Noir and Blanchot

Deteriorations of the Event

William S. Allen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781501384639
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501358920
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

In dark or desperate times, the artwork is placed in a difficult position. Optimism seems naïve, while pessimism is no better. During some of the most demanding years of the 20th century two distinctive bodies of work sought to respond to this problem: the writings of Maurice Blanchot and American film noir. Both were seeking not only to respond to the times but also to critically reflect them, but both were often criticised for their own darkness. Understanding how this darkness became the means of responding to the darkness of the times is the focus of Noir and Blanchot, which examines key films from the period (including Double Indemnity and Vertigo) alongside Blanchot's writings (particularly his 1948 narrative Death Sentence).

What emerges from this investigation is the complex manner in which these works disrupt the experience of time and the event and in doing so expose an entirely different mode of material expression.

1

Dark time

What is the status of the work of art in desperate times? The fictional and critical writings of Blanchot, much like the films noir coming out at the same time, are, however obliquely, both an expression of and a commentary upon the situations in which they arose. Thus, what is significant about these works is not just their darkness and strangeness but the fact that these qualities partly come from the obscure material aspects of their situation, which leads to a different mode of experience in their audiences. And so, as this mode derives from the pressure of the times, it is as political as it is aesthetic, thereby indicating how the times can give rise to works that reflect the times, a demand raised most pointedly in Hölderlin’s question, ‘what are poets for in meagre times?’ in which its interrogative seems to become its own answer. While these political and aesthetic aspects are not merged into each other, it can be shown that the unique aesthetic form of film noir, for example, is its own political interrogation, just as is the case for Blanchot’s narratives. But this interlinking also shows that a more extrinsic association of politics and aesthetics in the work fails to the extent that it does not recognize this prior intimacy, which then affects how we think about that pre-eminent political and aesthetic problem in such desperate times: the event. It is thus of considerable interest that the relation of politics and aesthetics in Blanchot’s writings (much like film noir, as will be found) does not take place through the revelatory institution of an origin but via the rather more ambivalent form of a chiaroscuro, in which each aspect negates the other without eliminating or assimilating it, since the negation of politics by aesthetics, and vice versa, leads not to a mere emptiness or indistinction but to a shattering, stuttering reversal from one side to the other, in which is found the contingency of the times.

Hölderlin’s elegy ‘Brot und Wein’ was written in the winter of 1800–1, after his separation from Susette Gontard. It is written along the lines of a classical elegy with nine verses that fall into three sections, and at the beginning of the final section is the verse that ends with the question cited earlier:

Indessen dünket mir öfters Meanwhile often it seems to me

Besser zu schlafen, wie so ohne better to sleep than to be without

Genossen zu seyn, comrades as we are,

So zu harren und was zu thun so to wait, and what to do and say

indeß und zu sagen, in the meanwhile

Weiß ich nicht und wozu Dichter I don’t know and what are poets for

in dürftiger Zeit? in meagre times?

Aber sie sind, sagst du, wie des But they are, you say, like the wine

Weingotts heilige Priester, god’s holy priests

Welche von Lande zu Land Who drifted from land to land

zogen in heiliger Nacht. in holy night.

The poem was dedicated to Hölderlin’s friend, the novelist Wilhelm Heinse, and it is his words that form the answer in the final lines. That Hölderlin was unconvinced by this response is confirmed by the fact that this verse was entirely rewritten in the following years as he continued to revise the poem, leaving in its place a more severe and enigmatic turning to the earth and to the night.¹

Although this revision is highly significant for understanding Hölderlin’s changing thoughts, and his concomitant move away from the strictures of classical poetry, these lines were nevertheless written, here, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, although they were not fully published until its very end. It is from this situation that Heidegger will configure his epochal reading of Hölderlin, for which this question will prove instrumental, but it is more important for present purposes to consider the broader stakes to which Hölderlin’s question refers, which remain outstanding. The word that Hölderlin uses, dürftig, has a range of meanings (poor, meagre, thin, wretched, humble, scanty, weak, needy) that all point to a lack, and the lack he is referring to is onto-theological, which is to be understood as a fundamental lack of authority or law; there is no centre or ground that can orientate people and in which art could find its raison d’être. That this situation still pertains is the mark of modernity, but it is part of the double-edged ambivalence of this situation that it is not only the case that we are in a time of need but that time itself is poor or weak. For the lack of authority that Hölderlin has detected also unravels the flow of history and, as his later works will begin to explore, this leads to what he will call the categorical turning, the turning back of time upon itself. This time of darkness is thus also a dark time, one obscured in or by itself, which has as much impact on the historical path of the political, on the revolutionary event, as it has on the work of art and its artists.

