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Books Like Thomas l'Obscur by Maurice Blanchot
The novel as absolute limit — prose that undoes its own claim to be narrative
Blanchot's 1941/1950 prose work — Thomas swims, reads, exists, but each action approaches the impossible point where language dissolves into what it cannot say; one of the founding texts of poststructuralist literature alongside Beckett's Molloy.
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Buy on AmazonAminadab
by Maurice Blanchot
Blanchot's second novel (1942) — the same radical uncertainty applied to a Kafka-esque bureaucratic setting; reading Thomas and Aminadab together gives the full picture of Blanchot's narrative project in the 1940s.
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Buy on AmazonL'Espace littéraire
by Maurice Blanchot
The critical essays (1955) that develop in explicit theoretical terms the concepts Thomas l'Obscur enacts — the relationship between writing and death, the Orpheus myth, the work as the absence of the work; the most important context for reading Thomas.
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Buy on AmazonMolloy
by Samuel Beckett
The most important parallel text (1951) — Beckett and Blanchot independently arrived at the novel as the impossibility of narrative at almost the same moment; reading Thomas l'Obscur alongside Molloy gives the range of what the postwar French novel could do at the limit of language.
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Buy on AmazonL'Innommable
by Samuel Beckett
Beckett's third novel (The Unnamable, 1953) is the most extreme companion to Thomas l'Obscur — both texts approach the point where the first person dissolves into the impossibility of being or speaking; comparing them gives the two paths through the same philosophical limit.
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Buy on AmazonLa Part du feu
by Maurice Blanchot
Blanchot's first major critical collection (1949) includes 'La littérature et le droit à la mort' — the essay that gives the most direct theoretical account of what Thomas l'Obscur is doing; essential reading alongside or immediately after the novel.
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Buy on AmazonLes Chants de Maldoror
by Comte de Lautréamont
Lautréamont is the major precursor — the hallucinatory dissolution of the boundaries of the self in Maldoror is the nineteenth-century ancestor of what Blanchot is doing; the tradition from Lautréamont through Bataille and Blanchot is the dark counter-tradition of French fiction.
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Buy on AmazonNausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre's 1938 existentialist novel is the closest contemporary parallel — Roquentin's experience of the contingency of existence has the same quality of the world failing to sustain its own consistency; but where Sartre's phenomenological investigation leads to existentialist conclusions, Blanchot's leads to the impossibility of any conclusion.
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Buy on AmazonLe Très-Haut
by Maurice Blanchot
Blanchot's third novel (The Most High, 1948) — the most politically engaged of his fictions, set in a dystopian bureaucratic state during an epidemic; read after Thomas l'Obscur and Aminadab for the full picture of Blanchot's fictional world.
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