Lars Iyer

Philosophical Studies
Centre for Knowledge, Science and Society
University of Newcastle upon Tyne
lars.iyer@ncl.ac.uk

 

Trust the tale, not the teller–but what if the identity of the teller is given in the articulation of the tale? What if there would be not only no tale without a teller, but no teller without a tale? What if tale and teller were bound up in an interdependence that is far more complex than hitherto supposed? The “narrative turn” in the humanities is born of an insistence that there are modes of experience that cannot be captured by a theory that would transcend the historicity of experience.¹ It calls for a new concretion, a new plunge into existence through the examination of the way in which experiences are meaningfully interconnected as elements in a sequence. In this sense, as David Carr argues in an admirable book, narrative is not a later imposition on pre-narrative experience but constitutes experience itself.²To posit the real as something that is experienced and only thereafter narrated is to misunderstand the way in which human behavior is directed toward the achievement of projected ends.

 

The turn in question might appear to strike a great blow for the freedom of human beings to determine their existence for themselves. Likewise, the appeal to a new understanding of the role of narrativity seems to permit communities to redefine their place in the world.³ But communities themselves are vulnerable to powerful reactionary forces, and individuals, as narrativists show, are never to be considered in isolation from the communities that shape and inform their values.⁴ It is always possible for certain fundamentalist elements to invoke a hidden but originary orthodoxy, regulating the lives of “insiders” and governing their attitude to “outsiders.” But what is it that permits communities to, as it were, fold in upon themselves, submitting themselves to the enforcement of programmable, carefully regulated behavior?

 

No doubt the drive to unify, to relate everything back to a point of origin, is a liability inherent to all forms of narration. In this sense, it might be possible to invoke a grand narrative that unifies all other narratives, a broader, deeper story that always aims to perpetuate a reassuring order, regulating the relationship between members of a community and between that community and others. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard tells us that the age of the grand récit has passed, but perhaps the grandest tale of them all–the tale that is told in the elaboration of any tale–still exerts its dominion. In this way, the narrative turn risks granting dignity to a debilitating and demobilizing story of the dominance of hegemonies and elites. It becomes necessary, therefore, as part of this turn to rethink narration, treating it, as Linda Singer recommends of community, not as “a referential sign” but as “a call or appeal” (125). The turn in question calls for provocative responses, for attempts to resist the prevailing determination of meaning and value.

 

Maurice Blanchot, I will suggest, shows us how we might respond to an appeal inherent in the desire to narrate that would permit us to articulate a different relationship to the dominating narratives of our time. In some of his most vehement and programmatic pages, he argues that there is a desire indissociable from Western civilization (indeed, it could be said to constitute civilization itself) to recount its history and its experience, recapturing and thereby determining its past. Blanchot retraces this desire to the monotheisms that inaugurate “the civilization of the book” (Infinite 425). As he argues, the exigencies that are realized by the Book are reaffirmed over the course of history through a certain determination of the humanitas of the human being, implying notions of subjectivity, community, and historicity.

 

In one sense, it is necessary for disciplines and genres, for philosophy, scientific discourse, and historiography, to reinforce a certain conception of the human being. But while the human being can be treated as a physiological specimen, as a collection of chemicals or as a physically extended body among other bodies, this does not mean that this is all the human being is. Anatomy presupposes a corpse, but are there practices that would allow us to attest to experience as it is shaped in human existence? Would literary narratives provide the model for the narrative structures that constitute our experience? It might seem the narrativist has a great deal to learn from literary criticism. As Lewis and Sandra Hinchman observe, the narrativists “have assimilated the idiom of literary criticism in which narrative has always played a very big part” (xiii). But as David Carr argues, literary critics often depend on a contrast between narration and the real that threatens to make literature merely a practice of representation.⁵ Narrative, he insists, does not simply attribute a structure to our experience after the fact, but has always already shaped that experience.

 

Thus, although the great novel might seem to represent the human being in the midst of the world, setting events back into their time and place, into the concreteness one might think the narrativist seeks, there is another kind of literary writing and another kind of literary criticism. Blanchot shows us that there is a drive in a certain literary practice to realize a non-representational work, a thing of pure language, an object that is made of language in the same way that the image on the painter’s canvas is made from colors.⁶ Moreover, Blanchot also shows that this drive is at work in the most worldly novel: even the novel, he argues, is linked to a certain writing that attests to another kind of narration. The writing he affirms challenges many of the preconceptions about language and the human being that other literary critics (and perhaps other thinkers associated with the narrative turn) maintain.

 

I will focus in this essay on one of his stagings of the play of writing in the Book that he ironically recasts canonical accounts of self-determination.⁷ In his retelling of a section of Homer’s Odyssey that opens Le Livre à venir, Blanchot relates a story about the way literature bears witness to an experience of historicity, memory, and community that indicates another way we might relate ourselves to the Book. Homer relates the story of two half-bird and half-woman Sirens who sang so beautifully that they enticed sailors to wreck their ships on the rocky shores of their island. Ulysses wanted to hear their song and, on Circe’s advice, stopped the ears of his crew with wax and had himself lashed to the mast of his ship, bidding them to pay no heed to whatever he said as the ship drew near the Sirens’ island. In “The Sirens’ Song,” Blanchot collapses the figures of Ulysses and Homer into one, imagining that the Odyssey was written by a Ulysses who had, after his long and risky journey, safely returned home. The composite figure Ulysses-Homer stands in for the novelist who merely confirms the conception of the human being that belongs to the Book. The composition of the Odyssey becomes the figure for any act of recounting that confirms the underlying identity of the human being without taking into account an experience that Blanchot links to writing. For Blanchot, the novel can be counterposed with another literary form, the récit.⁸ The Blanchotian novel is bound by the same covenant that binds our civilization to itself; the Blanchotian récit, however, indicates the call that draws writing out of the Book. As I will explain, the latter is not to be regarded as a separate genre from the novel, but as an event that bestows the possibility of narration even as it is dissimulated in its movement.

