The Necessity of Writing Death and Imagination

The Necessity of Writing Death and Imagination in Maurice Blanchot's L'Espace Littéraire
Author(s): Donald G. Marshall

Source: boundary 2, Vol. 14, No. 1/2 (Autumn, 1985 - Winter, 1986), pp. 225-236
Published by: Duke University Press
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The Necessity of Writing Death and Imagination
in Maurice Blanchot's L'Espace littdraire
Donald G. Marshall
In 1902, the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal assumed

the persona of a sixteenth-century Englishman, Lord Chandos, to p
his own distrust of language and especially of writing. Replying to
inquiries of his friend Francis Bacon, Chandos explains why he h
given up all literary activity. Though a precociously brilliant and am
bitious writer, Chandos now finds that words "crumble" in his mou
like moldy mushrooms. He is overcome by a strange discomfort at
abstract terms we use with fluent, habitual self-assurance to simpli
and fuse into judgments the world's isolated parts. What remains fo
him are the scattered fragments of ordinary experience. And yet a
predictable moments these fragments suddenly flood with a higher
a mystic exaltation which also lies beyond any possible words. To sp
of such experiences would demand "thinking in a material more im-
mediate, more liquid, more glowing than words." This language, the only
one in which he could write or think, is "a language none of whose
words is known to me, a language in which inanimate things speak to
me."
Yet to the very sentence in which Chandos professes his ig-
norance of the only language adequate to his experience, he adds a
surprising clause which overturns his line of thought. Though he has
225
assured Bacon that religious ideas hold no power over him, he adds
that this unknown language of things is one "wherein I may once in
the grave have to justify myself before an unknown judge." He will be
held to account not for the idle words Jesus warns against (Matt.
12:26),but for the very language he failed to write. Through Lord Chan-
dos, Hofmannsthal is, of course, probing a crisis in his own artistic voca-
tion. Endowed as a teenager with a staggering lyric gift, Hofmannsthal
came to distrust his conviction that self and world could be fused
through the perfection of verbal form. However beautiful, he no
realizes, verbal form can never be raised to the level of an absolute th
could transmit spiritual insight. In contrast to the lyricist's demo
pride, Hofmannsthal sought some equivalent to the true humility of pi
ty, and this quest, as is well known, carried him into the drama.
We may ask whether a modern writer's agony over his vocation
to write, however impressive in its intensity, can be exemplary for u
more ordinary mortals. That it may be is suggested, I think, by anoth
persona, that of the prosperous, ageing lawyer Melville assumes to tel
the story of Bartleby the Scrivener. In offices constrained between d
walls, one white, one black, where this lawyer passes his life amo
rich men's papers, the clerk Bartleby step by step loosens the ho
desire gives us on the world, withdrawing into the single activity of cop
ing, before vanishing at last into his own mere presence, mute but fo
variations on the phrase, "I prefer not to." The lawyer struggles t
disengage himself from a dangerous sympathy he feels for Bartleby's
obtrusive passivity, even insisting to those who hold him responsi
for the clerk that he is "nothing to me." When Bartleby is finally car
ried off to prison, he too reproaches the nameless lawyer, refuses the
food he pays for, and dies, huddled like an indecipherable hierogly
against the Egyptian walls of the Tombs. In a coda, the lawyer adds th
rumor that Bartleby had worked in Washington for the Dead Letter o
fice, where his "pallid hopelessness" would have been heightened
despair as streams of letters on errands of life sped toward death. Th
narrator's final, enigmatic exclamation, "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"
asks us, I think, to accept Bartleby's fate, entangled as it is with writin
as our own condition.
This prefatory conjunction of meditations about writing brings
me to my subject, Maurice Blanchot. For fifty years, he has strict
meditated the curious problem I have defined: that writing is radically
defective and betrays our most intense insights; that the writer never
theless feels writing imposed on him as the justification of his ver
existence; and that this irresolvable contradiction reveals somethin
hidden, yet essential about our mortal, human condition. The claim tha
writing is at once insufficient, yet necessary may strike us as a peculiar
ly modern dilemma. Responding to Hegel, Blanchot traces out th
"dialectical" movement of the work of verbal and written art: the work
is first the speech of the gods, but as what precedes and is the condi-
tion of their manifestation, it becomes the speech of their absence at
the same time that it becomes the precise, balanced speech of man;
the speech of Man becomes in turn the speech of man's absence, th
226
speech of men in all their diversity, the speech of what does not speak
in "Man," but speaks man's dispossession from his own essence and
