Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” contrasts the collective wisdom (counsel, Rat) once found in stories with the communicated information found in modern novels. Only at the end can a novel point beyond its limitations, namely, its lack of counsel, but the novel can only point. Of L’Education sentimentale’s ending, Benjamin writes: “The novelist… cannot hope to take the smallest step beyond the limit at which he invites the reader to a divinatory realization of the meaning of life by writing ‘Finis’” (page). 

Having no counsel about life, modern novels can proffer only the protagonist’s death, as if the novel’s invitation—‘Finis’—were always written on a dying character’s forehead: Benjamin again: “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” 

In Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying, one of the speakers in the dialogue, Vivian, hyperbolically praises the warmth a fictional death yields: “One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré. It is a grief from which I have never been able completely to rid myself. It haunts me in my moments of pleasure. I remember it when I laugh.” 

Can't really keep up this silly august academic tone. Though I don't have another.

Stoekel, in his intro to his translation of The Most High, writes as if Blanchot's novel is about the Sunday of life, the end of history--as if it were the novelization of Kojeve's reading of Hegel.--I'm sure I meant something by this, meant to go somewhere. It'll come back to me. 

I couldn't say, with Vivian, that the deaths of J in Death Sentence are among the greatest tragedies of my life. At least, not the way Vivian seems to mean it. Vivian goes on to say that Balzac created life, he did not copy it. But on the other hand, yes, those tendernesses in Death Sentence, the outbursts of anger, the struggle, my real fidelity to the quasi-fictional oath that comprises the suppressed ending of Death Sentence (the post-script about the task of the reader)--those haunt me. 

Me, too, Viv. Me too.