The Blank

[Dave Monroe]

>From Harold Bloom, The Breaking of the Vessels
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982), Ch. 3,
"Transumption," pp. 73-107 ...

   "The blank, being both the unwritten page and
unviewable void or abyss, would be for Freud the image
of primal repression, a defense prior to any dribve
against which we need to be defended.  For criticism,
the blank is the colorless all-color that is the white
light of the trope.  Melville called this atheism, by
which I think he meant atheism from a Gnostic stance,
the denial of the alien, true god, or the sense that
the invisible spheres had been formed in fright. 
Blank is the whiteness or blackness, with color
excluded either way.  Hence the pathos of Stevens'
Phosphor Reading by His Own Light:

It is difficult to read.  The page is dark.
Yet he knows what it is that he expects.

The page is blank or a frame without a glass
Or a glass that is empty when he looks.

   "This is close to the comic squalor of romancing
the etymon that Beckett explore in one of Endgame's
Sublime moments.  Hamm asks for his dog.  Clov hands
him a three-legged black toy dog.  Hamm feels and
fondles it and says: 'He's white, isn't he?', and Clov
replies: 'Nearly.'  Hamm, exasperated, demands to know
if the dog is white or not, and Clov says simply: 'He
isn't.'  The page of Phosphor is dark and blank,
Hamm's dog is black and blank, because black and blank
have the same root, bhel, to shine or flash, which
became in its various forms what Freud called
antithetical primal words.  The fire which burned to a
white flame and left a white mark left also a black
ash.  White and black, blank and flame, the
antithetical image of the poet Phosphor, reading by
his own evening star light, mocks Miltonic tradition
evean as Hamm and Clov carry that tradition into its
endgame.
   "The Miltonic tradition of the blank is complicated
by a famous passage in Areopagitica:

   That virtue therefore which but a youngling in the
contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that
vice promises to her followewrs, and rejects it, is
but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but
an excremental whiteness ..." (pp. 78-9)

Cf., e.g., ...

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/b.html#blicero

http://www.hyperarts.com/pynchon/gravity/alpha/w.html#weissmann

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