the interruption of myth

7/30/2019 The Interruption of Myth

1/39

THE INTERRUPTION OF MYTH: A NANCIAN READINGOF BLANCHOT AND AL-BAYATI

Abstract

Jean-Luc Nancys provocative second chapter ofThe Inoperative Community, MythInterrupted, sets to rede ne the relationship between myth and literature. This paperputs Nancys new perspective to test through juxtaposing Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayatis

myth of Orpheus with Maurice Blanchots. The assumption is that when literaturestages myth and presents it from various perspectives, it does so not to invoke orallegorize its content through the letter, but rather to interrupt it. This new discoveryof the untraceability of myth leaves us with a different perspective of literature asthat language which cuts across myth and exposes its limit and as a language thatinhabits myth only to interrupt it. Blanchots interest in Orpheus, as it is articulatedin his novel/story Thomas lobscur (the 1950 New Version) and in his chapter onOrpheuss Gaze in The Space of Literature, and al-Bayatis reference to Orpheusin his poetic collections He Who Comes and Does Not Come, Death in Life, and

Writing on the Mud thematize this playful staging of the myth of Orpheus. Bothseem to follow a different path with the same myth. Blanchot disregards the endingof the Orpheus story, and al-Bayati disregards the gaze. However, it is not justselection, but modification that is at work here: both shape their chosen materials inconformity to a specific need. The logic that binds the two writers together in rela-tion to myth and literature expresses itself not only in the choice of the same myth,but they also have in common the shared debt to this classical material and moreimportantly in their (re)de nition of this material. The point of departure betweenthe two of them in their treatment (reinterpretation) of Orpheus is that Blanchot is

looking at the effect of death on writing, while al-Bayati is exploring the effect ofwriting on death.

Introduction

Language is a perpetual Orphic song,Which rules with Daedal harmony a throngOf thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, IV: 415-417)

It is not a mere coincidence that many 20th-century literary gures andphilosophers resort to mythical models like Oedipus, Odysseus, and Orpheusat the most decisive moments of their thinking. They return to them astropes or imaginary carriers of the ideas their invocation represents. Thismyth-based thought that characterizes modernism in general has perhaps

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Journal of Arabic Literature, XXXIII, 3Also available online www.brill.nl
http://www.brill.nl/


2/39

THE INTERRUPTION OF MYTH 249

taken place because it helps through the analogical use of myth to approx-imate the relationship between reason in its crude Kantian terms and expe-rience in its unruly and imaginative sense. The psychical content of Freudsmale abnormality and family romance is represented by Oedipus; the

dialectic of enlightenment in Adorno and Horkheimer visits the Odyssey tostage its double thesis of enlightenment as nding its roots in mythologyand of enlightenment as lapsing into mythology; the anthropological struc-turalism of Lvi-Strauss invests in myth as containing the rst grains ofhuman rationality that provide a systematic model of logic capable of over-coming contradictions; the literary theory of Eric Auerbachs Mimesis usesHomers Odyssey in the famous chapter of Odysseuss Scar and juxta-poses it to the ancient Hebrew stories in order to prove that none of thosetwo stylistic conventions pre gures the representational politics of Westernrealism that Auerbach believes to have emerged with the Gospels.

Myth has thus been used and given many de nitions by the psychoana-lyst, the cultural theorist, the anthropologist, and the literary critic. Now,what questions will these representations impose upon us? It is obvious thatmyth has more or less been used as raw material to solidify ideas and atti-tudes in order to provide some sort of intellectual security. This in turn has

affected the trajectory of literary theory in the rst half of the 20th-century.New approaches to the study of literature, pioneered by gures like C. G.Jung, Joseph Campbell, and culminating in Northrop Frye, have offered aninterpretation of literature that sees literary texts through the prism of myth,or vice versa. This treatment of literature and myth as coterminous hasignored their essential differences, and only recently has an interest in mythas myth and as different from literature started to develop among a groupof writers like George Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Pierre Vernant, andMarcel Detienne. The assumption is that when literature stages myth andpresents it from various perspectives, it does so not to invoke or allegorizeits content through the letter, but rather to interrupt it. Myth may serve asa focus of an ethical idea of self-transcendence or self-sacri ce or of anyother idea that needs to be justi ed. But when a literary text refers to myth,or rewrites myth, this does not mean that literature brings a dead myth backto life. For myth never dies, it rather dies down, like a communal value-

consensus, and the only thing that literature could do is stir and interrupt it,thus contributing to a better understanding of the variety of fundamental choicesopen to any given human community. That is why Nancys theory on mythis useful for any kind of study that compares myth and literature. But inorder to understand how literature interrupts myth, it will be useful to offera quick overview of the 20th-century literary criticism of myth that consti-tutes the background of Nancys theory of myth.

Among the many theories that relate literature to myth, two approaches


3/39

250 THE INTERRUPTION OF MYTH

1 Joseph Campbell, for instance, makes a very brief reference to the myth of Orpheus andEurydice and groups it in the box of the archetype of return, arguing that like hundreds ofanalogous tales throughout the world, the myth suggests that in spite of the failure recorded,a possibility exists of a return of the lover with his lost love from beyond the terrible thresh-old. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1949) 206.

2 Although it might be a tempting argument to claim that al-Bayati, for instance, used themyth of Orpheus or myth in general as a metaphor for a nationalistic project or as a call forrevolution, or even as a re ection of the social and cultural malaise of his Iraqi community,

one has to admit that this is just one possible reading among others. For allegorical treatmentof myth in modern Arab poetry see for instance Rt Awa, Usrat al-Mawt wa al-Inbithf al-Shir al-Arab al-adth (Beirut: al-Muassasah al-Arabiyyah lil-Dirst wa al-Nashr, 1974);see also Aida Azouqa, Defamiliarization in the Poetry of Abd al-Wahhb al-Bayti and T. S.Eliot: A Comparative Study, Journal of Arabic Literature , 32 no. 2 (2001): 167-211.

3 George Bataille, The Absence of Myth Writings on Surrealism (London: Verso, 1994)48.

4 Jean-Luc Nancy, Myth Interrupted in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Conner;trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, Simona Sawhney (Minnesota: U ofMinnesota P, 1991) 47.

stand out. The rst one is represented by a group of critics who insist ontreating myth in literature as an archetype that has been established in thehuman heritage within which humanity seeks to nd an imaginative spaceof comprehension.1 The second views myth as a mask or a fantastic element

that writers use in order to re ect more eloquently and rhetorically onhuman reality. While these two critical presuppositions or expectations ofmyth are often substantial and well-founded, they both still establish a bind-ing extrinsic pattern of thought that claims to address myth while in factjumping over it for what lies beneath or outside it. These critical modes ofexternality derive mainly from a grandiose connotative envisioning of liter-ature and myth as something that means, not as something that exists for itsown sake.2

Nancy, on the other hand, claims that myth is origin, or is at leastrelated to an unthinkable origin. Literature continues or discontinues mythbut does not bind everything together the way myth does. According toNancy, we live in what Bataille describes as the absence of myth,3 orwhat Nancy himself chooses to call the interruption of myth, or the mythof myth.4 This logic, if traced backwards, would force us to consider amyth like Orpheus, whether in Virgils Georgics or Ovids Metamorphoses,

as already an interruption of its own mythicity. This discovery of theuntraceability of myth, to use Marcel Detiennes word, would thus leaveus with a different perspective of literature as that language which cutsacross myth and exposes its limit and as a language that inhabits myth onlyto interrupt it. Some critics even reconsider the relationship between myth
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=/0085-2376^282001^2932:2L.167[aid=3481394]


4/39


and literature and see the former to be the invented by the latter, to theextent that myth has become the other of literature:5

Myth is interrupted by literature precisely to the extent that literature does notcome to and end. It does not come to an end at the very place where the

work passes from an author to a reader, and from this reader to anotherreader or to another author. It does not come to an end at the place wherethe work passes on to another work by the same author or at the place whereit passes into other works of other authors. It does not come to an end whereits narrative passes into other narratives, its poem into other poems, itsthought into other thoughts, or into the inevitable suspension of the thoughtor the poem.6

Literature, like myth, does inscribe the way we are together, but because

it does not do so and the same way myth does, it offers something that itdoes not hold as essence. In our case, when Blanchot and al-Bayati lookback to the Orpheus story, as this study hopes to reveal, the myth is notheld as essence. In fact, the story itself becomes their Eurydice, whichmeans that in order for their literary texts to exist, part of the Orpheus myth,indeed part of all our past fountains of inspiration, our tradition, has to belost like Eurydice herself. Literature therefore cannot do the job of myth byassuming the task of collective necessity. Literature designates what Nancycalls the singular ontological quality7 that gives being an essence, exceptthat literature does not hold it in reserve. Literature has nothing to say aboutthe essence of myth, and therefore literature lacks being. Literature to Nancyis without thesis, and therefore, there cannot be any one single literary workthat would establish our human essence. For unlike myth, literature does notcome to an end. Having lost all transcendental signi ers literature cannotfunction in the age of technological reproducibility to establish a mythic

project and to build a community of shared essences. Contrary to myth, lit-erature cannot fuse individuals together, but can only cut across myth toexpose its negativity. Literature comes in when we have the absence ofsomething and the absence of myth becomes the necessary condition for lit-erature to be. But literature too is caught in the technology of writing: itgestures towards transcendence, and even if it makes that gesture, it cannotachieve it, yet it always suspends it. Only myth as myth can do this becauseit has an ontological function that goes beyond any kind of critical lan-guage. In literature one has to have an inventor, an author. Myth does not

5 For more on how recent scholarship in mythology has become inventive and informed byready-made ideologies, read Marcel Detienne, Linvention de la mythologie (Paris: Gallimard,1981).

