Interjection
Topic: The Infinite Conversation

The strangely formatted section (xiii-xxiii) is almost a fictional account of an encounter narrated by another voice.  It is as if this triangulation represents the process of reading: an encounter takes place between a writer who invites and the reader who comes more or less willingly.  But it’s as if they are subconsciously aware of another presence in the room in which they meet, for they do not sit facing each other across a table, but they create an “opening,…an interval large enough that another person might consider himself their true interlocutor, the one for whom they would speak if they addressed themselves to him” (xiii-xiv).  Perhaps the narrator interposes himself between the writer and the reader.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.  The one who invites is not the writer but the narrator, the voice of the book, you might say.  And the writer is that presence that seem to pervade their subconscious.  In any case, a narrator is most definitely present and comments upon the meeting.

 

What is the nature of their weariness?  It is not world-weariness from which people seek escape in the rich and revitalizing world of the imagination.  It is a condition that compels him to invite the reader to the table, yet it keeps him from expressing himself: “what weariness makes possible, weariness makes difficult” (xiv).  So conversation begins awkwardly with a frank admission of one’s failure to communicate.  A book on some level always communicates: it would say something.  And most readers come away, thinking s/he understood what the author was trying to say; they feel satisfied at knowing that there was at least an attempt at communication.  A synergistic moment is achieved briefly between the two, when the guest asks the host, “And if you were not as weary as you say you are, what would you say to me?” (xiv).  This potential for communication makes them forget their weariness momentarily and feel “gay.”  An indeed, most readers do not get beyond the level of communication; they are not cognizant beyond consciousness.  But it is as if Blanchot wants us to think that books wish to be acknowledged for its silence, its inability to communicate, its inability to be engaging, though unfailingly cordial. 

 

The guest on the other hand appears to be in the practical world, for noticing that the host is “weary,” he recommends that he “rest” (xiv).  So the reader often fails to interpret.  Meaning is always relevant to the practical world of work and play.  But the host makes a startling claim, that the guest himself is “no less weary than [he], perhaps more so” (xiv).  But this is where things turn a bit cryptic.  Even as they are able, as in the real world, to joke about weariness—“on the whole, we get on fairly well”—one of them gets up, notices the shelves of books surrounding them, and utters the following question: “How will we manage to disappear?”  We don’t know who says this.  Though it’s probably the host, the ambiguity makes it possible that somehow, spontaneously, the guest realized why he was invited here for this conversation: to disappear.  So far, that seems to be the purpose of literature, of conversation: the disappearance of the self, the erasure of appearance.

 

But only if this disappearance would guarantee something.  Even if the reader is advanced enough to recognize this purpose, s/he is still naïve in think that “it would suffice for us” (xiv).  The host replies, “No, it would not suffice…” (xiv).  The pronoun reference is unclear, so it’s my guess that “it” refers to the aforementioned desire to disappear.  It wouldn’t suffice for what?  In literature, there is no sufficiency, no threshold  to be reached before one could say “I have read something.”  So one could say that identification with an imaginative alternate reality, though admirably selfless it is, is not the purpose of literature.  There must e a purpose behind this conversation, which must have been instigated for some reason, but this intentionality itself disappears and is already forgotten.  Nothing else remain in consciousness except this sense of weariness.  To say some more about weariness, it doesn’t seem to be exhaustion, for if it were, the host would not have desired and requested a conversation.  It seems to be a kind of self-forgetting in which the energy to go on is retained without loss, hence needing no “rest,” but in which the mind can no longer hold fast to knowledge and reality.  What is needed is not simply the disappearance of the ego, for it has already been suspended in this darkened room of literature, but a way to remain in it, to continue this meeting through conversation in the absence of the ego.

Interjection
Topic: The Infinite Conversation

After the author’s “Note” initialed by Blanchot come anonymous utterances that go on for pages.  (For the sake of convenience I will call this section “Interjection.”)  These segments are sort of bulleted with a strange notation, as if he were making a list, but you could hardly call these a list.  Rather, these seem at first, because of the “bulleted” format, a collection of random utterances.  But in fact, he’s telling a story, with each paragraph break accentuated as if to stress an unbridgeable break in time in a continuous narrative.  In any case, I could only digest the first paragraph before I had to start making sense of it in writing. 

The tone is inviting; an anonymous person is welcomed by an “aged man” and finds himself in a “conversation [which] began long ago” (xiii).  A certain “kind of benevolence…emerges” when they realize that this conversation will be the last.  In their conversation, they expect “[t]he event that [they] promised to evoke today.”  And this event is incongruous with the benevolence achieved between them.  But this event, a “confirmation,” never comes, for it was given in the immemorial past; and “this is the condition of their conversation.”

