ABSTRACT
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has always been a staple of western European culture, a thematic and symbolic resource for writers, craftsmen, and artists in every age and genre. Orpheus’ search for reparation, beginning from the sense of an irreparable loss at the surface of things, echoes the human drama in a civilisation whose validating rituals have been drained of power. For Maurice Blanchot, the twentieth-century French literary theorist, novelist, and philosopher, myths can sometimes provide an allegorical starting point for thinking about the nature of literature. In Blanchot’s extraordinary essay The Gaze of Orpheus Eurydice is the animate cadaver which Orpheus pursues by means of the self-surpassing magic of his song. Blanchot is saying, at this infinitely estranging and disabling moment, the artist who has had the courage to risk everything might discover a further kind of authenticity, one no longer pre-given in the mode of utterance.
