Thomas the Obscure

"A stone rolled, and it slipped through an infinity of metamorphoses the unity of which was that of the world in its splendor. In the midst of these tremblings, solitude burst forth...Thomas went forward. The great misfortune which was to come still seemed a gentle and tranquil event." This passage comes near the end of Thomas the Obscure (p. 114); but it just as well could have been placed in the beginning. It is not that nothing happens in the course of this brief and intense fiction - it is as long as it can be, and no shorter. Anne dies. That is event enough. The book gathers around that event, and eavesdrops on two beings that are differently enveloped in it: Anne dying and Thomas affected. What we hear are the murmurings of their beings, waves of singular beings crashing onto the shore, of this death; the slightly different tones and rhythms of the waves' slapping is what we hear. The text is all foam. We begin with Thomas in the water, losing himself there. Awaiting the death, witness to the dying, and the intimate companion of this dying woman. Foam: the in between formations of the water's detritus that mark what the accumulated cycling of wave upon purely flowing wave deposits around the shoals of these individuals. Anne, in dying, (not quite her own dying) wonders at Thomas' perpetual absence. The "obscurity" of Thomas is her rendering of him. She bursts onto the scene at a dinner occasion, blazing with beauty and concentrates Thomas' attention. The vividness of the encounter creates the book, but does not provide Anne with companionship in her most solitary moments. Anne has died by the time the passage cited above comes up in the text, but maybe she has already died, whatever that means for Thomas, by the time the book begins, with Thomas in the ocean, amid the foam, maybe drowning, communing in dying but absent from Anne's bedside. I find Blanchot's fiction arresting. It is the fiction that needs to be written and only can do so as art (in one form or another, and Blanchot writes it), and is what art has to be. This is the fiction of beings' speaking enroute to the human event. Impossible, because being does not speak - and therein lies the essential fiction. Blanchot knows of this, and details his acquaintance in unsurpassed non-fiction (but still fiction-making) essays, thought pieces, thought experiments all. Thomas poeticizes in prose the most dear and precious moment: when we need a voice from beyond, need some assurance of deliverance or salvation; and what is delivered is only the voice of that being, its waves one by one, one word, one sentence following on and on, crashing onto the shores of the most human act of dying. This is the only fiction there is: the evocation and writing of this voice. (Deleuze certainly heard it.) Blanchot had long ago completed Thomas when he wrote this fictional conversation (how many voices, we do not know): ""Attraction by which, keeping us in the mystery of the illusion, we think we recognize them, name them, keep them at a distance under the brilliance of the name, and thus, embellishing it, facilitate their approach." - "Always too close for them to be near to us." `' "And yet separated by the movement of their coming." - "They're not coming."" (The Step Not Beyond; p. 111) The names here: Thomas and Anne. We think we can know them when they do not even "know" each other. Thomas, walking, is tranquil "before" the event, the waves break, and we read the foam.

Maurice Blanchot's narratives were revered by Jacques Derrida and others who knew the ways that words create our world. The story of Thomas the Obscure has always haunted me, since I first read this narrative 40 years ago. Luckily, others have shared my enthusiasm. This translation has offered MB's language another chance in English. If Wallace Stevens wrote a novel, it might read like this singular narrative.

This is about the most difficult to read stuff I have ever set my mind to ... I couldn't figure out half the sentences they are so long and convoluted. And I don't think it's the translation ... I think this is a book for people studying Blanchot, French literature. Probably best read in the original French,

The tendency of prose to settle while being read will not be found in this book. Stability of the mind will be a memory worth forgetting as you embark into a personalized world of disturbing imagery (disturbing in a good sense)and ambiguity at its absolute height. A must read for anyone interested in non'linear literature.

Written between 1932 and 1940 Blanchot's first novel is the ultimate post-modern fiction: `the ontological narrative' which transformed the possibilities of the novel before Sartre and Beckett. It is a perplexing novel on the subject of the nature of being; a paradoxical work that searches for being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery. First published in English 26 years ago this re-issue of the Station Hill Press trade version includes an illuminating essay on translation by Robert Lamberton.

A very poetic and beautiful book.