Lydia Davis / Maurice Blanchot, invisible

But the invisible remains nevertheless. If we were to engage in an act of indirect translation of this phrase (trying to imagine the French of a source text which is not available to us) we might reach for the word demeure for "remains." Mais l'invisible demeure néanmoins. This slightly archaic choice would be guided by its significance for the author, Maurice Blanchot, whose later work in many ways circled around this French modification of a Heideggerian vocabulary: demeurer meaning to remain, to stay, to stick, but primarily to live, to dwell. Blanchot — French writer and thinker of literature whose work across fiction and essay, from the 1930s to his death in 2003, is difficult to categorise — was writing here in response to Davis, as his translator, in a private letter.1 Davis's translation of the phrase is included in an elegiac essay for Blanchot, "Maurice Blanchot Absent." This obscured referent, obscurity as a source, is characteristic of both Blanchot's and Davis's writing. The sentence reflects the characteristically slippery, sticky, collapsing of a paradox in Blanchot's writing, allowing language to modify the thought it translates. The invisible persists, invisibly. In a way we can take this as a cue for how we read Davis's translation, and her inclusion of it in this elegiac essay for Blanchot is a clue for how we might read her own stories. Writing, for Blanchot, is a form of appearance, but what it makes apparent is an invisibility, a disappearance in language. Davis's translation, slyly, reproduces this disappearance, the source language that remains, invisibly, in a translation-text, the disappearance of the translator in her own writing.

Blanchot's sentence invites us, as readers, to notice this persistence of the invisible. Davis's incorporation of this sentence into her essay makes apparent her own position as a translator who invisibly accompanies the work she's translating.2 And the persistence, the stickiness, the "remaining" of the invisible is heuristically useful for thinking translation itself. The invisible, the difference of that act of translation, the word behind that translation, nevertheless dwells in the translation. Davis's representation of this private letter in her short, elegiac, memorial essay for Blanchot might, in this way, be understood to outline the elegiac contours of translation. What remains of Blanchot, in this memorial act of translation, is his invisibility. And the question of what is visible of Blanchot in Davis — or indeed of Davis in her translations of Blanchot — will centre on this slippery question of the visibility of the invisible.

In one sense invisibility, rather than visibility, is a condition of reading. It is only on the condition that we stop seeing words and start reading them — stop seeing them as simple visual marks and experience them instead in a non-visual way — that we are able to read. It is only when words cease to be visible that they become legible. And just so, in reading Davis here, it is only on the condition that we stop seeing Davis and see the "invisible" source text that her translation works. What we read in Davis's translation, But the invisible remains nevertheless, is that elegiac distance between visibility and invisibility, between what we can experience and what remains without being experienceable, and between a word (demeure?) and its visible mark, "remains." Davis's reproduction of this letter is elegiac also in the sense that it describes Blanchot's own invisibility to her. Though she translated much of his work in the 1970s and 1980s, and indeed was, with her then husband Paul Auster, one of the key mediators of Blanchot's thought to an anglophone audience, she neither met nor saw him. Taking up the vocabulary of Blanchot's friend Emmanuel Levinas, Davis relates the centrality of this personal invisibility in Blanchot's project: the "invisible" referred to here is Blanchot's own face — 'I would have preferred the face to remain the invisible into which it had faded away' (383). Our encounter with Blanchot, in this letter, constitutes a face, a thing for which (to paraphrase Levinas) we bear an ethical responsibility of recognition, an other, which nevertheless remains invisible to us, has already faded away for us.3 Our responsibility in reading this, maddeningly, is to a face that has already gone.

Davis's work from this period plays with this image of the private source, the letter, and this fading appearance, the face, in her own stories. We see both the letter and the face become images of that interface of translation with appearance and disappearance, reading and writing, in the story "The Letter" from Break it Down (1986). The story is narrated by a woman who is painfully reminded of the absence of an old lover by chance traces of his presence — a friend who has seen him, a phone company who calls to ask where he lives. His absence keeps appearing, as in this moment when she distracts herself by working on translation:

