ABSTRACT
The essay by Maurice Blanchot was an early and highly influential piece of Beckett criticism in France, which made a distinctive departure from the dominant humanist mode. Beckett's prose is important to Blanchot because it transforms the role of 'external reader', capable of detached aesthetic sentiments, into that of 'victim'. Themes characteristic of Blanchot's writings on literature which appear in his discussion of the trilogy are the work's relation to its origin, the disappearance of the 'I', and neutrality. As Bruno Clement argues, the claim overlooks the numerous self-conscious references to failure in Beckett's prose fiction; in his comment that 'The Unnamable has more importance for literature than most 'successful' works in its canon'. Blanchot has misplaced the judgements of success and failure, even when the scare quotes around 'successful' are taken into account. In Blanchot's writing on Beckett, commentary and text are hard to distinguish, the former taking on the rhythms and syntax of the latter.
