What Is There to Say? Blanchot, Melville, des Forets, Beckett (review)

Abstract

Speech is Ann Smock's subject in this book. She addresses the manner in which that notion is constructed in the constellation of writers announced in her subtitle (with incursions upon occasion into the work of others such as Jean Paulhan, Marguerite Duras, and Simone Weil), following the meanders of those constructions with perspicacity, tact, and a very considerable intrepidity. For these are writers who choose—but is it properly speaking a matter of choice?—to problematize speech, offering it in the most extreme instances as an impossible thing, even as they engage in it. Among those writers, Maurice Blanchot occupies the center of the stage, as Smock reads him through the others and the others through him. It is the Blanchot-Melville pairing that [End Page 128] she returns to most frequently, casting it as a dialogue, or more precisely perhaps as a kind of entretien in Blanchot's sense of the word, that is, as an "interrupted" conversation whose intervals of silence speak as eloquently as the speech they interrupt.