Maurice Blanchot, Thomas le solitaire by Michael Holland, Oxford's professor

February 16, 2023

Article by guest writer

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas le solitaire by Michael Holland, Oxford's professor

“For any work, there is an infinite number of possible versions.”
This is how Maurice Blanchot introduced, in 1950, the new version of his novel Thomas the Obscure, “written […] from 1932 onward, submitted to the publisher in 1940, published in 1941.” Already reduced by three quarters in 1950, that first version—unavailable during Blanchot’s lifetime—has come to be regarded by many readers as a less mature stage in his writing, seemingly confirming Jean Paulhan’s witticism from 1942 about Aminadab: “What [Blanchot] writes is almost unbearable over 400 pages and perfectly beautiful in ten.”
The discovery of Thomas le solitaire compels us to revise that judgment.

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas le Solitaire
by Michael Holland
MA, DPhil
Emeritus Professor of French at the University of Oxford
Fellow of St Hugh’s College

Oxford, 19 January 2016 (Notes for the Librairie Le Feu Follet following a first reading of Thomas le Solitaire: “It’s a bit long, I’m afraid, but the book is truly extraordinary. It’s also a little disjointed. Still, I’m sending it to you as is.”)

“For any work, there is an infinite number of possible versions.”
This is how Maurice Blanchot introduced, in 1950, the new version of his novel Thomas the Obscure, “written […] from 1932, submitted to the publisher in 1940, published in 1941.” Already reduced by three quarters in 1950, that first version—unavailable during Blanchot’s lifetime—has long been seen by many readers as a less advanced stage of his writing, seeming to merit Jean Paulhan’s quip in 1942 about Aminadab: “What [Blanchot] writes is almost unbearable in 400 pages and perfectly beautiful in ten.”
The discovery of Thomas le Solitaire compels us to revise that judgment. In its broad outlines, this novel closely resembles the first Thomas. It is, in this sense, a first first version. And what it immediately reveals is that in the novel published in 1941, the author was already demonstrating a narrative refinement and economy of expression that critics have too often overlooked.
A work already fully shaped, yet still engaged in exploring modes of storytelling, narration, and style—full of trial runs and narrative experiments—Thomas le Solitaire constantly highlights the various literary choices and devices that culminate in Thomas the Obscure.

“There are, for any work, an infinity of possible variations.” This is how Maurice Blanchot introduced the new version of his novel Thomas the Obscure in 1950, “written [...] starting in 1932, handed over to the publisher in 1940, published in 1941.” Already reduced by three-quarters in the 1950 version, the original text—unavailable during Blanchot’s lifetime—has long been regarded by many readers as a less accomplished stage in his development as a writer, seemingly validating Jean Paulhan’s quip, made in 1942 about Aminadab: “What [Blanchot] writes is almost unbearable in 400 pages and perfectly beautiful in 10.” The discovery of Thomas the Solitary compels us to reconsider this judgment.

In both books, Hélène-Irène has a husband and lovers. In Thomas the Solitary, her husband is unfaithful with Solange and Berthe, while she herself is involved with Li and with Gabriel, who awaits her in his pied-à-terre, preparing tea as a riot brews. This novel thus places the emphasis on Irène’s emotional entanglements with several men and ultimately with Thomas. Thomas the Obscure, by contrast, stresses the distance Blanchot establishes between narrative and the traditional novel form, describing such sentiments as “abstract and monstrous allegories.” As in Thomas the Obscure, Hélène-Irène becomes entangled in the riot as she goes to meet Thomas. But in Thomas the Solitary, a very specific link is drawn between her and the event: “She was on her way to a romantic rendezvous, taking quite naturally the paths opened up for her by the revolution” (176). She is even described as “the only revolutionary.” When she finally sits beside Thomas in the cinema, before “the most insignificant images of cinema” (180), it is far clearer in this novel than in Thomas the Obscure that there exists a connection between revolution and image—an idea Blanchot had already suggested as early as 1937, in his first piece of literary criticism for L’Insurgé, entitled “From Revolution to Literature.” Explicitly in the novel, however, he adopts a stance only implicit in that essay, but which undoubtedly reflects his view in the aftermath of the events of February 6, 1934: that revolution is essentially imaginary in nature; that, as in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, it draws its force from the image; and that to ignore this foundational truth is to doom revolution to failure.