6 Nancy 64-65.7 Nancy 64.


5/39


have an author. Literature is thus impure and improper: impure because itlives on the absence of myth and improper because it is a process of de-appropriation and can never be a process of becoming. So, if we aretogether in the absence of myth, then we are together in the non-mythic.

After the writings of George Battaille, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Marcel Detienne,one has to admit that the relationship between literature and myth hasbecome much more complicated than the mind-soothing individuation orrepetitive archetypalism that informed the intellectual grounds of the rsthalf of 20th-century writings that psychoanalyze myths and regard them asuniversal metaphors or dreams of humanity that could explain for us theunconscious repressed by logos. By nally establishing the shift from mythas allegory, as allos- (something else) and agoreuein (to say publicly), toSchellings understanding of myth as tautegory,8 namely as saying some-thing and meaning exactly that, a deconstructive approach to myth that alsoinforms the present study challenges the psychoanalytical axiom that claimsthat myth is not what it is. As Battaille tersely puts it, we live in animmense void which makes myth no longer a closure. It is this absenceof myth, this interruption that I wish to study in Blanchot and al-Bayati.

The treatment of the myth of Orpheus in Blanchot or al-Bayati, indeed in

any artistic work that considers myth a symbol that constitutes a language,might suffer from the lapse into arbitrary interpretation. Reference tomythology in literary texts differs from culture to culture and from genera-tion to generation and in our case from one perspective on the same mythto another. Indeed modern literary theory will have taught us nothing if ithas failed to convey to us the open-endedness of the process of signi cation.Therefore, any treatment of Blanchots or al-Bayatis Orpheus as a staticand xed metaphor for X will eventually fail because it anchors thought andprevents critical diversity and poetic inventiveness. It was Lvi-Strauss whorst told us in an anthropological spirit that mythology is static and that

we nd the same mythical elements combined over and over again.9 Butthis is not the case with literatures treatment of myth, which never remains

8 For more on Schelling and the description of myth as tauto-gorical, namely, standing

on its own as a declaration of itself, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, Toward a Science ofMythology in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece , trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: ZoneBooks, 1990) 226-60.

9 Claude Lvi-Strauss,Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York: SchockenBooks, 1995) 40. Although in Lvi-Strauss myth has it own realm and does not stand for any-thing else outside itself, nor, unlike science, does it make us master nature, it is still viewedfrom a structuralist presupposition of meaning; to him myth gives us a total view of the world,and in life we need such a view in order to make sense of existence: it gives man, veryimportantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand theuniverse, Lvi-Strauss 17.


6/39


suspended in history, nor (as will be argued below) does literature repeat thesame mythical pattern over and over again. Here lies the dangerous prospectof any criticism guided by the desire for a kind of a myth in the text thathas to have unity and meaning. This type of criticism risks reinventing the

intentionality of the author and thinking his/her text for him/her. Althoughit is not a remote possibility that a text would speak for many things, polit-ical, social, intellectual, one should not lose track of the fact that rst andforemost a text speaks for itself and for its very existence as text, as some-one like Paul de Man would have it.

Blanchots interest in Orpheus, as it is articulated in his novel/storyThomas lobscur (the 1950 New Version) and in his chapter on OrpheussGaze in The Space of Literature, and al-Bayatis evocation of Orpheus inhis poetic collections He Who Comes and Does Not Come (Alladh Yat wa

L Yat), Death in Life (Al-Mawt f al-ayt), and Writing on the Mud (Al-Kitbah al al-n) seem to thematize this playful staging of the myth ofOrpheus. And if it were true that the zenith a critical reading should reachis, as Blanchot declares, not to designate a productive activity, nor toproduce anything, nor again to add anything, the best that my readingof Blanchot and al-Bayati could aspire to achieve is freedom, a kind of

liberty that, in Blanchots words, lets the works overwhelming decisive-ness af rm itself, lets be its af rmation that is and nothing more.10

Both Blanchot and al-Bayati seem to follow a different path with thesame myth. This seeming difference is not the result of cultural dissimilar-ity, since both writers stand out as different from their own peers who dwelton the myth. But is it not also true that great writers do not dwell on mythwithout extending, appropriating, and sometimes even totally disrupting it?This is what Blanchot and al-Bayati do with Orpheus. Blanchot disregardsthe ending of the Orpheus story, and al-Bayati disregards the gaze.However, it is not just selection, but modi cation that is at work here: bothshape their chosen materials in conformity to a speci c need. The logic thatbinds the two writers together in relation to myth and literature expressesitself not only in the choice of the same myth. They also have in commonthe shared debt to this classical material and more importantly in their(re)de nition of this material. The point of departure between the two of

them in their treatment (reinterpretation) of Orpheus is that Blanchot is look-ing at the effect of death on writing, while al-Bayati is exploring the effectof writing on death.

10 Maurice Blanchot, Orpheuss Gaze in The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock(Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982) 194.


7/39


Although my argument depends on these structural and ideological dif-ferences, it is important to stress a line of parallelism at work in the twowriters. Offering their accounts of Orpheuss art in their respective texts,both Blanchot and al-Bayati are caught in a kind of artfulness that will

eventually lead to a total identi cation and the loss of distinction betweenBlanchot, al-Bayati and Orpheus himself.

The Myth of Orpheus in Blanchot

Virgils Orpheus sings of death and rebirth, and Ovids becomes anobject of metamorphosis. Both poets speak of the dismemberment and deathof Orpheus at the hands of the Bacchants of his native Thrace. With thepassage of time, later writers embellished the Orphic myth with marvelousmiracles and wonders: after being decapitated, Orpheuss head continued tosing, and his lyre never ceased to play. His head and lyre then oated withthe tide down the stream and out to sea to the isles of Lesbos and wereeventually transformed into celestial lights in the heavens while the Musesburied the other parts of his mutilated body in a tomb near Mount Olympus,where up to this day the nightingales sing more sweetly than they do in any

other place on earth.11

But in generation after generation of poetic rework-ings, Orpheus was associated with more than music. He was even mademore mythical than he already is now. Because of his Katabasis eis Aidou(Descent to Hades) and because of getting to see what no mortal eye hasever seen, Orpheus acquired an aura of sacredness and was claimed to havehad access to the secret of all knowledge. His name has been associatedwith special knowledge of the mysteries of life, death, reincarnation andrebirth into a world where he exercises a supreme charm over its naturalinhabitants.

Blanchots literary writing is so hermetic that scholars such as Paul deMan might warn us that reading Blanchot differs from all other readingexperiences.12 But the main difference, indeed the main dif culty lies notonly in the seduction brought about by the limpidity of language thatallows for no discontinuities or inconsistencies,13 as de Man argues, butalso in the fact that Blanchot has already fully accounted for the act of read-

11 For a modern poetic retelling of the myth of Orpheus, read Seamus Heaney Orpheusand Eurydice and Death of Orpheus inAfter Ovid: New Metamorphoses , eds. Michael Hofmannand James Lasdun (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994) 222-29.

12 Paul de Man, Impersonality in the Criticism of Maurice Blanchot in Blindness andInsight (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971) 62.

13 de Man 62.


8/39


ing in general, to the effect that any criticism of his criticism does not actu-ally take us anywhere outside his critical sphere:

To read a poem is not to read not yet another poem; it is not even to enter,via this poem, into the essence of poetry. The reading of a poem is the poem

itself, af rming itself in the reading as a work. It is the giving birth, in thespace held open by the reader, to the reading that welcomes it; it is the poembecoming power to read, becoming communication opened between powerand impossibility , between the power linked to the moment of reading and theimpossibility linked to the moment of writing.14

The act of writing, according to Blanchot, begins with the gaze ofOrpheus, because he sees Orpheuss gaze as that which no longer unveilswhat it sees. Broadly speaking, the muths,15 i.e., the plot of the myth ofOrpheus, is an intriguing one. Robert Graves lists at least fteen sources ofthe Orpheus myth in addition to Ovids,16 the most established line of whichgoes like this: Orpheus, a famous gifted singer capable of enchanting wildbeasts and of taming nature with his music, falls in love with Eurydice, whodies on their wedding day of a snake-bite. Chagrined and distressed,Orpheus undertakes a suicidal journey to the Underworld to bring Eurydiceback to life. He manages through the power of his art to persuade

Persephone and Pluto to let him take Eurydice back to the upper world, pro-vided that he guide her without looking back at her. When Orpheus violatesthis proviso and looks back, Eurydice, we are told, disappears, and Orpheusloses her for the second and last time. The tale, of course, does not endthere, but Blanchot re-appropriates the myth and uses it as his vision of art.The act of writing, says Blanchot, begins with Orpheuss gaze,17 that is,writing is an act of dying, and this dying produces a form of the imaginaryand which is more fascinating than the original/Eurydice because it achievesthe original without achieving it. Herein lies the ambiguity of literature: itis the inspiration to achieve the unachievable through annihilation. In otherwords, death is the condition for literature to be, in fact for language in itsentirety. In order for language to be possible at all, death/negation appearsto be the premise. In Literature and the Right to Death Blanchot writes:

14 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 198.15 Muths etymologically was used synonymously with logos to refer to the spoken word,

but eventually came to mean a story, a plot line or a structure of narrative. For an overviewof the history of mythology and the opposition between logos and muths, see Vernant, TheReason of Myth inMyth and Society in Ancient Greece 186-207. See also Eric A. HavelocksChapter Five Epic as Record versus Epic as Narrative in Preface to Plato (Cambridge:Harvard UP, 1936).

