Communication through interruption: The dislocated conversation of writing and reading (Franz Kafka, Austria, Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, Louis-Rene Des Forets, Nathalie Sarraute, Maurice Blanchot, France)

Maurice Blanchot employs the concept of interruption to characterize the role of discontinuity in conversation, and in the literary work. For Blanchot, interruption both aids in understanding by allowing for the necessary pauses and intervals that define the boundaries of words and thoughts, and it also disrupts continuity by emphasizing the infinite interval separating the two parts of an exchange---speaker and listener, writer and reader, writing and the origin from which it arises. One of the most important ideas that comes out of this analysis of interruption concerns the distinction of the book and the work. In The Space of Literature , Blanchot writes, "The writer belongs to the work, but what belongs to him is only a book, a mute collection of sterile words, the most insignificant thing in the world" (23). While the writer's task involves a sort of passive listening to the incessant murmur of the infinite work, she or he must in a sense betray the most essential quality of the work---its infinite recession into nothingness---by bringing the work to expression within the material and linguistic confines of the book. In spite of this necessary failure on the part of writing, the book, for the reader, remains the site where she or he may gain a sort of access to the work. Thus, the book becomes a means of impossible exchange between writing and reading---an exchange based upon the interruption of the work's infinite recession. I develop a reading of Blanchot's continual reference to the Orphic myth throughout his work as a way of considering the impossible communication of literature. After a preliminary chapter dedicated to an analysis of the Blanchotian theoretical perspective that informs my dissertation, I focus upon the notion of communication through interruption as a way of reading five short fiction texts. Franz Kafka's "The Burrow," Jorge Luis Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths," Louis-Rene Des Forets's The Bavard, Nathalie Sarraute's Tropisms, and Blanchot's L'arret de mort all address the supposed outer limits of the text, meditating upon the interrupting function of textual space in regards to the infinite movement of the work. In addition, they focus on the interaction and communication of writing and reading within, and infinitely outside of, the text that serves as their site of exchange. Kafka's narrator obsesses over the outer surroundings of his burrow, which propels him to keep digging, Borges proposes the possibility of unwritten narratives beyond the material space of the text, Des Forets focuses upon the infinite quality of empty chatter, Sarraute "says" as little as possible by bringing attention to the profound "emptiness" of the text itself and the characters within, and Blanchot demonstrates the Orphic circularity of writing and reading as it erases the boundaries which create order and definition in the text. In his or her own unique fashion, each writer meditates upon the limiting factors of textual space and seems to search for a certain blankness which defies containment. This blankness provides the interval within which literary communication functions. When reading these texts through Blanchot's theoretical perspective, we can see the way that these contemporary writers turn away from the concrete, the meaningful, the significant, in favor of a much less secure grounding that defies spatial, temporal, and cognitive limitations.