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3.37 AVERAGE
3.37 AVERAGE
i'm proud to say i didn't get it. it feels as though blanchot's prose, drenched in claustrophobia, takes perverse pleasure in condemning weary readers like myself to forever wander through the labyrinths in search of an exit. consuming this prose might very well demand the almost supernatural will expended by J in her rage against the dying of the light. perhaps in an altogether different circumstance...
"ces événements ont été très grands et ils m'ont occupé tous les jours. mais, aujourd'hui, ils pourrissent, leur histoire est morte et mortes aussi ces heures et cette vie qui alors ont été les miennes. ce qui parle, c'est la minute présente et celle qui va la suivre. à tous ceux qu'elle abrite, l'ombre du monde d'hier plaît encore, mais elle sera effacée. et le monde qui vient tombe déjà en avalanche sur le souvenir d'autrefois."
reflective
slow-paced
"[And] she stared at me, but in a strange way, as if I had been in back of myself, and infinitely far back."
Precious: sending plaster casts of a hand to a palm reader. Decadent the first time, but when it happens twice in the same novel (against all odds!) one thinks this surely must be a trope of Huysmans's (Huysmans sentenced to death the same year Blanchot sentenced to be born), or is the mechanical conveyance of plaster a conceit to avoid the dread-ful fortune-teller scene (Impossible to pull off in literature, not even by Kleist.)
Compared to the stupefied physicians of the early 20th century, overwhelmed by the pathophysiology of disease and an obligation to tonal fidelity at bedside, modern physicians are perhaps better on the margins. (Surely more accurate at prognostication than the palm read, though likely hardly less halting.)
"[Infidelity's] merit is to keep [a] story in reserve," <-- on infidelity [to a text] and bad translation, which creates another (unintended?) reading (this is another kind of death-transcendence)
On infidelity to a tone. A sad moment becomes happy, or there is a moment of comedy or delirious-transcendence ("A perfect rose"), but only to return to a greater silent despair; though Blanchot may not be aware that the sadness turned to humor turned to sadness can become (burnt) humor again at the final moment. (Compare this to the vision of 'silence beyond silence beyond silence.')
"[But] the road wants to see if the man who is coming is really the one who should be coming: it turns around to see who he is. [. . .] Unhappy is the path that turns around to look at the man walking on it;" <-- Another funny moment described as "profoundly sad." Me myself wouldn't mind if a road turned to lay its eyes on me just once.
dark
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
No rating, as this was truly the most provisional of first readings (if it had been any longer I would have set it aside to try again another time when I was more on its wavelength). With the very first words the reader is plunged into a churning whirlpool of thought, perception, & moods; I quickly resigned myself to simply be thrashed about in its currents until it abruptly ends & withdraws like a tide on a beach.
I accept I wasn't quite up to the challenge this text poses—something I always hate admitting—but will return again someday.
"It may be that all these words are a curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening."
I accept I wasn't quite up to the challenge this text poses—something I always hate admitting—but will return again someday.
"It may be that all these words are a curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening."
I'm trying to gather my thoughts about what I just read and I can't. I'm so confused. I don't even know what the author was trying to convey. Everything was extremely convoluted and at times so vague I had trouble grasping what was happening. I was so disappointed because the first half was actually rather intriguing.
The first half is narrator talking about his dying wife, J. - who strangely looked more and more like a child closer she got to death and even came back to life after her first death once. J.'s reactions to her own approaching death
.....or narrator's attitude towards her (or later as he tries to get over death) seem to justify the title.
The narrator even agreed to her once that her death was long overdue. And it was all so powerful until J. died for second time, after that though prose sustained its beauty, the story seemed to fall apart as we see Narrator trying to get over the loss of his wife through different cognitive responses - running away (choosing to live in hotels instead of his own place); being violent towards a woman to carry out frustration, indulging in self-delusion (because reality was too much) etc in a number of apparently unrelated incidences and thus some of the negative reviews here.
*
"Every minute stolen from solitude and fear was an inestimable boon for J. She fought with all her strength for one single minute: not with supplications, but inwardly, though she did not wish to admit it. Children are that way: silently, with the fervor of hopeless desire, they give orders to the world, and sometimes the world obeys them. The sickness had made a child of J.; but her energy was too great, and she could not dissipate it in small things, but only in great things, the greatest things."
.....or narrator's attitude towards her (or later as he tries to get over death) seem to justify the title.
"The only difference, and it was a large one, was that I was living in proud intimacy with terror; I was too shallow to see the misery and worthlessness of this intimacy, and I did not understand that it would demand something of me that a man cannot give. My only strong point was my silence. Such a great silence seems incredible to me when I think about it, not a virtue, because it in no way occurred to me to talk, but precisely that the silence never said to itself: be careful, there is something here which you owe me an explanation for, the fact that neither my memory, nor my daily life, nor my work, nor my actions, nor my spoken words, nor the words which come from my fingertips ever alluded directly or indirectly to the thing which my whole person was physically engrossed in. I cannot understand this reserve, and I who am now speaking turn bitterly towards those silent days, those silent years, as towards an inaccessible, unreal country, closed off from everyone, and most of all from myself, yet where I have lived during a large part of my life, without exertion, without desire, by a mystery which astonishes me now. I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It i a motionless pain that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe. I have shut myself up in a room, alone, there is no one in the house, almost no one outside, but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo."
The narrator even agreed to her once that her death was long overdue. And it was all so powerful until J. died for second time, after that though prose sustained its beauty, the story seemed to fall apart as we see Narrator trying to get over the loss of his wife through different cognitive responses - running away (choosing to live in hotels instead of his own place); being violent towards a woman to carry out frustration, indulging in self-delusion (because reality was too much) etc in a number of apparently unrelated incidences and thus some of the negative reviews here.
"As for me, I have not been the unfortunate messenger of a thought stronger than I, nor its plaything, nor its victim, because that thought if it has conquered me, has only conquered through me, and in the end has always been equal to me. I have loved it and I have loved only it, and everything that happened I wanted to happen, and having had regard only for it, wherever it was or wherever I might have been, in absence, in unhap- piness, in the inevitability of dead things, in the necessity of living things, in the fatigue of work, in the faces born of my curiosity, in my false words, in my deceitful vows, in silence and in the night, I gave it all my strength and it gave me all its strength, so that this strength is too great, it is incapable of being ruined by anything, and condemns us, perhaps, to immeasurable unhappi- ness, but if that is so, I take this unhappiness on myself and I am immeasurably glad of it and to that thought I say eternally, “Come,” and eternally it is there."
*
"People who are silent do not seem admirable to me because of that, nor yet less friendly. The ones who speak, or at least who speak to me because I have asked them a question, often seem to me the most silent, either because they evoke silence in me, or because, knowingly or unknowingly, they shut themselves up with me in an enclosed place where the person who questions them allies them with answers that their mouths do not hear."