16 Robert Graves, The Greek Myths vol. I (New York: Penguin Books, 1955) 133.17 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature 176.


9/39


My language does not kill anyone. But if this woman were not really capableof dying, if she were not threatened by death at every moment of her life,bound and joined to death by an essential bond, I would not be able tocarry out that ideal negation, that deferred assassination which is what mylanguage is.18

The idea that language begins in death might be in con ict withBlanchots statement that literature begins where literature becomes a ques-tion. There appear to be two beginnings, but in fact death and the questionmark are one, for death is itself the question mark that hardly promises ananswer. To Blanchot, therefore, literature begins with Orpheuss gaze atEurydice, and if literature is the life that endures death and maintains itselfin it,19 it is because the dynamic reciprocity between language and death

never dies. Death is not only the hope of writing, but its negativity is heldout for language. To Blanchot, writing has to feed on death in order to sur-vive it:

When we speak we are leaning on a tomb, and the void of that tomb is whatmakes language true, but at the same time this void is reality and deathbecomes being. There is being that is to say, a logical and expressibletruth and there is a world, because we can destroy things and suspend exis-tence. This is why we can say that there is being because there is nothing-ness: death is mans possibility, his chance, it is through death that the futureof a furnished world is still there for us; death is mans greatest hope, hisonly hope of being man.20

If for Blanchot art neither dreams nor creates but simply demands, inOrpheuss case, art then would demand death and sacri ce in order for it tobe. Eurydice, who stands for this ambiguity as both the work and theunwork of art, is the furthest that art can reach . . ., the profoundly obscure

point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend. She is theinstant when the essence of night approaches as the othernight.21 Preciselythat which has to be retrieved in the work of art has to be lost in the veryprocess of (un)working it. Orpheus cannot tolerate not to gaze at Eurydicein the darkness of her non-formation. For Blanchot, then, it is not Eurydicesbeauty or person that instigates Orpheuss impatient gaze, it is rather theurge of art to catch Eurydice in her darkness, to see Eurydice as darkness,as the essence of the night in the night. This essence of the night is itselfthe same essence of art, of desire, and of death. In other words, what

18 Blanchot, Literature and the Right to Death in The Gaze of Orpheus , trans. Lydia Davis(New York: Station Hill Press, 1981) 43.

19 Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus 54.20 Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus 55.21 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 171.


10/39


Orpheus wants is not Eurydice, but perhaps Eurydice-as-lost. In this act ofsimultaneous appropriation and disappropriation, Blanchot rejects thestraightforward interpretation of the myth that condemns Orpheus as guiltyof impatience and forgetfulness:

Immemor heu Victusque animi respexit22

Although Blanchot might seem to be so clear and simple here, his sim-plicity is itself the sign that something deep and subtle is at play. This para-dox is indeed at the heart of Blanchots thought. De Man describes this formof deceptive clarity as a light of a very different nature, adding that noth-ing is more obscure than the nature of this light.23 The paradox that seemsto be at work here is that passivity/negation becomes a means of activity/transcendence.

According to Blanchot, art feeds on disobedience; in this very sense artbecomes an outlaw, a de Sadian call for breaking the con nes of reason.Law, in a word, means limits. But desire in Blanchot forgets the law, or atleast pretends to deny its existence, and Orpheuss destiny, says Blanchot,is not to submit to this ultimate law.24 In fact, Blanchots interest in

Orpheus as a transgressor goes way back to his rst published work,Thomas lobscur, which he rewrote in 1950. Thomas lobscur is one of themost hermetic texts among 20th-century French novels, which led one majorcritic, Jean Starobinski, to end his criticism of the rst chapter with theavowal that Blanchot, au vrai, soffre une comprhension inachevable,non une explication. Je my suis donc pris obliquement. Lchec dune

explication, aprs tout, en dit long sur ce quune uvre a dirrductible et

dexceptionnel.25 [Blanchot, to be sure, gives himself over to an unachiev-able comprehensibility, not to an analysis. I thus went about things in aroundabout way. The failure of an analysis, after all, says much about theirreducible and exceptional qualities of a work.] Given Blanchots irreduci-bility to any critical exegesis, his unachievable comprehensibility, one hasto learn Starobinskis lesson by trying to avoid de nitive answers and bylooking instead to the images through which Blanchot delineates hisunheroic hero.

22 Forgetful alas, and overcome by passion, he looked back (Virgil, Georgics 4.491)23 de Man 63.24 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature 172.25 Jean Starobinski, Thomas lobscur, Chapitre Premier: Critique (juin 1966) 513. Unless

otherwise noted, all translations from the French are my own. For an English translation ofThomas lobscur see Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure , trans. Robert Lamberton andDavid Lewis (New York: D. Lewis, 1973).


11/39


The relationship between the two major components in Thomass experi-ence with the outside, his gaze and the night, makes the novel an earlyctionalization of Blanchots Orphic theory of literature. The novel reiter-

ates for us Blanchots obsession with vision, death and night as articulated

in The Space of Literature. Generally, Thomas lobscur in its revised editionturns out to be, on close reading, a love story, and more speci cally, a storyabout what it is to experience the non-relation of two lovers. The principalevent in the story is the death of Anne, or perhaps, Thomass experience ofher death. But prior to this event, there is the strangeness of Annes expe-rience, or non-experience, of Thomas. With respect to the love story, it iscertain that Thomas and Anne keep company, and Anne, for her part, expe-riences quelques jours de grand bonheur.26 [a few days of great happi-ness.] Thomas seems to have completely and unconditionally abandonedhimself to Anne, but his passivity turns out to be a radical impassivity thatmakes him inaccessible to her as well as to us as readers. Chapter II putsthe stress on Thomass eyes and shows us how Thomas has been invadedby the other night and appears to have just returned from the dead:

A cet instant, Thomas commit limprudence de jeter un regard autour de lui.La nuit tait plus sombre et plus pnible quil ne pouvait sy attendre.

Lobscurit submergeait tout, il ny avait aucun espoir den traverser lesombres, mais on en atteignait la ralit dans une relation dont lintimit taitbouleversante.27 [At this instant, Thomas committed the imprudence of look-ing about himself. The night was darker and more terrible than he hadexpected. The obscurity submerged everything, there was no hope of travers-ing its shadows, yet one grasped its reality in a relationship whose intimacywas deeply moving.]

Right from the very beginning thus we nd ourselves not so much lost in

darkness as dazzled by la nuit [qui] tait plus sombre et plus pnible [thenight (that) was darker and more painful], one which Thomas ne pouvaitsy attendre. [had not expected.] Limpidity, the medium which grants usunlimited vision has itself become the limit of vision, the most impassableof all routes (la plus infranchissable de traverses). In the blinding excess orthe unde nable de ciency of the event, in the eruption of a light that is nolonger simply transparent, and in the insinuation of a kind of darkness thatis no longer simply the privation of a light, a new type of relation is atwork. With his eyes shut, Thomas could see more plainly in the darkness.This (non)vision is itself a source of ocular fascination for him:

26 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas lobscur: Nouvelle Version (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) 62.27 Maurice Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 19.


12/39


Comme la nuit tombait, il essaya de se redresser et, les deux mains appuyessur le sol, il mit un genou terre, tandis que son autre jambe se balanait;puis, il t un mouvement brusque et russit se tenir tout fait droit. Il taitdonc debout. la vrit, il y avait dans sa faon dtre une indcision quilaissait un doute sur ce quil faisait. Ainsi, quoiquil et renonc voir dans

les tnbres, ctait plutt le contraire.28 [As the night was falling, he tried tostand up and, with his two hands pressed against the ground, rose up on oneknee, while his other leg swung back and forth. Then he made a brusquemovement and managed to get himself upright. He was now standing. Intruth, there was an indecisiveness in his manner that gave a sense of uncer-tainty to what he was doing. Thus, although he had given up being able tosee in the dark, it was rather the contrary.]

