Death Sentence [Paperback]

This lost classic of French literature is thankfully back in print, translated by Paul Auster's first wife, the excellent detail-led writer Lydia Davis. Death Sentence recounts the horrific drawn out death of writer Colette Laure Peignot whose posthumously gathered writings are now available as The Collected Writings of Laure on City Lights. See also on Amazon. The prose here sticks like a dart in your memory. Its the stuff of ticking clocks and sleepless nights. Gripping yet troubling. A vital part of the Georges bataille-Laure story. Highly recommended both as a translation and as a compelling piece of prose.

Since I am not an accomplished fiction reader, I came to Blanchot's "Death Sentence" with trepidation. Blanchot is one of those French `postmodernists" that drives American pundits crazy. I am personally devoted to studying everything I can about him. For me, he is a deep explorer of the creative spirit as lived by the artist today. Still, the fears lingered: Would I understand this author, whose reputation for obscurity is renowned? Would reading this book be a dry exercise in slogging through strange wordings and plot convolutions?
And then the surprise. Each and every sentence sparks with luminously, incandescently clear impact. And yet, each and every one of these sentences disassembles the narrative right before my eyes. Each sentence instigates a tear: "...this sadness communicated a feeling to me that was absolutely distressing, that was dispossessed and in some way bereft of itself; the memory of it became inexpressible despair, despair which hides in tears but does not cry, which has no face and changes the face it borrows into a mask." (p. 49) Oh my.
The narrative is simple: first the death, spontaneous resuscitation and then completely instigated final death of the narrator's loved one; then, in the second part of this slim book, the narrator proposes marriage while he and his female companion are taking refuge from aerial bombardment, during the early days of WWII. The pressing crowd subsequently separates the couple as everyone rushes out of the subway bomb shelter. They reunite - if that is the term for what happens here -- in a space of estranging darkness:
"Everything about that room, plunged in the most profound darkness, was familiar to me; I had penetrated it, I carried it in me, I gave it life and which no force in the world could ever overcome. That room does not breathe, there is neither shadow nor memory in it, neither dream nor depth; I listen to it and no one speaks; I look at it and no one lives in it. And yet, the most intense life is there, a life which I touch and which touches me.... May the person who does not understand that come and die. Because that life transforms the life which shrinks away from it into a falsehood." (p. 67)
I found this work in the space of death to be strangely liberating. I was mourning a death in my own immediate circle when I read it. In my death scene, I too instigated a final deathblow, the death sentence (euthanasia for my brave and aged dog, fighting to the end). In reading this work during this time, the very unsettling of the narration streamed forth as a linguistic "nature" pouring out, as it does, beyond any trivialities of meaning I can bring to a comprehension of a beloved's death. The flights of language out of any sentiment or meaning, the interruptions and dislocations articulated here opened room for a free constitution of what living now meant in the face of what was a definitive, inescapable death event. The breaking apart, the "absent meaning," (The Writing of the Disaster; p. 24) let the dark in. The dark of a world beyond my reach, not my own sentimental illuminations, surrounded me and freed up the mystery, set it loose. The only way to live is to let the touching happen - whatever and however that occurs. As Steven Wright said, "Shins are for seeing in the dark."
Kafka shines a guiding light for Blanchot. Where Kafka narrated the occasions of dislocation and ever-receding destination, Blanchot articulates the forming of a literature right in the heart and tumult of the artists' experiences - death sentences all.
The echoes of Kafka resound throughout Death Sentence. As Blanchot says of Kafka's writing, "We do not know if we are grasping the outside or the inside, whether we are in the presence of the building or the hole into which the building has disappeared." (Work of Fire, p. 23) When contemplating the seminally guiding literature of Kafka, Blanchot says: "So is art the place of anxiety and complacency, of dissatisfaction and security. It has a name: self-destruction, infinite disintegration. And another name: happiness, eternity."
Indeed.

A short, harrowing work interested neither in description, character development, nor cleverness but rather in staring death in the eye. If you like Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen King, or even Raymond Carver you doubtless may detest this abstract gift of a conflicted consciousness of a taciturn man in love with a sickly, dying young woman during troubled times. Perhaps the supreme study of the impossibility of fidelity, let alone true love, in a world where death hangs in the air as the possibility of total absence or, more frighteningly, as the cipher of a total presence condemned to repeat its secret to deaf ears.