Thomas
As if to mark an immediate separation between the novel and the character whose name it bears, Thomas the Solitary opens with Thomas’s decision, for the first time, not to bathe, but instead to enter the sea in spirit while “lying still on the pebbles of the beach,” “marvellously upheld by a thought,” and to let himself drown, “the sea having attained its highest degree of power: that of being conceived by the mind and reflected in material images” (2). The connection between these two fundamental levels—reality and spirit—is thus severed from the outset. One might think of Cocteau’s Thomas the Impostor (1923), whose protagonist, struck by a bullet, declares: “I’m lost if I don’t pretend to be dead.” But where Cocteau’s novel ends with fiction and reality becoming one, and Thomas dying for real, Blanchot’s Thomas reaches the same threshold—“In that instant when he dreamt the appearances of death, he did not realize that he had just undergone a true death”—but remains unaware of it. This unawareness becomes the very engine of Blanchot’s novel: Thomas’s ignorance, driving him to seek a death he has already suffered, becomes the generative principle of a fiction in which the impossibility of knowing one’s own death—a simple aporia for thought—becomes the pursuit of what constitutes that impossibility, and the systematic deconstruction of all the rational scaffolding by which thought seeks to grasp it.

This marks the categorical significance of Blanchot’s novel, not only for fiction but more especially for the development of twentieth-century thought. The novel both accompanies and anticipates the major shifts we associate with the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Martin Heidegger, whom Blanchot would become one of the most persistent critics of. While Thomas the Obscure presents, in its first chapter, the paradoxical condition of being dead-alive in which its protagonist is caught, it takes the first six chapters of Thomas the Solitary to reach the same point. In Thomas the Obscure, Blanchot hastens to the encounters with Anne and Irène, through which the novel will systematically shed the resources of thought. In Thomas the Solitary, he seems to have felt the need to prepare this movement in far greater detail—sometimes rather laboriously. While indifference quickly emerges as the mindset signified by the name Thomas, propelling him between two modes of his new condition, it remains entangled in a personal story and conventional psychology that keep this first novel within the framework of traditional fiction.

When Thomas rises after his drowning, he sees “bodies that were only limbs and heads that were nothing,” while his own face “retained from his dream a kind of marine fixity that explained the greenish fixity of his eyes,” giving him the inhuman look of a fish. “But he himself,” we read, “felt nothing.” He is nothing but a gaze. Yet the strangeness of this gaze—when it falls, for example, on three pretty women, one of whom returns it—remains embedded in his personal story:

“For two generations, no man of Thomas’s family had failed to understand the promises of such a look; and the mimicry of indifference and disdain he displayed in rejecting it cut him off at once from a whole lineage of amiable, unfaithful, and gallant men, leaving him linked only to a distant ancestor from the time of the First Empire, a hypochondriac and a misogynist” (4).

And the indifference from which he emerges—“that marvellous indifference whose birth he felt in his heart” (4)—remains something Thomas is aware of, something his mind continues to reflect on, and which, as the beginning of chapter II shows, is inscribed in time no less than in his family history: “He long remembered that afternoon when happiness was offered to him [...] as an inexhaustible feeling of indifference” (6).

For four more chapters, Thomas’s death will be transformed into a systematic and lucid dying. The logic dictating that to know oneself dead is to not quite be dead will be staged, and gradually counterbalanced—especially in preparation for the encounter with Anne, and then with Hélène-Irène, to whom Anne will introduce “her dead friend” (181). In chapter II, the world itself disappears—earth and sea—as in Noah’s Ark, leaving Thomas “the last survivor in this cataclysm that had struck nature” (9). The three young women say: “We will not see him again,” and thus Thomas learns that he has left the world. But this is not the end: he must now be stripped of his self. Returning to the hotel for dinner, he finds “a timid young man whom he did not recognize” (10). The young man’s long legs, blue eyes, and blond hair suggest a brief self-portrait, meant to highlight the ghostliness of Thomas, who orbits around the others “desperately seeking, in leaving the earth, the last traces of man” (14).

Yet he does not leave it entirely. At this stage, it is clear that Blanchot is suspending the final moment that cannot quite become final, in order to free it from all representations imposed by thought. Now that the world and the physical self have been dismissed, reasoning and psychology dominate chapter IV: “The next day and the day after, Thomas experienced only one feeling that filled him entirely, but which he could not define” (15). He turns to childhood to explain the “monstrous aptitudes” he feels awakening within him (18). But his memories unravel, and he stands “among his disfigured and counterfeit memories, like a stranger” (21). He descends to the beach: we have reached not only the moment when “he broke with himself, ceasing to separate himself through a thought” (23), but also the section of Thomas the Solitary later reworked into the reading scene of chapter IV of Thomas the Obscure. For both Thomas and the novel that replaces him, this is a turning point. The Solitary comes to an end, and in their own ways, the rest of the novel and the novel that succeeds it diverge radically from the original character—transforming him into “a strange man,” or presenting him in the guise of “He.”

