The Absence of the Book and the Future of the Work: Blanchot, Barthelme, and Creative Reading Practice

Abstract

This paper conducts a close and creative – meaning of creation, concerned with creating – reading of Donald Barthelme's ‘Nothing: A Preliminary Account’ in an attempt to make manifest Blanchot's theory of reading and his notion of the absence of the book. Using Blanchot and Barthelme's critical-creative works, the paper argues that the reader actually creates texts through the act of temporally juxtaposing and orienting works toward and around each other, such that each text is crafted not only by individual reader-psyches but the adjacent texts and reading conditions in which the work is consumed. In this way, texts are bound to temporal readerly circumstance – or, as Blanchot puts it, ‘scriptuary exigency’ – and authors can only conceive of audience speculatively. The paper introduces the Oulipian notion of anticipatory plagiarism and recent theories about deliberate anachronism to illustrate that time in fiction is a fundamental concern of the writer as well as a source of anxiety for the reader. Ultimately, I argue that the texts we author are in fact further composed by those text's future-tense reading situations and demonstrates how considering our text's future during the writing process might recalibrate a work's capacities and potential.