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Thomas the Obscure
Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the new novel, the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot's first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, the ontological narrative--a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.
124 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1941
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About the author
Maurice Blanchot
146 books602 followersMaurice Blanchot was a French philosopher, literary theorist and writer of fiction. Blanchot was a distinctly modern writer who broke down generic boundaries, particularly between literature and philosophy. He began his career as a journalist on the political far right, but the experience of fascism altered his thinking to the point that he supported the student protests of May 1968. Like so many members of his generation, Blanchot was influenced by Alexandre Kojeve's humanistic interpretation of Hegel and the rise of modern existentialism. His “Literature and the Right to Death” shows the influence that Heidegger had on a whole generation of French intellectuals.
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May 24, 2020
Existentialist Kabbalah
Interwar existentialism appeared as a sort of overnight philosophical and literary mushroom. Typically attributed to the intellectual spores thrown off by the 19th century philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, the single word description of existentialism is ‘absurd’. Absurdity is lack of reason in every sense - the absence of implicit meaning, the sterility of human action, and ultimately the pointlessness of life. According to Martin Heidegger, for example, the event which provokes the question of the reasonableness of life is its inevitable termination, death, which is the triumph of unreason.* For the writer Albert Camus, the possibility to personally choose death rather than life gives life its foundational significance, despite the obvious indifference of the universe.
Maurice Blanchot is an existentialist. But he is not an absurdist in the same way that Heidegger or Camus are absurdists. Blanchot believes that because none of us can have an experience of death, it can’t be a motivating factor for life. Death is a rumour which can’t be taken seriously. For him, life itself, the experience of existence is the only motivation necessary to fill it with meaning, purpose and reason. Experiencing existence in the midst of the daily pressures, obligations, and distractions may not be easy, or even ‘natural’, but it is certainly possible. Being, as it were, is it’s own reward if we care to appreciate it.
At the very outset of Thomas the Obscure, Thomas experiences near-drowning, apparently intentionally. As everything about his world and even his own body dissolves in a sort of trance, he experiences “a sort of holy place, so perfectly suited to him that it was enough for him to be there, to be;” To be; not to die is his intention and his experience; and it is an attractive experience not one of fear. He approaches death and spits in its eye when he feels his own existence quite distinctly from his other bodily sensations or his thoughts.
Later that night Thomas has another out of body experience, seeing and feeling himself simultaneously: “what he looked at eventually placed him in contact with a nocturnal mass which he vaguely perceived to be himself and in which he was bathed... outside himself there was something identical to his own thought which his glance or his hand could touch.” He is objectively present, even to himself. In other words he has some sort of unique significance in the world of things. He can simultaneously experience and reflect upon that experience. This is the miraculous character of his being. It is not necessary to look elsewhere for ‘reason.’ This is itself sufficient reason for his life.
The existential void, nothingness, exists for Thomas, but it is hardly a threat. His experience is that “through this void, it was sight and the object of sight which mingled together. Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision... Its own glance entered into it as an image... from all evidence a foreign body had lodged itself in his pupil and was attempting to go further... the body of Thomas remained, deprived of its senses. And thought, having entered him again, exchanged contact with the void.” Thought and the void are interchangeable (or perhaps better said: the void is an idea) - a challenging as well as provocative proposal. Where does it come from?
Blanchot is certainly not from the same intellectual gene pool as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Camus. His literary forebears are Flaubert and Kafka - the first aesthetic, the second spiritual. Blanchot testifies to both, especially the latter, in his writing and correspondence. And it is Kafka’s brand of existentialism - Jewish, Eastern European, and (knowing the inadequacy of the term) life-focussed - which Blanchot represents. As Thomas realises on the second night of the story, “He was really dead and at the same time rejected from the reality of death.” Death is not his enemy, nor his inspiration.
Blanchot was not merely incidentally interested in Kafka. He analysed Kafka’s work in detail and recognised its dominant influence: the Kabbalah, that mystical discipline which seeks to integrate language with living in a way which can only be described as existentialist. Gershon Scholem, the leading scholar of Kabbalah in the 20th century, considered Kafka’s work as canonical in Kabbalistic literature, on a par with the Zohar, and even the Bible itself.
The Kabbalah is absurdist in the manner in which Blanchot (and Kafka) is absurdist. It seeks to undermine not just the dominance and distortions of language but also the conventions of reason language embodies. Thomas explicitly reports at the evening’s dinner that he is “unsatisfied by the words.” The purpose of Kabbalah is to reveal what lies behind language, beyond the distractions brought about by everyday life, to expose us to, in a word, existence. This is what Heidegger called Dasein, the particular reflective mode of being of a person. But in Blanchot, there is Dasein with a difference (For a fuller explanation of Kabbalah and its interpretive use, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
Dasein, according to Heidegger, must decide what its life is, what it will be committed to, what its point will be. For Heidegger, the content of these choices is all there is, this is Dasein tout court. But not so for Blanchot. He knows that any fixation of purpose is already lethal. It implies the cessation of new interpretations, of new possibilities, of learning about oneself as well as the world, of life in a sense more profound that the stopping of physical processes.**
For Blanchot existence is a receptacle for the sort of content by which Heidegger defines Dasein. This receptacle is not a thing in any concrete sense (neither is Dasein) but something, nevertheless, which is, and is independent of its contents - a psyche, a life-force, or if one prefers, a soul. Its content is constantly changing. It certainly can’t be defined by some arbitrary choice at any moment in time.
In fact, in some sense this entity is entirely beyond time; it is eternal and the locus of a potentially infinite series of interpretations passed on from generation to generation of physical persons (largely through language!). It is an entity, therefore, not driven, like Dasein, by fear of death, but the continuously new possibilities of its interpretations of life.
Thomas explicitly uses the method of Kabbalah while reading after dinner. “He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention in relation to every symbol.” This is the technique by which Kabbalah ‘alienates’ language in order to re-establish it as subservient to human interests. Every word, every letter, each mark of punctuation has a potentially hidden meaning, in fact an infinity of potential meanings, to be discovered and explored. Others would think Thomas wasn’t really reading at all because he never turned a page, but this was only because he was being so excruciatingly attentive to his text.
The technique has an unusual effect. Words become active subjects rather than mere passive objects of Thomas’s perception: “he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute.” This may seem dream-like but in comparison with Heidegger’s neologisms and prosaic complexity, Blanchot is at least comprehensible.
It’s as if the attention directed at the text enlivens the text itself and encourages it to provide its re-constructive judgment on Thomas: “he recognized himself with disgust in the form of the text he was reading, he retained the thought that (while, perched upon his shoulders, the word He and the word I were beginning their carnage) there remained within his person which was already deprived of its senses obscure words, disembodied souls and angels of words, which were exploring him deeply.” Heidegger claims that ‘Language speaks Man’; and in a sense it clearly does. But as Blanchot suggests, Language also interrogates Man. If so, there is no need to invent a new vocabulary as Heidegger has done. Much better to attend to the angels of words we already possess.
Thomas struggles with the merciless text as if he were a student with the Torah. But he is “thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing.” The Kabbalistic paradox of constructive deconstruction is complete. Thomas encounters his own existence through the existence of the text. Perfect ‘absorbtive’ Kabbalah, as Moshe Idel was later to describe it (See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
I am an expert neither in existentialism nor Kabbalah. But I don’t think Blanchot can be understood much less appreciated, at least in Thomas the Obscure, without a recognition of his unique combination of these two threads of intellectual and literary endeavour. Together I think they provide at least an entry into his method of writing and thought.
*Heidegger’s description of ‘Being-towards-death’ in Being and Time is clearly dependent on Kierkegaard, although he is not cited explicitly. This idea of death giving significance to life, although having Greek philosophical precedents, is most fully expressed in Christian theology. The Christian motive for living is salvation after and, crucially, through death. This is markedly different from the Judaic (and Islamic) motive of obedience to the divine will as an end in itself. It is, I think, the primary differentiating factor of Christianity as a dogmatic religion of faith, and Judaism as an ethical religion of correct behaviour. I believe my characterization of Kafka and Blanchot as ‘Jewish’ in the above is, therefore, apt both historically and culturally as a Kabbalistic rejection of the Christian standpoint that death provides the meaning for life.
** The distinction between purpose and purposefulness is at the heart of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as well. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Interwar existentialism appeared as a sort of overnight philosophical and literary mushroom. Typically attributed to the intellectual spores thrown off by the 19th century philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, the single word description of existentialism is ‘absurd’. Absurdity is lack of reason in every sense - the absence of implicit meaning, the sterility of human action, and ultimately the pointlessness of life. According to Martin Heidegger, for example, the event which provokes the question of the reasonableness of life is its inevitable termination, death, which is the triumph of unreason.* For the writer Albert Camus, the possibility to personally choose death rather than life gives life its foundational significance, despite the obvious indifference of the universe.
Maurice Blanchot is an existentialist. But he is not an absurdist in the same way that Heidegger or Camus are absurdists. Blanchot believes that because none of us can have an experience of death, it can’t be a motivating factor for life. Death is a rumour which can’t be taken seriously. For him, life itself, the experience of existence is the only motivation necessary to fill it with meaning, purpose and reason. Experiencing existence in the midst of the daily pressures, obligations, and distractions may not be easy, or even ‘natural’, but it is certainly possible. Being, as it were, is it’s own reward if we care to appreciate it.
At the very outset of Thomas the Obscure, Thomas experiences near-drowning, apparently intentionally. As everything about his world and even his own body dissolves in a sort of trance, he experiences “a sort of holy place, so perfectly suited to him that it was enough for him to be there, to be;” To be; not to die is his intention and his experience; and it is an attractive experience not one of fear. He approaches death and spits in its eye when he feels his own existence quite distinctly from his other bodily sensations or his thoughts.
Later that night Thomas has another out of body experience, seeing and feeling himself simultaneously: “what he looked at eventually placed him in contact with a nocturnal mass which he vaguely perceived to be himself and in which he was bathed... outside himself there was something identical to his own thought which his glance or his hand could touch.” He is objectively present, even to himself. In other words he has some sort of unique significance in the world of things. He can simultaneously experience and reflect upon that experience. This is the miraculous character of his being. It is not necessary to look elsewhere for ‘reason.’ This is itself sufficient reason for his life.
The existential void, nothingness, exists for Thomas, but it is hardly a threat. His experience is that “through this void, it was sight and the object of sight which mingled together. Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision... Its own glance entered into it as an image... from all evidence a foreign body had lodged itself in his pupil and was attempting to go further... the body of Thomas remained, deprived of its senses. And thought, having entered him again, exchanged contact with the void.” Thought and the void are interchangeable (or perhaps better said: the void is an idea) - a challenging as well as provocative proposal. Where does it come from?
Blanchot is certainly not from the same intellectual gene pool as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Camus. His literary forebears are Flaubert and Kafka - the first aesthetic, the second spiritual. Blanchot testifies to both, especially the latter, in his writing and correspondence. And it is Kafka’s brand of existentialism - Jewish, Eastern European, and (knowing the inadequacy of the term) life-focussed - which Blanchot represents. As Thomas realises on the second night of the story, “He was really dead and at the same time rejected from the reality of death.” Death is not his enemy, nor his inspiration.
Blanchot was not merely incidentally interested in Kafka. He analysed Kafka’s work in detail and recognised its dominant influence: the Kabbalah, that mystical discipline which seeks to integrate language with living in a way which can only be described as existentialist. Gershon Scholem, the leading scholar of Kabbalah in the 20th century, considered Kafka’s work as canonical in Kabbalistic literature, on a par with the Zohar, and even the Bible itself.