Of course, no writer is ever privy to this conversation, this infinite conversation which knows no beginning and will confirm nothing in the present.  The writer attains a certain “proximity” to this conversation.  In fact, s/he may even be immersed in this conversation, or the work.  But nothing will ever emerge from it.  The book s/he writes will not be a translation of the conversation.  The book is a “violence of a beginning” (SL 23) that breaks the writer off from the work: “The writer belongs to the work, but what belongs to him is only a book, a mute collection of sterile words, the most insignificant thing in this world” (SL 23).  One ought simply to wait, but waiting can be difficult, for we are impatient and anxious when we lose our bearing, our sense of self, our identity. 

Readers (and writers) can be divided into two groups, one that seeks entertainment and the other that seeks meaning.  By entertainment, I do not simply mean amusement but the pleasure one derives from recognizing what is familiar, the reality in which we experience life.  This we find “entertaining,” for it confirms the reality of our experience and the knowledge we gain from it.  We become more and more knowledgeable about the reality we live in by reading literature that shows more and more of it.  We find the diversity of life pleasurable.  But then there are those who desire to construct a new meaning from literature; they even seek to erase familiarity in order to find or create a new sensibility, a new way of organizing knowledge and interpreting experience.  Yet they both have one thing in common: they seek a confirmation of constructed realities.  Reality, whether familiar or transformative, is still a construct, a conceptual architecture that enables us to dwell in the realm of cognizable experiences.  No matter how or why we read, we seek confirmation that literature doesn’t really give us but we think it does.  To us it is intimate, rewarding, fun; and we feel comforted somehow—at least I do when I finish a book I like. 

But none of this has to do with literature, which at the end of the day is cold comfort.  If the interlocutors taking part in the infinite conversation are “benevolent” to each other, they are to us rather “neutral,” even discomforting, for they put us into question.  They interrogate us, not with questions that have answers but with questions as questions, expecting no answers.  Under this kind of questioning, we have no recourse to answers, either familiar or transformative.  Simply put, we don’t read literature for answers to “big” questions.  If we find constructive concepts or organizing themes to apply to our experience, that’s not because literature intended and expressed such notions.  We’ve simply turned literature into a magical mirror on the wall.  Literature is forbidding; it’s an absolute refusal.  And unless we come to realize this while reading a book we haven’t read it properly or the book was poorly written, in fact, not “written” at all. 

It seems paradoxical: how does this kind of forbidding conversation be “benevolent”?  What kind of benevolence refuses to regard us the reader, or the writer, for that matter?  In fact, this is not paradoxical at all.  What has always attracted me about literature is its disinterested impersonality.  It is an absence of prejudice that is endemic to having a specific personality or character.  It says nothing to me, nothing about me; and I want to be in the presence of this kind of silence forever.  This silence, this indifference, is benevolence.

Doty's "Demolition"
Topic: The Infinite Conversation

One cannot write about reading without reading.  So I picked this poem, and the choice is not an innocent coincidence.  I know of Blanchot’s other book, The writing of the Disaster,” and the title of Doty’s poem, as well as the title of the collection of his poems (My Alexandria), resonates with “disaster.”  So when reading I subconsciously listen for echoes. 

