Voorwoord van Jeff Fort bij Engelse vertaling van Aminadab

Voorwoord van Jeff Fort bij de Engelse vertaling van Aminadab uit 2002

(met uitdrukkelijke toestemming van de auteur)

THIS IS A STRANGE BOOK. For readers familiar with Blanchot's narrative works, such a statement goes without saying. Strangeness is the very element in which these works move and unfold; it is their single most constant "effect" and has the status of a deliberate, if elusive, method.

     Aminadab is Blanchot's second novel. Published in 1942, it appeared only a year after his first novel, the first version of Thomas l'obscur. With the exception of the latter (which has long been out of print in France), Aminadab is the last of his narrative works to be translated into English; its appearance makes it possible for the reader of English to survey very nearly the entirety of Blanchot's fiction. One interesting feature that marks this work is the shift from the novel to what Blanchot would later designate as récits, a term that is difficult to translate and whose ambiguity serves well the "stories" that these later works never quite coalesce into. While not completely devoid of features resembling characters and events, the récits gradually dispense with all recognizable narrative conventions and constantly verge toward the rarefied disappearance of the voice that proffers them. Aminadab, on the other hand, is very much a novel and insists on being one, as the designation roman (novel) on the cover of the original edition informs us. It focuses on a single character and maintains a more or less linear plot that can be summarized in fairly simple terms: Thomas arrives in an unidentified village, and upon seeing a woman signal to him (apparently) from one of the upper windows in a boardinghouse, he decides to enter the building and look for her. The novel follows him through the uncanny detours of his search and his efforts to reach the upper part of the building. Such a plot can be seen as altogether conventional and even in a way as very "classic" - the hero on a quest. By adopting it, Blanchot is attempting to confront the familiar genre with his own insistence on strangeness and with a resolutely antirealist aesthetic, which he considered more urgently needed than ever, precisely for the sake of challenging and renewing the contemporary novel.

     We know that Blanchot was meditating a great deal on the nature of the novel around the time of writing Aminadab because we have several articles from this period in which he addresses the question. The situation in which these articles were written was remarkable, to say the least, and its contradictions shed light on Blanchot's thinking concerning the novel, as well as on the composition of Aminadab: Between 1941 and 1943 Blanchot, living in occupied Paris, was employed to write a weekly column for a pro-Petain paper called Journal des débats. Having disengaged from his shrill pamphleteering of the 1930s, however, Blanchot did not write political articles (and had no interest in doing so); rather, his column fell under the rubric Chronique de la vie intellectuelle (Chronicle of intellectual life) and was devoted entirely to literary matters. Oddly, he seems to have tried simply to ignore the political context of his venue (though it must have seemed very odd to see these often extremely refined literary meditations printed next to the crude political propaganda that characterized the paper). It is often said that the beginning of World War II, especially the surrender of France, marks for Blanchot a period of withdrawal from the political into the literary, and there certainly are grounds for locating here an important transformation in Blanchot's thought and writing. (It was also the period in which his friendship with Georges Bataille began, an event of great significance in Blanchot's life and work.) Indeed, the paradoxes of this situation are further sharpened by the extreme refusal of engagement - and of all forms of verisimilitude and realism - as well as the vindication of the novel's radical autonomy that Blanchot puts forth in these articles.

     Attacking "the facilities of realism" on the one hand and the servile observance of traditional forms on the other, Blanchot advocates a traditionalism (if it can be called that) that would remain faithful to the disruptive and creative aspects of tradition. The tradition itself is not simply given but something that must be sought, and this search necessarily involves experimentation and risk - for example, the risk of arbitrariness that realism would avoid by depending on external circumstances for an appearance of necessity. But verisimilitude, Blanchot argues, cannot provide the necessity required by the inner workings of the novel, for, he says, the world itself cannot provide this. In one article entitled "The Pure Novel," Blanchot sums this up revealingly: "[T]he world, which should provide the creative self with raw material, today seems itself to be exhausted; it has lost its originality and its objective truth, it imposes itself only as an inconsistent and impure system whose appearance the mind feels tempted, even obliged to reject in order to reestablish its own interpretation of it and to express its own original experience." In this respect, Blanchot concludes, "the pure novel, whatever its failings, may deserve more attention than the accomplished works of objective narrative. It is in search of the unknown. It demands the inaccessible." This search - which may well recall the one undertaken in Aminadab - is Blanchot's justification for withdrawing from, even "rejecting," the world when it comes to artistic creation and artistic experience. In search of the unknown, it sets up a world of its own. In the same essay Blanchot elaborates on this movement in terms that resonate clearly with the project pursued in Aminadab:

