The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays by Maurice BlanchotJeffrey DeShell
Maurice Blanchot. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays. Station Hill, 1999. 529 pp. $29.95.
While thousands of books appear each year, few publications can be classified as genuine events: this is one of them. Station Hill has collected its previous six récits (Vicious Circles, Thomas the Obscure, The Madness of the Day, Death Sentence, When the Time Comes, The Man Who Was Standing Apart from Me), plus a sampling from its essay collection (The Gaze of Orpheus), into a single stunning, beautiful, and canonical volume.
The editorial material is quite helpful. Christopher Fynsk provides an illuminating theoretical forward, and the publisher George Quasha contributes a lucid history of publishing Blanchot in America, as well as a perspicacious argument for Blanchot’s poetic or literary impact in this country, an argument too often absent from most current discussions of his work. But it is Blanchot’s own writing, at once translucent and obscure, intimate and distancing, morbid and hopeful, which truly shines forth here with a brilliant, dark light.
Although I found myself missing the oddly monumental quality of those thin, exquisite earlier editions, this collection offered the opportunity to develop connections between the different sites of textual inquiry. While the volume specifically refuses to contextualize the different récits into anything resembling a totalizing whole, oeuvre or work—what Quasha calls a “thesis”—this collection does allow the texts, both fictional and theoretical, to speak to one another, to converse with one another and to ask and repeat the question of what literature is.
This is a magnificent work of writing, translating, and publishing. It should not be missed by any reader interested in contemporary literature or theory: it should not be missed by any reader interested in writing. [Jeffrey DeShell]