self-presence. In this history of withdrawal, with nothing left to say, the
work ultimately becomes the speech of itself: "In the work which has
disappeared, the work itself wishes to speak, and this experience
becomes the quest for the essence of the work, becomes the affirma-
tion of art, the concern for its origin."2 Blanchot himself calls this a
"crude scheme" (un sch6ma grossier), and even if it could be filled in,
we may yet not wish to press the claims of scholars like Havelock, Ong,
or McLuhan, who find the cause or at least the principle of intelligibili-
ty of history in the unfolding of what is latent in language-the shift
from oral to written, from manuscript to print cultures. We encounter
the same problem in all the modern (or "modernist") arts. Deprived of
their traditional ends, suspicious of the connections-natural, rational,
or conventional-established between their means and those ends, the
modern arts become ends and means at once in an attempt to establish
themselves within a circular and contradictory movement. Insofar as
writing exhibits the same movement, we may speak of an art of writing
or literary art, if we recognize that "art" has neither its Aristotelian nor
Horatian meaning, nor is it that secured experience of the beautiful
posited by general aesthetics.
Even if the problem of writing in the modern world is thus a gen-
uinely historical problem, I think Blanchot means to argue that modern
writing does not simply stand as the latest in a series of "arts" of writing,
but rather that historical circumstance thus exposes, like a raw nerve,
what was already their radical precondition. History's gift to us, however
ambiguous, is a writing burdened with the quest of its own possibility.
What gives this quest its full ambiguity is already revealed in Blanchot's
historical sketch, namely, withdrawal. The withdrawal of what writing
seems to manifest through its own withdrawal leads us at last to writing
itself, but to writing as what withdraws. It may help to clarify this rather
obscure thought if we note its close parallel to Heidegger's procedure
in Being and Time. Seeking to re-open the question of Being, Heideg-
ger remarks that nothing seems less problematic: everything we en-
counter simply "is." Yet just this unproblematic prominence of particular
beings conceals for us the bare Being which recedes behind them. How,
then, should we begin our inquiry into Being, so as to make it a ques-
tion? Heidegger's ingenious answer is that we should begin with that
being for which its own being is a question, namely, Dasein, human
being. Similiarly, Blanchot turns to those for whom writing is a ques-
tion, because as writers their very existence is founded on their rela-
tion to writing. But we cannot turn to them in a moment when they write
with fluent mastery. They will be in quest of writing only when writing
withdraws, refuses itself. Blanchot therefore focuses especially on
writers like Kafka, Rilke, Mallarme, who took their vocation as writers
with the utmost seriousness; and within their writings, he turns to journ-
als or letters written not about the experience of writing, but written
paradoxically about the experience of struggling to find the possibili-
ty of writing. This may at first strike us as a biographical approach,
227
focused on the psychology of creation in the testimony of certain self-
conscious modern authors. But I think it would be truer to say that Blan-
chot is not recording testimony, but is attempting what Heidegger calls
"existential analysis" of these writers' experience.
In his analysis of Dasein, Heidegger takes literally the word's
components: human being is "being-there," being "in-the-world!" What
is peculiar about the experience of writing is that writing is withdrawal:
the writer is no longer "in the world," but is withdrawn from it and from
himself as correlative with it. What this means may be more visible
against the background of the history of criticism. Any mimetic theory
is concerned to withdraw the work of art from the indeterminate void
of passion or inspiration (Plato's Ion and Republic, book 10) and to
supply a standard for making and judging art works, a standard justified
by its connecting the work of art to a world of real beings (Aristotle's
Poetics).
Mimetic theories are in little favor today, despite the indomitable
resugences of various realisms. But it will be instructive to consider
Blanchot's retort to all theories which make the image secondary in
relation to reality. To show the power of an image to overturn all the
categories of our thought, Blanchot asks that we consider a disturb-
ing, even shocking image: a dead body. The dead body is real and pre-
sent, yet testifies to absence, like the double structure of presence and
absence in the image. Since a dead body is the departed person, and
yet is only his shadow, death transforms the body into something which,
like an image, is only a resemblance. But it is a resemblance of itself,
and since it thus resembles what has disappeared, it resembles nothing
that is. A dead body is not simply "there," spatially or temporally; it is-
or was-something else. If it is therefore not "in" a place and time, it
