BLANCHOT - 2002 - Salama. The Interruption of Myth

THE INTERRUPTION OF MYTH: A NANCIAN READING
OF BLANCHOT AND AL-BAYATI
Abstract
Jean-Luc NancyÕs provocative second chapter of The Inoperative Community, ÒMyth
Interrupted,Ó sets to rede ne the relationship between myth and literature. This paper
puts NancyÕs new perspective to test through juxtaposing Abd al-Wahhab al-BayatiÕs
myth of Orpheus with Maurice BlanchotÕs. The assumption is that when literature
stages myth and presents it from various perspectives, it does so not to invoke or
allegorize its content through the letter, but rather to interrupt it. This new discovery
of the ÒuntraceabilityÓ of myth leaves us with a different perspective of literature as
that language which cuts across myth and exposes its limit and as a language that
inhabits myth only to interrupt it. BlanchotÕs interest in Orpheus, as it is articulated
in his novel/story Thomas lÕobscur (the 1950 New Version) and in his chapter on
ÒOrpheusÕs GazeÓ in The Space of Literature, and al-BayatiÕs reference to Orpheus
in his poetic collections He Who Comes and Does Not Come, Death in Life, and
Writing on the Mud thematize this playful staging of the myth of Orpheus. Both
seem to follow a different path with the same myth. Blanchot disregards the ending
of the Orpheus story, and al-Bayati disregards the gaze. However, it is not just
selection, but modification that is at work here: both shape their chosen materials in
conformity to a specific need. The logic that binds the two writers together in rela-
tion to myth and literature expresses itself not only in the choice of the same myth,
but they also have in common the shared debt to this classical material and more
importantly in their (re)de nition of this material. The point of departure between
the two of them in their treatment (reinterpretation) of Orpheus is that Blanchot is
looking at the effect of death on writing, while al-Bayati is exploring the effect of
writing on death.
Introduction
Language is a perpetual Orphic song,
Which rules with Daedal harmony a throng
Of thoughts and forms, which else senseless and shapeless were.
(Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, IV: 415-417)
It is not a mere coincidence that many 20th-century literary gures and

philosophers resort to mythical models like Oedipus, Odysseus, and Orpheus
at the most decisive moments of their thinking. They return to them as
tropes or imaginary carriers of the ideas their invocation represents. This
myth-based thought that characterizes modernism in general has perhaps
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THE INTERRUPTION OF MYTH 249
taken place because it helps through the analogical use of myth to approx-
imate the relationship between reason in its crude Kantian terms and expe-
rience in its unruly and imaginative sense. The psychical content of FreudÕs
male abnormality and Òfamily romanceÓ is represented by Oedipus; the
dialectic of enlightenment in Adorno and Horkheimer visits the Odyssey to
stage its double thesis of enlightenment as nding its roots in mythology
and of enlightenment as lapsing into mythology; the anthropological struc-
turalism of L vi-Strauss invests in myth as containing the rst grains of
human rationality that provide a systematic model of logic capable of over-
coming contradictions; the literary theory of Eric AuerbachÕs Mimesis uses
HomerÕs Odyssey in the famous chapter of ÒOdysseusÕs ScarÓ and juxta-
poses it to the ancient Hebrew stories in order to prove that none of those
two stylistic conventions pre gures the representational politics of Western
realism that Auerbach believes to have emerged with the Gospels.
Myth has thus been used and given many de nitions by the psychoana-
lyst, the cultural theorist, the anthropologist, and the literary critic. Now,
what questions will these representations impose upon us? It is obvious that
myth has more or less been used as raw material to solidify ideas and atti-
tudes in order to provide some sort of intellectual security. This in turn has
affected the trajectory of literary theory in the rst half of the 20th-century.
New approaches to the study of literature, pioneered by gures like C. G.
Jung, Joseph Campbell, and culminating in Northrop Frye, have offered an
interpretation of literature that sees literary texts through the prism of myth,
or vice versa. This treatment of literature and myth as coterminous has
ignored their essential differences, and only recently has an interest in myth
as myth and as different from literature started to develop among a group
of writers like George Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and
Marcel Detienne. The assumption is that when literature stages myth and
presents it from various perspectives, it does so not to invoke or allegorize
its content through the letter, but rather to interrupt it. Myth may serve as
a focus of an ethical idea of self-transcendence or self-sacri ce or of any
other idea that needs to be justi ed. But when a literary text refers to myth,
or rewrites myth, this does not mean that literature brings a dead myth back
to life. For myth never dies, it rather dies down, like a communal value-
consensus, and the only thing that literature could do is stir and interrupt it,
thus contributing to a better understanding of the variety of fundamental choices
open to any given human community. That is why NancyÕs theory on myth
is useful for any kind of study that compares myth and literature. But in
order to understand how literature interrupts myth, it will be useful to offer
a quick overview of the 20th-century literary criticism of myth that consti-
tutes the background of NancyÕs theory of myth.
Among the many theories that relate literature to myth, two approaches
250 THE INTERRUPTION OF MYTH
stand out. The rst one is represented by a group of critics who insist on
treating myth in literature as an archetype that has been established in the
human heritage within which humanity seeks to nd an imaginative space
of comprehension. 1 The second views myth as a mask or a fantastic element
that writers use in order to re ect more eloquently and rhetorically on
human reality. While these two critical presuppositions or expectations of
myth are often substantial and well-founded, they both still establish a bind-
ing extrinsic pattern of thought that claims to address myth while in fact
jumping over it for what lies beneath or outside it. These critical modes of
externality derive mainly from a grandiose connotative envisioning of liter-
ature and myth as something that means, not as something that exists for its
own sake.2
Nancy, on the other hand, claims that myth is Òorigin,Ó or is at least
related to an unthinkable origin. Literature continues or discontinues myth
but does not bind everything together the way myth does. According to
Nancy, we live in what Bataille describes as the Òabsence of myth,Ó 3 or
what Nancy himself chooses to call the Òinterruption of myth,Ó or Òthe myth
of myth.Ó4 This logic, if traced backwards, would force us to consider a
myth like Orpheus, whether in VirgilÕs Georgics or OvidÕs Metamorphoses,
as already an interruption of its own mythicity. This discovery of the
ÒuntraceabilityÓ of myth, to use Marcel DetienneÕs word, would thus leave
us with a different perspective of literature as that language which cuts
across myth and exposes its limit and as a language that inhabits myth only
to interrupt it. Some critics even reconsider the relationship between myth
1
Joseph Campbell, for instance, makes a very brief reference to the myth of Orpheus and
Eurydice and groups it in the box of the archetype of return, arguing that like Òhundreds of
analogous tales throughout the world,Ó the myth Òsuggests that in spite of the failure recorded,
a possibility exists of a return of the lover with his lost love from beyond the terrible thresh-
old.Ó Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1949) 206.
2
Although it might be a tempting argument to claim that al-Bayati, for instance, used the
myth of Orpheus or myth in general as a metaphor for a nationalistic project or as a call for
revolution, or even as a re ection of the social and cultural malaise of his Iraqi community,
one has to admit that this is just one possible reading among others. For allegorical treatment
of myth in modern Arab poetry see for instance RÂt¨ ®Awa´, Usßârat al-Mawt wa al-Inbi®¨th
fÂ al-Shi®r al-®ArabÂ al-¼adÂth (Beirut: al-Mu¾assasah al-®Arabiyyah lil-Dir¨s¨t wa al-Nashr, 1974);
see also Aida Azouqa, ÒDefamiliarization in the Poetry of ®Abd al-Wahh¨b al-Bay¨ti and T. S.
Eliot: A Comparative Study,Ó Journal of Arabic Literature, 32 no. 2 (2001): 167-211.
3
George Bataille, ÒThe Absence of MythÓ Writings on Surrealism (London: Verso, 1994)
48.
4
Jean-Luc Nancy, ÒMyth InterruptedÓ in The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Conner;
trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, Simona Sawhney (Minnesota: U of
Minnesota P, 1991) 47.
and literature and see the former to be the invented by the latter, to the
extent that myth has become the ÒotherÓ of literature:5
Myth is interrupted by literature precisely to the extent that literature does not
come to and end. It does not come to an end at the very place where the
work passes from an author to a reader, and from this reader to another
reader or to another author. It does not come to an end at the place where
the work passes on to another work by the same author or at the place where
it passes into other works of other authors. It does not come to an end where
its narrative passes into other narratives, its poem into other poems, its
thought into other thoughts, or into the inevitable suspension of the thought
or the poem.6
Literature, like myth, does inscribe the way we are together, but because
it does not do so and the same way myth does, it offers something that it
does not hold as essence. In our case, when Blanchot and al-Bayati look
back to the Orpheus story, as this study hopes to reveal, the myth is not
held as essence. In fact, the story itself becomes their Eurydice, which
means that in order for their literary texts to exist, part of the Orpheus myth,
indeed part of all our past fountains of inspiration, our tradition, has to be
lost like Eurydice herself. Literature therefore cannot do the job of myth by
assuming the task of collective necessity. Literature designates what Nancy
calls Òthe singular ontological qualityÓ 7 that gives being an essence, except
that literature does not hold it in reserve. Literature has nothing to say about
the essence of myth, and therefore literature lacks being. Literature to Nancy
is without thesis, and therefore, there cannot be any one single literary work
that would establish our human essence. For unlike myth, literature does not
come to an end. Having lost all transcendental signi ers literature cannot
function in the age of technological reproducibility to establish a mythic
project and to build a community of shared essences. Contrary to myth, lit-
erature cannot fuse individuals together, but can only cut across myth to
expose its negativity. Literature comes in when we have the absence of
something and the absence of myth becomes the necessary condition for lit-
erature to be. But literature too is caught in the technology of writing: it
gestures towards transcendence, and even if it makes that gesture, it cannot
achieve it, yet it always suspends it. Only myth as myth can do this because
it has an ontological function that goes beyond any kind of critical lan-
guage. In literature one has to have an inventor, an author. Myth does not
5
For more on how recent scholarship in mythology has become inventive and informed by
ready-made ideologies, read Marcel Detienne, LÕinvention de la mythologie (Paris: Gallimard,
1981).
6
Nancy 64-65.
7
Nancy 64.
have an author. Literature is thus impure and improper: impure because it