Since the rule of verisimilitude has no value, the novel is free to transform reality; not just color it differently but change its structure, overturn its laws and extinguish the light of understanding. It secretes its own world. It is master of its own appearances. It arranges its figures and incidents into a new ensemble, around a unity of its own choosing and with no need to justify its frame of reference. This freedom can seem absolute, but it is none the less bound by a fundamental necessity to harmonize, without trompe-l'oeil effects, the inside and the outside of the novel's creation.

The language of the novel leaves the world behind in order to search for its own reality and its own laws, which are not those of the familiar world that surrounds us. But in this separation from the world, it nevertheless maintains a strict relation to the "outside" of the novel - not a relation of representation, however, rather a linguistic relation, one which assumes, enigmatically, that the nature of the novelistic world, however "unreal," and the nature of the "real" world both have their common source in the most essential operations of language.

     The shadow of Stephane Mallarmé falls heavily over these ruminations (one of the essays is entitled "Mallarmé and the Art of the Novel"), and the "purity" they invoke is closely related to the one sought in the poet's work. The refusal of the world, Blanchot claims, means attempting to find in language not a depiction of the world but "the essence of the world," the very principle of its constitution as a world? Mallarmé, he says, takes seriously the notion that "language is an absolute, the very form of transcendence, and that it can none the less find its way into a human work." Blanchot the novelist, however, takes the poet's work as a precedent that "allows us to dream of a writer, a symbol of purity and pride, who would be for the novel what Mallarmé was for poetry, and to envisage that work with which Mallarmé sought to match the absolute." With this dream in  mind, Blanchot sketches out a pressing task for the novelist in which "he heads towards those strange tenebrous regions where he seems to awaken in the deepest sleep, towards that pure presence where things appear so bare and so reduced that no image is possible, towards that primordial spectacle where he never tires of contemplating what can be seen only after a complete self-transformation."

     I have dwelt on these essays and their extreme statements because of their unmistakable resonance with Blanchot's project in Aminadab. How can we not see the boardinghouse as an attempt to figure "those strange tenebrous regions" into which the novelist must sleepily tread? Is not Thomas's striving toward the heights, his search for the upper floors and for the woman who may have waved to him, not strictly analogous to the search for the law that dictates the inner necessity and coherence of the novel itself? This is true especially in that so much of Thomas's time is spent discussing and interpreting the law, attempting to position himself in relation to it, and trying to assume for himself its singular application to him and his destiny. Finally, where is it more obviously the case that a world is constituted by the risky fiat of language than in a novel? Indeed, it is difficult not to see the novelistic world conjured up in Aminadab as an allegory that is strangely coextensive with the adventure of writing that it would allegorize.

     Of course, it is not solely in the wake of Mallarmé that Blanchot attempts to take up this challenge. The tradition of the novel itself had already confronted it, at least implicitly, in what I referred to above as its most "classical" structure: from its roots in narratives like The Odyssey, to the medieval romances and quests, to Don Quixote and Moby-Dick, the novel form has always put into play, often ironically, the drifting and wandering search for the distant, the unknown, the inaccessible, and the otherwise enigmatic. It is clear that if Blanchot took on this form, it was in order to undo it from the inside, or rather to continue the undoing that was already well under way - a process that involves bringing more and more manifestly into the sphere of the narrative the linguistic origin of its existence.