is errant or wandering, and yet it is fixed, immobile. A dead body makes
present to us something which wanders, which has withdrawn from its
place in the world. This withdrawal is not an idealization of the real,
not a movement toward the idea, the essential, the universal, the general,
the realm of disclosed meaning. A dead body does not establish a rela-
tion between one meaning and another, as an image does according
to traditional theory, but establishes a relation of meaning, what seems
to have meaning, but has only interminable, indeterminate meaning,
meaning whose potential infinity is immediately present in its very void.
The dead body is not something we have the power to dispose of, but
rather it has the power to dispose of us. Even when we turn away from
a dead body, we do so because we feel that its image will long haunt
us, so that gazing or refusing to gaze at it both put us in its power. This
power of the image over reality, this necessity it imposes on us from
outside which yet resonates with something in us, is fascination. The
image the writer seeks, Blanchot asserts, is not a freely fashioned im-
age which is secondary to some arbitrarily chosen reality, but an image
with just this fascination, this power of necessity in itself and over us.
This difficult, even painful meditation seems to me largely suc-
cessful in drawing our attention to a strange but essential aspect of
our experience of literature. The withdrawal of things into their images
228
transforms their ontological standing for us. Literature is not merely
fiction, nor must we "suspend" reference to reality, as is sometimes
thought. But understanding a poem will require building something else
on any reference, something not reducible to thematic interpretation,
even though thematic interpretation is indispensable. Writing provides
the space where this transformation of things takes place, because in
writing, language is also withdrawn into its image. Writing fixes
language in a fascinating image which yet seems to disclose an infini-
ty of meaning. Yet we must weigh the cost of this discovery. If in writing
language withdraws into its own image and therefore disposes more
readily of the withdrawal of every thing into its image, we have sur-
rendered one standard for determining and understanding the written
word. If a writer seeks an image which has the compulsion of fascina-
tion, and yet writing is not submitted to reality in the way mimetic theory
claims, then where will the writer find what makes his writing not wilful,
but necessary?
The traditional alternative is, of course, that this necessity comes
from the artist's subjectivity. Though it has sources in the neo-platonism
of the Renaissance, the full flowering of this theory comes with the
romantic notion of imagination which flows out of Kant, even as it
transforms his ideas. But Blanchot rejects subjective, expressionist
theories too. He points out that romantic subjectivism justified imagina-
tion on the ground that through it, the artist reached a realm of values
beyond the utilitarianism of science, a transcendental world where
human being, brought to its own proper essence, realized its superiori-
ty to the merely given. Thus open to the Absolute, imagination grasps
the whole, the integrated totality which lies behind and secretly governs
the merely apparent. Imagination's inventions are thus no mere nega-
tions, but touch that possibility of an "other," that power of negation
which is the force behind reality's own dialectical unfolding. Descartes's
separation of object from subject, Blanchot argues, gives the inward
certitude of subjectivity dominion over the objective. The deeper, the
more insatiable, the emptier this founding subjectivity becomes, the
greater its dominion. (EL p. 290) For Kant, the very possibility of science
rests on the categories subjectivity imposes as the conditions of all
possible experience. Blanchot's criticism of subjectivist, expressivist
theories argues that they thus ultimately submit to precisely that ob-
jectivity against which they set out to assert their freedom. Again, we
must weigh the cost of this critique. When Kant freed the work of art
from imitation and the rules of reason, he asserted that the work of art
nevertheless embodies a law which subjectivity freely gave itself. If
writing knows neither mimetic nor expressive, neither objective nor sub-
jective determinations, what is to keep it from wandering aimlessly and
endlessly?
To pose the problem in terms simple, but rich in implications,
Blanchot cites Kafka's surprised and delighted discovery that he entered
into literature from the moment he was able to say "he" instead of "I."
(EL p. 17) A fictional narrative relates the doings of some person, but
its narrative statements are neither about the world nor about the
229
author's experiences. In some sense, an author might make his
characters do anything. But a writer who exists in relation to writing
holds writing as at once the end and the source of his existence. He
exposes himself to the obscure experience in which writing becomes
his source and its own source through him. He finds that he can write
not by exercising personal will, but by discovering what the experience
