Thomas The Obscure

by Maurice Blanchot

  X

  WHEN THEY FOUND HER stretched out on a bench in the garden, they thought she had fainted. But she had not fainted; she was sleeping, having entered into sleep by way of a repose deeper yet than sleep. Henceforth, her advance toward unconsciousness was a solemn combat in which she refused to give in to the thrill of drowsiness until she was wounded, dead already, and defended up to the last instant her right to consciousness and her share of clear thoughts. There was no complicity between her and the night. From the time the day started to fade, listening to the mysterious hymn which called her to another existence, she prepared herself for the struggle in which she could be defeated only by the total ruin of life. Her cheeks red, her eyes shining, calm and smiling, she enthusiastically mustered her strength. In vain the dusk brought its guilty song to her ear; in vain was a plot woven against her in favor of darkness. No sweetness penetrated her soul along the path of torpor, no semblance of the holiness which is acquired through the proper acceptance of illness. One felt that she would deliver into death nothing other than Anne, and that, fiercely intact, retaining everything that she was until the very end, she would not consent to save herself by any imaginary death from death itself. The night went on, and never had there been so sweet a night, so perfect to bend a sick person. The silence flowed, and the solitude full of friendship, the night full of hope, pressed upon Anne's stretched-out body. She lay awake, without delirium. There was no narcotic in the shadows, none of those suspicious touchings which permit the darkness to hypnotize those who resist sleep. The night acted nobly with Anne, and it was with the girl's own weapons, purity, confidence and peace, that it agreed to meet her. It was sweet, infinitely sweet in such a moment of great weakness to feel around oneself a world so stripped of artifice and perfidiousness. How beautiful this night was, beautiful and not sweet, a classic night which fear did not render opaque, which put phantoms to flight and likewise wiped away the false beauty of the world. All that which Anne still loved, silence and solitude, were called night. All that which Anne hated, silence and solitude, were also called night. Absolute night where there were no longer any contradictory terms, where those who suffered were happy, where white found a common substance with black. And yet, night without confusion, without monsters, before which, without closing her eyes, she found her personal night, the one which her eyelids habitually created for her as they closed. Fully conscious, full of clarity, she felt her night join the night. She discovered herself in this huge exterior night in the core of her being, no longer needing to pass before a bitter and tormented soul to arrive at peace. She was sick, but how good this sickness was, this sickness which was not her own and which was the health of the world! How pure it was, this sleep which wrapped around her and which was not her own and blended with the supreme consciousness of all things! And Anne slept.

  During the days which followed, she entered into a delicious field of peace, where to all eyes she appeared bathed in the intoxication of recovery. Before this magnificent spectacle, she too felt within herself this joy of the universe, but it was an icy joy. And she waited for that which could be neither a night nor a day to begin. Something came to her which was the prelude not to a recovery but to a surprising state of strength. No one understood that she was going to pass through the state of perfect health, through a marvelously balanced point of life, a pendulum swinging from one world to another. Through the clouds which rushed over her head, she alone saw approaching with the speed of a shooting star the moment when, regaining contact with the earth, she would again grasp ordinary existence, would see nothing, feel nothing, when she could live, live finally, and perhaps even die, marvelous episode! She saw her very far away, this well Anne whom she did not know, through whom she was going to flow with a gay heart. Ah! Too dazzling instant! From the heart of the shadows a voice told her: Go.

  Her real illness began. She no longer saw anyone but occasional friends, and those who still came stopped asking for news. Everyone understood that the treatment was not winning out over the illness. But Anne recognized in this another sort of scorn, and smiled at it. Whatever her fate might be, there was more life, more strength in her now than ever. Motionless for hours, sleeping with strength, speed, agility in her sleep, she was like an athlete who has remained prone for a long time, and her rest was like the rest of men who excel in running and wrestling. She finally conceived a strange feeling of pride in her body; she took a wonderful pleasure in her being; a serious dream made her feel that she was still alive, completely alive, and that she would have much more the feeling of being alive if she could wipe away the complacencies and the facile hopes. Mysterious moments during which, lacking all courage and incapable of movement, she seemed to be doing nothing, while, accomplishing an infinite task, she was incessantly climbing down to throw overboard the thoughts that belonged to her alive, the thoughts that belonged to her dead, to excavate within herself a refuge of extreme silence. Then the baneful stars appeared and she had to hurry: she gave up her last pleasures, got rid of her last sufferings.

