Aminadab 0803213131 (2 page)

great a proximity. As Michel Foucault emphasizes in his beautiful essay on Blanchot, "The Thought from the Outside," which refers a great deal to Aminadab, it is a distance opened by language and located in the simple but vertiginous "I speak" that has been deprived of all bearings and con tinues in a perfect coincidence with its own unmoored taking place.16 For his part, Sartre referred to Aminadab as "fantastic," but it is not at all certain that this term applies to Aminadab. If so, it is in the manner of a work like Don Quixote, that is, as the disenchanted space of a simula tion sustained entirely by language. Aminadab begins and ends as a mirage of signs and significations, from the sign in the window to the enigmatic aphorisms on the lamps glowing in the endless twilight of the final scene. Blanchot makes it very clear in the opening pages that the strange world of Aminadab is constituted by signs whose manipulation it is. When Thomas first enters the building, he searches up and down a long corridor for a stairway, but in vain; until, that is, he suddenly notices a curtain with a sign above it on which is "written in crudely traced letters: The entrance is here." The conclusion is simple and direct: "So the entrance was there." If this is "fantastic," it is nevertheless far from magical and is closer to a mere manipulation of words whose only effects are empty simulations. One is reminded of Alice, whose fall down the rabbit hole is accompanied by a sleepily murmured interchange of letters ("do cats eat bats? . . . do bats eat cats?") and who upon landing finds herself in a situation strikingly similar to that of Thomas -searching a hallway for an open door, she's given in structions by signs that appear out of nowhere ("drink me" ) . Just as Alice's wonderland is not ruled by magic (not even within her "reality"; she has to take drugs to bring about her transformations) but rather by linguis tic play, Thomas's adventures in the boardinghouse proceed according to laws that are first and foremost textual. The "fantastic" here does not con sist in the immediate realization of thoughts or a dreamlike alternate world but in the empty effects of nomination. In this sense, literary space is one in which the name in no waycreates the thing but rather, as Blanchot asserted in an early essay, the absence of the thing, its shimmering emptiness (an absence and emptiness that are prior to, and constitutive of, any presence and fullness)P Here enchantment is disabled by the rigor of fiction itself, the recognition that this gesture - creating something by naming it- re mains empty and leaves only the residue of the name. Here everything is possible, but nothing actually happens except a fictional speech in search of its own law and origin. xu

One of the most important effects of this speech is precisely that of simulation and mimesis. Like K.'s "illusory emptiness," the space through which Thomas wanders is full of illusions and is itself an illusion. It is a world made up of crude but fascinating images that double the already artificial world containing them. This is made clear from the beginning with the proliferation of paintings and other types of doubling whose rela tion to - or difference from - Thomas's "reality" is disturbingly indistinct. He himself is painted not long after entering the building, and the artifice of the building is doubled in paintings that depict the rooms exactly. He is soon attached, by handcuffs, to a companion who remains his distorted double throughout most of the novel and whose voice in the end replaces his own. In an early scene this companion is described as having a tattoo on his face that duplicates the face itself. Thomas's intimate embraces of his tattooed companion present a mimicry of earlier literary adventures, a malodorous parody of Ishmael's affectionate encounter with Queequeg in the early chapters of Moby-Dick (a novel that has an important place in Blanchot's criticism) . It is thus at every point and on multiple levels that the fictive nature of the novel is incorporated into the novelistic world itself, not as a narrator's ironic reflections but as the very law of the world that is in the process of unfolding. Thomas thinks at one point: "Was not everything here play-acting?" This question is echoed throughout Blan chot's fictional work, most explicitly in the recit entitled The One Who Was Standing Apart from Me where the first-person narrator asks several times: "Here where we are, everything is dissimulated, isn't it?" 18 Literary space presents itself as a "here" that is pure dissimulation, pure fiction and arti fice. In this regard, the suspension of disbelief required by the fantastic is not relevant here, because belief is never solicited. Thomas himself does not believe, and in this he is the "doubting" figure his name evokes; indeed, he does not even believe in the illusoriness of the illusions: "I have rea son to think that there is a bit too pronounced a tendency here to explain everything in terms of illusions." And yet he is irretrievably caught up in a movement driven by the attraction of this false world. His "quest" passes through illusions in search of an illusion and through a textual space that seeks its law in speech as a simulation of speech. To carry out his search, Thomas must know the laws of the house. Every one he encounters is deeply preoccupied with these laws, but no one really knows what they are. They remain inscrutable and arbitrary, contained in xiii