The practice, and perhaps even the idea, of reading changes when one feels what Blanchot calls the “exigency,” or the demand, of writing.  For instance, after reading the poem aloud twice and getting the gist of it, I was suddenly seized by the opening lines’ emotional interest: “The intact façade’s now almost black/ in the rain; all day they’ve torn at the back/ of the building,…” (ll.1-3).  The irresistible impulse to write seizes hold of my hand with the pen and I write words that I never would have used until now, that is, these are not my words of self-expression, but what I’m about to write has everything to do with me the writer I have just now become.  All that’s left of the building is the façade.  It stands inert, without resistance, without expression; it’s simply “intact.”  The backhoe hollows out the building from the rear slowly.  The tireless backhoe knows no giving up as it patiently claws away at the crumbling building.  Its claw finally rises triumphant over the “three stories of columns and cornices,” and “the crowd…cheer” (ll.6-7).  I stop reading and think, as well as write, about this.  As a reader I had been active, but now, I stand passively, much like the building, as this image begins to replace my consciousness.  Word by word, like each scoop of broken concrete bits, my writing replaces me, and I yield to the demand of this image that demands writing.  Why do they cheer at the death of a building at the hands of a merciless, Godzilla-like machine hacking away at it like a cancer eating away at a helpless body?  The building is something of a monument: “‘the oldest concrete structure/ in New England,’ the newspaper said” (ll.3-4).  So the crowd came out to mark a momentous occasion that will soon erase itself—the violent mark the backhoe leaves is an erasure.  What writing does is leave a mark or trace of an erasure, even of its own.  It is merciless against its own ambition to be a lasting monument.  What I’m writing now, demanded by an image in the poem, has nothing to do with me; in fact, it requires my complete submission to the image and the writing it demands.  This is how one writes.  I leave no monument to myself; in fact I destroy the monument I wanted to build through an “interpretation,” the completion of a reading.  I could not complete my reading, for I was interrupted by writing.  This demolition of monumental self and history (the building was almost a century old) is somehow worth witnessing and even cheering.  This amoral hedonism is almost reprehensible, for we cheer the spectacle, forgetting almost willfully the tragedy of death.  We distance ourselves from the violence done not only to the building but to those who had businesses there.  We disregard our awareness of violence and suffering.  The poem tells us that “[w]e love disasters that have nothing to do/ with us” (ll.13-14).  Maybe so, because that’s what we want to believe, some reasonable insight that explains our psychology.  The crowd that takes amoral pleasure in this demolition consists of society’s rejects: those “out of work, unemployable, or academics” (l.18).  They are alienated from, or in the case of academics alien to, constructive work.  They are not part of a sturdy social architecture that still remains standing erect.  They’ve been “ruined;” they are the broken pieces of a “building” that once stood.  They do not cheer out of voyeuristic pleasure from a safe building across the street, nor do they cheer out of sadistic pleasure at watching something else get destroyed.  No one can really know why they, or we, cheer at witnessing the demise of something that’s been a part of the architectural, and indeed social, fabric of a town.  It’s not like watching a Greek tragedy, indulging in a cathartic sorrow, and cheering only afterwards.  Sorrow is repressed in this cheering crowd.  It’s also not like cheering at professional wrestling, where the violence is not real and it indeed “has nothing to do with us,” does not touch us.  They cheer at the violence that has been done and is being done to them.  This makes little sense, and no interpretation can satisfactorily drive away the mystery temporarily.  We do not believe what the poet himself tells us—it has no meaning, and no authority; it’s just another futile speculation.  The poet can, if he is strong enough like the crowd, take hedonistic pleasure at the poem’s meaningless, the unanswerable question chipping away at its architecture of meaning.  It requires an absolute distance between the self (the reader and the writer) and the people to whom things are done in literature.  The absolute distance erases me, and I simply become the reader/writer completely beholden to the service of the image/writing.

Here I exercise mastery out of sheer exhaustion from work and stop writing for now.  But surely my reprieve is only temporary, for the passive, inert, disappearing image never truly lets go.

Notes
Topic: The Infinite Conversation

After the epigraphs, MB provides an undated note to the book.  Of course, it’s the very concept of the “book” which this book attempts to unsettle, in so far as the conventional notion of the “book” can be defined, in contradistinction to language or writing, as an “indicat[ion] of order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the promise of a communication that would one day be immediate and transparent” (xii).  Writing is the unknowable other that constitutes the substratum of all kinds of “books” or “unities,” such as poetry, the novel, the essay, criticism, etc.  These identifiable and distinguishable forms of writing attempt primarily to communicate thought and make it as “immediate and transparent” as possible.  In so attempting, it forgets that writing is a creature that lacks identity.  It’s not because it lends itself to an infinite number of interpretations.  Rather, it is because writing indicates an absence of thought.  It cannot be said to exist as a thing to be apprehended: it simply questions rational apprehension by revealing itself as the emptiness at the core of reason.  So one question I have is, aside from the question about what precisely this absence is, how this writing, which is more than using a particular language according to its grammatical rules, came about as writers “innocently” practices all forms of expression and communication?  How did writing become separated in our consciousness from the recognizable forms of writing with their unique conventions?  Communication and expression, as well as defining the conventions of the literary forms, are constructive activities.  We build not only art but also civilizations with laws and morals.  But writing undermines all this, and in fact, this is the all important task of writing, to affirm nothingness at the core of all we know and all we have built: “Writing thus becomes a terrible responsibility.  Invisibly, writing is called upon to undo the discourse in which, however unhappy we believe ourselves to be, we who have it at our disposal remain comfortably installed.  From this point of view writing is the greatest violence, for it transgresses the law, every law, and also its own” (xii).  This undoing, by the way, is not a deconstructive undoing, though obviously quite similar.  Deconstruction would not claim to be violent, I think.  It’s more ethical to denounce violence, according to reason.  But Blanchot does not renounces it; in fact he equates writing with violence.  This equation effectively destroys ethics.  If we condemn violence, we condemn writing; and we return smugly back to our comfortable world of civilization.  What is terrible about writing is that we must take responsibility for doing necessary violence.  This is the ultimate task of literature, of “books” we read.  This book destroys books, including itself.  It is not anything but a formless conversation conducted in writing about writing.  And so reading from beginning to end is in fact to fall into the rhythm of undoing.  Reading a novel from beginning to end is a way of undoing reading.  Of course, how do I talk about this through a specific novel, say a Trollope I happen to be reading at present?

