The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays

In their ongoing effort to bring the mysterious, influential French thinker and writer to the attention of American readers, the publishers at Station Hill have, since 1978, employed uniformly excellent translators (Paul Auster, Lydia Davis and Robert Lamberton) to turn out eight of Blanchot's books (The Madness of the Day; The Infinite Conversation; etc.). This volume combines six of Blanchot's works of fiction along with a gaggle of essays of literary criticism. Readers seeking the feel of his fiction in this collection should start with the novel Death Sentence, whose structure depends (like that of a musical work) not on any one story but on two series of stories--one of women who are ill, the other of apartments. Blanchot's narrator becomes the point of mysterious convergence in which death and architectural space receive a lover's linkage. Another work, Thomas the Obscure, offers a more conventional plot--a man at a resort has an affair with a woman--but the story is ornamented with extraordinary hallucinatory episodes: Thomas gets quite literally stared down by a book he is reading. In The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me the fundamental conditions of dialogue are allegorized in a series of odd remarks exchanged between the narrator and a perhaps imaginary companion. Blanchot takes his literary orientation from his friend Georges Bataille, from Lautr amont and from Rimbaud. His fiction writing dispenses with character and action to explore philosophical mysteries, trafficking in the nature of their inexpressibility; as a fiction writer, Blanchot is, above all, a great philosopher. It's no surprise, then, that his obsession with language and incommunicability is best understood in his much-celebrated essays. Those here (mostly from Station Hill's ealier collection, The Gaze of Orpheus) are reminders of Blanchot's lucid intelligence: the same readers baffled by his fiction will find him a brilliant reader of literature and a patient guide through the labyrinths of dread, death and language. His insights into Kafka, Rilke and Proust are not to be missed. (Apr.)