  What was uncertain was where she would come forth. She was already suffocating. My God, she is well; no, she is; she is perfect from the point of view of being; she has, elevated to the highest degree, the joy of the greatest spirit discovering his most beautiful thought. She is; no, she is well, she is slipping, the thunder of sensations falls upon her, she is smothered, she cries out, she hears herself, she lives. What joy! They give her something to drink, she cries, they console her. It is still night. Yet she could not help realizing it: around her, many things were changing, and a desolate climate surrounded her, as if gloomy spirits sought to draw her toward inhuman feelings. Slowly, by a pitiless protocol, they took from her the tenderness and friendship of the world. If she asked for the flowers she loved, they gave her artificial roses with no scent which, though they were the only beings more mortal than herself, did not reserve her the pleasure of wilting, fading and dying before her eyes. Her room became uninhabitable: given a northern exposure for the first time, with a single window which admitted only the late afternoon sun, deprived each day of another lovely object, this room gave every evidence of being secretly emptied in order to inspire in her the desire to leave it as soon as possible. The world too was devastated. They had exiled the pleasant seasons, asked the children to cry out in joy elsewhere, called into the street all the anger of cities, and it was an insurmountable wall of shattering sounds that separated her from mankind. Sometimes she opened her eyes and looked around with surprise: not only were things changing, but the beings most attached to her were changing as well. How could there be any doubt? There was a tragic lessening of tenderness for her. Henceforth her mother, plunged for hours on end in her armchair without a word, her face ashen, carefully deprived of everything which might have made her lovable, no longer revealed anything of her affection but a feeling which made her ugly, at the very moment when Anne, as never before in her life, needed young and beautiful things. What she had once loved in her mother, gaity, laughter and tears, all the expressions of childhood repeated in an adult, all had disappeared from this face which expressed only fatigue, and it was only far away from this place that she could imagine her again capable of crying, of laughing—laughing, what a wonder! no one ever laughed here—a mother to everyone but her daughter. Anne raised her voice and asked her if she had been swimming. "Be quiet," said her mother. "Don't talk, you'll tire yourself." Obviously, there were no confidences to be shared with a person about to die, no possible relationship between her and those who are enjoying themselves, those who are alive. She sighed. And yet her mother resembled her, and what is more every day added a new trait to this resemblance. Contrary to the rule, it was the mother who took her daughter's face as a model, made it old, showed what it would be like at sixty. This obese Anne, whose eyes had turned gray as well as her hair, this was surely Anne if she were foolish enough to escape death. An innocent play: Anne was not duped. In spite of everything, life did not make itself hatef
ul; she continued to love life. She was ready to die, but she was dying still loving flowers, even artificial flowers, feeling herself horribly orphaned in her death, passionately regretting this ugly Anne, this impotent Anne she would never become. Everything that was insidiously proposed to her so that she would not perceive that she was losing a great deal in leaving the world, this complicity of moralists and doctors, the traditional swindle perpetrated by the sun and by men, offering on the last day as a last spectacle the ugliest images and faces in dark corners, where it is obvious that those who die are content to die ... all these deceptions failed. Anne intended to pass into death completely alive, evading the intermediate states of disgust with life, refusal to live. Yet, surrounded by hardness, watched by her friends who tested her with an air of innocence, saying, "We can't come tomorrow, excuse us," and who then, after she had answered in true friendship, "That's not important, don't take any trouble," thought, "How insensitive she is becoming; she no longer cares about anything," faced with this sad plot to reduce her to feelings which, before dying, must degrade her and make all regrets superfluous, the time arrived when she saw herself betrayed by her discretion, her shyness, just what she retained of her habitual manner. Soon they would be saying, "She's no longer herself, it would be better if she died," and then: "What a deliverance for her if she died!" A gentle, irresistible pressure, how could one defend oneself against it? What did she have left that she could use to make it known that she had not changed? Just when she should have been throwing herself incessantly on her friends' shoulders, telling her doctor: "Save me, I don't want to die"—on that one condition they might still have considered her part of the world—she was greeting those who entered with a nod, giving them that which was most dear, a glance, a thought, pure impulses which just recently were still signs of true sympathy, but which now seemed the cold reserve of someone at odds with life at the very least. These scenes struck her and she understood that one does not ask restraint and delicacy of a person who is suffering, feelings which belong to healthy civilizations, but rather crudeness and frenzy. Since it was the law, since it was the only way to prove that she had never had so much attachment for all that surrounded her, she was seized by the desire to cry out, ready to make a move to reinforce every bond, ready to see in those near to her beings who were ever nearer. Unfortunately, it was too late: she no longer had the face or the body of her feelings, and she could no longer be gay with gaiety. Now, to all those who came, whoever they might be (that was unimportant, time was short), she expressed by her closed eyes and her pinched lips the greatest passion ever experienced. And, not having enough affection to tell everyone how much she loved them, she had recourse as well to the hardest and coldest impulses of her soul. It was true that everything in her was hardening. Until then, she still had suffering. She suffered to open her eyes, suffered to receive the gentlest words: it was her one manner of being moved, and never had there been more sensitivity than in this glance which won the simple pleasure of seeing at the cost of cruel, tearing pain. But now, she hardly suffered any more at all; her body attained the ideal of egoism which is the ideal of every body: it was hardest at the moment of becoming weakest, a body which no longer cried out beneath the blows, borrowed nothing from the world, made itself, at the price of its beauty, the equivalent of a statue. This hardness weighed terribly on Anne; she felt the absence of all feeling in her as an immense