The Space of Literature [Hardcover]

Better to read this than to read ten manuals on the subject of writing.

Blanchot evokes the non-presence of death in writing, writing's necessary complicity with death. This death, however, is not the Hegelian death that would negate and finalize the subject (cf Arendt), fixing it in a form on which judgement could finally be passed. No, true to his essay on the absence of any right to death (which appears in _The Work of Fire_ and _The Station Hill Blanchot Reader_), this death never occurs. This death is never present, happens at no particular time, and happens to no one (see also _The Writing of the Disaster_). It cannot be said to happen or occur at all. It is never present, and being so, shares with writing the latter's most unearthly, strange quality - the absense of the writer and of that about which has been written.

In addition to being the most profound book on writing about which I can write with any knowledge, this is also Blanchot's most coherent and accessible set of essays. They possess something of a centrality of purpose and, together, make up something of a book, rather than the collections which make up the remainder of his critical and quasi-critical work. This may be a failing in the eyes of most Blanchotophiles, but it provides a bridge from the normal style of scholarly exposition to his more challenging investigations, and can be recommended as a first approach for the reader who is unfamiliar with his work. Nevertheless, some prior acquaintance with Rilke, Mallarme, Hoelderlin, and Kafka will be of immeasurable aid.

Most importantly, this one stands as its own example of writing that utterly lacks completion, that is haunted throughout with a palpable sensation of absence, a sensation that is at once as appealing as it is astonishing and unsettling.

Ann Smock's qualities as a translator shine through in Blanchot's earlier theoretical work, wherein one encounters a variety of themes that preoccupy him for the remainder of is literary life. Except for "Literature and the Right to Death", this is--in my opinion--the best starting point for anyone who is newly discovering Blanchot, but it remains significant and important for even the most well-read Blanchot scholars!

Many who aspire to being "more creative," are familiar with Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. This competent and assuring book - my wife is involved in such a program now - helps people develop practices that lessen the weight and noise of practical doings so that freer, more spontaneous and generative energies can seep through and inspire creativity. Blanchot's book starts from the utterly, completely opposite pole, from that "distant interior," where any practical busy-ness is not even in sight. An "elsewhere;" (p. 71) "Art is the world overturned," he says; (p. 217) and this "...art is `true' only in the work always still to come." (p. 235).
This book, like Cameron's intends a way, to be sure; but Blanchot is concerned to show the artist a way back.

The Space of Literature takes up the experiential itinerary of the artist from out of the depths of this "anterior region." The book describes "the leap," called inspiration (p. 177), that is required if the artist is to move out from that pure storm, poor in moorings, rich in torrent, wind and foam, that entrances the artist's desire and bring forth the work. Then, chapter-by-chapter, section-by-section, he articulates how the artists, through works, weave fragile tendrils that span from out of the vortex back to "our" world. This movement reaches its expository climax in the poignant retelling of the Orpheus myth ("The Gaze of Orpheus"). Here Orpheus's rescue of his wife Eurydice from death and bring her back to earth fails because great artist turns his gaze back in order to behold the beloved he brings forth from that teeming underworld. Such a gaze, back toward the impetus of the artist's work, is always forbidden. But failing is the risk the artist must venture: "The work of art is linked to a risk; it is the affirmation of an extreme experience." (p. 236).

Blanchot's account not only delineates the space (a non-space, really) of literature, he also takes the willing reader right up to the raging fringes in which art becomes necessary for some people: it aims right at the collision of art-generating experiencing (I call "the arteous") and language as it permeates and fails to encompass that experience; it resounds exactly with what a person in this vortex feels and realizes at that point of confliction (Blanchot knows this from his own literary writing);); he stops and takes up his pen right at the place of the darkest night, where nothing happens and pure chance sparks minute emergences -- emergences that artists, with all their living, affirm. Kafka, Mallarme and Rilke provide the focal points. Hölderlin, right at the end, enflames the whole book that preceded. Indeed Hölderlin looms over the book as the figure of the extreme experience that Blanchot cares about most and ardently seeks to convey to us.

Here we sample Blanchot at his most luminous exposition: "The poet exists only poetically as the possibility of the poem, and in this sense, he only exists after it, although he stands uniquely before it. Inspiration is not the gift of the poem to someone existing already, but the gift of existence to someone who does not yet exist." (p. 227) He has thought this notion from the beginning of his authorship, and here he expresses it with poise and elegance (elsewhere, in The Work of Fire, in "The `Sacred' Speech of Hölderlin," the fire burns).

For me, a mentor to the aspiring spirit, I know that when such a spirit has been freed from habituation and standards of material satisfaction, accomplishment, value and power, after the jubilation of release, the question, "How do I live now" arises as a new and daunting terror. There is little solace or reassurance to offer the sojourner who lives in the way of the artist.

However, this book, maybe more than any other I have read, points to an itinerary that spirit can undertake, and can affirm. It takes the itinerary of the artist all the way through passages of death and tragedy, all the way out from the underworld and all that has been left behind there, to point to the artist's measure, composure, poise while residing right in the heart of the conflict, right in the void left in the wake of the death of God and all the gods. For Blanchot this is the way the artist comes to us, mourning what is lost in that very act of gathering and guiding the work onward toward a place among us.

And yet, this book may not speak to artists. Not because it is academic or estranging, but, ironically, because it is too demystifying. For Blanchot places word markers all around the burgeoning torrents of art-making experience; and he does so with unfailing accuracy. To the artist who may hesitate to take this work on, I suggest this: Blanchot fervently desists from dissecting or characterizing the ineluctably empty core that defies and refuses articulation even as it pours itself into the life demanded by the arteous. It is still yours alone. No "analysis" relieves you of the incomprehensible enigma that incites your work.

The Space of Literature does speak powerfully to certain philosophically inclined readers, to educated poets as well as to literati or critics who are willing to take a step out of the din of "interpretation" that buries art in histories and psychological mumbo-jumbo order to "save" the artist. And, I should mention, one negative note for me is Blanchot's focus on death - a notion I think we no longer have to harbor as some kind of totem of meaning the artwork must bear.

Finally, Blanchot offers a narrative opening onto the "way the artist is." He lights up the sense that there is a way, and that the greats have lived it, into it, through it, and were permeated through and through by it. And maybe for unnamed others who dare Blanchot's necessary obscurities and who choose to dwell and tarry with them for a while, it will open a new horizon where artists take their places as founding breakout creatives. Their works stand apart from our daily goings on, but are there nonetheless, within reach of our most pressing urge to be fully human.

He draws the curtains around this space with these words, elided here: "In the work of art, being is risked... to emerge deep down in appearance... the excess in affirmation... the true will be able to take place."

Go there, with Blanchot. The journey can be made.