In the short paragraph (omitted from Thomas the Obscure) that concludes chapter IV and the novel’s exposition phase, the narration switches to the present tense to signal that death and thought will now coincide: “Thomas at last understood what slow death was gradually taking hold of him. Motionless on the shore, he is alone: things flow past him” (25). (The typescript originally read “collapse” instead of “flow,” with the “r” in “écroulent” crossed out. The manuscript confirms the intended reading of “écoulent.”) It is now time to introduce the character known as the innkeeper in Thomas the Obscure and as the hotelier in Thomas the Solitary.

However, even though the existence of at least two other versions of the 1941 Thomas confirms that Blanchot’s reference to “an infinite number of versions” was no mere hyperbole, Thomas le Solitaire is much more than just another version. For there is a fundamental textual link between it and the Thomas of 1941. Chapter IV of that version does not exist in the same form in Thomas le Solitaire. It begins: “Thomas remained in his room, reading. […] Those who entered leaned over his shoulder and read these sentences: ‘He walked down to the beach, he wanted to walk, etc.’” (p. 21).
Now, the quoted section that follows (pp. 21–22) was not written for the 1941 version like the rest of the chapter: it is in fact a slightly altered excerpt from Chapter IV of Thomas le Solitaire (pp. 23–25 of the typescript). There is much to be said about the significance of this self-reading that Blanchot imposes not on Thomas, but on the novel itself in this unpublished chapter. But first and foremost, it allows us to establish this: Thomas le Solitaire is not merely an unpolished version of the final novel, but a kind of precursor to it and even—playing on the name Thomas—a twin work.
Reading the definitive novel thus necessarily entails reading this version. Thomas le Solitaire matters for everything that Thomas the Obscure rejects. The example it provides encourages and legitimates us to pursue this reading on a broader scale.

Thomas le Solitaire, like all of Maurice Blanchot’s narrative work, has its roots in a desire that has haunted literature since the first European Romantics: to know oneself to be dead—or, as the novel itself puts it, “to leave the world without closing one’s eyes” (p. 72).
Perhaps the last in a line stretching from Novalis and Jean Paul to Poe and, later, Kafka, Blanchot ultimately breaks with this tradition, bringing it to a close once and for all by making of the novelistic art not so much a search for a more developed version of that condition, as an attempt to assume it through thought in what is most impossible within it: the very act of thinking death inevitably defers the moment at which death becomes real.
In other words, “to know oneself to be dead” is not, for Blanchot, first and foremost the strange fate of a fictional character (one thinks of Poe’s Mr. Valdemar or Kafka’s hunter Gracchus), but rather the systematic elaboration of a mode of discourse in which such “knowledge” may come to be spoken.

In short, the subject of this knowledge is not, in the final analysis, a protagonist, nor even the author or reader of the novel, but the novel itself, in so far as it takes over from thought to offer a language to the consciousness that “knows itself to be dead.” And by staging the repeated impasses into which fiction runs when it attempts to confront this condition by means of a character, Blanchot gradually drives his novel toward a point of rupture—one in which the narrative separates from itself by speaking in an entirely different language.

This is how we must understand the moment of self-reading in Chapter IV: there, the novel of Thomas, no longer content with generating an infinite succession of versions, turns back upon itself, interrupts itself, and in doing so signals that the destiny of both the character named Thomas and the novel itself will now be played out at the level of this interruption.
Rather than undergoing this interruption as something that ends one version and launches another, the narrative applies it to itself; from now on, the interruption will no longer occur between two novels—its “in-betweenness” will operate within the work itself.

As a novel, Thomas the Obscure thus becomes its own character: Thomas is always already Thomas, and the novel—with all its conventional elements (characters, setting, plot…)—now serves only to provide language with the means to cease being a novel, to interrupt itself, and in that very gesture, to think.
In 1941, Blanchot was still far from having found the language that, under the name writing of the disaster, would inscribe this interruption within the very discourse of rational thought. Only with the “new version” of Thomas the Obscure in 1950 could he even begin his true exploration of that discourse.

