The Work of Fire: woops and version read Blanchot

[version]

We've never read him. We're going to read him. Has anyone read him?

 

[woops]

i didn't know until just now that he wrote some novels might be a good way in

 

[version]

i didn't know until just now that he wrote some novels might be a good way in

I'm reading Death Sentence right now. It's only 80 pages.

" ... the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them."

 

[woops]

I'll have a look for that tomorrow

 

[jenks]

I started reading a bit based on some stuff Andrew Gallix had written about him in Unwords. Problem was I got the Blanchot reader and it’s just enormous and rather dispiriting - I put it down and haven’t picked it up since. I should give it another go.

 

[version]

I can see why people compare him to Beckett. The one I'm reading kicks off with the narrator addressing the reader and immediately establishes some sort of suspicion of writing. He talks about a crime or event, but talks around it and says there are ten words to say about it and that he thinks now is the time to say those ten words but that his words have been shrinking and crumpling away from the truth whenever he's tried to write them.

I'm reminded of Borges a little too in that you've got this mysterious event or case being detailed that seems to warp the things around it and resist description.

 

[woops]

not found a copy yet

 

[version]

not found a copy yet

If you don't mind reading on a device...

 

[woops]

If you don't mind reading on a device...

who did the translation ???

 

[version]

who did the translation ???

Don't worry, it's Lydia Davis not Paul Auster.

 

[version]

The most French thing I've found in French writing is the incessant contradiction and reversal. I'm reading a book of his essays now too - 'The Gaze of Orpheus' - and in the first essay he says things like the writer is important because he has nothing to say. That sort of thinking runs through so much of French literature, or at least the French literature I've read. You get it in Debord too when he says the only truth in spectacular society is the false, and in Baudrillard when he says things like he has too much respect for reality to believe in it.

This is a line I liked from the Blanchot...

"It seems comical and miserable that in order to manifest itself, dread, which
opens and closes the sky, needs the activity of a man sitting at his table
and forming letters on a piece of paper."

 

[woops]

A book about nothing - Flaubert's description of Madame Bovary

 

[woops]

and nabokov says in an interview the word reality should always be in inverted commas

 

[version]

I started reading a bit based on some stuff Andrew Gallix had written about him in Unwords. Problem was I got the Blanchot reader and it’s just enormous and rather dispiriting - I put it down and haven’t picked it up since. I should give it another go.

Is it the Station Hill one?

 

[0bleak]

and nabokov says in an interview the word reality should always be in inverted commas

Ah, that must be the writer who the character Elliot West was referencing in Amityville 3-D from 1983.

 

[jenks]

Is it the Station Hill one?

Yes it is. I’ve got it back off the shelf. I will attempt some tomorrow.

 

[version]

I'm reading Death Sentence right now. It's only 80 pages.

" ... the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them."

Finished this in a daze this morning. Genuinely strange book. It is like Beckett, but there's something more elegant and less eccentric about it, a certain gothic flavour and none of the scatological stuff. I pictured pale Victorian ghosts in black and white.

The sense of immaculate compression, of hermetic sealing, is perhaps what they share most closely. I had a similar sense to reading Molloy, that I was exploring a windowless room or a polished stone or some sort of vacuum or alien artifact with something ill-defined and vaguely sinister moving around inside.

 

[woops]

Which one next?

 

[version]

Which one next?

Still reading one of the essay collections, 'The Gaze of Orpheus', so that one for now.

 

[version]

I'm reading Death Sentence right now. It's only 80 pages.

" ... the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them."

Silence has been coming up a lot lately between this, Burroughs and du Bouchet.

“I have lost silence, and the regret I feel over that is immeasurable. I cannot describe the pain that invades a man once he has begun to speak. It is a motionless pain that is itself pledged to muteness; because of it, the unbreathable is the element I breathe. I have shut myself up in a room, alone, there is no one in the house, almost no one outside, but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother it and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo.”