The Kabbalah is absurdist in the manner in which Blanchot (and Kafka) is absurdist. It seeks to undermine not just the dominance and distortions of language but also the conventions of reason language embodies. Thomas explicitly reports at the evening’s dinner that he is “unsatisfied by the words.” The purpose of Kabbalah is to reveal what lies behind language, beyond the distractions brought about by everyday life, to expose us to, in a word, existence. This is what Heidegger called Dasein, the particular reflective mode of being of a person. But in Blanchot, there is Dasein with a difference (For a fuller explanation of Kabbalah and its interpretive use, see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
Dasein, according to Heidegger, must decide what its life is, what it will be committed to, what its point will be. For Heidegger, the content of these choices is all there is, this is Dasein tout court. But not so for Blanchot. He knows that any fixation of purpose is already lethal. It implies the cessation of new interpretations, of new possibilities, of learning about oneself as well as the world, of life in a sense more profound that the stopping of physical processes.**
For Blanchot existence is a receptacle for the sort of content by which Heidegger defines Dasein. This receptacle is not a thing in any concrete sense (neither is Dasein) but something, nevertheless, which is, and is independent of its contents - a psyche, a life-force, or if one prefers, a soul. Its content is constantly changing. It certainly can’t be defined by some arbitrary choice at any moment in time.
In fact, in some sense this entity is entirely beyond time; it is eternal and the locus of a potentially infinite series of interpretations passed on from generation to generation of physical persons (largely through language!). It is an entity, therefore, not driven, like Dasein, by fear of death, but the continuously new possibilities of its interpretations of life.
Thomas explicitly uses the method of Kabbalah while reading after dinner. “He was reading with unsurpassable meticulousness and attention in relation to every symbol.” This is the technique by which Kabbalah ‘alienates’ language in order to re-establish it as subservient to human interests. Every word, every letter, each mark of punctuation has a potentially hidden meaning, in fact an infinity of potential meanings, to be discovered and explored. Others would think Thomas wasn’t really reading at all because he never turned a page, but this was only because he was being so excruciatingly attentive to his text.
The technique has an unusual effect. Words become active subjects rather than mere passive objects of Thomas’s perception: “he perceived all the strangeness there was in being observed by a word as if by a living being, and not simply by one word, but by all the words that were in that word, by all those that went with it and in turn contained other words, like a procession of angels opening out into the infinite to the very eye of the absolute.” This may seem dream-like but in comparison with Heidegger’s neologisms and prosaic complexity, Blanchot is at least comprehensible.
It’s as if the attention directed at the text enlivens the text itself and encourages it to provide its re-constructive judgment on Thomas: “he recognized himself with disgust in the form of the text he was reading, he retained the thought that (while, perched upon his shoulders, the word He and the word I were beginning their carnage) there remained within his person which was already deprived of its senses obscure words, disembodied souls and angels of words, which were exploring him deeply.” Heidegger claims that ‘Language speaks Man’; and in a sense it clearly does. But as Blanchot suggests, Language also interrogates Man. If so, there is no need to invent a new vocabulary as Heidegger has done. Much better to attend to the angels of words we already possess.
Thomas struggles with the merciless text as if he were a student with the Torah. But he is “thrust back into the depths of his being by the very words which had haunted him and which he was pursuing.” The Kabbalistic paradox of constructive deconstruction is complete. Thomas encounters his own existence through the existence of the text. Perfect ‘absorbtive’ Kabbalah, as Moshe Idel was later to describe it (See https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).
I am an expert neither in existentialism nor Kabbalah. But I don’t think Blanchot can be understood much less appreciated, at least in Thomas the Obscure, without a recognition of his unique combination of these two threads of intellectual and literary endeavour. Together I think they provide at least an entry into his method of writing and thought.
*Heidegger’s description of ‘Being-towards-death’ in Being and Time is clearly dependent on Kierkegaard, although he is not cited explicitly. This idea of death giving significance to life, although having Greek philosophical precedents, is most fully expressed in Christian theology. The Christian motive for living is salvation after and, crucially, through death. This is markedly different from the Judaic (and Islamic) motive of obedience to the divine will as an end in itself. It is, I think, the primary differentiating factor of Christianity as a dogmatic religion of faith, and Judaism as an ethical religion of correct behaviour. I believe my characterization of Kafka and Blanchot as ‘Jewish’ in the above is, therefore, apt both historically and culturally as a Kabbalistic rejection of the Christian standpoint that death provides the meaning for life.
** The distinction between purpose and purposefulness is at the heart of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as well. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
January 8, 2022
There are great authors and there are poor authors… There are bad readers and there are good readers…
I wish I were a reader like this…
Thomas the Obscure is a story of a love affair but the lovers live in the world so strangely solipsistic.
And the lovers incessantly keep moving through the weird duality of their world, through being and not being of their existence…
And for them, present at the absence of life, being and not being are the same.
Authors dwell in the books they write… Readers dwell in the books they read.
Rather than withdraw from a text whose defenses were so strong, he pitted all his strength in the will to seize it, obstinately refusing to withdraw his glance and still thinking himself a profound reader, even when the words were already taking hold of him and beginning to read him… he entered with his living body into the anonymous shapes of words, giving his substance to them, establishing their relationships, offering his being to the word ‘be’.
I wish I were a reader like this…
Thomas the Obscure is a story of a love affair but the lovers live in the world so strangely solipsistic.
What was going to happen? She did not know, but devoting her entire life to waiting, her impatience melted into the hope of participating in a general cataclysm in which, at the same time as the beings themselves, the distances which separate beings would be destroyed.
And the lovers incessantly keep moving through the weird duality of their world, through being and not being of their existence…
At this instant the real fall begins, the one which abolishes itself, nothingness instantly devoured by a purer nothingness.
And for them, present at the absence of life, being and not being are the same.
I am truly in the beyond, if the beyond is that which admits of no beyond. Along with the feeling that everything has vanished, this night brings me the feeling that everything is near me.
Authors dwell in the books they write… Readers dwell in the books they read.
Read
November 29, 2018Η τάση της πεζογραφίας να κατανοηθεί ενώ διαβάζεται δεν θα βρεθεί μέσα σε αυτό το βιβλίο.
Αυτό το είδος ποιητικής πεζογραφημένης ελεγείας θανάτου έχει μια σταθερή αξία, είναι μία μνήμη που αξίζει να ξεχνάμε.
Δεν ξέρω να σας πω αν κατάλαβα, τί κατάλαβα, και πως το φιλτράρισα τούτο το γραπτό.
Ανήκει σε κάποιον εξατομικευμένο κόσμο ανησυχίας και ασάφειας, έναν κόσμο με εσωτερικά βάθη και ύψη, που απευθύνεται σε όντα μυθοπλασίας.
Βασικά έχουμε ένα τίποτα. Μια μαυρίλα. Μια απομάκρυνση. Μια μοναξιά, παρέα με θάνατο και κατασκευασμένες φωνές.
Δυο όντα ο Θωμάς και η Άννα τυλίγουν και ξετυλίγουν απουσίες και αδύνατα γεγονότα που δεν συμβαίνουν ή αν συμβούν είναι μάλλον μυθοπλασία.
Είναι δυο υπάρξεις που δεν μιλάνε, δεν ακούν, δεν υπάρχουν μα υπάρχουν μέσα απο τη ζωή του θανάτου τους και εκατομμύρια τέτοια πειράματα σκέψεων στα οποία το πειραματόζωο ( εγώ δηλαδή) έπαθε όλες τις παρενέργειες που δεν αναφερόνται αλλά εννοούνται.
Η Άννα πεθαίνει. Επιτέλους, συνέβη κάτι ας ειναι και μακάβριο. Φρούδες ελπίδες. Έρχεται η διαβεβαίωση της απελευθέρωσης ή της σωτηρίας και εντέλει η φωνή του όντος παραδίδεται στα κύματα των λέξεων.
Μόλις άρχιζα να πιστεύω πως βγάζω νόημα με έπνιγαν τα κύματα της φωνής που δεν ακούγεται και συντρίβεται στην ακτή της πιο ανθρώπινης πράξης θανάτου.
Τί λέω.
Αυτά που διάβασα. Αυτά που νομίζω πως δεν κατάλαβα. Αυτά που δεν θέλω να καταλάβω.
Φανταστικές συνομιλίες, ψευδαισθήσεις, ηρεμία, κίνηση, εξώθηση, προσέγγιση, αναγνώριση του εσωτερικού του ανθρώπινου γεγονότος.
Εν κατακλείδι, δεν ανήκω στην ελίτ των θιασωτών αυτού του είδους τέχνης. Δεν μπορώ να διαβάσω τον πεζογραφικό αφρό της λογοτεχνίας που σπάει στα κύματα φωνών που υποκινούνται και γράφονται.
*Αν δεν υπήρχε το επίμετρο θα έπρεπε να μείνει για πάντα στο σκοτάδι ο Θωμάς ο σκοτεινός.
Καλή ανάγνωση.
(απο εμένα είναι όχι)
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
Αυτό το είδος ποιητικής πεζογραφημένης ελεγείας θανάτου έχει μια σταθερή αξία, είναι μία μνήμη που αξίζει να ξεχνάμε.
Δεν ξέρω να σας πω αν κατάλαβα, τί κατάλαβα, και πως το φιλτράρισα τούτο το γραπτό.
Ανήκει σε κάποιον εξατομικευμένο κόσμο ανησυχίας και ασάφειας, έναν κόσμο με εσωτερικά βάθη και ύψη, που απευθύνεται σε όντα μυθοπλασίας.
Βασικά έχουμε ένα τίποτα. Μια μαυρίλα. Μια απομάκρυνση. Μια μοναξιά, παρέα με θάνατο και κατασκευασμένες φωνές.
Δυο όντα ο Θωμάς και η Άννα τυλίγουν και ξετυλίγουν απουσίες και αδύνατα γεγονότα που δεν συμβαίνουν ή αν συμβούν είναι μάλλον μυθοπλασία.
Είναι δυο υπάρξεις που δεν μιλάνε, δεν ακούν, δεν υπάρχουν μα υπάρχουν μέσα απο τη ζωή του θανάτου τους και εκατομμύρια τέτοια πειράματα σκέψεων στα οποία το πειραματόζωο ( εγώ δηλαδή) έπαθε όλες τις παρενέργειες που δεν αναφερόνται αλλά εννοούνται.
Η Άννα πεθαίνει. Επιτέλους, συνέβη κάτι ας ειναι και μακάβριο. Φρούδες ελπίδες. Έρχεται η διαβεβαίωση της απελευθέρωσης ή της σωτηρίας και εντέλει η φωνή του όντος παραδίδεται στα κύματα των λέξεων.
Μόλις άρχιζα να πιστεύω πως βγάζω νόημα με έπνιγαν τα κύματα της φωνής που δεν ακούγεται και συντρίβεται στην ακτή της πιο ανθρώπινης πράξης θανάτου.
Τί λέω.
Αυτά που διάβασα. Αυτά που νομίζω πως δεν κατάλαβα. Αυτά που δεν θέλω να καταλάβω.
Φανταστικές συνομιλίες, ψευδαισθήσεις, ηρεμία, κίνηση, εξώθηση, προσέγγιση, αναγνώριση του εσωτερικού του ανθρώπινου γεγονότος.
Εν κατακλείδι, δεν ανήκω στην ελίτ των θιασωτών αυτού του είδους τέχνης. Δεν μπορώ να διαβάσω τον πεζογραφικό αφρό της λογοτεχνίας που σπάει στα κύματα φωνών που υποκινούνται και γράφονται.
*Αν δεν υπήρχε το επίμετρο θα έπρεπε να μείνει για πάντα στο σκοτάδι ο Θωμάς ο σκοτεινός.
Καλή ανάγνωση.
(απο εμένα είναι όχι)
Πολλούς ασπασμούς.
July 1, 2015
At once I was taken into the event, the hailstorm of ideas, thoughts, the words seeking their place and joining as magnetic twinings. Ever repetitive, ever reaching, dense and incomprehensible while singing the poetry of prose.