In everything that separates it from the 1941 Thomas, Thomas le Solitaire thus complements and illuminates that first work—both in what it achieves and in what limits it.
Everything that Thomas the Obscure rejects or transforms still belongs, by that very fact, to Thomas the Obscure.

Thomas le Solitaire comprises sixteen chapters, whereas Thomas the Obscure has fifteen. Otherwise, the novel closely resembles the 1941 Thomas the Obscure. Nevertheless, there are significant differences. In both cases, the incipit is the same: “Thomas sat and looked at the sea.” And in Chapters II and III, a subtle parallel links the two novels: in both Chapter IIs, Thomas finds himself in a wood; in both Chapter IIIs, he returns to the hotel for dinner.

In Chapter IV, as we have seen, the two novels diverge entirely on the diegetic level, while becoming inseparable through the device of self-reading. As if to prepare this moment, in Chapter II of Thomas the Obscure, Thomas “turned his back to the sea” before entering a small wood—just as the Thomas of Thomas le Solitaire does in Chapter II.
This gesture of “turning away” is performed by Thomas only in Chapter IV of Thomas le Solitaire, more precisely in the section of that chapter that is quoted in Chapter IV of Thomas the Obscure. As a result, the act of turning away from the sea appears twice in Thomas the Obscure. There is thus a telescoping of Chapters II and IV of Thomas le Solitaire into Chapter II of Thomas the Obscure, a compression that precipitates the break with the narrative continuity created by “Thomas sat and looked at the sea,” replacing it with a new relationship between the narration and itself.

In Thomas the Obscure, Thomas is thus deprived—almost from the outset—of the scopophilic narcissism that characterizes his relationship to the sea, by turning his back on it twice. At the same time, the narration, turning back on itself in the act of citation, does not mirror itself but instead enacts that same gesture of turning away at the level of its own continuity, by interrupting it. A double trope—of interruption and reversal—that will determine the whole trajectory of Blanchot’s writing from this point forward.

In Chapter V of both novels, everything seems to return to similarity and continuity: “In the village lived a strange man” (Thomas le Solitaire); “In the village lived a man in the form of He” (Thomas the Obscure).
This continues into Chapter VI in both novels: “Night was beginning to fall. Antoine [the innkeeper] went out to watch the twilight” (Thomas le Solitaire); “The innkeeper stepped outside before the sun had set. It was not yet twilight...” (Thomas the Obscure, p. 47).

Yet, as the substitution of “a man in the form of He” for “a strange man” already suggests, the shift toward the very language of narration and the abandonment of conventional fiction are now fully at work in Thomas the Obscure. To compose Chapter VI of that novel, Blanchot makes extensive cuts to Chapter VI of Thomas le Solitaire, removing nearly all references to Antoine the innkeeper in order to reach more quickly what concludes the chapter: the appearance of Anne.

“Anne was smiling,” which marks the beginning of Chapter VII in Thomas le Solitaire, thus becomes the second paragraph of Chapter VI in Thomas the Obscure. This change introduces a permanent offset in the chapter numbering between the two novels.
From this point forward, however, the corresponding chapters will largely follow the same structure, with one exception: Chapter VIII of Thomas the Obscure, before aligning with Chapter IX of Thomas le Solitaire, begins with an entirely new section—the episode of the nearly blind cat.

From that point on, the corresponding chapters of the two novels will begin and end in the same way. Only the final chapter presents two notable differences: Thomas le Solitaire presents Thomas’s monologue in the penultimate chapter as excerpts from his Notebooks; and the final sentence of Thomas the Obscure echoes the ending of Kafka’s The Trial (“as though the shame had already begun for him”), which is absent from Thomas le Solitaire.

To sum up: beginning with the moment in Chapter VI (Thomas the Obscure) and Chapter VII (Thomas le Solitaire) when “Anne was smiling,” the two novels are narratively aligned. But prior to that, Blanchot had significantly altered, from one version to the next, the way in which the novel introduces its central subject: the encounter between Thomas and Anne.

Genre

[References to Thomas the Obscure are to the 2005 Gallimard edition]

If Thomas the Obscure struck readers in 1941 by its strangeness—Claude Roy compared it to a UFO—Thomas le Solitaire, at least on the surface, belongs to the rather conventional and widely practiced genre of the bourgeois sentimental novel of the interwar period.
The action begins on the French Riviera in summer: time is spent on the beach, tennis is played, meals are taken at the hotel, and the casino in Monte Carlo is frequented. Thomas lies on the sand, watches young women bathe, and tries to approach some of them. We meet Geneviève, Éveline, Louise, Mme Taillegloire and Mme Renetour; we hear the story of the Ruffeteau family, whose estate lies abandoned and where Thomas would like to go walking. We come across Desrousseaux and his failed election campaign, the Guilleminets and the Métadiers, families from the region, as well as Antoinette, Jeannette, Françoise and Angéline, the maids.