     One absolutely inevitable reference in this respect is Franz Kafka, whose work Aminadab resembles in ways that are surely meant to be obvious. The Castle, which it most closely resembles, falls (however obliquely) within the tradition of the novel as search, and Blanchot, in this early novel, is as it were taking up the thread left by Kafka's last great work. In his review of Aminadab, Jean-Paul Sartre reports that Blanchot claimed not to have read Kafka when he wrote the novel; but of course Sartre doesn't fall for this ruse and proceeds to accuse Blanchot of turning Kafka's effects into a cliche or commonplace (we hardly have Blanchot to thank for that). And yet, in a sense, we could say that it is true he had not yet read Kafka and that Aminadab itself is Blanchot's (first) reading of Kafka. Perhaps we could also apply to Blanchot the statement he himself used to describe Kafka's diary writings: "il fait son apprentissage," he is carrying out his apprenticeship. In his diaries Kafka apprenticed himself to "masters" such as Goethe, Kleist, and Flaubert. In Aminadab, Blanchot (at thirty-four still a young writer) openly and unabashedly apprenticed himself to Kafka, not only by borrowing certain forms (the novel as wandering and as a series of conversations) and addressing some of the same essential concerns (the law, error, fiction itself) but also by actually repeating, practically verbatim, certain phrases from Kafka, and sometimes not the least well known. It is clear that Blanchot more or less explicitly set out to write a novel under the guidance of an exemplary predecessor and, in his search for the unknown, to enter into the uncanny space in which the land surveyor had lost his way.

     Blanchot later wrote of The Castle that its entire meaning might be carried by the wooden bridge where K. pauses to "stare up into the illusory emptiness" before crossing it into the village and initiating the novel's ambiguous adventure. What he meant, I think, was that this movement of arrival and beginning enacts the radical leave-taking that the novel, in Blanchot's extreme conception of it, must perform. Even more than K., Thomas is a figure without a past, and his entry from the "broad daylight" of the village into the obscure spaces of the house seals his separation from the world of the familiar day. Blanchot would eventually speak a great deal about "literary space"; in Aminadab, the entry into this space is in some measure taken literally, in the sense that here this space is figured as a fictional place, enclosed by walls. The writer's entry into a literary space, a space made of letters, is thus doubled by the character's entry into a microcosm that takes the form of a house, and it is this doubling that gives Aminadab the aspect of an allegory and that causes it to resonate far beyond the fictional situation depicted. This movement is an exit into an outside that can never be inhabited and in which things are seen from across an irreducible distance even as they threaten to suffocate with too great a proximity. As Michel Foucault emphasizes in his beautiful essay on Blanchot, "The Thought from the Outside," which refers a great deal to Aminadab, it is a distance opened by language and located in the simple but vertiginous "I speak" that has been deprived of all bearings and continues in a perfect coincidence with its own unmoored taking place.

     For his part, Sartre referred to Aminadab as "fantastic," but it is not at all certain that this term applies to Aminadab. If so, it is in the manner of a work like Don Quixote, that is, as the disenchanted space of a simulation sustained entirely by language. Aminadab begins and ends as a mirage of signs and significations, from the sign in the window to the enigmatic aphorisms on the lamps glowing in the endless twilight of the final scene. Blanchot makes it very clear in the opening pages that the strange world of Aminadab is constituted by signs whose manipulation it is. When Thomas first enters the building, he searches up and down a long corridor for a stairway, but in vain; until, that is, he suddenly notices a curtain with a sign above it on which is "written in crudely traced letters: The entrance is here." The conclusion is simple and direct: "So the entrance was there." If this is "fantastic," it is nevertheless far from magical and is closer to a mere manipulation of words whose only effects are empty simulations. One is reminded of Alice, whose fall down the rabbit hole is accompanied by a sleepily murmured interchange of letters ("do cats eat bats? ... do bats eat cats?") and who upon landing finds herself in a situation strikingly similar to that of Thomas - searching a hallway for an open door, she's given instructions by signs that appear out of nowhere ("drink me"). Just as Alice's wonderland is not ruled by magic (not even within her "reality"; she has to take drugs to bring about her transformations) but rather by linguistic play, Thomas's adventures in the boardinghouse proceed according to laws that are first and foremost textual. The "fantastic" here does not consist in the immediate realization of thoughts or a dreamlike alternate world but in the empty effects of nomination. In this sense, literary space is one in which the name in no way creates the thing but rather, as Blanchot asserted in an early essay, the absence of the thing, its shimmering emptiness (an absence and emptiness that are prior to, and constitutive of, any presence and fullness). Here enchantment is disabled by the rigor of fiction itself, the recognition that this gesture - creating something by naming it - remains empty and leaves only the residue of the name. Here everything is possible, but nothing actually happens except a fictional speech in search of its own law and origin.

