Critique du récit pur: gleam of time in Maurice Blanchot’s narratives

Abstract

ABSTRACT Maurice Blanchot’s itinerary as a critic and writer is marked by a transformation occurring around the beginning of WW2, when Blanchot abandoned right-wing political journalism to focus on literature. His criticism and narrative fictions from the 1940s elaborate the notion of a ‘pure novel’, inspired partly by Mallarmé, in response to historical conditions of the Occupation, in an assertion of literary sovereignty after bitter political defeat. Blanchot casts this pure form of writing through figures of light and luminosity that would transcend, even destroy, empirical experience – moving toward the disaster he will later invoke – thus affording a certain evasion from historical realities, while also betraying an intimate relation to their specific concrete historical conjuncture. The argument is not that Blanchot sublimates / allegorises political disappointment through literary narrative (see Jeffrey Mehlman in the 1980s), but that his literary texts enact a relation to factual political and historical responsibility that ‘pure’ literature fails to liquidate, but rather continually evokes. Tracing out constitutive evasions in Thomas the Obscure, Aminadab, The Madness of the Day, and The Instant of my Death, reveals how Blanchot’s fiction betrays a necessary accounting of the author’s factual history, a historical responsibility called up in the strange vacuous light of literature itself.