Bungaku Jihyo 1941-1944 (Literary Chronicles 1941-1944)

This book is a translation of a collection of literary reviews published by 20^th-century French writer and literary critic Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) in a newspaper between 1941 and 1944, during the early years of his career. Although Blanchot was already in his mid-thirties at the time, it was not until after the Second World War that he became active and well-known as a literary critic. Thus, this was the beginning of his career. After the war, Blanchot contributed monthly book reviews to literary magazines, which he compiled into collections such as The Work of Fire (1949), The Space of Literature (1955) and The Book to come (1959), in which he developed a distinctive literary theory that connected the activity of “writing” literary language to “dying.” The language of literature has a dimension in which it cannot be said that “I” am writing, in which it is rather as if a separation from me is writing. Conversely, death comes to everyone equally, but needless to say, at the moment of death, we are already no longer in the world. Hence, we cannot experience that moment as our own. In this sense, the (impossible) space of literature is analogous to the (impossible) space of death. If you are at all interested in this kind of literary theory, I recommend that you peruse the aforementioned works. This book is for those who have read such literary criticism and are interested in Blanchot, and who wonder how Blanchot read literary works and other books before he became known as such a unique literary figure.

The years 1941-44 were a time when France was occupied by the German invasion of 1940 and its puppet government in Vichy. Publications were subject to strict censorship, but the Journal des Débats was allowed to be published by standing with the Pétainists. In fact, until the 1930s, Blanchot had been more of a journalist writing nationalist political commentary than a literary critic, but when the decision was made to serialize his work in the Journal des Débats, he appears to have decided to concentrate solely on literary criticism and for the next four years, he published a weekly series of literary reviews under the title “Chronicles of Intellectual Life.” The title was ironically elegant for wartime, but its true meaning was revealed in the first text. It was about the growing intellectual interest in the repressed life of the Occupation. Apart from the first few references to current affairs, there are no direct references to the war or the occupation, but rather diverse books are introduced and reviewed, including recent novels, poetry, reviews, criticism, civilization, comparative mythology, history and linguistics, and so on. It can be read as a kind of document of how so many new publications came out during the Occupation, while being a document of a journalist’s conversion and the birth of a literary figure. During the occupation, Blanchot read an enormous amount of books while witnessing the disasters of war in different ways, discussed them with invaluable friends in criticism and literature, and continued to reflect and write, thereby deepening his thinking about literature and becoming the Blanchot of the post-war period. In this book, you can read about his trajectory.
 

* After publication, it was discovered that the original source book contained several decipherment errors due to the lack of accuracy of the microfiche of the Journal de Débats. We thank Professor Takeshi Matsumura (Department of Language and Information Sciences) for pointing this out.

(Written by GOHARA Kai, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2022)