     One of the most important effects of this speech is precisely that of simulation and mimesis. Like K.'s "illusory emptiness," the space through which Thomas wanders is full of illusions and is itself an illusion. It is a world made up of crude but fascinating images that double the already artificial world containing them. This is made clear from the beginning with the proliferation of paintings and other types of doubling whose relation to - or difference from -Thomas's "reality" is disturbingly indistinct. He himself is painted not long after entering the building, and the artifice of the building is doubled in paintings that depict the rooms exactly. He is soon attached, by handcuffs, to a companion who remains his distorted double throughout most of the novel and whose voice in the end replaces his own. In an early scene this companion is described as having a tattoo on his face that duplicates the face itself. Thomas's intimate embraces of his tattooed companion present a mimicry of earlier literary adventures, a malodorous parody of Ishmael's affectionate encounter with Queequeg in the early chapters of Moby-Dick (a novel that has an important place in Blanchot's criticism). It is thus at every point and on multiple levels that the fictive nature of the novel is incorporated into the novelistic world itself, not as a narrator's ironic reflections but as the very law of the world that is in the process of unfolding. Thomas thinks at one point: "Was not everything here play-acting?" This question is echoed throughout Blanchot's fictional work, most explicitly in the récit entitled The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me where the first-person narrator asks several times: "Here where we are, everything is dissimulated, isn't it?" Literary space presents itself as a "here" that is pure dissimulation, pure fiction and artifice. In this regard, the suspension of disbelief required by the fantastic is not relevant here, because belief is never solicited. Thomas himself does not believe, and in this he is the "doubting" figure his name evokes; indeed, he does not even believe in the illusoriness of the illusions: "I have reason to think that there is a bit too pronounced a tendency here to explain everything in terms of illusions." And yet he is irretrievably caught up in a movement driven by the attraction of this false world. His "quest" passes through illusions in search of an illusion and through a textual space that seeks its law in speech as a simulation of speech.

     To carry out his search, Thomas must know the laws of the house. Everyone he encounters is deeply preoccupied with these laws, but no one really knows what they are. They remain inscrutable and arbitrary, contained in books that no one reads and that may not even exist. The result is that, together with this obscure and ubiquitous law, it is "carelessness that reigns in the house." No one knows who is part of the staff and who is a tenant, who is a servant and who is to be served. But this scrambling of relations does not do away with hierarchy; on the contrary, it makes of hierarchy a principle of delirium. For Thomas, the law points upward and is necessarily the law of ascent. Everything depends on reaching the upper floors. Along the way he encounters characters who both forbid him and bid him on, and each point he reaches is one to be passed, leading on and upward to the next one. In his long discussions with these characters, the law simultaneously opens and blocks his way, and each encounter throws up obstacles and points beyond itself. Thus the law invites its own transgression and transcendence, a passing beyond that leads, it would seem, to the distant origin of the law in which all these encounters would converge. But Thomas's upward trajectory is also, in another sense, a downward movement. At the end, Dom, his erstwhile companion, says to Thomas: "Your ambition was to reach the heights," but this is only to proclaim his failure. If he reaches the upper floors, it is only after falling into a vertiginous illness, after which he wakes to discover that he is treated as - and therefore effectively is - a servant. If he approaches the uppermost point of the house, brilliant but invisible, it is only because he has been ordered to clean it. If he has reached his goal, it is only in order to expire in a twilight of weakness and debility that will never quite come to an end. In this regard one might recall Samuel Beckett, who wondered whether "the ascent to heaven and the descent to hell might be one and the same. How beautiful to believe that this were so." But if this were so, then it might be that the movement of transcendence, leading into the upper regions, enjoined and forbidden by the law, is indistinguishable from a transgression, a stepping beyond, that lands one in an inexpiable hell of language.

