The settings of Thomas the Obscure — the sea, a hotel, night, a death-bed — are vague; the two main characters, Thomas and Anne, are even vaguer. Thomas, after entering the endless void of ocean and reading a book whose words devour him, filling him with their absence of reality, digs himself a grave and throws himself in, thus approaching the core of an infinity where he was bound by the very absence of limits. Dead, he arises like Lazarus, goes to meet Anne and surrounds her like an abyss. Anne disappears into night and eternity and, beyond time, becomes the time of men before reassuming an image and a body. At this point she falls ill and, after a long decline, dies; Thomas, who has sat at her bedside, delivers a long monologue in which he declares himself to be the inverted image of all things on the retina of the absolute eye, then marches out into a primordial, invisible spring and, in the novel’s final episode, leads a flock of constellations into the sea.


While English readers may find Thomas the Obscure difficult, they also find it rewarding. Maurice Blanchot exemplifies the French literary avant-garde in that he often writes about the space of literature, a concept that has never existed in English fiction — its closest American equivalent might be ‘the interzone’ of William Burroughs. This space is neither entirely allegorical, metaphorical nor symbolic, but irreducibly ambiguous and indeterminate.


Like his friend Georges Bataille, Blanchot is constantly concerned with the realm of the impossible. In his non-fiction he shows his fascination with the figure of Orpheus, who crossed the boundary separating life and death and, giving in to impulse, betrayed his task of bringing Eurydice back to life by turning around to look at her face. Thomas could be understood as an Orpheus of sorts, a consciousness wandering through the lands of death. Like Orpheus, Thomas embodies the impulse of reason which leads towards that which cannot be. For Blanchot, this impulse and the impossibility which it necessarily entails are the distinguishing features of literature’s unique space.

‘On this road, each man he met died. Each man, if Thomas turned away his eyes, died with him a death which was not announced by a single cry. He looked at them, and already he saw them lose all resemblance beneath his glance, with a tiny wound in the forehead through which their face escaped. They did not disappear, but they did not appear again. As far away as they became visible, they were shapeless and mute. Nearer, if he touched them, if he directed toward them not his glance, but the glance of this dazzling and invisible eye which he was, every moment, completely...and nearer yet, almost blending with them, taking them either for his shadow or for dead souls, breathing them, licking them, coating himself with their bodies, he received not the slightest sensation, not the slightest image, as empty of them as they were empty of him.’ p42