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26.

MAURICE BLANCHOT IN
NOUVELLE REVUE FRANAISE

October 1953, 67886

Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907), French novelist and critic, has


published several novels, the best known, Thomas
LObscur (1941); but he is particularly influential for such
critical works as La Part du feu (1949), LEspace
littraire (1955), Le Livr venir (1959), LEntretien
infini (1969).
Who is doing the talking in Samuel Becketts novels, who is this tireless
I constantly repeating what seems to be always the same thing? What
is he trying to say? What is the author looking forwho must be
somewhere in the books? What are we looking forwho read them? Or
is he merely going round in circles, obscurely revolving, carried along
by the momentum of a wandering voice, lacking not so much sense as
center, producing an utterance without proper beginning or end, yet
greedy, exacting, a language that will never stop, that finds it intolerable
to stop, for then would come the moment of the terrible discovery: when
the talking stops, there is still talking; when the language pauses, it
perseveres; there is no silence, for within that voice the silence eternally
speaks.
An experiment without results, yet continuing with increasing purity
from book to book by rejecting the very resources, meager as they are,
that might permit it to continue.
It is this treadmill movement that strikes us first. This is not someone
writing for beautys sake (honorable though that pleasure may be), not
someone driven by the noble compulsion many feel entitled to call
inspiration (expressing what is new and important out of duty or desire
to steal a march on the unknown). Well, why is he writing then?

SAMUEL BECKETT: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE 129

Because he is trying to escape the treadmill by convincing himself that


he is still its master, that, at the moment he raises his voice, he might
stop talking. But is he talking? What is this void that becomes the voice
of the man disappearing into it? Where has he fallen? Where now?
Who now? When now?
He is strugglingthat is apparent; sometimes he struggles secretly,
as if he were concealing something from us, and from himself too,
cunningly at first, then with that deeper cunning which reveals its own
hand. The first stratagem is to interpose between himself and language
certain masks, certain faces: Molloy is a book in which characters still
appear, where what is said attempts to assume the reassuring form of a
story, and of course it is not a successful story, not only because of what
it has to tell, which is infinitely wretched, but because it does not
succeed in telling it, because it will not and cannot tell it. We are
convinced that this wanderer who already lacks the means to wander
(but at least he still has legs, though they function badlyhe even has a
bicycle), who eternally circles around a goal that is obscure, concealed,
avowed, concealed again, a goal that has something to do with his dead
mother who is still dying, something that cannot be grasped, something
that, precisely because he has achieved it the moment the book begins
(I am in my mothers room. Its I who live there now.), obliges him to
wander ceaselessly around it, in the empty strangeness of what is hidden
and disinclined to be revealedwe are convinced that this vagabond is
subject to a still deeper error and that his halting, jerky movements occur
in a space which is the space of impersonal obsession, the obsession
that eternally leads him on; but no matter how ragged our sense of him,
Molloy nevertheless does not relinquish himself, remains a name, a site
within bounds that guard against a more disturbing danger. There is
certainly a troublesome principle of disintegration in the story of
Molloy, a principle not confined to the instability of the wanderer, but
further requiring that Molloy be mirrored, doubled, that he become
another, the detective Moran, who pursues Molloy without ever
catching him and who in that pursuit sets out (he too) on the path of
endless error, a path such that anyone who takes it cannot remain
himself, but slowly falls to pieces. Moran, without knowing it, becomes
Molloy, that is, becomes an entirely different character, a
metamorphosis which undermines the security of the narrative element
and simultaneously introduces an allegorical sense, perhaps a
disappointing one, for we do not feel it is adequate to the depths
concealed here.

130 SAMUEL BECKETT: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

Malone Dies evidently goes further still: here the vagabond is


nothing more than a moribund, and the space accessible to him no
longer offers the resources of a city with its thousand streets, nor the
open air with its horizon of forests and sea which Molloy still
conceded us; it is nothing more than the room, the bed, the stick with
which the dying man pulls things toward him and pushes them away,
thereby enlarging the circle of his immobility, and above all the pencil
that further enlarges it into the infinite space of words and stories.
Malone, like Molloy, is a name and a face, and also a series of
narratives, but these narratives are not self-sufficient, are not told to win
the readers belief; on the contrary, their artifice is immediately exposed
the stories are invented. Malone tells himself: This time I know
where I am goingit is a game. I am going to playI think I shall be
able to tell myself four stories, each one on a different theme. With
what purpose? To fill the void into which Malone feels he is falling; to
silence that empty time (which will become the infinite time of death),
and the only way to silence it is to say something at any cost, to tell a
story. Hence the narrative element is nothing more than a means of
public fraud and constitutes a grating compromise that overbalances the
book, a conflict of artifices that spoils the experiment, for the stories
remain stories to an excessive degree: their brilliance, their skillful
irony, everything that gives them form and interest also detaches them
from Malone, the dying man, detaches them from the time of his death
in order to reinstate the customary narrative time in which we do not
believe and which, here, means nothing to us, for we are expecting
something much more important.
It is true that in The Unnamable the stories are still trying to survive:
the moribund Malone had a bed, a roomMahood is only a human
scrap kept in a jar festooned with Chinese lanterns; and there is also
Worm, the unborn, whose existence is nothing but the oppression of his
impotence to exist. Several other familiar faces pass, phantoms without
substance, empty images mechanically revolving around an empty
center occupied by a nameless I. But now everything has changed, and
the experiment, resumed from book to book, achieves its real
profundity. There is no longer any question of characters under the
reassuring protection of a personal name, no longer any question of a
narrative, even in the formless present of an interior monologue; what
was narrative has become conflict, what assumed a face, even a face in
fragments, is now discountenanced. Who is doing the talking here? Who
is this I condemned to speak without respite, the being who says: I am
obliged to speak. I shall never be silent. Never. By a reassuring