lives on the absence of myth and improper because it is a process of de-
appropriation and can never be a process of becoming. So, if we are
together in the absence of myth, then we are together in the non-mythic.
After the writings of George Battaille, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Marcel Detienne,
one has to admit that the relationship between literature and myth has
become much more complicated than the mind-soothing individuation or
repetitive archetypalism that informed the intellectual grounds of the rst
half of 20th-century writings that psychoanalyze myths and regard them as
universal metaphors or dreams of humanity that could explain for us the
unconscious repressed by logos. By nally establishing the shift from myth
as allegory, as allos- (something else) and agoreuein (to say publicly), to
SchellingÕs understanding of myth as tautegory,8 namely as saying some-
thing and meaning exactly that, a deconstructive approach to myth that also
informs the present study challenges the psychoanalytical axiom that claims
that myth is not what it is. As Battaille tersely puts it, we live in an
Òimmense voidÓ which makes myth no longer a closure. It is this Òabsence
of myth,Ó this ÒinterruptionÓ that I wish to study in Blanchot and al-Bayati.
The treatment of the myth of Orpheus in Blanchot or al-Bayati, indeed in
any artistic work that considers myth a symbol that constitutes a language,
might suffer from the lapse into arbitrary interpretation. Reference to
mythology in literary texts differs from culture to culture and from genera-
tion to generation and in our case from one perspective on the same myth
to another. Indeed modern literary theory will have taught us nothing if it
has failed to convey to us the open-endedness of the process of signi cation.
Therefore, any treatment of BlanchotÕs or al-BayatiÕs Orpheus as a static
and xed metaphor for X will eventually fail because it anchors thought and
prevents critical diversity and poetic inventiveness. It was L vi-Strauss who
rst told us in an anthropological spirit that Òmythology is staticÓ and that
Òwe nd the same mythical elements combined over and over again.Ó 9 But
this is not the case with literatureÕs treatment of myth, which never remains
8
For more on Schelling and the description of myth as Òtauto-gorical,Ó namely, standing
on its own as a declaration of itself, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, ÒToward a Science of
MythologyÓ in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone
Books, 1990) 226-60.
9
Claude L vi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture (New York: Schocken
Books, 1995) 40. Although in L vi-Strauss myth has it own realm and does not stand for any-
thing else outside itself, nor, unlike science, does it make us master nature, it is still viewed
from a structuralist presupposition of meaning; to him myth gives us a total view of the world,
and in life we need such a view in order to make sense of existence: Òit gives man, very
importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the
universe,Ó L vi-Strauss 17.
suspended in history, nor (as will be argued below) does literature repeat the
same mythical pattern over and over again. Here lies the dangerous prospect
of any criticism guided by the desire for a kind of a myth in the text that
has to have unity and meaning. This type of criticism risks reinventing the
intentionality of the author and thinking his/her text for him/her. Although
it is not a remote possibility that a text would speak for many things, polit-
ical, social, intellectual, one should not lose track of the fact that rst and
foremost a text speaks for itself and for its very existence as text, as some-
one like Paul de Man would have it.
BlanchotÕs interest in Orpheus, as it is articulated in his novel/story
Thomas lÕobscur (the 1950 New Version) and in his chapter on ÒOrpheusÕs
GazeÓ in The Space of Literature, and al-BayatiÕs evocation of Orpheus in
his poetic collections He Who Comes and Does Not Come (AlladhÂ Ya¾tÂ wa
L¨ Ya¾tÂ), Death in Life (Al-Mawt fÂ al-¼ay¨t), and Writing on the Mud (Al-
Kit¨bah ®al¨ al-ÞÂn) seem to thematize this playful staging of the myth of
Orpheus. And if it were true that the zenith a critical reading should reach
is, as Blanchot declares, Ònot to designate a productive activity,Ó nor to
Òproduce anything,Ó nor again to Òadd anything,Ó the best that my reading
of Blanchot and al-Bayati could aspire to achieve is Òfreedom,Ó a kind of
liberty that, in BlanchotÕs words, Òlets the workÕs overwhelming decisive-
ness af rm itself, lets be its af rmation that is and nothing more.Ó10
Both Blanchot and al-Bayati seem to follow a different path with the
same myth. This seeming difference is not the result of cultural dissimilar-
ity, since both writers stand out as different from their own peers who dwelt
on the myth. But is it not also true that great writers do not dwell on myth
without extending, appropriating, and sometimes even totally disrupting it?
This is what Blanchot and al-Bayati do with Orpheus. Blanchot disregards
the ending of the Orpheus story, and al-Bayati disregards the gaze.
However, it is not just selection, but modi cation that is at work here: both
shape their chosen materials in conformity to a speci c need. The logic that
binds the two writers together in relation to myth and literature expresses
itself not only in the choice of the same myth. They also have in common
the shared debt to this classical material and more importantly in their
(re)de nition of this material. The point of departure between the two of
them in their treatment (reinterpretation) of Orpheus is that Blanchot is look-
ing at the effect of death on writing, while al-Bayati is exploring the effect
of writing on death.
10
Maurice Blanchot, ÒOrpheusÕ s GazeÓ in The Space of Literature , trans. Ann Smock
(Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982) 194.
Although my argument depends on these structural and ideological dif-

ferences, it is important to stress a line of parallelism at work in the two
writers. Offering their accounts of OrpheusÕs art in their respective texts,
both Blanchot and al-Bayati are caught in a kind of artfulness that will
eventually lead to a total identi cation and the loss of distinction between
Blanchot, al-Bayati and Orpheus himself.
The Myth of Orpheus in Blanchot

VirgilÕs Orpheus sings of death and rebirth, and OvidÕs becomes an
object of metamorphosis. Both poets speak of the dismemberment and death
of Orpheus at the hands of the Bacchants of his native Thrace. With the
passage of time, later writers embellished the Orphic myth with marvelous
miracles and wonders: after being decapitated, OrpheusÕs head continued to
sing, and his lyre never ceased to play. His head and lyre then oated with
the tide down the stream and out to sea to the isles of Lesbos and were
eventually transformed into celestial lights in the heavens while the Muses
buried the other parts of his mutilated body in a tomb near Mount Olympus,
where up to this day the nightingales sing more sweetly than they do in any
other place on earth.11 But in generation after generation of poetic rework-
ings, Orpheus was associated with more than music. He was even made
more mythical than he already is now. Because of his Katabasis eis Aidou
(Descent to Hades) and because of getting to see what no mortal eye has
ever seen, Orpheus acquired an aura of sacredness and was claimed to have
had access to the secret of all knowledge. His name has been associated
with special knowledge of the mysteries of life, death, reincarnation and
rebirth into a world where he exercises a supreme charm over its natural
inhabitants.
BlanchotÕs literary writing is so hermetic that scholars such as Paul de
Man might warn us that reading Blanchot Òdiffers from all other reading
experiences.Ó 12 But the main difference, indeed the main dif culty lies not
only in the seduction brought about by Òthe limpidity of language that
allows for no discontinuities or inconsistencies,Ó 13 as de Man argues, but
also in the fact that Blanchot has already fully accounted for the act of read-
11
For a modern poetic retelling of the myth of Orpheus, read Seamus Heaney ÒOrpheus
and EurydiceÓ and ÒDeath of OrpheusÓ in After Ovid: New Metamorphoses , eds. Michael Hofmann
and James Lasdun (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994) 222-29.
12
Paul de Man, ÒImpersonality in the Criticism of Maurice BlanchotÓ in Blindness and
Insight (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971) 62.
13
de Man 62.
ing in general, to the effect that any criticism of his criticism does not actu-
ally take us anywhere outside his critical sphere:
To read a poem is not to read not yet another poem; it is not even to enter,
via this poem, into the essence of poetry. The reading of a poem is the poem
itself, af rming itself in the reading as a work. It is the giving birth, in the
space held open by the reader, to the reading that welcomes it; it is the poem
becoming power to read, becoming communication opened between power
and impossibility, between the power linked to the moment of reading and the
impossibility linked to the moment of writing. 14
The act of writing, according to Blanchot, begins with the gaze of

Orpheus, because he sees OrpheusÕs gaze as that which no longer unveils
what it sees. Broadly speaking, the muth¬s,15 i.e., the plot of the myth of
Orpheus, is an intriguing one. Robert Graves lists at least fteen sources of
the Orpheus myth in addition to OvidÕs,16 the most established line of which
goes like this: Orpheus, a famous gifted singer capable of enchanting wild
beasts and of taming nature with his music, falls in love with Eurydice, who
dies on their wedding day of a snake-bite. Chagrined and distressed,
Orpheus undertakes a suicidal journey to the Underworld to bring Eurydice
back to life. He manages through the power of his art to persuade
Persephone and Pluto to let him take Eurydice back to the upper world, pro-
vided that he guide her without looking back at her. When Orpheus violates
this proviso and looks back, Eurydice, we are told, disappears, and Orpheus
loses her for the second and last time. The tale, of course, does not end
there, but Blanchot re-appropriates the myth and uses it as his vision of art.
ÒThe act of writing,Ó says Blanchot, Òbegins with OrpheusÕs gaze,Ó17 that is,
writing is an act of dying, and this dying produces a form of the imaginary
and which is more fascinating than the original/Eurydice because it achieves
the original without achieving it. Herein lies the ambiguity of literature: it
is the inspiration to achieve the unachievable through annihilation. In other
words, death is the condition for literature to be, in fact for language in its
entirety. In order for language to be possible at all, death/negation appears
to be the premise. In ÒLiterature and the Right to DeathÓ Blanchot writes:
14
Blanchot, The Space of Literature 198.
15
Muth¬s etymologically was used synonymously with logos to refer to the spoken word,
but eventually came to mean a story, a plot line or a structure of narrative. For an overview
of the history of mythology and the opposition between logos and muth¬s, see Vernant, ÒThe
Reason of MythÓ in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece 186-207. See also Eric A. HavelockÕs
Chapter Five ÒEpic as Record versus Epic as NarrativeÓ in Preface to Plato (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1936).
16
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths vol. I (New York: Penguin Books, 1955) 133.
17
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature 176.
My language does not kill anyone. But if this woman were not really capable
of dying, if she were not threatened by death at every moment of her life,
bound and joined to death by an essential bond, I would not be able to
carry out that ideal negation, that deferred assassination which is what my
language is.18
The idea that language begins in death might be in con ict with
BlanchotÕs statement that Òliterature begins where literature becomes a ques-
tion.Ó There appear to be two beginnings, but in fact death and the question
mark are one, for death is itself the question mark that hardly promises an
answer. To Blanchot, therefore, literature begins with OrpheusÕs gaze at
Eurydice, and if literature is Òthe life that endures death and maintains itself
in it,Ó19 it is because the dynamic reciprocity between language and death
never dies. Death is not only the hope of writing, but its negativity is held
out for language. To Blanchot, writing has to feed on death in order to sur-
vive it:
When we speak we are leaning on a tomb, and the void of that tomb is what
makes language true, but at the same time this void is reality and death
becomes being. There is being that is to say, a logical and expressible
truth and there is a world, because we can destroy things and suspend exis-
tence. This is why we can say that there is being because there is nothing-
ness: death is manÕs possibility, his chance, it is through death that the future
of a furnished world is still there for us; death is manÕs greatest hope, his
only hope of being man.20
If for Blanchot art neither dreams nor creates but simply demands, in
OrpheusÕs case, art then would demand death and sacri ce in order for it to
be. Eurydice, who stands for this ambiguity as both the work and the
unwork of art, Òis the furthest that art can reach . . ., the profoundly obscure
point toward which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend. She is the
instant when the essence of night approaches as the other night.Ó 21 Precisely
that which has to be retrieved in the work of art has to be lost in the very
process of (un)working it. Orpheus cannot tolerate not to gaze at Eurydice
in the darkness of her non-formation. For Blanchot, then, it is not EurydiceÕs
beauty or person that instigates OrpheusÕs impatient gaze, it is rather the
urge of art to catch Eurydice in her darkness, to see Eurydice as darkness,
as the essence of the night in the night. This essence of the night is itself
the same essence of art, of desire, and of death. In other words, what
18
Blanchot, ÒLiterature and the Right to DeathÓ in The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis
(New York: Station Hill Press, 1981) 43.
19
Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus 54.
20
Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus 55.
21
Orpheus wants is not Eurydice, but perhaps Eurydice-as-lost. In this act of

simultaneous appropriation and disappropriation, Blanchot rejects the
straightforward interpretation of the myth that condemns Orpheus as guilty
of impatience and forgetfulness:
Immemor heu Victusque animi respexit22

