Feelings occupied him, then devoured him. He was pressed in every part of his flesh by a thousand hands which were his only hand. A mortal anguish beat against his heart. Around his body, he knew that his thought, mingled with the night, kept watch. He knew with certainty that it, too, was looking for a way to enter into him. Against his lips, in his mouth, it was forcing its way toward a monstrous union. Beneath his eyelids, it created a necessary sight. And at the same time it was furiously destroying the face it kissed.In the sea Thomas lived the freedom of the abyss' crashing silences. But the water mirage on waters disappears. Solitude's enemy of the unseen faces living in its blacknesses. Nothing is not nothing. Silences can mean the repressed, and the hidden. It is when he's on the shore and a swimmer is escaping it's edges that he feels closest. I can't call it enlightenment almosts but the lessening of a burden, this close to the far away figure. Thomas in the woods they are the lessfaces of between the pillars of darkness you are passing them. Thomas never escapes the not alone. The intruders slip in him; thoughts, passions feelings. When he is reading he disappears into the eye I, he, it. The hideous distortion of meaning into Meaning. Oh no, in the dinner there are People. The kind of people that sniff around your edges and go back to Their People. Not one of us. I must be one of these because in all classroom/group situations I am the unpartnered. The speed of light will never catch up to the speed of sound and they will never hear you, Thomas. Oh no, there's a beautiful face. I have wondered/don't want to know if young and beautiful women read stories and don't feel apart of another species. If they look into mirrors unknowing the other is a reflection and can't do anything without them. This is Anne world and this is Thomas world. Beautiful face eight spider legs all at once walking in the other people world. I don't feel for the Anne who cannot beat her fists on the doors of Thomas world and understand it. It's not compulsory to have this access. That they will move their arm in the mirror when you move yours. It is the closeness to the swimmer that gets me. When the silence feels like you aren't going to be strangled in your chest. Anne world dies and her beautiful face is still beautiful face. She also heard Thomas; in fact, she knew now what she had to say to Thomas, she knew exactly the words she had searched for all her life in order to reach him. But she remained silent; she thought what good is it- and this word was also the word she was seeking- Thomas is insignificant. Let us sleep.If nothingness is free. Where Thomas doesn't matter anyway. Anne world is the living not a host he can't feel free of. If Socrates lives through Plato then why doesn't her symbolic world become the kind of brain and gut worms agitating after death. Mummified sun that remembers its shadows. Solitudes killer is yourself. I don't believe that spider Anne could have put one or three or eight probing tentacles into his brain mass and took anything away that wasn't material of her own orbs. I am relieved she is free, because death is going to happen anyway, but what about the blind eyes slipping into Thomas' I's again. They become men, they were him, they were swimmers, the shore. It's ugly when you're beating your fists on your own doors, silence begging.
Cette oeuvre de Blanchot fait l’effet d’une balle, une balle qui fend l’air prêt à nous fendre le crâne. Elle est fulgurante, pourtant on la voit arriver comme au ralenti. Rapide et lente. Thomas l’obscur est Le roman sur le néant. C’est un trou noir qui nous aspire, nous lecteur, incapablement préparé à sombrer. Thomas l’obscur est comme ce reflet sur la flaque d’un trottoir où viennent se dessiner les arbres, les maisons, les immeubles, le ciel… Thomas l’obscur est comme cette image sur cette surface miroitante. Elle n’est ni les arbres, ni le ciel qu’elle reflète. Elle n’est ni l’eau, ni le sol sur laquelle elle repose. C’est une image qui existe sans exister. L’illusion de la réalité et la réalité de cette illusion. Une image qui contient tout et rien à la fois. Thomas l’obscur, c’est un négatif de tout et de rien. Les mots manquent. Blanchot semble aspirer leur essence pour créer un monde, un espace, un temps, quelque chose entre les lignes, entre les pages, oui, comme si la vie ou la mort se déroulaient dans le blanc des pages, l’existence sont les mots, mais ce qui importe n’est pas ce qui est noirci, mais ce qui est blanc, c’est là où réside la véritable obscurité, dans le blanc des pages, dans celui de l’existence."Par ce vide, c’était donc le regard et l’objet du regard qui se mêlaient. Non seulement cet œil qui ne voyait rien appréhendait quelque chose, mais il appréhendait la cause de sa vision. Il voyait comme objet ce qui faisait qu’il ne voyait pas. En lui, son propre regard entrait sous la forme d’une image, au moment où ce regard était considéré comme la mort de toute image. Il en résulta pour Thomas des préoccupations nouvelles. Sa solitude ne lui sembla plus aussi complète, et il eut même le sentiment que quelque chose de réel l’avait heurté et cherchait à glisser en lui."
What do You think about Thomas The Obscure (1995)?
Bad writing straining after the ineffable. As with many other existentialists, female consciousness is portrayed as merely a satelite of the male. Thomas is never evoked in any interesting way, we just get clumsy overstatement and blurriness as a substitute for the profound, and the narrative is frequently ludicrous. This is nothing like Beckett or any other reference point a "postmodernist" might lazily assimilate it with. Read Nathalie Sarraute instead for a genuinely acute examination of identity and language.
—Jonathan Norton
"Death was a crude metamorphosis beside the indiscernible nullity which I nevertheless coupled with the name Thomas. Was it then a fantasy, this enigma, the creation of a word maliciously formed to destroy all words? But if I advanced within myself, hurrying laboriously toward my precise noon, I yet experienced as a tragic certainty, at the center of the living Thomas, the inaccessible proximity of that Thomas which was nothingness, and the more the shadow of my thought shrunk, the more I conceived of myself in this faultless clarity as the possible, the willing host of this obscure Thomas."
—Simei Doblinski
this book is a recit (an event, not a narration of an event) - that is, the event itself is the book, the writing, its creation. it's a book giddy with impossibility, which i appreciate deeply. blanchot and i share a similar sense of humor. stuplimity maybe.favorite moments:"This grave which was exactly his size, his shape, his thickness, was like his own corpse, and every time he tried to bury himself in it, he was like a ridiculous dead person trying to bury his body in his body." (35)"Now Anne opened her eyes. There was in fact no more hope." (85)"I was thus the sole corpse of humanity." (93)"With one hand showing that I was indeed there, with the other -- what am I saying? -- without the other, with this body which, imposed on my real body, depended entirely on a negation of the body, I entered into absolute dispute with myself. Having two eyes, one of which was possessed of extreme visual acuity, it was with the other which was an eye only because of its refusal to see that I saw everything visible. And so on, for all my organs." (96-7)heh heh heh
—Megan