Vision no longer seizes and dominates the world, but it is also unable to

extinguish itself; it continues to be sustained in and by its own impossibil-ity. We see in Blanchots text that Thomass gaze is cast precisely on thatwhich limits and abolishes it. What we have here is not only a question oflosing sight of vision, but also of darkness itself as vision, thus the exteri-ority of the object of vision has never actually been separated from the inte-riority of its subject:

Ctait la nuit mme. Des images qui faisaient son obscurit linondaient. Il

ne voyait rien et, loin den tre accabl, il faisait de cette absence de visionle point culminant de son regard. Son il, inutile pour voir, prenait des pro-portions extraordinaires, se dveloppait dune manire dmesure et, sten-dant sur lhorizon, laissait la nuit pntrer en son centre pour en recevoir lejour. Par ce vide, ctait donc le regard et lobjet du regard qui se mlaient.29

[It was the night itself. He was ooded by the very images that constitutedits obscurity. He saw nothing, and, far from being distraught by this, madethis absence of vision the culminating point of his gaze. His eye, useless forseeing, took on extraordinary proportions, growing boundlessly and, extend-

ing itself over the horizon, let the night penetrate into its center in order toreceive its day. It was through this void that the gaze and the object of thegaze blended together.]

This duplicity in Thomass vision blends the literal and the metaphoricalnuance, and is reminiscent of the gaze of Orpheus that Blanchot describeslater in The Space of Literature, a gaze which at the same time both wantsto see and not to see that which lies behind the visible. Orpheuss gaze isboth towards and away from Eurydice; it achieves visibility at the verymoment it makes vision impossible, invisible. In the above-quoted passagethe night becomes a point of articulation achieved by a kind of vision-shat-tering darkness, and like Orpheus, Thomas is no longer able to make out

28 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 17.29 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 20-21.


13/39


objects in the night; what he sees is the essence of the night as inessen-tial.30 In this sense, Orpheuss and Thomass gazes thus become a turningat the limits of possibilities, between day and night, and their turningbecomes their tropes, since it is essential to Blanchot that art be de ned as

a movement outside the true.31 Thomass essence appears to be found inhis opacity, thus invoking the title, Thomas Lobscur, which describes himas obscure, but his obscurity also has a double entendre about it. Thomas isdark, impenetrable, and inessential, yet the reverse still holds: not that hisessence remains dark, but that this darkness has always already beenThomass essence, that he exists as essentially dark and as essentiallyobscure. The title thus not only invaginates vision and obscurity inside oneanother, but it also makes the obscure an object of vision in and of itself.Perhaps that is why Thomass eye becomes capable of seeing the non-essence as essential: Non seulement cet il qui ne voyait rien apprhendaitquelque chose, mais il apprhendait la cause de sa vision. Il voyait commeobjet ce qui faisait quil ne voyait pas.32 [Not only did this eye that sawnothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. It sawas an object (sees), which meant that it did not see at all. It saw as objectthat which prevented it from seeing.] Given the ambiguity of this last sen-

tence, still the dilemma of a blindness that infects sight from within, onewhich cannot be gured as death or deprivation, is a blow to Western ratio-nality. When Blanchot writes Bientt, la nuit lui parut plus sombre, plusterrible que nimporte quelle nuit, comme si elle tait rellement sortie duneblessure de la pense qui ne se pensait plus, de la pense prise ironiquementcomme objet par autre chose que la pense.33 [Soon, the night appeareddarker, more terrible than any other night, as if it had truly seeped from awound of thought that no longer thought itself, of thought taken ironicallyas object by something other than thought.] Sartre attacks the passage fromthe Cartesian viewpoint that a thought which thinks that it does not knowis still a thought. The premises of such an objection are evident; it takes forgranted the very identity of vision with thought (the Cartesian, Kantian, orHusserlian constitutive identity of the subject).34 This Cartesian concept of

30 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 172.31 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 77.32 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 21.33 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 20.34 Martin Jay traces the relationship between seeing and knowledge back to its etymo-

logical origins:The word theater, as has often been remarked, shares the same root as the word the-ory, theoria, which meant to look at attentively, to behold. So too does theorem, whichhas allowed some commentators to emphasize the privileging of vision in Greek math-ematics, with its geometric emphasis. The importance of optics in Greek science has also


14/39


the thinking subject has brought about consciousness and perspectival-ism, what in visual studies is referred to as the unilinear or geometralpoint of vision,35 namely, the notion that everything exists only as de nedby the subject. This notion makes everything else other, or object,

including language itself. For critics who like to work extrinsically withBlanchots text, it would not be dif cult to nd a political allegory, one inwhich Blanchot could be ridiculing Western philosophy for incarceratingitself in the haunting tradition of the transcendental subject, to borrowFoucaults term, a subject that is captive to a pre-given system of signi-

cation, which conveys a phony sense of mastery over a vision that it can-not see and a thought that it cannot even understand.

If Thomass vision consists of his ability to see and perhaps even moreof his greater inability to see, then we are driven towards a degree zero inwhich vision and non-vision, subject and object, are identical to one another.This negativity is a persistent theme in Blanchots uvre. Otherwise, whatwould be the implications of this internalization of vision in Thomas? CouldBlanchot be arguing that perception itself, the way we see things isalready structured by a kind of language that emanates from us and comesback to us and that our visions have never left our bodies? It has become

evident that human vision is both physiologically and sociologically condi-tioned, and in most cases, we are trained to see things, and it turns out thatwe do not see things as they are, but rather we see what we think thingsare. Linguistically, this would imply that it is the signi er that shapes ourperception of the signi ed, not vice versa. In short, the relationship betweenknowing, seeing, imagining, and writing, is in its entirety one ofinsecurity and has thus put the whole project of Western epistemology intoquestion. What the mind recognizes is not always the same as what the eyesees. What this could mean is that dominant philosophies ignore the possi-bility of what exists outside of their discourse. While not trying to be sopositive about it, Thomass inward vision might very well be an irony ofthe traditional ways of seeing. For while it is true that objects are seen,

been adduced to illustrate its partiality for sight. But nowhere has the visual seemed so

dominant as in the remarkable Greek invention called philosophy. Here the contempla-tion of the visible was extended to become the philosophical wonder at all that was inview. Truth, it was assumed, could be as naked as the undraped body. Knowledge(eidenai) is the state of having seen, Bruno Snell notes of Greek epistemology, andthe Nous is the mind in its capacity as an observer of images. Martin Jay, DowncastEyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: U ofCalifornia P, 1993) 23.

35 See Peter de Bolla, The Visibility of Visuality in Vision in Context: Historical andContemporary Perspectives on Sight, eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York:Routledge, 1996) 65-79.


15/39


these objects are described in terms of existing lexemes and a designatedlinguistic framework. The efforts to describe the unknown in terms of theknown, to install ready-made signi eds on brand-new signi ers, have indeedcreated a rupture in the relationship between seeing and knowing, between

observation and appropriation. Again, if there is any ulterior motive that thischapter offers, with its strong insistence on (non)vision, it would lie in Thomassrejection of this ideology of visual appropriation, an ideology against whichhe rebels in his desire to abandon himself, to give himself to himself, to bein contact with the nocturnal mass that is nothing but himself, and tobathe in his own vision:

Sa premire observation fut quil pouvait encore se servir de son corps, en

particulier ses yeux; ce ntait pas quil vt quelque chose, mais ce quilregardait, la longue le mettait en rapport avec une masse nocturne quilpercevait vaguement comme tant lui-mme et dans laquelle il baignait. 36 [His

rst observation was that he could still make use of his body, in particularhis eyes. It wasnt that he saw something, but eventually, what he was gaz-ing at put him in touch with a nocturnal mass that he perceived vaguely asbeing part of himself, and in which he bathed.]

Vision, therefore, in its ontological inessentiality, cannot be mastered by a

concept or a desire. The predicament of Thomas for Blanchot, like that ofOrpheus, is that he loses the object of his desire at the moment of turningtoward it and simultaneously loses his own identity in the anonymity andnon-presence of the object of his vision. To look is to submit to an inex-haustible exhaustion, an endless dissolution of the I that cannot even beknown as such: Thomas betrays the visual experience in remaining true toit, producing a vision by remaining blind to its necessary failure.

Later in Chapter VIII, Anne attributes Thomass obscurity to the fact that

nothing could be discovered about his life and that in every circumstance heremained anonymous and without a history. It is evident, however, that whatis secret about Thomas is not something that he keeps to himself; the secretis rather the distance, sometimes called indiffrence,37 that separates himfrom Anne, and as it so happens, separates him from himself as well. Theonly thing Anne needed in order to understand Thomas was another I likeThomass, one that would free her vision from its glassy solitude, an I

that is also an eye, and a thought. Again, the relationship betweenbeing, vision, and thought is mirrored in Anne: il lui manquait unmoi sans sa solitude de verre, sans cet il atteint depuis si longtemps de

strabisme, l il dont la suprme beaut est de loucher le plus possible. L il

36 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 19.37 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 85.


