The Pain of Dialogue - Blanchot

It is a matter of dialogue. How rare dialogue is; we realize this by the surprise it makes us feel, bringing us into the presence of an unusual event, almost more painful than remarkable. In novels, the "dialogued" part is the expression of laziness and routine: the characters speak to put white spaces on a page and out of an imitation of life, where there is no narration, only conversation; from time to time one must give speech to people in books; the direct contact is an economy and a repose (for the author more than for the reader). Or, the "dialogue", under the influence of some American writers, can be wrought of an expressive incommunicativeness: more threadbare than in reality, a little below the meaningless speech that suffice for us in current life. When someone speaks , it is his refusal to speak that becomes obvious; his discourse is his silence: closed, violent, saying nothing but himself, his abrupt massiveness, his desire to emit words rather than to speak. Or simply, as happens in Hemingway, this exquisite way of expressing himself a little below zero is a ruse to make us believe in some high degree of life, emotion, or thought, an honest and classic ruse that often succeeds and to which Hemingway's melancholy talent given various resources.

The Book to Come, p. 151 (Stanford Uni. Press)

a past to come - Maurice Blanchot

"All our writing - for everyone and if it were ever writing of everyone - would be this: the anxious search for what was never written in the present, but in a past to come."

Maurice Blanchot on Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities' (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften)

The man without particularities, who does not want to recognise himself in the person he is, for whom all the traits that particularise him make him nothing in particular, never close to what is closest to him, never foreign to what is exterior to him, chooses to be this way because of an ideal of freedom, but also because he lives in a world - the modern world, our world - in which particular deeds are always about to be lost in the impersonal conjuncture of relationship, of which they mark only the temporary intersection. In the world, the world of great cities and great collective masses, it is immaterial whether something has truly taken place and in what historical event we suppose ourselves to be actors and witnesses.

'Musil', The Book to Come, Maurice Blanchot, p.138