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short novel The Madness Of The Day – this infection
is necessary and happens to all genres; in fact, a genre
is basically the effacement of that infection. As the
dynamic of absence and presence that frequently drives
Blanchot’s writing, the direction was necessary.
In a remarkably condensed early essay, ‘How Is
Literature Possible?’ this movement is prefigured. In
it, Blanchot reviews a critical work by Jean Paulhan
about the opposition of what we might call traditional
and rebellious literature. The idea of overthrowing
cliché and the tired generic forms (that is, Tradition)
has dominated our conception of literature for 150
years. Blanchot mentions Victor Hugo’s rejection of
rhetoric, Verlaine’s denunciation of eloquence and
Rimbaud’s abandonment of “old-hat” poetry. Sixty
years on, it hasn’t changed that much. Think of Martin
Amis’ famous “war against cliché”, J.G. Ballard’s
expressed distaste for literature and Steven Wells of
ATTACK! Books thumping the table of the high-chair
with his spoon. Indeed, Beckett’s Trilogy could itself
be called a work of terrorism against the citadel of tradition.
Yet the rebels themselves are divided into two
camps. Those, like Wells, who are keen to dispense
with literature altogether in an amphetamine-fuelled
auto-da-fé and so destroy the complacent world of
bourgeois stolidity, and those, like Amis, who want to
prune language of its deadwood so that a consciousness
can be experienced in all its grotesque, singular
BUY Maurice Blanchot books online from and
richness. What Blanchot (and indeed Paulhan) does
is to point out that in order to do either requires a
scrupulous attention to language. “Whoever wants to
be absent from words at every instant or to be present
only to those that he reinvents is endlessly occupied
with them so that, of all authors, those who most
eagerly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism [i.e.
using cliché] are also exactly the ones that are most
exposed to this reproach.” Does this, then, destroy all
hope of what literature might offer us? Yes, according
to those who do not consider themselves writers, because
writing is a work of distance from the ‘ecstasies’
of the human condition. Not so fast, says Blanchot:
“It is the same for those who through the marvels
of asceticism have had the illusion of distancing
themselves from all literature. For having wanted to
rid themselves of conventions and of forms, in order to
touch directly the secret world and the profound metaphysics
that they meant to reveal, they finally contented
themselves with using this world, this secret, this metaphysics
as they would conventions and forms that they
complacently exhibited and that constituted at once the
visible framework and the foundation of their works.
[…] In other words, for this kind of writer metaphysics,
religion, and emotions take the place of technique and
language. They are a system of expression, a literary
genre – in a word, literature.” (trans. Charlotte Mandell)
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