| Title | : | The Madness of the Day |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0930794362 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780930794361 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 32 |
| Publication | : | First published March 17, 1973 |
The Madness of the Day Reviews
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Although I had not forgotten the agonizing contact with the day, I was wasting away from living behind curtains in dark glasses. I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.
What happened? How did I get swallowed into this black hole of elusive paradoxes while I gullibly thought I was going to read a story? Having recently read another of novella of Blanchot,
De idylle, I was ready for a another puzzling mental stretch but as ever keen on gently entering the mind and life of the nameless narrator not exactly for this cosmic yoga and ignorantly balancing on the rim of an abyss. Afterwards, after finishing finding out this short text seems to have been analysed to shreds by people like Blanchot’s friend Levinas and Derrida and admittedly inspired countless other comments reputed for obscuring rather than elucidating its interpretation, my reading giddiness perhaps could be diagnosed as the conventional perplexity of the non-initiated outsider.
Is my life better than other people's lives? Perhaps. I have a roof over my head and many do not. I do not have leprosy, I am not blind, I see the world – what extraordinary happiness! I see this day, and outside it there is nothing. Who could take that away from me? And when this day fades, I will fade along with it – a thought, a certainty, that enraptures me.
Seeing can be as desirable or undesirable as blindness. Getting to vision, truth, knowledge and light isn’t univocally beatific, one might get hurt in the process. The maddening moment, the angst when we are driven out of Plato’s cave of illusion and are exposed to the blinding light of seeing reality. Unfortunately there is no way back into the comfort of familiar darkness and shadows. Or like Goethe in Thomas Mann’s
Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns wonders, could it be that the brightest light is composed of darknesses, could it be that dear love is composed of nothing but impurities, that Newton after all was right stating there is nothing darker than light?
The worst thing was the sudden, shocking cruelty or the day; I could not look, but I could not help looking. To see was terrifying, ad to stop seeing tore me apart from my forehead to my throat.
Blanchot wished each of his literary works to be an enigma, to himself and to his readers. In the nightmare and angst Blanchot’s paragon Kafka is never far away, in reading nor in writing. ’Fear is your only master. If you think you no longer fear anything, there’s no point in reading. But it's when your throat is constricted with fear that you will learn to speak.’ Ultimately Blanchot refuses storytelling in the sense ordinary mortals might understand this concept. I would prefer not to? ’A story? No. No stories, never again.’
This circular (non?) story can be read in English
here. The lithographies are from the Dutch artist Bram van Velde (1895-1981), created to illustrate the 1973 Fata Morgana edition of La folie du jour. -
''There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.''
-Samuel Beckett
It is one of the most challenging books to review I’ve come across, for what is there to write about, what is to there write with, what is there to write for, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day of that madness that consists in writing; to write beyond what is perceptible, is not merely 'to write' in the usual sense of the word, but to write beyond the surface to convey something it may unfold by the patterns that require careful study rather than casual scrutiny. What a does a word implicitly mean when we write it down, when you say Tree, does it really mean tree or it may signify a lot many things. Does the word is bound by an unseen string to what it signifies- the signifier or it exists independent of the signifier. An idea arises from negation of physical reality of a thing, for an idea is abstract which does not need anything to signify it. The annihilation of physical reality of a thing from its existence is quintessential for literature. Literature becomes possible where words take on a strange and mysterious reality of their own, where they acquire existence of their own- existence which doesn't require any priori to bring itself up-and where also meaning and reference remain allusive and ambiguous. The marvelous fiction of Blanchot marked by the power of language is to destroy those elements of reality it ostensibly labors to reveal.
