which inspires Orpheus requires an endlessly sustained movement—one where nothing can be accomplished or achieved. Therefore, his act of impatience responds to his desire to see Eurydice in her nocturnal state, rather than maintaining the interval and the infinite movement by keeping himself turned away.
While we might be tempted to conclude that Orpheus’s impatience results in his failure, and that patience would have guaranteed his success, we have already seen that success, from the perspective of the world, would not satisfy Orpheus’s work. In addition, in the passage above, Blanchot refers to patience as a “ruse” which is no more faithful to the absence of time than impatience. Infinite patience would fail to take Orpheus to the point where the work experiences its undoing—a point where it is exposed to the absence of time and to the excess of disappearance when everything has disappeared. Orpheus’s patient descent still requires a certain degree of mastery, and his look back marks the limit of his power; at this limit, he confronts a refusal that constitutes his relation with the work. His look back announces an end, and it also announces a beginning that cannot possibly begin. In this look, Orpheus experiences his own disappearance, along with the disappearance of Eurydice. He no longer has the power to speak, to sing, to say “I,” or to make anything appear in the light of day. Therefore, while we might at first see the moment of impatience as an empowered interruption of the interminable process of the work, it also marks the release of the work beyond its relation with Orpheus and his song. And, for Blanchot, this represents a moment of inspiration: “To look at Eurydice, without regard for the song, in the impatience and imprudence of desire which forgets the law: that is inspiration” (173, emphasis in original). Orpheus sacrifices everything in a reckless moment where his power to master the night disintegrates, and he experiences the profound disappearance of what his song seemed to have within its grasp. “But that forbidden movement is precisely what Orpheus must accomplish in order to carry the work beyond what assures it” (174). Orpheus’s look sends the work infinitely away, to disappear beyond a space where things can be made to disappear. Paradoxically, Blanchot explains that Orpheus must have already looked back in order to initiate his descent toward Eurydice. Orpheus enters the night through the seductive power of his song—a song that begins at the moment he turns back toward Eurydice to bring her in her absence to the light of day. His loss of Eurydice becomes the song, which always refers back to the loss of what inspires it. Orpheus’s work is the means by which he initiates his work, and this circularity reflects the absence of time of the work. The interminable error of the writer’s process, even if interrupted by an impatient look back, is maintained precisely in the impossibility encountered by the look back—the impossibility of beginning or ending. Blanchot explains, “One writes only if one reaches that instant which nevertheless one can only approach in the space opened by the movement of writing. To write, one has to write already” (176).
In one of the last sections of The Space of Literature, Blanchot turns his attention to the act of reading and its relation to writing. If writing depends upon a movement toward disappearance, loss, and impossibility, reading would seem to counter this movement in some sense. Blanchot often describes reading as a light and careless process, which strongly contrasts the serious risk involved in the task of writing. And, yet, reading plays a crucial role in the “life” of the book. “What is a book no one reads? Something that is not yet written. It would seem, then, that to read is not to write the book again, but to allow the book to be: written—this time all by itself, without the intermediary of the writer, without anyone’s writing it. The reader does not add himself to the book, but tends primarily to relieve it of its author” (193). Here, it is important to note that Blanchot is discussing the book, not the work—one that a reader might or might not open, depending on his or her mood or some other extraneous factor. But this lack of care or investment brings a sort of freedom to the book, which, without the reader, remains weighted down in its relation to the writer. Even if the work pulls the writer into a space of powerlessness and takes him or her toward disappearance, the book bears the traces of this grave struggle until the reader calls it forward and relieves it of its author. And if the work demands that the writer disappear into anonymity, the reader responds to this demand by picking up the book, without regard for the writer, as if this writer had no relation to what is written. Blanchot explains that this reader could be any reader:
The reader is himself always fundamentally anonymous. He is any reader, none in particular, unique but transparent. He does not add his name to the book (as our fathers did long ago); rather, he erases every name from it by his nameless presence, his modest, passive gaze, interchangeable and insignificant, under whose light pressure the book appears written, separate from everything and everyone. (193)
In this passage, we see that the reader’s anonymity parallels the writer’s, and the use of the word “gaze” perhaps suggests the myth of Orpheus. While writer and reader have distinct relations to the book (and to the work), Blanchot deliberately blurs the distinction at points in order to emphasize the way that the two processes mirror one another, never really sustaining a stable identity or role of their own. The reader’s anonymity suggests that the act of relieving the book from its author does not constitute a moment of power or mastery, where the reader makes the book his or her own. At this point, reading is simply a matter of carelessly gazing at the book; and though this gaze casually seeks to make something appear, it certainly does not experience the profound loss associated with the writer’s gaze. The writer’s anonymity, on the other hand, refers to a sort of sacrifice demanded by the work. And when the writer “gazes” in a moment of impatience, he or she loses everything and affirms the disappearance and concealment of the work. But even when recounting the myth of Orpheus, Blanchot continually comes back to the notion of the carelessness and lightness of impatience—the way that the sacrifice of the work and the look back to Eurydice require a moment where the writer forgets all the work, effort and patience that led him or her to that point. In the look back, the writer seems to act more like a reader, or even to respond to reading’s demand.
While the reader first approaches the book in a state of disappearance where he or she has no particular identity, reading soon seems to have a mission. In reading’s approach to the book, something becomes apparent: “The book is there, then, but the work is still hidden. It is absent, perhaps radically so; in any case, it is concealed, obfuscated by the evident presence of the book, behind which it awaits the liberating decision, the ‘Lazare, veni foras’” (195). This reference to Jesus’s resurrecting call to Lazarus evokes Blanchot’s earlier use of the command Noli me legere, which plays off of Jesus’s warning to Mary that she not touch him. Whereas Noli me legere represents a refusal—particularly the denial of the writer when he or she tries to read the work—Lazare veni foras would seem to suggest the reader’s power to make something appear in his or her approach to the book. The reader, who first opens the book in anonymity and lightness, soon experiences the book as the concealment of the absent work. Blanchot continues: “To make this stone fall seems to be reading’s mission: to render it transparent, to dissolve it with the penetrating force of the gaze which unimpeded moves beyond” (195). And reading thus calls forth the work, seeking to make it appear from behind the stone, through the power of its gaze. If the reader’s gaze was light and casual at first, it now takes on the seriousness of a task. And where Orpheus fails (in the sense that his gaze and attempt to resurrect Eurydice send her infinitely away), Jesus succeeds in bringing the dead Lazarus back to life. It would seem that reading has become the power to make absence appear.
Blanchot further explores the resurrecting power of reading by examining the significance of the speaking, breathing Lazarus:
To roll back the stone, to obliterate it, is certainly something marvelous, but it is something we achieve at every moment in everyday language. [ . . . ] In his well-woven winding sheet, sustained by the most elegant conventions, [Lazarus] answers us and speaks to us within ourselves. But what answers the call of literary reading is not a door falling open or becoming transparent or even getting a bit thinner. It is, rather, a ruder stone, better sealed, a crushing weight, an immense avalanche that causes earth and sky to shudder. (195)
Picking up the book, the reader becomes aware of the