Later, the action shifts to Paris, whose streets, monuments, and fashionable places are described in a way that anchors the novel in a recognisable world. While in Thomas the Obscure, Thomas, led by Anne into a crowd, meets only “those who have a passion, a mania...” (p. 161), in Thomas le Solitaire, these people are leaving “the Opéra, the Paramount, the Comédie Française” (p. 161). Returning home in the evening, everyone in Thomas the Obscure returns “with their share in the millionth of the famous monuments” (p. 162), while in Thomas le Solitaire, they are Parisians returning “with their share in the millionth of the Louvre, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Trocadéro” (p. 163). In Thomas le Solitaire, passers-by stop “in front of the window displays at Nicolas and Guerlain” (p. 165), whereas in Thomas the Obscure they stop simply “in front of the window displays” (p. 164). A “theatre hall” in the latter becomes the Gaîté-Cinéma in Thomas le Solitaire (p. 177). The earlier novel even includes an advertisement for a “Scandale” corset (p. 169), and elsewhere mentions “women who shop at Patou” (p. 17)—with “rue de la Paix” handwritten above the typescript. The characters go to “Weber’s, the Florian, […] the Dante bar” (p. 175).
Whatever the milieu evoked, Thomas le Solitaire maintains a realist grounding that Thomas the Obscure systematically eliminates in favour of generalisation and abstraction.

History and current events also play a role in this realist approach. We learn that Thomas’s youthful illusions included “the virtue of M. Thiers, the probity of Fouquet” (p. 21).
Whereas in Thomas the Obscure Thomas’s monologue evokes “the murder of the most inoffensive man” (p. 292), in the Notebook excerpted in Thomas le Solitaire, it is “the most inoffensive man, M. Lebrun, President of the Republic” (p. 323).
This reference gives us at least a starting date for Blanchot’s work on Thomas le Solitaire, since Albert Lebrun was elected President on 10 May 1932 and remained in office until 1940. Other allusions allow for a more precise dating: at the beginning of Chapter IV, Thomas reads in the newspapers about “the end of Russian dumping, the end of the deficit,” topics of political debate between 1931 and 1933; there is also mention of “the forthcoming reconciliation between France and Germany,” an ideal that did not survive the death of Aristide Briand in March 1932. Finally, we read that Thomas decides to stop reading the newspapers “for fear of learning that America had cancelled the war debts” (p. 15). Between 1932, the year of the Lausanne Conference, and 1934, when the United States signalled its willingness to negotiate, the question of inter-allied debts occupied successive governments.

A particularly telling clue that this novel was not written before 1934 appears in the description of the riot in which Thomas and Irène become involved in Chapter XII (the same episode appears in Chapter XI of Thomas the Obscure).
“The riot was approaching the Élysée,” we read. “If the Republic were overthrown that evening, […] it was possible Irène might reach the Avenue Marigny […]. But the riot was defeated. […] At the decisive moment, all that could be heard from the leaders was ‘shit,’ the cry of the defeated […]. Irène stepped out of the car. The riot police, pushing back the demonstrators, abruptly exposed her to the cold, […] already disfigured, like the riot, in the face of history” (p. 176).

Many details in this episode are suppressed in Thomas the Obscure, in keeping with the same movement that substitutes abstraction for realist detail (for example, we read “the riot was approaching the centre” rather than “the Élysée,” and “If the Republic were overthrown” becomes “If the essences suffered their tragic defeat,” p. 174).
But in Thomas le Solitaire, it is quite clear that what is being described is the evening of 6 February 1934.

Literary References and Genre

Thomas le Solitaire abounds with literary references from the period. Anne reads “romans from Veillées des chaumières, which she hid in her bedroom, as others hid Paris-Flirt or L’Initiation sexuelle” (p. 95). Thomas had led Anne “into a novel by Zénaïde Fleuriot” (p. 90). Irène is accustomed to living “among people who insisted on being introduced to Cocteau before reading Les Enfants terribles, and who called Christian Bérard ‘Bébé’” (p. 190).