Although Blanchot might seem to be so clear and simple here, his sim-
plicity is itself the sign that something deep and subtle is at play. This para-
dox is indeed at the heart of BlanchotÕs thought. De Man describes this form
of deceptive clarity as a light Òof a very different nature,Ó adding that Ònoth-
ing is more obscure than the nature of this light.Ó 23 The paradox that seems
to be at work here is that passivity/negation becomes a means of activity/
transcendence.
According to Blanchot, art feeds on disobedience; in this very sense art
becomes an outlaw, a de Sadian call for breaking the con nes of reason.
Law, in a word, means limits. But desire in Blanchot forgets the law, or at
least pretends to deny its existence, and ÒOrpheusÕs destiny,Ó says Blanchot,
Òis not to submit to this ultimate law.Ó 24 In fact, BlanchotÕs interest in
Orpheus as a transgressor goes way back to his rst publishe d work,
Thomas lÕobscur, which he rewrote in 1950. Thomas lÕobscur is one of the
most hermetic texts among 20th-century French novels, which led one major
critic, Jean Starobinski, to end his criticism of the rst chapter with the
avowal that ÒBlanchot, au vrai, sÕoffre ˆ une compr hension inachevable,
non ˆ une explication. Je mÕy suis donc pris obliquement. LÕ chec dÕune
explication, apr s tout, en dit long sur ce quÕune uvre a dÕirr ductible et
dÕexceptionnel.Ó25 [Blanchot, to be sure, gives himself over to an unachiev-
able comprehensibility, not to an analysis. I thus went about things in a
roundabout way. The failure of an analysis, after all, says much about the
irreducible and exceptional qualities of a work.] Given BlanchotÕs irreduci-
bility to any critical exegesis, his Òunachievable comprehensibility,Ó one has
to learn StarobinskiÕs lesson by trying to avoid de nitive answers and by
looking instead to the images through which Blanchot delineates his
unheroic hero.
22
Forgetful alas, and overcome by passion, he looked back (Virgil, Georgics 4.491)
23
de Man 63.
24
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature 172.
25
Jean Starobinski, ÒThomas lÕobscur, Chapitre PremierÓ: Critique (juin 1966) 513. Unless
otherwise noted, all translations from the French are my own. For an English translation of
Thomas lÕobscur see Maurice Blanchot, Thomas the Obscure, trans. Robert Lamberton and
David Lewis (New York: D. Lewis, 1973).
The relationship between the two major components in ThomasÕs experi-

ence with the outside, his gaze and the night, makes the novel an early
ctionalization of BlanchotÕs Orphic theory of literature. The novel reiter-
ates for us BlanchotÕs obsession with vision, death and night as articulated
in The Space of Literature. Generally, Thomas lÕobscur in its revised edition
turns out to be, on close reading, a love story, and more speci cally, a story
about what it is to experience the non-relation of two lovers. The principal
event in the story is the death of Anne, or perhaps, ThomasÕs experience of
her death. But prior to this event, there is the strangeness of AnneÕs expe-
rience, or non-experience, of Thomas. With respect to the love story, it is
certain that Thomas and Anne keep company, and Anne, for her part, expe-
riences Òquelques jours de grand bonheur.Ó26 [a few days of great happi-
ness.] Thomas seems to have completely and unconditionally abandoned
himself to Anne, but his passivity turns out to be a radical impassivity that
makes him inaccessible to her as well as to us as readers. Chapter II puts
the stress on ThomasÕs eyes and shows us how Thomas has been invaded
by Òthe other nightÓ and appears to have just returned from the dead:
A cet instant, Thomas commit lÕimprudence de jeter un regard autour de lui.
La nuit tait plus sombre et plus p nible quÕil ne pouvait sÕy attendre.
LÕobscurit submergeait tout, il nÕy avait aucun espoir dÕen traverser les
ombres, mais on en atteignait la r alit dans une relation dont lÕintimit tait
bouleversante. 27 [At this instant, Thomas committed the imprudence of look-
ing about himself. The night was darker and more terrible than he had
expected. The obscurity submerged everything, there was no hope of travers-
ing its shadows, yet one grasped its reality in a relationship whose intimacy
was deeply moving.]
Right from the very beginning thus we nd ourselves not so much lost in
darkness as dazzled by Òla nuit [qui] tait plus sombre et plus p nibleÓ [the
night (that) was darker and more painful], one which Thomas Òne pouvait
sÕy attendre.Ó [had not expected.] Limpidity, the medium which grants us
unlimited vision has itself become the limit of vision, the most impassable
of all routes (la plus infranchissable de traverses). In the blinding excess or
the unde nable de ciency of the event, in the eruption of a light that is no
longer simply transparent, and in the insinuation of a kind of darkness that
is no longer simply the privation of a light, a new type of relation is at
work. With his eyes shut, Thomas could see more plainly in the darkness.
This (non)vision is itself a source of ocular fascination for him:
26
Maurice Blanchot, Thomas lÕobscur: Nouvelle Version (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) 62.
27
Maurice Blanchot, Thomas lÕobscur 19.
Comme la nuit tombait, il essaya de se redresser et, les deux mains appuy es
sur le sol, il mit un genou ˆ terre, tandis que son autre jambe se balan ait;
puis, il t un mouvement brusque et r ussit ˆ se tenir tout ˆ fait droit. Il tait
donc debout. Ë la v rit , il y avait dans sa fa on dÕ tre une ind cision qui
laissait un doute sur ce quÕil faisait. Ainsi, quoiquÕil e t renonc ˆ voir dans
les t n bres, cÕ tait plut™t le contraire.28 [As the night was falling, he tried to
stand up and, with his two hands pressed against the ground, rose up on one
knee, while his other leg swung back and forth. Then he made a brusque
movement and managed to get himself upright. He was now standing. In
truth, there was an indecisiveness in his manner that gave a sense of uncer-
tainty to what he was doing. Thus, although he had given up being able to
see in the dark, it was rather the contrary.]
Vision no longer seizes and dominates the world, but it is also unable to
extinguish itself; it continues to be sustained in and by its own impossibil-
ity. We see in BlanchotÕs text that ThomasÕs gaze is cast precisely on that
which limits and abolishes it. What we have here is not only a question of
losing sight of vision, but also of darkness itself as vision, thus the exteri-
ority of the object of vision has never actually been separated from the inte-
riority of its subject:
CÕ tait la nuit m me. Des images qui faisaient son obscurit lÕinondaient. Il
ne voyait rien et, loin dÕen tre accabl , il faisait de cette absence de vision
le point culminant de son regard. Son il, inutile pour voir, prenait des pro-
portions extraordinaires, se d veloppait dÕune mani re d mesur e et, sÕ ten-
dant sur lÕhorizon, laissait la nuit p n trer en son centre pour en recevoir le
jour. Par ce vide, cÕ tait donc le regard et lÕobjet du regard qui se m laient.29
[It was the night itself. He was ooded by the very images that constituted
its obscurity. He saw nothing, and, far from being distraught by this, made
this absence of vision the culminating point of his gaze. His eye, useless for
seeing, took on extraordinary proportions, growing boundlessly and, extend-
ing itself over the horizon, let the night penetrate into its center in order to
receive its day. It was through this void that the gaze and the object of the
gaze blended together.]
This duplicity in ThomasÕs vision blends the literal and the metaphorical
nuance, and is reminiscent of the gaze of Orpheus that Blanchot describes
later in The Space of Literature, a gaze which at the same time both wants
to see and not to see that which lies behind the visible. OrpheusÕs gaze is
both towards and away from Eurydice; it achieves visibility at the very
moment it makes vision impossible, invisible. In the above-quoted passage
the night becomes a point of articulation achieved by a kind of vision-shat-
tering darkness, and like Orpheus, Thomas is no longer able to make out
28
Blanchot, Thomas lÕobscur 17.
29
Blanchot, Thomas lÕobscur 20-21.
objects in the night; what he sees is Òthe essence of the night as inessen-
tial.Ó 30 In this sense, OrpheusÕs and ThomasÕs gazes thus become a turning
at the limits of possibilit ies, between day and night, and their turning
becomes their tropes, since it is essential to Blanchot that art be de ned as
a Òmovement outside the true.Ó31 ThomasÕs essence appears to be found in
his opacity, thus invoking the title, Thomas LÕobscur, which describes him
as obscure, but his obscurity also has a double entendre about it. Thomas is
dark, impenetrable, and inessential, yet the reverse still holds: not that his
essence remains dark, but that this darkness has always already been
ThomasÕs essence, that he exists as essentially dark and as essentially
obscure. The title thus not only invaginates vision and obscurity inside one
another, but it also makes the obscure an object of vision in and of itself.
Perhaps that is why ThomasÕs eye becomes capable of seeing the non-
essence as essential: ÒNon seulement cet il qui ne voyait rien appr hendait
quelque chose, mais il appr hendait la cause de sa vision. Il voyait comme
objet ce qui faisait quÕil ne voyait pas.Ó 32 [Not only did this eye that saw
nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. It saw
as an object (sees), which meant that it did not see at all. It saw as object
that which prevented it from seeing.] Given the ambiguity of this last sen-
tence, still the dilemma of a blindness that infects sight from within, one
which cannot be gured as death or deprivation, is a blow to Western ratio-
nality. When Blanchot writes ÒBient™t, la nuit lui parut plus sombre, plus
terrible que nÕimporte quelle nuit, comme si elle tait r ellement sortie dÕune
blessure de la pens e qui ne se pensait plus, de la pens e prise ironiquement
comme objet par autre chose que la pens e.Ó33 [Soon, the night appeared
darker, more terrible than any other night, as if it had truly seeped from a
wound of thought that no longer thought itself, of thought taken ironically
as object by something other than thought.] Sartre attacks the passage from
the Cartesian viewpoint that a thought which thinks that it does not know
is still a thought. The premises of such an objection are evident; it takes for
granted the very identity of vision with thought (the Cartesian, Kantian, or
Husserlian constitutive identity of the subject).34 This Cartesian concept of
30
31
32
33
34
Martin Jay traces the relationship between ÒseeingÓ and ÒknowledgeÓ back to its etymo-
logical origins:
The word Òtheater,Ó as has often been remarked, shares the same root as the word the-
ory, theoria, which meant to look at attentively, to behold. So too does theorem, which
has allowed some commentators to emphasize the privileging of vision in Greek math-
ematics, with its geometric emphasis. The importance of optics in Greek science has also
the Òthinking subjectÓ has brought about ÒconsciousnessÓ and Òperspectival-

