Monday 20 February 2012

Maurice Blanchot on Literature

How many of us go to the library and pick up a book at random?


Usually, we arrive at the library already looking for something: this genre, that author, a certain subject matter. We want to get more out of the book than just the experience of reading it; we look for some meaning in it – call it knowledge, or truth, or what you will. But what happens if we pick up a book without these expectations and preconceptions, if we allow ourselves to read without searching?


Maurice Blanchot believes that the best literature challenges the idea that there exists a hidden meaning in the text which everyone can get at. Each text works in its own right, and each reader will interpret it differently. Literature should evade any definition, because the process of categorisation misses out on something fundamental about the experience of reading.


Literature is a historical, existential phenomenon. We shouldn’t engage with texts as objects, or as messengers of information, but rather we should regard each text as an existential experience. Engaging with a text in this way opens us up to historicity, the meaning of life, the ‘other’, and so on, and in doing so demands us to challenge our beliefs, and our ethics.


Here is the paradox: at the core of a literary text, there is no core. Since a text has no absolute meaning, texts have an infinite capacity for meaning. Although our cognitive limits are trapped within our temporality, literature remains open to infinite interpretation.


Classification closes things down, but infinity opens.


So, next time we visit the library, and pick up a book, we should not obstruct what the text has to show us by searching for some meaning that just isn’t there; we should see what we are opened up to.


Stephanie Kirby, N0243693

5 comments:

  1. This is a really interesting point, and reflects Blanchot's view on literature, however, I believe that although there is no one thing that all readers will gain from reading any one text, the author of a piece of literature will have had an original intended meaning of that piece of writing.

    As humans we will always gain different meanings from the same thing, as we are inherently unique in nature.

    Although we will all find different meaning in text, I believe that there is always an originally intended meaning for a piece of literature but as Stephanie discussed previously, we should not block off the meaning that we may gain from the literature without searching for the 'intended' message.

    If we approach literature with a mentally 'blank slate' who knows what we will gain from it. However I believe that to disregard the writers original meaning of the literature is not helpful, and that it should be considered when creating our own impression of the text.

    Imogen Blundell
    N0270340

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    1. “I believe that although there is no one thing that all readers will gain from reading any one text, the author of a piece of literature will have had an original intended meaning of that piece of writing.”

      I fully agree with you on this point, Imogen. I think an author will always have some sort of meaning in mind when they write, and their work is an attempt to express this meaning.

      Your comments made me think of a book called The Unfortunates, by B.S. Johnson, which has just recently come back into print. It’s quite an experimental book, because its chapters are designed to be read in a random order. The 27 chapters are individually bound, and are presented to the reader loose, in a box; only the first and last chapters are marked accordingly.

      The Unfortunates is about a sports reporter sent to Nottingham to report on a football match, but once there he realises that he is in the same city in which he first met a friend of his who died of cancer at 29 years of age. The chapters of the book represent the disordered collection of memories and recollections which the protagonist experiences; Johnson wanted the relationship between the chapters to imitate the jumbled way in which memories occur to us.

      In this way, I think the book does tell a story, but the narrative is secondary to the experience of reading the book, and the feelings and responses that the book evokes in the reader, which are ultimately beyond the control of the author, and will be, as you say, unique to each individual.

      I think The Unfortunates is a great example of how – although an author will always have in mind some meaning which he wishes to communicate – the real importance of a book can lie beyond the author’s intention. In this case, the author’s aim was to allow the reader to experience the process of remembering as the protagonist does, however I think that the real meaning of the book is found in the personal emotional response which the reader experiences when he engages with, and is opened up to, the existential elements of the book (friendship, loss, etc.).

      I agree with your point that we should not disregard the author’s original intended meaning of the text, but at the same time I don’t think that the author ought to have a monopoly on meaning. Personally, I think that we give too much authority to the author, and so to bear the author’s meaning in mind can distort our own personal interpretation and experience of a text.

      Stephanie Kirby (N0243693)

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  2. Nice work Stephanie. This is a nice example of the type of thing we are looking for. Clear and engaging with the ideas in a Blanchotia fashion. I like the example of the library also. In a sense, the library tends to be an opaque space. It is filled with meaning and symbols etc. but the only moment it become animated is in a dialogic sense, i.e. when there is readers responding to the material. I also like that fact that you got to the sense that the text is dynamic for Blanchot, and it is about illiciting meaning than having it prearranged in advance.

    Imogen, you make a fair point. The author has to have some minimal contact with a text. If James Joyce wrote Ullysses he had to have some sense of what he was trying to achieve, although I suppose the way in which the text is received depends on a variety of different meanings. Umberto Eco also made an interesting point in relation to this, he suggested that a text can have innumerable meanings but not just any meaning. The literary text thus has to have some basis on who wrote it and who receives it.

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  3. This idea of gleaning a sense of authorship from a text seems, to my mind, to be par excellence an issue of perspective-in the Nietzschen sense of a genealogical historicism. Any sense of meta-narrative inherent in the 'existant' of the literary texts must die with authorship. With the emergence of the texts as a thing in the world-in Stephanie's case, a book in a library-the text is removed a generation from the authors sense of its meaning.

    Even if the process of rendering the text as a thing-in-the-world was totally faithful to the truth of the authors perspective-what Blanchot describes as the convergence of the lived experiences of the author in the moment of contemplation of writing (even before the actual act-which is again, transformative of itself)-if the process of publishing a text was absolutely faithful to the intentions of the author, the reader would still be a generation removed from that intention, because reading is quintessentially a question of semantics. I uses the term generation, in the sense of a photograph produced from a negative.

    Thinking along these lines, if makes sense to think of this interpretative process as a movement towards infinity-and this is true in the literal sense, if you restrict yourself only to considering the permutations involved in the organisation of the words on the page.

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  4. I agree with many of the arguments concerning the literary text's autonomy from the author; even if through some means we could access an author's intention, perhaps for a contemporary text, that text's meaning would inevitably already be drifting away into the endless possiblities of understanding that come with different and differential cultures and historical circumstances. I think this is just to restate Marlon's point.

    I think that Foucault frees us from these kind of deliberations, even if just momentarily, when he makes the move (broadly speaking) from an epistemological discussion of the text and its authorial intention to an ontological one. In a similar way to his other analyses of the functioning of power, Foucault wants to investigate the "author-function"; how the concept of the author fits into everyday discourse. Speaking of the author as "the subject", he asks:

    "under what conditions and through what forms can an entity like the subject appear in the order of discourse, what position does it occupy; what functions does it exhibit; and what rules does it follow in each type of discourse?" (Foucault in Leitch et. al, 2010, pg. 1489)

    This seems like a helpful way of talking about the author. The concept of authorial intention seems so built into our discourse that there won't just be an abandoment of it on the theoretical grounds of its fallacious nature. In fact, it may not be a stretch to say that this concept would be part of the historical circumstances that are constitutive of a texts interpretation.

    Tom Cumming n0276389

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