 

I

 

Zoon logon echon: for the Greeks, it is the ability to talk discursively, to speak, that marks out the human being as the human being.⁹ But for the human being, language is not a tool but a condition: one speaks not with a language but from it. We inhabit language–or rather language inhabits us. Language is not a tool that would offer itself to be used, but a field that opens through us and opens the world to us, determining what it is possible for us to say and not to say. But it is, for this reason, never the “object” of our awareness. It dissimulates itself, except at those moments when the capacity to express oneself comes to crisis. Language opens like the day itself, granting a world to the human being–but furled in this opening and opening with it is the dim awareness that something has come between the human being and the rest of nature.

 

As soon as Adam steps onto the scene, Blanchot claims in his retelling of the story of Genesis, everything is born again to the human being whose humanitas resides in his ability to speak. In Blanchot’s words, “God created living things, but man had to annihilate them. Not until then did they take on meaning for him, and he in turn created them out of the death into which they had disappeared” (Work 323). Adam, naming the animals, has first of all negated each of the animals in its particularity. The animal cannot talk discursively; the human being, who is defined by this faculty, is granted thereby a mastery over the world. The world is named and thereby possessed, but this possession, which issues from the very humanitas of the human being as the animal that speaks, depends upon the distance that opens between real and ideal existence: between the thing named and the abstract generality of the name.

 

In this sense, language might be said to depend on a preliminary annihilation. Death is the condition of possibility of the human being as the animal who speaks. But this means in turn that there can be no return to life before language. As Blanchot writes, “man was condemned not to be able to approach anything or experience anything except through the meaning he had to create” (Fire 323). But this means that the animal that speaks bears an essential relation to negation, to death, since it is only through negation, through death, that language means. Language, in this sense, always alludes to the possibility of this destruction; without it, as he writes, “everything would sink into absurdity and nothingness” (Work 324).

 

But the power that reaffirms the humanitas of the human being turns on the speaker. The capacity to speak depends on the annihilation of the speaker in the here and now; as Blanchot writes, “I say my name, and it is as though I were chanting my own dirge”; I can only speak by interrupting the order to which I belong as a human being. I say “I” and negate the “I”; the impersonal presence of this word affirms itself in my place (Work 324). There remains only the ideal existence of a word that could exist without me. Language depends upon this trembling enunciation, upon the void that opens even as it appears possible for the human being to speak of everything. This means that the mastery of the human being comes at a price: Adam’s act of naming begins a more general idealization of everything that exists, but it simultaneously encloses the human being within a certain order of being. This enclosure permits the great acts of the literary imagination: the epic, the Bible, the medieval Summa, but finally, as I will show, the novel: books that would say everything. But the mastery over speech presumes a weakness or susceptibility. The human being remains receptive to another experience of language which no longer permits the opening of a field of power and possibility.

 

Blanchot figures this double experience of language in terms of Ulysses’ encounter with the Sirens. The Odyssey is the story of a homecoming, recounting Ulysses’ long journey home from Troy. Although he saw “many cities of men… and learned their minds” (I.4), Homer tells us, Ulysses was at all times “fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home” (I.6). Although Ulysses appears capable of everything (he is heroic and wily), his adventures are episodes on a journey home, they are contained within the broader story of a return. The Odyssey is a figure for a movement that is ultimately conservative, in which the heterogeneous experience is ultimately determined by the law (nomos) of an underlying homogeneity. In this case, Ulysses can be said to be at home (oikos) insofar as he remains confident in his powers and is not challenged by a heterogeneity that might turn him from himself.

 

For Blanchot (but also for Levinas¹⁰), the Ulysses of The Odyssey can be said to enjoy an economic existence insofar as okio-nomia is understood to refer to the ever-renewed attempt to secure his self-identity. Ulysses’ journey home stands in for the subject for whom everything that exists is opened and unfolded as to a unitary point of convergence, the ego. Like the Ulysses of The Odyssey, the task of the subject is to trace a circular itinerary through what is unknown, experiencing it, undergoing it, to what is known. The reaffirmation of the “I” as the “I” means that I can never encounter anything new–it is as if everything I meet came from me since the heterogeneity of the thing is always and already subordinated to language. There is no possibility of heterogeneity, of anything that could occur that would outstrip its circular journey. It is this self-identification that lies at the root of both the solitary subject and language itself.

 

Both representation and the determination of narrative are economic notions of this kind. So, too, is the conception of the novel that I indicated. But a certain literary writing attests to an aneconomic experience, an experience of a genuine heterogeneity. It refers to an interruption of the most human capacity of the animal who speaks, that is, the bestowal of meaning, nomination. Everyday language uses the name to identify the thing, idealizing it, taking it into the universal. But this is to lose the thing in its real existence. The living thing and its name are not identical; the word can only encounter the thing as an instance of a universal, as a particular that awaited idealization. The literary writing in question, by contrast, understands that the negation of the word gives the thing a new, ideal existence as a word. As Blanchot puts it, “it observes that the word ‘cat’ is not only the nonexistence of the cat but a nonexistence made word, that is, a completely determined and objective reality” (Work 325). This sort of literary language would become thing-like, transposing the singularity of the thing into language. It realizes that in listening to a single word, one can hear nothingness “struggling and toiling away, it digs tirelessly, doing its utmost to find a way out, nullifying what encloses it–it is infinite disquiet, formless and nameless vigilance” (Work 326). Thus the work of literature realizes something unreal and non-representational, letting non-existence exist as a kind of “primal absence,” not as the sign of absent things but as a thing itself, as an object made of words (Work 72).