16/39


dont de l il, la pense de la pense.38 [she needed an I without herglassy solitude, without this eye af icted for so long with strabism (withoutthis eye which had squinted for so long), the eye whose supreme beauty isto squint as much as possible. The eye of the eye, the thought of the

thought.] Shortly before she dies, Anne opens her eyes without the least signof curiosity, and avec la lassitude de quelquun qui sait parfaitement la-vance tout ce qui va soffrir sa vue.39 [with the lassitude of someone whoknows perfectly well in advance everything that will greet her eyes.]Blanchot calls this moment one of suprme distraction, of suprmeretour dEurydice, une dernire fois vers ce qui se voit.40 [supreme distrac-tion, supreme return of Eurydice, one last time towards that which isvisible.] Perhaps it is at this point of incommensurability and inexplicableseparation that Thomas and Anne repeat for us the scenario of Orpheus andEurydice, whose inevitable separation is also enacted through the impact ofthe other night and the (de)(con)structive gaze, when Orpheus looks atthe center of the night in the night. 41 It is in fact this gaze that Blanchotdwells much on and that constitutes his artistic stand on the myth in the rstplace:

When Orpheus descends to Eurydice, art is the power that causes the night

to open. Because of the power of art, the night welcomes him; it becomes thewelcoming intimacy, the understanding and harmony of the rst night. ButOrpheus has gone down to Eurydice: for him, Eurydice is the limit of whatart can attain; concealed behind a name and covered by a veil, she is the pro-foundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem tolead. She is the instant in which the essence of the night approaches as theothernight.42

By breaching the contract, by violating the one and only condition for a

secure ascent from Hades to Earth, Orpheus has lost Eurydice twice and for-ever. But this very loss, this defeat is at the same time the triumph of art.Orpheus succeeds in failing to bring the object of his desire to the light ofday, or as Blanchot likes to put it, Orpheus manages to achieve his (un)-work through necessary forgetting:

But Orpheus, in the movement of his migration, forgets the work he is toachieve, and he forgets it necessarily, for the ultimate demand which his

movement makes is not that there be a work, but that someone face this

38 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 86.39 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 124.40 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 123.41 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 171.42 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 171.


17/39


point, grasp its essence, grasp it where it appears, where it is essential andessentially appearance: at the heart of night. 43

By looking at Eurydice, Orpheus has disobeyed the imperative for hissong, but this betrayal simultaneously insures the perpetuation of the song,

so that his gaze is [his] ultimate gift to the work. It is a gift whereby herefuses, whereby he sacri ces the work, bearing himself toward the originaccording to desires measureless movement and whereby unknowingly hestill moves toward the work, toward the origin of the work.44 The work isthus founded on the error of Orpheuss gaze, the error of his desire againsthis artwork. The dilemma is that he has gazed into what he cannot abso-lutely behold. Contrary to Sophocless Oedipus or Shakespeares Lear, in

Blanchots Orpheus there is no insight in blindness, no need to kill visionin order to see. Orpheuss gaze is only possible because he is already anartist: this gaze is the movement of desire that shatters against the songsdestiny. But in order to descend toward this instant, Orpheus has to possessthe power of art already.45

Like the loss of Eurydice, the death of Anne was inevitable to Thomas,for he too, like Orpheus is not after vision, but rather the idea of it, orvision which could only be obtained through its own negativity. The impli-

cation is that only through dis-appearing and nonvision could any vision bepossible at all. What Thomas experiences here is what Blanchot refers to asan act of look[ing] in the night at what night hides, the other night, the dis-simulation that appears.46 But is not dissimulation what literature does ingeneral? Could Orpheuss gaze thus be Blanchots myth of literature? Butin order for dissimulation as such to appear, the dissimulation whichdestroys the possibility of any Kantian or analogical thinking of the as if

structure, the image whose possibility is predicated upon nothingness, uponthe groundless ground of hollowness, has to be visible. This demand for thevisibility of the invisible makes Orpheuss desire a desire for the impossi-ble, for seeing the presence of Eurydices in nite absence:

It is inevitable that Orpheus transgress the law which forbids him to turnback, for he already violated it with his rst steps toward the shades. Thisremark implies that Orpheus has in fact never ceased to be turned towardEurydice: he saw her invisible, he touched her intact, in her shadowy absence,

in that veiled presence which did hide her absence, which was the presenceof her in nite absence.47

43 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 171.44 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 174.45 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 176.46 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 172.47 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 172.


18/39


This recasting of the Orpheus myth, its parallels in Thomas and Anne, putsus face to face with the question of the work of art, its need, as RogerLaporte puts it, to uncover the unknown whilst leaving it unknown, andto captivate us with its obscurity, a transparent Night in which the trans-

parency is at heart more opaque than opacity itself.48 But if true visionbegins with Orpheuss gaze at Eurydice, the death of Eurydice would thenbecome the hope of vision without which no vision is possible, and visionitself becomes an epitome of forsakenness. Thomas as an Orphic gure epit-omizes this relationship. The double color (white/black) and the oppositionday/night are effaced without confusion in the night. All that which Annestill loved was called the night; all that which Anne hated was also calledthe night: an absolute night where there were no longer contradictory terms,where those who suffered were happy, where white found a common sub-stance with black, a night without confusion. If we relate this to the open-ing of Thomas lobscur, to the very rst words in Chapter I Thomas sas-sit et regarde la mer [Thomas sat down and looked at the sea] as a genesisof color, from the absolute night, where white found a common substancewith black, we can see how Thomas seems to welcome this strange sight-lessness, this apprehension of no vision.

The question of vision in both Orpheus and Thomas is dictated by theeye, namely, the outside, which of course raises the question of writing.What, then, is the relationship of the language network to the eye? If thepossibility of seeing is at stake, could we still see even when there are nowords that signify sight? It is of course obvious that the relationship ofThomas and Orpheus with the outside may be indicated visually. This raisesthe problem of transcendence, empty or full, and perhaps in this way theeye offers the possibility of us to speak about things. Writing too is readunder the essence of this relation to things. But what does the eye see ornot see in Thomas lobscur? Again, in The Space of Literature Blanchotcalls Orpheuss gaze the beginning of writing. The book contains somethinglike a preface in which Blanchot calls the the pages entitled OrpheussGaze the center, albeit an un nished center, displaced by the pressure ofthe book [but] also a xed center which . . . displaces itself while remainingthe same and becoming always more central, more hidden, more uncertain

and more imperious.49

Blanchot directs the center of the book to Orpheussgaze the moment of expropriation that inaugurates writing. Likewise, thetext of the new version of Thomas lobscur opens with a similar preface.The new text is in a sense a subtraction, which opens up new possibilities.

48 Roger Laporte, Maurice Blanchot Today in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing,ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (New York: Routledge, 1996) 33.

49 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 3.


19/39


Il y a, pour tout ouvrage, une in nit de variantes possibles. Aux pages inti-tules Thomas lObscur, crites partir de 1932, remises lditeur en mai1940, publies en 1941, la prsente version najoute rien, mais comme elleleur te beaucoup, on peut la dire autre et mme toute nouvelle, mais aussitoute pareille, si, entre la gure et ce qui en est ou sen croit le centre, lon

a raison de ne pas distinguer, chaque fois que la gure complte nexprimeelle-mme que la recherche dun centre imaginaire.50 [There is, for any work,an in nity of possible variants. To the pages entitled Thomas the Obscure,written from 1932 onwards, turned in to the editor in May, 1940, publishedin 1941, the present version adds nothing. But as it takes much from thesepages, one could call it different and even completely new, but also com-pletely the same, if one is not right to distinguish between the gure and whatis or is believed to be its center, each time that the complete gure onlyexpresses the search for an imaginary center itself.]

Hence the center is always imagined but is also constituted by the act ofreading, as if something were lurking there. Thus we can see the novel itselfas Blanchots Orphic act of looking back at Blanchots own work, and inthe context of his own criticism we are made to think that Blanchots gazeis his ultimate gift to Thomas lobscur. It is a gift whereby Blanchot him-self, like Orpheus, rejects and sacri ces his own work, bearing himselftoward the origin according to desires measureless movement and

whereby unknowingly he still moves toward the work, toward the origin ofthe work,51 con rming the works uncertainty, for is there ever a work?Blanchots gaze becomes the extreme moment of liberty, the moment whenhe frees himself from himself and, still more important, frees the work[Thomas lobscur] from his concern, frees the sacred contained in the work,gives the sacred to itself, to the freedom of its essence, to its essence whichis freedom.52 Only then does inspiration become the gift of artpar excel-

lence. In this decision to look back at his own work and destroy it, Blanchotrisks everything, and achieves the leap that he speaks about towardsthe end on Orpheuss Gaze, that is, to write, one has to write already.53

Blanchots second Thomas lobscur is in every way already written, it is hisgaze at his own Eurydice. (See Appendix I)

In Blanchots version of the Orphic myth, Eurydice, like Thomass night,is the perfectly obscure point towards which art and desire, death andnight, seem to tend. She is the instant when the essence of night approaches

as OTHER NIGHT;54 she lies at the absolute asymptote of Orpheuss task

50 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 8.51 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 174.52 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 175.53 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 176.54 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 171.


