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    Blanchot, Maurice - Bergson & Symbolism, (1949) 4 YFS 63

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    MAIRA ALEJANDRA ZAPATA PEREZ
    This document summarizes Maurice Blanchot's analysis of the relationship between Bergson's philosophy and Symbolism in literature. It argues that while superficial parallels can be drawn, Bergson's philosophy of duration and intuition does not fully capture the essence of Symbolist works by Baudelaire and Mallarme. Blanchot also notes that writers like Paul Valery and the Surrealists had differing views than Bergson on language and its relationship to thought. The document concludes by providing biographical information on Blanchot and his recent publications.

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    Blanchot, Maurice - Bergson & Symbolism, (1949) 4 YFS 63

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    MAIRA ALEJANDRA ZAPATA PEREZ
    34 views4 pages
    This document summarizes Maurice Blanchot's analysis of the relationship between Bergson's philosophy and Symbolism in literature. It argues that while superficial parallels can be drawn, Bergson's philosophy of duration and intuition does not fully capture the essence of Symbolist works by Baudelaire and Mallarme. Blanchot also notes that writers like Paul Valery and the Surrealists had differing views than Bergson on language and its relationship to thought. The document concludes by providing biographical information on Blanchot and his recent publications.

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    This document summarizes Maurice Blanchot's analysis of the relationship between Bergson's philosophy and Symbolism in literature. It argues that while superficial parallels can be drawn, Bergson's philosophy of duration and intuition does not fully capture the essence of Symbolist works by Baudelaire and Mallarme. Blanchot also notes that writers like Paul Valery and the Surrealists had differing views than Bergson on language and its relationship to thought. The document concludes by providing biographical information on Blanchot and his recent publications.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    34 views4 pages

    Blanchot, Maurice - Bergson & Symbolism, (1949) 4 YFS 63

    Uploaded by

    MAIRA ALEJANDRA ZAPATA PEREZ
    This document summarizes Maurice Blanchot's analysis of the relationship between Bergson's philosophy and Symbolism in literature. It argues that while superficial parallels can be drawn, Bergson's philosophy of duration and intuition does not fully capture the essence of Symbolist works by Baudelaire and Mallarme. Blanchot also notes that writers like Paul Valery and the Surrealists had differing views than Bergson on language and its relationship to thought. The document concludes by providing biographical information on Blanchot and his recent publications.

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    MAURICE BLANCHOT

    Bergson and Symbolism


    Must we look for the foundations of symbolism in Bergson's philosophy,
    as it is now customary to declare? Monsieur E. Fiser would have us be­
    lieve so, in his book on the Symbole litteraire; nevertheless, his study,
    substantial and serious, also provides us with reasons for questioning
    the value of these parallels. It is clear that only with indifferent success
    can this critic discover, in Baudelaire or Mallarme, the Bergsonian the-nes
    for which spirituality is essentially the past contracted within a present
    that harbors this past in its entirety. That innocency of profound exis­
    tence, that mobility of the self which disappears in a shadowy intimacy,
    all the pure reality whose onsurge no metaphor can represent and which,
    for Bergson, is the essence of duration, corresponds only through quite
    external analogies with the ideal spectacle that Mallarme's poetic achieve­
    ment presents to contemplation. If we could be satisfied with a phrase
    or two, we might say that the inapprehensible nothing, the "no" born
    from expectancy, doubt and absence, the silent thunder which rever­
    berates amidst images dissolving one into another and which heralds, in
    the works of Mallarme, a fascinating "breaking point," is separated by
    an abyss from Bergsonian philosophy and is meaningful only in a vertigo
    wherein anguish reduces itself to exhaustion and unceasingly triumphs
    over ravishment. Similarly with Baudelaire, if again superficial phrases
    were acceptable, it might be seen that the dream does not express the
    purity of a self plunged in duration, but proclaims the radiation of a
    magical consciousness that comes into contact with the essence of the
    world. The myth is not a means for turning toward oneself and finding
    oneself in the form of pure time, it is the expression of the exhausting
    and impossible march to that point where the universe and the heart
    desiring it seem to become one. "In certain almost supernatural states of
    the soul," said Baudelaire, "profundity is revealed entirely in the spec­
    tacle, however commonplace it may be, spread out before one's eyes.
    The spectacle becomes the Symbol of profundity." Is it advisable to
    translate such texts, as of course can be done, into the terminology of
    Bergsonian philosophy? This sort of game, which denies poetry, also
    denies Bergsonism, so intent on respecting the purity and originality of
    the primordial intuition.
    Nor do we consider that Bergson's views on language can represent ex­
    actly the Symbolists' attitude with regard to words. It is not even sure that

    63
    Yale French Studies

    the poetic labor may not be made incomprehensible by an attempt to fit it


    in with Bergson's remarks. In a sense, the philosophy of the Immediate
    Data of Consciousness did not consist of a criticism of language in gen­
    eral, a criticism doubtless as old as speech; rather did it show why, and
    under what conditions, language became an unreliable instrument. Fur­
    thermore, it gave back to speech, after having discredited it as a means
    of expressing the interior life, the power to suggest melodic duration,
    to make this indirectly available for the non-participant. Why do words,
    incapable of expressing meta-intellectual truths, become apt, in new
    arrangements, to facilitate the approach to and even provoke the intuiting
    of these truths? This difficulty has often been stressed. It manifests in
    striking fashion the mixture of mistrust and faith, of suspicion and
    friendship which characterizes the relations between the Bergsonian
    mind and language. Bergson, in short, was imbued with an extreme dis­
    trust of words and an extreme confidence in poetry. It is not his crit­
    icism of language which makes possible and illuminates the existence
    of a symbolic art, but his profound feeling for art which furnishes him
    with the proofs of the validity and excellence of language, considered
    as the new system of a spell.