 

In the literary work, language would thus exist in the manner of a thing, as something that has no meaning beyond its own opacity. It would rid language of everything it would name by allowing it to achieve a physicality of its own. Words emerge from the dictionary and from language, drawing attention to their own weight, the presence of what appeared previously to be an absence, the being of what was once nothingness. To write, as Blanchot observes of Mallarmé, “is not to evoke a thing but an absence of thing… words vanish from the scene to make the thing enter, but since this thing is itself no more than an absence, that which is shown in the theater, it is an absence of words and an absence of thing, a simultaneous emptiness, nothing supported by nothing” (Work 49). And yet, words must mean if literature is to be readable. And indeed, the poem, made of language, cannot become a thing. The literary work must allow itself to become a cultural object, available and accessible. Likewise, the literary writer may always become a great writer whose work evidences a mastery of narrative modes, of incident and characterization, who is lauded because his or her work can reflect back the glories of the world. It is this tendency in the literary work that Blanchot captures when he invokes the novel. The work of literature becomes the novel when it fails to become an autonomous thing unto itself. In so doing, it becomes impure and non-absolute because it depends on the world it mirrors: “Willing to represent imaginary lives, a story or a society that it proposes to us as real, it depends on this reality of which it is the reproduction or equivalent”; it is always in collusion with a certain mimetologism (Work 191).¹¹ In this sense, literature hovers at the crossroads of verisimilitude and the creation of an autonomous thing. It is never a pure thing nor a pure representation; it comprises both movements and cannot do without them. Literary language depends on a paradox, on an irresolvable contradiction.

 

Blanchot figures this contradiction by retelling Ulysses’ encounter with the Sirens, the secret search to join language with the language of the thing, to attend to nothingness digging in the word. One can detect the same insistence that literary language is joined to ordinary language in the claim that the Sirens’ song is neither extraordinary nor inhuman; it is simple and everyday; it possesses an extraordinary power, to be sure, but it is a power that lurks within ordinary singing (“Sirens'” 443). Nevertheless, to be lured by the Sirens is to be attracted by that which is extraordinary in the most human of capacities. It is to discover another voice at the heart of the human one–a song that cannot be possessed by a singer. It is to find out that human singing is ultimately inhuman, that to sing is always to sing “with” the song of the Sirens–to join one’s voice to theirs, but in doing so, to relinquish one’s voice. From the first, the song is polyphonous; but this does not mean it is a duet–to sing, rather, is to be joined by an inhuman voice.

 

This is why the voice in question dissimulates itself. The ultimate object of literary aspiration is not one of which its author or its reader need be aware. What is “marvelous” about the song of the Sirens is that “it actually existed, it was ordinary and at the same time secret” (“Sirens'” 443). The song was heard, and in such a way that it allowed more discerning hearers to heed a secret strangeness within ordinary singing. It stands in for the literary text, which, like the encounter with the Sirens, belongs to “strange powers,” to “the abyss” (“Sirens'” 443). To hear the abyssal song of the Sirens is to realize that an abyss has opened in every utterance; and that any utterance, even the indexical “I,” is enough to entice those who heard it to disappear into an abyss. But just as the literary writer is unable to realize the impossible “object,” to allow the poem to become a thing, the sailor cannot reach the source of the song.

 

It is for this reason that the Sirens’ song can never be said to be never actually present. Rather, it only implies the direction of the true sources of the song; the song of the Sirens is “only a song still to come,” a song that would lead its listener toward “that space where the singing would really begin” (“Sirens'” 443). The Sirens seduce because of the remoteness of their song; their song is only the attraction of a song to come. Likewise, the unattainable ideal of the literary “object” is seductive because of its very unattainability. Those sailors, who are led toward the source by the Sirens’ song, steer their ships onto the rocks that surround the Sirens’ isle; finding that in reaching the ostensible source of the song, there is nothing but death, they “disappear.” The negation that the literary author would address implicates the author, who is unable to undertake the task he or she sets himself or herself in the first person. Likewise, the sailors discover in this region that music itself is absent, that the goal is unattainable; there is no attainable literary “object,” no possibility of making the literary work into a thing. From this perspective, the writer is too early because the goal recedes, because the work is unrealizable, because she can never wait long enough. The sailor has always weighed anchor too soon; the source of the song is always infinitely distant; they die broken-hearted because they have failed not once but many times. But the writer is also too late; the goal has been overshot, the writer is originarily unfaithful to his impossible goal.

 

Ultimately, the search for the “essence” of the song, its source and its wellspring, disappoints. And yet, though the Sirens’ song seems to promise a marvelous beyond to which it can never deliver us, we should not regard it as a lie. The song to come will never make itself present, yet it exists as the “hither side” of essentialization. And the search for the “object” of literature remains an admirable one. Blanchot unfolds this analysis through the example of Ulysses. But his Ulysses is not Homer’s. For Blanchot, Ulysses becomes Homer himself, becomes the writer of his own Odyssey: not only a traveler whose journey secretly figures an authorial itinerary, but a literary author himself, who has set out to write a novel.

 

II

 

Now it is true, Blanchot concedes, Ulysses did overcome the Sirens in a certain way. Indeed, he has himself bound to the mast, his wrists and ankles tied, in order to observe them, to pass through what no other human being had endured. He endures the song; his crew, ears plugged, admire his mastery. Ulysses appears all the more impressive for the way his response to the song of Sirens allows him and the sailors he commands to regain a mastery that was challenged or had been lost: the mastery over song itself. Indeed, Ulysses’ apparent courage allows the sailors to regain their grip on the human activity of singing; they are no longer daunted by the inhumanity of the Sirens’ song. Moreover, Ulysses’ actions cause the Sirens, who figure for the lost, sought-after “object” of literature, to understand that the song is nothing special: it is merely a human song that sounds inhuman, and the Sirens are merely animals with the appearance of beautiful women. The Sirens can no longer delude themselves that they bear a privileged relationship with the song they thought was in their power. They recognize themselves in the sailors over whom they once had power, for they are fated to remain as far away from what they seek as the sailors. In an extraordinary turn, this knowledge turns the Sirens into real women; they become human because they belong, with the sailors, on the hither side of the origin they too would seek.¹²

 

It would appear, then, that the literary object is, in the end, just a special kind of language, an imitative echo of the song that men have always sung to themselves. The literary work that would strive to be something more than another cultural artifact, more than a novel that would reflect the world back to itself, must be content with this modest role. Just as the Sirens become real women, the unattainable literary object becomes a mere goal among other goals; the literary writer is a human being like other human beings. Indeed, we might even condemn the writer for holding out such a ridiculous dream.

