Illegibility

Blanchot and Hegel

William S. Allen

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501376764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The philosophical significance of Maurice Blanchot's writings has rarely been in doubt. Specifying the nature and implications of his thinking has proved much less easy, particularly in reference to the key figure of G. W. F. Hegel. Examination reveals that Blanchot's thinking is persistently oriented towards a questioning of the terms of Hegel's thought, while nevertheless remaining within its themes, whichshows how rigorously he studied Hegel's works but also how radical his critique of them became. Equally, it allows for a crucial discussion of the differences between Blanchot's responses to Hegel and those of Jacques Derrida, with the implicit suggestion that in some ways Blanchot's critique of Hegel is more far-reaching than that developed by Derrida. William S. Allen demonstrates those aspects of Hegelian thought that permeate Blanchot's writings and, in turn, develops a detailed three-way analysis of Derrida, Hegel, and Blanchot. The key question around which this analysis develops is that of the relation between thought and language concerning the issue of the infinite and its legibility. Illegibility introduces a new and substantially philosophical account of Blanchot's importance, and also showshow his writings laid the ground for Derrida's workswhile developing their own uniquely challenging response to the problems of post-Hegelian thought.

1

Roussel and Lautréamont

I Torn lining

The transformation of language that occurs in Roussel’s writings requires more explanation and doing so reveals that it presents a rigorous if unexpectedly materialist version of Hegel’s notion of the speculative sentence. This literary parallel indicates a profound point about the relation of language to experience, which will be explored further through the work of Lautréamont, and particularly through Blanchot’s reading of the literal nature of metaphor, in which each of these terms are found to be catachrestic. What then becomes apparent is that in the works of both Roussel and Lautréamont a form of language emerges that is not fully legible but instead takes place as a transformation of experience, a transformation that bears its own form of thought, which occurs by way of language but is not limited to it.

Roussel is not a writer of the order of Kafka or Proust, but what he has done is of importance because it is so unusual, for in attempting to write according to what seems like an algorithmic procedure he has not only produced some extraordinary literary works but has also brought out the relation between literature and language by treating literary language as something that can be produced by a serial technique. This is to treat literature in a way that divorces it from inspiration and in doing so exposes its own poetics, as it were, a poetics apparently drawn from language, rather than being imposed on it. In order to investigate the implications of this discovery I will first outline Roussel’s literary procedure before turning to Hegel’s speculative logic of sentences, and there is perhaps no better place to start than the summary given by Foucault of a short story entitled Chiquenaude (Flick of the finger) that Roussel published in 1900:

One evening, a farcical play is put on; but it is already no longer the premiere (reproduction of a reproduction). The spectator who is going to narrate it has composed a poem that one of the characters must recite several times on stage. But the celebrated actor who has taken the role has fallen ill: an understudy replaces him. Thus, the play starts with the “verses of the understudy in the play of Red-Heel the Pirate” [les “vers de la doublure dans la pièce du Forban talon rouge”]. This twice-copied Mephisto comes on stage and recites the poem in question: a proud ballad in which he boasts of being protected from all blows by his marvellous scarlet clothing that no sword in the world can pierce. Taken with a beautiful girl, one evening he substitutes himself – a new doubling – for her lover, a highwayman and an incorrigible swashbuckler. The bandit’s fairy godmother (his clever double) uncovers the devil’s plan in the reflection of a magic mirror (that unmasks the double by repeating him); she gets hold of the enchanted clothing and sews into its lining some moth-eaten material of the same colour (a torn lining). When the bandit returns to challenge the devil to a duel (confronting his double played by an understudy), his rapier has no trouble passing through the cloth, once invulnerable but now split and separated from its power by the lining – more exactly by “the worms in the lining of the material of the strong red trousers” [“les vers de la doublure dans la pièce du fort pantalon rouge”].¹

The play begins and ends with the same phrase subtly transformed, and the story is seemingly merely the texture that joins the two together, and so despite the baffling series of reversals and duplications that take place there is a sense in which nothing happens. Instead, there is only the concatenation of a set of images that appear to return to themselves without remainder, as if the genie of the story after being released from its lamp finally returns and is once more sealed immaculately inside it. This is far from being Roussel’s most developed work, but its significance lies in the fact that it is the first to employ his procédé (device or technique), which will in his later writings become thoroughly transformed.

