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same way as, say, Joyce’s Ulysses.
[Note: Blanchot’s essay on Beckett, ‘Where now?
Who now?’ can be found in The Sirens’ Song: Selected
Essays of Maurice Blanchot, edited by Gabriel
Josipovici, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch, and in
Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage in a translation
by Richard Howard. However, both are long out
of print.]
Blanchot’s own novels, such as Thomas The Obscure,
have a kinship with Beckett’s work; there is constant
dissimulation and wandering. In many ways though,
they are closer to Kafka’s; there are many mysterious
landscapes, doors and rooms. Only they lack both
these authors’ humour. His narratives are often insipid.
However, in the late 1950s, the critical writing and the
fiction began to merge, creating perhaps an entirely new
genre. As the fiction clarified into analysis, the analysis
developed the opacity of the fiction. In the massive
essay collection The Infinite Conversation there are
occasional dialogues between two friends (assumed
to be Blanchot and Georges Bataille). Then in 1962, a
novel appeared called L’attente l’oubli (Translated as
Awaiting Oblivion). It is an almost eventless narrative
of an unnamed man and a woman sharing a hotel room.
Each fragment of text is denoted and separated from
the rest by a printed diamond or star. The spaces disrupt
straightforward narrative progress.
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“She was present, already her own image, and her
image, not the remembrance, the forgetting of herself.
When seeing her, he saw her as she would be, forgotten.
“Sometimes he forgot her, sometimes he remembered,
sometimes remembering the forgetting and
forgetting everything in this remembrance.” (Trans.
John Gregg)
In a recent interview, the novelist Ian McEwan says
that novels “show the possibility of what it is like to be
someone else”. Awaiting Oblivion faces a complication
to this: narrative progress tends to look straight through
that someone else. As we begin to understand the person
in front of us, the understanding takes his or her
place; it becomes only a means of furthering narrative.
No wonder we love to be alone with a page-turner! Perhaps
significantly, McEwan’s latest novel Atonement is
about the guilt felt by a writer. The other person, like
language, resists simple closure to one clear meaning.
In the case of Awaiting Oblivion, however, it also resists
compulsive interest.
Why did Blanchot go down this route rather than
continuing to write novels and critical works? Perhaps
he found that once defined, a genre of literature closes
in on itself. When infected with another however, not
only is the comfort of reader disturbed, but literature
itself becomes a question. As Derrida later detailed in
The Law Of Genre – a close reading of Blanchot’s very
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