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Preface

Roland Barthes famously pronounced the “death of the author” in a 1967 essay where he discussed the way that writing necessarily causes the voice to disperse and to lose its origin.¹ No longer could we think of an Author-Creator who serves as the origin of the text, its foundation, the determiner of its meaning. Of course, for Barthes, a recognition of the multiplicity and indeterminacy that arises in writing fundamentally changes the way we approach it; rather than attempting to limit a text to a single, authoritative origin, we might give ourselves over to the rich, endlessly-shifting plurality that writing offers. I mention Barthes as a means of introducing the notion of disappearance that drives my book. While my book focuses on Maurice Blanchot, one of the most significant French writers of the twentieth-century, Barthes’s discussion of the author’s death resembles the less concrete idea of disappearance that weaves through many of Blanchot’s critical works—namely, his 1955 book, The Space of Literature. Like we see in Barthes’s essay, the concept of an empowered author has no place in Blanchot’s work; on the contrary, for Blanchot, the writer necessarily disappears in the process of writing, as he or she no longer has the power to say “I,” to create, to make a work come into being. The writer begins writing at the point where he or she can’t possibly write, where he or she disappears into an anonymous, passive space in which nothing can be done. That irresolvable paradox remains central to Blanchot’s thought, even if we might have difficulty pinning it down in any way. Blanchot’s own multiple, dispersed voice in his critical writings and his fictions provides various paths where we might trace the movement of disappearance involved in the work of literature—perhaps beginning with the writer, but also extending to the reader and to the text itself. In the first chapter of this book, I will explore the various ways that the theme of disappearance arises in Blanchot’s critical work, focusing on The Space of Literature in particular. In the subsequent chapters, I will provide a reading of five short fictions that reflect Blanchot’s notion of disappearance from distinct perspectives.

Franz Kafka serves as one of the central figures in The Space of Literature, as Blanchot finds in his life and work the struggle of solitude. By solitude, Blanchot does not mean a writer’s empowered decision to seclude himself or herself from the world in favor of the literary work; rather, the “essential solitude” characterizes the writer’s disappearance, or loss of self, into the impersonal space of the work. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot spends much more time grappling with Kafka’s Diaries than he does with any particular story or novel. Kafka’s Diaries allow Blanchot to explore the experience of writing as it is documented throughout Kafka’s journaling—both in the sense that the Diaries include fragments of stories and show us something of the writing process, and in the sense that they demonstrate Kafka’s inability to find a place in the world or in his work. After a discussion of Kafka’s diaries, and Blanchot’s musings upon the diaries, I will dedicate the rest of the chapter to Kafka’s narrative, “The Burrow,” as it tells not only a story of endless wandering, but also one of profound solitude and disappearance. “The Burrow” takes the reader into the pitch black, underground space where the narrator confronts not only his torturous isolation, but also the threat that he will lose himself to whatever lurks outside, on the other side of the darkness where he is sequestered. Interestingly, the first-person narrative emerges as a sort of journaling, as we read a carefully-documented account of the narrator’s construction of his burrow. The narrator’s experience, in all its darkness, paradoxically sheds light upon the risk of disappearance that he confronts, as one who responds to the demand of the work.

After considering the notion of solitude in the chapter on “The Burrow,” I will look to Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” in order to discuss the question of infinitude as it relates to the disappearance of the literary work beyond the structures seemingly guaranteed by the material book. Borges’s story plays with and challenges the possibility of structural containment, allowing the various levels and meanings of his narrative to permeate one another. Within the story, he proposes the idea of an infinite text, and the reader experiences the implications of such an idea when trying to comprehend and interpret that which always escapes beyond the limits of one’s grasp. Borges’s text purposefully eludes our efforts to limit it, and thus to understand it, which draws our attention to the way the text recedes beyond our vision. In the beginning of my chapter on “The Garden of Forking Paths,” I examine the various images of infinitude and labyrinthine space in Borges’s work, as a way to approach the notion that any attempt to represent infinitude necessarily dissolves the very thing that one attempts to bring to light. Blanchot in particular takes interest in Borges’s figure of “the aleph,” an impossible point in space that contains all space. Such figures adumbrate Borges’s literary universe and take special shape in “The Garden of Forking Paths.” As I develop an analysis of this story, I draw particular attention to the way that Borges plays with textual structures, intricately forming them at the same time that he continually suggests the presence of that which infinitely escapes them.