Reflection
Topic: The Infinite Conversation

Time for some reflection.  There was too much to digest in the title and the epigraphs, so let me take a breather.

How does the neutrality of the other influence the practice and the meaning of reading?  If I read with my familiar voice I take pleasure in indulging in the emotional drama, unexpected turns in plot, ethical dilemma, and artful use of language.  Yet all of this is of no concern in reading literature, oddly enough.  What seems to matter is this other neutral thing that cannot be read.  Perhaps this neutral other is a reader too.  When this other reads, s/he reads nothing literally.  What does it mean to read nothing while at the same time creating a mental reality?  Understanding this “activity” of reading nothing seems crucial to understanding the ordinary activity of reading that we are so familiar with. 

Thus reading literature involves a dual activity: on the one hand, we create an image of reality which gratifies us; but on the other hand, we are awakened to the nothingness into which reality disappears.  (This is no activity at all, of course, and Blanchot’s “The Two Versions of the Imaginary” is “illuminating” on the point about duality.)  So, when reading literature, the question so much isn’t about interpreting reality from multiple perspectives (all good readers have an ear for platitudes). But more seriously, reading is also not about examining with a critical mind the productive and thought-provoking discrepancy between what we assume with credible reason to be reality and the more difficult “truth” we are persuaded to consider in literature.  The question also isn’t so much about the ultimately didactic function of literature that teaches us to question our individual senses of reality we develop through experience and reasoning and to consider alternate possibilities for understanding reality.  Rather, reading literature concerns first of all the possible connection between what we experience in literature and the nothingness (the neutrality, the otherness) against which this fictional reality we’ve created is seen and apprehended. 

In reading then, we simply dismiss reality as that which never existed, and this is probably the most difficult argument to be convinced of, that there is no reality to which literature is related.  Since there is no reality to be interpreted, reading literature also has nothing to do with interpretation, however one wants to cling to this precious concept.  There is nothing to be “seen” and be described from any perspective.  So, in the absence of the things to be seen (and I’m sure Dr. Johnson is looking for a rock to kick in heaven while Berkeley is sticking his tongue out at him) how does one “see” images?  That is, how does one imagine in vacuum?

In my humble opinion, Blanchot is more radical than Derrida, who deconstructs reason, or philosophy.  Deconstruction is, I think, always a deconstruction of something.  But for Blanchot, there is no image of anything; there is only the image couched in nothingness.  Blanchotian reading doesn’t require an object; it requires the absence of objects.  And without objects is no desire, hence “the neutrality.”  Maybe this is why Blanchot is so interested in Simone Weil (I would be more certain if I could remember what I read years ago).  She was full of desire; yet she renounced God, the object of her desire—she refused to join the Catholic church.  This desire without object is very much like the image without reality—or in my case, work without profit (“work without hope,” as Coleridge would say).

Epigraphs
Topic: The Infinite Conversation

There are five epigraphs, one from a poet, the others from a philosopher, though words like “poet” and “philosopher” would hardly identify Mallarme and Nietzsche.  But maybe a distinction is after all suggested: the philosopher comes across as more loquacious than the poet who, since M’s quotation sits atop those by N, engenders so much commentary and conversation with his single utterance.

“This mad game of writing”—these are M’s words extracted by MB.  This is not a complete sentence—it lacks a predicate.  So it’s unmoored from all that would give it meaning, the substructure into which the topic is fitted.  Simply announcing a topic is more than enough to start a conversation, or at least a stream of commentary by a mad professor type.

