Abstract

Writing and that which it entails are the subject of countless texts by Maurice Blanchot. In particular, Blanchot has focused on the notion of the work, or more precisely on a groundlessness or an absence of the work, which he has designated from different perspectives over the course of more than half a century. In various ways, Blanchot has conceived of the work as an affirmation of its undoing. The question of narration, often about a confrontation with death, is fundamentally important, as is evident for example in Blanchot’s Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day or The Instant of My Death. In a sense, it is bound up with the possibility of the work. Writing about Henry James in “The Turn of the Screw” 2 in The Book to Come, Blanchot discusses narration. What is described is indeed a certain absence of the work relating to the writer’s difficult struggle to narrate everything. I will examine Blanchot’s reading of James to expose this conception of narration centred on seizing the truth. It is apparent that Blanchot approaches the question very differently in “Narrative Voice ,” in The Infinite Conversation in which there is a decentring of the work. 3 I will show that this text as well as certain writings by Derrida make it possible to arrive at a conception of narration in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw which strongly contrasts with the one put forward by Blanchot in The Book to Come. Thus, alongside Blanchot’s reading of The Turn of the Screw which relates to the project of realising the work as a totality, Blanchot makes possible a more radical approach to the text, illustrating the non-totalization of the work whose borders are uncertain. In this way, Blanchot can be shown to step beyond an impossible conception of the absence of the work