The Last Man by Maurice Blanchot
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Are You a Nobody Too?

Existentialism is often adept at expressing the contradictions of Homo Sapiens as a species, but rather less good at demonstrating these contradictions at the level of an individual person, and fairly awful at describing the contradiction in the first person. I take The Last Man as Blanchot’s attempt to correct that literary defect. Essentially the book is an exercise in discovering exactly how many variations there are to be contradictory about oneself.

Blanchot starts quite properly at the beginning: “Now I think that maybe he didn’t always exist or that he didn’t yet exist.” OK, the present moment as the synthesis of never and always? Complicated but comprehensible. Similarly the dialectic of the experiencing writer and the reflective writer form a ‘we’. That's what someone contemplating his own memories appears to be - we'll sort of. But Blanchot's synthesis isn’t very stable: “In this ‘we,’ there is the earth, the power of the elements, a sky that is not this sky, there is a feeling of loftiness and calm, there is also the bitterness of an obscure constraint. All of this is I before him, and he seems almost nothing at all.” Yep, pretty close to nothing at all.

Nonetheless, he does get a glimpse of himself from time to time, only to have that too disintegrate into his own authorly product: “There are moments when I recover him as he must have been: a certain word I read, write, moves aside to make room for his own word.” He can’t trust himself to even recall the dialectical encounter: “I became convinced that I had first known him when he was dead, then when he was dying.” I get how ephemeral language can be; but this is taking the mickey. Is it a parody of a parody signifying the end of parody? Or maybe just a wind-up?

Everything about himself immediately contradicts whatever it is that might be the case: “A creature so irresponsible, so terribly not guilty, like a madman, but without a speck of madness, or else hiding that madness inside him, always infallible: he was a burn in the eyes.” Whose eyes? His? The narrator’s and his associates’? The reader’s? His character is entirely ambiguous: “He inspired terror, much more so than someone absolutely powerful would have done, but it was a rather gentle terror and, for a woman, tender and violent.” As a man , he is unable to confront himself at all: “And more than anything else his immeasurable weakness: this was what I didn’t have the courage to approach, even if only by knocking up against it.” Is any of this actually descriptive? Even of a lack of description? This is language simply negating itself ad nauseam.

The constant shifting from first to second to third person, and then from singular to plural is, I suppose, meant to represent movement of perspective around the semiotic wheel. But, aside from making the text more or less incomprehensible, what does this passage, for example, accomplish: “...was he a broken man? On his way downhill from the very beginning? What was he waiting for? What did he hope to save? What could we do for him? Why did he suck in each of our words so avidly? Are you altogether forsaken? Can’t you speak for yourself ? Must we think in your absence, die in your place?” And why am I as the reader bothering to invest time to decipher any of this? It is not beautiful prose; it is a nonsensical mashup that makes Finnegans Wake look like a children's primer.

So of what value is such autobiographical ‘honesty’? Can it even be called honesty? Blanchot is ready with an answer: “He did not have any precise notion of what we call the seriousness of facts.” If so, why spend the effort writing about yourself? And more important for the reader, why bother with it at all? I’ve been trying, but I can’t think of a good reason. Perhaps someone else can provide a helpful suggestion.

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