In these later works Roussel takes the procédé a step further by making the explanations for each of the narrative twists into narratives themselves, which are then woven into the main story. This has a disorientating effect on our reading, as the explications are equally perplexing and only seem to call for further explications, which leads to confusion over what is meant to be explanatory in the narrative and what is to be explained. Highlighting this uncertainty, the first edition of Impressions d’Afrique included a note from Roussel to advise those readers ‘not initiated into the art’ of the author to start with chapter ten, proceed to the end and then return to the beginning. In doing so, the reader is presented with the narrative chronologically and thereby given the explanations that will supposedly unravel the descriptions in the first half of the book.² This novel was Roussel’s first large-scale work to use the procédé and it emerged out of an unpublished short story called ‘Parmi les Noirs’, which was structured around the transition from its opening sentence, ‘Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard’ (the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table), to its transformed echo, ‘Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard’ (the white man’s letters on the bands of the old plunderer). Although the latter sentence describes some of the features of Impressions d’Afrique, its terms have largely been abandoned, and the first sentence has disappeared entirely, such that in the transition from short story to novel the clues to the procédé have been lost. So, while the earlier text follows the same logic as Chiquenaude, where a particular sentence opens and closes the narrative by means of the slight displacement that it carries, this mechanism has become concealed within the novel in the form of the stories that it relates. But this additional layer of explanatory concealment would not be revealed for another twenty-five years, when Roussel finally explained it in his posthumous work, Comment j’ai écrit certains de mes Livres. Up until then the novel simply presented its narrative alongside a rationale that only duplicated it with a further series of stories.

But there is more to these stories than their mechanics for, despite the conventional forms in which they appear, Roussel’s texts follow a logic of persistent absence. Chiquenaude emphasizes this logic by way of the series of deferrals and displacements that mediate the narrative of an actor who is only an understudy, playing a part in which he only repeats lines about success while impersonating someone else within the play, only to be discovered and to lose himself when the truth of his appearance is replaced with a fake lining. Thus, although there is a methodological conversion that takes place in the transformation from short story to novel, in which the procédé becomes concealed, this not only arises out of the experience of the richness of linguistic associations and resonances but also out of their withdrawal, which is to indicate that the experience of writing is double: that there was an experience of (literary) fulfilment is only evidenced by the fact that there was an experience. Its evidence lies in the mark that it leaves behind and it is this infinitesimal trace (Marcel Duchamp would call it inframince) that arises in the transition from billard to pillard, or Forban talon to fort pantalon, which means that despite initial appearances the procédé does not immaculately return to itself like the genie to the bottle but leaves a remainder, a subtle displacement. It is this shift that is the trace of the experience, as it indicates that there is no absolute return but rather a transition, an experience, if only of the most minimal kind, and this is the experience of writing, as it is only out of this experience that there is writing.

The procédé used in Chiquenaude was only the first stage for Roussel, since by starting with a word bearing two distinct meanings he could then go on to construct sentences where each subsequent word would extend the duplicity of reference by bearing further double meanings. In this way, he could move away from the transparent schema that structured his early works to a more buried network of associations, as the expanding series of references within each sentence would provide the space for a narrative to develop without the procédé having to be indicated. So, while the genesis of Impressions d’Afrique ‘consists in a rapprochement between the word billard and the word pillard’, this relation only takes place by way of the ever-expanding series of ambiguous resonances that each word reveals. For example, billard led to queue (cue/train), which might bear a chiffre (monogram/numeral); equally reprises could refer to the darning in the bandes (cushions) of the old billiard table or the melodic repetitions of a song; and the colle (glue) sticking the paper to the base of the chalk (blanc) was also a slang word for detention. These terms could then be combined into phrases by the use of the preposition à, which meant that the queue à chiffre was both the monogrammed billiard cue, and the numeral sewn onto the train of the bandit’s gown; the bandes à reprises could either be the repaired cushions of the billiard table, or the repetitions in the song sung by the old plunderer’s bands [CJE: 13–14/5–6]. It is as if beneath the ordinary scenario of an old billiard table a new and strange world has been revealed as each word now appears like a door that opens onto ambiguity. Occasionally, these phrases can be found within the text, thereby partly illuminating its mechanics, but often the chains of associations are too hidden or too long so that we are only presented with the cipher and very little hope of fathoming it and so, although Roussel does provide some clues by giving numerous examples of these lexical matrices in Comment j’ai écrit, much of what goes on remains unexplicated.