books that no one reads and that may not even exist. The result is that, together with this obscure and ubiquitous law, it is "carelessness that reigns in the house." No one knows who is part of the staff and who is a tenant, who is a servant and who is to be served. But this scrambling of relations does not do away with hierarchy; on the contrary, it makes of hierarchy a principle of delirium. For Thomas, the law points upward and is neces sarily the law of ascent. Everything depends on reaching the upper floors. Along the way he encounters characters who both forbid him and bid him on, and each point he reaches is one to be passed, leading on and upward to the next one. In his long discussions with these characters, the law simul taneously opens and blocks his way, and each encounter throws up ob stacles and points beyond itself. Thus the law invites its own transgression and transcendence, a passing beyond that leads, it would seem, to the dis tant origin of the law in which all these encounters would converge. But Thomas's upward trajectory is also, in another sense, a downward move ment. At the end, Dom, his erstwhile companion, says to Thomas: "Your ambition was to reach the heights," but this is only to proclaim his fail ure. If he reaches the upper floors, it is only after falling into a vertiginous illness, after which he wakes to discover that he is treated as - and there fore effectively is - a servant.19 If he approaches the uppermost point of the house, brilliant but invisible, it is only because he has been ordered to clean it. If he has reached his goal, it is only in order to expire in a twi light of weakness and debility that will never quite come to an end. In this regard one might recall Samuel Beckett, who wondered whether "the as cent to heaven and the descent to hell might be one and the same. How beautiful to believe that this were so." 20 But if this were so, then it might be that the movement of transcendence, leading into the upper regions, en joined and forbidden by the law, is indistinguishable from a transgression, a stepping beyond, that lands one in an inexpiable hell of language. If there is one thing that the characters in Aminadab do, it is talk. Their endless commentaries, their unreliable and conflicting clarifications, their meandering stories and legends -especially the long and remarkable monologue placed near the center of the novel - open within the narra tive a series of impassioned and delirious voices. I would hazard to say that with these voices, carried away by forces that far exceed the fictional situation of which they speak, this novel enters into its most singular and proper mode. In them, Blanchot's prose takes on the mixture of rigor and
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lyricism that is characteristic of his most beautiful, enigmatic, and chal lenging writing. At the same time, these passages make it more clear than ever that we are dealing, in some sense, with an allegorical text, for they reveal the far-reaching dimensions of the experiences being related, reso nating with broad domains that are equally historical, political, religious, and of course literary. But in their indeterminacy, they evoke allegorical associations that cannot be reduced to a single alternate set of meanings or to a particular, discernible referent. They introduce a "saying otherwise" (aIle-gory) that overflows the fictional parameters and exceeds all refer ence, threatening to resolve, literally, into nothing. If Aminadab is an alle gory, it is an allegory of nothing, and Thomas is told that if he were ever to reach the upper floors, he would find nothing because there is nothing.21 In his ambiguous relation to the law, he strives upward toward this noth ing; the voices that throw up their elaborate detours in his path also move toward the nothing that inhabits them as their most obscure compulsion. Driven beyond all figuration, they speak from an enigma located at the juncture of two questions that are repeated throughout Aminadab: Who are you? What do you want? If Aminadab's allegorical associations cannot be reduced to a single ref erent, the title itself does evoke one particular and very important set of associations. Blanchot's biographer, Christophe Bident, informs us that Aminadab was the name of Emmanuel Levinas's younger brother, who had been shot to death by the Nazis in Lithuania not long before the novel appeared.22 In Hebrew the name means "my people are generous" or "wandering people."23 These references are nowhere explicit in Blan chot's novel, in which Aminadab is not, properly speaking, a character but a legendary underground figure who is mentioned only toward the end. But one could claim that this peripheral position actually places the name and what it designates even more centrally within the texture of the novel, as though it were literally encrypted. In fact, it is not difficult to see at least a suggestive, if not necessarily very clear, relation between the concerns of the novel and the Jewish existence to which its title points. Here again, Blanchot's critical writings are illu minating. In an essay written twenty years later entitled "Being Jewish," Blanchot speaks of the meaning of Jewish experience in terms that reso nate clearly with some of his most constant preoccupations concerning literature and literary language. In this essay, Blanchot wants to insist that
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the apparently negative forms of Jewish experience, such as exile and up rootedness, are not merely negative. To the questions (attributed to Boris Pasternak) "What does being Jewish signify? Why does it exist?" Blanchot responds: "It exists so that the idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initia tive that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close at hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak." Emphasizing the radical exteri ority of this experience and of the speech that it would teach us, Blanchot elaborates on the nature of this speech:
To speak to someone is to accept not introducing him into the system of things or of beings to be known; it is to recognize him as unknown and to receive him as foreign without obliging him to break with this difference. Speech, in this sense, is the Promised Land where exile fulfills itself in sojourn since it is not a matter of being at home there but of being always Outside, engaged in a movement wherein the Foreign offers itself, yet without dis avowing itself. To speak, in a word, is to seek the source of meaning in the prefix that the words exile, exodus, existence, exteriority, and estrangement are committed to unfolding in various modes of experience; a prefix that for us designates distance and separation as the origin of all "positive value."24

