期刊名称：Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature
印刷版ISSN：1447-8986
电子版ISSN：1833-6027
出版年度：2006
卷号：5
页码：11-24
出版社：Association for the Study of Australian Literature
摘要：Franz Kafka asserted that ¡°writing is an observation which is also an act¡±
(qtd. in Blanchot, Space of Literature 73). All our forms of writing and text
contribute to cultural meaning-making: the counterfactual virtuality of the
novel, the charged concision of the poem, the modest, perhaps halting,
confessions of an oral tale¡ªthese resource us as profoundly as theoretical
disquisition and philosophical inquiry. Maurice Blanchot, commenting on
Kafka, suggests that the belief that writing is an observation which is also
an act is a form of confidence, almost metaphysical confidence, in the face of
bureaucratic phantasms and desolating injustice. It is, in Blanchot¡¯s words,
¡°fidelity to the work¡¯s demands, the demands of grief ¡± (Space 75). There
is a solemnity to this statement that is very compelling: it suggests that
all writing, in a sense, is an assertion against loss, a wish to commit to the
figure, or figuration, what seems otherwise assigned to wordless compliance
or surrender. Yet the work¡¯s demand here implicates or assumes a kind of
redemptive drive, a promise of reparation within words themselves. I hope
modestly to affirm this promise by the end of my paper.
