XII
THOMAS WENT OUT into the country and saw that spring was beginning. In the distance, ponds spread forth their murky waters, the sky was dazzling, life was young and free. When the sun climbed on the horizon, the genera, the races, even the species of the future, represented by individuals with no species, peopled the solitude in a disorder full of splendor. Dragonflies without wing-cases, which should not have flown for ten million years, tried to take flight; blind toads crawled through the mud trying to open their eyes which were capable of vision only in the future. Others, drawing attention to themselves through the transparency of time, forced whoever looked at them to become a visionary by a supreme prophecy of the eye. A dazzling light in which, illuminated, impregnated by the sun, everything was in movement to receive the glint of the new flames. The idea of perishing pushed the chrysalis to become a butterfly; death for the green caterpillar consisted of receiving the dark wings of the sphinx moth, and there was a proud and defiant consciousness in the mayflies which gave the intoxicating impression that life would go on forever. Could the world be more beautiful? The ideal of color spread out across the fields. Across the transparent and empty sky extended the ideal of light. The fruitless trees, the flowerless flowers bore freshness and youth at the tips of their stems. In place of the rose, the rose-bush bore a black flower which could not wilt. The spring enveloped Thomas like a sparkling night and he felt himself called softly by this nature overflowing with joy. For him, an orchard bloomed at the center of the earth, birds flew in the nothingness and an immense sea spread out at his feet. He walked. Was it the new brilliance of the light? It seemed that, through a phenomenon awaited for centuries, the earth now saw him. The primroses allowed themselves to be viewed by his glance which did not see. The cuckoo began its unheard song for his deaf ear. The universe contemplated him. The magpie he awoke was already no more than a universal bird which cried out for the profaned world. A stone rolled, and it slipped through an infinity of metamorphoses the unity of which was that of the world in its splendor. In the midst of these tremblings, solitude burst forth. Against the depths of the sky a radiant and jealous face was seen to rise up, whose eyes absorbed all other faces. A sound began, deep and harmonious, ringing inside the bells like the sound no one can hear. Thomas went forward. The great misfortune which was to come still seemed a gentle and tranquil event. In the valleys, on the hills, his passing spread out like a dream on the shining earth. It was strange to pass through a perfumed spring which held back its scents, to contemplate flowers which, with their dazzling colors, could not be perceived. Birds splashed with color, chosen to be the repertory of shades, rose up, presenting red and black to the void. Drab birds, designated to be the conservatory of music without notes, sang the absence of song. A few mayflies were still seen flying with real wings, because they were going to die, and that was all. Thomas went his way and, suddenly, the world ceased to hear the great cry which crossed the abysses. A lark, heard by no one, tossed forth shrill notes for a sun it did not see and abandoned air and space, not finding in nothingness the pinnacle of its ascent. A rose which bloomed as he passed touched Thomas with the brilliance of its thousand corollas. A nightingale that followed him from tree to tree made its extraordinary mute voice heard, a singer mute for itself and for all others and nevertheless singing the magnificent song. Thomas went forward toward the city. There was no longer sound or silence. The man immersed in the waves piled up by the absence of flood spoke to his horse in a dialogue consisting of a single voice. The city which spoke to itself in a dazzling monologue of a thousand voices rested in the debris of illuminated and transparent images. Where, then, was the city? Thomas, at the heart of the agglomeration, met no one. The enormous buildings with their thousands of inhabitants were deserted, deprived of that primordial inhabitant who is the architect powerfully imprisoned in the stone. Immense unbuilt cities. The buildings were piled one on the other. Clusters of edifices and monuments accumulated at the intersections. Out to the horizon, inaccessible shores of stone were seen rising slowly, impasses which led to the cadaverous apparition of the sun. This somber contemplation could not go on. Thousands of men, nomads in their homes, living nowhere, stretched out to the limits of the world. They threw themselves, buried themselves in the earth where, walled between bricks carefully cemented by Thomas, while the enormous mass of things was smashed beneath a cloud of ashes, they went forward, dragging the immensity of space beneath their feet. Mingling with the rough beginnings of creation, for an infinitely small time they piled up mountains. They rose up as stars, ravaging the universal order with their random course. With their blind hands, they touched the invisible worlds to destroy them. Suns which no longer shone bloomed in their orbits. The great day embraced them in vain. Thomas still went forward. Like a shepherd he led the flock of the constellations, the tide of star-men toward the first night. Their procession was solemn and noble, but toward what end, and in what form? They thought they were still captives within a soul whose borders they wished to cross.