If the name Aminadab means "my people are generous," Blanchot points out that "the great gift of Israel [is] its teaching of the one God." But he hastens to qualify this: "But I would rather say, brutally, that what we owe to Jewish monotheism is not the revelation of the one God, but the reve lation of speech as the place where men hold themselves in relation with what excludes all relation: the infinitely Distant, the absolutely Foreign." 25 The Distant and the Foreign cannot be equated with God as a transcendent reality occupying another superior world; they are rather names for the alterity and strangeness of what is always already in our midst, a strange ness closely bound up with language and with the partly unbridgeable rela tion to the other through language. To speak this strangeness (Paul Celan: "the poem has always hoped . . . to speak on behalf of the strange . . . on behalf of the other") is to address the otherness that makes familiarity, and speech itself, possible; it is to approach the place where we are already but which we cannot ever quite inhabit. As Blanchot puts it, in reference again to Jewish experience: "The Jewish people become a people through the exodus. And where does this night of exodus, renewed from year to xvi

year, each time lead them? To a place that is not a place and where it is not possible to reside." 26 Within the parameters of a novelistic fiction, Aminadab attempts to ap proach and to explore this place that is not a place. Like The Castle whose author may well have had similar reflections in mind- it is a novel of wan dering and speech, endless error and passionate commentary. Thomas is an exile with no abode who finds himself, however, in the promised land of speech. In this sense, Aminadab remains true to the exigency of exteriority and strangeness that Blanchot attributes to literary space, in which all movement is wandering and where speech bears the weight of the law- not as a legal corpus but as an ontological principle - the impossible but always shimmering mirage of a destiny and a destination. The task of literature, which Blanchot implies must in some sense "be Jewish," 27 and which Aminadab emblematizes and enacts in its excessive allegories, is to maintain this passionate movement toward an intimate strangeness opened by language at the heart of the ordinary and familiar and to speak the language that would keep it open.
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I would like to thank the editors at University of Nebraska Press for their support of'Blanchot's work and of this novel in particular. I would also like to thank Susette Min for her encouragement and companionship. Lastly, I am pleased to have the occasion to express my gratitude to two impor tant translators of Blanchot who have preceded me. Lydia Davis has been an inspiration and a generously supportive interlocutor. To Ann Smock I am especially indebted; her help as a teacher and a friend have been indis pensable, and without it I could not have carried out this work. Both were among the first to recognize the importance of Blanchot's writing and the necessity of translating it; for their groundbreaking work they deserve our praise and thanks.