Relieved that I am finally done though the novel was a mere 117 pages. (the words, only and slim, are to be excused.) Yet if I didn’t read, Thomas the Obscure, I would not have lodged within me a perspective on the importance of an authentic life, an authentic death. Without the use of character or plot development Blanchot covers immense ground in pursuit of life and the living, the living of a death.
Due to the extraordinary density I will not read this book again but I am grateful I did once. Through the non-linear rendering a meaning entered silently into my pores. It is an experience. Once inside it does not leave. I can’t explain it and I don’t think I want to try. Some things better left unexamined? But it is different than the core messages I receive from linear novels no matter how profound. By weathering (?) and reading through how the story is told, its unique and particular form, I was led to a wordless land of words. As never before I was inside the event unfolding. No longer reading about it, not even from the first sentence I was within the torrential flow of consciousness. This was the closest I have come to consciousness through words. It was an extraordinary feat.
I remove half a kindled star throbbing to join its compatriots due to the tedium at parts and the density. I…well I wanted it a somewhat… a little larger than somewhat… a more comfortable read. The truth is I didn’t want to labor so hard. Huh? This is a part of what Blanchot reveals in this book. What life is and isn’t. Being comfortable in the face of knowledge and wisdom is not a part of, Life, at all. Here I am admitting to it publicly. Maybe not the brightest thing I’ve done.
If someone better trained and more knowledgeable were to read this book they may very well be able to understand and be able to explicate the unique style, how and why it works, the uses of density and tedium for specific purposes. My guess is they will join all 5 stars in a happy reunion. I hope it
happens. I still have much to learn about this book and this Mr. Blanchot.
4.5/5
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November 8, 2016Povremeno pročitam neku ovakvu knjigu da proverim jesam li i dalje džiber bez ukusa. Jesam, i slava Bogu.
Toliko sam se razočarala, na osnovu Blanšoovih eseja očekivala sam zaista nešto drugačije (ali zašto? jer sam optimista, očito). A ovo je pretenciozno i preciozno i pre svega sterilno do bola i sve vreme se vrti isti štos sa paradoksalnim rečenicama ("događaj je bio toliko ozbiljan da ga niko od prisutnih nije primetio") i, takođe sve vreme, dolazilo mi je da poglavljima stavljam podnaslove u stilu "Toma pliva i proživljava krizu identiteta, pet strana" "Toma razmišlja da li je u stanju da ustane sa zemlje i šta će mu se onda ružno desiti, dve strane", "Toma se valja po podu hotelske sobe u egzistencijalnoj krizi, sedam strana".
Da, znam da je ovo mnogo cenjeno u krugovima vrhunskih intelektualacai intelektualnih snobova, ali mante me. "Remekdelo psihološkog romana", lele, ako se ovo uporedi npr. sa Zapisima Maltea Lauridsa Brigea valjda postaje jasno ko kosi a ko vodu nosi.
Toliko sam se razočarala, na osnovu Blanšoovih eseja očekivala sam zaista nešto drugačije (ali zašto? jer sam optimista, očito). A ovo je pretenciozno i preciozno i pre svega sterilno do bola i sve vreme se vrti isti štos sa paradoksalnim rečenicama ("događaj je bio toliko ozbiljan da ga niko od prisutnih nije primetio") i, takođe sve vreme, dolazilo mi je da poglavljima stavljam podnaslove u stilu "Toma pliva i proživljava krizu identiteta, pet strana" "Toma razmišlja da li je u stanju da ustane sa zemlje i šta će mu se onda ružno desiti, dve strane", "Toma se valja po podu hotelske sobe u egzistencijalnoj krizi, sedam strana".
Da, znam da je ovo mnogo cenjeno u krugovima vrhunskih intelektualaca
January 25, 2015
Feelings occupied him, then devoured him. He was pressed in every part of his flesh by a thousand hands which were his only hand. A mortal anguish beat against his heart. Around his body, he knew that his thought, mingled with the night, kept watch. He knew with certainty that it, too, was looking for a way to enter into him. Against his lips, in his mouth, it was forcing its way toward a monstrous union. Beneath his eyelids, it created a necessary sight. And at the same time it was furiously destroying the face it kissed.
In the sea Thomas lived the freedom of the abyss' crashing silences. But the water mirage on waters disappears. Solitude's enemy of the unseen faces living in its blacknesses. Nothing is not nothing. Silences can mean the repressed, and the hidden. It is when he's on the shore and a swimmer is escaping it's edges that he feels closest. I can't call it enlightenment almosts but the lessening of a burden, this close to the far away figure. Thomas in the woods they are the lessfaces of between the pillars of darkness you are passing them. Thomas never escapes the not alone. The intruders slip in him; thoughts, passions feelings. When he is reading he disappears into the eye I, he, it. The hideous distortion of meaning into Meaning. Oh no, in the dinner there are People. The kind of people that sniff around your edges and go back to Their People. Not one of us. I must be one of these because in all classroom/group situations I am the unpartnered. The speed of light will never catch up to the speed of sound and they will never hear you, Thomas. Oh no, there's a beautiful face. I have wondered/don't want to know if young and beautiful women read stories and don't feel apart of another species. If they look into mirrors unknowing the other is a reflection and can't do anything without them. This is Anne world and this is Thomas world. Beautiful face eight spider legs all at once walking in the other people world. I don't feel for the Anne who cannot beat her fists on the doors of Thomas world and understand it. It's not compulsory to have this access. That they will move their arm in the mirror when you move yours. It is the closeness to the swimmer that gets me. When the silence feels like you aren't going to be strangled in your chest. Anne world dies and her beautiful face is still beautiful face.
She also heard Thomas; in fact, she knew now what she had to say to Thomas, she knew exactly the words she had searched for all her life in order to reach him. But she remained silent; she thought what good is it- and this word was also the word she was seeking- Thomas is insignificant. Let us sleep.
If nothingness is free. Where Thomas doesn't matter anyway. Anne world is the living not a host he can't feel free of. If Socrates lives through Plato then why doesn't her symbolic world become the kind of brain and gut worms agitating after death. Mummified sun that remembers its shadows. Solitudes killer is yourself. I don't believe that spider Anne could have put one or three or eight probing tentacles into his brain mass and took anything away that wasn't material of her own orbs. I am relieved she is free, because death is going to happen anyway, but what about the blind eyes slipping into Thomas' I's again. They become men, they were him, they were swimmers, the shore. It's ugly when you're beating your fists on your own doors, silence begging.
May 3, 2020
"It is in such great poverty, such absence, that I recognize all the passions from which I have been withdrawn by an insignificant miracle. Absent from Anne, absent from my love for Anne to the extent that I loved Anne. And absent, doubly, from myself, carried each time by desire beyond desire and destroying even this nonexistent Thomas where I felt I truly existed. Absent from this absence, I back away infinitely. I lose all contact with the horizon I am fleeing. I flee my flight. Where is the end? Already the void seems to me the ultimate in fullness: I understood it, I experienced it, I exhausted it. Now I am like a beast terrified by its own leap. I am falling in horror of my fall. I aspire vertiginously to reject myself from myself. Is is night? Have I come back, another, to the place where I was? Again there is a supreme moment of calm. Silence, refuge of transparency for the soul. I am terrified by this peace. I experience a sweetness which contains me for a moment and consumes me. If I had a body, I would grip my throat with my hands. I would like to suffer. I would like to prepare a simple death for myself, in an agony in which I would tear myself to pieces"
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April 7, 2023Clearly this is one of those books--like Mircea Cărtărescu's
Blinding
--that has been patiently waiting for me. C'est incroyable !
Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKYS1...
Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKYS1...
August 27, 2017
It was a story emptied of events, emptied to the point that every memory and all perspective were eliminated, and nevertheless drawing from this absence its inflexible direction which seemed to carry everything away in the irresistible movement toward an imminent catastrophe. What was going to happen? She did not know, but devoting her entire life to waiting, her impatience melted into the hope of participating in a general cataclysm in which, at the same time as the being themselves, the distances which separate beings would be destroyed.Though he originally conceived of it as a novel, Blanchot whittled that first version of Thomas the Obscure down by three-quarters to its final form as a récit. One wonders what context may or may not have been shaved off as a result, although Blanchot's steadfast dedication to opacity in his fiction inclines me to doubt how much more context would be gained through the restoration of the original text. Even more than later Beckett, Blanchot defies anything other than guesswork when it comes to interpretation of his work. Not that reductionists are scared off. For example, his Wikipedia entry laughingly reduces Thomas the Obscure to being 'about the experience of reading and loss.' Words fittingly fail me.
Blanchot was forever probing at what he saw as the void found in writing. He was a philosophical cartographer of sorts, much like Kafka and Beckett, though his 'maps' are typically of labyrinthine design which fail by nature to lead one to a specific destination. For me, few other writers of fiction so authentically capture in words the futility inherent in attempting to capture in words the futility of facing and describing existence. This is the brilliance of the récit form. And I should add that reading Blanchot in translation as I do adds an additional layer of futility to the process. In fact, the translator of this volume, Robert Lamberton, includes an excellent short afterword addressing the nature of translation and specifically the difficulty of translating Blanchot.
As a first 'novel' this defies all stereotypes attached to such works, except perhaps the one that they hold the seeds of all future work by a given writer. Blanchot establishes his baseline and then covers a lot of ground here, certainly beyond just 'reading and loss.' And though as with others of his works, I periodically found myself tempted to excavate below his structure, I ultimately found it more enjoyable to stay on the surface and just follow his turns of phrase through the labyrinth.
June 15, 2021
Οδηγίες χρήσης και ταπεινή προτροπή: να διαβαστεί με χαλαρούς ρυθμούς, σπαστά, εν μέσω άλλων αναγνωσμάτων. — Κίνδυνος υψηλών δόσεων παραισθήσεων! Είναι απ' τα βιβλία που βυθίζεσαι στην άβυσσό τους, ηδονικά και νωχελικά, ώσπου το μυαλό πήζει απ' τις εικόνες — τις γεμάτες παραδοξότητα, σκότος, πόνο, μηδενισμό και κλειστοφοβία — και βάζεις τον σελιδοδείκτη για να καταλαγιάσει για λίγο η σκόνη — για λεπτά, ώρες ή μέρες, αναλόγως αποθεματικών.
Παράδειγμα απ' την Άννα τη σκοτεινή: «Φαίνεται ότι κατά τη διάρκεια αυτής της νύχτας είχε αφομοιώσει κάποιο πράγμα φανταστικό που γι’ αυτήν ήταν ένα πύρινο ��γκάθι και που την ανάγκαζε να απωθεί προς τα έξω, όπως ένα χυδαίο απόβρασμα, την ίδια της την ύπαρξη. Ακίνητη επάνω στον μεσότοιχο, το σώμα αναμεμειγμένο με το καθαρό κενό, οι μηροί και η κοιλιά ενωμένα με ένα άφυλο και ανόργανο μηδέν, τα χέρια σφίγγοντας σπασμωδικά μία απουσία χεριών, το πρόσωπο πίνοντας εκείνο που δεν ήταν ούτε ανάσα ούτε στόμα, η Άννα είχε μεταμορφωθεί σε ένα άλλο σώμα που η ζωή του, πενία, ένδεια υπέρτατες, την είχε κάνει να γίνει σιγά σιγά η ολότητα εκείνου που δεν μπορούσε να γίνει».
Τον Μπατάιγ, στενό φίλο του Μπλανσό, τον θεωρώ ως το βιάγκρα της λογοτεχνίας. Ο Μπλανσό ανήκει στα βαριά παραισθησιογόνα. — Προσοχή στις παρενέργειες!