For Anne the reader, “From the books themselves, those burning mirrors, the silvering had been stripped, and the admiration, the curiosity that were meant for Anne passed through without refraction…” In this striking moment, Thomas le Solitaire and Thomas the Obscure diverge significantly: in the former, the gaze passes “through the fate of Thérèse Desqueyroux, through the death of Bella” (p. 140); in the latter, it passes “through the fate of Electra, through the death of Lady Madeleine Usher” (p. 145).

Just as familiar are the emotions and psychological states of the characters, which Thomas le Solitaire lays out using the tools of the traditional psychological novel. It is a love story not unlike those of Jacques Chardonne. When Thomas approaches Anne, we read: “Thomas was about to begin his apprenticeship in love” (p. 75). In Thomas the Obscure, emotion has vanished altogether: Thomas moves “towards the most precious point of life” (p. 79).

Even when they are depicted with unsettling depth and complexity, these emotions never overflow the framework of the interwar sentimental novel. In many respects, Thomas le Solitaire belongs to its era—it demands to be read as one would read the fiction of the 1930s.

The Second Novel

It soon becomes clear that if Thomas le Solitaire presents itself as a conventional novel, it is in fact a trap: by drawing the reader into its characters and narrative, it exposes them to a fiction that exceeds and destabilizes the very structure it maintains so firmly.

It is not merely the story of a profoundly strange individual—though it is that too—but of the effort to construct a language capable of recognising and giving voice to that strangeness at the heart of the self. Through a double movement, the novel intensifies the uncanniness of both Thomas and the world he inhabits, and fills this world with figures whose function is to allegorise the reader’s and the novel’s own effort to account for such a character and such a world.

Without ever leaving the domain of the sentimental novel, Thomas le Solitaire forces its reader into a reflection that shifts the meaning of fiction toward narration itself. Narration and analysis undergo a kind of divorce: whereas the symbolist or simply symbolic novel transforms banal narrative and characters into vehicles for inexpressible meaning, Thomas le Solitaire, while pursuing a similar aim, introduces a decisive break by rendering continuous, straightforward reading impossible.

Between the narrative set on the Côte d’Azur and then in Paris, and the allegory of thought that this same narrative sustains; between the love triangle formed by Thomas, Anne and Irène and the meditation on being and language that unfolds within it, the reader moves only by undergoing a radical shift in perspective—one that is as disorienting as it is essential.

And if this reversal exceeds the bounds of the novel while never departing from it, it is because the true agent of this fiction is not the novel, but language itself. Language is the real actor, the principal character of this fiction; it governs the unfolding, provides the bridge between the novel’s two registers, inserting itself as a third element between the sentimental narrative and its allegorical reflection—pulling the reader from one and exposing them to the other through a perpetual reversal and a deliberate destabilisation.

To fulfil this role, the language of the novel is always ready to break from the fiction it carries, interrupting it with metaphors whose incongruity is their rule.

Narrative Method

Strictly speaking, there is no plot in Thomas le Solitaire. Neither the love triangle of Thomas, Anne, and Irène, nor the fleeting presence of other lovers such as Paul, Gabriel, or Li steers the novel toward the kind of resolution that its apparent genre might suggest.

Though the events seem oriented toward a future, the novel remains caught in a perpetual present, which repeats itself through the permutations of its three characters, as if waiting to discover the fissure that will drain time of its chronological substance and precipitate the novel toward its end.

For that is the true function of the character named Thomas: not to be the hero of a sentimental novel, nor the allegorical figure of a philosophical parable, but—by undoing both the realistic and symbolic modes of traditional fiction—to bring language into coincidence with what suspends it: the hiatus of consciousness in which death becomes thought.

A distinct and decisive role in this project is played by metaphor, which constitutes a major portion of the novel’s narrative substance. Ordinarily, metaphors deepen our understanding of a situation or character; here, they do quite the opposite.
Rather than illuminating the reality they describe, in a novel where narrative constantly returns to the same limit-situation, metaphors detach from the story—either proliferating autonomously according to a logic of incongruity, or splitting internally into heterogeneous elements whose dissonance becomes their only meaning.

An example of the first tendency: “the most vaccinated civil servant could still catch one of those shameful diseases known as the disgust for life, tenderness, syphilis” (p. 165);
of the second: “a fat man, already stooped, with a flabby belly—he looked to him like the Hermes of Praxiteles or Ramon Novarro” (p. 41).

