Thomas The Obscure (9 page)

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.

A
FTERWORD

T
HIS
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 say 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.

R
OBERT
L
AMBERTON

* Readers in search of such an analysis are referred to Geoffrey Hartman's per
ceptive 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 con
nectedness or of rupture with other manners of speaking. There scholarship intervenes, but it bears less on the nearly unrecover
able 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 subser
vient 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 ver
bal 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 shovel 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.