Maurice Blanchot in his Madness of Day destroys the Aristotilian category of the primacy of Plot, along with most every classical value ascribed to dramatic storytelling. He does within literature what many so-called post-modernists do about literature. He creates text that falls in on itself. Action and character and episode shift in a never ending play of signification. It uses its own mass as a kind of grounding and never finds a level space on which to stand. It ends where it began, nowhere and everywhere.
A man.
Lost to himself.
Insane.
Alone.
This could be Ajax in the postmodern world. There is no set plot or rather there is no linear narrative. The various dramatic episodes flow neatly and smoothly one into the next in a powerfully organic way. Every death is a rebirth. Every reversal of situation reverses again and every recognition becomes once again hidden. The plot, in its own way, is actually quite clear. What is kept from us in any fixed way is place and time and point of view. Blanchot paints for us not a hospital room or a prison cell, but a true landscape of the mind. The transitions between events are at least as compelling as the events themselves. It is the connections and the distortions that are of interest, not the step by step series of locations.
Our speaker confronts the disaster of their own Being and finds himself lost in clouds of thought. Self and purpose obscured by the many shifting currents of the mind. Blanchot’s narrator is the perfect answer to Ajax and his righteous rage. We see this when he says, so simply, “When I die . . . I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which is stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it: I experience boundless pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying.”
Blanchot weaves a tapestry that speaks in the space between Ajax’s words. It is a vital stillness that holds us captive. A meditation on the inevitability of Human experience. It is a coming to terms with the madness and absurdity of life. The complete insanity that is the modern condition. One becomes the other.
The text moves imperceptibly slow. It creeps along. Holding your attention fully in the moment and when you step back to see where you are, a surprise awaits you. ‘How ever did we get here,’ one must ask. For place is not a static thing in this world. Time too. The end is in the beginning and we feel ourselves moved along inevitably like an ant upon a mobius strip. We become locked inside this story that is not a story. “A story? No. No stories, never again.”
This kind of text calls for a precision and a stillness that can only be found within the cleanliness of minimalism. That solitary speaker, alone, must not be over exposed. The words are too full, they go mad in the fullness of day. Only in the half light are they safe to be spoken. The memory that falls through our narrator’s hands like water must not get burned out. It is a fragile and delicate thing. Soft. “That was the truth: the light was going mad, the brightness had lost all reason; it assailed me irrationally, without control, without purpose.”
Blanchot’s meditation on mortality and madness must be handled with poetry. Prose is dangerous. Literality deadly.
The text must be allowed to breathe. The still and fragile morning air must be able to contain both the finality of life and the possibility of death. For in this stillness “a vast solitude opened . . . and the entire world disappeared inside it.” The text lives in the madness of day “and outside it there is nothing.”
Tags: ajax, blanchot, light, madness of day, minimalism, theory
Lyricism and Poetry
Something of my response here:
http://www.ghunka.com/index.cgi/Theater/Theatreminima/spectral.html