His face floating — an image, not quite a face — between her eyes and the page, interrupting literally her attempt to read, seems to summon the persisting, "invisible" face by which Blanchot characterises the appearance of his own writing. The work of translation, as represented here by Davis, is, like Blanchot's work of writing, work which — to use Blanchot's own phrase — unworks itself, interrupts itself, haunted by this invisibility upon which it depends and yet it cannot present. Translation is a way structurally to make sense of her lover's absence. But an impossibility of translating (and reading) is part of that structure. The story culminates with the narrator receiving a letter from this lover which, after deferrals and interruptions, she translates in fragments. The letter comprises a signed, dated, and addressed poem, which we have to guess is Valéry's "Le Bois Amical," ending with the words "compagnon de silence," which the narrator translates "companion of silence."5 Valéry's sonnet describes two lovers separated by death and then reunited, "nous nous retrouvions," as the narrator reads it. The poem, however, has been mis-transcribed by the ex-lover, shifted from Valéry's past nous nous sommes retrouvés to the imperfect tense. Or the narrator has mis-read it. Such misreading, or the possibility of misreading, is significant in the story. If their union can be shifted from the passé composée of completed action to the imparfait of uncompleted, then the narrator's pain might also some day be resolved, possibly. The possibility of misreading hangs over this narration as the active principle of the story. The possibility of reunion depends upon her reading incorrectly, reading the wrong words. If the lover can persist, invisibly, then he might yet remain present.

The story brings together writing, translation, and reading on the terms of this interruption. The narrator's reading and writing are interrupted by these appearances of invisible faces, misread words. Reading Blanchot in Davis and Davis in Blanchot will mean reading along this axis of interruption and misapprehension — seeing things that vanish. Translation cannot fail to obscure, to make invisible, its source language, but in doing so only makes present the way language itself seems to make things invisible as well as visible. What we see in translation, as this representation of translation by Davis reaffirms, is the invisibility of the source language. And this analogises something of the way we read. Reading — the displacement of visible marks into words — means adjusting oneself to such invisibility. Davis's "Maurice Blanchot Absent" is instructively written in memory of his persistent invisibility. Reading Blanchot in Davis, reading through that work of translation, means approaching the text as a complex surface. It appears to us as if it were a face, something which we recognise is other to us — and yet, as Blanchot insists, as if it were a face we could not reach, one which had already faded away.

Davis's relation to Blanchot has been discussed extensively in terms of what is visibly Blanchotian in her writing. Jonathan Evans, for example, following Derrida in part, describes Davis's work as a direct response to narrative challenges raised by Blanchot to the possibility of the story itself, or of narrative completion.6 But these complications of the structure of translation also work their way into the surface of the written text. Davis's own stories are striated by these structures of visibility and invisibility which mark translation. Reading Davis, I want to suggest, means reading as if the stories functioned like translations, moving across that elegiac axis between appearance, disappearance, and the appearance of disappearance.

We can see this more clearly in another of Davis's translations. Blanchot's La Folie du jour, The Madness of the Day, was written in 1949 but not published until 1973. The short récit is published in a context where Blanchot is increasingly thinking about responsibility in literature. His political writing of the period responds to French decolonisation (from Vietnam to Algeria) and the student-worker uprising in Paris 1968 as altering our relationship to literature. In this context, Blanchot suggests that the writer has a responsibility to become anonymous, to disappear, in order not to "use others to free yourself from yourself," while at the same time, in another slippery, sticky thought, "you are condemned to yourself in order for there still to be someone to welcome others."7 Political, ethical responsibility asks us to become anonymous but to remain present. Literature is responsible not for presenting others, but for welcoming the "unknown familiar."8 This is what Blanchot calls, in a political text from the 1960s, "speaking as if anonymously."9 And so, writing as the text's anonymous author, Blanchot insists that "each one of the signatories needs to be considered equally its unique author; I assume this responsibility globally, in its entirety" (29). Literature establishes a relationship between people in which, because we are unknown, we are familiar, because invisible, visible, because illegible, legible.

Davis's translation of The Madness of the Day raises these stakes of visibility and invisibility, legibility and illegibility, familiarity and being unknown, because — to repeat my claim — her translation is itself the mark of persistence, the visible sign, of that invisibility which conditions writing. Davis's stories, like her translations of Blanchot, will incorporate invisibility not only as a theme but, as in translation, as a conditioning structure of reading and writing. 

In simple terms, The Madness of the Day is a life story.10 But the narrator's representation of his life is complicated by pivotal moments of invisibility, indeed of blindness. Firstly, the narrator has a "brief vision": he sees a woman on a street pass through a door and out of his sight. He is fascinated by this vision, in which 'something is happening'. This vision is followed by his blinding:

That Blanchotian slipperiness of terms, again: being blinded means also being exposed to the "shocking" light of the day. "I could not look, but I could not help looking." The possibility of seeing is joined to the impossibility of seeing. Glass here is at once a medium of vision and blindness. The narrator continues, describing surgery to recover from this "blow," in which blindness and his covered eyes lead to another kind of fascination, another vision: 

This hypervisibility, the extreme visibility of the invisible, is a vision of light itself, "full daylight." In this récit, a capacity to see is thus tied to the impossibility of seeing: he cannot see what makes seeing possible, light, just as words disappear in order to be read. After this episode, the narrator describes how he "could not read or write," how indeed his very "sight was a wound."13 His narrative falters because he is trying to narrate that invisibility itself, trying somehow to read that vision of vanishing.