Next, an analysis of des Forêts’s narrative The Bavard will demonstrate and develop the way that language opens a space for its own disappearance. Des Forêts’s narrator invites us to engage with a sort of language that fills and constitutes textual space, despite its utter emptiness. The bavard—or “non-stop talker”—says nothing (over a span of roughly one hundred pages), dedicating his narrative only to its own perpetuation and sacrificing its possibility for constructive meaning by revealing it as a simple indulgence, a ruse. In this way, what we have read seems to disappear before us, but we are forced to ponder what remains when nothing is left. The bavard’s narrative functions as a sort of game, or magic trick; he actually compares himself to an illusionist, making something appear only to destroy it once we have fallen for the allure of the illusion. While the narrator identifies himself from the very beginning of the text as a bavard, and proceeds to tell us precisely about his uncontrollable illness of bavardage, the reader nevertheless becomes engaged as the seemingly privileged listener of the confessional-style narrative. We likely recognize the verbosity of narrative, at the same time that we fall into the trap of assigning it meaning—despite what we have been told. As Blanchot explains in The Space of Literature, the reader approaches the book as a stone, behind which lies the dead Lazarus; and we can’t help but to call him forward, to bring death and absence into the light of day. Des Forêts’s narrator plays with this readerly instinct, indulging it before ultimately making himself and his narrative disappear.

One could argue that Sarraute’s Tropisms seems to begin with the “nothing” that paradoxically emerges at the end of des Forêts’s text—at least in the sense that Tropisms refuses to identify any single person or thing in a distinct way. The reader never has the illusion of clarity, continuity, or an accessible narrative voice, but rather immediately confronts the remarkable obscurity of the narrative. Sarraute’s text abandons the “I” from the beginning, as well as recognizable or discernible characters, locations, or plots. In this way, “he,” “she,” “it,” “here,” “there,” and so on, disappear into a striking anonymity. This° name-less, place-less space evokes Blanchot’s discussion of the neutral—a space, a mode, a voice founded upon no one, nowhere. If Kafka’s narratives and his journals explore the struggle of the writer who experiences his disappearance and powerlessness to constitute himself through language, Sarraute’s Tropisms explores the space of this disappearance, powerlessness, and withdrawn language—“a language which no one speaks.”² The floating, neutral character of the language, which seems to arise from no one, speaks in the blanks of the text as much as it does throughout the nearly indistinguishable, chapter-like fragments. As we move from fragment to fragment, we seem to have new characters and situations (though characters are only identified as “he,” “she,” and “they”), rather than a running narrative; at the same time, the fragments bear repetitions and resemblances that make them blur into one another. In Sarraute’s text, many of the aspects of more traditional literature that allow us to ground the narrative and characters in something seemingly solid and reassuring have disappeared, leaving us to deal with the irreducible obscurity of the language.

In the final chapter of my book I will turn back to Blanchot, but this time through a narrative text, L’arrêt de mort. This récit approaches disappearance in a variety of ways, but I focus on the issues of circularity and repetition in particular. As his discussion of the récit in The Book to Come would indicate, Blanchot’s narrative proposes a sort of time outside of time—one that challenges notions of linearity and historicity and that functions by way of repetition and circular paradoxes. Like the work of Orpheus (a central figure in Blanchot’s essays), the narrative of L’arrêt de mort is founded upon, moves toward, and arises out of its disappearance and impossibility. Michel Foucault writes in “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside” that L’arrêt de mort is “dedicated to the gaze of Orpheus: the gaze that at the wavering threshold of death goes in search of the submerged presence and tries to bring its image back to the light of day.”³ The anonymous narrator of L’arrêt de mort retrieves the main character, J., from death, only to lose her again at his own hand when he injects a lethal dose of morphine into her veins. And supposing the narrator remains the same in the two fragments that constitute L’arrêt de mort, his transgressive gaze re-emerges when he calls forth a second female character from a deathly state. Aside from those two principal encounters, certain strange, nocturnal scenes repeat themselves throughout the text—such as the spontaneous and confused entry of one of the several female characters, or the narrator himself, into a stranger’s room in the middle of the night. No event appears to be singular in this récit, but rather finds itself repeated in various ways, as if each penetration of the night forcefully reopens a profound wound that is always, ceaselessly open. In Foucault’s brief reference to L’arrêt de mort, he seems to touch upon that very idea when he suggests that the narrator’s gaze upon J.’s death “is what makes a second woman appear in the middle of the night in an already captive state of stupefaction” (44). Just as Orpheus must have already gazed towards Eurydice in order to initiate his descent to her, each confrontation that the narrator has with the night in L’arrêt de mort allows for the one that follows it, and the one that precedes it. Despite the narrator’s efforts to ground his experiences in specific dates, times, and historic events, the récit exhibits the infinite circularity of Orpheus’s descent, which assures his own disappearance, as well as that of Eurydice.