 

But the story is more complex. Blanchot suggests that although the author might appear to want to strike out and make a thing of words, the literary writer is held back by cowardice. Blanchot condemns Ulysses because he exposes the Sirens’ song for what it is without exposing himself to the risk of seeking its source. The apparent bravery of his self-exposure to the Sirens belies a certain cowardice, for Ulysses will not confront the greater mystery here: that of the relation between human and more-than-human that is at stake in singing itself. While the sailors might believe Ulysses is heroic, Blanchot knows that Ulysses does not want to succumb to the desire that would lead him toward the source of the Song. Ulysses is reluctant to “fall,” wanting to maintain his mastery. He cannot let himself “disappear,” but would endure and save for posterity the experience that is granted to him because of his uncanny “privilege.” The writer conceals a similar reluctance, simultaneously heeding the abyss in every utterance and refusing to heed it, refusing to hear what would cause him to disappear and would overcome his powers. Like Ulysses, who would endure the Sirens’ song without letting himself be seduced by it, the writer merely feigns adventurousness.

 

However, Ulysses’ cunning ploy to stop the ears of his crew with wax and have himself bound to the mast of his ship cannot preserve him from the Sirens. The novelist, in the same way, cannot withhold himself from the effects of the language he employs. Unbeknownst to Ulysses, and, indeed, unbeknownst to the sailors who watch him grimace in ecstasy, he does indeed succumb to the enchantment of the Sirens. Ulysses is not free of the Sirens; his technical mastery does not prevent them from enticing him into the other voyage which is, he explains, the voyage of the récit–of a song that has been recounted and, for this reason, is made to seem harmless, “an ode which has turned into an episode” (“Sirens'” 445). Ulysses’ ruses do not prevent his “fall.” Although it appears that Ulysses emerges from his encounter with the Sirens unscathed, returning to Ithaca to reclaim his wife, his son, and his domestic hearth, he drowns just as others have fallen before him. Ulysses is ensorcelled by the Sirens and “dies”; he has embarked on another voyage.

 

Likewise, the literary writer appears able to navigate successfully through the process of literary creation and is able to accomplish the literary work. Readers admire the fact that books are produced, that literature remains important, reading, perhaps, the biography of the writer who wrote the novels on their shelves, or of the vicissitudes of their composition. This is the novelist who has exhibited a mastery of language and whose language, upon closer examination, reveals what is extraordinary about all language. But the novelist is the virtuoso who re-invents our world and enriches our language. However, the novelist, unbeknownst to himself or herself, reveals a caesura at the heart of the process of literary creativity that is the condition of the possibility of literature. Blanchot writes of an experience whose inscription in the novel escapes author and reader, but that nevertheless makes the novel possible. He writes of a secret struggle at the heart of Ulysses’ encounter with the Sirens that is, he claims, the very struggle that marks the birth of the novel.

 

How might one explain this “other” voyage? Now Blanchot is not on the trail of a secret intention that, beneath the conscious will of the novelist, would lead the commentator toward a reserve that remains undiscovered by literary critics or psychologists. As he writes, “No one can sail away with the deliberate intention of reaching the Isle of Capri”; the other voyage is marked by “silence, discretion, forgetfulness” (“Sirens'” 445-6). It cannot be undertaken as just another task to be accomplished. Silence, discretion, and forgetfulness dissimulate the voyage from the narrative of the novel–this is why, indeed, the author does not know of the fascination that rules over what he takes to be “his” creation.

 

Yes, Ulysses is a cowardly figure who seeks to preserve himself against his disappearance, but he really does “fall” or “disappear” nonetheless; the encounter with the Sirens overcomes his mastery. Although we can imagine Ulysses regaling Penelope and Telemachus with stories of his exploits, there is one tale he would be unable to recount. If Ulysses were to begin one day on a book of reminiscences, if he were, as Blanchot suggests, to become Homer himself and tell the story of his exploits by narrating the first story, an entire dimension of the encounter with the Sirens would hold itself in reserve. But it is this encounter with the Sirens that allows the author to assume the power to write. Ulysses-Homer could not begin his book without having undertaken the journey as Ulysses.

 

It follows that for every Homer, every novelist, there is, for Blanchot, always and already a drowned Ulysses. The novelist will have already undertaken an Odyssey, albeit one whose memory conceals itself from him. In order to write an account of his adventures, Ulysses-Homer will draw on his memories of the real journey; but he will also, unbeknownst to him, have undertaken his encounter with the Sirens in another dimension. In asking us to entertain the notion that Ulysses and Homer were one and the same person, Blanchot separates out the moments of the composition of the novel in accordance with the two versions of the story of Ulysses’ encounter that he recounts.

 

One might imagine Ulysses-Homer sitting down in peace to begin his memoirs. Telemachus and Penelope are close by; he writes under the protection of his home, his Kingdom, and is confident in the powers that accrue to him as a novelist. But even as he picks up his pen to write, Ulysses-Homer undergoes a peculiar transformation: this novelist is no longer the real Ulysses who cleverly defeated the Sirens, but the “other” Ulysses, one who is stirred by the dream that he could follow the song to its source. This Ulysses sets himself the impossible goal of laying bare the power of song itself, and as such, must be defeated in this aim, which demands, as its toll, that he, Ulysses, disappear as Ulysses. Likewise, no novelist as a novelist can endure this disappearance. The source of writing does not reveal itself to him. In refusing to allow itself to be measured by the wiliness and native cunning of Ulysses, the source envelops Ulysses himself, drowning him as it drowned the Sirens when they became real women. The Odyssey–and this name stands in for any novel–is the tombstone not only of the Sirens, but of Ulysses the sea-captain, the adventurer. The fact that the real Ulysses survived his encounter with the Sirens does not mean that the other Ulysses can secure his grasp upon the source, the power of writing itself. That power is denied him because he can never reach it as Ulysses. He falls, he must fall (and he even wants to fall) because he cannot seize upon that which he would seek.

