Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003)

Monokl’un kırmızı serisinde Maurice Blanchot Kafka okurları için olağanüstü bir yapıta imza atıyor ve Kafka’yı hiç görülmedik bir halde okurunun karşısına çıkarıyor.
Yazmak gececil şeydir; kendini karanlık güçlere bırakmak demektir, aşağıdaki bölgelere inmek, kendini saf olmayan kucaklaşmalara teslim etmektir. Bütün bu ifadeler Kafka için dolaysız bir hakikati barındırır. Karanlık büyülenmeyi, arzunun iç karartıcı parıltısını, her şeyin show more radikal ölümle son bulduğu geceleyin zincirlerinden boşanan şeyin tutkusunu çağrıştırır. Peki, aşağının güçleriyle neyi anlar Kafka? Bunu bilmiyoruz. Ama git gide, canlı şeylere susamış ve her türlü hakikati güçten düşürmeye muktedir olarak, sözcükleri ve hayaletimsi bir gerçekliğin yaklaşmasıyla sözcüklerin kullanımını birbirine bağlayacaktır. İşte bu yüzden son yıl arkadaşlarına yazmayı dahi neredeyse bırakacak ve özellikle de kendinden söz etmeyecektir: “Doğru, hiçbir şey yazmıyorum ama gizleyecek bir şeyim olduğundan değil. Her şeyden önce, bunu kendime son yıllarda stratejik nedenlerle bir yasa bellediğim için, sözcüklerime de mektuplarıma da güvenmiyorum; kalbimi pekâlâ insanlarla paylaşmayı istiyorum ama sözcüklerle oynayan ve onu dilleri sarkık, mektupları okuyan hayaletlerle paylaşmak istemiyorum.” Dolayısıyla sonucun kesin bir şekilde şu olması gerekirdi: artık yazmamak. Oysa sonuç bambaşkadır: “Benim için yazmak en zorunlu ve en önemli şeydir.” Ve Kafka, bizlere bu zorunluluğun nedenlerini göstermekten, hatta onları farklı mektuplarında yinelemekten geri kalmadı: eğer yazmayacak olursa delirecekti. Yazmak deliliktir, onun deliliğidir ama bu delilik onun aklıdır…
Kendinden kaçmayı isteyerek kendi saplantısına daha da batan kör uyanıklığıyla edebiyat; eğer varoluş varoluştan çıkma olanaksızlığıysa, varlık her zaman varlığa geri itilen şeyse, dipsiz derinlikte olan şey çokta dipteyse, hâlâ uçurumun temeli olan uçurumsa, kendisine karşı çarenin olmadığı çareyse, varoluş saplantısının tek tercümesidir.
MAURICE BLANCHOT show less

"[And] she stared at me, but in a strange way, as if I had been in back of myself, and infinitely far back."

Precious: sending plaster casts of a hand to a palm reader. Decadent the first time, but when it happens twice in the same novel (against all odds!) one thinks this surely must be a trope of Huysmans's (Huysmans sentenced to death the same year Blanchot sentenced to be born), or is the mechanical conveyance of plaster a conceit to avoid the dread-ful fortune-teller scene (Impossible show more to pull off in literature, not even by Kleist.)

Compared to the stupefied physicians of the early 20th century, overwhelmed by the pathophysiology of disease and an obligation to tonal fidelity at bedside, modern physicians are perhaps better on the margins. (Surely more accurate at prognostication than the palm read, though likely hardly less halting.)

"[Infidelity's] merit is to keep [a] story in reserve,"
On infidelity to a tone. A sad moment becomes happy, or there is a moment of comedy or delirious-transcendence ("A perfect rose"), but only to return to a greater silent despair; though Blanchot may not be aware that the sadness turned to humor turned to sadness can become (burnt) humor again at the final moment. (Compare this to the vision of 'silence beyond silence beyond silence.')

"[But] the road wants to see if the man who is coming is really the one who should be coming: it turns around to see who he is. [. . .] Unhappy is the path that turns around to look at the man walking on it;" show less

Ok, I'm an unabashed enthusiast for French literature - at the same time that I'm an anti-nationalist. I'm reminded of a French-Canadian friend asserting to me that French culture is much more supportive of language play than American culture is & I find that easy enuf to believe. My friend sd that there're French comedians whose comedy is oriented around complex puns - contrast this to endless dick jokes & you get the idea.

W/ the preceding in mind, I mention that 5 of my favorite writers show more are French: François Rabelais, "Comte de Lautrémont" (honorary Frenchmen despite his being an Uruguayan expatriate - he wrote & died in France), Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, & Georges Perec. Raymond Queneau is certainly high up there too. many others that I'm probably not thinking of at the moment.