It is worth looking more closely at what Hölderlin says here, for twice he remarks that this time of need exists in the meanwhile. For something to be in the meanwhile is for it to exist between events, and removed from them, and it is perhaps as such that time is poor or weak, since it would lack substance insofar as it is uneventful. It is thus that it is a mean time in all senses of the word. If time itself is impoverished, then this is because it is unable to accomplish itself and instead has become empty or idle; it falls into neglect and becomes prey to other forces. The practice of revolution is in this way metaphysical as it seeks to rescue the time of the event, to put time to work again and prevent it from collapsing under the pressure of its own deterioration. But doing so requires recognition of this decay before there can be any kind of intervention that would seek to rectify it. Hence, the revolution is intrinsically related to this mean time as it is derived from it, and the same is true of the work of art, such that it is also subject to this deterioration of time, the effects of which are distinct from any interiorization or exteriorization and instead concern the dissolution of terms and events. This is not to privilege the decay of time but to realize that through it the work of art is exposed to its own disruption in which another mode of experience is found, from which any thought of change must come.

In Marxist thought the idea of permanent revolution denotes a specific problem in the development of socialism. First with Marx himself, and then later and more substantially with Trotsky, permanent revolution is concerned with the problem of how the revolution should proceed given the differing situations to be found in different countries and at different times, as well as the problem of how revolutionaries should engage with existing class structures, parties and ideologies. To a large degree permanent revolution describes the absolute lack of compromise that revolutionaries should take towards these existing structures, as well as to the idea of allowing capitalism to fall into decline before socialism can emerge. Trotsky’s thought on the latter point is most distinctive, as he insisted on the possibility of a socialist revolution even in situations where capitalism had not fully emerged, on the basis that it embeds itself, with this uncompromising attitude, in the pre-existing structures, and takes advantage of what can be gained by internationalizing the revolution so that it is not limited to its local conditions.

It is thus that the revolution can be understood as permanent, for in its lack of restraint it occurs continuously and throughout society, regardless of any structures or borders. Aside from this pervasive lack of compromise, I will not be discussing permanent revolution but will be seeking to understand what occurs in thought and language when history is subjected to such an imperative. This is not to abdicate from the sociopolitical but to find that which is captured by the idea of permanent revolution that is not part of Marxist doctrine. What is fundamental to Trotsky’s innovation is the notion of a mode of historical change that does not occur through a series of structured stages, and so can apply to art just as much as it does to politics.² But in departing from this conventional model to essay a notion of radical, thorough and continuous change permanent revolution almost becomes an impossible thought, if it is not rendered banal, insofar as it holds a paradoxical combination of permanence and revolution. And when it is understood that whatever passes by the name of revolution involves both negation and desire, destruction and creation, then the implications of this change, once it is made permanent, are profoundly challenging. A notion of history as constant negation and desire presents considerable difficulties for thought and language, but it also opens up a relation to such convulsions that history, politics and aesthetics attempt to conceal through their formations. Understanding what happens when this relation of form and rupture is inverted makes it possible to understand the desire that revolution bears, whether it is political or artistic, and what is at stake in its demands.

The sense that there is a mode of time that is neither linear nor circular is found in situations of rupture, which is also the form by which thought or language responds to these moments. What is then problematic is the relation between this anomalous mode of time and these condensed and fragmentary forms, which in responding to this breach also expose it further. To begin I will look at how Blanchot discusses this problem in relation to the works of René Char, where the experience of this anomaly is marked by a form of writing that conveys the rupturing of worldly order, before moving on to his 1948 narrative L’Arrêt de mort, in which this breakdown undermines the very possibility of the event as that which happens, with all that this implies for the ‘moment’ of death. Blanchot’s rethinking of the event thus leads to a revision of the nature of historical change as well as of the work of art. In their place a materialist thought emerges that is based in contingency, in a time of error, of accidents and mistakes, where occurrences are strange and opaque and in which time comes to feel like it is following a path that is inevitable or repetitive but that is simply a result of its contingency. These ruptures and deviations may become blind spots for thinking, but they also lead into a time that is unpredictable, where chance emerges in a thought of alienation. It is for this reason that I will examine two key noir films, Double Indemnity and Vertigo, for what they indicate about the nature of a world constituted by such breakdowns and accidents and its social and personal consequences. Finally, I will turn to two studies of historico-material disruption, Béla Tarr’s film Damnation and Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, which delineate the almost impossible demands on thought in encountering this negativity.

