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was perhaps suddenly in invincible. Dead – immortal.
Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for
suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal
or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death
by a surreptitious friendship.” (from The Instant Of My
Death, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg)
The shots didn’t come; he was told to run and thereby
regained a life where, from then on, he writes, “the
instant of my death [was] henceforth always in abeyance”.
Later, he discovered that a manuscript had been
taken from his room by enemy officers believing it
to contain military secrets. Instead of the death of the
author, there was the death of the text.
One might say: but this is written in the third person;
it is either fiction or Blanchot is writing about another
person – perhaps literature itself. That lost manuscript
certainly has the convenience of fiction, standing for
the agency and meaning as it withdraws. However,
such a distinction is impossible. By writing in the third
person, Blanchot emphasises the distance inherent to
such reminiscence – itself already literature, already
intimate with death.
Ten years later, Blanchot’s The Space Of Literature is
saturated with this experience:
- to write is to break the bond that unites the
word with myself.
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- to write is to withdraw language from the
world.
- to write is to surrender to the fascination of
time’s absence.
- the writer never reads his work. It is, for him,
a secret.
- in the solitude of the work … we discover a
more essential solitude.
- art is the power by which night opens
(trans. Ann Smock)
Throughout this extraordinary book, Blanchot traces
the impact of the night on the work of various authors –
Rilke, Mallarmé and Kafka in particular. If, for Kafka,
“there exists only the outside, the glistening flow of the
eternal outside” what does that mean for his world of
expression, of escape, of liberty that is writing? The
question is part of the work itself. In this way, reading
Blanchot is frustrating: there is at once the assertiveness
of the phrases quoted above and a resistance to
actually saying anything in the usual manner. His assertions
serve to obscure what was previously clear.
Rather than offering an alternative to, say, a Freudian or
Marxist reading of ‘Metamorphosis’, Blanchot reveals
how each reading has to make a leap over the abyss.
For the reader, it is intoxicating, yet almost impossible
to then put to use. Lydia Davis – pioneering translator of
the récit Death Sentence – says she can follow the argu-
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