Elementos compartidos

Blanchot’s work undermines teleocratic conceptions of style in terms of generic norms in ways which echo Gadamer’s critique of style as unity and normativity. To think of style as genre, that is, in terms of the teleocratic idea that style is primarily definable against already-existing norms or formal rules, becomes untenable through Blanchot, whose own style dissolves generic distinctions, and who leads to thinking of style in relation to the eventhood of the work.

16 _{Philip Beitchman, “The Fragmentary Word,” SubStance 39 (1983): 58–74 (71).} 17 _{Beitchman 71.}

The radical hybridity of Blanchot’s styles is more pronounced in his later, fragmentary work, which Roger Laporte calls “a new style, a new genre.”18 Significantly, however, what we have been calling a style, the fragmentary, with its speaking of the neuter, is characterised by the way it “dispense[s] with attributions of mode or genre,” thus suspending the normativity of pre-established styles.19 In Hill’s words, Blanchot’s late writing is “essentially unclassifiable [and] fictional representation finally seems to have become indistinguishable from meditative, philosophical prose, and vice versa.”20

The result of this generic hybridity, of style that refuses to be teleocratically pigeonholed within existing norms, is, as Blanchot puts it, “a threat and a scandal of thought.” The voice of the neuter in the fragmentary, writes Blanchot, “is that which cannot be assigned to any genre whatsoever: the non-general, the non-generic as well as the non-particular” (IC 299). This resistance to categorisation and prescription inscribing a relation to the “unknown” makes the fragmentary style profoundly subversive of conventional conceptions of thought. It opens new possibilities of thinking through an “interruption in language” that responds to “the unknown in its infinite distance” (IC 77). Style, in Blanchot, does not replace thought, but makes new modes of thinking—thought oriented to the yet-to-be-known of the future—possible.

While the dissolution of generic distinctions of style is clear in Blanchot’s later work, the récit/roman dichotomy that appears frequently in Blanchot’s early writing already gestures at this problematisation. Indeed, more than being stylistic or generic, the récit/roman dyad, for Blanchot, names inextricably intertwined possibilities in the ontology of the work. Blanchot writes about one particular episode in Homer’s The Odyssey—the encounter with the Sirens—and how the novel (roman) and the récit have different relations towards the Sirens and their “imperfect songs that were only a song still to come [but that] did lead the sailor toward that space where singing might truly begin” (BC 3).21 The roman is characterised by its focus on entertainment, its being based on a series of episodes in time, as well as its credibility and familiarity which it presents as fictional. As Clark argues, this “definition of the novel would remain reductive, even silly, were it not set up entirely by way of contrast to the récit, a mode

18 _{Roger Laporte, “Maurice Blanchot Today,” trans. Ian Maclachlan, in Carolyn Bailey Gill ed. Maurice}

Blanchot: The demand of writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) 25–33 (26).

19 _{Leslie Hill, “Introduction,” in Carolyn Bailey Gill ed. 1–20 (11).} 20 _{Hill, Extreme Contemporary 13.}

21 _{Since the word “narrative,” in English, may also refer to novel writing and there is no English}

of language to which the novel is understood as embodying a resistance.”22 The récit, unlike the novel, is a “narrative of one single episode” and it “escapes the forms of daily time and the world of ordinary truth” (BC 6).

However, the novel and the récit are not simply different genres but inherently interrelated (im)possibilities in the work. As Lars Iyer argues, while the novelist “believes [...] that he is in command of that which he would narrate,” he can only write by cutting himself off from the dangers of the sirens’ song. Or, in Iyer’s words, the novel leaves behind “the memory of the experience” in order to become a novel.23 This memory, on the contrary, is what the récit as an event bears witness to, and it involves a “struggle” from which “what we call the novel was born.” The novel foregrounds the voyage towards the sirens but, unlike the récit, forgets “any allusion to a goal or a destination,” the inhuman song of the sirens itself. This makes the novel an essentially human enterprise, also because—in line with Blanchot’s thinking of desouvrement or unworking—human beings are powerless to reach the “Isle of Capraea,” where the Sirens dwell. “No one can head for this island,” writes Blanchot, “and whoever decided to would still go there only by chance” (BC 5). The novel cannot not forget its own point of origin, but that point in the space of literature, the event which the récit enacts, remains.