Blanchot questions the binary opposites, such as life and death, which are proposed by Structuralism, and that each event must be explored individually and then its relationship to related term and that there is no hierarchy, as in case of idea of binary opposites propagated by Structuralism. His approach is certainly towards post structuralism but beyond the concepts (différance) of popular Post- Structuralists such as Derrida and Deleuze. Even though he does not proposes any systematic philosophical theory of his own however, his thought remains strictly irreducible to any of these categories, insofar as it resists enclosure, and responds ceaselessly to the demand of bearing witness to that which is timeless, nameless, and radically other. The tussle, between the functioning of a system—be it philosophical, political, textual—and its anarchic, unrepresentative, outside, is a commonly recurring trope within Blanchot’s writings as we witness in The Madness of the Day too. To insist, that is, on the text's artificiality, its non communicative, intransitive nature and on the poetics of its language as its true content. The problems such a theory awakens admit of no answer. And such problems have not been addressed so relentlessly and effortlessly as done by Blanchot. The writer, as Mr. Blanchot says, ''finds himself, only realizes himself, through his work; before his work exists, not only does he not know who he is, but he is nothing.''
Behind their backs I saw the silhouette of the law. Not the law everyone knows, which is severe and hardly very agreeable; this law was different. Far from falling prey to her menace, I was the one who seemed to terrify her. According to her, my glance was a bolt of lightning and my hands were motives for perishing. What's more, the law absurdly credited me with all powers; she declared herself, perpetually on her knees before me. But she did not let me ask anything and when she had recognized my right to be everywhere, it meant I had no place anywhere. When she set me above the authorities, it meant, You are not authorized to do anything. If she humbled herself, You don't respect me.
Though it may look impossible at onset to delve deep down the mysteries mix of Blanchot’s universe, for it may look clear and innocuous from above but one has to take deep plunge into it to understand it or rather to experience it, for what is there to be understood, but still there are some jewels of Blanchot which may be found by someone who is ready to sacrifice conventional hope of narrative and prose. Death is the most shimmering of those jewels which one may found in Blanchot’s world, for he famously said that Death cannot be experience, rather attempting to make Death the subject of an imaginary projection, or attempting a phenomenological reconstruction of dying, Blanchot writes the experience of the impossibility of the experience of death which is a matter of chance and indeterminate. The ways in which eventuality may not occur or at least cannot be experienced, one may observe that the narrator of the story come out like all every other men, in fact he is everyman. And if the true event is chance, writing the event, clearly, will be equivalent to exploring the indeterminacy. Blanchot raises the prospect that writing itself is an event and so is subject to indeterminacy. Therefore, his writing presupposes that nothing exist prior to it; this is the deepest sense of notion of the solitude and the autonomy of writing.
I would rid myself of myself. I distributed my blood, my innermost being among them, lent them the universe, gave them the day. Right before their eyes, though they were not at all startles, I became a drop of water, a spot of ink. I reduced myself to them. The whole presence of me passed in full view before them, and when at last nothing was present but my perfect nothingness and there was nothing more to see, they ceased to see me too.
Blanchot's writings may come across as odd or as if nothing is moving to naïve reader or in first encounter, for he is to be read again to read what has to be read again. He investigates the absolute responsibility the writer has to language. His works locate a narrative voice that ruminates upon subtle encounters too evanescent to be understood, a voice that shuns the very idea of understanding. They are works in which motivation and psychology give way to the soiled purity and sturdy frailty of language. We understand that to speak is to control that which is spoken of; Mr. Blanchot's entire occupation has been to call this glibness into question. He has shown us that the void writing creates between itself and the world can never be filled adequately; the writer's hope to tell a story is futile. What is point of then affixing greatness to some pieces of literature, perhaps since this void is, infinitely and mysteriously, the only space in which literature can exist, the space where the cat is not and never will be a cat.
I am not learned; I am not ignorant. I have known joys. That is saying too little: I am alive, and this life gives me the greatest pleasure. And what about death? When I die (perhaps any minute now), I will feel immense pleasure. I am not talking about the foretaste of death, which his stale and often disagreeable. Suffering dulls the senses. But this is the remarkable truth, and I am sure of it: I experience boundless pleasure in living, and I will take boundless satisfaction in dying.
