Into Disaster

“Everyone seriously interested in the history of French literature and of French intellectual life in general during the 20th century will find a great deal to think about in these book reviews, regularly composed by Maurice Blanchot at the major turning point in his own life, when his defeated country lost its bearings altogether and no one could feel confident about the value of cultural traditions or the purpose of thinking and writing. How to survive this disaster, interpret it, use it? Michael Holland's instructive introduction to this collection, and his excellent translations provide not only additional material on which to base an appraisal of Blanchot's political and literary itinerary, but also a remarkable contribution to the picture still coming into focus of the French disaster in the 1940s --of the various reconnoiterings, compromises, conversions, commitments that would color French letters well into the second half of the twentieth century.”---—Ann Smock, University of California, Berkeley
“. . .an extraordinarily diverse and colourful series of critical essays, in which works of lasting quality and significance sit alongside others which have been justifiably forgotten, and where friendship and loyalty toward those who share Blanchot’s ideals play a decisive role in shaping his attention and his choices. Though given piquancy by the sometimes haughty verve always present in them to some degree, the articles also celebrate in sometimes ecstatic tones the pure joy and consolation that literature can bring.”---—Michael Holland, from the Introduction
What did Blanchot do, as a writer, during World War II? If this was a time of 'withdrawal,' as is often said, it was not a time of silence. The critical reflections and book reviews collected here reveal a writer in crisis who found it imperative to call on the public to read, and to think. In doing so, he continued to write in one of the only ways he knew how: by traversing a contemporary literary landscape shaped by war, conflict and defeat. This position is marked by compromise, to be sure. At the same time, Into Disaster resounds with a critical voice caught up in the urgency of literature experienced as the urgency of an unfolding history, and as one response to a moment in which no easy or adequate response was possible. These brief essays are tensed by the forces that wrought them.---—Jeff Fort, University of California, Davis
Michael Holland has brought a most valuable set of essays into English, masterfully providing new resources for approaching the emergence of what will become one of the most important literary voices of the post-war period. Into Disaster presents a thought obscurely defined by circumstances and separating from them in ways that are, in varying measure, problematic, enigmatic, and decisive. These efforts to uphold the exigencies of literature in uncertain hours provide a gripping reading experience.---—Christopher Fynsk, University of Aberdeen
Maurice Blanchot has remained our essential contemporary, and the best literary educator ever, because he is always thinking 'absolutely' while addressing the most burning issues of war-time France like terror, fascism and the degradation of humanity.---—Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania