Spike Magazine

Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com
We don’t experience the world without this murmuring,
a kind of voice-under codifying and animating
an otherwise uniform world. Yet we spend most of
our lives avoiding or sedating it with entertainmentdistraction,
drugged socialising, or plausible theories
of hominid brain development. It is Blanchot’s unique
attunement to these murmuring questions – to what
resists the Socratic demand – which distinguishes his
work. When he reviews a book, rather than judging it
within set external criteria, such as the persuasiveness
of character or plot, or its relevance to the breaking
news of the moment, he asks certain questions that
emerge from the experience of reading the book itself.
This is clear in an exemplary essay on Samuel
Beckett’s trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The
Unnameable. Here is a book that has no justification.
It has no sensitive social analysis. It is scornful of
polite taste and ridicules all notions of the redeeming
power of art. It makes much fun of its struggle to efface
the author with the usual means of the suspension
of disbelief, before spiralling into a calamitous verbal
free fall. Blanchot asks, “Who speaks in Samuel
Beckett’s books? … Who is the tireless ‘I’ who seems
always to say the same thing?” At first, the answer
is clear: it is Samuel Beckett. But it by asking this
deceptively simple question he opens us to the novel’s
terrible dynamic.
Molloy is narrated by a man telling of a past full of
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and
cities, forests and seascapes, while stuck in his absent
mother’s room. This is the usual displacement of the
author’s own voice. Molloy could be Beckett writing in
his own room. Eventually, Molloy invents another narrator,
Moran, a police detective, who narrates his own
story, in this case the pursuit of Molloy. Blanchot says
this a “slightly disappointing” allegory of the author’s
search for something more original than itself. Beckett
is having fun with the conventions of the novel – which
is why so many readers see only absurdity in his work.
Yet at the same time Molloy and Moran offer a reassuring
presence like normal characters in a novel speaking
through their all-powerful master, and so protecting us
from what Blanchot calls “a greater threat”.
That threat begins to appear in Malone Dies. Malone’s
death would provoke the “ultimate disaster which is to
have lost the right to say I”. Malone is bedridden, having
only a pencil for company. Nonetheless, it enables
him to turn his room into “the infinite space of words
and stories.” He tells stories – a simple pastime – to
fill the imminent vacuum of death. It is a recipe for
farce, grotesque tragicomedy and outrageous lyricism;
everything that makes Beckett great entertainment:
“All I want to do now is to make a last effort to understand,
to begin to understand, how such creatures
are possible. No, it is not a question of understanding.
Of what then? I don’t know. Here I go none the less,
095
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