of writing compels him to write with all the fascination of the image.
Such a writer is withdrawn from his being-in-the-world, exiled by a
swerve into the anonymous, impersonal space of creation. This is not
simply an "other" world, but other than any world, radically indeter-
minate, both spatially interminable and temporally incessant. No one
can dwell in this literary space, this realm of I'oeuvre, of the work of
writing; anyone who tried to do so would be lost in the ecstasy of
madness or religious transcendence. If the writer is actually to produce
a book, his patient endurance of this appallingly hazardous experience
must have limits. In a gesture of impatience, the writer must reduce
his indeterminate erring to the determinate fixity of an image, impose
a silence on the incessant and interminable language of this erring,
must close the work (I'oeuvre) into a book (livre). Compelled to some
strategy of withdrawal, the writer of a narrative might decide, for ex-
ample, to model his narrative on worldly facts, on personal experience,
or on literary conventions. But if he is to keep full faith with the ex-
perience of writing, he must find a way to convert precisely the indeci-
sion, the undecidability of literary space into the decisions which
constitute a book. Just as the writer enters into literary space by a
swerve that withdraws him from being-in-the-world, even so I'oeuvre,
the work of writing, must withdraw behind livre, the accomplished fact
of writing, and in a way which transforms the initiating withdrawal into
a necessity which affirms writing as withdrawal.
There are various ways of clarifying and, I hope, confirming this
dizzying yet perfectly determinate analysis of the writer's experience.
One way is to recall Blanchot's starting point, already indicated, in
Heidegger's philosophy. Just as Being withdraws, conceals itself behind
beings and indeed is this self-concealment, so I'oeuvre withdraws
behind livre. For Heidegger, Dasein, human being, is completely involved
with particular beings in the world. But occasionally human being ex-
periences a radical loss-not just of particular objects, but of every ob-
ject, of world itself. This experience is dread (Angst), and through it
human being comes to realize that in all its involvements, it has been
appropriating the world into projects by which it makes actual its own
possibilities. With this realization, human being is brought to the ques-
tion, which of these possibilities is most essentially its own? This ques-
tion recalls it from the abandonment of its own freedom and
responsibility through submission to a necessity derived either f
the world of objects or from mere social commonplace. In order
discover its own inner necessity, Heidegger argues, human being mu
grasp itself as a totality. It discovers the limit which determines thi
totality in the possibility of having no more possibilities, in the finit
of death. Human being must resolutely face this discovered limi
230
as to convert it into an affirmation of what it essentially and necessari-
ly is. For Blanchot, writing is an alternative experience of withdrawal
of and from world. In the resulting encounter with the work of writing,
itself as indeterminate as mere Being, the writer must grasp, in just this
exposure to indeterminateness, the necessity which founds his writing
and thus his existence as a writer. In the longest and most important
section of L'Espace litt6raire, entitled 'L'oeuvre et I'espace de la mort,"
Blanchot explores the relation between writing and death. Gradually,
he diverges from Heidegger in important ways which contribute as much
to existential philosophy as to our understanding of writing. But before
I describe them, I want to provide a second confirmation that Blanchot
is correct to think that something fundamental is disclosed by consider-
ing writing in relation to death.
This confirmation comes from the work of Russell Noyes, a
psychiatrist who collected reports of several hundred persons who had
experienced life-threatening danger.3 A majority of them, in the last
moments before losing consciousness, fully expected to die. Their
reports of these last moments contain striking similarities. Time slow-
ed or even seemed to vanish. They became calm, even when aware of
intense feelings ranging from fear to-frequently-joy. They felt that
they themselves or the world around them became unreal. They found
themselves having intense visual images and sometimes focusing at-
tentively on seemingly trivial details. They felt as though they were
observing their experience from outside: many of the accounts were
spontaneously given in the third person. They experienced panoramic
memory, occasionally mingled with images of the future, a weaving of
the past and future oddly facilitated by the intensity of their focus on
the present moment. Frequently, they reported mystical, even religious
experiences, impossible or very difficult to put into words. Some felt
they grasped an ineffable, but irresistibly true meaning. Here is a typical
report by a young man with no notable literary gift involved in an
automobile accident:
I remember, like in slow motion, the sound of glass