Παράδειγμα απ' την Άννα τη σκοτεινή: «Φαίνεται ότι κατά τη διάρκεια αυτής της νύχτας είχε αφομοιώσει κάποιο πράγμα φανταστικό που γι’ αυτήν ήταν ένα πύρινο ��γκάθι και που την ανάγκαζε να απωθεί προς τα έξω, όπως ένα χυδαίο απόβρασμα, την ίδια της την ύπαρξη. Ακίνητη επάνω στον μεσότοιχο, το σώμα αναμεμειγμένο με το καθαρό κενό, οι μηροί και η κοιλιά ενωμένα με ένα άφυλο και ανόργανο μηδέν, τα χέρια σφίγγοντας σπασμωδικά μία απουσία χεριών, το πρόσωπο πίνοντας εκείνο που δεν ήταν ούτε ανάσα ούτε στόμα, η Άννα είχε μεταμορφωθεί σε ένα άλλο σώμα που η ζωή του, πενία, ένδεια υπέρτατες, την είχε κάνει να γίνει σιγά σιγά η ολότητα εκείνου που δεν μπορούσε να γίνει».
Τον Μπατάιγ, στενό φίλο του Μπλανσό, τον θεωρώ ως το βιάγκρα της λογοτεχνίας. Ο Μπλανσό ανήκει στα βαριά παραισθησιογόνα. — Προσοχή στις παρενέργειες!
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October 6, 2024حیف که اعجوبهای مثل بلانشو توی سایه مونده (و شبه-نویسندهی نا-فیلسوفی مثل کامو شده خدای اسنوبها و خورهی اینستاگرام بازی؛ خوشتیپِ سابقاً فوتبالیستِ سیگاری، خودکشیدوستی که به زندگی «آری» گفت و خودش رو نکشت تا با اون بازیگر خوشگله نامهبازی بکنه و زنش رو دق بده، در حالی که به اورجی بازیهای سارتر و دوبوآر «نه» میگفت. آخرش هم که تصادف کرد و به جذابترین شکل ممکن مُرد تا جاودانه شه.) شاید به خاطر ضدیهودی/راست افراطی بودنش. شاید به خاطر دوری از مهملات رسانهها (بلانشو هم مثل سلینجر کلاً یکی دوتا عکس داره و هیچ مصاحبهای). شاید به خاطر اینکه بلانشو نویسندهی راحتی نیست. خوندنش سخت و دردناک و ترسناکه و پیامی برای پیامخواهان نداره، چون مثل اسم اون کتاب خوب فقط ادبیات و مرگ براش مهمه و شب... بلانشو شب رو زنده میکنه، انگار به راز زندگی ما شبدیوانهها (که هر روز خیانت معهودِ روز بعد رو فراموش نمیکنیم) دست پیدا کرده و انگار انزوای خودخواستهام این مواجهه رو ثقیلتر و بارورتر کرده. در نهایت برای اینکه قدر آغازها و پایانها، شخصیتپردازیها و... رو بدونیم و خیره به چشمان مرگ... باید به اندازهی غارنشینِ اولیه تنها و بیپناه بوده باشیم
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اینچنین بود که در عمق یک غار، جنون متفکری کمگو بر من ظاهر شد و کلماتی نامعقول در گوشم طنین انداخت، همچنان که بر دیوار غار این کلمات را مینوشتم: «میاندیشم، پس نیستم» این کلمات تصوری خوشایند در من پدید آورد
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اینچنین بود که در عمق یک غار، جنون متفکری کمگو بر من ظاهر شد و کلماتی نامعقول در گوشم طنین انداخت، همچنان که بر دیوار غار این کلمات را مینوشتم: «میاندیشم، پس نیستم» این کلمات تصوری خوشایند در من پدید آورد
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July 20, 2020Hayatım boyunca okuduğum hiçbir kitap beni bu kadar zorlamamıştı. “Anladığım” iddasında olduğum kimi bölümleri de esasında doğru anlamamış olabilirim diye düşünüyorum şimdi. Edebi derinliğim olmadığı için mi, estetik yetersizliğim sebebi ile mi bilemiyorum ama bu kitap benim için birkaç gömlek yukarıda. Bu nedenle bir not tercihim de olmadı.
Okumak isteyecek olanlara da tavsiyem; başlama kararı vermeden önce bir şekilde kitabın ilk on sayfasını (S.11-S.21) okumanız olacaktır. İlk on sayfa esasında kitabın en anlaşılır bölümü olduğu bilgisini de göz önüne alarak okuma/okumama kararı vermenizi tavsiye ediyorum.
Okumak isteyecek olanlara da tavsiyem; başlama kararı vermeden önce bir şekilde kitabın ilk on sayfasını (S.11-S.21) okumanız olacaktır. İlk on sayfa esasında kitabın en anlaşılır bölümü olduğu bilgisini de göz önüne alarak okuma/okumama kararı vermenizi tavsiye ediyorum.
April 3, 2023
Između nepodnošljivosti i fascinacije, u rusvaju preteranosti, Blanšo blanšira i flambira čitaoce svojim gluvnim činima i dijamantsko-ćilibarskim književnim grabuljama koje ljube ništavilo, a pljuju ideju da usidrenje u smislu postoji. Smrt za smrt, zub za zub, see that my grave is kept clean.
September 7, 2023
“Da li je ništavilo bilo tvoja suprotnost? Rekao sam da nije. Ali, uz blago krivotvorenje spoja reči, stekao sam jedan utisak. Da sam tražio suprotnost tvoje suprotnosti, izgubivši pravi put i bez povratka, izvrsno napredujući od tebe – svesti (koja si i postojanje i život) do tebe – nesvesti (koja si stvarnost i smrt) – našao bih, bačen u užas nepoznatog, sliku svoje zagonetke koja bi bila u isti mah ništavilo i postojanje.“
Umalo nisam, već posle nekoliko poglavlja, receptivnosti ograničene sopstvenim očekivanjima i prezirom prema, kako je tada izgledalo, bespotrebnim ugnjetavanjem paradoksima, odbacio knjigu bez pravog razumevanja šta zapravo čitam. Na sreću je nekoliko, slobodno mogu reći – genijalnih odeljaka prodrlo do svesti i interesovanje se umnogostručilo; naučio sam da uživam u tekstu na pravi način, bez opiranja, bez prigovora, i posle prvog od dva uzastopna čitanja - jer je drugo bilo neophodno s obzirom na spočetnu neozbiljnost – postalo je jasno da egzistencijalizmu niko, koliko je meni poznato, nije ovako pristupio, i bešnje udarao o lingvističke i iskustvene barijere. Toma je otelovljeni paradoks, živ i neživ, ništavilo u telu; „jedini leš čovečanstva“: on je svako umirući, telesan i bez volje sem „volje“ nedostatka volje, biće i praznina u jednom nemogućem spoju. (Ne)postoji u stvarnosti i ništavilu, u neku ruku, stvarnijem od stvarnosti; on stoji u tački preseka nečega i ničega, kao – kako zamišljam, u centru osmice koja se savija dok se gornji i donji krug (postojanje i praznina) ne preklope u istoj fenomenološkoj ravni međusobno se ne potirući, u ambicioznoj želji da se smrt za života uvrsti u iskustveno, jer se smrt “izvlači iz života a ne prestanka života“, i sve što se o Tomi može reći, nužno je paradoks. Pomislilo bi se: jalov je to metod, krik je bez glasa, međutim, upravo postiže efekat u željenom maniru: onim što govori, pokazuje gde je granica; onim što govori, govori šta ne govori, jer način ne postoji, i ulogom, reči prevazilaze sopstvena značenja: negativ su filma koji se ne može razviti.
Priča počinje Tominim uplivavanjem u oluju na otvorenom moru i nekakvim davljenjem koje ga zauvek odvaja od živih a pripaja praznini. Na obalu izlazi promenjena osoba, telo lišeno čula koje postaje „biće nebića čija je nedostojna negacija, koju prouzrokuje kao svoju duboku harmoniju“.
„Unutar smrti, sama smrt mu je bila uskraćena; tom užasno uništenom čoveku, koga je u ništavilu zaustavila sopstvena slika...“
„Nešto posve besmisleno služi mi kao razum. Osećam da sam mrtav – ne; osećam, živ, da sam beskrajno mrtviji od mrtvog. Otkrivam svoje biće u vrtoglavom ponoru u kojem ga nema, odsustvo, odsustvo u koje se smešta poput kakvog boga. Ne postojim i trajem; neumoljiva budućnost se beskrajno širi zarad tog ugnjetavanog bića. Duh se u užasu osvrće prema vremenu koje ga odvlači.“
„Čudnovat beše njegov užas, kada se, prešavši poslednje prepreke, našao na uskim vratima svoje grobnice, i to ne kao vaskrsao, već mrtav, uveren da je istovremeno izbegao i smrt i život. Hodao je oslikana mumija ; posmatrao sunce koje je nastojalo da mu izmami nasmejano i živahno lice. Hodao je, jedini verodostojni Lazar, u kom je vaskrsla sama smrt.“
„Naginjem se nad tobom, tebi jednak, nudeći ti ogledalo za tvoje savršeno ništavilo, za tvoju tamu koja nije ni svetlo ni odustvo svetlosti, za tu prazninu koja posmatra. Svemu što jesi a, sto u našem jeziku, ne postoji, pridodajem jednu svest. Nalažem ti da svoj kranji identitet doživiš kao odnos, imenujem te i određujem. Ti postaješ slasna pasivnost.“
Vrativši se u hotel, na večeri se priključuje lepoj Ani čiji sjaj pod Tominim pogledom bledi, umor je obuzima kao i kasnije, prilikom njihovih sastanaka, smela, kobna želja da sazna ko je, tačnije, šta je on? Saznanje i sjedinjenje sa Tomom, sa onim što predstavlja; odgovor na njeno pitanje, čiju težinu sa zebnjom naslućuje – odgovor kojim je“opkoljava poput ponora“, i uvid da je „izgubila svaku šansu da se zaustavi na vreme“ čim je zakoračila tim putem, jesu, po mom mišljenju, najbolji delovi teksta.
„Ana ga ugleda kako se približava, nimalo začuđena, poznavši u tom neminovnom biću čoveka od koga će uzalud nastojati da pobegne, koga će sretati svakoga dana.“
„Ne samo da je bio uništen svaki povod jasnog sporazumevanja, već se Ani činilo da je tajna tog bića prešla u njeno srce, gde je mogla biti shvaćena samo kao pitanje koje se beskonačno postavlja na pogrešan način.“
„Njene se ruke nežno skršiše, koraci je napustiše, i ona utonu u čistu vodu u kojoj je, svakog trena, preskačući beskrajne potočiće, preskakala iz života u smrti i, još gore, iz smrti u život, u mučnom snu koji se već nalazio u okrilju mirnog sna.“
„Činilo se da shvata – kakva surova iluzija – da ravnodušnost koja je kuljala Tomom kao kakva stajaća voda, potiče od njenog upada u oblasti u koje nikad nije trebalo da prodre, od kobnog odsustva koje je uspelo da probije sve brane, i to tako da je, želeći da sada otkrije to nago odsustvo, taj čisti negativ, jednak čistoj svetlosti i dubokoj želji, morala da se podvrgne velikim izazovima da bi ga domašila.“
Jasno je da se velikoj većini, najvećoj većini čitalaca, ovo delo neće posebno dopasti: jedni će ga smatrati pretencioznim i tmurnim, a drugi - previše ukaljanim misticizmom, implicitnim dualizmom i sl. Iako bih mogao, na meni nije da osporavam ovakve tvrdnje, samo obaveštavam; smatrajte se upozorenim.
"Umesto da ustukne od teksta koji se tako dobro brani, svim silama se založio da ga se domogne, tvrdoglavo odbijajući da odvrati pogled, verujući da i dalje pomno čita, međutim, reči su ga se već dočepale i počele da ga čitaju."