ism,Ó what in visual studies is referred to as the ÒunilinearÓ or Ògeometral
pointÓ of vision, 35 namely, the notion that everything exists only as de ned
by the subject. This notion makes everything else Òother,Ó or Òobject,Ó
including language itself. For critics who like to work extrinsically with
BlanchotÕs text, it would not be dif cult to nd a political allegory, one in
which Blanchot could be ridiculing Western philosophy for incarcerating
itself in the haunting tradition of the Òtranscendental subject,Ó to borrow
FoucaultÕs term, a subject that is captive to a pre-given system of signi-
cation, which conveys a phony sense of mastery over a vision that it can-
not see and a thought that it cannot even understand.
If ThomasÕs vision consists of his ability to see and perhaps even more
of his greater inability to see, then we are driven towards a degree zero in
which vision and non-vision, subject and object, are identical to one another.
This negativity is a persistent theme in BlanchotÕs uvre. Otherwise, what
would be the implications of this internalization of vision in Thomas? Could
Blanchot be arguing that perception itself, the way we ÒseeÓ things is
already structured by a kind of language that emanates from us and comes
back to us and that our visions have never left our bodies? It has become
evident that human vision is both physiologically and sociologically condi-
tioned, and in most cases, we are trained to see things, and it turns out that
we do not see things as they Òare,Ó but rather we see what we ÒthinkÓ things
are. Linguistically, this would imply that it is the signi er that shapes our
perception of the signi ed, not vice versa. In short, the relationship between
Òknowing,Ó Òseeing,Ó Òimagining,Ó and Òwriting,Ó is in its entirety one of
insecurity and has thus put the whole project of Western epistemology into
question. What the mind recognizes is not always the same as what the eye
sees. What this could mean is that dominant philosophies ignore the possi-
bility of what exists outside of their discourse. While not trying to be so
positive about it, ThomasÕs inward vision might very well be an irony of
the traditional ways of seeing. For while it is true that objects are Òseen,Ó
been adduced to illustrate its partiality for sight. But nowhere has the visual seemed so
dominant as in the remarkable Greek invention called philosophy. Here the contempla-
tion of the visible was extended to become the philosophical wonder at all that was in
view. Truth, it was assumed, could be as naked as the undraped body. ÒKnowledge
(eidenai) is the state of having seen,Ó Bruno Snell notes of Greek epistemology, Òand
the Nous is the mind in its capacity as an observer of images.Ó Martin Jay, Downcast
Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley: U of
California P, 1993) 23.
35
See Peter de Bolla, ÒThe Visibility of VisualityÓ in Vision in Context: Historical and
Contemporary Perspectives on Sight, eds. Teresa Brennan and Martin Jay (New York:
Routledge, 1996) 65-79.
these objects are described in terms of existing lexemes and a designated

linguistic framework. The efforts to describe the unknown in terms of the
known, to install ready-made signi eds on brand-new signi ers, have indeed
created a rupture in the relationship between seeing and knowing, between
observation and appropriation. Again, if there is any ulterior motive that this
chapter offers, with its strong insistence on (non)vision, it would lie in ThomasÕs
rejection of this ideology of visual appropriation, an ideology against which
he rebels in his desire to abandon himself, to give himself to himself, to be
in contact with the Ònocturnal massÓ that is nothing but himself, and to
bathe in his own vision:
Sa premi re observation fut quÕil pouvait encore se servir de son corps, en
particulier ses yeux; ce nÕ tait pas quÕil v”t quelque chose, mais ce quÕil
regardait, ˆ la longue le mettait en rapport avec une masse nocturne quÕil
percevait vaguement comme tant lui-m me et dans laquelle il baignait. 36 [His
rst observation was that he could still make use of his body, in particular
his eyes. It wasnÕt that he saw something, but eventually, what he was gaz-
ing at put him in touch with a nocturnal mass that he perceived vaguely as
being part of himself, and in which he bathed.]
Vision, therefore, in its ontological inessentiality, cannot be mastered by a

concept or a desire. The predicament of Thomas for Blanchot, like that of
Orpheus, is that he loses the object of his desire at the moment of turning
toward it and simultaneously loses his own identity in the anonymity and
non-presence of the object of his vision. To look is to submit to an inex-
haustible exhaustion, an endless dissolution of the ÒIÓ that cannot even be
known as such: Thomas betrays the visual experience in remaining true to
it, producing a vision by remaining blind to its necessary failure.
Later in Chapter VIII, Anne attributes ThomasÕs obscurity to the fact that
nothing could be discovered about his life and that in every circumstance he
remained anonymous and without a history. It is evident, however, that what
is secret about Thomas is not something that he keeps to himself; the secret
is rather the distance, sometimes called Òindiff rence,Ó37 that separates him
from Anne, and as it so happens, separates him from himself as well. The
only thing Anne needed in order to understand Thomas was another ÒIÓ like
ThomasÕs, one that would free her vision from its glassy solitude, an ÒIÓ
that is also an Òeye,Ó and a Òthought.Ó Again, the relationship between
Òbeing,Ó Òvision,Ó and ÒthoughtÓ is mirrored in Anne: Òil lui manquait un
moi sans sa solitude de verre, sans cet il atteint depuis si longtemps de
strabisme, lÕ il dont la supr me beaut est de loucher le plus possible. LÕ il
36
37
dont de lÕ il, la pens e de la pens e.Ó38 [she needed an ÒIÓ without her
glassy solitude, without this eye af icted for so long with strabism (without
this eye which had squinted for so long), the eye whose supreme beauty is
to squint as much as possible. The eye of the eye, the thought of the
thought.] Shortly before she dies, Anne opens her eyes without the least sign
of curiosity, and Òavec la lassitude de quelquÕun qui sait parfaitement ˆ lÕa-
vance tout ce qui va sÕoffrir ˆ sa vue.Ó39 [with the lassitude of someone who
knows perfectly well in advance everything that will greet her eyes.]
Blanchot calls this moment one of Òsupr me distraction,Ó of Òsupr me
retour dÕEurydice, une derni re fois vers ce qui se voit.Ó40 [supreme distrac-
tion, supreme return of Eurydice, one last time towards that which is
visible.] Perhaps it is at this point of incommensurability and inexplicable
separation that Thomas and Anne repeat for us the scenario of Orpheus and
Eurydice, whose inevitable separation is also enacted through the impact of
the Òother nightÓ and the (de)(con)structive gaze, when Orpheus Òlooks at
the center of the night in the night.Ó 41 It is in fact this gaze that Blanchot
dwells much on and that constitutes his artistic stand on the myth in the rst
place:
When Orpheus descends to Eurydice, art is the power that causes the night
to open. Because of the power of art, the night welcomes him; it becomes the
welcoming intimacy, the understanding and harmony of the rst night. But
Orpheus has gone down to Eurydice: for him, Eurydice is the limit of what
art can attain; concealed behind a name and covered by a veil, she is the pro-
foundly dark point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to
lead. She is the instant in which the essence of the night approaches as the
other night. 42
By breaching the contract, by violating the one and only condition for a
secure ascent from Hades to Earth, Orpheus has lost Eurydice twice and for-
ever. But this very loss, this defeat is at the same time the triumph of art.
Orpheus succeeds in failing to bring the object of his desire to the light of
day, or as Blanchot likes to put it, Orpheus manages to achieve his (un)-
work through Ònecessary forgettingÓ:
But Orpheus, in the movement of his migration, forgets the work he is to
achieve, and he forgets it necessarily, for the ultimate demand which his
movement makes is not that there be a work, but that someone face this
38
39
40
41
42
point, grasp its essence, grasp it where it appears, where it is essential and
essentially appearance: at the heart of night. 43
By looking at Eurydice, Orpheus has disobeyed the imperative for his