Blanchot’s account of the récit enacts a paradoxical anachrony in the relation between the récit and the event that pushes towards a thinking of style in terms of singular performativity or eventhood rather than generic normativity or stylistic deviation. While the novel remains rooted in human experience and human time, the récit exists, as Hill puts it, “only as an enactment of the singular event that constitutes the récit itself.”24 In a recognisable style characterised by paradox, Blanchot speaks of how the récit

is the movement toward a point—one that is not only unknown, ignored, and foreign, but such that it seems, even before and outside of this movement, to have no kind of reality; yet one that is so imperious that it is from that point alone that the narrative [récit] draws its attraction, in such a way that it cannot even ‘begin’ before having reached it; but it is only the narrative [récit] and the unforeseeable movement of the narrative [récit] that provide the space where the point becomes real, powerful, and alluring. (BC 7)

22 _{Clark, Sources 84.}

23 _{Lars Iyer, “Blanchot, Narration, and the Event,” Postmodern Culture 12.3 (2002) n. pag (paragraph}

38). Web, 10 Sep 2011.

The récit then, rather than a narrative in a particular style defined by its adherence to specific stylistic requirements, is a movement towards its own origin, an orientation towards a future that can never be present.

As Blanchot writes, “the narrative [récit] begins where the novel does not go [the dwelling of the Sirens] but still leads us by its refusals and its rich negligence” (BC 6). The novel may steer away from the event of the récit by favouring unity, continuity and sequentiality, but it leads us there anyway in being what Iyer terms “a narration of that which it has already lost.”25 Thus, the differences between the roman and the récit, rather than generic or stylistic, are determined by different moments in the relation of the work with its own origin. This is why, as Hill puts it, “there is no such a thing as the récit in general, but also why there are so many récits.”26 The event of the récit, or the récit as an event, is always singular, and one may say that a récit is only similar to other récits in being an imitable example of singularity. This thinking of the récit clearly problematises the understanding of genre as a category definable by stylistic, structural, thematic, or linguistic features. If the récit is always a singular event, then style, in relation to it, has to be thought within this incalculable eventhood rather than in terms of the fulfilment of generic criteria that would categorise the text in which it appears as a récit.

For Blanchot, modernist literature radicalises the problematisation of literature as definable in terms of “unity of genres.” Indeed, in modernism, adherence to stylistic norms no longer regulates “literature”:

genres scatter and forms are lost, […] each book seems foreign to all the other books and indifferent to the reality of genres […]. [W]hat seems to express itself in art works is not eternal truths, types and characters, but a demand that is opposed to the order of essences. (BC 200)

The effect of this break with traditional style and the continuity of genres in modernism has the paradoxical effect, for Blanchot, of taking literature towards its “disappearance.” What this means is not that literature is no longer written but, on the contrary, literature goes “toward itself, toward its essence” (BC 195). Modernist literature performs its non- teleocratic non-essentiality by calling itself into question, not in terms of a collection of styles, forms, or genres that are already recognised and classified, but as something that cannot be “discovered [...] verified [or] justified.” What speaks in modern literature is not eternal truth or specific literary styles but the anti-teleocratic voice of the neuter (BC

25 _{Iyer, “Blanchot, Narration, and the Event” paragraph 38.} 26 _{Hill, Extreme Contemporary 143.}

200). At least momentarily, certain works of modernism take art towards its end in the sense that “rare, fugitive” (BC 110) works by writers like Woolf, Joyce, Broch, Musil, and Mann do not simply “exhaust” a genre but seem “to have broken something” (BC 108).