    Bergson, nonetheless, while strongly aware of the poet's powers, con­


    tinues to be uneasily vigilant when confronted by words, which are in
    a constant process of crystallization and are weighed down by our intellec­
    tual and practical habits. It is natural for him to pronounce a negative
    eulogy of creative language, and he shows how it manages to avoid be­
    trayal of the profound vision by remaining foreign to it, by turning
    around it in a series of disparate images, by delineating in an enchanted
    whirl the contours of that figure whose absence it lights up. No word
    possesses such spellbinding force that it can strip consciousness of its
    veils. All one can ask of the adroit flow of words is a frank avowal that
    not one of them, even for a moment, can appear as the equivalent of
    intution and unite with this lightning flash in the invocation it addresses
    to it. This attitude of tempered antipathy has nothing in common with
    Baudelaire's attitude. As for Mallarme, what is more essentially contrary
    to his thought? Against his horror of cliches, of oratorical forms, of
    prosaic logic must be set his passion for words, his "twenty-four-letter
    piety," his intimacy with all forms of expression, from the word, a
    jewel flower, an isolated flame that burns far off, to the line of poetry,
    "mot supreme, parfait, vaste, natif," "mot neuf et comme incantatoire."
    If this word is of course not destined to convey, free from all pretext,
    the thought of an object or the significance of a state of soul, it has

    64
    MAURICE BLANCHOT

    nevertheless a value other than that of its pure sonority, and the trust
    Mallarme puts in it is the trust in a jewel lit by its sparkle, in a center
    of suspense from which radiates a musical significance, in a figure which
    revolves and is undone in the allusion it reveals. "The childishness of
    literature up to now," he said, in reply to Jules Huret's inquiry, "has
    been to believe, for example, that choosing a certain number of precious
    stones and putting their names on paper, even very skillfully, was to
    make precious stones. That is not so. Since poetry consists in creating,
    one must take certain states in the human soul, gleams of a purity so
    absolute that that, in reality, well sung and properly illuminated, con­
    stitutes man's jewels: where there is symbol, there is creation, and the
    word 'poetry' acquires its meaning here: it is, in short, the only possible
    human creation." And Mallarme will also declare, in a supreme homage
    to the word: "I imagine, with the ineradicable doubtless writer's preju·
    dice, that nothing will endure unless it be voiced."
    One might also note that Paul Valery conceives of the relations
    between language and thought in a way which sets him immeasurably
    apart from Bergson. To the extent that for him a literary work always
    appears to be a forgery, and that "in language subjected to rhythm,
    measure, rhyme and alliteration, endeavor is confronted by conditions
    utterly foreign to the matrix of thought," he sees in poetic labors the
    means of breaking with the spontaneous mind and of achieving a par­
    ticular beauty which can be compared with no other. The writer, through
    his corrections, his fresh starts, the deliberate obstinacy of his refusals,
    far from coming closer to his original intention, as Bergson stated, moves
    away from the authentic vision, and the nature of language assures him
    of a fresh enchantment, based on a number of necessary mistakes and
    misunderstandings. Thus, in the case of Paul Valery, there is a trust in
    language which is trust, not in a system of expression, capable of a faith­
    fu1 correspondence with thought, but in the special properties of form,
    in its own original inductive effects, in its potency which fits it to or­
    ganize, and to construct the marvel of, the poem. That is an ambition
    altogether at variance with Bergsonism. Paul Valery supposes-and on
    this postulate surrealism grew-that if ever language coincides with the
    original thought, it is at the point of departure, when the mind surrenders
    it&elf to the immediate, to the crude monster which it then is for itself.
    But he adds that the writer fulfills his mission only when he replaces
    this untouched spontaneity by the endeavors of the most acutely conscious
    labor. Spontaneous language is perhaps the language which best explains
    the formlessness of the interior life, but the language which matters for

    65
    Yale French Studies

    the artist is that of utmost consciousness, and there is nothing the mind
    more keenly despises than unreflecting spontaneity, the image of its own
    accidents and chance encounters. And this, from a certain viewpoint, is
    the antithesis of Bergsonian philosophy. •

    (Translated by Joel A. Hunt)

    FRANCE'S FOREMOST critic, Maurice Blanchot has entitled his latest


    collection of essays La Part du feu. Also published in 1949 are his Lautre·
    amont et Sade, and a "recit," L'Arret de mort.

    • For permiSSIOn to print this article we wish to thank, not only Monsieur
    Blanchot, but also Literary Masterpieces, Inc., of 437 Fifth Avenue, New York,
    representatives in the U.S. of the Librairie Gallimard.

    66

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