This is the third book I read by Blanchot after Thomas the Obscure, Death Sentence and all these are great manifestations of Post-modernism where the subjects of the stories are ontological in nature- about being itself, and to create fiction, which ontologically discovers itself in negation of itself, endless search about various possibilities in a story, of the story itself (which consists of various fragments which may ordered as the reader may please- which implies to give the reader greatest range of possibility), is something extraordinary and which only a few have been able to achieve.
I had no enemies. No one bothered me. Sometimes a vast solitude opened in my head and the entire world disappeared inside it, but came out again intact, without a scratch, with nothing missing.
4.5/5
*revised on 14.02.2020 -
This is NOT a pleasant story. I'm fact, it's devastating. But it won't take you long to read it, if you don't have a weak heart, and you DO have a mind to read it.
Caveat lector, though.
What's commonly called madness can be trauma-induced. It was for young Maurice, squirming under an iron Nazi heel. And it was for me, plunged into climacteric trauma in my wide-eyed innocence. And the psychological damage to innocents in a war zone is of a profound, untold immensity.
War zones can be anywhere. In a distant country or in the dark passageways of a kid's heart. Anywhere.
When Blanchot, still a kid at heart like me, with highminded and ironclad scruples, walked into a taunting sort of ambush put on by leering Nazi goons - they staged a mock execution.
As a sorta joke.
A dirty laundry problem, coupled with a direfully soiled ingenuous tabula rasa of a mind - with the painful afteraffect of non-stop 3D waking nightmares - landed him in a wartime hospital in his occupied country, France.
This story details his horrifically reductionist experiences there. Remember, the draconian docs were all Vichy French - as Samuel Beckett's scarred memories attest, for he too was their victim, according to the late Deirdre Bair. So natch, Heaven has likely pardoned his paranoia.
It was Brutal.
And the aftershock was horrendous. Blanchot could no longer reconnect the dots of either his memories or his logic.
He was a ruin, like Beckett, upon his release. Shades of The Painted Bird!
It's reflected in his immense oeuvre.
Here was a man who had now to suddenly befriend his brain's brutally blank nothingness, for there remained no other option.
From meticulously crafted literary criticism to surrealistically haunting "fiction" - as witness this story - his output seems absurdly cool.
But as General Sherman said, war is hell.
So it is with inner, psychological wars -
In an outwardly nondescript man.
He could have been a guy like your neighbour!
And no other story I know is so Representative of this Untold Hell of official Psychological Warfare. -
La Folie du jour, 1973 = The Madness of the Day, Maurice Blanchot
The Madness of the Day that it is "a story whose title runs wild and drives the reader mad. La Folie du Jour, the madness of today, of the day today, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day itself, itself mad... La folie du jour is a story of madness, of that madness that consists in seeing the light, vision or visibility, to see beyond what is visible, is not merely 'to have a vision' in the usual sense of the word, but to see-beyond-sight, to see-sight-beyond-sight... The story obscures the sun.with a blinding light."
تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز یازدهم ماه سپتامبر سال 2007 میلادی
عنوان : جنون روز؛ نویسنده موریس بلانشو؛ مترجم: پرهام شهرجردی؛ تهران، ویستار، 1385؛ در 56 ص؛ شابک: 9789645507648؛
ا. شربیانی -
Uma narrativa? Não. Nada de narrativa. Nunca mais.
Tem qualquer coisa de Bartleby este protagonista de Maurice Blanchot, um escritor que se recusa a contar o que quer que seja sobre um ataque que o deixou quase cego...
Escute, você é um homem instruído, sabe que o silêncio atrai a atenção. A sua mudez está a traí-lo de forma mais insensata. Respondia-lhes: “Mas o meu silêncio é verdadeiro. Se o ocultasse, vocês descobri-lo-iam um pouco mais adiante.”
...que se recusa a reagir...
Eu perguntava: Porquê estes sermões? É o meu espaço que roubo? Fiquem com ele.
...se recusa a criar laços...
Sou egoísta? Só alguns me imputam sentimentos, não sinto pena de ninguém, raramente desejo agradar, raramente desejo que me agradem.