 

There is thus another voice and another order of the event; there is a Ulysses who is the shadow of the first who does not return to Ithaca, completing the circle and thereafter settling down to write his memoirs. The novel that Ulysses-Homer writes likewise depends upon his drowned double, who lies at the bottom of the ocean. The human time in which Ulysses-Homer sets himself the task of writing the novel called The Odyssey and, indeed, accomplishes it, depends upon the other time–the inordinate instant when he embarks on another journey. The birth of the novel cannot be understood without reference to the aneconomic movement of Ulysses. The psychologist of creativity will never grasp the relationship between the power of creativity and the other voyage to the end of the possible. Nor can the philosopher broach the question of the temporality of time without taking this inordinate instant into account. It is only the critical commentator who could attend to the hidden vicissitudes of the birth of the novel, who is privy to the instant that has secretly inscribed itself in the novel. Blanchot tells us that the novel tells another tale, one unbeknownst to its teller and to an entire industry of cultural reception. I will try to make sense of his claim that the composition of the novel implies a récit, with reference to Breton’s Nadja.

 

III

 

The récit, a history of French literature might tell us, names a literary form of which Breton’s Nadja, Duras’s The Malady of Death, and Blanchot’s own Death Sentence and When the Time Comes are examples: short, novella- or novelette-length fictions that are focused around some central occurrence. As Blanchot writes in “The Sirens’ Song,” although “the récit seems to fulfill its ordinary vocation as a narrative,” it nevertheless bears upon “one single episode” in a way that does not strive to narrate “what is believable and familiar” in the manner of the novelist (446).

 

In Breton’s récit, this episode is the series of meetings with the young woman who bears its name. In one sense, Breton is aware of the singularity of the récit. He insistently rejects conventional genres; Nadja, unlike the novel, is not keen to pass for fiction. It does not draw attention to its artifice, keen to present itself as a form of entertainment, as a diverting series of episodes. Breton’s récit narrates an encounter that is extraordinary not only because the young women its narrator meets is exceptional but also because this encounter transforms the world. For Clark, Nadja “enact[s] an unprecedented mode of writing whose provenance is a new experience of the streets as a space of inspiration and mediation to the unknown” (213). As Clark observes, it is neither simply a fictional work nor an autobiography; it does not relate anecdotes from afar, but indicates its own relation to the events: “the actual writing of the text is affirmed as part of the writer’s own exploration of the events he is living” (214). It does not merely imitate Breton’s experience but is part of the articulation of an event that escapes the measure of the experiencing “I.” The very narration of the encounter with Nadja transgresses the ordinary conceptions of the ego, consciousness, the will, and freedom. Breton is not, like the Blanchotian novelist, the creator-God who freely and sovereignly sustains his creation–a God for whom anything is possible in the field of his creation. His récit would interrupt both the assurance of the novelist who creates and preserves a world and also the assurance of the reader, for whom the world the novel imitates is the same world he or she inhabits.

 

Breton’s récit narrates an extraordinary event; but, for Blanchot, it also names the unattainable “object” of literary fascination, the source of the Sirens’ song. He insists that the récit does not recall or re-stage the event, but brings it about:

 

The récit is not the narration of an event, but that event itself, the approach to the place where that event is made to happen [le lieu où celui-ci est appélé à s’produire]–an event which is yet to come and through whose power of attraction the tale can hope to come into being, too. (“Sirens'” 447)

 

How should we understand this apparently self-contradictory claim? It might appear that Breton seeks to write about his encounter with Nadja, but his récit hides another and more fundamental encounter, one that is the condition of possibility of any narration. The event that Breton would narrate is joined in his récit by another narration and another event: that of the interruption of his capacities as an author, the figure for which, in Blanchot, is the song of the Sirens. Breton, in short, has forgotten what he set out to remember; he has lost what he sought to find.

 

How might one understand this claim? To recall: the sailors were too impatient and dropped anchor because they thought they had reached what they sought. But the only way to “find” the source of song was, Blanchot said, to undergo an involuntary “disappearance.” Just as it is impossible to endure this disappearance in “human” or ordinate time, it would also be impossible for anyone or anything, the récit included, to endure the event. Ulysses is condemned only to approach the event until he “disappears.” Likewise, the author of a récit can do no more than approach until he too “disappears.” The very notion of a “patient” approach to the source of the song of the Sirens is that of a relinquishment of will; the author cannot simply choose to become “patient,” to “disappear,” or to “fall,” but passively undergoes “disappearance,” and in so doing is caught up in what happens as the récit.

 

In writing of Nadja, in attempting to re-experience his encounter with her at what appears to be one remove from the “real” event, Breton the writer undergoes a “disappearance.” Is this what Breton understands when he asks, in the last lines of his book, “Who goes here? Is it you, Nadja? … Is it only me? Is it myself?” (144). These lines, responding like an echo to the first words of Nadja, “Who am I?” mean for Blanchot “that the whole narrative is but the redoubling of the same question maintained in its spectral difference” (Infinite 420). Both questions put the authorial identity under question. Was it Breton who wrote Nadja, or did he vacate his position, allowing the encounter with Nadja to have, as it were, written itself?

 

In writing of Nadja, thereby granting her an ideal existence, Breton allows us to hear nothingness digging tirelessly in the name that is the name of his book. But who, then, is Breton the writer? For Blanchot, Breton’s récit testifies in an extraordinary way to the encounter with the Sirens that redoubles his enigmatic encounter with Nadja. True, Breton met Nadja and was intrigued by her. He set out to write a book without genre, a work that related this encounter and this fascination. But in writing Nadja, in recasting his adventure on an ideal plane, apparently subordinating words and sentences in order to tell his tale, Breton removes himself yet further from her. Writing of Nadja, he loses her anew and has to make do with a papery Nadja, made of words. But the redoubled loss of Nadja demands another loss, for Breton yields himself up as a writer, that is, as the one who freely, sovereignly, would sign his name to the book that is ostensibly his. Breton does not do so voluntarily, nor, afterwards, is it given to him to remember, at least in a straightforward and unambiguous way, the vicissitudes of literary creation. Nevertheless, the attempt to write about a marvelous moment itself requires his “disappearance” as an author. It is as if the act of narrating set a trap for him. To take up writing, to narrate an encounter, is to give oneself up as a lure to the trap that threatens to snap shut. That the author escapes it, recovering in order to finish a work, is not a tribute to his ingenuity. To be sure, Breton finishes Nadja, but his narrative depends upon the other journey he was compelled to undertake as soon as he took up his pen. He is lost, as Blanchot writes, “in a preliminary Narrative,” in an event that begins when he starts to write (Infinite 414).

