L'Arret de Mort=: Death Sentence

Since I am not an accomplished fiction reader, I came to Blanchot's "Death Sentence" with trepidation. Blanchot is one of those French `postmodernists" that drives American pundits crazy. I am personally devoted to studying everything I can about him. For me, he is a deep explorer of the creative spirit as lived by the artist today. Still, the fears lingered: Would I understand this author, whose reputation for obscurity is renowned? Would reading this book be a dry exercise in slogging through strange wordings and plot convolutions? And then the surprise. Each and every sentence sparks with luminously, incandescently clear impact. And yet, each and every one of these sentences disassembles the narrative right before my eyes. Each sentence instigates a tear: "...this sadness communicated a feeling to me that was absolutely distressing, that was dispossessed and in some way bereft of itself; the memory of it became inexpressible despair, despair which hides in tears but does not cry, which has no face and changes the face it borrows into a mask." (p. 49) Oh my. The narrative is simple: first the death, spontaneous resuscitation and then completely instigated final death of the narrator's loved one; then, in the second part of this slim book, the narrator proposes marriage while he and his female companion are taking refuge from aerial bombardment, during the early days of WWII. The pressing crowd subsequently separates the couple as everyone rushes out of the subway bomb shelter. They reunite - if that is the term for what happens here -- in a space of estranging darkness: "Everything about that room, plunged in the most profound darkness, was familiar to me; I had penetrated it, I carried it in me, I gave it life and which no force in the world could ever overcome. That room does not breathe, there is neither shadow nor memory in it, neither dream nor depth; I listen to it and no one speaks; I look at it and no one lives in it. And yet, the most intense life is there, a life which I touch and which touches me.... May the person who does not understand that come and die. Because that life transforms the life which shrinks away from it into a falsehood." (p. 67) I found this work in the space of death to be strangely liberating. I was mourning a death in my own immediate circle when I read it. In my death scene, I too instigated a final deathblow, the death sentence (euthanasia for my brave and aged dog, fighting to the end). In reading this work during this time, the very unsettling of the narration streamed forth as a linguistic "nature" pouring out, as it does, beyond any trivialities of meaning I can bring to a comprehension of a beloved's death. The flights of language out of any sentiment or meaning, the interruptions and dislocations articulated here opened room for a free constitution of what living now meant in the face of what was a definitive, inescapable death event. The breaking apart, the "absent meaning," (The Writing of

I've been a fan of Maurice Blanchot for years, and this novel is probably his masterpiece. I've read it now three times, and I'm looking forward to my fourth reading. It's that kind of book. You can't read it too often. It's relatively short, but extremely intense. When I finished reading the last page yesterday,even though I was in a public place, I had to shout out loud---so stunning was the ending. This is a love story about a young man and woman. The woman dies early in the story, but their love is so strong she's not really dead. She keeps reappearing to her lover in other personae. Almost unceasing ecstasy.

A short, harrowing work interested neither in description, character development, nor cleverness but rather in staring death in the eye. If you like Barbara Kingsolver, Stephen King, or even Raymond Carver you doubtless may detest this abstract gift of a conflicted consciousness of a taciturn man in love with a sickly, dying young woman during troubled times. Perhaps the supreme study of the impossibility of fidelity, let alone true love, in a world where death hangs in the air as the possibility of total absence or, more frighteningly, as the cipher of a total presence condemned to repeat its secret to deaf ears.

L'arret de mort (Death Sentence)is a beautifully crafted piece of literary art...and one which starkly draws the boundary line between what is perceived as 'The Art of the Novel' in France and its dumbed-down American counterpart. Blanchot (along with Bataille, Robbe-Grillet and countless others; certainly not all from France) is a writer who dares to ask what fiction is, dares to redefine the form, re-examine his new definitions...he dares to make his novels about ideas, not mere bedtime stories (or worse, Hollywood film-treatments). From the first sentence to the last this novel draws the reader into considerations of our mortality, of the haunting trajectory of our experience, and most daring of all, it questions the very nature of literary endeavor. Magnificent.