...que se recusa a ambicionar mais do que aquilo que a vida lhe dá...
A minha infância desapareceu, a juventude ficou nas estradas que percorri. Não importa. Alegro-me com o que se passou, agrada-me o que é, o que há-de vir ser-me-á suficiente. Será a minha vida melhor do que a de todos os outros? Talvez. Tenho um tecto sobre a cabeça e muitos não. Não tenho lepra, não sou cego, vejo o mundo – que felicidade extraordinária! Contemplo este dia e para além dele não existe nada. Quem poderá roubar-me isto?
“A Loucura do Dia” é também um livro que se alicerça em paradoxos constantes...
O pior foi a brusca e chocante crueldade do dia – não podia olhar nem deixar de olhar. Ver era aterrador, deixar de ver dilacerava-me da testa à garganta.
São cerca de 50 páginas com mais espaço em branco do que texto, mas com uma profusão de ideias que nos fazem deter, reler, recuar e digerir.
Por vezes criava-se uma vasta solidão na minha cabeça onde o mundo inteiro desaparecia, voltando a sair intacto, sem um arranhão, sem nada em falta. -
I was wasting away from living behind curtains in dark glasses. I wanted to see something in full daylight; I was sated with the pleasure and comfort of the half light; I had the same desire for the daylight as for water and air. And if seeing was fire, I required the plenitude of fire, and if seeing would infect me with madness, I madly wanted that madness.
Does anyone else get that feeling when someone is telling you about themselves? You could split off into two people, one who follows and another stays behind. "I am This. This is who I am." They are talking about what happiness must be like. It is the day and all the other days things are handed down to people who are in the right place at the right time. They are talking about how things will be. If part of you stands still you might see what they can't see (I really want to mean what it feels like if it is still living, uncertain). I had that feeling of multiple selves following him. Against the wall, into where there is behind doors and gesturing over heads. A madman, he will say. I was once this. That used to be me, in a crowd. Voices say nod, yes you are that. I was once a happy person. Follow me into falling in the rabbit hole of the invisible cracks in the walls. Sidewalks and breaking backs for those you don't notice. Voices go this is what you tell about yourself. A blinded man, sinking. Break off and go behind "This is what should have happened" justice. Be silent and split off into doctors and there are so many kind of doctors to say what is wrong with you. I think of so many things at once when people speak about themselves. I had all of these thinking at once about what happens to a man when he's fallen. The thing about The Madness of the Day for me was this. Do you stay silent when you fall or do you fade away like must be millions of other people no one ever hears?
I had this feeling about myself when I was briefly envious of the newly blinded man getting his telephone answering job in the institution. That was before there were the cracks big enough to hold all of the other sick people. Go down the street and there will be more.
I had the right kind of feeling when Justice perches on his shoulders and there are possible angels for what should happen. What it looks like when people talk about themselves and you could see what really happened. It doesn't matter what will happen, if it is true or not. People are not selling you anything when they list off all of their attributes and keys to life. What it feels like against the wall is you (him) are trying to be in place long enough for some clarity. I had that feeling. (I write that over and over again on goodreads. I feel sick at trying to sound smart. That would be fraudulent on my part. I don't live on much more than half thoughts and twinges of feeling. My mental limbs quivering and misery of my ever stupidity. The Madness of the Day was affecting to me. I didn't want to not review it because it is too big for me to know what really happens to someone else. I never talk to anyone anymore because I feel blah blah blah all of the time. I didn't feel blah blah blah. I felt this sick twisting of stuck in clarity I'll never have. Human to human stuff or person to person, though none of it is ever real.)I see this day, and outside it there is nothing. Who could take that away from me? And when this day fades, I will fade along with it—a thought, a certainty, that enraptures me. I have loved people. I have lost them. I went mad when that blow struck me, because it is hell. But there was no witness to my madness, my frenzy was not evident: only my innermost being was mad. Sometimes I became enraged. People would say to me, Why are you so calm? But I was scorched from head to foot; at night I would run through the streets and howl; during the day I would work calmly.