Umalo nisam, već posle nekoliko poglavlja, receptivnosti ograničene sopstvenim očekivanjima i prezirom prema, kako je tada izgledalo, bespotrebnim ugnjetavanjem paradoksima, odbacio knjigu bez pravog razumevanja šta zapravo čitam. Na sreću je nekoliko, slobodno mogu reći – genijalnih odeljaka prodrlo do svesti i interesovanje se umnogostručilo; naučio sam da uživam u tekstu na pravi način, bez opiranja, bez prigovora, i posle prvog od dva uzastopna čitanja - jer je drugo bilo neophodno s obzirom na spočetnu neozbiljnost – postalo je jasno da egzistencijalizmu niko, koliko je meni poznato, nije ovako pristupio, i bešnje udarao o lingvističke i iskustvene barijere. Toma je otelovljeni paradoks, živ i neživ, ništavilo u telu; „jedini leš čovečanstva“: on je svako umirući, telesan i bez volje sem „volje“ nedostatka volje, biće i praznina u jednom nemogućem spoju. (Ne)postoji u stvarnosti i ništavilu, u neku ruku, stvarnijem od stvarnosti; on stoji u tački preseka nečega i ničega, kao – kako zamišljam, u centru osmice koja se savija dok se gornji i donji krug (postojanje i praznina) ne preklope u istoj fenomenološkoj ravni međusobno se ne potirući, u ambicioznoj želji da se smrt za života uvrsti u iskustveno, jer se smrt “izvlači iz života a ne prestanka života“, i sve što se o Tomi može reći, nužno je paradoks. Pomislilo bi se: jalov je to metod, krik je bez glasa, međutim, upravo postiže efekat u željenom maniru: onim što govori, pokazuje gde je granica; onim što govori, govori šta ne govori, jer način ne postoji, i ulogom, reči prevazilaze sopstvena značenja: negativ su filma koji se ne može razviti.
Priča počinje Tominim uplivavanjem u oluju na otvorenom moru i nekakvim davljenjem koje ga zauvek odvaja od živih a pripaja praznini. Na obalu izlazi promenjena osoba, telo lišeno čula koje postaje „biće nebića čija je nedostojna negacija, koju prouzrokuje kao svoju duboku harmoniju“.
„Unutar smrti, sama smrt mu je bila uskraćena; tom užasno uništenom čoveku, koga je u ništavilu zaustavila sopstvena slika...“
„Nešto posve besmisleno služi mi kao razum. Osećam da sam mrtav – ne; osećam, živ, da sam beskrajno mrtviji od mrtvog. Otkrivam svoje biće u vrtoglavom ponoru u kojem ga nema, odsustvo, odsustvo u koje se smešta poput kakvog boga. Ne postojim i trajem; neumoljiva budućnost se beskrajno širi zarad tog ugnjetavanog bića. Duh se u užasu osvrće prema vremenu koje ga odvlači.“
„Čudnovat beše njegov užas, kada se, prešavši poslednje prepreke, našao na uskim vratima svoje grobnice, i to ne kao vaskrsao, već mrtav, uveren da je istovremeno izbegao i smrt i život. Hodao je oslikana mumija ; posmatrao sunce koje je nastojalo da mu izmami nasmejano i živahno lice. Hodao je, jedini verodostojni Lazar, u kom je vaskrsla sama smrt.“
„Naginjem se nad tobom, tebi jednak, nudeći ti ogledalo za tvoje savršeno ništavilo, za tvoju tamu koja nije ni svetlo ni odustvo svetlosti, za tu prazninu koja posmatra. Svemu što jesi a, sto u našem jeziku, ne postoji, pridodajem jednu svest. Nalažem ti da svoj kranji identitet doživiš kao odnos, imenujem te i određujem. Ti postaješ slasna pasivnost.“
Vrativši se u hotel, na večeri se priključuje lepoj Ani čiji sjaj pod Tominim pogledom bledi, umor je obuzima kao i kasnije, prilikom njihovih sastanaka, smela, kobna želja da sazna ko je, tačnije, šta je on? Saznanje i sjedinjenje sa Tomom, sa onim što predstavlja; odgovor na njeno pitanje, čiju težinu sa zebnjom naslućuje – odgovor kojim je“opkoljava poput ponora“, i uvid da je „izgubila svaku šansu da se zaustavi na vreme“ čim je zakoračila tim putem, jesu, po mom mišljenju, najbolji delovi teksta.
„Ana ga ugleda kako se približava, nimalo začuđena, poznavši u tom neminovnom biću čoveka od koga će uzalud nastojati da pobegne, koga će sretati svakoga dana.“
„Ne samo da je bio uništen svaki povod jasnog sporazumevanja, već se Ani činilo da je tajna tog bića prešla u njeno srce, gde je mogla biti shvaćena samo kao pitanje koje se beskonačno postavlja na pogrešan način.“
„Njene se ruke nežno skršiše, koraci je napustiše, i ona utonu u čistu vodu u kojoj je, svakog trena, preskačući beskrajne potočiće, preskakala iz života u smrti i, još gore, iz smrti u život, u mučnom snu koji se već nalazio u okrilju mirnog sna.“
„Činilo se da shvata – kakva surova iluzija – da ravnodušnost koja je kuljala Tomom kao kakva stajaća voda, potiče od njenog upada u oblasti u koje nikad nije trebalo da prodre, od kobnog odsustva koje je uspelo da probije sve brane, i to tako da je, želeći da sada otkrije to nago odsustvo, taj čisti negativ, jednak čistoj svetlosti i dubokoj želji, morala da se podvrgne velikim izazovima da bi ga domašila.“
Jasno je da se velikoj većini, najvećoj većini čitalaca, ovo delo neće posebno dopasti: jedni će ga smatrati pretencioznim i tmurnim, a drugi - previše ukaljanim misticizmom, implicitnim dualizmom i sl. Iako bih mogao, na meni nije da osporavam ovakve tvrdnje, samo obaveštavam; smatrajte se upozorenim.
"Umesto da ustukne od teksta koji se tako dobro brani, svim silama se založio da ga se domogne, tvrdoglavo odbijajući da odvrati pogled, verujući da i dalje pomno čita, međutim, reči su ga se već dočepale i počele da ga čitaju."
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March 17, 2024داشتم کلیم سامگین از گورکی رو میخوندم، از خوندنش هم بسیار راضی بودم که از غیب این کتاب افتاد تو دستم.
من نمیتونم در این لحظه از زندگیم هیچ متنی رو به نوشتهای از بلانشو ترجیح بدم.
پس دم شما گرم بابت انتشار و ترجمه.
میدونم که یک نشر عزیز هم درحال ترجمه و چاپ یک اثر دیگه از بلانشو ست که بیصبرانه در انتظار چاپ اون هستیم.
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وای وای عجب موجودیِ این بلانشو
باید مجموعه آثارش کامل چاپ بشه نه اینطور قطره چکونی!
من نمیتونم در این لحظه از زندگیم هیچ متنی رو به نوشتهای از بلانشو ترجیح بدم.
پس دم شما گرم بابت انتشار و ترجمه.
میدونم که یک نشر عزیز هم درحال ترجمه و چاپ یک اثر دیگه از بلانشو ست که بیصبرانه در انتظار چاپ اون هستیم.
دوستان عزیز لطفاً بخاطر معرفی یا یادداشتی از من نیفتید توی چاه. برای تهیه هر اثر به معرفی دیگر دوستان اتکا کنید.
وای وای عجب موجودیِ این بلانشو
باید مجموعه آثارش کامل چاپ بشه نه اینطور قطره چکونی!
September 4, 2018
Eigentlich sollte man dieses Buch weder bewerten noch besprechen, schon aus Wertschätzung gegenüber Maurice Blanchot, dem Meister des Paradoxons, der in einem seiner Essays anmerkt:
Keine Ahnung, ob man das als Handlung bezeichnen kann, was da auf den Leser zukommt, ich werde versuchen, den Inhalt so gut wie möglich darzustellen. Man verzeihe eine gewisse Langatmigkeit, nur so ist es mir möglich, einen halbwegs glaubwürdigen Eindruck dieses schwer zu beschreibenden Werks zu vermitteln:
Wenn einer schwimmt, schwimmt sein Körper. Zugleich hat der Körper, der schwimmt, die Aufgabe zu denken, dass er schwimmt. So gibt es einen Körper, der denkt, dass er schwimmt und einen Körper der schwimmt in dem er denkt, und beide sind der selbe Körper.
Wenn einer schwimmt und Nebel senkt sich aufs Wasser, sodass die Oberfläche des Wassers in einem gleichmäßigen Lichtschein verschwindet, dann kann es passieren, dass sich der Körper, der denkt und der, der schwimmt, ineinander auflösen und mit dem Licht verschmelzen. So wird das gedachte Meer zum echten Meer, «in dem er wie ertrunken liegt» und «in dem er seine endlose Reise mit einem abwesenden Organismus in einem abwesenden Meer fortführt.»
Aber dann muss er zurück ans Ufer, wo ihn der Zwiespalt einholt und ihn jeder Blick an seine Zerrissenheit erinnert. Sein Sein ist ein Desaster.
Noch da und alles klar?
Thomas, der Obskure, der Denker im Dunkel des Nichtdenkens, ertrinkt in der Leere des Meeres, versinkt in der Finsternis des Waldes und kämpft mit dem Paradoxon der Existenz. Seine äussere Welt, die surreal und absurd ist wie ein Traum, verfließt an ihren Grenzen mit der inneren Welt. Thomas gräbt sich mit den Fingernägeln in die modrige Wirklichkeit des Waldbodens:
Die Perspektive des Texts wechselt jetzt in die Innenwelt Annes, die ihre Möglichkeiten der Beziehung zu Thomas bedenkt. «‹Ja›, sagte sie, ‹ich möchte Sie sehen, wenn Sie allein sind.›» Die Unmöglichkeit dieses Satzes, nein - seiner Aussage, sollte man sich genüßlich innehaltend im frontalen Cortex zergehen lassen. Nach erfrischender Kontemplation lassen wir Anne weitersprechen:
In Kapitel XI spricht Thomas einen in direkter Rede geschriebenen, endlos anmutenden Monolog über den Tod. In diesem wahrscheinlich bedeutsamsten Abschnitt erlebt er seine Trauer und entdeckt seine eigene Existenz im Tod seiner Freundin, den er selber stirbt und so zum einzigen möglichen Toten wird, «der einzige Tote, der nicht den Eindruck erweckt, durch Zufall zu sterben.» Nach zahlreichen Seiten bleischweren Erörterns des ganzen Desasters endet er mit einer Huldigung der Nacht:
Doch nach wenigen Seiten wird die aufsteigende Sonne schon «leichenhaft», dräut schon wieder Verderben und Untergang, das Weltenrad dreht sich erbarmungslos weiter...
Soweit die Handlung, auch Denken ist schließlich eine Handlung. Wer in meiner lückenhaften Kurzfassung einen leicht ironischen Unterton heraushören sollte, hört nur die Flöhe husten. Es wäre unfair, nicht zu berücksichtigen, dass erstens der Text über 80 Jahre alt ist und zweitens auf Französisch verfasst wurde. Beides rechtfertigt ein gewisses Pathos und eine leicht geschraubte Ausdrucksweise, so gesehen ist der Text nahezu klar und auch frei von überflüssiger Metaphorik.
Was mich fasziniert ist die Radikalität dieses Texts. Er stellt so ziemlich jede bis dahin bekannte Art des Erzählens in Frage. Der Text macht etwas mit mir, er vereinnahmt mich. Ich spüre ihn fast physisch. Das Lesen ist aufwühlend und erregend, es wird keine Geschichte über Ereignisse erzählt, der Text wird selber zum Ereignis. Zugleich wird jede Einordnung verunmöglicht, die Grenze zwischen Roman, Poesie und Essay ist aufgehoben, es entsteht ein wortgewaltiger Universaltext über die großen Fragen der Existenz. Er findet in der «Nichtvorhandenheit die vollendete Form für seine Vorhandenheit». Die Bedeutung Blanchots für die Entwicklung der Philosophie und der Literatur, speziell die Postmoderne kann fast nicht überschätzt werden.