song, but this betrayal simultaneously insures the perpetuation of the song,
so that his Ògaze is [his] ultimate gift to the work. It is a gift whereby he
refuses, whereby he sacri ces the work, bearing himself toward the origin
according to desireÕs measureless movement and whereby unknowingly he
still moves toward the work, toward the origin of the work.Ó 44 The work is
thus founded on the error of OrpheusÕs gaze, the error of his desire against
his artwork. The dilemma is that he has gazed into what he cannot abso-
lutely behold. Contrary to SophoclesÕs Oedipus or ShakespeareÕs Lear, in
BlanchotÕs Orpheus there is no insight in blindness, no need to kill vision
in order to see. OrpheusÕs gaze is only possible because he is already an
artist: Òthis gaze is the movement of desire that shatters against the songÕs
destiny. But in order to descend toward this instant, Orpheus has to possess
the power of art already.Ó45
Like the loss of Eurydice, the death of Anne was inevitable to Thomas,
for he too, like Orpheus is not after vision, but rather the idea of it, or
vision which could only be obtained through its own negativity. The impli-
cation is that only through dis-appearing and nonvision could any vision be
possible at all. What Thomas experiences here is what Blanchot refers to as
an act of Òlook[ing] in the night at what night hides, the other night, the dis-
simulation that appears.Ó 46 But is not dissimulation what literature does in
general? Could OrpheusÕs gaze thus be BlanchotÕs myth of literature? But
in order for dissimulation as such to appear, the dissimulation which
destroys the possibility of any Kantian or analogical thinking of the as if
structure, the image whose possibility is predicated upon nothingness, upon
the groundless ground of hollowness, has to be visible. This demand for the
visibility of the invisible makes OrpheusÕs desire a desire for the impossi-
ble, for seeing the presence of EurydiceÕs Òin nite absenceÓ:
It is inevitable that Orpheus transgress the law which forbids him to Òturn
back,Ó for he already violated it with his rst steps toward the shades. This
remark implies that Orpheus has in fact never ceased to be turned toward
Eurydice: he saw her invisible, he touched her intact, in her shadowy absence,
in that veiled presence which did hide her absence, which was the presence
of her in nite absence.47
43
44
45
46
47
This recasting of the Orpheus myth, its parallels in Thomas and Anne, puts
us face to face with the question of the work of art, Òits need,Ó as Roger
Laporte puts it, to Òuncover the unknown whilst leaving it unknown,Ó and
to Òcaptivate us with its obscurity, a transparent Night in which the trans-
parency is at heart more opaque than opacity itself.Ó48 But if true vision
begins with OrpheusÕs gaze at Eurydice, the death of Eurydice would then
become the hope of vision without which no vision is possible, and vision
itself becomes an epitome of forsakenness. Thomas as an Orphic gure epit-
omizes this relationship. The double color (white/black) and the opposition
day/night are effaced without confusion in the night. All that which Anne
still loved was called the night; all that which Anne hated was also called
the night: an absolute night where there were no longer contradictory terms,
where those who suffered were happy, where white found a common sub-
stance with black, a night without confusion. If we relate this to the open-
ing of Thomas lÕobscur, to the very rst words in Chapter I ÒThomas sÕas-
sit et regarde la merÓ [Thomas sat down and looked at the sea] as a genesis
of color, from the absolute night, where white found a common substance
with black, we can see how Thomas seems to welcome this strange sight-
lessness, this apprehension of no vision.
The question of vision in both Orpheus and Thomas is dictated by the
Òeye,Ó namely, the outside, which of course raises the question of writing.
What, then, is the relationship of Òthe language networkÓ to the eye? If the
possibility of seeing is at stake, could we still see even when there are no
words that signify sight? It is of course obvious that the relationship of
Thomas and Orpheus with the outside may be indicated visually. This raises
the problem of transcendence, empty or full, and perhaps in this way the
eye offers the possibility of us to speak about things. Writing too is read
under the essence of this relation to things. But what does the eye see or
not see in Thomas lÕobscur? Again, in The Space of Literature Blanchot
calls OrpheusÕs gaze the beginning of writing. The book contains something
like a preface in which Blanchot calls the Òthe pages entitled ÔOrpheusÕs
GazeÕÓ the center, albeit an un nished center, Òdisplaced by the pressure of
the book [but] also a xed center which . . . displaces itself while remaining
the same and becoming always more central, more hidden, more uncertain
and more imperious.Ó49 Blanchot directs the center of the book to OrpheusÕs
gaze the moment of expropriation that inaugurates writing. Likewise, the
text of the new version of Thomas lÕobscur opens with a similar preface.
The new text is in a sense a subtraction, which opens up new possibilities.
48
Roger Laporte, ÒMaurice Blanchot TodayÓ in Maurice Blanchot: The Demand of Writing,
ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (New York: Routledge, 1996) 33.
49
Il y a, pour tout ouvrage, une in nit de variantes possibles. Aux pages inti-
tul es Thomas lÕObscur, crites ˆ partir de 1932, remises ˆ lÕ diteur en mai
1940, publi es en 1941, la pr sente version nÕajoute rien, mais comme elle
leur ™te beaucoup, on peut la dire autre et m me toute nouvelle, mais aussi
toute pareille, si, entre la gure et ce qui en est ou sÕen croit le centre, lÕon
a raison de ne pas distinguer, chaque fois que la gure compl te nÕexprime
elle-m me que la recherche dÕun centre imaginaire.50 [There is, for any work,
an in nity of possible variants. To the pages entitled Thomas the Obscure,
written from 1932 onwards, turned in to the editor in May, 1940, published
in 1941, the present version adds nothing. But as it takes much from these
pages, one could call it different and even completely new, but also com-
pletely the same, if one is not right to distinguish between the gure and what
is or is believed to be its center, each time that the complete gure only
expresses the search for an imaginary center itself.]
Hence the center is always imagined but is also constituted by the act of
reading, as if something were lurking there. Thus we can see the novel itself
as BlanchotÕs Orphic act of looking back at BlanchotÕs own work, and in
the context of his own criticism we are made to think that BlanchotÕs gaze
is his ultimate gift to Thomas lÕobscur. It is a gift whereby Blanchot him-
self, like Orpheus, rejects and sacri ces his own work, Òbearing himself
toward the origin according to desireÕs measureless movement and
whereby unknowingly he still moves toward the work, toward the origin of
the work,Ó51 con rming Òthe workÕs uncertainty, for is there ever a work?Ó
BlanchotÕs gaze becomes the Òextreme moment of liberty, the moment when
he frees himself from himself and, still more important, frees the work
[Thomas lÕobscur] from his concern, frees the sacred contained in the work,
gives the sacred to itself, to the freedom of its essence, to its essence which
is freedom.Ó52 Only then does inspiration become the gift of art par excel-
lence. In this decision to look back at his own work and destroy it, Blanchot
risks everything, and achieves Òthe leapÓ that he speaks about towards
the end on ÒOrpheusÕs Gaze,Ó that is, Òto write, one has to write already.Ó 53
BlanchotÕs second Thomas lÕobscur is in every way already written, it is his
gaze at his own Eurydice. (See Appendix I)
In BlanchotÕs version of the Orphic myth, Eurydice, like ThomasÕs night,
is Òthe perfectly obscure point towards which art and desire, death and
night, seem to tend. She is the instant when the essence of night approaches
as OTHER NIGHTÓ;54 she lies at the absolute asymptote of OrpheusÕs task
50
51
52
53
54
and abilities. When Orpheus is permitted to retrieve her from the heart of
obscure darkness of the night within the night, he cannot look at this dark-
ness. Like Thomas, he can only approach it with his gaze [eyes, sight,
vision] turned away: Òthis is what concealment means when it reveals itself
in the night.Ó 55 He too must turn away to conceal his gaze from the night,
i.e., from that which by de nition conceals. Orpheus fails to do this, and
instead, he opts to look down into the night, abandoning Eurydice as well
as the work he was embarking on. A grave mistake. But Blanchot tells us
that OrpheusÕs task is not the restitution of Eurydice into the daylight world.
Rather his task is to face the night, just as ThomasÕs task in Chapter II is
to face the overpowering appearance of darkness. But the gaze gazes back
at its gazer, and the loss of their objects, Eurydice or vision, is also the loss
of the looking subjects, Orpheus and Thomas. When Orpheus looks back at
Eurydice, Blanchot tells us, he is not there either: ÒHad he not looked at
her, he would not have drawn her toward him; and doubtless she is not
there, but in this glance back he himself is absent. He is no less dead than
she dead, not of that tranquil worldly death which is rest, silence, and end,
but of that other death without end, the ordeal of the endÕs absence.Ó 56 It is
this very absence that marks the beginning of Thomas lÕobscur. Disoriented
and paralyzed by the absence of water, Thomas decides to let himself swim
with rather than swim against the current. He abandons himself to water or
perhaps to chance. He tries to lose himself in immersion, he desires a mon-
strous unity:
Il nageait, monstre priv de nageoires. Sous le microscope g ant, il se faisait
amas entreprenant de cils et de vibrations . . . il chercha ˆ se glisser dans une
r gion vague et pourtant in niment pr cise, quelque chose comme un lieu
sacr , ˆ lui-m me si bien appropri quÕil suf sait dÕ tre lˆ pour tre; cÕ tait
comme un creux imaginaire o il sÕenfon ait parce quÕavant quÕil y f t, son
empreinte y tait d jˆ marqu e.Ó57 [He swam, a monster deprived of ns.
Under the giant microscope, he was making an enterprising pile of eyelashes
and vibrations . . . he tried to slip himself into an area that is vague and yet
in nitely de ned, something like a sacred place, so appropriate to himself that
it was enough to be there in order to be; it was like an imaginary hole into
which he used to squeeze himself because even before he was inside, his
imprint was already marked there.]
Thomas has abandoned himself to the water and to the night. It is his
trace that has been found. And like Orpheus, he too must come back: ÒFinalement
il dut revenir.Ó58 [Finally, he had to return.] He too must make an approach.
55
56
57
58
Like OrpheusÕs, ThomasÕs path is asymptotic: he too is lost to never being

able to completely lose himself. BlanchotÕs reference to vision in Thomas
lÕobscur creates a form of the imaginary that is more fascinating than the
original because it achieves the original without achieving it; herein lies the
ambiguity of literature, which becomes, then, the inspiration to achieve
the unachievable through annihilation. In other words, death becomes the
condition for literature to be, in fact, for language in its entirety. In order for
language to be possible at all, Blanchot regards death/negation as a must.
The Myth of Orpheus in al-Bayati59

It could be argued that al-BayatiÕs persistent dwelling on the myth of Orpheus
in his poetry is different from BlanchotÕs. After all, al-Bayati ignores the
gaze completely and preoccupies himself with the question of OrpheusÕs
expulsion and dismemberment. Despite their divergent angles of vision, both
Blanchot and al-Bayati share the same telos: both view themselves as artists
exploring the possibilities of inventive expression through their embrace of
a form of darkness. Moreover, to risk stripping them down to their bare
bones, or at least to try nding a gravity that holds both of them together,
it could still be argued that in their treatments of Orpheus, Blanchot and al-
Bayati are equally governed by one structural logic of binary oppositions:
of presence versus absence, and of subject versus object. It is a logic that
tells exactly the same concept of the duplicity of vision.
In general terms, al-BayatiÕs poetry achieves its tension through an inter-
play between what seems to be two opposing worlds. Al-Bayati is in a sense
Òwandering between two worlds, one dead / The other powerless to be
born,Ó to quote Matthew Arnold. 60 It is this tension between the living and
the dead that the myth of Orpheus clearly articulates. For al-Bayati there
appear to be no articulated borders that can markedly separate the worlds
of Orpheus and Eurydice, Isis and Osiris, or Khayyam and ®A¾ishah. Their
tendency to shift and to invade each otherÕs space accounts for al-BayatiÕs
despondent and, at times, reconciliatory tone. But whether it be Orpheus or
Khayyam, Osiris or Buddha, Prometheus or Jonah, al-BayatiÕs persona bears
59
For other approaches to the use of myth in the poetry of al-Bayati, see I½s¨n ®Abb¨s,
Ittij¨h¨t al-Shi®r al-Mu®¨×ir (Kuwait: Al-Majlis al-WaßanÂ lil-Thaq¨fah wa al-Funân wa al-
¤d¨b, 1978); Ñub½Â Mu½yÂ al-DÂn, Al-Ru¾y¨ fÂ Shi®r al-Bay¨tÂ (Baghdad: Wiz¨rat al-Thaq¨fah,
1988); RÂt¨ ®Awa´, Ò®Abd al-Wahh¨b al-Bay¨tÂÓ in Usßârat al-Mawt 154-69; Þarr¨d al-KubaysÂ,
Maq¨lah fÂ al-As¨ßÂr fÂ Shi®r ®Abd al-Wahh¨b al-Bay¨tÂ (Damascus: Wiz¨rat al-Thaq¨fah wa-
al-Irsh¨d al-QawmÂ, 1974); Aida Azouqa, ÒAl-Bayy¨tÂ and W. B. Yeats as Mythmakers: a
Comparative StudyÓ, Journal of Arabic Literature 30 no. 3 (1999), pp. 258-90.
60
Matthew Arnold, ÒStanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,Ó in The Poetical Works of
Matthew Arnold (London: The Macmillan Co., 1913) 321.
witness to the suffering of the poet, so that only the idea and not the word
remains as a kind of musical hope to haunt his lines. What exactly is the
nature of the connection between the Orphic myth and the night? How does
al-Bayati use or treat Orpheus? Is myth treated as a myth and therefore
Òtautegorical,Ó namely, meaning what it says, as someone like Schelling
might see it, or is it Òontological,Ó as Nancy would call it? Does he treat it
as a metaphor or perhaps even as an allegory that might be incorporated in
his poetic imagery to make it connote something else outside its denotative
function? In other words, how far does al-BayatiÕs treatment of Orpheus dif-
fer from that of Blanchot, or even from the Ovidian text?
In many of al-BayatiÕs poems, the personal, mythical, historical, and
social intermingle, providing the in nite possibilities of his poetry. Among
these in nities Orpheus seems to surface, whether explicitly or implicitly,
nourishing his poetic vision, leading him to states of poetic enlightenment,
regardless of whether the Orphic gure oats up from Greek mythology or
from Mesopotamian or Egyptian counterparts. The interplay in Orpheus between
Katabasis and Anabasis is not a new one, and one might easily dismiss al-
Bayati for presenting a world too simplistically irreconcilable, too strictly
divided between the appearance of reality and the desire to change this real-
ity. Unlike so many contemporary poets, al-Bayati is not content with allow-
ing the invisible to remain private and concealed. What gives his poetry
weight is its tendency to move in one single poem from the social Òin the
caf shops of the worldÕs cities I beg for postcards,Ó 61 to the mythic and
the prophetic: ÒAnd why, my Lord, have the words abandoned us / When
the miracle of the priest and the moans of the witches were of no avail?Ó 62
But most of all it is in this tension between the world of the living and the
realm of the dead that al-Bayati plays on the rami cations of Orpheus, on
the variations of a seemingly disparate image, conveyed by a voice modu-
lating between irony, despair, hope, and sympathy in order to capture the
fragmentation and dismemberment of contemporary experience. But what
does the eye see or not see in al-BayatiÕs version of Orpheus?
Al-BayatiÕs poem ÒThe ProphecyÓ in his collection al-Kit¨bah ®al¨ al-ÞÂn
[Writing on the Mud] introduces a persona trying to write on the water what
the singer, presumably Orpheus, has just said to the night. Now, if the
singer is Orpheus, and the poetic persona is writing what Orpheus the singer
61
®Abd al-Wahh¨b al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒAl-Mu®jizahÓ ÒThe MiracleÓ: DÂw¨n ®Abd al-Wahh¨b al-
Bay¨tÂ, vol. 2 (Beirut: D¨r al-®Awdah, 1971) 274. Henceforth referred to as DÂw¨n. All Arabic
translations from al-Bay¨tÂ are mine. For a full translation of the poems, please see ÒThe
Mise-en-Sc ne of Writing in al-Bay¨tÂÕs Al-Kit¨bah ®al¨ al-ÞÂn,Ó Journal of Arabic Literature,
32 no. 2 (2001), 159-66.
62
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒThe Miracle,Ó DÂw¨n 274.
has said his music, his poetry then the act of writing will come to rep-
resent a kind of poetry that personi es the night as an attentive listener and
makes of him/it OrpheusÕs sole companion:
A free woman would eat her breasts if she were hungry in the land of poor
kings
A Daphla ower on a stream
Stripping herself naked in shyness
While I am writing / And I write on the mud what the singer said to the night
I denude the words
And the incantations of the unchaste fortunetellers. 63
As in Blanchot, the night becomes the Orphic trope par excellence. In a