shattering ... As the car started spinning I came up
out of my seat and looked at the ceiling of the
Volkswagon. I remember being very interested in the
roof like I hadn't seen it before. The whole thing must
have happened super quick but seemed to take a
tremendous amount of time....
I gave no consideration to the danger, it just
didn't exist. I had a sensation of floating. It was almost
like stepping out of reality.
A famous geologist, Albert Heim, while climbing in the Alps, slip

from the edge of a cliff. He reports that as he fell to what seemed ce
tain death, he "felt no trace of anxiety or pain, but went to death matt
of-factly and without dread. It all had to happen that way: it seem
eminently correct." This introduction of a psychiatric study may see
231
reductive. Blanchot's analysis, as I remarked, is ontological, not
psychological. But I think the parallel would be reductive only if Noyes's
reports seemed clearer and more self-evident than Blanchot's descrip-
tion of the writer's experience. They seem to me on the contrary only
more vividly quotidian, a clue that the experience Blanchot speaks of
is a deeply puzzling and yet completely ordinary possibility for human
being.
The real test, certainly, will be whether Blanchot can illuminate
a writer's case. I will focus on his discussion of Rilke, who is the ex-
emplary figure in L'Espace litt6raire. Responding to his destiny as a poet,
Rilke believed, obliged him to open himself even to the terror of dying.
Paradoxically, he felt that those who attempted to master this terrify-
ing and alien moment by making it subject to their own willed deci-
sion, that is, by committing suicide, betrayed death by refusing patiently
to attend it, to wait for it and to pay attention to it. In contrast, Rilke
waits patiently for the death which is his own, the necessary outcome
of his life. Blanchot stresses that this is no Renaissance notion of self-
fashioning, no art of living and dying which would make of the work
of art an enduring monument affirming the artist's personality. Our era
knows no such justification for art, nor even what art is. Rilke instead
images death as a fruit, which each of us bears within, slowly ripen-
ing. What is essential in this image, Blanchot thinks, is not the assimila-
tion of death to organic, natural process, but the discovery that death
is within life, not at its end. It is something secret within us, an invisi-
ble form, a gesture, a hidden silence. To figure forth (6tre les figurateurs),
to become the poets of our death (EL p. 161), demands a peculiar tem-
poral relation to death, patience. Yet the patience of one who waits for
his own death to ripen within means nothing unless it is maintained
in the most strenuous tension against impatience. Patience becomes
an incessant labor which envisions no end toward which one could leap
by any abbreviating projecting.
This conception of death was completely overturned when Malte
Laurids Brigge (and through him Rilke) confronted the impersonality
of death. The suicide tries to master the terror of death by an act of
will, but evades its alienness. Even worse, for Rilke, is the modern
world's converse evasion of death, that reduction of death to quotidian
banality which inspired Brigge's terror at an absence of terror. Death
in the moden city is an anonymous vulgarity, of no more importance
than drinking a gulp of water or cutting open a cabbage. It joins those
other mass-produced, hastily made objects directed toward an
anonymous, distracted, inattentive public of consumers. Yet Rilke
senses that there is something essential, inescapable about just this
anonymity, this invisibility of death. Writing in a letter of the ten-year
crisis his own book precipitated in him, Rilke notes that nothing fur-
ther seems possible to him, not even to die. (EL p. 169) Wandering with
heroic patience through this decade of impossibility-Blanchot notes
that in one four-year period Rilke lived in fifty different places-he tries
to convert the impossibility he encountered in Malte Laurids Brigge into
a new beginning. When he finally achieved this new beginning in the
232
Duino Elegies, he wrote in a letter that death is that side of life which
is not turned toward us, nor illuminated by us. Blanchot regards this
as a key phrase, which expresses the curiously enabling discovery that
death is what escapes us essentially. It does so, first, because as mor-
tals we are limited: we see only what is turned toward us; to be here,
as mortals on this earth, we give up being there. We may at first hope
to escape this limitation through consciousness, with its power to repre-
sent what is absent, what is hidden from our limited perception. Yet
consciousness delivers us over to representation, withdrawing us from
the object and enclosing us within the interposed world of our own
representations. To overcome both these objective and subjective limits,
we would need another access to things, an intimacy which belongs