Was mich stört, ist die Radikalität dieses Texts. Er stellt all meine Überzeugungen über das Lesen in Frage. Der Text macht etwas mit mir. Er tut weh. Das Lesen ist irritierend und verstörend, eine Zumutung. Zu allem Überfluss ist der Text philosophisch so überfrachtet, dass es für mich die Grenze des Erträglichen überschreitet. Ich weiss nicht, soll das Poesie sein, ein Roman oder ein Essay oder eine existenzialistische Liturgie voller Pathos und Kitsch. Es gibt keinen Halt, an dem ich mich festhalten könnte, nur Worte, Sätze, die mich verschlingen: «als bereits die Worte sich seiner bemächtigten und ihn zu lesen begannen. Er wurde von Händen fühlbar ergriffen und durchdrungen, von einem Zahn voll Gift gebissen;» Dass Blanchot nur von ein paar verkopften Philosophen wahrgenommen wurde, ist nicht verwunderlich.
Widersprüchlichkeit und “alternative Fakten” (im tatsächlichen Sinn einer gleichwertigen Gültigkeit!) prägen unsere sogenannte Wirklichkeit stärker, als es Anhänger des Hausverstands wahrhaben wollen (... auch Newtons Welt ist nur einer dieser unglücklichen Einzelfälle). Vor allem das Denken und die Sprache führen, wenn selbstbezüglich angewandt, unweigerlich zum Paradoxon und in der Folge zur Katastrophe.
Paradoxon, Desaster und die Leere, das sind die großen Leitmotive Blanchots, neben dem Tod, der in seiner Nichterlebbarkeit ebenso ein Paradoxon darstellt wie ein Desaster in seiner Erlebbarkeit und zuletzt die ewige, absolute Stille versinnbildlicht. Aus diesen Fäden webt er ein verschlungenes, mit dem Verstand nicht mehr auflösbares Klanggewebe, dessen Strukturen direkt in ihrer Dynamik auf den Leser einwirken, ohne Umweg in seinem Körper spürbare Resonanzen erzeugen und dadurch Geschichte, Handlung, Figuren, ja selbst die Worte obsolet werden lassen. Er siedelt sein ganzes Weltbild auch ganz bewußt im Reich des Dunklen an, inklusive Schrecken, Einsamkeit, Angst und Verzweiflung. Durch sein Verständnis der Leere wird Blanchot gerne als säkularer Mystiker gesehen, trotzdem an seinem Weg überall dieses Grauen lauert. Ich würde die Erfahrung der Leere lieber in einem Gefühl der heiteren Gelassenheit erleben.
Wenn es einem Autor gelingt, die Zerrissenheit seiner Hauptfigur im Körper des Lesers leibhaftig zu implantieren, dann heisst das ★★★★★, auch wenn es schmerzt.
Wie ein Strauch voll mit schwarzen Tollkirschen ist dieses Buch anziehend und zugleich giftig. Ich bewundere es und kann nur jeden davor warnen. Der Genuß wirkt halluzinogen und kann Ihre Gesundheit gefährden!
«Der Schriftsteller befindet sich in der zunehmend komischen Situation, nichts zu sagen zu haben, es auf keine Weise schreiben zu können und doch durch eine äußerste Notwendigkeit gezwungen zu sein, es unentwegt niederzuschreiben.»Wie das Zitat ahnen lässt, handelt es sich hier nicht um flotte Unterhaltung. Schon die ersten Seiten erwiesen sich als geradezu widerständig, die Sätze wehrten sich hartnäckig gegen meine vorschnelle Vereinnahmung. Schnell begriff ich, dass ich hier Zeit und Energie investieren muss. Der Text in seiner extremen Verdichtung erfordert langsames und sehr bedächtiges Lesen in kurzen, konzentrierten Etappen, lange Verdauungspausen und mehrfaches Wiederholen unverdauter Passagen.
Keine Ahnung, ob man das als Handlung bezeichnen kann, was da auf den Leser zukommt, ich werde versuchen, den Inhalt so gut wie möglich darzustellen. Man verzeihe eine gewisse Langatmigkeit, nur so ist es mir möglich, einen halbwegs glaubwürdigen Eindruck dieses schwer zu beschreibenden Werks zu vermitteln:
Wenn einer schwimmt, schwimmt sein Körper. Zugleich hat der Körper, der schwimmt, die Aufgabe zu denken, dass er schwimmt. So gibt es einen Körper, der denkt, dass er schwimmt und einen Körper der schwimmt in dem er denkt, und beide sind der selbe Körper.
Wenn einer schwimmt und Nebel senkt sich aufs Wasser, sodass die Oberfläche des Wassers in einem gleichmäßigen Lichtschein verschwindet, dann kann es passieren, dass sich der Körper, der denkt und der, der schwimmt, ineinander auflösen und mit dem Licht verschmelzen. So wird das gedachte Meer zum echten Meer, «in dem er wie ertrunken liegt» und «in dem er seine endlose Reise mit einem abwesenden Organismus in einem abwesenden Meer fortführt.»
Aber dann muss er zurück ans Ufer, wo ihn der Zwiespalt einholt und ihn jeder Blick an seine Zerrissenheit erinnert. Sein Sein ist ein Desaster.
Noch da und alles klar?
Thomas, der Obskure, der Denker im Dunkel des Nichtdenkens, ertrinkt in der Leere des Meeres, versinkt in der Finsternis des Waldes und kämpft mit dem Paradoxon der Existenz. Seine äussere Welt, die surreal und absurd ist wie ein Traum, verfließt an ihren Grenzen mit der inneren Welt. Thomas gräbt sich mit den Fingernägeln in die modrige Wirklichkeit des Waldbodens:
«Eine unveränderliche Leiche grub sich da ein und fand in dieser Nichtvorhandenheit von Form die vollendete Form für ihre Vorhandenheit. Es war ein Drama, dessen Grauen die Bewohner des Dorfs im Schlaf empfanden.»Später sitzt er im Hotel am Tisch, unter sprechenden Menschen, ein weiteres Drama, «ein Schweigen trat ein, war ein Gespräch denn möglich?», dann nimmt er Anne wahr und «ihre ganze von wundervollem Licht erhellte Gestalt zog ihn an». Und anders als mit den Menschen, die beim Abwenden des Blicks bereits einen Tod sterben, gelingt es, mit Anne eine fragile Verbindung herzustellen.
Die Perspektive des Texts wechselt jetzt in die Innenwelt Annes, die ihre Möglichkeiten der Beziehung zu Thomas bedenkt. «‹Ja›, sagte sie, ‹ich möchte Sie sehen, wenn Sie allein sind.›» Die Unmöglichkeit dieses Satzes, nein - seiner Aussage, sollte man sich genüßlich innehaltend im frontalen Cortex zergehen lassen. Nach erfrischender Kontemplation lassen wir Anne weitersprechen:
«Wenn ich jemals vor Ihnen stehen könnte, indem ich mich ganz von Ihnen entfernte, dann hätte ich eine Chance, zu Ihnen zu kommen, oder vielmehr weiß ich, daß ich nicht zu Ihnen käme. Die einzige mir verbleibende Möglichkeit, die Distanz zwischen uns zu verringern, wäre, mich unendlich weit zu entfernen. Ich bin aber schon unendlich weit weg und kann nicht noch weiter weg gehen. Sobald ich Sie berühre, Thomas...»Anne erlebt eine glückliche Zeit - was wäre ein Roman ohne schöne Liebesgeschichte? Jedoch, alle Phänomene des Daseins sind - wie schon der alte Siddhartha Gautama wußte - unzulänglich, vergänglich und ohne Substanz, das Glück dauert naturgemäß kurz, Anne wird krank, sie stirbt.
In Kapitel XI spricht Thomas einen in direkter Rede geschriebenen, endlos anmutenden Monolog über den Tod. In diesem wahrscheinlich bedeutsamsten Abschnitt erlebt er seine Trauer und entdeckt seine eigene Existenz im Tod seiner Freundin, den er selber stirbt und so zum einzigen möglichen Toten wird, «der einzige Tote, der nicht den Eindruck erweckt, durch Zufall zu sterben.» Nach zahlreichen Seiten bleischweren Erörterns des ganzen Desasters endet er mit einer Huldigung der Nacht:
«Ach Nacht, jetzt bringt mich nichts mehr zum Sein, nichts wird mich mehr von dir trennen. Wunderbar bleibe ich der Einfachheit verhaftet, zu der du mich einlädst. Dir gleich beuge ich mich über dich und biete dir einen Spiegel für dein vollkommenes Nichts, für deine Finsternis, die weder Licht noch Nichtvorhandensein von Licht ist, für diese Leere, die betrachtet.»Das letzte Kapitel ist erfüllt von Frühling und jubelndem Vogelgezwitscher, gleißendem Licht und gebärender Natur, man möchte fast ausrufen “Hosanna in der Höhe!”.
Doch nach wenigen Seiten wird die aufsteigende Sonne schon «leichenhaft», dräut schon wieder Verderben und Untergang, das Weltenrad dreht sich erbarmungslos weiter...
Soweit die Handlung, auch Denken ist schließlich eine Handlung. Wer in meiner lückenhaften Kurzfassung einen leicht ironischen Unterton heraushören sollte, hört nur die Flöhe husten. Es wäre unfair, nicht zu berücksichtigen, dass erstens der Text über 80 Jahre alt ist und zweitens auf Französisch verfasst wurde. Beides rechtfertigt ein gewisses Pathos und eine leicht geschraubte Ausdrucksweise, so gesehen ist der Text nahezu klar und auch frei von überflüssiger Metaphorik.
Was mich fasziniert ist die Radikalität dieses Texts. Er stellt so ziemlich jede bis dahin bekannte Art des Erzählens in Frage. Der Text macht etwas mit mir, er vereinnahmt mich. Ich spüre ihn fast physisch. Das Lesen ist aufwühlend und erregend, es wird keine Geschichte über Ereignisse erzählt, der Text wird selber zum Ereignis. Zugleich wird jede Einordnung verunmöglicht, die Grenze zwischen Roman, Poesie und Essay ist aufgehoben, es entsteht ein wortgewaltiger Universaltext über die großen Fragen der Existenz. Er findet in der «Nichtvorhandenheit die vollendete Form für seine Vorhandenheit». Die Bedeutung Blanchots für die Entwicklung der Philosophie und der Literatur, speziell die Postmoderne kann fast nicht überschätzt werden.
Was mich stört, ist die Radikalität dieses Texts. Er stellt all meine Überzeugungen über das Lesen in Frage. Der Text macht etwas mit mir. Er tut weh. Das Lesen ist irritierend und verstörend, eine Zumutung. Zu allem Überfluss ist der Text philosophisch so überfrachtet, dass es für mich die Grenze des Erträglichen überschreitet. Ich weiss nicht, soll das Poesie sein, ein Roman oder ein Essay oder eine existenzialistische Liturgie voller Pathos und Kitsch. Es gibt keinen Halt, an dem ich mich festhalten könnte, nur Worte, Sätze, die mich verschlingen: «als bereits die Worte sich seiner bemächtigten und ihn zu lesen begannen. Er wurde von Händen fühlbar ergriffen und durchdrungen, von einem Zahn voll Gift gebissen;» Dass Blanchot nur von ein paar verkopften Philosophen wahrgenommen wurde, ist nicht verwunderlich.
Widersprüchlichkeit und “alternative Fakten” (im tatsächlichen Sinn einer gleichwertigen Gültigkeit!) prägen unsere sogenannte Wirklichkeit stärker, als es Anhänger des Hausverstands wahrhaben wollen (... auch Newtons Welt ist nur einer dieser unglücklichen Einzelfälle). Vor allem das Denken und die Sprache führen, wenn selbstbezüglich angewandt, unweigerlich zum Paradoxon und in der Folge zur Katastrophe.