void, and anguish clutched her. Then, in the form of this primordial passion, having now only a silent and dreary soul, a heart empty and dead, she offered her absence of friendship as the truest and purest friendship; she resigned herself, in this dark region where no one touched her, to responding to the ordinary affection of those around her by this supreme doubt concerning her being, by the desperate consciousness of being nothing any longer, by her anguish; she made the sacrifice, full of strangeness, of her certainty that she existed, in order to give a sense to this nothingness of love which she had become. And thus, deep within her, already sealed, already dead, the most profound passion came to be. To those who cried over her, cold and oblivious she returned hundredfold what they had given her, devoting to them the anticipation of her death, her death, the pure feeling, never purer, of her existence in the tortured anticipation of her nonexistence. She drew from herself not the weak emotions, sadness, regret, which were the lot of those around her, meaningless accidents with no chance of making any change in them, but the sole passion capable of threatening her very being, that which cannot be alienated and which would continue to burn when all the lights were put out. For the first time, she raised the words "give oneself" to their true meaning: she gave Anne, she gave much more than the life of Anne, she gave the ultimate gift, the death of Anne; she separated herself from her terribly strong feeling of being Anne, from the terribly anguished feeling of being Anne threatened with dying, and changed it into the yet more anguished feeling of being no longer Anne, but her mother, her mother threatened by death, the entire world on the point of annihilation. Never, within this body, this ideal of marble, monster of egoism, which had made of its unconsciousness the symbol of its estranged consciousness in a last pledge of friendship, never had there been more tenderness, and never within this poor being reduced to less than death, plundered of her most intimate treasure, her death, forced to die not personally but by the intermediary of all the others, had there been more being, more perfection of being. And so she had succeeded: her body was truly the strongest, the happiest; this existence, so impoverished and restrained that it could not even receive its opposite, nonexistence, was just what she was seeking. It was just that which permitted her to be equal, up to the very end, to all the others, in excellent form to disappear, full of strength for the last struggle. During the moments which followed, a strange fortress rose up around Anne. It did not resemble a city. There were no houses, no palace, no constructions of any sort; it was rather an immense sea, though the waters were invisible and the shore had disappeared. In this city, seated far from all things, sad last dream lost among the shadows, while the day faded and sobbing rose gently in the perspective of a strange horizon, Anne, like something which could not be represented, no longer a human being but simply a being, marvelously a being, among the mayflies and the falling suns, with the agonizing atoms, doomed species, wounded illnesses, ascended the course of waters where obscure origins floundered. She alas had no means of knowing where she arrived, but when the prolonged echoes of this enormous night were melting together into a dreary and vague unconsciousness, searching and wailing a wail which was like the tragic destruction of something nonliving, empty entities awoke and, like monsters constantly exchanging their absence of shape for other absences of shape and taming silence by terrible reminiscences of silence, they went out in a mysterious agony. There is no way to express what they were, these shapes, beings, baneful entities—for us, can something which is not the day appear in the midst of the day, something which in an atmosphere of light and clarity would represent the shudder of terror which is the source of the day? But, insidiously, they made themselves recognized on the threshold of the irremediable as the obscure laws summoned to disappear with Anne. What was the result of this revelation? One would have said that everything was destroyed, but that everything was beginning again as well. Time, coming forth from its lakes, rolled her in an immense past, and, though she could not entirely leave space where she still breathed, drew her toward bottomless valleys where the world seemed to have returned to the moment of its creation. Anne's life—and this very word sounded like a defiant challenge in this place where there was no life—participated in the first ray thrown in all of eternity through the midst of indolent notions. Life-giving forces bathed her as if they had suddenly found in her breast, consecrated to death, the vainly sought meaning of the word "life-giving". Caprice, which built up the infinite framework of its combinations to conjure up the void, seized her and if she did not lose all existence at that moment, her discomfort was all the worse, her transformation gr
eater than if, in her tranquil human state, she had actually abandoned life, for there was no absurdity she was allowed to escape, and in the interval of a time simulated by the fusion of eternity and the idea of nothingness, she became all the monsters in which creation tried itself in vain. Suddenly —and never was anything so abrupt—the failures of chance came to an end, and that which could in no way be expected received its success from a mysterious hand. Incredible moment, in which she reappeared in her own form, but accursed instant as well, for this unique combination, perceived in a flash, dissolved in a flash and the unshakeable laws which no shipwreck had been able to submerge were broken, giving in to a limitless caprice. An event so serious that no one near her perceived it and, although the atmosphere was heavy and weirdly transformed, no one felt the strangeness. The doctor bent over her and thought that she was dying according to the laws of death, not perceiving that she had already reached that instant when, in her, the laws were dying. She made an imperceptible motion; no one understood that she was floundering in the instant when death, destroying everything, might also destroy the possibility of annihilation. Alone, she saw the moment of the miracle coming, and she received no help. Oh, stupidity of those who are torn by grief! Beside her, as she was much less than dying, as she was dead, no one thought to multiply their absurd gestures, to liberate themselves from all convention and place themselves in the condition of primal creation. No one sought out the false beings, the hypocrites, the equivocal beings, all those who jeer at the idea of reason. No one said in the silence: "Let us hurry and before she is cold let us thrust her into the unknown. Let us create a darkness about her so that the law may abandon itself disloyally to the impossible. And ourselves, let us go away, lose all hope: hope itself must be forgotten."