As such, I've definitely read more French writers (in English translation) than most Americans. & I tend to seek out the more experimental ones. & I've found some of them to be colossal bores. On the minus side there's been Michel Butor's "Passing Time" [you can read my shoddy review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2963301.Passing_Time] & Nathalie Sarraute's "The Planetarium" (don't remember this one at all). I even plowed thru at least 5 novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet. I almost liked those - if only for their formal severity.

& then there's Maurice Blanchot. I read "The Madness of the Day" 1st. It did nothing for me [you can read me saying the same thing in 5 sentences here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1147264.Madness_of_the_Day]. Then I read the considerably longer "Aminadab". I liked that a bit more but still not enuf to really embrace Blachot [See my somewhat more extensive review here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/445745.Aminadab].

But I'm stubborn. So I just read this 3rd bk b/c I'm curious - he's obviously a thoughtful writer but what can I get out of it? A man goes to a door. He's surprised by who opens it. There's another woman who lives there. Maybe he knew her before, maybe he didn't. He moves in.. or stays there for a little while.. or something.. Maybe he had a history w/ one or both of the women.. Such is the skeleton of the 'plot'. But no 'meat' fleshes out these bones - the rest of the bk is all 'marrow' instead, it's all internal - in the 1st person narrator's excuse for a mind. If this guy were a friend of mine he'd drive me crazy.

The bk seems to be based around canceled-out dualities. "Time has passed, and yet it was not past" The narrator seems to be trapped in some sort of limbo of microscopic analysis - so tedious as to be borderline monomaniacal. As he got thru the doorway & the internal monologue started in earnest I practically groaned w/ the knowledge that, yes, this was going to be a Blanchot novel like the other novels. Was Blanchot like this as a person? Did he spend all his time FIXATED on ideas that he was incapable of putting into any kind of life-affirming action? If so, I'd hate to be him on his death-bed.

All of wch isn't to say that this wasn't 'good' in some sense. As a reader, just navigating the narrative was an interesting challenge: Who are these people? What is their interrelationship? The 1st-person implies things that it doesn't deliver - as if the narrator already knows it so why shd he say anything about it? Then again, who these characters are & what they're doing w/ each other appears to just be a pretext for presenting the narrator's introversion:

"Now I have to say this: even though I saw how real it was, this gesture left me feeling uncomfortable, uneasy. Why? This is hard to understand, but it made me think of a truth whose shadow it would be, it made me think of some sort of unique, radiant thing, as though it had tried to condemn to mere likeness an inimitable instant. Bitter suspicion, disconcerting and burdensome thought."

What's he 'reacting' to? One of the women taking his 2 hands & putting them against her throat. Is he a paranoid? show less

I gave a not particularly enthusiastic review to Blanchot's "The Madness of the Day" wch was, at that point, the only thing I'd read by him. Then my respected colleague Franz Kamin sd I shd give him another chance so when I found this bk I picked it up. Others put in a good word for him too. I've read many 19th & 20th century French writers so I definitely have a taste for such things but Blanchot's a writer I never discovered when I was most in the thick of such interests.

Whilst reading show more it, though, I found myself wondering: Do I even ENJOY reading anymore? Perhaps if I'd read it 30 yrs ago I wd've found it fascinating. As it was, I mostly just found it tedious - much like the only bk I've read by Michel Butor. The back-cover promo for "Aminadab" compares it to Kafka's "enclosed and allegorical spaces" &, yes, it's very claustrophobic - like Kafka, like Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast Trilogy" - wch I loved as a young teenager.

But this is the type of claustrophobia that reminds me of friends making what I consider to be 'bad' decisions - I just felt like saying: "Don't do that!" - like talking to a character in a horror movie about to make a fatally stupid blunder. In other words, as the protaganist goes thru his progressive entanglement, I found myself caring only insofar as I was annoyed.

Also on the back cover blurb it says: "Blanchot's novel functions as an allegory referring, above all, to the wandering and striving movement of writing itself" & keeping that assertion in mind made the bk slightly more interesting to me. Strangely, but as a nice change from the norm, the 'romantic' aspect of it is downplayed to the point of barely a mention in the translator's intro. However, it seems to me that the bk is as much about human relationships as anything more formal - w/ the human relationships not being very appealing to me.

All in all, "Aminadab" is fairly original & unusual - 2 qualities I always search out - but I found myself not caring very much. Blanchot has helped me realize that I want something very different out of writing than what wd've been interesting 30 yrs ago (just based on its difference). Now? It's not so clear what I want - stimulation, of course, but maybe I'm too jaded to receive that easily. show less