Blanchot and Literary Criticism by Mark Hewson (review)Barnaby Norman

Modernism/modernity, Volume 20, Number 1, January 2013, pp. 163-164(Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mod.2013.0006

For additional information about this article

Accessed 7 May 2014 23:02 GMT GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v020/20.1.norman.html

book reviews

163rendered an oddly static poet, and her 1965 poetry is read without any nuanced or discernible difference from her 1976 work despite the fact that Knickerbocker had earlier correctly identi-fied the process of change and flux that is central to Bishops The Monument from North & South (1946). Plaths use of sound is rightly identified a strength in a number of her poems, but here again a trick is missed: the same tendency clearly informs Dickinsons poetry (for instance, I felt a Funeral, in my Brain or This World is not Conclusion). Had Knickerbocker joined the poetic dots to form a wider and more intricate critical graph, his book would have yielded fuller, more substantial, and more provocative arguments.

Note1. Robert Frost, letter to John Bartlett, July 4, 1913, in Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Law-

rence Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964), 79.

Blanchot and Literary Criticism. Mark Hewson. London: Continuum, 2011. Pp. xx + 150. $90.00 (cloth); $27.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Barnaby Norman, Kings College London

Blanchot and Literary Criticism is a series of studies that offers erudite analyses of several texts in which Maurice Blanchot approaches works by modern writers. Hewson focuses primarily on Blanchots writings published in the collections Faux pas (1943), La Part du feu (The Work of Fire, 1949), LEspace littraire (The Space of Literature, 1955), and Le Livre venir (The Book to Come, 1959), and in so doing he isolates the work that is most recognizably critical in its approach. During the period covered by Hewson, Blanchot was also writing fictions, and from the following collection of essays onwards (LEntretien infini; The Infinite Conversation, 1969), it is even more difficult to categorize Blanchots writing as it integrates sections of dialogue and becomes increasingly concerned with its own fragmentation. After an initial chapter looking at Blanchots understanding of modern literature, the second and third chapters analyze his read-ings of Hlderlin and Mallarm respectively, and the fourth and fifth chapters for the most part provide an account of Blanchots thought as a counterpoint to Martin Heideggers.

Taken individually, Hewsons studies are models of good scholarship and often bring great insight, albeit to quite familiar terrain. The individual studies of Blanchots work on Hlderlin and Mallarm are extremely welcome additions to the field and provide an excellent resource for scholars seeking to orient themselves in these complex areas. The fourth chapter is perhaps the high point of the work; Hewson ranges over a constellation of texts to present a supple analysis of what Blanchot saw as the fundamental ambiguity of the negating power of language. In this and the next chapter, Heideggers text is set beside Blanchots so that the two bodies of work illuminate each other, yet neither is reduced to the other. Despite many good reasons to read this book, however, there are still a couple of areas that I found problematic.

My major concern is the overall purpose of the book and the way its thesis is framed; it constantly risks slipping into incoherence. The books title certainly announces an enormous question: what relation does Blanchots work maintain with literary criticism? This is not, how-ever, quite the question that Hewsons pieces ask, and he somewhat sidesteps it by pursuing a derivative issue, asking why Blanchots work has not been more consistently taken up in literary studies (see introduction). In the introduction, which joins the conclusion as one of the least satisfying parts of the book, there is no indication of why he uses the term literary criticism in

M O D E R N I S M / m o d e r n i t y

164 his title. Where is this critical absence? In France, for example, it would be difficult to overstate the extent of Blanchots influence in thinking about literature in postwar scholarship. Blanchots supposed absence from the field of literary criticism has the feel of a false problem that has been constructed to give the volume the role of mediating his writings to a larger public, or perhaps, as I will suggest below (and the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive), the title is a residue from earlier thinking about the work, thinking that became less and less tenable as the research progressed. The key issue, I would suggest, is not so much a simple absence in the field, but the infinitely complex relation between Blanchots work and the discipline of literary criticism.

The question of that relation is something that Blanchot reflects on. In the famous note at the beginning of LEntretien infini, he speaks of the Book and of its supersession by a kind of writing for which the name Mallarm stands as an index. The reader understands that Blan-chots work is itself implied in this movement beyond the Book, a movement that, according to Hewson, always indicates an 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.1 This order, this culture of the Book, would include within it literary criticism to the extent that it has not been opened up by writing as analyzed by Blanchot. Hewson himself glosses the Book as the work as known and appreciated in the element of scholarship and culture (125), and he directly discusses the note to LEntretien infini in the Mallarm chapter (65), but he nevertheless argues for a place for Blanchots discourse within literary studies even as such an inclusion is resisted by the texts themselves (as they mark a radical departure from the culture of the Book).

Even if this (impossible) relation does not become the theme of an extended analysis in Blanchot and Literary Criticism, there is a certain slippage of terminology when the text broaches the subject. At the beginning of the second chapter, we read the following: In order for Blanchots work to be productively questioned and appropriated within literary studies, it is first necessary to decide to what extent his work belongs to this discipline (21). The chapter concludes that Blanchots criticism in fact begins to leave the discipline; Blanchot decides to move away from the discursive field of research and towards a more poetic commentary. If Blanchots text does take this radical step beyond the discipline, then the question is not how it will be appropriated by that discipline but (more interestingly) the extent to which it can be appropriated at all. So in the following chapter, when Hewson discusses the degree to which Blanchot has followed Heidegger into an essential questioning of being, he now suggests that it is only by thinking through this movement that one can negotiate the extreme difficulty of situating Blanchots work in relation to theory and criticism (58, my emphasis). Finally, at the end of the fourth chapter, as Hewson concludes his excellent analysis of the ambiguity of the negative, he writes that this is one of the points at which literary studies would have to engage with Blanchots work, if it is to encounter it at all (102, my emphasis). We note a movement from a calculated appropriation, through a more nuanced situating, and ending up in a barely hoped-for encounter. It is as though in the course of the writing the very notion of absorbing Blanchots work into the field of literary criticism became increasingly hard to entertain.

The difficulty about this book is that it argues for a place for Blanchots work within literary criticism and then, through the movement of its own argument, reveals an absolute resistance to such disciplinary appropriation. And it appears, for this reason, as an incoherent work. But then this might be the mark of a genuine piece of research.

Note1. Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2003), xii.