20/39


and abilities. When Orpheus is permitted to retrieve her from the heart ofobscure darkness of the night within the night, he cannot look at this dark-ness. Like Thomas, he can only approach it with his gaze [eyes, sight,vision] turned away: this is what concealment means when it reveals itself

in the night.55 He too must turn away to conceal his gaze from the night,i.e., from that which by de nition conceals. Orpheus fails to do this, andinstead, he opts to look down into the night, abandoning Eurydice as wellas the work he was embarking on. A grave mistake. But Blanchot tells usthat Orpheuss task is not the restitution of Eurydice into the daylight world.Rather his task is to face the night, just as Thomass task in Chapter II isto face the overpowering appearance of darkness. But the gaze gazes backat its gazer, and the loss of their objects, Eurydice or vision, is also the lossof the looking subjects, Orpheus and Thomas. When Orpheus looks back atEurydice, Blanchot tells us, he is not there either: Had he not looked ather, he would not have drawn her toward him; and doubtless she is notthere, but in this glance back he himself is absent. He is no less dead thanshe dead, not of that tranquil worldly death which is rest, silence, and end,but of that other death without end, the ordeal of the ends absence.56 It isthis very absence that marks the beginning ofThomas lobscur. Disoriented

and paralyzed by the absence of water, Thomas decides to let himself swimwith rather than swim against the current. He abandons himself to water orperhaps to chance. He tries to lose himself in immersion, he desires a mon-strous unity:

Il nageait, monstre priv de nageoires. Sous le microscope gant, il se faisaitamas entreprenant de cils et de vibrations . . . il chercha se glisser dans unergion vague et pourtant in niment prcise, quelque chose comme un lieusacr, lui-mme si bien appropri quil suf sait dtre l pour tre; ctait

comme un creux imaginaire o il senfonait parce quavant quil y ft, sonempreinte y tait dj marque.57 [He swam, a monster deprived of ns.Under the giant microscope, he was making an enterprising pile of eyelashesand vibrations . . . he tried to slip himself into an area that is vague and yetin nitely de ned, something like a sacred place, so appropriate to himself thatit was enough to be there in order to be; it was like an imaginary hole intowhich he used to squeeze himself because even before he was inside, hisimprint was already marked there.]

Thomas has abandoned himself to the water and to the night. It is histrace that has been found. And like Orpheus, he too must come back: Finalementil dut revenir.58 [Finally, he had to return.] He too must make an approach.

55 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 171.56 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 172.57 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 13.58 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 13.


21/39


Like Orpheuss, Thomass path is asymptotic: he too is lost to never beingable to completely lose himself. Blanchots reference to vision in Thomaslobscur creates a form of the imaginary that is more fascinating than theoriginal because it achieves the original without achieving it; herein lies the

ambiguity of literature, which becomes, then, the inspiration to achievethe unachievable through annihilation. In other words, death becomes thecondition for literature to be, in fact, for language in its entirety. In order forlanguage to be possible at all, Blanchot regards death/negation as a must.

The Myth of Orpheus in al-Bayati59

It could be argued that al-Bayatis persistent dwelling on the myth of Orpheusin his poetry is different from Blanchots. After all, al-Bayati ignores thegaze completely and preoccupies himself with the question of Orpheussexpulsion and dismemberment. Despite their divergent angles of vision, bothBlanchot and al-Bayati share the same telos: both view themselves as artistsexploring the possibilities of inventive expression through their embrace ofa form of darkness. Moreover, to risk stripping them down to their barebones, or at least to try nding a gravity that holds both of them together,

it could still be argued that in their treatments of Orpheus, Blanchot and al-Bayati are equally governed by one structural logic of binary oppositions:of presence versus absence, and of subject versus object. It is a logic thattells exactly the same concept of the duplicity of vision.

In general terms, al-Bayatis poetry achieves its tension through an inter-play between what seems to be two opposing worlds. Al-Bayati is in a sensewandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to beborn, to quote Matthew Arnold.60 It is this tension between the living andthe dead that the myth of Orpheus clearly articulates. For al-Bayati thereappear to be no articulated borders that can markedly separate the worldsof Orpheus and Eurydice, Isis and Osiris, or Khayyam and Aishah. Theirtendency to shift and to invade each others space accounts for al-Bayatisdespondent and, at times, reconciliatory tone. But whether it be Orpheus orKhayyam, Osiris or Buddha, Prometheus or Jonah, al-Bayatis persona bears

59 For other approaches to the use of myth in the poetry of al-Bayati, see Isn Abbs,Ittijht al-Shir al-Muir (Kuwait: Al-Majlis al-Waan lil-Thaqfah wa al-Funn wa al-db, 1978); ub Muy al-Dn, Al-Ruy f Shir al-Bayt (Baghdad: Wizrat al-Thaqfah,1988); Rt Awa , Abd al-Wahhb al-Bayt in Usrat al-Mawt154-69; arrd al-Kubays,Maqlah f al-Asr f Shir Abd al-Wahhb al-Bayt (Damascus: Wizrat al-Thaqfah wa-al-Irshd al-Qawm, 1974); Aida Azouqa, Al-Bayyt and W. B. Yeats as Mythmakers: aComparative Study, Journal of Arabic Literature 30 no. 3 (1999), pp. 258-90.

60 Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, in The Poetical Works ofMatthew Arnold (London: The Macmillan Co., 1913) 321.
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/external-references?article=/0085-2376^281999^2930:3L.258[aid=3481395]


22/39


witness to the suffering of the poet, so that only the idea and not the wordremains as a kind of musical hope to haunt his lines. What exactly is thenature of the connection between the Orphic myth and the night? How doesal-Bayati use or treat Orpheus? Is myth treated as a myth and therefore

tautegorical, namely, meaning what it says, as someone like Schellingmight see it, or is it ontological, as Nancy would call it? Does he treat itas a metaphor or perhaps even as an allegory that might be incorporated inhis poetic imagery to make it connote something else outside its denotativefunction? In other words, how far does al-Bayatis treatment of Orpheus dif-fer from that of Blanchot, or even from the Ovidian text?

In many of al-Bayatis poems, the personal, mythical, historical, andsocial intermingle, providing the in nite possibilities of his poetry. Amongthese in nities Orpheus seems to surface, whether explicitly or implicitly,nourishing his poetic vision, leading him to states of poetic enlightenment,regardless of whether the Orphic gure oats up from Greek mythology orfrom Mesopotamian or Egyptian counterparts. The interplay in Orpheus betweenKatabasis and Anabasis is not a new one, and one might easily dismiss al-Bayati for presenting a world too simplistically irreconcilable, too strictlydivided between the appearance of reality and the desire to change this real-

ity. Unlike so many contemporary poets, al-Bayati is not content with allow-ing the invisible to remain private and concealed. What gives his poetryweight is its tendency to move in one single poem from the social in thecaf shops of the worlds cities I beg for postcards,61 to the mythic andthe prophetic: And why, my Lord, have the words abandoned us / Whenthe miracle of the priest and the moans of the witches were of no avail?62

But most of all it is in this tension between the world of the living and therealm of the dead that al-Bayati plays on the rami cations of Orpheus, onthe variations of a seemingly disparate image, conveyed by a voice modu-lating between irony, despair, hope, and sympathy in order to capture thefragmentation and dismemberment of contemporary experience. But whatdoes the eye see or not see in al-Bayatis version of Orpheus?

Al-Bayatis poem The Prophecy in his collection al-Kitbah al al-n[Writing on the Mud] introduces a persona trying to write on the water whatthe singer, presumably Orpheus, has just said to the night. Now, if the

singer is Orpheus, and the poetic persona is writing what Orpheus the singer

61 Abd al-Wahhb al-Bayt, Al-Mujizah The Miracle: Dwn Abd al-Wahhb al-Bayt, vol. 2 (Beirut: Dr al-Awdah, 1971) 274. Henceforth referred to as Dwn. All Arabictranslations from al-Bayt are mine. For a full translation of the poems, please see TheMise-en-Scne of Writing in al-BaytsAl-Kitbah al al-n, Journal of Arabic Literature,32 no. 2 (2001), 159-66.

62 al-Bayt, The Miracle, Dwn 274.


23/39


has said his music, his poetry then the act of writing will come to rep-resent a kind of poetry that personi es the night as an attentive listener andmakes of him/it Orpheuss sole companion:

A free woman would eat her breasts if she were hungry in the land of poorkings

A Daphla ower on a streamStripping herself naked in shynessWhile I am writing / And I write on the mud what the singer said to the nightI denude the wordsAnd the incantations of the unchaste fortunetellers.63

As in Blanchot, the night becomes the Orphic trope par excellence. In asense, the poet is writing Orpheus, and writing itself becomes Orpheusbecause, like Orpheus, it dies and disappears on the surface of the mud. Inthis act of dying, writing too, like Orpheuss gaze that makes him no moreexistent than the Eurydice he looks at, becomes invisible in itself and invis-ible to itself. Later in The Prophecy, al-Bayatis persona becomes ascripture of mud and a thread of smoke / on which are written the spellsand prayers,64 thus giving a new dimension to the relationship betweenmyth and the body as a scene of writing, especially when his reference to

the Orphic myth is tinged with themes from the Egyptian myth of Isis andOsiris. This peculiar mixture of East and West intensi es the universal needfor resurrection and rebirth. Isis, goddess of curing and of spinning andweaving, and Osiris, god of reincarnation and, later, of death, were the pri-mal couple, children of Earth and Sky. Sept, or Typhoeus, Osiriss jealousbrother, murders him, places his body in a sealed cof n and casts it into theNile, displaced as the Euphrates in the poem. His faithful wife Isis recoversthe body and hides it in a marshland, only to be found again by Sept whilehunting, who mutilates the corpse and cuts it into fourteen pieces, scatteringit all over the country. Isis manages to recover all of Osiriss dismemberedcorpse except for the penis, which is said to have been eaten by sh. Osiristhen retires to the Underworld and becomes the King of the Dead. The Isis-Osiris theme of death and resurrection, the water motif, magic, the presenceof ritual and ceremony, are all recognizable elements in al-Bayatis text.More signi cantly, the reference to dismemberment and fragmentation in the

Osiris myth falls back upon the text and embodies it in several ways. LikeOsiris, al-Bayatis poetic persona is dismembered, and the fragmentation ofOsiriss body is reenacted in the personas poetic vision. Part of him isengaged in the process of writing; another part can see a ower on a water

63 al-Bayt, Al-Nubah The Prophecy, Dwn 245. See Appendix II.64 al-Bayt, The Prophecy, Dwn 246.


