Mallarme and Blanchot
Mallarme and Blanchot
Mallarme and Blanchot
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Blanchot and Mallarme
Leslie Hill
Le Livre a venir
MLN, 105, (1990): 889-913 C) 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
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890 LESLIE HILL
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M L N 891
Coup, a new edition of two early stories from the 1930s which first
appeared in print together as Le Ressassement 8ternel in 1952.
In the light of this lengthy engagement of Blanchot with Mal-
larme's text, I want to consider three main issues. First, I shall be
looking at the place of Mallarm6 in Blanchot's critical writings;
second, I want to explore Blanchot's particular interpretation of
Mallarm6; and, finally, I shall be saying something about the im-
portance of Mallarm6 as a writer from the perspective of Blan-
chot's own literary practice.
The reference to Mallarm6, as I have implied, is rarely absent
from Blanchot's critical writing. But more remarkable than the
longevity of Blanchot's interest in the poet is the extent to which
the name of Mallarm6 persistently fulfils the same structural role
in respect of the internal composition of Blanchot's collections of
essays. In the earlier books mentioned, the essays on Mallarm6 fall
consistently at, or towards, the beginning of the volume (or, as
with Faux Pas, which Blanchot divides into sections, at the head of
the individual sections). Thus, in La Part dufeu, the Mallarme essay
follows two opening chapters on Kafka and in L'Espace litMraire a
piece on Mallarm6 immediately follows the initial section on 'la so-
litude essentielle'. Mallarm6's place is thus that of the second
figure to appear in the text. Conversely, in Le Livre a venir, the
essay on Mallarm6 comes second to last, and 'Un Coup de des'
operates as the penultimate point of reference. As a result,
whether as second from the beginning or as second-to-last, the
name of Mallarm6 in Blanchot's text has the function of a limen,
that is, a threshold, a limit, a margin, opening and closing the
space of writing, existing as part of that space but at a distance
from it.
This liminal place of Mallarm6 is difficult to explain by recourse
to literary history or to the dates of composition of Blanchot's
essays. In his writing Blanchot shows scant interest in chronolog-
ical progression, and history itself is hardly ever invoked as an ade-
quate structural framework for Blanchot's analysis. But it no doubt
could be said that Mallarm6's appearance on the limen is little more
than a chance occurrence, a random effect lacking real signifi-
cance. Since many of Blanchot's texts began as reviews or pieces in
journals (notably La Nouvelle Revue francaise and Critique), the ob-
jection might be that the shape of Blanchot's individual collections
of essays is more indicative of the occasional and haphazard nature
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892 LESLIE HILL
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M L N 893
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894 LESLIE HILL
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M L N 895
Je dis: une fleur! et, hors de l'oubli ou ma voix relegue aucun con-
tour, en tant que quelque chose d'autre que les calices sus, musicale-
ment se 1eve, idWe meme et suave, l'absente de tous bouquets.
Au contraire d'une fonction de numeraire facile et representatif,
comme le traite d'abord la foule, le dire, avant tout, reve et chant, re-
trouve chez le Poete, par necessite constitutive d'un art consacre aux
fictions, sa virtualite. ((E.c., 368)5
These words form the basis for what is now a powerful modern
vulgate. Though it has its origins in German Romanticism, it has
continued to dominate modern literary theory since the Symbolists
and has taken on numerous different guises. In Russian Forma-
lism and the work of Roman Jakobson, which later provided the
foundations for the Paris structuralism of the 1950s and 1960s, it
is a claim that poetic language and ordinary language are subject
to divergent, even antagonistic conventions. Whereas the com-
municative or referential function predominates in ordinary dis-
course, poetic discourse, it is argued, has its end in itself. As such,
it has the capacity (in Shklovsky's phrase) to 'break the glass ar-
mour' of habitual, automatic perception and thus renew the expe-
rience of the world by the reader.
