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1 800 €

Réf : 83783

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Maurice BLANCHOT (Horace WALPOLE) & Paul ELUARD

Le roman noir - Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

S.n. [Journal des débats], s.l. (Paris) 1944, 13,5x21cm & 2 pages in-4 & 2 1/2 in-8, 2 pages 1/2 in-4.

Le roman noir - Complete autograph manuscript and typescript 
Autograph manuscript by Maurice Blanchot, 2 1/2 pages in-8, published in Journal des débats (March 30, 1944).
Complete manuscript written on both sides in very dense handwriting, with numerous words crossed out, corrections and additions. The article was published upon the reissue of Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto with a preface by poet Paul Eluard.  The complete typescript is enclosed.
The reissue by Editions José Corti of Walpole's Castle of Otranto, with a preface by Paul Eluard presented an opportunity for Maurice Blanchot to give his definition of the roman noir, which witnessed renewed interest namely thanks to Surrealism. “The roman noir is not to be simplistically confused as fantasy literature. While it makes room for the supernatural "de toute nature", its main aim is to stir the senses through the resources of terror. It draws it into a frenzied movement that leaves it no rest. It makes believe anything but happy endings and agreeable compromises, by means whose conventional nature increases its power still further. It's a methodical art aware of its own crudeness and often derives subtle and remarkable effects from it."
Blanchot continues with an almost political analysis of the roman noir - created in the days of pre-Revolutionary rationalism, and flourished in the aftermath of 1789, before declining during the Restoration. He concludes: "Horace Walpole is much more than a pioneer. With this very slim book, he truly appears as the author of thousands of works that grew out of him. With this very slim book (sic), he is the most prolific of writers".
Maurice Blanchot's fine text on Horace Walpole.
 
Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronique de la vie intellectuelle" column of the Journal des Débats.
In half a newspaper page (around seven in-8 pages) the young author of “Thomas l'obscur” took his first steps in the field of literary criticism, beginning a theoretical body of work that he would later develop in numerous essays, from "La Part du feu" to "L'Entretien infini" and "L'Écriture du désastre". From the very first articles, Blanchot demonstrates an acuity of analysis that goes far beyond mere literary news. Alternating between the classics and the moderns, first-rate writers and minor novelists, his chronicles lay the foundations for the critical thinking that was to mark the second half of the 20th-century.
Transformed by his writing and by the war, Blanchot abandoned the violent opinions influenced by Charles Maurras he had during his youth, in the course of his thinking “au nom de l'autre” [in the name of the other].
Paradoxically he transformed literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism, at the very heart of an "ouvertement Maréchaliste" [friendly to Maréchal Pétain] journal: "To burn a book, to write one, are the two acts in which culture inscribes its contrary oscillations" (“Le Livre”, Journal des Débats, January 20, 1943).
In 2007 Cahiers de la NRF issued every unpublished in volume literary chronicle with a pertinent analysis of Blanchot's critical work: "novels, poems, essays give rise to a singular reflection, ever surer of its own rhetoric, delivered more to the echo of the impossible or to the sirens of disappearance. (...) Not without contradictions or side-steps, and in the feverish certainty of a work in progress (...) these articles reveal the genealogy of a critic who transformed the occasion of the chronicle into the necessity of thought" (C. Bident).
Maurice Blanchot's autograph manuscripts are extremely rare.
 

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