Biblical story, Lazarus indeed emerges from behind the stone once again to take part in the world of the living. Blanchot, though, compares the resurrection of Lazarus to everyday language, which causes us to reconsider the significance of what is made to appear. Everyday language negates what it names in order to give rise to the concept, but what appears bears the absence of what has disappeared in the act of naming. Lazarus, then, appears—but as a sort of replacement or stand-in for what has been called forth from behind the stone; moreover, this resurrected Lazarus appears as the profound concealment of the dead Lazarus. One has to kill the already dead Lazarus in order to bring him into the light of day, and the resurrected Lazarus paradoxically bears the death of the dead Lazarus at the same time that he hides it by appearing alive, cleanly clothed, and full of life. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot continues his reflections on the resurrection of Lazarus:
But what does this Lazarus saved and raised from the dead that you hold out to me have to do with what is lying there and makes you draw back, the anonymous corruption of the tomb, the lost Lazarus who already smells bad and not the one restored to life by a force that is no doubt admirable, but that is precisely a force and that comes in this decision from death itself? (36)
Although the story of Lazarus’s resurrection at first seems to contrast the myth of Orpheus, Blanchot encourages us to see the calling forth of Lazarus in terms of constructive negativity. While Lazarus appears, through the force of a marvelous power, he announces the absence of what remains concealed.
Returning specifically to the relation of the Lazarus story to reading, we can see that reading’s mission to “roll back the stone” might indeed result in the successful appearance of Lazarus in the world, but that this appearance points to a profound disappearance. Blanchot tells us that “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). Even though the reader calls forth the work, Blanchot shifts our attention from what seems to be resurrected to the “ruder stone” that refuses the reader’s call and power to make appear. The apocalyptic language of Blanchot’s description suggests that the stone marks an extreme limit—the end of everything—and that the dead Lazarus lies beyond, and in excess of, this end. In this way, the reader’s relation to the work does not differ from that of the writer; both confront the refusal of the work, even if the reader’s interpretive efforts might give the appearance of bringing the mysteries of the book to life. John Gregg explains, “Thus the noli me legere which Blanchot consistently invokes to describe writers’ incapability of authoritatively reading their own works, actually applies to all readers. No one can read the work. It is the book that lends itself to understanding, and it can be read by both author and reader.”21 Like the writer, the reader does not have the power to make the work appear; both can approach the book, but the work always escapes the grasp of this approach. For this reason, the lightness, carelessness, and anonymity of the reader’s process become the essential aspect of his or her relation to the work, in the sense that these characteristics contrast a sort of reading that would seek to impose an authoritative interpretation. It must be added, though, that the interpretive efforts of a reader confront the refusal of the work, and therefore affirm the disappearance of the work and constitute the reader’s only relation to the work. Again, Blanchot keeps us from being able absolutely to distinguish “good” reading from “bad” reading, ability from inability, calling forth from letting be. In this particular case, the calling forth of the book into the light of day, although it makes of reading an act of power, also affirms the disappearance of the work. Blanchot writes, “Disappearance, even when it is disguised as useful presence, belongs to the work’s essence” (206). Reading thus parallels the gaze of Orpheus, which paradoxically remains faithful to the work by betraying it.
Toward the end of The Space of Literature, Blanchot returns to a reflection on ends, on the final moment where the world’s truth appears through the labor of man and the process of history:
When all has been said, when the world comes into its own as the truth of the whole, when history wants to culminate in the conclusion of discourse—when the work has nothing more to say and disappears—it is then that it tends to become the language of the work. In the work that has disappeared the work wants to speak, and the experience of the work becomes the search for its essence, the affirmation of art, concern for the origin. (232)
In the chapters that follow, I will explore the way that several short fictions reflect the language of the disappeared work—a language that doesn’t have the ability to begin, or appear, or speak. Writer and reader communicate with this unspeakable language and face the threat of their own disappearance at the point that they turn over the power to bring their work forward into the light of day. All of the fictions address a space where, in one way or another, nothing can be done and nothing can be made to appear. In this way, they explore the dynamics of disappearance and the way that this movement of infinite recession characterizes the literary work.
Chapter 2: Franz Kafka and the Disappearance of the Writer
One of the tricky questions that confronts us when reading the narratives of Franz Kafka concerns the difficulty of making any sort of assertion about meanings, allegorical implications, or the act of interpretation in general. It seems too easy to find oneself in the trap of suggesting an underlying truth or transcendent principle to guide our reading; critics such as Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze have famously and correctly exposed the limitations of such readings. And yet a limited approach feels difficult to escape. Perhaps the temptation to “read for meaning”—insofar as that act threatens to be dangerously reductive, if unavoidable—begins with the sense that Kafka often tells stories about the search for meaning and the process of navigating the branching possibilities of our experience in and understanding of the world. Moreover, perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point. That issue marks a critical intersection of the writing of Kafka, the writing about Kafka, and, connecting back to the framework of this particular study, the writing of Blanchot. Kafka emerges as one of the central figures in Blanchot’s critical texts, and the way that Blanchot deals with Kafka’s writing reflects the various difficulties that arise when responding to his work. In The Space of Literature, Blanchot largely focuses on Kafka’s Diaries as a means of discussing the experience of writing and the disappearance of the writer in this solitary experience. Before exploring the question of the writer’s disappearance, and in particular the way that this disappearance takes shape in Kafka’s story “The Burrow,” it is necessary to address issues of reading and interpretation that arise when suggesting metaliterary connections between Kafka’s narrator and the figure of the writer.
In Benjamin’s essay “Some Reflections on Kafka,” he notes the way critics have heavily focused on Kafka’s personal writings as a means for interpreting his fictions—“to the neglect of his real works.”22 Benjamin’s comments point to the tendency to search for and supposedly locate the “key” to Kafka’s narratives, thereby reducing the labyrinthine nature of the texts to a single, navigable path. He tells us that “both the psychoanalytical and theological interpretations equally miss the central points [of Kafka’s works]” and goes on to explore the way that those works evoke a “prehistoric world” that lies underneath, before, and beyond their simultaneously familiar and foreign textual environments (23, 27). In effect, Benjamin argues that efforts to illuminate the meaning of Kafka’s narratives through, for example, the Freudian lens of his troubled relationship with his father, defy the relation to the dark and the unknown—a relation that remains central and must be maintained in the experience of Kafka’s work. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Deleuze and Guattari proceed in a similar vein, rejecting uniquely content-oriented