to things and to ourselves at once. Rilke found this intimacy not by sur-
rendering consciousness, but by transforming and purifying it into an
even more interior and invisible depth, an open freed to real things and
to the ghosts of things in our representations of them. This open, which
Rilke called Weltinnenraum, the interior space of the world, appeared
to Rilke first in certain "mystic" experiences, but then in the movement
of poetry.
What is required to reach this open is a vast work of transfor-
mation, in which things become interior to themselves and interior to
us, in which we become the preserving shelter of their own reserve. Such
an interiorization draws everything visible into an invisible. But is not
such a metamorphosis already accomplished in the perishing of
everything? Here, for Rilke, as Blanchot interprets him, is our special
gift: we, the most perishable of things, give to everything our gift of
perishing. We must bring ourselves to will this transformation, this
perishing. Dying becomes our task, a labor that does not make things,
which aims at no "results," which does not use or seize objects. Rather,
bringing them into the space of imagination, it transforms things into
what cannot be seized, what is beyond use or using up, in a movement
not of possession, but of dispossession, dispossessing things from
us and us from ourselves. This transforming interior space is the poem,
a space where language does not name in order to master, but names
in and by silence. The poet holds open the interior space of the world,
draws the visible back into the invisible, by means of form, by giving
the exactitude of the precise word to that experience of anxiety which
separates him from the world.
Such a poet is figured by Rilke in Orpheus, not the conqueror
of death, but the dismembered poet who figures the necessity of disap-
pearing. Heidegger argues that a resolute being-toward-death would
convert the recognition of finitude into the founding moment of our
authenic being-in-the-world. By this resoluteness, this decisiveness, we
introduce into the world the determinateness of our projects, so that
its finite order grows out of our preoccupation with our own finitude.
But this movement, Blanchot suggests, carries us by an odd reversal
past the instant of death itself. Death becomes transparent, withdraws
into an invisibility which is the source of all invisibility, of that invisible
form which structures our experience beyond our awareness. There are,
233
he concludes, two deaths, one which is authentic to us, and another
which withdraws behind it, invisible and impersonal. This discovery is
the inner core of Rilke's experience through the length of his career
as a writer, an experience his poetry preserves beyond images and
forms. (EL pp. 208-209) From the conception that death is an achieve-
ment one works toward as essential to oneself, Rilke discoves an im-
personal death, where dying issues not from oneself, nor from life, but
from death, just as the written must issue from the work of writing. The
experience of this impersonal death does not lead to resolute
decisiveness, but to the artist's refusal to choose things, especially
"beautiful" things, to his openness to everything, without the closure
of decision, in all the disinterest of the impersonal. In this strange realm,
which is not "accessible," which never enters into a relation of presence,
spatial or temporal, but always withdraws into invisibility, in this indeter-
minate realm which can never become the foundation of anything, we
encounter a necessity that has nothing to do with the authenticity of
the "1," but belongs to what is "outside" me, to what speaks through
me, though "I" cannot speak it. When the poet surrenders the protec-
tive certitudes of his own existence and delivers himself to a limitless
insecurity; when the poet accepts his own disappearance in order to
pen this originating void; when the poet hearkens to this indeterminate
and interminable murmur from "outside": then the poet finds the poem's
origin precisely in its own lack, in his experience of its impossibility,
of its power to pass beyond what is "possible" for him. Yet both these
deaths are necessary, the authentically personal and the impersonal,
just as the invisible which saves and preserves the visible also needs
the visible and is saved and preserved by it. This movement, Blanchot
suggests, is the "pure contradiction," the "reine Widerspruch" Rilke
writes of in his epitaph; it is the experience of this impossible, imper-
sonal death which is also the source of imagination's transforming
movement in the work of writing (I'oeuvre).
I would wish to stress that we are not presented here with a
"theory" of writing we might abstract and generalize. Rather, as Paul
de Man says, Blanchot's criticism is the vehicle by which he approaches
himself as a writer, seeking the necessity which will compel his own
