Maurice Blanchot’s Thomas the obscure

Thomas the obscure is a key novel in Blanchot’s fictional oeuvre. But not only because it closes or opens a cycle, as has been said, but also because it confirms a narrative principle that Blanchot would only abandon through silence, and which is also, in a certain sense, his closure. In the pages of Thomas the obscure, the fable of Orpheus and Eurydice to which the novel alludes, of an undeserved destiny, the novel is governed by its own laws, which it transgresses and abides by at the same time. Only fiction is real, Blanchot seems to be telling us here. Only fiction makes it possible to recover, like Orpheus, that which has been lost, that without which one cannot live and which was the reason for existence, that which sometimes one had never had, but only to lose it definitively, only for the loss to be deserved, so that the innocent becomes guilty, guilty without redemption, guilty of his innocence.

Published in the early spring of 1950, the new version of Thomas the obscure opens the way for the stories that were to follow, as a note to the reader makes clear.

The present version adds nothing to the pages entitled Thomas the obscure begun in 1931, delivered to the publisher in May 1940 and published in 1941, but since much remains of them, it can be said to be different, and even an entirely new version, but identical at the same time, if one is right in making no distinction between the figure and what is, or believes to be, its centre, provided that the whole figure expresses nothing more than the search for an imaginary centre.[1]

Thomas the obscure marks the first absolute commitment of the I to fiction. The two are fused from the beginning: the first letters of Thomas are similar to the last letters of Blanchot, and Thomas ends as Maurice begins; if we put the name together in reverse and rearrange the letters of the author’s name:

Blanchot= Tho

Maurice= mas

The title of the book finally forms an anagram of Maurice Blanchot. This Thomas who lives in a sanatorium is also Thomas Mann, whose surname has the same assonance as the female character in the novel, Anne, which also means “humanity”, thus representing a kind of “first Adam”. This character with the biblical name is also the apostle Jude Thomas, or perhaps Jade the Obscure; this Thomas Christian (Hegel’s second son was called Thomas Emmanuel Christian) is the dialectical confrontation of unbelief and Christianity, “the fusion of extremes by friendship and by philosophy”; and finally, this hero of the obscure is Heraclitus the Obscure, the paradoxical philosopher of matter.

What questions do these names raise? The capacity of an individual to live the loss of love; the capacity of a body to represent all others, to give space to its movements in the air, to its gestures in space, even as it returns them to itself; the capacity of a name to make room for its shadow, its dark or sacred side, to recognise and almost prepare its own abyss. For Blanchot, Thomas the obscure will be if not an entry into the silence of poetry, at least the marker of a predominant nocturnal demand, above and against The Madness of the Day, that of the world, not least his own. It will be the creation of a creature who understands his creator, that is to say, includes him and turns him around, giving him an identity. Blanchot is Thomas, not that the text is strictly autobiographical.

A fact that remains forgotten and is not usually mentioned at all in the books is the intimate relationship with: friendship, death and illness. Moments that marked a before and after in his career as a writer and how, through his novels, he describes landscapes of his personal life.

In 1922, before his sixteenth birthday, Maurice Blanchot underwent surgery on his duodenum. A medical error that would affect his blood and cause after–effects for the rest of his life.

In fact, the few descriptions of this fateful mistake, for example in The Death Sentence or The Madness of the Day, tell less than the proximity to death caused by such an Interior Experience. Illness would remain for Blanchot a fact of the body, a facet of the world, and he would share its pain, which we will see in his novel Thomas the obscure.

Thomas, the main character, who is by turns human and monstrous, a living dead, meets two young women.

Anne and Irene enter into strange, impossible, metaphysical and often indescribable relationships with him before choosing their death and dying, Irene struck in the throat by a sharp object, Anne by simple exhaustion. Everything takes place under the tutelage of a law according to which one is nothing solid and one finds spaces in which one can establish a fair reciprocity with the Other (even in cruelty).

Thus Lacan, in Seminar 9: Identification, proposes Maurice Blanchot as one of the essential writers when it comes to approaching the problematic of the phantasm.

Anne’s death becomes her the imaginary centre of the novel. Blanchot’s concern, paradoxically, is to insist that the two works are one, stressing only the difference in perspective between them, even as he feels it necessary to point out that the difference in writing is such that the second version now replaces the first, annulling it and establishing it as a secret, thus creating a death scene.

Anguish, as Lacan says, is an affect that does not deceive. In this way, it brings to light an affect that has the function of revealing what the signifier cannot repress a Real.

The protagonist of Blanchot’s novel, then, is detached from all representation, the anguish is Real because it has no meaning, and because it is not linked to the imaginary or the symbolic. We are faced with the oceanic feeling of which Freud spoke.

The story is tightened around Thomas’s initiatory journey, a totally precarious narration that relates an extreme confrontation with the Inner Experience. For example, Blanchot formulates this recurring concern: “What, then, questions me most radically? Not my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being–to–death or being–for–death, but my presence–for–death. Other who becomes absent by dying.”

In this affirmation Blanchot writes: “[…] man sees himself determined, between being and nothingness and from the infinity of this intermediate space thought of as relation, the status of his new sovereignty, which is that of a being without being in the endless becoming of a death impossible to die.”[2]

History, therefore, can only provide a commentary on the impossible journey towards what it is to be present in death. It follows the movement by which Anne withdraws from the world without conveying how she comes to see things. Her dreams are pure dreams, without content, without home: “no palace, no buildings of any kind, rather a vast sea, though the waters were invisible and the shore had disappeared.” Her consciousness has lost its humanity, and all that remains is “to be, to be wonderfully”. Anne surrenders herself to a death without false image or pretence, including that of sainthood. While a few monsters still inhabit this pure horizon, “there is no way of expressing what they are, because, for us, in the middle of the day something can appear that is not the day”, something like a primordial dawn? History denies all novel development, all possibility of action and even of imagery, such is now its law. It offers “a world stripped of artifice and perfidy.”

Thomas the obscure is a philosophical novel that takes us into a world full of biblical, spiritual and chaotic references, manifested by the characters. Who naturally affirm their existence through “the death of the Other”. The illness Blanchot speaks of is an Inner Experience linked to death as he will say in his book The Madness of the Day:

“I am alive, and life gives me enormous pleasure. And death? When I die (perhaps very soon) I will experience immense pleasure. I do not mean the anticipated taste of death, which is unpalatable and often unpleasant. Suffering is stultifying. But I am convinced of the following truth, which seems to me self–evident: if living gives me unbounded pleasure, dying will give me infinite satisfaction.”[3]

In this way Thomas the obscure reflects a world of multiplicities and references that are intimately linked to the author’s life, from the anagram that results in the name Thomas, to the way in which the philosophers who have influenced the character relate to him.

In conclusion, as the novel progresses, we will be participants in “living” the death of the Other and thus dying his own death.

For Blanchot, the limit–experience cannot be enhanced by an individual or by a supposed collective consciousness: it is not attributable to a subject, because of the absolute individuality of the subject. The limit–experience is not the experience of someone, but the access of the Me–who–dies “to the space where, dying, he never dies as ‘I’, in the first person”.[4]