Maurice Blanchot, A World in Ruins: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1943. Translated by Michael Holland

Abstract

This is the third of four volumes translating Maurice Blanchot’s Chroniques littéraires du ‘Journal des débats’ (Paris: Gallimard, 2007). Alongside the collection Faux pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), the volumes give us an enhanced picture of his literary criticism during the Second World War, after France’s capitulation. The articles contained in this volume are fairly brief, and each bears the date of its weekly publication in the Journal des débats, an establishment liberal newspaper then nearing the end of its life. They address classic and contemporary literature, mostly French, but also philosophy, political theory, Christian mysticism, and more. They look at poetry (as Michael Holland’s helpful Introduction underlines), but also at the novel — in the period Blanchot was writing and publishing novels of his own (Thomas l’obscur, 1941; Aminadab, 1942; Le Très-Haut, 1948). Literary scholars will therefore be able to play the game of applying Blanchot’s criticism to his own writing (for instance, ‘it is a novel that, instead of giving a realistic portrayal of war, absorbs it more profoundly into an inner adventure, describing it indirectly through the effects that it has on a mind that is suddenly expelled from itself and exposed to a devastating truth’, p. 36). Holland’s scholarly work goes far beyond this, however, and with these translated volumes he continues his enterprise of tracking the life that Blanchot spent writing. He has written, scare quotes at the ready, of ‘[le] groupe des “Blanchot-positifs”’ (Avant-dire: essais sur Blanchot (Paris: Hermann, 2015), p. 180), a striking suggestion of infection or contagion. Throughout Blanchot’s writing, too, we find striking formulations: the reader is assaulted by compressed, aphoristic phrases. But we also find an entire conceptual enterprise that seeks to free writing from such phrase-making, and instead turns towards passivity and weakness. The tension between these two aspects offers a trusty path into the depths of Blanchot’s œuvre. But are these aspects simultaneous, or chronologically distinct? It is here that these volumes are particularly useful, soliciting approaches that are calm, patient, and evidence-based. For there is no shortage of evidence. These critical articles are abundant, varied, erudite, and the task of reading them without preconceptions will need to be done at length. We see that in 1943 Blanchot was still referring in broadly positive terms to refinement, good breeding, discretion, harmony, the French character, imperiousness, elegance, and so on. But while clarity and lucidity are still important, there is already an awareness of the distortion this light produces when cast over its objects. In short, this is no longer the Blanchot of 1936–37, but neither is it quite the post-war Blanchot, if indeed there is a post-war Blanchot.