sense, the poet is writing Orpheus, and writing itself becomes Orpheus
because, like Orpheus, it dies and disappears on the surface of the mud. In
this act of dying, writing too, like OrpheusÕs gaze that makes him no more
existent than the Eurydice he looks at, becomes invisible in itself and invis-
ible to itself. Later in ÒThe Prophecy,Ó al-BayatiÕs persona becomes Òa
scripture of mud and a thread of smoke / on which are written the spells
and prayers,Ó 64 thus giving a new dimension to the relationship between
myth and the body as a scene of writing, especially when his reference to
the Orphic myth is tinged with themes from the Egyptian myth of Isis and
Osiris. This peculiar mixture of East and West intensi es the universal need
for resurrection and rebirth. Isis, goddess of curing and of spinning and
weaving, and Osiris, god of reincarnation and, later, of death, were the pri-
mal couple, children of Earth and Sky. Sept, or Typhoeus, OsirisÕs jealous
brother, murders him, places his body in a sealed cof n and casts it into the
Nile, displaced as the Euphrates in the poem. His faithful wife Isis recovers
the body and hides it in a marshland, only to be found again by Sept while
hunting, who mutilates the corpse and cuts it into fourteen pieces, scattering
it all over the country. Isis manages to recover all of OsirisÕs dismembered
corpse except for the penis, which is said to have been eaten by sh. Osiris
then retires to the Underworld and becomes the King of the Dead. The Isis-
Osiris theme of death and resurrection, the water motif, magic, the presence
of ritual and ceremony, are all recognizable elements in al-BayatiÕs text.
More signi cantly, the reference to dismemberment and fragmentation in the
Osiris myth falls back upon the text and embodies it in several ways. Like
Osiris, al-BayatiÕs poetic persona is dismembered, and the fragmentation of
OsirisÕs body is reenacted in the personaÕs poetic vision. Part of him is
engaged in the process of writing; another part can see a ower on a water
63
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒAl-Nubâ¾ahÓ ÒThe Prophecy,Ó DÂw¨n 245. See Appendix II.
64
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒThe Prophecy,Ó DÂw¨n 246.
stream; still a third part can envision a river of blood on the face of queens,
a fourth is observing carts departing; however, he still lies silent and power-
less like a mummy in the river bed waiting for resurrection:
And I see a river of blood dying the faces of queens
And the departure of the carts
In the valleys of the Orient, re, and the silence of creatures.65
This partition decentralizes vision and shatters the geometricality of the

subject position of al-BayatiÕs persona. Dismemberment thus becomes a
mortal punishment and creates the desire for reintegration through myth.
This interweaving of body and text in a single poetic utterance: ÒI am a
scriptureÓ the bringing together of the ÒIÓ as a physical entity, of ÒBeingÓ
as a state of consciousness, and of ÒscriptureÓ as writing offers the possi-
bility of identi cation and con rms the perpetual gap between dismember-
ment and wholeness, exclusion and inclusion, separation and indivisibility:
Oh, the nakedness of the sky of words
Under which I lie like hay, a mummy
Silently awaiting resurrection for thousands of years
Carrying my own death within me, a traveler, a passerby, without food or
water.
Every time the Euphrates changes course,
My soul lies helpless beneath its bed, with mud and weeds
Oh, who could reassemble my internal organs scattered by the priest over
time and place?66
The con ict between speech and silence is a major one here. The persona
is forced to remain silent, to wait helplessly, though he is full of the desire
to speak. But in order to make his voice heard, he has no other recourse
than to keep the words inside his naked body or his body inside the naked
words, or to make his naked body become his naked words. But here it is
the words, and not Sept, their very nakedness, their hollowness and empti-
ness, that cause the dismemberment of the textual body from the inside. The
strain of silence accumulates until the whole body bursts, and myth itself
becomes the only hope to re-member the schism between voice and silence
in the body of the persona as text. This peculiar use of the Osiris/Orpheus
myth as a metaphor for language thus hints at the idea that myth can resolve
the dichotomy between silence and speech. Like Osiris and Orpheus, lan-
guage suffers from sheer mutilation, and the human body that dies under the
inef cacy of speech could only be resurrected in myth and as myth.
65
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒThe Prophecy,Ó DÂw¨n 245.
66
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒThe Prophecy,Ó DÂw¨n 245-46.
Al-BayatiÕs poetics of death seems to sustain itself in only one form: self-
referentiality. This path could serve very well as a trajectory for the criti-
cism mapped out both by Freudian as well as Lacanian psychoanalysis.
FreudÕs Beyond the Pleasure Principle and LacanÕs de nition of the rela-
tionship between death and language disclose to us how literature can only
posit as its goal the confrontation of its voice with its own death, which
might eventually lead to a kind of poetics constantly threatened with silence.
Here al-Bayati seems to be saying that poetry has no voice, thus echoing
BlanchotÕs de nition of the poem:
The poem literature seems to be linked to a spoken word that cannot be
interrupted because it does not speak; it is. The poem is not the word itself,
for the poem is a beginning, whereas this word never begins, but always
speaks anew, and is always starting over. However, the poet is the one who
has heard this word, who has made himself into an ear attuned to it, its medi-
ator, who has silenced it by pronouncing it.67
The question of voice appears once again later in the text:

Oh, what do I say to the singer?
When at night the horses sigh under the fence
And the magi of the coming time play their drums
From one exile to another they come back defeated
When Ashtarout rises from her underworld crying
In her sacerdotal attire,
When the horn is blown yet no dead are awakened or any light shines
The cock crows on the ruins of ÒUrÓ
Oh, what should I say to the singer,
While I collect the remains of my body mutilated by the priest in all times,
And my votive offerings, and the seeds?68
But this time the poetÕs death wish becomes a life wish, a wish for
remembering his body and restoring his life back together. But if he wishes
to be alive, does this mean that he is now dead? In whose voice then is the
poem spoken? What we nd ourselves listening to is an impossible voice:
the voice of a dead persona, one that resembles in its nihilism the voice of
Louis MacNieceÕs not-yet-born fetus in his poem ÒPrayer Before Birth.Ó69 In
both poems, the personaeÕs absent voices have actually said nothing: they
are already nothing. One is dead, the other unborn. In death, al-BayatiÕs per-
sona is no longer able to express his own difference from himself: there is
no voice for the disappearance of voice.
67
68
al-Bay¨tÂ, DÂw¨n 247.
69
Louis MacNiece, The Collected Poems of Louis MacNiece, ed. E. R. Dodds (New York:
Oxford UP, 1967) 193.
But if there is a sense of ontology to al-BayatiÕs poem, it has to emerge