24/39


stream; still a third part can envision a river of blood on the face of queens,a fourth is observing carts departing; however, he still lies silent and power-less like a mummy in the river bed waiting for resurrection:

And I see a river of blood dying the faces of queensAnd the departure of the cartsIn the valleys of the Orient, re, and the silence of creatures.65

This partition decentralizes vision and shatters the geometricality of thesubject position of al-Bayatis persona. Dismemberment thus becomes amortal punishment and creates the desire for reintegration through myth.This interweaving of body and text in a single poetic utterance: I am ascripture the bringing together of the I as a physical entity, of Being

as a state of consciousness, and of scripture as writing offers the possi-bility of identi cation and con rms the perpetual gap between dismember-ment and wholeness, exclusion and inclusion, separation and indivisibility:

Oh, the nakedness of the sky of wordsUnder which I lie like hay, a mummySilently awaiting resurrection for thousands of yearsCarrying my own death within me, a traveler, a passerby, without food or

water.

Every time the Euphrates changes course,My soul lies helpless beneath its bed, with mud and weedsOh, who could reassemble my internal organs scattered by the priest over

time and place?66

The con ict between speech and silence is a major one here. The personais forced to remain silent, to wait helplessly, though he is full of the desireto speak. But in order to make his voice heard, he has no other recourse

than to keep the words inside his naked body or his body inside the nakedwords, or to make his naked body become his naked words. But here it isthe words, and not Sept, their very nakedness, their hollowness and empti-ness, that cause the dismemberment of the textual body from the inside. Thestrain of silence accumulates until the whole body bursts, and myth itselfbecomes the only hope to re-member the schism between voice and silencein the body of the persona as text. This peculiar use of the Osiris/Orpheusmyth as a metaphor for language thus hints at the idea that myth can resolve

the dichotomy between silence and speech. Like Osiris and Orpheus, lan-guage suffers from sheer mutilation, and the human body that dies under theinef cacy of speech could only be resurrected in myth and as myth.

65 al-Bayt, The Prophecy, Dwn 245.66 al-Bayt, The Prophecy, Dwn 245-46.


25/39


Al-Bayatis poetics of death seems to sustain itself in only one form: self-referentiality. This path could serve very well as a trajectory for the criti-cism mapped out both by Freudian as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis.Freuds Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Lacans de nition of the rela-

tionship between death and language disclose to us how literature can onlyposit as its goal the confrontation of its voice with its own death, whichmight eventually lead to a kind of poetics constantly threatened with silence.Here al-Bayati seems to be saying that poetry has no voice, thus echoingBlanchots de nition of the poem:

The poem literature seems to be linked to a spoken word that cannot beinterrupted because it does not speak; it is. The poem is not the word itself,for the poem is a beginning, whereas this word never begins, but alwaysspeaks anew, and is always starting over. However, the poet is the one whohas heard this word, who has made himself into an ear attuned to it, its medi-ator, who has silenced it by pronouncing it.67

The question of voice appears once again later in the text:

Oh, what do I say to the singer?When at night the horses sigh under the fenceAnd the magi of the coming time play their drums

From one exile to another they come back defeatedWhen Ashtarout rises from her underworld cryingIn her sacerdotal attire,When the horn is blown yet no dead are awakened or any light shinesThe cock crows on the ruins of UrOh, what should I say to the singer,While I collect the remains of my body mutilated by the priest in all times,And my votive offerings, and the seeds?68

But this time the poets death wish becomes a life wish, a wish forremembering his body and restoring his life back together. But if he wishesto be alive, does this mean that he is now dead? In whose voice then is thepoem spoken? What we nd ourselves listening to is an impossible voice:the voice of a dead persona, one that resembles in its nihilism the voice ofLouis MacNieces not-yet-born fetus in his poem Prayer Before Birth.69 Inboth poems, the personaes absent voices have actually said nothing: theyare already nothing. One is dead, the other unborn. In death, al-Bayatis per-

sona is no longer able to express his own difference from himself: there isno voice for the disappearance of voice.

67 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 37.68 al-Bayt, Dwn 247.69 Louis MacNiece, The Collected Poems of Louis MacNiece , ed. E. R. Dodds (New York:

Oxford UP, 1967) 193.


26/39


But if there is a sense of ontology to al-Bayatis poem, it has to emergefrom some kind of affect. This affect is itself the result of the undoing ofthe poetry; [it] ruins it, says Blanchot, and in it restores the unendinglack of work.70 The sacri ce of the poetic word and of the one who writes

it appears again in al-Bayatis The Blind Sorcerer, with the magician ofthe tribes dead people71 who wishes to be burned. This particular poemproblematizes silence by making it speak itself and by doing away with thevoice and with all its possible forms, the active, the passive, the middle,indeed with the entire notion of agency, so that the poets own questionsthat desperately seek an agent are vainly looking for answers that are noanswers. Still, somebody has to be this magician, this priest. The implica-tion could be that poetry goes back to some place before language, perhapsto nothingness, to silence, or to death. Maybe it is this voiceless voice thatmakes literature possible in the rst place, that enables it, yet disables it atthe same time, that allows writing while stepping beyond it, and that posi-tions itself as a wedge between literature and myth. This absent voice in al-Bayati could quite likely be the myth of literature.

InMitologiae, Fulgentius refers to the etymology of the name of Orpheus,which according to him, comes from oria phone, namely, best voice. In

a chapter entitled Une criture inventive, la voix dOrphe, les jeux dePalamde, [An Inventive Writing, the Voice of Orpheus, the Games ofPalamedes], Marcel Detienne de nes Orpheuss voice as antrieure la parolearticule, [anterior to the articulated word] essentially because it has anexceptional quality of assigning Orpheus to a world of music prior to verse,au monde de la musique avant le vers, la musique sans parole, un domaineo il nimite personne, o il est le commencement et lorigine. [to the worldof music before verse, music without words, a domain where he imitates noone, where he is the beginning and the origin.] His lyre is not merely a tech-nical object, and his song jaillit comme une incantation originelle.72

[springs forth like an original incantation.] If this argument holds, al-Bayatis Orpheus, who is constantly blow[ing] the pipe of existence,73

could then be a combination of art and music, of poetry incarnate, a suf-ferer in the presence of words who is still capable of singing the magicwords of the witches, the rosy and romant ic songs of the young

princesses, and the dirges that celebrate the death of sparrows:

70 Blanchot, The Space of Literature 37.71 al-Bayt, Dwn 250.72 Marcel Detienne, Lcriture dOrphe, (LIn ni, Gallimard, 1989) 112.73 al-Bayt, Dwn 253.


27/39


So burn me,For I am the magician of the tribes dead peopleIn the caf shops of the world cities I lived, and on the wet sidewalks of the

dawnCarrying a scripture of mud and the re of resurrection running through the

veins of the mummyFilled with esh, the leaves of the evening are blooming on the walls.Who would call upon me?Who would carry the warnings of heaven?Who would suffer, in the presence of words,From earths return to the Ice Age and to the caveman?Who would sing to the witches,To the young princesses, and to the death of sparrows?74

This con rms the idea that al-Bayati regards myth as an eternal fountain ofinspiration, both the means and the end at the same time. To al-Bayati, itis the Orphic vision that matters and not merely the myth of Orpheus. As agure of the Greek singer, Orpheus consolidates al-Bayatis own myth of

the Orpheus myth and gives it some sort of poetic foundation. Orpheus ismentioned only in the title, but the whole poem is so impregnated with thespirit of Orpheuss song that the title Orpheuss Descent to the Under-world is absolutely relevant.