However, Blanchot does not think of modernist literature—in its intense questioning of its own origins—as a different literary style or genre determined by the era in which it is produced. This sets his thinking apart from teleocratic conceptions of modernist style, such as that of Jameson who, as will be seen in Chapter 5, defines style in modernism as a period-specific phenomenon that reflects a particular stage in capitalist ideology. Rather, for Blanchot, in modernist literature, literature becomes what it has always been: an escape from genre and from anything which may act as an “essential determination” (BC 201). Blanchot suggests that the way art seems to be founded on its impossibility is not just an aspect of modernism but “the secret demand of art, which is always, in every artist, the surprise of what is, without being possible, the surprise of what must begin at every extreme, the work of the end of the world” (BC 107). It is in this sense that Blanchot speaks about the future of literature being a movement towards its non-essentiality. Style, if taken as referring to an aspect of genre, that is, in terms of formal rules that determine the essence of a work, a genre or a literary era, is what literature exceeds in its quest for its own non-essence. Indeed, the non-teleocratic “essence of literature is precisely to escape [...] any assertion that stabilizes it or even realizes it: it is never already there, it always has to be rediscovered or reinvented” (BC 201). From a Blanchotian position, to retain the term “style,” one has to think of it in terms of the event of literature, that is, in terms of an an-archic moment in which anything which already exists stops, falls apart, and is interrupted in the creation of something, that, at least momentarily, escapes essential determination and definition: the event as the non-teleocratic and an-archic suspension of the law.

As Blanchot argues, despite the traditional characterisation of modernism in terms of stylistic innovation, these works are not characterised by an attempt to achieve “newness at any price” and neither are they necessarily products of genius (BC 109). They are, rather, moments of revolution in which previous generic, stylistic norms are suspended. Even more than modernism, however, surrealism is for Blanchot the literature of the revolution, or as Iyer puts it, literature of “the day after the revolution.”27 For Blanchot, “surrealism” is not a style, a system or a school, nor a

27 _{Lars Iyer, Blanchot’s Vigilance: Literature, Phenomenology and the Ethical (New York: Palgrave}

movement of art and literature” (IC 407) but a radical rejection “of what counts as art” (WF 301). Through “chance,” which “is offered by way of encounter,” thought is introduced to “what is encountered only through encounter” (IC 412). Surrealism allows us to see how writing is not simply a reflection of thought—as if the style of surrealism would be an attempt to convey a previously existing experience—but “thought writing (not thought written)” (IC 412). “Knowledge,” writes Blanchot, “does not exist before writing” and “the written comes to thought in the movement of writing” (IC 421). The surrealist experience is an opening to chance, surprise, the unknown, derangement, all of which may be met, in a volatile instant, and never fully grasped in an “encounter” through writing. This is not an encounter characterised by unity, which would allow style to coincide with thought, but a moment of “discordance” between terms that relate to each other through their exteriority (IC 416). As Blanchot writes, “through the aleatory[,] a relation is therefore produced that is no longer founded on continuity.” Style, in surrealism (in literature and thought), is not a teleocratic expression of the writer, of a concept or subject matter, but something that, in being written, touches, at least momentarily, that which is unknown, on the outside, and that always surprises us.

While Blanchot’s thinking, like Gadamer’s, problematises the understanding of style in terms of unity and normativity, there are essential differences in their respective thinking of the issue. Gadamer argues that focusing on style as an aspect of genre would lead to missing the “ontological valence” or the “truth” of the work that arises, always anew and singularly, in the hermeneutic encounter with the work (TM 130). For Gadamer, style is implicated in a moment of tarrying with the work that allows for the truth of the work to come into being. However, the temporality of style in Blanchot is radically different in that the singular event is “always still to come, always already past” and hence never conceivable in terms of the presence of “truth” (BC 10). Style, for Blanchot, can never fully coincide with truth in a way that Gadamer’s ontology of the work allows.