There are other ways of articulating this dichotomy between the
prosaic and the poetic, the representational and the autotelic, the
mimetic and the self-conscious. In American New Criticism, for
instance, it is the idea that poetic language is inherently more am-
biguous and more suggestive than communicative prose, and that
in poetic writing indirect connotation counts for more than explicit
naming. In France, meanwhile, Paul Valery, who had been one of
the first to be shown the corrected proofs of 'Un Coup de des' in
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896 LESLIE HILL
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M L N 897
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898 LESLIE HILL
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M L N 899
Valery also takes the view that Mallarm6's poems can be ascribed
to an aesthetic of conscious mastery. For Valery, the poetic act is a
heightened moment of self-presence and possession (in which, in
the famous words of the heroine of his poem, 'La Jeune Parque',
'toute a moi, maitresse de mes chairs, / ... je me voyais me voir' [I,
97]). Valery contrasts poetic language and practice with prose by
arguing that poetry falls subject to different prosodic or musical
conventions. 'Prose et poesie,' he writes, 'se servent des memes
mots, de la meme syntaxe, des memes formes et des memes sons
ou timbres, mais autrement coordonnes et autrement excites' (I,
1331).13 In this way, Valery thematises prose and poetry as two
differentiated but symmetrical activities. In the one, words have
only a shortened lifespan and rapidly give way to the exposition of
ideas and the exchange of mental images; in the other, words live
on as musical elements irreducible to simple ideas, during which
time poetry takes part in the purely self-legitimating pursuit of
itself. But in Valery's analysis of both prose and poetry, there is the
common unquestioned assumption that it is possible for the
speaker to exercise conscious mastery over language as an instru-
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900 LESLIE HILL
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M L N 901
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902 LESLIE HILL
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M L N 903
sera, comme le dit fort bien Blanchot, 'ce langage dont toute la force est
de n'etre pas, toute la gloire d'evoquer, en sa propre absence, l'absence
de tout'. ... En se risquant tout entier, Mallarme s'est decouvert, sous
l'eclairage de la mort, dans son essence d'homme et de poete. I1 n'a pas
abandonne sa contestation de tout, simplement il la rend efficace.
Bient6t il pourra ecrire que 'le poeme est la seule bombe'. (MLF, 157)21
I shall return to some of the detail of these remarks later, but there
is here, it would appear, something of a misunderstanding of
Blanchot by Sartre that has to do with the function and status of
negativity in Mallarmes text.
Together with his essays on Baudelaire and Genet, Sartre's work
on Mallarme represents a stage in an attempt to lay the founda-
tions for a historical anthropology and to develop an account of
literature founded on an existentialist ethics. Already in Qu'est-ce
que la littrature?, Sartre had relied on a crude version of the Mal-
larmean dichotomy between poetry and prose to establish prose as
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904 LESLIE HILL
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La Nuit est le livre, le silence et l'inaction d'un livre, lorsque, tout ayant
6t6 profer6, tout rentre dans le silence qui seul parle, parle du fond du
passe et est en meme temps tout l'avenir de la parole. Car le Minuit
present, cette heure oii manque absolument le present, est aussi l'heure
ou le passe touche et atteint immediatement, sans l'intermediaire de rien
d'actuel, l'extremite de l'avenir, et tel est ... l'instant meme de la mort
qui n'est jamais present, qui est la fete de l'avenir absolu et oiu l'on peut
dire que, dans un temps sans present, ce qui a ete sera. (EL, 114-15)24
est ne d'une entente nouvelle de l'espace litteraire, tel que puissent s'y
engendrer, par des rapports nouveaux de mouvement, des relations
nouvelles de comprehension.... On ne cree rien et on ne parle d'une
maniere creatrice que par l'approche prealable du lieu d'extreme va-
cance oiu, avant d'etre paroles determinees et exprimees, le langage est
le mouvement silencieux des rapports, c'est-a-dire 'la scansion ryth-
mique de l'etre'. Les paroles ne sont jamais lIa que pour designer
l'etendue de leurs rapports: l'espace oiu ils se projettent et qui, a peine
designe, se replie et se reploie, n'etant nulle part ou il est. (LV, 286)25
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906 LESLIE HILL
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M L N 907
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908 LESLIE HILL
of his anarchist friend, the writer Felix Feneon, who had just been
arrested for his alleged involvement in a bomb outrage (and in
1944 was to be nominated by the journalist Maurice Blanchot as
his candidate for the title of the most astute literary critic of the
age), Mallarme pointed out to the newspaper that 'il n'y avait pas,
pour Feneon, de meilleurs detonateurs que ses articles'. 'Et je ne
pense pas', he added, 'qu'on puisse se servir d'arme plus efficace
que la litterature'. Some years later, in L'Art en silence, published in
1901, Camille Mauclair comes nearer to Blanchot's formulation