Lastly, I would like to address the fact that I have chosen to work exclusively with short fictions—though the distinction of “short” hardly provides clear parameters by which we might measure a text. As noted above, Blanchot uses the term récit when discussing a particular kind of shorter text which he differentiates from the novel. He writes:

If for the sake of convenience—because this statement cannot be exact—we say that what makes the novel move forward is everyday, collective or personal time, or more precisely, the desire to urge time to speak, then the tale moves forward through that other time, it makes that other voyage, which is the passage from the real song to the imaginary song.⁴

Thus, the distinction of the récit and the novel, at least according to Blanchot, only indirectly involves the issue of length. If the récit is commonly shorter than the novel, this results from the way that the récit confines itself to the moment when time becomes the other time—a time outside of “everyday, collective or personal time.” Blanchot identifies the récit as the gulf that inhabits any narrative—an infinite distance that separates the récit from its destination, which is also, paradoxically, its origin. While the epic or the novel might contain this bottomless pocket, each also provides the superfluous, excessive, distracted narrative that surrounds it. Blanchot does not critique this; furthermore, he notes that the aimless digressions of the novel paradoxically fulfill the demand of the récit. One cannot approach the récit with purpose or intent; it exceeds any sense of effort, or mastery. Yet, unlike the novel, the récit takes focus, sending any narrative excess to the outside, if only in order to present its own measureless excess. One might therefore conclude that the récit takes on a shortened, condensed form as a means of bringing an undistracted attention to its infinite excessiveness.

In Small Worlds, a study of minimalism in French literature, Warren Motte suggests the difficulty in identifying something as “small.” He writes:

We designate things as “small” capriciously and according to different registers of perception. We may focus on a thing’s physical size; on its duration, intensity, or range; on its import, its significance; on the quantity of the elements composing it; or on the simplicity of its structure. What seems common to all of those interpretive moves is the notion of reduction in relation to some more or less explicit norm. Art that insists upon that reduction and mobilizes it as a constructive principle can be termed minimalist.⁵ (1, emphasis in original)

In the case of short fiction, or the récit if we specifically engage Blanchot’s term, smallness, or shortness, indeed assumes a sense of reduction. And as Blanchot suggests, a certain relativity is implied; in other words, “short” fiction is short in relation to the traditional novel. Of course, Blanchot’s definition of the récit does not necessarily apply to Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, or to Franz Kafka’s parables; yet each writer works with a form that plays on the notion of shortness. Borges writes in his “Autobiographical Essay,” “The feeling that the great novels Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn are virtually shapeless served to reinforce my taste for the short-story form, whose indispensable elements are economy and a clearly stated beginning, middle, and end.”⁶ Although we might assume a degree of irony in Borges’s comment, he clearly celebrates the straightforwardness and the structure of the shortened form. It comes in a neat, organized package that appears to get right to the point. Of course, with Borges and with Blanchot, the ideal of approaching some sort of textual essence does not suggest the pretension of doing so successfully. Rather, as we will see in all of the chapters to come, many short fictions self-consciously play upon their own minimal structures and undermine the notion of shedding excess. In the case of Blanchot’s discussion of the récit, it would seem that focusing the text on the essential moment of the récit simply opens the text up to an illimitable, immeasurable excess. Throughout the book, I will regularly come back to the way the five short texts I have chosen reflect upon “beginning, middle, and end,” playing upon their own structures and limits.

I would like to thank West Virginia State University for its generous support of this project. I would also like to express gratitude for my colleagues and academic mentors over the past several years—specifically Professors Warren Motte and Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield at the University of Colorado at Boulder.