imaginative writing. And this approach to the work of writing is ac-
complished through precisely that withdrawal from self which criticism
demands. As an imaginative writer, Blanchot commits himself to the
risk of critical impersonality, surrendering his automony as a writer in
order to let emerge within him a riecessity of writing that comes from
outside. This movement gives to Blanchot's criticism the pressure of
a truth quite different from that of accurate and verifiable interpreta-
tion. His criticism has the flavor not of theory, but-if I may venture
the word-of ethical writing. And it is from this perspective that I wish
to close, despite my admiration for it, with a reservation. Blanchot's
style, a masterful vertigo of repetition and reversal, is recognizably the
rhetoric of sublimity. But while there is an honorable tradition that
assimilates literature to moments of lyric sublimity, I think we ought
to be mistrustful of the appeal such lofty austerity makes to our sense
234
of high seriousness. We are rightly suspicious of the claim that poetry
"submits the shows of things to the desires of the mind." No, we want
to say, you don't make poems simply by twisting reality to fit your heart's
desire. Yet we may be less alert to the counter-temptation, the slide from
the experience that the beautiful is what is difficult, to the view that
what is difficult must be beautiful. St. Paul was certainly no stranger
to sublimity nor to the rhetoric of reversal and repetition. Yet he firmly
rejected attempts to draw the whole of human existence into the orbit
of an uncompromising religious transcendence. Food, circumcision,
and other indifferent matters were left to the individual's judgment, at
most restrained by a due regard for the feelings and weaknesses of
others. This peculiar, perhaps logically or philosophically scandalous
refusal to reduce all of human experience to what he uncompromis-
ingly regarded as its one essential point makes Paul's thinking surpris-
ingly instructive for us. Blanchot has indeed found something essential
about writing; but would his tone be appropriate to a discussion of, say,
Robert Herrick? Or if Herrick seems too minor, too "weak," in Harold
Bloom's terms, we might think of the range from Catullus to Jane
Austen. No doubt Jane Austen faced the void writing opens: Emma, for
example, is rich in materials to nourish a meditation on writing. Yet
would dwelling on such issues promise to produce a convincing and
balanced response to her work? Perhaps because the most ultimate
issues are firmly located elsewhere for her, she is able to attend to a
world of middles and gradations, where reversals are chiefly comic, serv-
ing, in R. P. Blackmur's phrase, the constant and resourceful restora-
tion of humility. My concern as a critic is with the language of criticism.
It seems to me that our era has been extraordinarily successful in devis-
ing a rhetoric of sublimity, responsive to modern art's heroic struggle
to reach new planes of reality. But perhaps we have neglected a more
humble language, responsive to writing's unresistant integration into
the range of our ordinary lives without demanding Du musst dein Leben
indern! From a heroic perspective, this will seem too relaxed, too com-
plaisant. And it may be. But I think it is also indispensable, and that
as long as we neglect it, our talk of writing will seem inflexible and even
reductive in its refusal to unbend.
University of Iowa
NOTES
1 I use the translation by Mary Hottinger and Tania and James Stern, of Hofmann-
sthal's Selected Prose, Bollingen Series 33 (New York: Pantheon, 1952), pp. 129-41.
My interpretation follows Hermann Broch's "Introduction" to this volume and
Blanchot's own reading.
2 Maurice Blanchot, L'Espace littbraire, Collection Id6es (Paris: Gallimard, 1955),

p. 314, my translation (hereafter cited as EL).
235
3 See "The Experience of Dying," Psychiatry, 35 (1972), 174-84; and by Russel Noyes
Jr. and Roy Kletti, "The Experience of Dying from Falls," Omega, 3 (1972), 45-52;
"Depersonalization in the Face of Life-Threatening Danger: A Description,"
Psychiatry, 39 (1976), 19-27; "Depersonalization in the Face of Life-Threatening
Danger: An Interpretation," Omega, 7 (1976), 103-14; "Depersonalization in
Response to Life-Threatening Danger,"Comprehensive Psychiatry, 18 (1977),
375-84; and "Panoramic Memory: A Response to the Threat of Death," Omega,
8 (1977), 181-94.
236

The Necessity of Writing Death and Imagination

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The Necessity of Writing Death and Imagination in Maurice Blanchot's L'Espace Littéraire

Author(s): Donald G. Marshall

In 1902, the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal assumed

I remember, like in slow motion, the sound of glass

A famous geologist, Albert Heim, while climbing in the Alps, slip

2 Maurice Blanchot, L'Espace littbraire, Collection Id6es (Paris: Gallimard, 1955),

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