In this way, metaphors become second-order metaphors: what they signify is precisely their internal discontinuity, offering in the course of the narrative repeated exemplars of the interruption that the narration itself strives—always unsuccessfully—to attain.

This use of metaphor is not, in itself, original—and Blanchot is fully aware of this. As he noted in his 1940 essay on Lautréamont, and again on many later occasions, it can be traced back to the German novelist Jean Paul (1763–1825) and continues through the works of Jean Giraudoux. These two authors, by Blanchot’s own admission, are his precursors and models, and Thomas le Solitaire bears their influence heavily, as does Thomas the Obscure.

But the repeated revisions that the latter novel imposes upon the metaphors found in Thomas le Solitaire—softening and moderating them—draw attention to the whimsical, eccentric, and at times brilliantly absurd quality of the metaphoric fabric in Blanchot’s early narrative style. It is significant that, in an article written after the publication of Thomas the Obscure, entitled From Jean Paul to Giraudoux (1944), Blanchot reaffirms his admiration for the role of metaphor in these two writers, but expresses a clear preference for Giraudoux, who submits metaphor to a gradual dialectical development, whereas in Jean Paul it tends to erupt in “a kind of frenzy,” “a burst of intoxication and a powerful incoherence,” producing “the strangest harmonies” and “the most chimerical coincidences.”

From this, we may conclude that Thomas le Solitaire is written under the sign of Jean Paul, whereas Thomas the Obscure tends toward Giraudoux.
In this first novel, metaphor verges on compulsion, appearing at nearly every turn of phrase without any motive beyond itself. It infuses the novel with a kind of continuous detonation—a permanent firework display in which the language of narration constantly anticipates the end the novel longs to reach, realising it momentarily in almost every sentence and thus marking, through its own intermittent suspension, the true stage upon which thought seeks to think its own interruption.

Some further examples:

“And even the unicorn, suddenly appearing in that countryside, would have calmly begun grazing the grass, stepping out of the fable like a bourgeois withdrawing from society, already ready for the slaughterhouse” (p. 45).
“Thomas suddenly found himself thrown into a vast vat of radium, where, bombarded with elbow jabs, head-butts […] he received all the atoms of a great life” (p. 161).
“All the vital energy, the pride-fuelled passion of those final seconds before the Marathon runner / Manthinean collapses, before the hundred-sausage club member gives up his bet before death—was breathing here” (pp. 160–161).
“Having exhausted all insignificant subjects—modern painting, family sagas, the immortality of the soul…” (p. 166).
“At his feet died all the powers that make Oedipus marry his mother, that drive a bankrupt to commit suicide the same day he wins the national lottery” (p. 167).
“The only fighters left were butchers and graduates of the École normale who talk about poetry” (p. 175).
“Her parents, her husband’s friends, the statues of Phidias, the parish priest from La Madeleine came toward her [Irène]” (p. 177).
“Even the most forsaken objects—a piggy bank in a millionaire’s hotel—possessed the certainty that they would not vanish with the end of the world. Supreme impudence was achieved by catch-all trays, fetish elephants, and Nevers faience plates hung on the wall…” (p. 322).
“That night […] there was a ridiculous resurgence of cancer, arteriosclerosis in the body, of hairline cracks in vases” (p. 322).
“With any kind of agony—covered in ulcers or piloting a torpedo-plane—I was dying…” (p. 323).
“All the Thomases […] were there […]. A few diplomats, a con man, a novelist, a neurasthenic, and—witnesses of his moods and virtues—three travelling salesmen. […] The novelist, ultimate glory, had become a minister; the neurasthenic too, ultimate catastrophe; and the travelling salesman had met Madame Bovary” (pp. 93–94).
“A troupe of Mussolinis, Napoleons […], Pasteurs was running through the street” (p. 110).
“We absolutely needed a Philemon and Baucis who were double amputees, a tubercular Job, a lovelorn Landru” (p. 154).

Proper Names

Proper names appear far more frequently in Thomas le Solitaire than in Thomas the Obscure. At the beginning of the novel, three young women—Geneviève, Éveline, and Louise—show an interest in Thomas. In the typescript version, near the end of Chapter III, one reads: “Éveline stood a little apart.” In the manuscript, Blanchot had initially written “Louise” but crossed it out and replaced it with “Éveline.”

In Chapter V, when Thomas has become “the stranger,” the text reads “Louise had walked with him,” though in the manuscript, Blanchot first wrote “the younger girl had walked with him,” before replacing it with “Louise.” This name is one that Blanchot would continue to use throughout his later fiction.

