Maurice Blanchot

Most reclusive writer of the 20th century

Maurice Blanchot, writer: born Quain, France 22 September 1907; died Yvelines, France 20 February 2003.

"There exists perhaps more than one writer who, like myself, writes so as to no longer have a face," wrote Michel Foucault in L'Archéologie du Savoir (1969 – The Archaeology of Knowledge, 1972). A select band of contemporary writers belongs to this species of negationers: J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon live totally unpublic lives, a condition considered particularly scandalous in the United States, the home of self-publicity.

Slightly less extreme forms of this voluntary self-withdrawal can be found in writers of genius such as Julien Gracq and Samuel Beckett; the latter's characters are often tantalisingly detached from "normal" existence, like Krapp in the monologue Krapp's Last Tape (1959), while Breath (1970) illuminates a heap of rubbish and lasts literally for a single breath. Hermann Melville's short 1853 novel Bartleby the Scrivener is about a man who is all refusal to co-operate with life, and who politely rejects all requests with "I should prefer not to".

But the most reclusive author of the 20th century was Maurice Blanchot, a figure practically unknown to the general public, and almost untranslated in Britain. Nor is he much better known in the US, where Paul Auster has translated for Station Hill Press an exquisitely slim volume of Blanchot's short parable-like stories under the title Vicious Circles (1985) which is a selection from his Le Ressassement éternel ("The Eternal Repetition") published as long ago as 1951.

Station Hill Press is to be congratulated for the production of several other Blanchot titles, including one of his early novels, L'Arrêt du Mort, that was published in 1948 (Death Sentence, 1978). Vicious Circles is notable because of the specially written "Afterword" by Blanchot – an unusual concession – in which he describes the difficulty of writing anything or of being anyone at all:

The "genius" can only hide himself, efface himself; he cannot leave behind any marks, cannot do anything that would show him to be superior in what he does and even in what he is; the divine incognito . . .

It sounds like true modesty: something rare in writers – a real example of "the Bartleby syndrome", the noli me tangere of one who cannot help being conscious of his own superiority.

Yet the first part of Blanchot's life gave no hint of the self-effacements that were to form the background of his maturity's mysterious mutenesses. Christophe Bident, in his admirable trail-blazing work on the writer, Maurice Blanchot: partenaire invisible (1998), lifted the veil of secrecy with cautious delicacy on this "invisible partner" but there are no scandalous "revelations" such as are the life-blood of most biographical best-sellers.

His family was well-off, living in the villas of Quain in bucolic Burgundy. As a youth, he was tall, blond and skinny, as can be seen from one of the two extant photographs of him, taken while he was a student at Strasbourg, leaning on the bonnet of a car accompanied by two ladies and his philosopher friend Emmanuel Levinas. He is the picture of almost aristocratic elegance and detachment, vaguely reminiscent of the early Auden. Bident tells us that he suffered from mild tuberculosis, ate very little and was known to have had only one rather abstract "liaison" – mainly epistolary – with Denise Rollin, the mistress of his close friend Georges Bataille.

A second photograph of Blanchot dates from 1929: a sensitive, intelligent, rather haughty head, still very fin de siècle: he sports a decadently full and negligently tied bow of the fashionable kind of cravat known as a lavallière.

The only other known picture of Blanchot is a snap – one can't dignify it by the term "photograph" – taken by some ignominious paparazzo for the sensationalising literary magazine Lire in 1985. We see our mysterious author amid the banality of a supermarket parking lot: he is still tall, though bent and frail-looking, as he pushes a shopping cart towards a white Renault 5. Of course, in the days of hand-held cameras photography was not the popular sport it became later but, all the same, only to have been properly photographed twice in one's long life seems almost like backing into the limelight.

The profusion and complexity of Blanchot's writings make it hard to put one's finger on him as a man and a writer: perhaps he was in truth writing in order to obliterate his image. He began by writing novels, some of which are now issued in modest paperback editions in France – a transformation he must have surely deplored as an invasion of editorial privacy. These fictions are composed in a lucid, dreamlike prose that soon almost hypnotises the attentive reader, and both characters and situations have a plangent, disquieting irreality that recalls two of his favourite authors, Kafka and Sade, about both of whom he wrote fascinating books. In his De Kafka à Kafka (1981) he writes:

Kafka often showed that he was a genius of prompt perceptions, capable of conveying the essential in a few swift strokes. But gradually he imposed upon himself a minuteness, a gradualism of approach, a detailed precision (even in the descriptions of his own dreams) without which man, exiled from reality, is swiftly captured by distraction and the confusions of inexact imagination.

In those words, we may have an insight into whatever it may have been that impelled Blanchot into a retreat from the world at large, so diffuse, so uncontrollable, and into the more selective world of his own mind. This reminds us of Milton:

For solitude is sometimes best society,

And short retirement urges sweet return . . .

Maurice Blanchot's retreat from the world may have been the result of a strong reaction against his former right-wing connections in literature and politics, which involved a taint of anti-Semitism before and during the Nazi occupation of France. Yet he was able to hide Levinas' wife and daughter and he helped clandestines to escape to Switzerland.

For a long time after the Second World War he lived (1949 to 1957) a life apart at Eze in the countryside above Nice, where he was often ill. But then he emerged again into public activity by joining the writers opposed to the war in Algeria. He supported calls from intellectuals to display "a spirit of insubordination" and he took an active part in the student riots of 1968.

In later life, Blanchot showed openness of mind (but a certain lack of common sense) in proposing to invite Salman Rushdie to his home to take part in a debate with the Ayatollah Khomeini about the Koran and The Satanic Verses. As late as November 1992, he leapt to the defence of the Syrian poet Faraj Beyrak incarcerated for his "unsuitable" opinions since 1987.

But that was the extent of Maurice Blanchot's "sweet returns" from "short retirement". He refused to play the media game and loathed television chat shows, where even the audiences of mostly young girls ogle the camera in hopes of being "spotted" and respectable writers lend their person to the press and the camera for easy rewards of money and instant celebrity.

"There are no dead," wrote Maeterlinck in The Bluebird. In Blanchot we lose a great individualist and a great writer whose work is almost unknown but will never die. He cannot be counted among the really dead.

James Kirkup