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convention, we answer it: it is Samuel Beckett. Thereby we seem to


draw closer to what is of concern in a situation that is not fictional, that
refers to the real torment of a real existence. The word experiment is
another name for what has actually been experiencedand here too we
try to recover the security of a name, to situate the books content at
the stable level of a person, at a personal level, where everything that
happens happens with the guarantee of a consciousness, in a world that
spares us the worst degradation, that of losing the power to say I. But
The Unnamable is precisely an experiment conducted, an experience
lived under the threat of the impersonal, the approach of a neutral voice
that is raised of its own accord, that penetrates the man who hears it, that
is without intimacy, that excludes all intimacy, that cannot be made to
stop, that is the incessant, the interminable.
Who is doing the talking here then? We might try to say it was the
author if this name did not evoke capacity and control, but in any case
the man who writes is already no longer Samuel Beckett but the
necessity which has displaced him, dispossessed and disseized him,
which has surrendered him to whatever is outside himself, which has
made him a nameless being, The Unnamable, a being without being,
who can neither live nor die, neither begin nor leave off, the empty site
in which an empty voice is raised without effect, masked for better or
worse by a porous and agonizing I.
It is this metamorphosis that betrays its symptoms here, and it is deep
within its process that a verbal survival, an obscure, tenacious relic
persists in its immobile vagabondage, continues to struggle with a
perseverance that does not even signify a form of power, merely the
curse of not being able to stop talking.
Perhaps there is something admirable about a book which
deliberately deprives itself of all resources, which accepts starting at the
very point from which there can be no continuation, yet which obstinately
proceeds without sophistry and without subterfuge for 179 pages,
exhibiting the same jerky movement, the same tireless, stationary tread.
But this is still the point of view of the external reader, contemplating
what he regards as only a tour de force. There is nothing admirable in
inescapable torment when you are its victim, nothing admirable in being
condemned to a treadmill that not even death can free you from, for in
order to get on that treadmill in the first place, you must already have
abandoned life. Esthetic sentiments are not called for here. Perhaps we
are not dealing with a book at all, but with something more than a book;
perhaps we are approaching that movement from which all books
derive, that point of origin where, doubtless, the work is lost, the point

132 SAMUEL BECKETT: THE CRITICAL HERITAGE

which always ruins the work, the point of perpetual unworkableness


with which the work must maintain an increasingly initial relation or
risk becoming nothing at all. One might say that The Unnamable is
condemned to exhausting the infinite. I have nothing to do, that is to
say, nothing in particular. I have to speak, whatever that means. Having
nothing to say, no words but the words of others, I have to speak. No
one compels me to, there is no one, its an accident, a fact. Nothing can
ever exempt me from it, there is nothing, nothing to discover, nothing to
recover, nothing that can lessen what remains to say, I have the ocean to
drink, so there is the ocean then.
It is this approach to origin which makes the experience of the work
still more dangerous, dangerous for the man who bears it, dangerous for
the work itself. But it is also this approach which assures the
experiment its authenticity, which alone makes of art an essential
research, and it is by having rendered this approach evident in the
nakedest, most abrupt manner that The Unnamable has more
importance for literature than most successful works in its canon. Try
listening to this voice that speaks, knowing that it lies, indifferent to
what it says, too old perhaps and too humiliated ever to be able to say at
last the words that might make it stop. And try descending into that
neutral region where the self surrenders in order to speak, henceforth
subject to words, fallen into the absence of time where it must die an
endless death:the words are everywhere, inside me, well well, a
minute ago I ha no thickness, I hear them, no need to hear them, no need
of a head, impossible to stop them, impossible to stop, Im in words,
made of words, others words, what others, the place too, the air, the
walls, the floor, the ceiling, all words, the whole world is here with me,
Im the air, the walls, the walled-in one, everything yields, opens, ebbs,
flows, like flakes, Im all these flakes, meeting, mingling, falling
asunder, wherever I go I find me, leave me, go toward me, come from
me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray,
Im all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no
ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to
say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that
merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes
something else, that Im quite different, a quite different thing, a
wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place
where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek,
like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of
caged beasts
[Translated by Richard Howard]

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