ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines Maurice Blanchot's understanding of the relationship of literature to sacred text before using this to unpack the motifs of blank and withdrawn books in Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable and Amin Maalouf's Le Periple de Baldassare respectively. The motif of the absent book in both novels acts as an expression for the desire to distance fixed and prescriptive inscriptions of the divine, and to replace these with more personalized idioms. In 'L'Absence de livre' ('The Absence of the Book'), Blanchot moves on to a more explicit connection between the idea of a withdrawn book and sacred scripture. Blanchot is interested in the fact that the Torah is believed to have existed in written form, before an oral transmission, which is then reinscribed, suggesting that nothing precedes the written word. The approach is evocative of Blanchot's understanding of sacred text as the originator of all poetic expression.
