good" listeners threaten to reveal the bavard's secret indulgence of her or his vice. Even if the listener recognizes the pointlessness of the bavard's chatter, the pressure to remain polite will likely prevent a bold interruption of the endless talking. Blanchot explains, "one doesn't walk away from a bavard; it's even one of the rare experiences of eternity, reserved for the everyday man."² In this way, the bavard traps the listener with her or his ability barely to take a breath, playing upon the listener's reluctance to interrupt, or abandon, the seemingly infinite stream of language. The bavard needs a willing participant, even if the bavard appears to talk with no regard for that person. We often have the feelings that such a talker attempts to fill space and silence when layering word upon word; in a way, these desperate and unsuccessful efforts reflect the inherent problems of communication. From this point of view, the listener's presence in the face of empty chatter points to the gap that necessarily separates all speakers and listeners. For the bavard, the production of words and phrases in an uninterrupted flow secures and perpetuates her or his most essential act, at the same time that this domination of the conversation suggests the graver impossibility of mutual communication. And in turn, the listener recognizes the futility of extracting meaning from discourse which exposes its lack of interest in meaning as it rattles on.

When Blanchot addresses the topic of conversation in The Infinite Conversation, he distinguishes the common dialogue from another sort of exchange where the participants recognize the gaping absence separating them in their attempt to communicate. In this latter case of entretien, the gulf separating, or interrupting, the two speakers becomes a profound, even if impossible, point of articulation. Blanchot goes on to say that "this [infinite gap between beings] is perhaps what would be most important to bring to expression, all the while leaving it empty."³ Not coincidentally, Blanchot's essay on Louis-René Des Forêts's The Bavard, "La Parole vaine," reverts to the language and ideas of his exploration of the entretien in The Infinite Conversation in an effort to capture the intriguing emptiness that pulls the reader through Des Forêts's self-nullifying text. From the beginning of the narrative, the bavard openly exposes his chattering tendencies, and by the end, he has denied the legitimacy and truth of his confessional-style text; the reader is forced to see herself or himself as the victim of a meaningless verbal deluge. Yet even if we feel betrayed, as readers, by the bavard's empty confession, our attention is drawn to something that attracts us by its absence. So we keep reading. Perhaps this infinite movement of language which functions in terms of the empty filling of space and time, rather than in terms of a blind trust in the conveyance of meaning, offers more than we might at first believe. This type of conversation—one founded on the impossibility of, or lack of interest in, communicating—allows for a different mode of communication. Blanchot touches on this idea in Des Forêts's text: "It's as if the emptiness of empty words, making itself visible in some way, gave rise to the emptiness of an empty place, and produced a glimpse of light."⁴ After all, filling a space with...