In the Flesch
A belated obituary of Maurice Blanchot in the Boston Globe by William Flesch. But isn’t all literature a form of belatedness? Flesch does well to provide a new angle by referring to Awaiting Oblivion, the 85-page novel (in the loosest sense) from 1962, featuring an unnamed man and woman in a hotel room:
“Literature and love have always gone together, but never more provocatively than in Blanchot. The demand of the literary work (on writer and reader alike) and the demand of love are the same: an attention which seeks neither to possess nor fix the fugitive nature of that which it loves.”
Yes, that might explain a lot. From the novel:
“The characteristic of the [hotel] room is its emptiness. When he enters, he does not notice it; it is a hotel room no different from those he has always lived in, the kind he likes, in a modest hotel. But as soon as he wants to describe it, it is empty, and the words that he uses apply only to the emptiness.”
Other Splinters posts of interest:
- New On Spike - August 2006
- Booker titles
- An indiscreet Ian Rankin
- Live Blanchot
- The tip of an iceberg