 

Homer’s Odyssey traces the journey of Ulysses to his homeland, but it does not bear upon those intermittences and discontinuities that would expose the economy of the journey to a troubling event. The Ulysses of the novel is always safe; even when he risks himself, he does so assured of his survival. He is always the man who undergoes adventures without risking a profound self-alteration: his ruses allow him to accomplish deeds that appear brilliant, but are actually hollow. This Ulysses seems to have mastered the song itself, to have mastered this power and to be able to recall the vicissitudes of his encounter at leisure, writing safely beside Penelope and Telemachus. But the watery death of the other Ulysses, for whom The Odyssey is a tomb, is testament to the fact that the contrivance of Ulysses could never allow him to endure what he cannot endure in the first person.

 

The novelist believes, like Ulysses-Homer, that he is in command of that which he would narrate, but Blanchot argues otherwise. He is, on Blanchot’s account, like the wily Ulysses; he can only become a novelist by refusing to relinquish himself to the call that solicits him. If he is able to write books, it is only because he is cut off from the original source of his “inspiration” by his own ruses and machinations. But his work attests to an inhuman effort to heed what the novelist cannot endure: another narration, a récit. The Blanchotian récit marks the memory of the experience that the novel leaves behind in order to become a novel. The struggle at the birth of the novel is therefore the struggle to do away with the event to which the récit bears witness, that is, to leave the “dead” or “disappeared” Ulysses in the water, to abandon death in favor of the deathless life of the whole, discontinuity in favor of absence, the absence of work for the work that gathers everything together. In leaving behind the récit, the novel also leaves the event itself behind. The novel is, for all its riches, only a narration of that which it has already lost. Yes, it dazzles; the novel reproduces the richness and detail of the world. The Blanchotian novelist dreams of Unity, where discontinuity would be merely a sign of the failure of the understanding, a mark of our finitude. In this way, the novel exerts, in advance, a grasp of the whole, of the time and space in which everything unfolds. The Blanchotian novel does not accomplish an absolute invention, creating something ungoverned by pre-existing rules. But in another sense, it is the Blanchotian récit that marks itself into the opening of the novel as the novel is marked as an inventive event. It is only the critical commentator who can attend to the happening of an event that itself reinvents the notion of invention and the inventor, for it no longer refers to the contrivance of an ingenious person. The novelty of this event is not that of a new art, instrument, or process. The invention that the récit “is” (beyond the intentions of the author of the novel) happens each time singularly and without precedent, cutting across what offers itself too readily to appropriation, identification, and subjectivation.

 

Blanchot’s account of the “other” voyage of Ulysses stages the joining of the inhuman voice of the récit to that of the novelist. The journey of this Ulysses is not circular. The primordial relation through which he would constitute himself as a self-centered and hedonistic subject is interrupted by a call that contests his self-realization. The closed circuit of his interiority is opened; Ulysses no longer experiences himself as an “I can” who can pass unhindered through the finite order of being. The song of the Sirens is unintegratably foreign. Ulysses can only give himself over in response to this call and, thus summoned, is prevented from recoiling or turning back upon himself. The infinite resistance of the song to Ulysses’ powers cannot be understood in terms of a clash of contrary wills, because Ulysses is precisely no longer “there.” Ulysses cannot exist with, or alongside, the song. Ulysses’ “disappearance” means that he is henceforward unable to unfold his potentialities in a realm in which willed action is possible. No higher synthesis will allow him to mediate the song of the Sirens and integrate it into his own endeavors. Rather, he is co-constituted by the call; his selfhood is simultaneously economic and aneconomic. He is defined by the wiliness and the cleverness that attest to the auto-affirmative strength and vitality that permit his boundless curiosity; but he is also governed by a lethal susceptibility to the call of the Sirens. At once, Ulysses is driven toward what satisfies the circular demand that would permit his economic return to himself and toward the aneconomic “experience” that denies this return. It is precisely this irresolvable play of economy and aneconomy that allows Ulysses to stand in for both the writer of the novel and the récit. It is this play that determines the relationship between novel and récit, preventing their resolution into a higher synthesis, that is, the incorporation of the récit as an episode in a novel. But the récit does not name a literary genre that is separable from the novel, just as the Blanchotian event would involve beings not separable from a certain order of civilization. Novel and récit are moments of the same movement of invention. The dissension between novel and récit in Blanchot’s writings can be found in any act. As such, all synthesizing, economic movements are provisional.

 

One can read “The Sirens’ Song” in terms of a struggle in a certain narrative recounting, concluding that the relationship between novel and récit bears upon a deeper struggle that has shaped our civilization, since the kind of narrative recounting one discovers in the novel is the sort of story–the story of stories, the narration that gathers up all other stories as such–that Western civilization has told to itself. There is no doubt that the narratorial voice of the novel is that of the Ulyssean subject who would recount episodes in a certain sequence. But the possibility of narration is predicated upon a recollection that is already determined by a certain conception of time. “The Sirens’ Song” bears upon the condition of possibility of narration.

 

What is it that permits this incredible recollection of an event that is said to escape all memory? How does Blanchot explain the relationship he describes between the “other” voyage, in which Ulysses drowns and is lost, and the voyage of the novel, in which this drowned Ulysses is forgotten and the living Ulysses–the one who, miraculously, survives his own death (understood as his disappearance qua Ulysses)–sails back to his homeland, to his wife and his son, to the okios, the family hearth?