and attributes to Mallarm% the phrase: je ne sais qu'une bombe,
c'est le livre'. Henri Mondor, in his biography of 1941, though he
does so without indicating his source, has the poet declare, in sim-
ilar terms, that lje ne connais d'autre bombe qu'un livre'. This
phrase, in its turn, is taken up, as we have seen, by Sartre and
reproduced from memory as evidence of Mallarme's own political
sympathies, though Sartre's Mallarme drops the literary flourish
and puts it more pugnaciously: je ne connais pas d'autre bombe',
he says, 'qu'un livre'. 32
In its oddly negative but affirmative syntax, Blanchot's version
of the phrase repeats fragments of both sound and sense as they
echo from other reports. But if the phrase assembles these earlier
sayings, it disperses them, too, and it is noticeable that Blanchot's
wording shows more concern for the repercussions of the event
than its alleged source. He thus substitutes a process for an object,
an explosion for a bomb, an act of fragmentation for one of
single-minded destruction, and the writing of disaster for a ges-
ture of militant commitment. In this way Mallarme's phrase-if
ever it was the poet's phrase-is translated by Blanchot into a
fragment of his own idiom. In the last, he thus becomes one of
Mallarme's co-authors and the phrase enacts not just the explosion
of a book but of a signature, too.33
At the end, within the volume of a book-the book of Blan-
chot's phantom quotation as well as the Book of Mallarme's last
years-there occurs something like a merging of the names of
Mallarme and Blanchot. Prose and poetry, the occasional and the
essential, the transitive and the intransitive merge, too, in Blan-
chot's writing, in the same way as do critical text and literary fic-
tion. The rule is of disaster and fragmentation. Regulated forms
lose their distinctness but only in order that each may display the
fundamental oscillation that makes each different from itself as
well as from its fellow. No legislation is possible on the topic of
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M L N 909
NOTES
2 'that which is necessary and that which is fortuitous will be mutually kept in
check by the force of disaster.'
5 'I say: a flower! and, beyond the oblivion to which my voice relegates any out-
line, as something other than the familiar chalices, musically there arises, the
idea itself and suave, the one absent from all bouquets.
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910 LESLIE HILL
12 'The lack of coherence of the texts, a concern for something other than logic,
the brilliance of certain formulations which show the way but do not explain, all
this makes it difficult to reduce Mallarm6's meditations to the unity and sim-
plicity of a doctrine.'
13 'Prose and poetry use the same words, the same syntax, the same forms and the
same sounds or resonances, but coordinated and stimulated in different ways.'
14 'What is interesting about language is how it destroys the material reality of
things through its abstract power, and then destroys this abstract value through
the sensuous evocative power of words.'
15 'a kind of consciousness without subject which, in so far as it is separate from
being, is detachment, challenge, the infinite power to create the void and to take
up a position within a lack.'
16 Jacques Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilee, 1986), 35. It is remarkable, though he is
never cited in the text, how much Blanchot's reading of Mallarm6 seems to have
influenced Derrida's own account of the poet in the essay 'La Double Seance' in
La Dissemination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 199-317.
17 'Words contain within themselves the moment of their own disguise; they have
in them, by virtue of this power of disguise, the power by which mediation (that
which therefore destroys immediacy) seems to have the spontaneity, the fresh-
ness, the innocence of the origin.'
18 'In poetic language, the world retreats and goals come to an end; in poetry, the
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M L N 911
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912 LESLIE HILL
relationships: the space into which they are projected and which, as soon as it is
designated, withdraws and retreats, being nowhere where it is.'
26 'is not made up of words, albeit pure ones; it is that into which words have
always already disappeared and the oscillating movement of appearance and
disappearance.'
27 Levinas makes a similar point in his book Sur Maurice Blanchot (Montpellier:
Fata Morgana, 1975). Levinas writes: 'La demarche qui domine la derniere phi-
losophie de Heidegger consiste a interpreter les formes essentielles de l'activit6
humaine-art, technique, science, 6conomie,-comme des modes de la verit6
(ou de son oubli). Que la marche a la rencontre de cette verit6, la reponse
donn&e a l'appel, s'engage pour Heidegger dans les chemins de lerrance et que
l'erreur soit contemporaine de la verite, que la revelation de l'etre en soit aussi la
dissimulation, tout cela temoigne d'une proximite tres grande entre la notion
heideggerienne de l'etre et cette realisation de l'irrealite, cette presence de l'ab-
sence, cette existence du neant que, d'apres Blanchot, l'aeuvre d'art, le poeme
laisse dire. Mais pour Heidegger la verite-un devoilement primordial-con-
ditionne toute errance et c'est pourquoi tout l'humain peut se dire en fin de
compte en termes de verite, se decrire comme 'devoilement de l'etre'. Chez
Blanchot, l'euvre decouvre, d'une decouverte qui n'est pas verite, une obscurite.