So do we also read Davis "invisibly" in this translation of Blanchot? I have suggested that her own writing not only responds to Blanchot's, but takes on that question of visibility as a condition of both writing and reading. Translation — literally moving from one place to another — only compounds this displacement, this wounding of sight. We can interpret The Madness of the Day as shaped by the possibility of such movement, displacement, that "brief vision" of the woman moving across a threshold and out of sight. Davis's story "The House Plans," from Break it Down, also concerns a narrator's movements in and out of sight. In this case, the story describes a man who leaves a city job to move into a ruined country house — decides, after frustrations, to leave — and then finally stays.14 His life, too, is narrated in terms of going outside the city, going elsewhere. And this countryside landscape appears to the narrator as a sudden vision. This vision, though, matches the fantasy that, the narrator tells us, has fascinated him throughout his life. The actual house is fit onto this imagined vision. If the story analogises translation as a movement to a new space, it thus does so in a complex sense: this narrative-translation is the alignment of a present vision with an imagined vision, not with a pregiven reality. It exists as an overlay before it appears. The narrator thus describes how, "Walking over the grass by the house, I watched, with the tired, expectant eyes of a man who has lived all his life in the city, magpies running through the thyme and lizards vanishing in the wall."15 The eyes are "expectant," in the sense of ex+specere, to look out. The narrative surprise, here, is that what he sees "vanishes" upon being seen.

This problem of seeing something vanish will constitute the story's hinge, and the narrator's experience of the house he buys and rebuilds. But the narrator himself also becomes something envisioned, something read. Firstly a hunter figure intrudes into the house only to do "nothing: after gazing at what was in the room, he shut the door behind him and went away" — the hunter "examines" and "inspects" the narrator and his belongings as if he were not there, as if he, like that lizard, were "vanishing." And visions of the city continue to haunt the space. The pictures on the walls are of the Place des Vosges and "behind Montparnasse."16 'Behind' Montparnasse (or, rather, behind its walls) are, of course, the ossuaries of the catacombs, the cemetery - the space of disappearing, of death. 

The story turns, indeed, on a doubling of that initial 'brief vision' of the vanishing lizard. The narrator describes, later, another appearance of the hunter, how "I saw a figure at the far end of the nearest field, walking very slowly across. My eyes felt as if a long emptiness had been filled. Without knowing it, I had been waiting for my friend."17 If the city, for Blanchot, in its insurrectionary moments becomes the space for encountering the "unknown familiar," then the narrator here makes the "field" of his anonymity (his apparent invisibility to this hunter) into just such a space. But doing so means, again, becoming anonymous, like that vanishing lizard. The key scene describes an "absorption" that turns into "invisibility":

It is as not expected, not visible, that the narrator is able to experience this "liberty." It is as a spectator that the narrator becomes invisible, anonymous. The narrator becomes unexpected, "where no one expected me to be," this "shadow." As if translated, the narrator occupies a perspective elsewhere than himself. But doing so, paying attention to the other, means fading himself. This displacement of visibility is what enables the narrator, finally, to fulfil his "expectant" vision. As in The Madness of the Day, it is not visibility but invisibility which constitutes the condition of the story. The narrator's final vision is thus of an expected familiarity: "I looked at the red landscape and felt that it was deeply familiar to me, as though it had been mine long before I found it."19

To lag behind oneself, one's visibility, in this way is to become something like a reader: not absent but outside, expecting rather than inspecting the text. But it is this position that enables that strange liberty of the "unknown familiar," the anonymity of the self that enables invisibility to enter into the regime of legibility. We read this story about France written in English, as if it were a translation. We also read it as if it were a translation in the sense that it narrates not the appearance of the self, of one's life, but the excavation of a space for the other in the space of that life. This enabling, disabling writing imagines the conditions of appearance of what might be expected but has not yet, by necessity, appeared, and in this sense enjoins us, as readers, to be responsible to this vanishing as the condition of its appearance. Davis's writing through Blanchot — through translation, through her own fiction — writes through such invisibility.

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Jacob McGuinn (@jmccobin) is currently Postdoctoral Research Associate at King's College London, on the AHRC Radical Translations project. His work on literature, poetics, and philosophy has appeared in Textual Practice, MLN, New Formations and is forthcoming in Twentieth-Century Literature.

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