Paradoxon, Desaster und die Leere, das sind die großen Leitmotive Blanchots, neben dem Tod, der in seiner Nichterlebbarkeit ebenso ein Paradoxon darstellt wie ein Desaster in seiner Erlebbarkeit und zuletzt die ewige, absolute Stille versinnbildlicht. Aus diesen Fäden webt er ein verschlungenes, mit dem Verstand nicht mehr auflösbares Klanggewebe, dessen Strukturen direkt in ihrer Dynamik auf den Leser einwirken, ohne Umweg in seinem Körper spürbare Resonanzen erzeugen und dadurch Geschichte, Handlung, Figuren, ja selbst die Worte obsolet werden lassen. Er siedelt sein ganzes Weltbild auch ganz bewußt im Reich des Dunklen an, inklusive Schrecken, Einsamkeit, Angst und Verzweiflung. Durch sein Verständnis der Leere wird Blanchot gerne als säkularer Mystiker gesehen, trotzdem an seinem Weg überall dieses Grauen lauert. Ich würde die Erfahrung der Leere lieber in einem Gefühl der heiteren Gelassenheit erleben.
Wenn es einem Autor gelingt, die Zerrissenheit seiner Hauptfigur im Körper des Lesers leibhaftig zu implantieren, dann heisst das ★★★★★, auch wenn es schmerzt.
Wie ein Strauch voll mit schwarzen Tollkirschen ist dieses Buch anziehend und zugleich giftig. Ich bewundere es und kann nur jeden davor warnen. Der Genuß wirkt halluzinogen und kann Ihre Gesundheit gefährden!
June 8, 2021
“Penso, logo não existo”
December 14, 2011
this book is a recit (an event, not a narration of an event) - that is, the event itself is the book, the writing, its creation. it's a book giddy with impossibility, which i appreciate deeply. blanchot and i share a similar sense of humor. stuplimity maybe.
favorite moments:
"This grave which was exactly his size, his shape, his thickness, was like his own corpse, and every time he tried to bury himself in it, he was like a ridiculous dead person trying to bury his body in his body." (35)
"Now Anne opened her eyes. There was in fact no more hope." (85)
"I was thus the sole corpse of humanity." (93)
"With one hand showing that I was indeed there, with the other -- what am I saying? -- without the other, with this body which, imposed on my real body, depended entirely on a negation of the body, I entered into absolute dispute with myself. Having two eyes, one of which was possessed of extreme visual acuity, it was with the other which was an eye only because of its refusal to see that I saw everything visible. And so on, for all my organs." (96-7)
heh heh heh
favorite moments:
"This grave which was exactly his size, his shape, his thickness, was like his own corpse, and every time he tried to bury himself in it, he was like a ridiculous dead person trying to bury his body in his body." (35)
"Now Anne opened her eyes. There was in fact no more hope." (85)
"I was thus the sole corpse of humanity." (93)
"With one hand showing that I was indeed there, with the other -- what am I saying? -- without the other, with this body which, imposed on my real body, depended entirely on a negation of the body, I entered into absolute dispute with myself. Having two eyes, one of which was possessed of extreme visual acuity, it was with the other which was an eye only because of its refusal to see that I saw everything visible. And so on, for all my organs." (96-7)
heh heh heh
December 3, 2021
The sort of book where not only do you ask for the purchase price refunded, but you demand compensation for the time spent reading and damages for mental anguish. I am handling this type of claim for authorial negligence; DM me for free consultation.
The novel provides a useful self-reflexive criticism: a "story emptied of events, emptied to the point that every memory and all perspective were eliminated, and nevertheless drawing from this absence its inflexible direction which seemed to carry everything away in the irresistible movement toward an imminent catastrophe."
Up there with The Stranger, Notes from the Underground, Hunger, and Steppenwolf, contending for the title of most abject fiction.
The novel provides a useful self-reflexive criticism: a "story emptied of events, emptied to the point that every memory and all perspective were eliminated, and nevertheless drawing from this absence its inflexible direction which seemed to carry everything away in the irresistible movement toward an imminent catastrophe."
Up there with The Stranger, Notes from the Underground, Hunger, and Steppenwolf, contending for the title of most abject fiction.
June 20, 2020
As I face the next six months of unemployment and poverty, I seem to have been borne back through a kind of Bohemian nostalgia, to my early university and post-university years living in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, working in bookstores, and running with the poets, artists, musicians and druggies of the early 1980s and those heady youthful years of semi-employment, poverty, and artistic and literary discovery. Such nostalgia has led me back to Blanchot, perhaps the single most influential writer on both my fiction and my criticism--indeed my whole approach to reading--and the desire to do with his works as I've done these last few years with Becket, Proust, Shirley Jackson, Jane Austen, Kathy Acker, Jean Rhys and others, and reread his entire oeuvres in chronological order in order to better understand the totality of the author's work and particularly to situate my own work's relationship to these early influences.
First of all let me say that it's clear to me from the get-go that I'm going to give every one of these novels five stars and put them all on my favorites list because Blanchot is just Blanchot no matter what he's writing and that's how I feel about Blanchot (the name on the book cover more than anything else, to me, to you, to history). So don't expect any nitpicking over which is best or which one should you start with or any other such nonsense reserved for good writers--because Blanchot is a great writer, a seminal writer, I guess, and--yes, I know this sounds banal--a writer's writer. I return to the well of Blanchot again and again, even if it's been some years since I actually read one of his books because of what he taught me about reading and writing when I was young enough not to have figured these things out yet for myself.
So, Thomas the Obscure is Blanchot's first recit, that is to say, although he first published it as a "novel," once he changed his mind about what a novel is and realized that his own writing fell into two categories, criticism and "recitation," or perhaps "narrative" is the best translation. He decided that this particular text fell into the latter category, rewrote it (by all accounts merely cutting away 2/3 of it), and re-framed it in said manner. This dual categorization of his works went on until his criticism became less and less tied to responding to individual texts, grew more and more theoretical and aphoristic, until even that differentiation became moot. (Thus I've decided to include the later aphoristic texts in this project even if it could be argued they are more critical than narrative.)
I was introduced to Blanchot by the Greek poet, surrealist, and teacher Nanos Valaoritis in a Nouveau Roman course at San Francisco State U. in 1982 or thereabouts. This university course, my encounter with Valaoritis, and my first readings of Beckett, Blanchot, Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras, is probably the single most important even in my intellectual life. So there's that. Valaoritis, who was also a creative writing prof., later helped me pen my own first recit in an independent study. That novel, now lost, was a sprawling epic about an American filmmaker named Leeland (get it?) who was making a subversive film to end all films. Each chapter was presented in a different film genre, from Western to noir, to musical and beyond--did I mention I was also reading Ulysses for the first time and that Nanos steered me toward Stuart Gilbert's book and...? I think you get the idea.
My engagement with Blanchot deepened as I began to pen my first published novel, Inbetween, in 1986 and as I read whatever new translations appeared of Blanchot's work through the following years. (As I said, I worked on-and-off in bookstores, so I kind of had my finger on the pulse of such things at the time.) I recall that I owned a copy of Thomas the Obscure way back then but I gifted it to my friend the rock star Mark Eitzel before I had a chance to read it myself--and he still thinks I never loved him. What a fool. Thus this was my first read through of Thomas... and now, having returned to the beginning, my reading of Blanchot's recits is complete.
I mention this both because I enjoy narration for its own sake and because this contradictory paradox says more than any other logical thing than I can say about how this narrative works. I cannot, nor would I want to, retell its story, discuss the characters of Anna and Thomas, how well they are drawn, their believability or likability, or the construction of the plot, or the narrative's pacing, or give you the moral of the story, isolate its themes or unpack its symbolism, or discuss the dramatic effect of its denouement. Blanchot's writing does none of those things and doesn't do them so well it makes them all seem puerile and conformist. Every one of Blanchot's narratives destroys the very concept of the novel and all of the conventions that critics have been able to isolate, dissect, and ruin for us. While I like and even admire Henry Miller, Blanchot was not content to spit in the face of literature, he turned a fire hose on it and washed it all away.
The best analogy I can think of is Babe Ruth. When the Babe hit 54 home runs in 1920 his closest rival, George Sisler, hit a paltry 19, and only five other players hit more than 11. Blanchot, like the Babe, was a giant among children in his field.
Thomas the Obscure is a rhetorical exercise in paradox and contradiction that proves that language, and therefore human existence, is wholly based upon the proposition that life is death and that death is the only thing we truly live. And everything else that we do, think, and most importantly, everything that we say, indeed all that can be said, follows from that proposition.
First of all let me say that it's clear to me from the get-go that I'm going to give every one of these novels five stars and put them all on my favorites list because Blanchot is just Blanchot no matter what he's writing and that's how I feel about Blanchot (the name on the book cover more than anything else, to me, to you, to history). So don't expect any nitpicking over which is best or which one should you start with or any other such nonsense reserved for good writers--because Blanchot is a great writer, a seminal writer, I guess, and--yes, I know this sounds banal--a writer's writer. I return to the well of Blanchot again and again, even if it's been some years since I actually read one of his books because of what he taught me about reading and writing when I was young enough not to have figured these things out yet for myself.
So, Thomas the Obscure is Blanchot's first recit, that is to say, although he first published it as a "novel," once he changed his mind about what a novel is and realized that his own writing fell into two categories, criticism and "recitation," or perhaps "narrative" is the best translation. He decided that this particular text fell into the latter category, rewrote it (by all accounts merely cutting away 2/3 of it), and re-framed it in said manner. This dual categorization of his works went on until his criticism became less and less tied to responding to individual texts, grew more and more theoretical and aphoristic, until even that differentiation became moot. (Thus I've decided to include the later aphoristic texts in this project even if it could be argued they are more critical than narrative.)
I was introduced to Blanchot by the Greek poet, surrealist, and teacher Nanos Valaoritis in a Nouveau Roman course at San Francisco State U. in 1982 or thereabouts. This university course, my encounter with Valaoritis, and my first readings of Beckett, Blanchot, Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Duras, is probably the single most important even in my intellectual life. So there's that. Valaoritis, who was also a creative writing prof., later helped me pen my own first recit in an independent study. That novel, now lost, was a sprawling epic about an American filmmaker named Leeland (get it?) who was making a subversive film to end all films. Each chapter was presented in a different film genre, from Western to noir, to musical and beyond--did I mention I was also reading Ulysses for the first time and that Nanos steered me toward Stuart Gilbert's book and...? I think you get the idea.
My engagement with Blanchot deepened as I began to pen my first published novel, Inbetween, in 1986 and as I read whatever new translations appeared of Blanchot's work through the following years. (As I said, I worked on-and-off in bookstores, so I kind of had my finger on the pulse of such things at the time.) I recall that I owned a copy of Thomas the Obscure way back then but I gifted it to my friend the rock star Mark Eitzel before I had a chance to read it myself--and he still thinks I never loved him. What a fool. Thus this was my first read through of Thomas... and now, having returned to the beginning, my reading of Blanchot's recits is complete.
I mention this both because I enjoy narration for its own sake and because this contradictory paradox says more than any other logical thing than I can say about how this narrative works. I cannot, nor would I want to, retell its story, discuss the characters of Anna and Thomas, how well they are drawn, their believability or likability, or the construction of the plot, or the narrative's pacing, or give you the moral of the story, isolate its themes or unpack its symbolism, or discuss the dramatic effect of its denouement. Blanchot's writing does none of those things and doesn't do them so well it makes them all seem puerile and conformist. Every one of Blanchot's narratives destroys the very concept of the novel and all of the conventions that critics have been able to isolate, dissect, and ruin for us. While I like and even admire Henry Miller, Blanchot was not content to spit in the face of literature, he turned a fire hose on it and washed it all away.
