The Space of Literature by Maurice Blanchot
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Meditations on Incompleteness

The only thing certain about any work of literature, indeed about writing of any kind, is that it is; it exists. But its being is of a certain kind. While essentially passive, writing is seditious. It promotes uncertainty about what is already known through both experience and other writing. It interrupts whatever intentions it encounters in the reader. It creates a space, a zone, of insecurity which paradoxically induces the need for more reading and hence more writing. Thus writing seduces both writers and readers into an obsessive state of permanent ‘unfinishedness,’ of longing for more.

“To write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself,” says Blanchot. In a sense this sterilises language. The word becomes independent once launched. On its own it has no effect. It is barely any thing at all. Language is not human but something alien per Blanchot: “To write is, moreover, to withdraw language from the world, to detach it from what makes it a power.”

And to read, one might add, is to break the bond that unites the world with the reader, replacing what is with what is written. What is read is doubly detached - from the writer and from the world. It is its own independent space, lurking, an alien reminder to the writer and a sort of fly-trap for any reader who happens to notice its existence.

Within this literary space anything is possible. Interpretations are potentially infinite. Like the physical universe, literary space, therefore, is expanding at an increasing rate. Writing breeds as it is fertilised through reading. It is not the gene that is selfish but the word that desires replication, translation, and re-definition.

Literary space is democratic in the same way that a dictionary is democratic. Individuals propose without constraint but only literary space disposes. This is the primary source of uncertainty. No one knows the physics of literary space. Its laws are its own, and hidden. Whenever these laws are in danger of being discovered, they change.

Religion is a small corner of literary space which is typically claimed by an authority which desires to limit local expansion and objects to incompleteness on principle. This sort of hubris has no effect on literary space but causes significant misery for readers and writers. The pen is not always mightier than the sword. But both are always subject to the dominance of literary space, and succumb to it eventually.

All activity inside literary space is useless. But it is where usefulness is defined. More to the point, it is where usefulness is re-defined, along with all other valuations. The revaluation of values occurs there more or less continuously in a way Nietzsche would approve, submitting himself to that very process. Since all authority relies on the stability of valuations to remain in power, there is a permanent tension between government - civil, social, religious, scientific, and institutional - and the activities of literary space.

Despite its density of population, literary space is a lonely place. Writing and reading are solitary activities. There is no consolation for this solitude except for the deeper penetration into literary space. Having entered into it, salvation is hopeless. Or rather, salvation is the very hopelessness of ever achieving a final understanding literary space. Incompleteness is our destiny, interrupted only by death.

View all my reviews