Four principal names appear in Thomas le Solitaire:

Anne

In Thomas the Obscure, Anne is a mysterious and difficult figure to decipher. She suddenly appears in Chapter IV, where Thomas has taken the form of “He”: the innkeeper, turning around, sees before him “a young woman living at the inn, named Anne,” who smiles at him (p. 51).

The figure referred to in Thomas the Obscure as “the innkeeper” is named Antoine—or “the hotelier”—in Thomas le Solitaire, and as will become clearer, his presence serves an allegorical function, illuminating what Blanchot is attempting to accomplish in the novel.

In Thomas le Solitaire, it is Antoine who first smiles at Anne—“for the first time in many years” (p. 27)—and Anne responds by smiling in return. There is, therefore, a reversal of initiative and a reciprocity: in the distance created by Thomas’s transformation into “a strange man,” the one who allegorically represents the novelist—or even the novel itself—generates a mirrored intimacy with the other main character.

Far more explicitly than in Thomas the Obscure, the novel establishes from the outset an unbridgeable distance between Thomas and Anne that compromises any possible relationship. They do not inhabit the same dimension: a smile may join Anne and Antoine only in Thomas’s absence; when he is present, Anne can only wither away, ultimately exiting the novel by dying, as the later stages of both versions will show.

This suggests that Anne is not truly alive; she is already dead—a lingering presence, a visual residue, a remnant destined to fade as the novel advances in its exploration of a thought of death.
This is made more explicit in Thomas le Solitaire, where, complementing the smile shared by Anne and Antoine, an element absent from Thomas the Obscure comes into play.

Thomas settles into the hotel “according to the rules”; but we read: “From that moment, Antoine felt that something strange was happening” (p. 27). He begins sniffing the air, trying to “breathe in his unease.”
At first, “the distant scent of meadows” arrives, and this reassures him. Then we read: “Anne’s perfume entered, then Anne, an honest woman” (p. 28). And it is then that Antoine smiles, after which Anne, “a little surprised,” smiles too—and continues smiling.

It is stated quite plainly: Anne is not first a visible presence—she is a scent, a pure sensation that only afterward becomes a figure.
As in Proust, and especially in Mallarmé, in the void to which time exposes consciousness by positing the destruction of all things, sensation alone rises to the surface. Mallarmé’s famous line—“I say: a flower!...”—was adapted by Blanchot in 1947 to read: “I say: this woman…” (La Part du feu, p. 313). There is no doubt that, in this echo, Blanchot was referring back to the first great female figure in his fiction, at the threshold of the radical transformation he would bring to Thomas the Obscure in 1950.

Irène

Like Anne, Irène plays essentially the same role in both Thomas le Solitaire and Thomas the Obscure. But more than Anne, she is immersed in the events and psychology of the traditional novel form that Thomas le Solitaire still adheres to.
This likely explains why she disappears entirely from the 1950 version of Thomas the Obscure. One might say that she anchors both Thomas and Anne in the “first” novel that Thomas le Solitaire sets out, and which Thomas the Obscure will subsequently pare down and abstract.

This is visible from the moment she appears on the scene in Chapter XIII (Chapter XII of Thomas the Obscure). In the latter novel, Anne is beginning to despair of ever getting closer to Thomas. The thought arises that she is not suited to him, that he may need other women. What this entails escapes her: “All she could do was approach the young woman she had suddenly chosen,” and in a spotlight worthy of a theatre stage, the novel shifts to Irène’s bedroom, where she lies sleeping heavily (p. 166).

In Thomas le Solitaire, action and feeling are grounded in the real world described by the novel. Tired of Thomas’s indifference, Anne notes that even prostitutes turn their eyes away from this “cold shadow.”
She then decides to introduce him to a friend—who, at least at first, is not named Irène but Hélène—“who lived in the coldest apartment […] one could find in Paris. It was the only place from which it was impossible to glimpse, through any window, the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, or a crumbling house with laundry, always the same, drying at the windows” (p. 167).

Remarkably, however, at a certain point in the typescript (p. 170), the name Hélène is unexpectedly replaced by Irène, while in the manuscript version, “Hélène” continues to appear for some time before being replaced, at last, by “Irène” on page 177—almost at the end of the chapter.

Investigations

Everything you’ve always wanted to know — and also what you think you already know, what you didn’t realize you couldn’t ignore, what you assumed no one knew, along with a few other erudite secrets. The Feu Follet investigations are like your curiosity: sharp and spirited.