Des Forêts’s narrator plays with this readerly instinct, indulging it before ultimately making himself and his narrative disappear.
One could argue that Sarraute’s Tropisms seems to begin with the “nothing” that paradoxically emerges at the end of des Forêts’s text—at least in the sense that Tropisms refuses to identify any single person or thing in a distinct way. The reader never has the illusion of clarity, continuity, or an accessible narrative voice, but rather immediately confronts the remarkable obscurity of the narrative. Sarraute’s text abandons the “I” from the beginning, as well as recognizable or discernible characters, locations, or plots. In this way, “he,” “she,” “it,” “here,” “there,” and so on, disappear into a striking anonymity. This° name-less, place-less space evokes Blanchot’s discussion of the neutral—a space, a mode, a voice founded upon no one, nowhere. If Kafka’s narratives and his journals explore the struggle of the writer who experiences his disappearance and powerlessness to constitute himself through language, Sarraute’s Tropisms explores the space of this disappearance, powerlessness, and withdrawn language—“a language which no one speaks.”2 The floating, neutral character of the language, which seems to arise from no one, speaks in the blanks of the text as much as it does throughout the nearly indistinguishable, chapter-like fragments. As we move from fragment to fragment, we seem to have new characters and situations (though characters are only identified as “he,” “she,” and “they”), rather than a running narrative; at the same time, the fragments bear repetitions and resemblances that make them blur into one another. In Sarraute’s text, many of the aspects of more traditional literature that allow us to ground the narrative and characters in something seemingly solid and reassuring have disappeared, leaving us to deal with the irreducible obscurity of the language.
In the final chapter of my book I will turn back to Blanchot, but this time through a narrative text, L’arrêt de mort. This récit approaches disappearance in a variety of ways, but I focus on the issues of circularity and repetition in particular. As his discussion of the récit in The Book to Come would indicate, Blanchot’s narrative proposes a sort of time outside of time—one that challenges notions of linearity and historicity and that functions by way of repetition and circular paradoxes. Like the work of Orpheus (a central figure in Blanchot’s essays), the narrative of L’arrêt de mort is founded upon, moves toward, and arises out of its disappearance and impossibility. Michel Foucault writes in “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From Outside” that L’arrêt de mort is “dedicated to the gaze of Orpheus: the gaze that at the wavering threshold of death goes in search of the submerged presence and tries to bring its image back to the light of day.”3 The anonymous narrator of L’arrêt de mort retrieves the main character, J., from death, only to lose her again at his own hand when he injects a lethal dose of morphine into her veins. And supposing the narrator remains the same in the two fragments that constitute L’arrêt de mort, his transgressive gaze re-emerges when he calls forth a second female character from a deathly state. Aside from those two principal encounters, certain strange, nocturnal scenes repeat themselves throughout the text—such as the spontaneous and confused entry of one of the several female characters, or the narrator himself, into a stranger’s room in the middle of the night. No event appears to be singular in this récit, but rather finds itself repeated in various ways, as if each penetration of the night forcefully reopens a profound wound that is always, ceaselessly open. In Foucault’s brief reference to L’arrêt de mort, he seems to touch upon that very idea when he suggests that the narrator’s gaze upon J.’s death “is what makes a second woman appear in the middle of the night in an already captive state of stupefaction” (44). Just as Orpheus must have already gazed towards Eurydice in order to initiate his descent to her, each confrontation that the narrator has with the night in L’arrêt de mort allows for the one that follows it, and the one that precedes it. Despite the narrator’s efforts to ground his experiences in specific dates, times, and historic events, the récit exhibits the infinite circularity of Orpheus’s descent, which assures his own disappearance, as well as that of Eurydice.
Lastly, I would like to address the fact that I have chosen to work exclusively with short fictions—though the distinction of “short” hardly provides clear parameters by which we might measure a text. As noted above, Blanchot uses the term récit when discussing a particular kind of shorter text which he differentiates from the novel. He writes:
If for the sake of convenience—because this statement cannot be exact—we say that what makes the novel move forward is everyday, collective or personal time, or more precisely, the desire to urge time to speak, then the tale moves forward through that other time, it makes that other voyage, which is the passage from the real song to the imaginary song.4
Thus, the distinction of the récit and the novel, at least according to Blanchot, only indirectly involves the issue of length. If the récit is commonly shorter than the novel, this results from the way that the récit confines itself to the moment when time becomes the other time—a time outside of “everyday, collective or personal time.” Blanchot identifies the récit as the gulf that inhabits any narrative—an infinite distance that separates the récit from its destination, which is also, paradoxically, its origin. While the epic or the novel might contain this bottomless pocket, each also provides the superfluous, excessive, distracted narrative that surrounds it. Blanchot does not critique this; furthermore, he notes that the aimless digressions of the novel paradoxically fulfill the demand of the récit. One cannot approach the récit with purpose or intent; it exceeds any sense of effort, or mastery. Yet, unlike the novel, the récit takes focus, sending any narrative excess to the outside, if only in order to present its own measureless excess. One might therefore conclude that the récit takes on a shortened, condensed form as a means of bringing an undistracted attention to its infinite excessiveness.
In Small Worlds, a study of minimalism in French literature, Warren Motte suggests the difficulty in identifying something as “small.” He writes:
We designate things as “small” capriciously and according to different registers of perception. We may focus on a thing’s physical size; on its duration, intensity, or range; on its import, its significance; on the quantity of the elements composing it; or on the simplicity of its structure. What seems common to all of those interpretive moves is the notion of reduction in relation to some more or less explicit norm. Art that insists upon that reduction and mobilizes it as a constructive principle can be termed minimalist.5 (1, emphasis in original)
In the case of short fiction, or the récit if we specifically engage Blanchot’s term, smallness, or shortness, indeed assumes a sense of reduction. And as Blanchot suggests, a certain relativity is implied; in other words, “short” fiction is short in relation to the traditional novel. Of course, Blanchot’s definition of the récit does not necessarily apply to Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, or to Franz Kafka’s parables; yet each writer works with a form that plays on the notion of shortness. Borges writes in his “Autobiographical Essay,” “The feeling that the great novels Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn are virtually shapeless served to reinforce my taste for the short-story form, whose indispensable elements are economy and a clearly stated beginning, middle, and end.”6 Although we might assume a degree of irony in Borges’s comment, he clearly celebrates the straightforwardness and the structure of the shortened form. It comes in a neat, organized package that appears to get right to the point. Of course, with Borges and with Blanchot, the ideal of approaching some sort of textual essence does not suggest the pretension of doing so successfully. Rather, as we will see in all of the chapters to come, many short fictions self-consciously play upon their own minimal structures and undermine the notion