from some kind of affect. This affect is itself the result of the undoing of
the poetry; Ò[it] ruins it,Ó says Blanchot, Òand in it restores the unending
lack of work.Ó 70 The sacri ce of the poetic word and of the one who writes
it appears again in al-BayatiÕs ÒThe Blind Sorcerer,Ó with Òthe magician of
the tribeÕs dead peopleÓ 71 who wishes to be burned. This particular poem
problematizes silence by making it speak itself and by doing away with the
voice and with all its possible forms, the active, the passive, the middle,
indeed with the entire notion of agency, so that the poetÕs own questions
that desperately seek an agent are vainly looking for answers that are no
answers. Still, somebody has to be this magician, this priest. The implica-
tion could be that poetry goes back to some place before language, perhaps
to nothingness, to silence, or to death. Maybe it is this voiceless voice that
makes literature possible in the rst place, that enables it, yet disables it at
the same time, that allows writing while stepping beyond it, and that posi-
tions itself as a wedge between literature and myth. This absent voice in al-
Bayati could quite likely be the myth of literature.
In Mitologiae, Fulgentius refers to the etymology of the name of Orpheus,
which according to him, comes from oria phone, namely, Òbest voice.Ó In
a chapter entitled ÒUne criture inventive, la voix dÕOrph e, les jeux de
Palam de,Ó [An Inventive Writing, the Voice of Orpheus, the Games of
Palamedes], Marcel Detienne de nes OrpheusÕs voice as Òant rieure ˆ la parole
articul e,Ó [anterior to the articulated word] essentially because it has an
exceptional quality of assigning Orpheus to a world of music prior to verse,
Òau monde de la musique avant le vers, la musique sans parole, un domaine
o il nÕimite personne, o il est le commencement et lÕorigine.Ó [to the world
of music before verse, music without words, a domain where he imitates no
one, where he is the beginning and the origin.] His lyre is not merely a tech-
nical object, and his song Òjaillit comme une incantation originelle.Ó72
[springs forth like an original incantation.] If this argument holds, al-
BayatiÕs Orpheus, who is constantly Òblow[ing] the pipe of existence,Ó 73
could then be a combination of art and music, of poetry incarnate, a suf-
ferer Òin the presence of wordsÓ who is still capable of ÒsingingÓ the magic
words of Òthe witches,Ó the rosy and romantic songs of Òthe young
princesses,Ó and the dirges that celebrate the Òdeath of sparrowsÓ:
70
71
72
Marcel Detienne, LÕ criture dÕOrph e, (LÕIn ni, Gallimard, 1989) 112.
73
So burn me,
For I am the magician of the tribeÕs dead people
In the caf shops of the world cities I lived, and on the wet sidewalks of the
dawn
Carrying a scripture of mud and the re of resurrection running through the
veins of the mummy
Filled with esh, the leaves of the evening are blooming on the walls.
Who would call upon me?
Who would carry the warnings of heaven?
Who would suffer, in the presence of words,
From earthÕs return to the Ice Age and to the caveman?
Who would sing to the witches,
To the young princesses, and to the death of sparrows? 74
This con rms the idea that al-Bayati regards myth as an eternal fountain of
inspiration, both the means and the end at the same time. To al-Bayati, it
is the Orphic vision that matters and not merely the myth of Orpheus. As a
gure of the Greek singer, Orpheus consolidates al-BayatiÕs own myth of
the Orpheus myth and gives it some sort of poetic foundation. Orpheus is
mentioned only in the title, but the whole poem is so impregnated with the
spirit of OrpheusÕs song that the title ÒOrpheusÕs Descent to the Under-
worldÓ is absolutely relevant.
There is a curious surface similarity between BlanchotÕs image of Òan
almost blind catÓ in Thomas lÕobscur and al-BayatiÕs reference to Òthe eyes
of the dying cats.Ó Near the middle of night two, Thomas is found digging
a hole near an almost blind cat. Suddenly, we are made to observe the feel-
ings of the cat. It feels separated from familiar sensations. There is a void
that rejects Thomas and that he cannot bridge. The almost blind cat has
been absorbed by the darkness of night and is now Òla nuit de la nuit.Ó This
Ònight of nightÓ marks the disappearance of space where appearance van-
ishes, a moment when darkness itself has been covered in darkness and dis-
appearance disappears, so that the cat has lost itself in its own gaze, in the
space of disappearance. The cat, described by Thomas as Òchat sup rieur,Ó75
enjoys the privilege of disappearing from the text, but not Thomas. Al-
BayatiÕs cats, on the other hand, appear in his poem ÒThe Nightmare of Day
and NightÓ in the same collection Al-Kit¨bah ®al¨ al-ÞÂn [Writing on the
Mud] wherein his persona Òwitness[es] the birth of the day / In the eyes of
the dying cats.Ó76 The persona searches feverishly for his beloved, until they
74
al-Bay¨tÂ, DÂw¨n 250-51.
75
76
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒK¨bâs al-Layl wa al-Nah¨rÓ ÒThe Nightmare of Night and Day,Ó DÂw¨n
290-91. See Appendix II.
nally meet Òafter the day had died.Ó But the revolution of the sun that
allows their rendezvous in the rst place is also the one that separates them
again, and so on:
Why do you cry?
You legendary river sucking the breasts of the city
Carrying its dirt to the seas,
The dead horses
And the wreck of carts
While I witness the birth of the day
In the eyes of the dying cats
After the sound of the skylark was copied,
And the singer singing to the sun on a record
The corpse was crying
While I was looking for you on the streets
Finally we met after the day had died
Then came the night after the day
And after the day another day
And so revolves the disc
And the years-broken voice of its singer
Is breathlessly chasing the darkness.77
There is in this poem a sense of doom amidst pleasure and the connection
of Òthe dying catsÓ to the night results in a cogent metaphor. CatsÕ eyes usu-
ally shine at night, and the death of this light in their eyes is signi cant of
the birth of the morning, so that the death of the cats could be the death of
the sparkling light that shines through their eyes during the night. The eyes
of the cats act like a harbinger of the day. In his sense the ÒcatsÓ function
as a metonymic indicator (their eyes) of hope, signaling not just the end of
the night, but also the birth of daylight. Unlike BlanchotÕs Orpheus or
Thomas, al-BayatiÕs Orpheus is not in quest of the work of art per se, nor
is he even sacri cing Eurydice for the inspiration of the night as night;
Orpheus in al-Bayati is rather seeking the daylight. Al-BayatiÕs singer is
tired of the longevity of the night; he does not want to see the essence of
its inessentiality or its nothingness.
As stated earlier, Orpheus in the two writers is appropriated as a myth,
but this is not all. By taking one aspect of this myth (the gaze in Blanchot
and expulsion in al-Bayati) and by analyzing it, Blanchot and al-Bayati put
myth itself to question. The gaze and the expulsion are dangerous because
Blanchot and al-Bayati make a gift of them; the gaze becomes the desire of
art and the desire for art, and expulsion becomes the desire for Utopia
through art. This designi cation of the myth is reminiscent of the Derridean
77
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒThe Nightmare of Night and Day,Ó DÂw¨n 290-91.
idea of language as emerging from Òplay,Ó or Òfree playÓ ( jeu) of signi ers,
which takes place in a eld of language that is limited and marked by the
lack of a center. In the same manner, the myth of Orpheus here could be
said to have taken on this new quality of in nity, since the center of the
original relationship between the myth as signi er and BlanchotÕs or al-BayatiÕs
appropriation of it as a signi ed can no longer hold or retain a xed sign
in an ongoing process of historical accumulation. Like language, or perhaps
because it has always already been in language, myth has no center, rather,
it lies within the structure and outside it:
The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a free play based
on a fundamental ground, a free play which is constituted on fundamental
immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of free
play. If this is so, the whole history of the concept of structure must be
thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center, as a linked chain
of determinations of the center. Successively, and in a formulated fashion, the
center receives different forms or names.Ó78
In Blanchot and al-Bayati, the myth of Orpheus itself seems to undo its
own mythicness. The gaze and the poetÕs fruitless search for Òthe needle in
a haystackÓ 79 shatter the possibility that anything could be realized from
their acts. If OrpheusÕs gaze in Blanchot tries to see something at night,
OrpheusÕs gaze in al-Bayati works to dissipate that very night. Both desire
to see what cannot be seen and to achieve the unachievable. In both writ-
ers there seems to be a strong cathexis between literature and the night.
Could literature thus be to them that Ònight,Ó the essence of the night in the
night, the urge that makes us want to see that which is not materialized?
Like BlanchotÕs, al-BayatiÕs Orpheus is gazing at the impossible, but his
gaze extends far beyond any existing or present object of vision; his gaze
is an escape from vision into Òshores of epochs where / when man is born
anew.Ó80
In both writers the absolute seems always to be Òthat night.Ó The only
difference between them is that in Blanchot the complex allegory of the
night derives mainly from the authority of the negative, and focuses on the
necessary failure of art, whereas in al-Bayati the only illumination that char-
acterizes the fate of his persona is the desperate and futile search for a
gleam of light amidst an enveloping darkness. He even gives one of his
78
Jacques Derrida, ÒStructure, Sign, and PlayÓ in The Structuralist Controversy: The
Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man (London: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1972) 247-
65.
79
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒHubâß àr yâs il¨ al-®¤lam al-Su ÂÓ ÒOrpheusÕs Descent to the Underworld,Ó
DÂw¨n 255. See Appendix II.
80
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒOrpheusÕs Descent to the Underworld,Ó DÂw¨n 253.
poems the title ÒThe Night is Everywhere.Ó 81 The frequently recurring words
in al-Bayati ÒI search,Ó Òthe underworld,Ó Òthe night,Ó ÒdeathÓ Ògraves,Ó
Òthe singer,Ó Òwords,Ó are all signs of a constant preoccupation with a cer-
tain loss that has its counterpart in the absoluteness of the night. Nor is the
night itself a new theme to either al-Bayati or Blanchot. Both were born into
a heritage of writers who were preoccupied with the same theme.82 In al-
Bayati the night becomes a source of ÒanxietyÓ in the literal as well in the
Bloomian sense of the word, and his Orpheus is always waiting for a
glimpse of light that would declare the advent of the dawn. His feelings
about the world take the night as a microcosm of that world; the night
becomes to al-Bayati a perception of the world. In this world the very dark-
ness of the night is itself the threat, the danger that the poet needs to over-
come, a peril through which he has to thread his way out. But something
has happened to the night itself. There are two kinds of ÒnightÓ in al-Bayati,
a ÒnightÓ that Òcollapses,Ó and the Òdesolate nights on the gates of Ashour:Ó
So why are you in expulsion with death and the leaves of the fall?
Wearing their rags, resurrected in all ages
Seeking the needle in a haystack, feverish, expelled?
Your crown: thorn, and your heels: ice
Vainly you cry because the night is long
And the steps of its hours in the cities of ant is re
...............................
Vainly you hang on to the thread of light in all ages
Seeking the needle in the haystack, feverish, expelled.83
The plural of the second night has unbundled this apparently omnipresent,
non-spatial Night into many nights. The hope of Ishtar/Eurydice extending
her hands to guide the poet through the night reverses the gender roles of
the Orphic myth. Ishtar/Eurydice here becomes the hope of reemergence
after OrpheusÕs tragic loss of her. With her appearance in the middle of the
night, Òthe ice will melt,Ó and things will cease to be cold or swallowed up
81
82
Among French writers who dwelt on the night are Nerval, Balzac, Goya, Mallarm , and
especially Baudelaire, whose Les eurs du mal is basically staged in darkness with a partic-
ular reference to the symbolic choreographic nature of the night. Al-BayatiÕs re ection on the
night is also in perfect harmony with and a continuation of a long established tradition. Many
Arab poets have dwelt more or less on the same image of the night as bleak, endless and
cruel Imru¾ al-Qays, a famous pre-Islamic Arab poet, is perhaps the rst to take up this image
of the night as a metaphor of chagrin and hopelessness. His long poem ÒMu®allaqahÓ begins
with what is considered to be the most rhetorical and eloquent description of the night in
Classical Arab Poetry:
A night like the waves of the sea lowered its veil / On me with various kinds of grief
to af ict me.
83
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒOrpheusÕs Descent to the Underworld,Ó DÂw¨n 253-55.
and dissolved in that night as in real darkness; all the obstacles, the dams
of the night and the dams which constitute the night will tumble down.
Time also becomes a major instrument at the disposal of the poet; if Òthe
night is everywhereÓ the persona is Òwaiting for the signal.Ó 84 Time is no
longer in control of the content of the text, no more beyond all the inces-
sant changes of detail that make it up; time with all its ages will be folded
like a sheet. Thus it is as if Òin a moment,Ó brief as it may be, a moment
which itself is a moment of time yet a moment that does stand outside time,
time loses its transcendental nature, becomes contained and turns into con-
tent of its own. In this moment the structure of the human being, of al-
BayatiÕs persona as a sufferer of time, as a transient being, suddenly reveals
unexpected power: the past is no longer irredeemable. This dissolution of
the past into the present is not a change from an old situation to a new one.
It is rather an awakening that asserts the presence of the present without
having to worry about the following pastness of that present. It is a moment
that materializes hope and asserts the present for its own sake, a moment in
which the poet knows, yet still denies, the impossibility of living wholly in
the present. It is a moment that celebrates a special event, freezes it, and
that becomes itself that very event. Here time has become not a way in
which events are related to each other and succeed each other, but the sub-
ject matter of one particular event. This moment in al-Bayati is the moment
of the act of writing, which becomes for him the paradoxical effect of a
piece of paper, of wet mud, of the surface of the water, of a human corpse
on time itself. And now that time has lent itself to this stillness, it has
become caught up in this rare moment of objecti cation, and ends up
becoming a mere thing, a tool constructed within the world of the poem:
Every time Ishtaar calls you from the grave and extends her hand,
The ice melts.
And in a moment, all ages are folded
The night collapses and so do the dams
And the dead in his winding sheet cries like a lonesome baby
After the priest had blessed him with bread and pure water.85
But this signi cant moment also has to discontinue at a certain point of
time, and al-BayatiÕs persona does know that time cannot simply be reduced
to mere stillness and that its uidity is uncontrollable. It is because there is
a sheer difference between the time of Hades and OrpheusÕs real time,
because time is not a mere thing, and because it is impossible to imagine
time as something possessed, this image of capturing time is a striking one,
84
al-Bay¨tÂ, ÒThe Night is Everywhere,Ó DÂw¨n 120.
85
albeit a tragic one. Eventually al-BayatiÕs persona has to give in to the

sweeping force of time:
Oh, how desolate are my nights on the gates of Ashour,
With death and the leaves of the fall
While I am ascending from the underworld towards the light and the distant
dawn
I am a dead man resurrected in iron armor.86
In al-Bayati as well as in Blanchot, Orpheus dies; he is not a constant

