Little is known about Maurice Blanchot except that he wrote an odd style of fiction. His novels are not really novels, his stories barely stories. His prose is very French in that it can be almost mathematical, yet it simultaneously evokes...
[more]Little is known about Maurice Blanchot except that he wrote an odd style of fiction. His novels are not really novels, his stories barely stories. His prose is very French in that it can be almost mathematical, yet it simultaneously evokes the most intense feelings of loss, misunderstanding, joy, and death. Just as the Marquis de Sade calmly and carefully enumerated the most horrific details of elaborate tortures, Blanchot carefully flushes out the minutiae of psycho-emotional existence.
While central in de Sade, the flesh is conspicuously absent from Blanchot's short and pithy tales, or "récits," as he called them. His books are virtually bereft of physical descriptions; the reader rarely knows the appearance of a character, the color of the room, the smells that linger. Rather, Blanchot concentrates on the effects -- always multiple, never predictable -- of people living, sometimes interacting with each other, often alone.
While Blanchot's books don't seem to involve much action, in fact they contain nothing but movement. Every moment, every glance, every mutter sends ripples throughout a situation: the repercussions of a whisper are known in the heavens. The sun setting, a knock on a door, the way a wave falls on the beach -- in these stories, the most subtle machinations of the world are intensely experienced. Classical motivation and typical plot-drivers are absent in Blanchot's works, and in their place we find pure event; Blanchot wrote in a realm where bodies are secondary to the things that happen to them.
And the greatest thing that can happen to bodies, at least according to Blanchot, is death. Death lingers in his nouns, is carried by his verbs, can be found lurking in his commas and periods and parentheses. His books are ghostly -- neither dead nor alive, neither bodily nor heavenly.
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