Memory seemed to them that desert of ice which a magnificent sun was melting and in which they seized again, by somber and cold remembering, separated from the heart which had cherished it, the world in which they were trying to live again. Though they no longer had bodies, they enjoyed having all the images representing a body, and their spirit sustained the infinite procession of imaginary corpses. But little by little forgetfulness came. Monstrous memory, in which they rushed about in frightful intrigues, folded upon them and chased them from this fortress where they still seemed, feebly, to breathe. A second time they lost their bodies. Some who proudly plunged their glance into the sea, others who clung with determination to their name, lost the memory of speech, while they repeated Thomas's empty word. Memory was wiped away and, as they became the accursed fever which vainly flattered their hopes, like prisoners with only their chains to help them escape, they tried to climb back up to the life they could not imagine. They were seen leaping desperately out of their enclosure, floating, secretly slipping forward, but when they thought they were on the very point of victory, trying to build out of the absence of thought a stronger thought which would devour laws, theorems, wisdom . . . then the guardian of the impossible seized them, and they were engulfed in the shipwreck. A prolonged, heavy fall: had they come, as they dreamed, to the confines of the soul they thought they were traversing? Slowly they came out of this dream and discovered a solitude so great that when the monsters which had terrified them when they were men came near them, they looked on them with indifference, saw nothing, and, leaning over the crypt, remained there in a profound inertia, waiting mysteriously for the tongue whose birth every prophet has felt deep in his throat to come forth from the sea and force the impossible words into their mouths. This waiting was a sinister mist exhaled drop by drop from the summit of a mountain; it seemed it could never end. But when, from the deepest of the shadows there rose up a prolonged cry which was like the end of a dream, they all recognized the ocean, and they perceived a glance whose immensity and sweetness awoke in them unbearable desires. Becoming men again for an instant, they saw in the infinite an image they grasped and, giving in to a last temptation, they stripped themselves voluptuously in the water.
Thomas as well watched this flood of crude images, and then, when it was his turn, he threw himself into it, but sadly, desperately, as if the shame had begun for him.
AFTERWORD
THIS TRANSLATION presents the second version of Thomas L'obscur (the only version available at this time). The original work was designated as a novel (roman), the revision as a récit. Three-quarters of the bulk of the original disappeared in the process.
It is tempting, in this context, to give away some of the secrets of the complex rhetoric of this rich work, to analyse them* to beg the reader to realize the fact that much of the discomfort he will experience in confronting this work is due to other factors than the translator's failure to iron out difficult points. Suffice it to s
ay that the translator's energies and abilities have been taxed principally to respect and retain the author's level of difficulty, of challenge to the reader, to translate at once the clarity and the opacity of the original.
ROBERT LAMBERTON
* Readers in search of such an analysis are referred to Geoffrey Hartman's perceptive article "Maurice Blanchot: Philosopher-Novelist" in his collection Beyond Formalism (Yale University Press, 1970).
Thomas and the Possibility of Translation
Still, one must translate (because one must): at the very least one must begin by searching out in the context of what tradition of language, in what sort of discourse the invention of a form that is new is situated—a form that is eternally characterized by newness and nevertheless necessarily participates in a relationship of connectedness or of rupture with other manners of speaking. There scholarship intervenes, but it bears less on the nearly unrecoverable and always malleable facts of culture than on the texts themselves, witnesses that do not lie if one decides to remain faithful to them.
L'Entretien infini, 119-120
Blanchot is writing here of the difficulty of approaching the language of Heraclitus. The pretext of his observations on translation is the principle developed by Clemence Ramnoux that Heraclitus' language remains largely untranslatable because of the subsequent formation (completed in the age of Plato and Aristotle) of a basic vocabulary of abstractions that constitute fundamental building blocks of our language and thought.1 Heraclitus, no less than Homer, speaks a language which is foreign to our own on the levels of vocabulary, of semantic fields, of the relationship of the word to that which it designates.
By the Fourth Century BC we (Europeans) had become linguistic dualists. Signifiant and signifie were forever divorced, the arbitrariness of their association exposed.2 Nevertheless, from before the moment of Socrates—in the age which lies in his enormous shadow (since we see him invariably illuminated from a proximal source, himself a myth projected back into the Fifth Century by Plato and Xenophon and constituting the brightness that creates the darkness around and beyond him)—from before Socrates we have a few precious verbal artifacts expressing, manifesting the state of language before the felix lapsus of the Greek enlightenment-
Subsequent texts are susceptible to translation. The languages in which they originally became manifest constitute arbitrary wrappings applied to a core of ideas. The situation recalls a science fiction film of the Forties in which substantial, corporeal, but utterly transparent (and therefore invisible) monsters were throwing the world into disorder. Once captured and subdued they revealed their form when coated with papier maché. Any other plastic medium would have served the same expressive function: fly paper, clay, perhaps even spray-paint. These interchangeable media would have expressed the same fortuitously imperceptible outline: the bug eyes, the claws, the saber-toothed- tiger fangs.
