The Fragmentary Word

Abstract

The work of Maurice Blanchot, in its strange intensity, poses the most crucial problems for any student of literature, art, or culture, as well as for anyone seriously interested in the craft of writing. Blanchot's work falls, not so neatly, into two main categories: (1) critical; (2) creative. The critical pieces were mainly written as reviews of recently appearing books for the NRF, over a 20-year period (from about 1945-1965) and have been collected over the years into six volumes, all published by Gallimard. What I call the creative work consists of about ten novels, recits, dialogues and, recently, collections offragments which have been appearing regularly since the novel Thomas L'Obscur was published in 1941. Blanchot is no great respecter of genre. His critical pieces often have a fictional, even poetic quality about them; and his non-critical work is often as abstract and maddeningly complicated as the texts of a Kierkegaard, Husserl or Heidegger. For Blanchot the only works worth considering are those which take up certain fundamental problems of life and death, culture and anarchy; he is, for instance, much occupied with the question of whether there is any authentic purpose for literature and art in our modern technocratic socieL cs that increasingly marginalize if not exile entirely these forms of activity. Furthermore, what matters is not the works in themselves but the themes they invent and provoke, the experiences they originate in, and the times they point the way to. Blanchot is no fetishist of the written word; the important thing for him is not what exactly the author said, but what he meant. Typical of this existential attitude toward literature (which Blanchot shares with Val6ry, Tzara, Leiris, Bataille and some other provocative moderns) is his judgement on the total meaning of Gide's career: Just like the best of Rimbaud and Lautr6amont the influence of his works is in the direction of