To briefly summarize the epigraphs, this illogical play of words is accomplished only by a plurality of voices divided mainly into the familiar self and the strange other; but these two seem indistinguishable from each other: “Because the one who says it is always the other,” says N.  The voice of the other in the ego sounds unsettlingly “neutral,” and it seems to recall the fear of darkness from which clear language thought it escaped from.  But, and this here is my interpretation, once you stop fearing madness, using language is a “fine,” jovial activity very much like dancing: “With [speaking] man dances over and above all things,” again says N.  (Can you imagine N dancing while spouting proto-deconstructive philosophy at the same time?)

I suppose the most important plurality of speech would occur between self and other, but this would in no way reduce the conversation to an endless monologue.  Only those who understands conversation, and plurality, in the most conventional and common sensical way would fail to grasp the meaning of this split between self and other.  Only this split would ensure that what “I” say remains always open to question, to self-questioning.  “Why two instances of speech to say the same thing?” asks N, and his answer, as I’ve already quoted above, is “[b]ecause the one who says it is always the other.”  These “instances,” it appears, do not indicate two separate utterances, either a repetition or a paraphrase of each other, but one utterance with two simultaneous resonances.  I speak as both myself, as I understand myself, and the strange other.  And though I may speak with inflections and emotions, giving my utterance a tone, it comes back to me in a toneless voice, forcing me to question my own sense of self: “The neutral, the neutral, how strangely this sounds to me,” says N.  How can “I” be neutral?  That would mean that I am stripped of personality, for my utterance, my self-expression, has at its heart some quality of nonbeing, of non-essence.  Words are said with and without a desire to express and to communicate—is this what MB means by conversations?  Who knows?  But let’s enjoy it, this illogical plurality, and be (all too) human.

Topic: The Infinite Conversation

To read a printed book from the very beginning to the very end, from the title and epigraphs to the afterword added much later after the first publication, would seem foolish to most, especially now when online publishing is all the rage.  But in fact, to read in such a linear manner is to read out of order.  The new-fangled idea of nonlinearity in reading hypertexts online is not new at all but what we’ve been doing all along since people began to “read.”  True, when one reads from beginning to end—and how else would you read a poem or a novel, but I’m for now discussing other types of writing usually broken up into separate segments of thought—one does conform to conventional structures of organized thought.  But conventions are mere convenient tools for organization, but for those who fail to see formality as informal conventions are evil instruments of thought control.  So what happens when one reads structured thought in the conventional way, following the suggested order of reading given to us in the form of a printed book and in the table of contents?

I begin with the title of a book I’ve chosen for this experiment: The Infinite Conversation by Maurice Blanchot, translated into and forwarded in English by Susan Hanson.  “Conversation” is as good word as any to describe Blanchot’s writings.  For those unfamiliar with him, and I can’t imagine anyone choosing to read this book without knowing anything about his works, the word “conversation” in the title would be puzzling, for it’s impossible to categorize it in an academic discipline.  And what short of academic, intellectual practice is having a “conversation”?  Is it criticism? Theory? Review? Systematic philosophy? Empirical analysis?  It sounds so vague, informal, and not at all academic until one realizes that “conversation” is precisely what intellectuals do and have been doing since the beginning of more or less formal, disciplined, philosophical inquiry: Socrates’ dialogues with his disciples.  Of course, the adjective “infinite” would suggest that this kind of conversation has no origin—Socrates began in medias res like the poets.  And the article “the”?  Well, it’s originally French, the English translator retained it to perhaps imply further that only an intellectual conversation, a conversation that searches thought for questions and answers, has the stamina and the wherewithal to forgo origin and attain infinity.  As I read, I no doubt will discover other connotations of the words in the title.

Beginning always feels it ought to be capital.  Momentous.  We are told to spark an interest.  But I think the ancient Greeks knew better than to believe in a new start, for it feels jarring.  It's easier to pretend that something's been happening and we have now just become aware of it.  It's not a random point of entry.  Once you "begin," so to speak, you create a fixed temporal line from the past to the future.  I suppose that's what beginning in medias res means, to create temporal contexts to which it is related.  By "beginning" in medias res you don't create the story--that may be too presumptuous.  Rather, you have found a way into a story that's been waiting to be told.  Like birth.  You don't create life by your own birth.  Rather, you are allowed to become part of an all encompassing life that's been going on for some time now.  Life had been waiting for your entry, your individual mark, however small and faint.  What are the things in the middle of which this blog has been dropped?   Like the day which begins in the dark, this blog begins in the middle of dark cyberspace and will probably remain in a fixed location for a long time, much like the earth wheeling about in actual infinite space.  But one thing at a time, one post at a time, my story will weave a tiny speck in a distant corner of life until it's too late to start over.