“The aim here is simply to test out to what extent it is possible to follow a text and at the same time to lose track of it, to be simultaneously the person it understands and the person who understands it, the person who, within a world, speaks of that world as though he or she were outside it; all in all, to take advantage of the strangeness of a dual work and an author split into two — into absolute lucidity and impenetrable darkness, into a consciousness that knows all and yet knows not where it is going — in order to feign the illusion of a commentary solely preoccupied with accounting for all and yet entirely aware of being able to explain nothing.”
—Maurice Blanchot, L’Expérience de Lautréamont
There is a particular quality to the way French writers approach philosophy, as though it is woven into literary form rather than appended to it. Writers such as Quignard, Duras, Ernaux, and Char engage philosophy and literature simultaneously. Many others, not all French, continue this modernist tradition of blending reflection and fiction.
Leslie Hill uses the Blanchot quotation above as the epigraph to his study, Blanchot: Extreme Contemporary. Recently I have been reading the opening essays in Blanchot’s Faux Pas. Aware of the limitations of my French, I have relied on Charlotte Mandell’s translation. Previous attempts at reading Blanchot had left me uncertain, but this time the introductory essay, From Anguish to Language, conveyed a clarity that suggests not a new world of thought but a return to older, deeper questions.
In parallel, I have been reading Pascal Quignard’s novels and his Lost Kingdom series, works that resist familiar forms and propose an inseparability of philosophy and literature. His writing accepts Beckett’s challenge to find a form that accommodates the mess, creating an exploratory mode of thinking that echoes Blanchot’s reflections on silence and the instability of language.
I love this: “to find a form that accommodates the mess.” A wonderful puzzle. Beckett’s writing is perfect at that. And his writing, sentence by sentence, retains a great sense of the messiness of it all. Finnegan’s Wake just popped into my mind as I write this. Still dipping in and out of that at the moment alongside Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, yet another form that seems capable of accommodating the mess.
Hill’s epigram struck me as a wonderful way of capturing how I approach these wonderful, often difficult books that do such a good job of accommodating the mess, or trying to, at least.