D'une decouverte qui n'est pas verite!-voila une singuliere maniere de de-
couvrir et voir le 'contenu' que sa structure formelle determine: obscurite abso-
lument exterieure sur laquelle aucune prise n'est possible. Comme dans un
desert on ne peut y trouver domicile. Du fond de l'existence sedentaire se leve
un souvenir de nomade. Le nomadisme n'est pas une approche de l'etat seden-
taire. I1 est un rapport irreductible avec la terre: un sejour sans lieu' (21-2).
('The move that dominates the late philosophy of Heidegger consists in inter-
preting the essential forms of human activity-art, technology, science,
economy-as modes of truth [or its forgetting]. That the march towards the
truth, the response to the call, involves for Heidegger taking paths that lead one
astray, and that error is contemporary with truth, and that the revelation of
being is also its concealment, all points to the existence of a very close relation-
ship between the Heideggerian notion of being and the making real of the
unreal, the presence of absence, the existence of nothingness that is what, in
Blanchot's view, the work of art or the poem articulates. But for Heidegger the
truth-a primordial unveiling-is the condition of all wandering, which is why
the whole of the human can be finally spoken of in terms of truth and be de-
scribed as an 'unveiling of being'. In Blanchot, the work discovers, in a discovery that
is not truth, a darkness. A discovery that is not truth! What a strange way of
discovering and seeing the 'content' which its formal structure determines: a
darkness that is absolutely exterior, on which no purchase is possible. Like in a
desert one finds no residence. From the depths of sedentary existence a no-
madic memory arises. Nomadism is not an approach of the sedentary state. It is
an irreducible relationship with the earth: a residence without place'.)
28 'what poets found, space-the abyss and foundation of speech-is that which
does not remain, and the authentic residence is not the shelter in which man is
preserved, but has to do with the rock on which one founders, by way of ruina-
tion and the chasm, and with the "memorable crisis" which alone gives access to
the moving void, that place where the creative task begins.'
29 'Later, he reflected that the event was in this way of being neither true nor
false'. 'Forgetting, waiting. The waiting that gathers, disperses; the forgetting
that disperses, gathers. Waiting, forgetting.'
30 'And thus in one sole language always make heard the double speech.'
31 'By a violent division, Mallarme separated language into two almost unrelated
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M L N 913
forms, the one being immediate speech and the other essential language. This is
perhaps true bilingualism. The writer is on his way towards a form of speech
which is never already given: speaking, waiting to speak. He accomplishes this
journey by getting ever nearer to that language which is historically destined to
be his, and that closeness questions, at times gravely, his belonging to any native
tongue.'
32 Blanchot first quotes the phrase from Mallarm6 in an earlier (more extensive)
version of the passage that now appears in L'Ecriture du desastre, 190-91. This
was originally published as a prefatory note to the collective volume, Misere de la
littfrature (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1978), 11-12. The other texts cited here in
sequence are as follows: Maurice Blanchot, 'Le Mystere de la critique,' Le
Journal des debats, 6 January, 1944; Stephane Mallarm6, Correspondance, vol. VI,
edited by Henri Mondor and Lloyd James Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 287;
Camille Mauclair, LArt en silence (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1901), 104; Henri
Mondor, Vie de Mallarmn (Paris: Gallimard, 1941), 670; Jean-Paul Sartre, Mal-
larme': la luciditW et saface d'ombre, 157. I am indebted to Michael Holland and to
Deirdre Reynolds for their invaluable assistance in helping me to track down
some of these quotations.
33 There is a parallel here, despite obvious other differences, with Blanchot's
reading of Hegel, as I am reminded by Andrzej Warminski in his essay,
'Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel', YFS, 69 (1985), 267-75. Warminski
writes, for instance, of Blanchot's engagement with Hegel that 'the attempt is
not to explain Hegel but to rewrite him in another place' (269).
34 'Writing, in this respect, is the greatest violence, for it transgresses the Law, any
law and its own law.'
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