There is a curious surface similarity between Blanchots image of analmost blind cat in Thomas lobscur and al-Bayatis reference to the eyesof the dying cats. Near the middle of night two, Thomas is found digginga hole near an almost blind cat. Suddenly, we are made to observe the feel-ings of the cat. It feels separated from familiar sensations. There is a voidthat rejects Thomas and that he cannot bridge. The almost blind cat hasbeen absorbed by the darkness of night and is now la nuit de la nuit. This

night of night marks the disappearance of space where appearance van-ishes, a moment when darkness itself has been covered in darkness and dis-appearance disappears, so that the cat has lost itself in its own gaze, in thespace of disappearance. The cat, described by Thomas as chat suprieur,75

enjoys the privilege of disappearing from the text, but not Thomas. Al-Bayatis cats, on the other hand, appear in his poem The Nightmare of Dayand Night in the same collection Al-Kitbah al al-n [Writing on theMud] wherein his persona witness[es] the birth of the day / In the eyes of

the dying cats.76 The persona searches feverishly for his beloved, until they

74 al-Bayt, Dwn 250-51.75 Blanchot, Thomas lobscur 46.76 al-Bayt, Kbs al-Layl wa al-Nahr The Nightmare of Night and Day, Dwn

290-91. See Appendix II.


28/39


nally meet after the day had died. But the revolution of the sun thatallows their rendezvous in the rst place is also the one that separates themagain, and so on:

Why do you cry?You legendary river sucking the breasts of the cityCarrying its dirt to the seas,The dead horsesAnd the wreck of cartsWhile I witness the birth of the dayIn the eyes of the dying catsAfter the sound of the skylark was copied,

And the singer singing to the sun on a recordThe corpse was cryingWhile I was looking for you on the streetsFinally we met after the day had diedThen came the night after the dayAnd after the day another dayAnd so revolves the discAnd the years-broken voice of its singerIs breathlessly chasing the darkness.77

There is in this poem a sense of doom amidst pleasure and the connection

of the dying cats to the night results in a cogent metaphor. Cats eyes usu-ally shine at night, and the death of this light in their eyes is signi cant ofthe birth of the morning, so that the death of the cats could be the death ofthe sparkling light that shines through their eyes during the night. The eyesof the cats act like a harbinger of the day. In his sense the cats functionas a metonymic indicator (their eyes) of hope, signaling not just the end ofthe night, but also the birth of daylight. Unlike Blanchots Orpheus or

Thomas, al-Bayatis Orpheus is not in quest of the work of artper se, noris he even sacri cing Eurydice for the inspiration of the night as night;Orpheus in al-Bayati is rather seeking the daylight. Al-Bayatis singer istired of the longevity of the night; he does not want to see the essence ofits inessentiality or its nothingness.

As stated earlier, Orpheus in the two writers is appropriated as a myth,but this is not all. By taking one aspect of this myth (the gaze in Blanchotand expulsion in al-Bayati) and by analyzing it, Blanchot and al-Bayati put

myth itself to question. The gaze and the expulsion are dangerous becauseBlanchot and al-Bayati make a gift of them; the gaze becomes the desire ofart and the desire for art, and expulsion becomes the desire for Utopiathrough art. This designi cation of the myth is reminiscent of the Derridean

77 al-Bayt, The Nightmare of Night and Day, Dwn 290-91.


29/39


idea of language as emerging from play, or free play (jeu) of signi ers,which takes place in a eld of language that is limited and marked by thelack of a center. In the same manner, the myth of Orpheus here could besaid to have taken on this new quality of in nity, since the center of the

original relationship between the myth as signi er and Blanchots or al-Bayatisappropriation of it as a signi ed can no longer hold or retain a xed signin an ongoing process of historical accumulation. Like language, or perhapsbecause it has always already been in language, myth has no center, rather,it lies within the structure and outside it:

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a free play basedon a fundamental ground, a free play which is constituted on fundamentalimmobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of freeplay. If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure must bethought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chainof determinations of the center. Successively, and in a formulated fashion, thecenter receives different forms or names.78

In Blanchot and al-Bayati, the myth of Orpheus itself seems to undo itsown mythicness. The gaze and the poets fruitless search for the needle ina haystack79 shatter the possibility that anything could be realized from

their acts. If Orpheuss gaze in Blanchot tries to see something at night,Orpheuss gaze in al-Bayati works to dissipate that very night. Both desireto see what cannot be seen and to achieve the unachievable. In both writ-ers there seems to be a strong cathexis between literature and the night.Could literature thus be to them that night, the essence of the night in thenight, the urge that makes us want to see that which is not materialized?Like Blanchots, al-Bayatis Orpheus is gazing at the impossible, but hisgaze extends far beyond any existing or present object of vision; his gazeis an escape from vision into shores of epochs where / when man is bornanew.80

In both writers the absolute seems always to be that night. The onlydifference between them is that in Blanchot the complex allegory of thenight derives mainly from the authority of the negative, and focuses on thenecessary failure of art, whereas in al-Bayati the only illumination that char-acterizes the fate of his persona is the desperate and futile search for a

gleam of light amidst an enveloping darkness. He even gives one of his

78 Jacques Derrida, Structure, Sign, and Play in The Structuralist Controversy: TheLanguages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1972) 247-65.

79 al-Bay t, Hub r ys il al-lam al-Su Orpheuss Descent to the Underworld,Dwn 255. See Appendix II.

80 al-Bayt, Orpheuss Descent to the Underworld, Dwn 253.


30/39


poems the title The Night is Everywhere.81 The frequently recurring wordsin al-Bayati I search, the underworld, the night, death graves,the singer, words, are all signs of a constant preoccupation with a cer-tain loss that has its counterpart in the absoluteness of the night. Nor is the

night itself a new theme to either al-Bayati or Blanchot. Both were born intoa heritage of writers who were preoccupied with the same theme.82 In al-Bayati the night becomes a source of anxiety in the literal as well in theBloomian sense of the word, and his Orpheus is always waiting for aglimpse of light that would declare the advent of the dawn. His feelingsabout the world take the night as a microcosm of that world; the nightbecomes to al-Bayati a perception of the world. In this world the very dark-ness of the night is itself the threat, the danger that the poet needs to over-come, a peril through which he has to thread his way out. But somethinghas happened to the night itself. There are two kinds of night in al-Bayati,a night that collapses, and the desolate nights on the gates of Ashour:

So why are you in expulsion with death and the leaves of the fall?Wearing their rags, resurrected in all agesSeeking the needle in a haystack, feverish, expelled?Your crown: thorn, and your heels: ice

Vainly you cry because the night is longAnd the steps of its hours in the cities of ant is re. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Vainly you hang on to the thread of light in all agesSeeking the needle in the haystack, feverish, expelled.83

The plural of the second night has unbundled this apparently omnipresent,non-spatial Night into many nights. The hope of Ishtar/Eurydice extendingher hands to guide the poet through the night reverses the gender roles of

the Orphic myth. Ishtar/Eurydice here becomes the hope of reemergenceafter Orpheuss tragic loss of her. With her appearance in the middle of thenight, the ice will melt, and things will cease to be cold or swallowed up

81 al-Bayt, Dwn 118.82 Among French writers who dwelt on the night are Nerval, Balzac, Goya, Mallarm, and

especially Baudelaire, whose Les eurs du mal is basically staged in darkness with a partic-

ular reference to the symbolic choreographic nature of the night. Al-Bayatis re ection on thenight is also in perfect harmony with and a continuation of a long established tradition. ManyArab poets have dwelt more or less on the same image of the night as bleak, endless andcruel Imru al-Qays, a famous pre-Islamic Arab poet, is perhaps the rst to take up this imageof the night as a metaphor of chagrin and hopelessness. His long poem Muallaqah beginswith what is considered to be the most rhetorical and eloquent description of the night inClassical Arab Poetry:

A night like the waves of the sea lowered its veil / On me with various kinds of griefto af ict me.

83 al-Bayt, Orpheuss Descent to the Underworld, Dwn 253-55.


31/39


and dissolved in that night as in real darkness; all the obstacles, the damsof the night and the dams which constitute the night will tumble down.Time also becomes a major instrument at the disposal of the poet; if thenight is everywhere the persona is waiting for the signal.84 Time is no

longer in control of the content of the text, no more beyond all the inces-sant changes of detail that make it up; time with all its ages will be foldedlike a sheet. Thus it is as if in a moment, brief as it may be, a momentwhich itself is a moment of time yet a moment that does stand outside time,time loses its transcendental nature, becomes contained and turns into con-tent of its own. In this moment the structure of the human being, of al-Bayatis persona as a sufferer of time, as a transient being, suddenly revealsunexpected power: the past is no longer irredeemable. This dissolution ofthe past into the present is not a change from an old situation to a new one.It is rather an awakening that asserts the presence of the present withouthaving to worry about the following pastness of that present. It is a momentthat materializes hope and asserts the present for its own sake, a moment inwhich the poet knows, yet still denies, the impossibility of living wholly inthe present. It is a moment that celebrates a special event, freezes it, andthat becomes itself that very event. Here time has become not a way in

which events are related to each other and succeed each other, but the sub-ject matter of one particular event. This moment in al-Bayati is the momentof the act of writing, which becomes for him the paradoxical effect of apiece of paper, of wet mud, of the surface of the water, of a human corpseon time itself. And now that time has lent itself to this stillness, it hasbecome caught up in this rare moment of objecti cation, and ends upbecoming a mere thing, a tool constructed within the world of the poem:

Every time Ishtaar calls you from the

the interruption of myth

Documents