     If there is one thing that the characters in Aminadab do, it is talk. Their endless commentaries, their unreliable and conflicting clarifications, their meandering stories and legends - especially the long and remarkable monologue placed near the center of the novel - open within the narrative a series of impassioned and delirious voices. I would hazard to say that with these voices, carried away by forces that far exceed the fictional situation of which they speak, this novel enters into its most singular and proper mode. In them, Blanchot's prose takes on the mixture of rigor and lyricism that is characteristic of his most beautiful, enigmatic, and challenging writing. At the same time, these passages make it more clear than ever that we are dealing, in some sense, with an allegorical text, for they reveal the far-reaching dimensions of the experiences being related, resonating with broad domains that are equally historical, political, religious, and of course literary. But in their indeterminacy, they evoke allegorical associations that cannot be reduced to a single alternate set of meanings or to a particular, discernible referent. They introduce a "saying otherwise" (alle-gory) that overflows the fictional parameters and exceeds all reference, threatening to resolve, literally, into nothing. If Aminadab is an allegory, it is an allegory of nothing, and Thomas is told that if he were ever to reach the upper floors, he would find nothing because there is nothing. In his ambiguous relation to the law, he strives upward toward this nothing; the voices that throw up their elaborate detours in his path also move toward the nothing that inhabits them as their most obscure compulsion. Driven beyond all figuration, they speak from an enigma located at the juncture of two questions that are repeated throughout Aminadab: Who are you? What do you want?

     If Aminadab's allegorical associations cannot be reduced to a single referent, the title itself does evoke one particular and very important set of associations. Blanchot's biographer, Christophe Bident, informs us that Aminadab was the name of Emmanuel Levinas's younger brother, who had been shot to death by the Nazis in Lithuania not long before the novel appeared. In Hebrew the name means "my people are generous" or "wandering people." These references are nowhere explicit in Blanchot's novel, in which Aminadab is not, properly speaking, a character but a legendary underground figure who is mentioned only toward the end. But one could claim that this peripheral position actually places the name and what it designates even more centrally within the texture of the novel, as though it were literally encrypted.

     In fact, it is not difficult to see at least a suggestive, if not necessarily very clear, relation between the concerns of the novel and the Jewish existence to which its title points. Here again, Blanchot's critical writings are illuminating. In an essay written twenty years later entitled "Being Jewish," Blanchot speaks of the meaning of Jewish experience in terms that resonate clearly with some of his most constant preoccupations concerning literature and literary language. In this essay, Blanchot wants to insist that the apparently negative forms of Jewish experience, such as exile and uprootedness, are not merely negative. To the questions (attributed to Boris Pasternak) "What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?" Blanchot responds: "It exists so that the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak." Emphasizing the radical exteriority of this experience and of the speech that it would teach us, Blanchot elaborates on the nature of this speech:

To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognize him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with this difference. Speech, in this sense, is the Promised Land where exile fulfills itself in sojourn since it is not a matter of being at home there but of being always Outside, engaged in a movement wherein the Foreign offers itself, yet without disavowing itself. To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all "positive value."

     If the name Aminadab means "my people are generous," Blanchot points out that "the great gift of Israel [is] its teaching of the one God." But he hastens to qualify this: "But I would rather say, brutally, that what we owe to Jewish monotheism is not the revelation of the one God, but the revelation of speech as the place where men hold themselves in relation with what excludes all relation: the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Foreign." The Distant and the Foreign cannot be equated with God as a transcendent reality occupying another superior world; they are rather names for the alterity and strangeness of what is always already in our midst, a strangeness closely bound up with language and with the partly unbridgeable relation to the other through language. To speak this strangeness (Paul Celan: "the poem has always hoped ... to speak on behalf of the strange ... on behalf of the other") is to address the otherness that makes familiarity, and speech itself, possible; it is to approach the place where we are already but which we cannot ever quite inhabit. As Blanchot puts it, in reference again to Jewish experience: "The Jewish people become a people through the exodus. And where does this night of exodus, renewed from year to year, each time lead them? To a place that is not a place and where it is not possible to reside." 

     Within the parameters of a novelistic fiction, Aminadab attempts to approach and to explore this place that is not a place. Like The Castle - whose author may well have had similar reflections in mind - it is a novel of wandering and speech, endless error and passionate commentary. Thomas is an exile with no abode who finds himself, however, in the promised land of speech. In this sense, Aminadab remains true to the exigency of exteriority and strangeness that Blanchot attributes to literary space, in which all movement is wandering and where speech bears the weight of the law - not as a legal corpus but as an ontological principle - the impossible but always shimmering mirage of a destiny and a destination. The task of literature, which Blanchot implies must in some sense "be Jewish," and which Aminadab emblematizes and enacts in its excessive allegories, is to maintain this passionate movement toward an intimate strangeness opened by language at the heart of the ordinary and familiar and to speak the language that would keep it open.