Consequently, it is possible to think of the text as operating like a loom weaving together the fabric of the narrative out of the threads of the words’ ambiguities. Viewed from one side, the fabric reveals one story, viewed from the other a different story is uncovered, but the fabric is necessarily the same: one single stream of words, yielding under a slight deviation of perspective to two utterly different narratives. In fact, such an image is used in Impressions d’Afrique, as the engineer Bedu has constructed a loom that is operated by paddles like a watermill, such that the passage of water through the paddles controls the movements of its spindles, which weave a large multi-coloured cloth embroidered with an image of Noah’s Ark [IA: 109–15/76–82]. Thus, an autonomous machine (loom/procédé) reveals by way of the currents (river/language) an image of harmony (Ark/loom) also resting on the movement of the waters. Such self-referentiality is difficult to fathom but what this indicates is the impossibility of determining a hierarchy between the different narrative levels. We might see one image and feel that we can perceive another buried beneath it, but the relation of depth is not given, for even if the images seem to refer to the procédé, this in turn simply refers back to the images it generates. Once the existence of this linguistic machinery has become apparent, it becomes difficult to say at what level its train of associations is operating, for there is a sense, driven by language’s referential function, that this concatenating logic is actually picking out the internal rhymes of objects and that language is simply a more mobile and ambiguous reflection of this objective logic. After all, why would billard and pillard be near homonyms unless there was some ontological necessity to their affinity, unless there was actually some relation between their referents? This is the logic that appears to drive the machinery of Roussel’s works, but it is necessary to be wary about such Cratylist illusions, as the way that Roussel’s writings reflect on their own origin in the procédé is simply the way that their relation to the world of things is indirectly demonstrated, for it indicates that language is not just a system of reference but bears the marks of its sonorous material generation, and thereby shows itself to be a thing. Hence there is no secret, encrypted meaning, for the designations of these words simply convey their material contingency.

The lack of a distinction between the designed and chance elements of the text helps illuminate the nature of the procédé, for although I have been describing its operations as mechanical, this is not accurate, as it is not comprised of separable parts that are causally and extraneously linked, but nor is it fully organic, since it does not generate any kind of coherent body. Rather, it fits the designation of being an artwork, insofar as it appears to have arisen naturally even though it is artificial, that is, it seems to bear a purposiveness without actually having any purpose. For the basis of the procédé lies in the affinities it uncovers between certain words and phrases, such that its operation comes simply from examining how the necessity of this contingent affinity might manifest itself. Affinity is thus construed as a problem or idea that can only be understood by putting it to work and it is in this way that it becomes the engine or heart (or genius) of the process, so that the procédé can be seen as a machine (in the abstract, non-mechanical sense) only insofar it is the means by which what is at issue in affinity can be realized. For as long as language is viewed as consisting of discrete parts that are only extraneously connected through the imposition of a syntactic order, then affinity can only be viewed as accidental and insignificant, but if language is seen as bearing its own immanent material order as a thing in the world like any other, then affinity becomes an issue whose necessity has to be examined. This is not to slip into linguistic animism since affinity is no less contingent than it is necessary, instead, its significance lies in what it conveys about the nature of the relation it expresses, rather than in any meaning stated.

This is not the end of Roussel’s procédé, which he felt it was his ‘duty’ to reveal, ‘since I have the feeling that writers of the future may perhaps be able to exploit it fruitfully’ [CJE: 11/3]. The third stage – following on from the use of near-identical sentences to frame a narrative and the subsequent doubling of phrases through a sequence of variations – was to move on to a process in which a phrase could be transformed if it was parsed differently. As was seen in the move from Forban talon rouge to fort pantalon rouge, the meaning of a phrase can be manipulated by slight changes to its vocalization, which then enabled Roussel to draw the material for his writings from all manner of found sources. For example, an advertisement for a machine called a Phonotypia yields ‘fausse note tibia’ (wrong note tibia, whence Lelgoualch’s flute in Impressions d’Afrique); the first line of a folksong, ‘J’ai du bon tabac dans ma tabatière’, becomes ‘jade tube onde aubade en mat a basse tierce’ (jade tube water aubade in matte third bass, whence the first scene shown on Fogar’s cinematic reed in Impressions d’Afrique); and a phrase from the Book of Daniel, ‘Mane Thecal Phares’, becomes ‘manette aisselle phare’ (handle armpit spotlight, whence the mechanism by which Fogar initiates his cinema) [CJE: 20–1/12–13, 23/15]. Each phrase exposes a matrix, from which the narrative then arises with the task of drawing together each of the elements mentioned. It is easy to see how the Surrealists might take this ‘evolved’ version of the procédé (as Roussel termed it) for some form of alchemy that turns base linguistic materials into the gold of poetry, thus revealing that poetic truths apparently lie buried within the objects around us. But Roussel is much less concerned with the manner of this revelation, as his offhand remarks about these transformations indicate: any of these phrases could be read in any number of alternate ways, leading to very differently parsed meanings.

And, from Duchamp to the Oulipo, it is this part of Roussel’s procédé that has undergone the most extensive elaborations – since for writers like Georges Perec, Michel Leiris, or Jacques Roubaud, this malleability is the key to a mnemotechnics, to a personal language-memory – but the arbitrary nature of these transformations means that we should not approach Roussel’s works as bearing some kind of ...