The central interest of this article is in the problem of the ‘origin’ as it is aggravated in the work of Maurice Blanchot. In The Space of Literature Blanchot directs attention to the myth of Orpheus as he describes the condition of the modern writer, tormented by an impossible desire to reach behind language towards what it destroy in its very existence. I begin by looking at a work by Bertrand Marchal in which he argues, through an examination of Les Dieux antiques, a translation by Mallarmé of a book of Comparative Mythology, that the poet’s work can be understood as a revival of the primordial myth, underlying the mythologies of the Indo-European cultures. The archetypal myth is the eternal battle between light and dark, and Mallarmé’s work is understood as the site of the re-emergence of the repressed trauma of the disappearance of the sun at the end of each day. The myth of Orpheus is read here as a solar myth in which the sun, Orpheus, destroys the tender twilight, Eurydice, in his own radiance. I suggest that Blanchot’s reading of the Orpheus story as a solar myth (cf. the night/the other night, the day etc.) is drawn out of his own reading of Mallarmé and that the evocation of this myth is not simply illustrative but that it is essential to the paradoxical movement that Blanchot discovers in Mallarmé’s work, and which he ascribes to ‘Literature’ more generally as it is re-inscribed through his writings. The broader framework of the essay follows the archaeological tendency that awoke in the human sciences in the mid 19th Century into the more insistent interrogation of the ‘origin’ in the work of the latter 20th Century.