The best analogy I can think of is Babe Ruth. When the Babe hit 54 home runs in 1920 his closest rival, George Sisler, hit a paltry 19, and only five other players hit more than 11. Blanchot, like the Babe, was a giant among children in his field.
Thomas the Obscure is a rhetorical exercise in paradox and contradiction that proves that language, and therefore human existence, is wholly based upon the proposition that life is death and that death is the only thing we truly live. And everything else that we do, think, and most importantly, everything that we say, indeed all that can be said, follows from that proposition.
April 13, 2019
After reading this book, I recommend to take consolation in listening to Franz Schubert's String Quartet No. 14.
Or, if no consolation is needed, Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 will also do.
Or, if no consolation is needed, Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 will also do.
September 27, 2010
the void, nihilism, existentialism at its limits...this book containing so completely the perfect split of the abject grayness of death and pointlessness and the limitless freedom of standing on the brink of the universe and free falling in an ecstasy so rich. some parts so deeply humorous and bizarre and right on the nose, especially describing the utter lethargy in the legs and body and heart. fave bit is when he's reading his book (ch.4) and blanchot is describing thomas's interaction with the words, and then becomes subtlely (word?) obvious that he's describing what you're doing while you're reading the text. want to read more of blanchot.
November 3, 2017
Atheistic mysticism can be interesting; when added to existential void-gazing and cod metaphysics, it's much less so. This book gets good once we leave Thomas's navel behind and spend some time with Anne, and then see how Thomas has changed (or failed to change) with Anne's death. But rather too much of this is faux-intellectual bloviating romantic silliness. I assume Blanchot's other work is less so, and look forward to reading it.
March 26, 2018
The dialectic between being/non-being, consciousness/unconsciousness, death and life is supremely observed in a dense, philosophical "novella" - though really I would consider this a piece of philosophy with a couple of characters. Not easy reading but very rewarding. The writing is amazing, it feels like Blanchot wrote it in a centerless void.
May 18, 2013
I have a new love and his name is Maurice.
July 10, 2023
Uma das mais penosas experiências de leitura dos últimos anos. “Obscuro” é aqui a palavra-chave, não tanto para predicar a personagem que dá título à obra, senão a própria obra. Ainda que “ininteligível” e “artificioso” sejam predicados igualmente essenciais para a caracterizar de forma mais completa.
Aparentemente, Thomas é o exemplo do ser neutro, absolutamente vazio de conteúdo e, também por isso, necessariamente condenado ao solipsismo, à incomunicabilidade. Afigura-se-me ser esta a temática central do livro. Contudo, ainda que se reconheça nela alguma fecundidade, a forma como foi desenvolvida parece-me um logro absoluto. A obra consiste num longo e repetitivo arrazoado de frases sobre frases – bem construídas, sintacticamente impecáveis, frequentemente com uma sonoridade bela e poética, é certo – mas absolutamente desprovidas de qualquer sentido e menos ainda de significado. São frases e frases que se seguem mas que não querem dizer nada, antes se reduzindo a um formalismo estilístico que vive da pura cadência da linguagem e da produção de efeitos estéreis, que se esgotam em si mesmos. E o pior é que, à medida que vamos avançando na (soporífera) leitura da obra, rapidamente nos apercebemos que esses efeitos seguem quase sempre o mesmo modelo, que é a criação de paradoxos semânticos, jogos de palavras, contradições, etc. Aliás, estou convencido de que não correria grande risco de perder se apostasse que, para qualquer dos capítulos do livro, caso alterássemos aleatoriamente a ordem dos parágrafos que o compõem, dificilmente algum leitor notaria algo de errado. Não espanta, pois, que apesar de extensamente reescrito pelo autor nove anos após o seu surgimento, Blanchot aceitasse como válida qualquer uma das versões.
Aceito perfeitamente que a intenção do autor, um dos expoentes do nouveau roman, possa ter sido mostrar como a linguagem pode ser radicalmente separada do mundo extra-linguístico e, nessa medida, valer por si própria como objecto de fruição estética ou enquanto construção auto-subsistente do espírito. Se isso for o caso, não temos senão as palavras e os sons que elas produzem, organizadas segundo as regras da sintaxe e da semântica, num edifício que se sustenta e justifica por si mesmo, à margem de qualquer inteligibilidade por referência a um conteúdo. É, no fundo, a tentativa de subverter a própria teleologia da linguagem e, por essa via, da literatura e da sua estrutura tradicional. No plano conceptual, um tal projecto até me poderia parecer interessante; o que duvido é que a experiência tenha sido bem sucedida e que o seu resultado seja algo mais do que pura vacuidade que aspira a profundidade, mas que, na melhor das hipóteses, não é senão o repositório dos sentidos que leitores, mais ou menos voluntariosos, sobre ele projectem.
Aparentemente, Thomas é o exemplo do ser neutro, absolutamente vazio de conteúdo e, também por isso, necessariamente condenado ao solipsismo, à incomunicabilidade. Afigura-se-me ser esta a temática central do livro. Contudo, ainda que se reconheça nela alguma fecundidade, a forma como foi desenvolvida parece-me um logro absoluto. A obra consiste num longo e repetitivo arrazoado de frases sobre frases – bem construídas, sintacticamente impecáveis, frequentemente com uma sonoridade bela e poética, é certo – mas absolutamente desprovidas de qualquer sentido e menos ainda de significado. São frases e frases que se seguem mas que não querem dizer nada, antes se reduzindo a um formalismo estilístico que vive da pura cadência da linguagem e da produção de efeitos estéreis, que se esgotam em si mesmos. E o pior é que, à medida que vamos avançando na (soporífera) leitura da obra, rapidamente nos apercebemos que esses efeitos seguem quase sempre o mesmo modelo, que é a criação de paradoxos semânticos, jogos de palavras, contradições, etc. Aliás, estou convencido de que não correria grande risco de perder se apostasse que, para qualquer dos capítulos do livro, caso alterássemos aleatoriamente a ordem dos parágrafos que o compõem, dificilmente algum leitor notaria algo de errado. Não espanta, pois, que apesar de extensamente reescrito pelo autor nove anos após o seu surgimento, Blanchot aceitasse como válida qualquer uma das versões.
Aceito perfeitamente que a intenção do autor, um dos expoentes do nouveau roman, possa ter sido mostrar como a linguagem pode ser radicalmente separada do mundo extra-linguístico e, nessa medida, valer por si própria como objecto de fruição estética ou enquanto construção auto-subsistente do espírito. Se isso for o caso, não temos senão as palavras e os sons que elas produzem, organizadas segundo as regras da sintaxe e da semântica, num edifício que se sustenta e justifica por si mesmo, à margem de qualquer inteligibilidade por referência a um conteúdo. É, no fundo, a tentativa de subverter a própria teleologia da linguagem e, por essa via, da literatura e da sua estrutura tradicional. No plano conceptual, um tal projecto até me poderia parecer interessante; o que duvido é que a experiência tenha sido bem sucedida e que o seu resultado seja algo mais do que pura vacuidade que aspira a profundidade, mas que, na melhor das hipóteses, não é senão o repositório dos sentidos que leitores, mais ou menos voluntariosos, sobre ele projectem.
June 13, 2017
Opět jedna z knih, při jejíž četbě jsem se bál, že mi mozek vyskočí z hlavy, doplazí se na silnicu a nechá se přejet kamijonem. Tak už to chodí, když kluk od prasat, co jezdil každou neděli trhat kopřivy, začne číst francouzký filozofy. Mám takový tušení, že kdybych tuhle knihu dovezl do rodný vesnice, pravděpodobně by moje víska vybouchla.
Ale abychom se dostali k ději. Temný Tomáš si jde zaplavat, pak na večeři mrkne na nějakou broskvičku, ta se do něj hned zamiluje, ale zamiluje se tak moc, že o tom musí osmdesát stran přemýšlet, až ji z toho nakonec rupne v palici a umře. Jak jsem již předeslal, knihu napsal filozof, takže to co jsem teď popsal se možná stalo, možná ne a všichni jsou kachna. Styl, který autor zvolil mi velmi silně připomínal moji starou, když má v sobě dvanáct litrů vína - moc tomu nerozumím, každá věta si odporuje a když mi něco začne dávat smysl, zjistím, že to neříkala ona, ale zrovna jel okolo trakař, kterej zněl podobně.
Přesto všechno musím tento těžký elaborát hodnotit čtyřmi hvězdičkami, protože sem tam přišel se zajímavou myšlenkou a navíc mi trochu nahlodal životní moudra, která jsem převzal od Šopenhauera a měl je za platné. Do budoucna bych ovšem preferoval, aby mi to někdo napsal formou eseje, než formou novely, jejímž vypravěčem je situace samotná. Předem děkuji a dobré čtecí pokadění do nového týdne přeje Palivo.
Ale abychom se dostali k ději. Temný Tomáš si jde zaplavat, pak na večeři mrkne na nějakou broskvičku, ta se do něj hned zamiluje, ale zamiluje se tak moc, že o tom musí osmdesát stran přemýšlet, až ji z toho nakonec rupne v palici a umře. Jak jsem již předeslal, knihu napsal filozof, takže to co jsem teď popsal se možná stalo, možná ne a všichni jsou kachna. Styl, který autor zvolil mi velmi silně připomínal moji starou, když má v sobě dvanáct litrů vína - moc tomu nerozumím, každá věta si odporuje a když mi něco začne dávat smysl, zjistím, že to neříkala ona, ale zrovna jel okolo trakař, kterej zněl podobně.
Přesto všechno musím tento těžký elaborát hodnotit čtyřmi hvězdičkami, protože sem tam přišel se zajímavou myšlenkou a navíc mi trochu nahlodal životní moudra, která jsem převzal od Šopenhauera a měl je za platné. Do budoucna bych ovšem preferoval, aby mi to někdo napsal formou eseje, než formou novely, jejímž vypravěčem je situace samotná. Předem děkuji a dobré čtecí pokadění do nového týdne přeje Palivo.
September 24, 2024
An inestimable work. One cannot help but agree with Pierre Madaule's assessment that this version, the "first" version (this designation having now been displaced by a solitary double...), is the definitive version of Thomas. And now that we can read both the "premiere" and "nouvelle" versions before the backdrop of a third double, doubling and displacing each - that is, Thomas le Solitaire - we have, doubled, refigured, the relation of the between-two, the entre-deux, which bears upon the third (the obscure night behind the day and night, night without night, death without death). All these relations, all these works, all non-self-identical, yet bound to one another by this name which falters and defaults as name, placeholder for the nameless and unnamable, the "originary" and abyssal shadow or double, (already echoed in and by Breton's famous qui) - Thomas...
May 25, 2016
This sentence gives the essence of Blanchot's style here. All the text resembles it and is a variation of same principle:
"Likewise, when he began to walk, one might have thought that it was not his legs, but rather his desire not to walk which pushed him forward".
Isn't it called using opposites in a sentence to form a paradoxical situation? Figuratively full of contradiction and oxymoron. It appears formally complicated from exterior, but does it really correspond to anything meaningful? I could not grasp it. I did not "enjoy" reading it.
I gave up at the midway; hopefully for never returning back again in the rest of my life.
"Likewise, when he began to walk, one might have thought that it was not his legs, but rather his desire not to walk which pushed him forward".
Isn't it called using opposites in a sentence to form a paradoxical situation? Figuratively full of contradiction and oxymoron. It appears formally complicated from exterior, but does it really correspond to anything meaningful? I could not grasp it. I did not "enjoy" reading it.
I gave up at the midway; hopefully for never returning back again in the rest of my life.
June 16, 2012
rich with impossiblity and swamped with contradictions, intentions and a purpose, which is the case for my appreciation of this book. an all emcompassing void penetrated and pulled back into reality to die with the pen that had written it, finding that death though the same portal as literature.
it deserves more than one reading, and eventually i will give it that reward, but for now im in recovery mode.
it deserves more than one reading, and eventually i will give it that reward, but for now im in recovery mode.
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