The Subject of Narration: Blanchot and Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

Writing and that which it entails are the subject of countless texts by Maurice Blanchot. In particular, Blanchot has focused on the notion of the work, or more precisely on a groundlessness or an absence of the work,which he has designated from different perspectives over the course of more than half a century. In various ways, Blanchot has conceived of the work as an affirmation of its undoing. The question of narration, often about a confrontation with death, is fundamentally important, as is evident for ex-ample in Blanchot’s Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day or The Instant of My Death. In a sense, it is bound up with the possibility of the work. Writing about Henry James in “The Turn of the Screw” in The Book to Come, Blanchot discusses narration.