 

In order to address this question (the way in which I choose to present the question of the condition of possibility in Blanchot’s theoretical writings in general), I will supplement Blanchot’s story of the two voyages of Ulysses with my own story of a third Ulysses. This is the Ulysses-Blanchot who has followed the others and watched them rise from the bottom of the sea, and, furthermore, who still remembers his fall (and the fall of the Sirens). This Ulysses-Blanchot is the writer of the story at the beginning of Le Livre à Venir.

 

IV

 

In Blanchot’s retelling of the encounter with the Sirens, The Odyssey becomes a memoir: it is the story Ulysses tells of his return, of the completion of the circle. Ulysses not only undergoes his encounter with the Sirens, but he relates this encounter himself. Nothing happens to him that he cannot relate: his is the memory that can recall everything, lifting it out of oblivion and recounting it in turn. Ulysses becomes Homer, the virtuoso of memory, the adventurer who, after his adventures, can tell his own story to entertain others. Ulysses-Homer writes, in the narratorial voice, of his triumph and his return.

 

Yes, Ulysses returns to his family, to his kingdom, and sets right all wrongs. But the Ulysses who returns to Ithaca, to the family hearth, to settle down and write, is followed by another Ulysses. Blanchot, in the guise of a sea-traveler, has followed Ulysses on both his voyages, remembering what Ulysses does not and disclosing this gap in Ulysses-Homer’s memory in “The Sirens’ Song.” Who would recognize this worn and threadbare Ulysses who returns to his home in order to remember what outstrips the memory of his homeland? And yet it is this other, hypermnestic “memory” that will allow him to write of the journey at the heart of the novel and the récit. This Ulysses, ineluctably marked by death, has been vouchsafed a secret that cost him his intimate relationship with his and any homeland, rendering his Odyssey infinite. This Blanchotian Ulysses drowns; and at the same time, he is able to bring us, his readers, tidings of the voyages that the literary writer has undertaken.

 

It is this Blanchotian Ulysses who waits at the elbow of the Ulysses-Homer, composer of The Odyssey. This Blanchotian Ulysses remembers the other story, the exile or the wandering of Ulysses. As the critical commentator who follows Ulysses to lose and then rediscover him, Blanchot triumphs because he alone can retrace this journey. Blanchot is capable of remembering what Ulysses forgets; moreover, since he, too, has written récits and novels, he can also remember what he had to forget as a literary author. His is the power to bear witness to the extraordinary happening of the récit but, as such, is a mastery of that which cannot be mastered–a tale of an event which will not allow itself to be recounted.

 

How are we to understand the adventures of this Blanchotian Ulysses? Blanchot is not the adept who has had an experience and would teach others about it; he does not keep a secret. Rather, he remains vigilant, on the look-out, waiting for the chance for his writing to be seized by an unknown current. He relinquishes his grip and allows his mastery to be taken from him, but this is what allows him to escape the trap, to recover himself from the preliminary récit. Blanchot is thus open to what the author of Nadja is not. He writes, with “The Sirens’ Song,” a récit of the récit, a text dense with beginnings, a text that belongs alongside every literary-critical essay he has written and every work of literature. This is why his writing is able to invent, why it says the true, why the accomplishment it would realize is much more decisive than the production of an aesthetics. For the récit of the récit would reveal the historicity of history in the shining out of events like the light that sparkles up from waves of water. Beginning and rebeginning, flashing up and into nothing, it is of the aleatory, of the event, of the instant without program and without project of which Blanchot would write. He shows us that Ithaca is traversed by waves, that there is no place of safety to which Ulysses, each of us, any of us, might return.

Notes

 

1. Lewis and Sandra Hinchman’s edited collection Memory, Identity, Community makes a convincing case for such a turn, showing how the human sciences are moving toward models of explanation of human behavior drawing on narrative models rather than nomological models.

 

2. Carr’s Time, Narrative, and History presents a powerful account of narrative as the temporal structure of human existence.

 

3. As Lewis and Sandra Hinchman argue, “a community’s stories offer members a set of canonical symbols, plots, and characters through which they can interpret reality and negotiate–or even create–their world. The culture ‘speaks to itself’ as members replicate these canonical forms in their own lives” (235). Likewise, Alistair Macintyre and Charles Taylor have argued that our understanding of the world as individuals depends upon an intelligibility granted by communal life.

 

4. As Georges Van Den Abbeele reminds us, “to the left’s investment in ‘community activism’ as a strategic retreat designed to reconstruct and build anew a base of popular support in the wake of severe electoral defeats by the right in England and the United States, corresponds the Thatcherite and Reaganite discourse on the return of juridical and managerial responsibilities to the level of ‘local communities,’ a cynical euphemism for the dismantling of the welfare state at the hands of so-called private enterprise” (xi). The essays in the volume he introduces provide a valuable attempt from various perspectives to reinvest community with a new sense.

 

5. For example, he shows us how Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending depends on the separability of the sense of the real and reality itself that Carr convincingly overturns (9). Likewise, he claims that Barthes demarcates art and life, depending once again on a model of representation as the imposition of a structure on the “real” world (9).

 

6. As Blanchot shows in The Work of Fire, it is not in order to represent the world that Lautréamont gave The Chants of Maldoror the body of a monumental thing, always pushing it toward impenetrability despite the coherence and the eloquence of his language. Maldoror strives to suffice to itself, to exist as a monad of words that reflects nothing but words. The sonority and rhythmic mobility of the poem is a sign of the attempt to render itself sovereign, to conquer its own space, literature’s space, and remain there. Literature, as Blanchot argues in dozens of essays, attends to an experience of language itself that escapes all kinds of narrativization (see Work 162-175).

 

7. See the retelling of Orpheus’ descent into Hades to rescue Eurydice in The Space of Literature (171-176) and the meetings between Theseus and the Sphinx in The Infinite Conversation (17-20) and Narcissus and Eurydice in The Writing of the Disaster (125-128). For a commentary on “Orpheus’s Gaze,” see my “The Paradoxes of Fidelity.” For a commentary on the passages on Theseus and the Sphinx, see my “The Sphinx’s Gaze.”