An example will help to show how the different aspects of this reading come together: when Marcel Carné’s Le Quai des brumes was released in May 1938 it was strongly criticized by Jean Renoir, who accused it of being propaganda for fascism. This outburst seemed out of character for Renoir and he later tried to retract it, and even though the film was very well received it attracted many similar comments. While other considerations may have played a role in Renoir’s reaction, the explanation he gave for condemning the film so robustly, which was reflected by other critics, was that it portrayed a society that was weak, corrupt and fragmented and thus open to the influence of fascist demagoguery; indeed, in his words, it seemed to need a dictator. France was enduring a very confused and unstable time in 1938, and already it seemed as though the spectre of defeat was hanging over it, as if the disaster were prefiguring itself, to such a degree that, as Georges Sadoul reported, representatives of the Vichy regime later claimed that if France was defeated it was because of Le Quai des brumes.³ It is evidence of the disturbing quality of the film that it provoked such comments, and many factors contributed to this sense of unease – from Jacques Prévert’s poetic rendition of Pierre Mac Orlan’s morbid novel, to the gloomy camerawork and set designs of Eugen Schüfftan and Alexandre Trauner, alongside Maurice Jaubert’s funereal score and a cast of characters who are either wretched, despicable or doomed. The scenario proceeds as if in a dream and yet is just as firmly anchored in a world of crime and decay so that it is not possible to know if the former arises from the latter or vice versa (which is exactly what is at issue in Mac Orlan’s notion of the ‘fantastique social’). It is this uncertainty that appears to have provoked Renoir’s condemnation, but it is important to see that it is the focus of the film. In dark times it is not possible simply to assert the social possibilities of hope, since these are unconvincing, but nor is it acceptable simply to portray their apparent impossibility. In place of this antinomy, it is necessary to look closely at the fabric of what is historically and materially current and explore both its complexities and its implications, and to do so without any assumptions as to their possibilities. This leaves the situation open to the worst, but such a possibility can never be ignored, but nor should it displace the sense in which the interval in which it may arise is also one in which the materiality of time is exposed, which is not an experience of its possibilities as much as of that which remains outside history, and is elusive or resistant to its movements. Only in becoming aware of this exteriority can any sense of historical change be thought, even if it becomes that in which thought is exposed to its own disaster.

The extent of this ambivalence can be gauged by the way Le Quai des brumes was also condemned by Lucien Rebatet, who was one of the most sophisticated and widely read critics of the 1930s but who was also violently fascist and anti-Semitic. Although Rebatet was largely dismissive of the films that went by the name of ‘poetic realism’, because of their supposed decadence, he was equally aware of what made these films distinctive, and he was one of the first (and one of the most enthusiastic) critics to use the term ‘noir’ in a consistent way to describe (and condemn) these films. But what is of considerable interest is that the language he uses to criticize Le Quai des brumes is also used in his response to Blanchot’s first novel, and although this could be adduced to the fact that his political views necessitated a similar vocabulary in relation to all cultural products of which he disapproved, it is highly significant that the same parallel would be marked by Sartre a few years later, when he would dismiss Blanchot’s writings with the same criticisms that he would use to condemn Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941). That writers from such opposing political positions could find themselves in agreement in relation to these works is very suggestive and points to the profound political-aesthetic uneasiness that they aroused. It is the aim of this book to examine how and why this disturbance arises and what it may be exposing that appears to disrupt the possibility of historico-political positivism.

Examining what Rebatet writes about these works is thus very revealing as his language clearly delineates their anomalous nature. The ‘sins’ of Le Quai des brumes, in his words, lie in its vagueness: we do not learn much about who the characters are or what they feel, everything is wrapped in the mists of its title and, although he appreciates the visual deployment of this motif, the vagueness of the characters only confirms their inconsequentiality, which is compounded by a poetic script that he does not hesitate to condemn on the basis of Prévert’s Surrealist background. However, as has often been noted, there is a sleight of hand here, as Rebatet emphasizes this vagueness in order to dismiss the film as inconsequential; for instance, he describes the film’s prologue in which the characters gather at a remote hut on the coast and then complains th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 Dark time
• 2 Ruptures and deviations
• 3 Chiaroscuro
• 4 Between deaths
• 5 Damnation
• 6 Rewriting history
• NOTES
• INDEX
• Copyright Page