-
"یک حکایت؟ نه. حکایتی نیست. دیگر هیچ وقت."
داستانی نیست. بریدههای گنگی از خاطرات که در پایان به آغاز میپیوندد و در دایرهای ابدی تکرار میشود. -
آنچه پیش میآید مطلوب من است.
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«این ناممکن بودن روایت (بعد از آشویتس شعر گفتن) سرنوشت استتیکیست که آشویتس به بلانشو تحمیل میکند. این تنها شکل اعتراف بلانشوست.»
یک حکایت؟ نه حکایتی نیست. دیگر هیچوقت. -
آیا خودخواهم؟ به کسی جز چند نفر احساسی ندارم، ترحم برای هیچ کس، به ندرت مایلم خوشایند کسی باشم، به ندرت مایلم کسی خوشایند من باشد، و من،کم و بیش برای خودم بی احساس، فقط در آنهاست که درد می کشم، بطوری که کمترین ناراحتی شان برایم درد بی پایانی می شود و با این همه، اگر لازم باشد، با طمأنینه قربانی شان میکنم، هر حس خوشبختی از آن ها میگیرم (برایم پیش می آید که آنها را بکشم.)
"از متن کتاب" -
Madness of the Day demands to be watched, but then, I would think that. I first came upon it at La Mama, a theatre I’m ashamed to say I’d never been to before the beginning of this year. Mystified too – how on earth could I have spent 15 years living in Melbourne going to the theatre with the fervour of a fanatic and be writing this now?
It was the experience of seeing it performed – soliloquies, one-man shows, how I love them – that made me come back to Geneva and buy the English translation. The haziness of the experience of reading it and recognising chunks of it, but not sure if it was all as in the show, not least because it was over 40C in the shade the night we saw it, made me write to La Mama and ask.
I received back a detailed reply from the director, Laurence Strangio:
http://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpres... -
Video review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKYS1... -
انقدر جمله هاي كتاب خوب بود كه دلم نمي اومد قسمتي شو حذف كنم براي توضيح،ولي خب چاره چيه؟
نه فاضل ام نه جاهل. خوشي هايي داشته ام.
پرسه زده ام. از جايي به جايي رفته ام. ساكن، در اتاقي تنها سر كرده ام. فقير بودم، بعد غني تر شدم، و بعد فقيرتر از خيلي ها.
سرپناهي دارم، خيلي ها ندارند. جذام ندارم، كور نيستم، دنيا را مي بينم، چه خوش بختي فوق العاده اي.
كساني را دوست داشتم، از دست شان دادم. وقتي اين ضربه به من وارد شد ديوانه شدم، چون عين جهنم است. اما ديوانگي ام بي شاهد ماند، سرگرداني ام ظاهر نمي شد، فقط باطن ام ديوانه بود. گاهي به خشم مي آمدم. به من مي گفتند: چرا انقدر آرام ايد؟ حال آنكه از سر تا پا سوخته بودم. شب در كوچه ها مي دويدم، نعره مي كشيدم، روز به آرامي كار مي كردم.
شديدن توصيه مي كنم بخونيدش! -
با بیانی شاعرانه و با بهره گیری از ایجازی بی نظیر، مفاهیم ذهن بلانشو روی صفحه ی کاغذ منتقل شده بود.و در عین حال به طرز عجیبی انگار فقط یک جمله بود. فقط یک جمله ی طولانی.
کتاب زیبایی بود. بارها باید بخوانمش تا کلمه به کلمه اش در ذهنم حک شود. -
«کلیّت» چیز خوبیست. این اثر کلیّت نداشت.
-
“The Madness of the Day” is a very fragmented and obscure piece of text. On the surface this English translation uses very simple language, but it is so hard to fully comprehend. I could not draw out any logical meaning during my first read. However, after a couple of re-reads, I discovered Blanchot’s usage of fitting but striking symbolism.
