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LEO BERSANI
of a general theory of contexts) and warned against the danger of
overvaluing, in criticism, a structuralist approach which may be
only a transitional stage in linguistics itself. The well-known analysis
which Uvi-Strauss and Jacobson have done of phonemic, syntactic
and rhetorical structures in Baudelaire's "Les Chats" (such criticism
can naturally
be
written by committees) manages to be the closest
reading of a poem I have ever seen, while it makes the poem entirely
invisible. But the delirium of the new "science"
is
precisely that: the
annihilation of meaning, the destruction of literature as the very
condition of an attempt to explain the possibility of either.
But the sanction for such interests does, to a certain extent, come
from the history of literature itself. The destruction of literary texts
is not an invention of contemporary critics; from Flaubert to Beckett,
almost every important modern writer has been engaged in the sub–
version of his own meanings, in a more or less violent refusal to be–
lieve in or be limited by the expressiveness of his language. Beginning
with
Bouvard et Pecuchet,
the masterpieces of monotony in modem
art could .be thought of as an attempt to say nothing at all within,
however, a language that would never stop. More radical than the
notion of universal structures which might finally be described
independently of all local contents
is
the notion of the absolute
neutrality and formlessness of a language which could never be spoken
or described, a language which is merely the endless repetition of an
infinite sameness.
No one has made that language the impossible subject of his
work more explicitly than Maurice Blanchot, perhaps the most ex–
traordinary voice-absolutely clear and absolutely enigmatic, un–
mistakable and devoid of personality-in modern literature. "The
search of literature is the search for the moment which procedes it."
Where? Literally nowhere, that is, in the nature of language itself,
which is not to refer to objects but to abolish them, which tempts us
with the possibility of a pure and objectless designation. What
Blanchot seeks to "hear" in literature is the "uninterrupted murmur"
of an original, limitless, neutral language which the literary work in
fact interrupts. It is, he suggests, perhaps only when literature is
fragmented, discontinuous and incomplete that it can bring us back
to that "pure point of the undetermined" which
is
its origin. By
continually contesting the meanings which it cannot help but create,
a work can thus evoke a kind of ideal meaninglessness, a vague and