 

8. Timothy Clark has some marvellous pages on Blanchot’s notion of the récit in Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot. Derrida has written at length on Blanchot’s notion of the récit in Parages.

 

9. Logos, as Heidegger remarks, means more than language simply understood as a collection of words: “it means the fundamental faculty of being able to talk discursively, and, accordingly, to speak” (305). The human being can use language in a way the animal cannot since, according to Heidegger, “the animal lacks the ability to apprehend as a being whatever it is open for” (306). It is the way in which the human being comports itself to beings that separates it from human beings.

 

10. In Totality and Infinity, Levinas argues that we are all–all of us, philosophers and non-philosophers–mediators or relays of a certain totality whether we assume, disavow, or transform its movement. Today, in the West, Levinas asks us to renew philosophy and with it to renew our civilization in response to a call that has gone unheard–the call of infinity, the infinite. This call resounds within the totality itself: we hear it, whether we know it or not–whether we respond to it or deny its unbridled force. Levinas asks us to overturn the “egology” or “economics” upon which what he calls totality is predicated by hearkening to this call. Ulysses, the voyager of Homer’s Odyssey, is the authentic figure of this egology; his travels are, in turn, a perfect figure for an economic return upon the ego. As Levinas remarks: “the itinerary of philosophy remains that of Ulysses, whose adventure in the world was only a return to his native island–a complacency in the Same, an unrecognition of the Other (48). See, for an examination of the relationship between Blanchot and Levinas, my “The Sphinx’s Gaze” and William Large’s “Impersonal Existence.”

 

11. On the other hand, there are authors for whom the novel must attain the status of an object sufficient unto itself. Can Sarraute’s Tropisms or Beckett’s The Unnameable be regarded as novels? It would be here that the novel unravels itself or approaches the condition of what Blanchot might call the “poem-thing.” One might admit that there are novels that are non-representational (Blanchot’s own Thomas the Obscure would be an example, or indeed The Chants of Maldoror [see note 6 above]), but the roman of “The Sirens’ Song” refers to the hegemonic notion of the novel. Furthermore, the novel cannot separate itself from the practice Blanchot calls writing. As I will make clear, roman and récit are bound up with one another in a complex economy.

 

12. Almost as soon as the Sirens become women, Blanchot tells us, they die. But Blanchot tells us nothing of the fabulous animals who are turned into women and undergo their own deaths (and perhaps their own resurrection). He writes of Ulysses’ death and resurrection, but Blanchot does not consider the fate of the Sirens after their deaths. Does he, in this silence, speak for them, and, thereby in the place of the women who, when their secret is revealed, die at the bottom of the ocean? In a sense, they have died before they have even begun–before they have been given the chance to begin, before any such chance has been envisaged to explore the source of the song that resounds in the speech they would speak as human women. Crucially, the Sirens die as soon as they become human women, preventing them from uprooting themselves, journeying according to other imperatives and exploring their own form of existence. Deprived of autonomy, determination, or identity, these dead women are more comforting than women who are still alive because they can serve as the screen without depth onto which Ulysses-Blanchot can project his fantasies. Does he exclude the possibility of their return or resurrection, of the story that they might tell about their adventure or their death? “The Sirens’ Song” is, perhaps, more complex than this reading would allow since Ulysses, Blanchot tells us, recognizes himself in the Sirens just as the Sirens recognize themselves in the sailors. The non-human females become human and Ulysses recognizes that he, too is in some sense non- or inhuman: he, too, is female or animal. Ulysses, part-Siren, is claimed by the feminine in a way that he does not realize, just as the Sirens are implicated in the masculine. There is a redistribution of the terms femininity and masculinity beyond a simple polarization of gender here. The scene of tutelage I invoked could be understood in terms of a hetero-affection, an affection that interrupts the economy of the masculine just as it disrupts the economy of the feminine. In this sense, “The Sirens’ Song” would attest to a certain feminization of the masculine that has always and already occurred–a feminization that does not happen from outside the masculine but is co-implicated with it, collaborating with and contaminating any notion of a pure masculinity–and, likewise, to a masculinization of the feminine that would co-determine and co-constitute what in the classical sense is taken to be the rigid opposite of masculinity. For a feminist interpretation of Blanchot’s writings, see Cixous’s Readings.

 

Works Cited

 

• Beckett, Samuel. Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. London: Calder Publications, 1995.
• Blanchot, Maurice. Le Livre a Venir. Paris: Gallimard, 1959.
• —. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
• —. “The Sirens’ Song.” Trans. Lydia Davis. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. New York: Station Hill, 1998. 443-450.
• —. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.
• —. Thomas the Obscure. Trans. Robert Lamberton. New York: D. Lewis, 1973.
• —. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995.
• —. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986.
• Breton, André. Nadja. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Grove, 1960.
• Carr, David. Time, Narrative, and History. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1986.
• Cixous, Hélène. Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva. Trans. Verena Conley. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
• Clark, Timothy. Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot: Sources of Derrida’s Notion and Practice of Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.
• —. The Theory of Inspiration: Composition as a Crisis of Subjectivity in Romantic and post-Romantic Writing. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.
• Derrida, Jacques. Parages. Paris: Galilée, 1986.
• —. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.
• Gill, Carolyn Bailey, ed. Maurice Blanchot. The Demand of Writing. London: Routledge, 1996.
• Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, World, Finitude, Solitude. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1995.
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• Lautréamont. Maldoror and Poems. Trans. Paul Knight. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Basic Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Adriaan Peperzaak et. al. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1996.
• —. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1969.
• Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984
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• Miami Theory Collective, eds. Community at Loose Ends. U of Minnesota P, 1991.
• Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Trans. Peter Connor et. al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.
• Sarraute, Nathalie. Tropisms. London: John Calder, 1964.
• Singer, Linda. “Recalling a Community at Loose Ends.” Community at Loose Ends. 121-30.
• Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989.
• Van Den Abbeele, Georges. Introduction. Community at Loose Ends. ix-xxvi.