God. He dies twice, rst in his descent, and a second time in his dismem-
berment. Like Eurydice, Orpheus witnesses a double death. But more in Blanchot
than al-Bayati, it is OrpheusÕs gaze, not the night, that becomes this trope,
and his turning becomes a turning at the limits of possibilities, between day
and night, entre espace as well as entre temps.
By Way of Conclusion
In the end, it really makes very little difference in the history of human
thought whether great gures ever actually existed in human bodies. Suf ce
it to say that a gure like Orpheus has been more important in the world
than millions of men who have lived and died. The Orphic reality, if there
ever was such a thing, would be the reality of an idea, and the best that one
knows about him is what men like Virgil, Ovid, Sartre, Blanchot, al-Bayati,
Detienne, Cocteau, Seamus Heaney and many others have thought about
him. To Blanchot and to al-Bayati the myth of Orpheus could be an alle-
gory for the de nition of art, or it might simply exist as a myth, but to us
it is a fertile ground for various possibilities of critical re ection, or perhaps
the space of literature where literature becomes that which encounters the
impossibility of its origin in the absence of any present. One cannot help
recalling BlanchotÕs de nition of writing as
effaced before it is written. If the word trace can be admitted, it is as the
mark that would indicate as erased what was, however, never traced. All our
writing for everyone and if it were ever writing of everyone would be this:
the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to
come.87
Likewise, in both writers the myth of Orpheus has to be effaced before it

is written, or even effaced in order to be written at all, existing as the efface-
ment of its own writing and the writing of its own effacement. This act of
86
87
Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State U of New York P,
1982) 17.
absence brings us back to the original argument outlined in the paper. To

push this logic of absence one step further, it would become impossible to
know for sure whether OvidÕs or even VirgilÕs text is ontological, literary,
allegorical, or religious. Aristotle tells us that poetry is an action in language
as compared to theology. Therefore, if we treated BlanchotÕs or al-BayatiÕs
texts as literary, Orpheus would be nothing but ction, and according to AristotleÕs
theory of mimesis, if there is any truth in poetry, it has to be on the alle-
gorical level alone. The only problem is that we can never know. To Nancy,
this could only mean that it would be impossible to read literature decon-
structively, since literature already deconstructs itself. Even if a literary text
is a singular experiment, its structure belongs to a groundless signi ed.
Neither Blanchot nor al-Bayati could capture the universal myth of
Orpheus. Literature and myth belong to different terrains. If BlanchotÕs and
al-BayatiÕs texts exemplify the myth of Orpheus, they could only exemplify
it negatively, in absentia. Literature can only represent myth in interruption
and as interruption. Myth has the language that has no self, a language
empty of subjectivity. It speaks itself and speaks what is in speaking itself.
Myth is the speech of the many. It is able to distribute being and does not
let anything be out of place. Everything gets structured in myth, the word
ÒmythÓ is simply declarative speech. It declares the way things are.
Finally, this brings us back to the original point we started from. If myth
is untraceable, then myth remains a myth: this is the best de nition one
could reach. Perhaps one can no longer say what myth is, since we cannot
have the experience of the truth of ancient times, nor can we pretend to
reproduce the truth of past happenings. What we can do is try to give myth
a form, and literature exposes this form. Literature lives on the death of
myth and inhabits that death. Literary language is self-referential, incom-
plete and can communicate only itself.
As opposed to myth, literature therefore cannot offer anything (collectiv-
ity, closure, transcendence, revolution). The Keatsian formula of literature as
Òsooth[ing] the cares / and lift[ing] the thoughts of manÓ is of no avail here.
Contrary to myth, in literature we cannot be together as single essence.
Literature does not have this totality of myth. Yet literature is still priv-
ileged because, as we can see in Blanchot and al-Bayati, it reveals to us a
sharing of the limits of Orpheus as myth, not the essence of the myth of
Orpheus. Where we share limits is where we are with others, where Iraq is
with France, and Egypt with Greece. This sharing is not a communion but
rather a sharing on the level of intellectuality. This sharing offers the possi-
bility not just of reconciling cultural differences, but of transcending them
as well. In the nal analysis, if there is such a thing as nal analysis, liter-
ature becomes a privileged place because as literature it can say everything
and anything, and becomes the site of Òspeaking withÓ or Òbeing with,Ó as
Nancy puts it. This is something that myth cannot do, because myth never
has Òbeing with.Ó Myth is ontological: it has what is and speaks the pres-
ence of all that is for a given people, whereas the literary language of
Blanchot and al-Bayati is not a language of presence, rather it is a language
of offering presence, or one that proposes to offer presence. In other words,
myth distributes being, but literature collects it.
Writing about myth in the absence of myth is indeed a challenging pro-
ject, one in which both Blanchot and al-Bayati put us face to face with the
genuine expression of the human community. In the absence of myth, one
might think that literature is a lonely art and a personal experience, as sin-
gular and as silent as a supplication. Untrue. ÒIn singularity,Ó argues Nancy,
Òtakes place the literary experience of community that is to say, the Ôcom-
munistÕ experience of writing, of the voice, of a speech given, sworn,
offered, shared, abandoned.Ó 88 In the absence of myth, it is literature that
becomes the most telling expression of the world, the inscription of our
communal presence:
And why, my Lord, have the words abandoned us,
When the miracle of the priest and the moans of the witches were of no
avail? 89
University of Wisconsin-Madison MOHAMMAD RAMADAN SALAMA
Appendix I
Comparing the beginning of Chapter II in both versions gives us an idea of
BlanchotÕs destructive Orphic gaze back at his original text, his own Eurydice:
Il se d cida pourtant ˆ tourner le dos ˆ la mer et il sÕengagea dans un petit

bois o il sÕ tendit apr s avoir fait quelques pas. La journ e allait, et ce quÕil
nÕy avait presque plus de lumi re, et ce quÕil en restait semblait effrayer les
oiseaux dont les cris eveillaient des chos d sagr ables. Cependant en d pit
de lÕobscurit on pouvait continuer ˆ voir assez distinctement certains d tails
du paysage et, en particulier, la colline qui bornait lÕhorizon et qui brillait,
comme si le cr puseule lÕe t laiss e insouciante et libre. Malheureusement les
arbres taient galement tr s clair s, et ˆ lÕimpression dÕun spectacle com-
mun et p nible dont on avait h‰te de voir la n. Lex arbres nÕavaient plus
lÕair dÕ tre des arbres, il se d tachaient en vain dans lÕair lumineux, il sem-
blait que le feuillage, frapp par les rayons tincelants, dev”nt terme et f t
soumis ˆ lÕ clairage dÕun triste jour. Ce qui inqui tait Thomas, cÕest quÕil
tait couch lˆ dans lÕherbe, avec le d sir de ne pas se relever avant
longtemps, bien que cette position lui f t fermellement interdite. 90
88
Nancy 70.
89
al-Bayati, DÂw¨n 274.
90
Blanchot, Thomas lÕobscur (Paris: Gallimard, 1941) 12.
Il se d cida pourtant ˆ tourner le dos ˆ la mer et il sÕengagea dans un petit

bois o il sÕ tendit apr s avoir fait quelques pas. La journ e allait, et ce quÕil
nÕy avait presque plus de lumi re, mais on continuait ˆ voir assez distincte-
ment certains d tails du paysage et, en particulier, la colline qui bornait
lÕhorizon et qui brillait, insouciante et libre.
Ce qui inqui tait Thomas, cÕest quÕil tait couch lˆ dans lÕherbe, avec le
d sir dÕy demeurer longtemps, bien que cette position lui f t interdite.91
91
Blanchot, Thomas lÕobscur: Nouvelle Version (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) 16-17.
Appendix II

BLANCHOT - 2002 - Salama. The Interruption of Myth

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THE INTERRUPTION OF MYTH: A NANCIAN READING

OF BLANCHOT AND AL-BAYATI

It is not a mere coincidence that many 20th-century literary gures and

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002 Journal of Arabic Literature, XXXIII, 3

have an author. Literature is thus impure and improper: impure because it

Although my argument depends on these structural and ideological dif-

The Myth of Orpheus in Blanchot

The act of writing, according to Blanchot, begins with the gaze of

Orpheus wants is not Eurydice, but perhaps Eurydice-as-lost. In this act of

Immemor heu Victusque animi respexit22

The relationship between the two major components in ThomasÕs experi-

the Òthinking subjectÓ has brought about ÒconsciousnessÓ and Òperspectival-

these objects are described in terms of existing lexemes and a designated

Vision, therefore, in its ontological inessentiality, cannot be mastered by a

By looking at Eurydice, Orpheus has disobeyed the imperative for his

Like OrpheusÕs, ThomasÕs path is asymptotic: he too is lost to never being

The Myth of Orpheus in al-Bayati59

As in Blanchot, the night becomes the Orphic trope par excellence. In a

This partition decentralizes vision and shatters the geometricality of the

The question of voice appears once again later in the text:

But if there is a sense of ontology to al-BayatiÕs poem, it has to emerge

albeit a tragic one. Eventually al-BayatiÕs persona has to give in to the

In al-Bayati as well as in Blanchot, Orpheus dies; he is not a constant

Likewise, in both writers the myth of Orpheus has to be effaced before it

absence brings us back to the original argument outlined in the paper. To

University of Wisconsin-Madison MOHAMMAD RAMADAN SALAMA

Il se d cida pourtant ˆ tourner le dos ˆ la mer et il sÕengagea dans un petit

Il se d cida pourtant ˆ tourner le dos ˆ la mer et il sÕengagea dans un petit

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Il se d cida pourtant ˆ tourner le dos ˆ la mer et il sÕengagea dans un petit

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