The truest Platonist among translators, Thomas Taylor, expressed the relationship with characteristic clarity and good conscience in 1787:
That words, indeed, are no otherwise valuable than as subservient to things, must surely be acknowledged by every liberal mind, and will alone be disputed by him who has spent the prime of his life, and consumed the vigour of his understanding, in verbal criticisms and grammatical trifles. And, if this is the case, every lover of truth will only study a language for the purpose of procuring the wisdom it contains; and will doubtless wish to make his native language the vehicle of it to others. For, since all truth is eternal, its nature can never be altered by transposition, though, by this means, its dress may be varied, and become less elegant and refined. Perhaps even this inconvenience may be remedied by sedulous cultivation. . . . [Concerning the Beautiful, Introduction]
Maurice Blanchot has not, to my knowledge, addressed himself publicly to the problem of translating Maurice Blanchot. I have inevitably wondered what he would think of my efforts, though I have respectfully refrained from entering into a dialogue with him.3 In the absence of any concrete evidence, I imagine the author of the works of Maurice Blanchot responding to the idea, the fact of the translation of his work (whether mine or another) with that "Nietzschean hilarity" Jeffrey Mehlman sees as characteristic of him—the dialectical twin of the austerity of his prose—and that this imaginary confrontation might be summed up in a phrase from Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas equally evoked by Mehlman: "This gaiety passed into the space I thought I occupied and dispersed me" ("Orphee scripteur," Poetique 20 [1974]).
To do justice to the problem of translating Blanchot, to provide a theoretical substructure to lend credibility to the enterprise, would require the formulation of a methodology antithetical to (but not exclusive of) that of Thomas Taylor. This second position would insist upon the absolute opacity of language, on the impossibility of translation, on the incorporeality of the bug- eyed monsters and the absurdity of the effort to reclothe them in some new plastic medium. It would emphasize the integrity of each word, each phrase, each volume of the original text and the necessary triviality of the effort to create some equivalent for it. It would, finally, rush between the legs of the Socratic colossus and take refuge in the absolute refusal of the duality of language, planting itself firmly beyond the fall, beyond the radiance.
This methodology would, of course, be no methodology at all. It would not open up a possible mode of action, but humbly, insistently, it would join hands with the viable methodology of Thomas Taylor to undermine and redeem the good conscience of that methodology. On the level of application, it would illuminate (but not solve) the major problem that confronts the translator of Blanchot (and not uniquely of Blanchot: one is tempted to say of any text since Joyce, since Mallarme, since Nietzsche). This is the problem of the unit to be translated. Word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, work: all demand to be rendered as unities, one enclosed within the other without the sacrifice of their integrity. And then there is the bug-eyed monster—Thomas Taylor would call it the eternal thought. Whether or not it exists, it makes its demands, it disrupts the world.
This is the point I have reached in the understanding of my task. Blanchot is not Heraclitus but Thomas l'Obscur is more than coincidentally related to Heraclite l'obscur—ho skoteinos, obscurus, an epithet used in antiquity to separate this Heraclitus from others of the same name, such as the allegorical commentator on Homer. Both epithets are probably developments from ainiktes, "the riddler,'' applied to the Ephesian philosopher by the third- century satirist Timon of Phlius (so Geoffrey Kirk). Blanchot himself insists on the epithet and its force which extends beyond the satirist's trivial slur to indicate the fundamental impulse to "make the obscurity of language respond to the clarity of things" (L'Entretien infini, 122). As he goes on to project the heritage of Heraclitus' mode of discourse, expressed in the figure of Socrates himself, Blanchot (as so often in his critical writings) illuminates the method of his own fiction: "... Heraclitus then becomes the direct predecessor and as if the first incarnation of the inspired bavard, inopportunely and prosaically divine, whose merit, as Plato claims—and surely it is a merit of the first order—consisted in the circularity of his undertakings, which 'by thousands of revolutions and without advancing a step would always return to the same point'" (L'Entretien infini, 125). Surely this is the same bavard whose austere, gay tone is heard in the belated incarnation of the narrative voice of Thomas l'obscur.
What other mysteries does that infuriating title hide? A reviewer of the first edition of this translation pointed to Cocteau's Thomas l'imposteur (Naomi Greene in Novel 8 [1975]). Perhaps she was correct. While working on the translation I considered every Thomas from the magical evangelist to the master of all the Schoolmen and the unfortunate Archbishop of Canterbury. I find it hard to believe that the second element of the title does not deliberately echo Thomas Hardy's title, and beyond that that the gravedigger scene of the fifth chapter of Thomas l'obscur does not echo the arrested burial of Jude's children, and specifically this tableau:
A man with a sh
ovel in his hands was attempting to earth in the common grave of the three children, but his arm was held back by an expostultaing woman who stood in the half-filled hole.
But the very ambiguity of the status of these "references" constitutes an element of Blanchot's deliberate smokescreen to foil the efforts of both reader and translator, both condemned to try to determine "in the context of what tradition of language, of what sort of discourse" his own invention is situated.
The reviewer mentioned above was kind enough to describe this translaton as "a labor of love." I am deeply grateful to her for that description. For this new edition I have attempted to articulate some of the presuppositions of that labor, from the cooler perspective of eight years' distance. I hope that, in the spirit of Blanchot's essay on Heraclitus, I have remained faithful to the text itself and maintained its integrity as a witness.
Robert Lamberton February, 1981
NOTES
1. These ideas are probably more familiar to English readers in the form they take in the work of Eric Havelock, who explored the problems posed by the language of Homer and the Presocratics in his Preface to Plato.
2. The Neoplatonists and the Middle Ages may have forgotten that this was the case, but this quasi-raythic formulation of our intellectual history still retains its basic truth.
Thomas The Obscure Page 8