The protagonist of the story talks about death, happiness, misery, knowledge, riches and poverty among many other things in his life. He finds it hard to come to terms with the harsh madness of the world outside. He is a delirious man who is fishing through the chasms of life.
The story is full of abstract thoughts and as a reader one is presented with multiple paradoxes. The best part however is that this challenging read is very short. So, one can take liberties in re-engaging any time. -
"به نظرم میآمد که خیلی میبازم."
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" They said to me (sometimes it was the doctor, sometimes the nurses), "You're an educated man, you have talents; by not using abilities which, if they were divided among ten people who lack them, would allow them to live, you are depriving them of what they don't have, and your poverty, which could be avoided, is an insult to their needs." I asked, "Why these lectures? Am I stealing my own place? Take it back from me." I felt I was surrounded by unjust thoughts and spiteful reasoning. And who were they setting against me? An invisible learning that no one could prove and that I myself searched for without success. I was an educated man! But perhaps not all the time. Talented? Where were these talents that were made to speak like gowned judges sitting on benches, ready to condemn me day and night."
-
The madness of the day is the night seeping through the light that distinguishes the day from the night; the twilight of conciousness which moves between madness and sanity, which is both human and yet beyond.
"No stories, never again." For this story is a black hole within itself, eating itself in the telling, bathing itself further in the light of the day which is but madness. The madness of the day, the snake eating its tail, the eternal recurrence, the story ever telling itself by saying nothing besides itself, i.e. nothing. -
A review? No. No reviews, never again.
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چند ترجمه از اين كتاب ديدم و هنوز فكر ميكنم بشود ترجمه اش كرد ولي همينها هم به تقريب خوبي براي ديدن شيوه كار بلانشو كفايت ميكند و بدعت و غرابت اين كار آشكارست
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I had to acknowledge that I was not capable of forming an account out of these events. I had lost the sense of history; that happens in a good many illnesses. But this explanation only made them more insistent. Then I noticed for the first time that there were two of them and that this distortion of the traditional method, even though it was explained by the fact that one of them was an eye doctor, the other a specialist in mental illness, constantly gave our conversation the character of an authoritarian interrogation, overseen and controlled by a strict set of rules. Of course, neither of them was the chief of police. But because there were two of them, there were three, and this third remained firmly convinced, I am sure, that a writer, a man who speaks and who reasons with distinction, is always capable of recounting the facts that he remembers.
An account? No. No accounts, never again.
Maurice Blanchot. -
«همه اینها واقعی بود. یادتان باشد».
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uh trying to make sense of this..help
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Actual rating: 4.5
I was so confused about what this was, but it was really good, it seemed like a decadent version of something.
So good, a quick read that leaves you with a lot of questions. -
Voor de geïnteresseerden:
https://archive.org/details/WaanzinVa... -
Já este é completamente mulher, mesmo sendo um homem a escrevê-lo.
Por isso mesmo é perfeito. -
! وزنهی نام ها دلیل بر کیفیت کارها نیست
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E' un librino pieno di echi che ho già ritrovato in altri scritti seguenti. A volte i maestri hanno bisogno di voci altre e altre penne, ma la loro lettura non cambia anzi si potenzia, perché sempre suscitano questi piccoli e dettagliati momenti di scrittura piena e meravigliosa.
Aggrotto le sopracciglia e sorrido, il mio capo annuisce e il mio cuore si apre a ciò che sento vero e reale: un giardino chiuso da alte mura, alberi e panchine dove sedersi a guardare il cielo, ogni giorno della propria reclusione, non capisco bene dove, a osservare il flusso interiore dei propri pensieri ché se non lo facessimo sì, sarebbe folle. Due poesie e poi lo scritto del curatore, interessante sempre a spiegare come la lettura di questo particolare autore non è spiegabile, sempre aperta, sempre in evoluzione grazie al lettore e a quel cielo tra le fronde di quel giardino. -
Something profound might be going on here, but I don't know what it is.
