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Maurice BLANCHOT

Les romans de Sartre. Manuscrit autographe

1945, 19 pages 1/2 in-8.

Autograph manuscript of the author of 19 pages and a half in-8 published in the October issue (No. 10) of L'Arche
Complete two-sided manuscript, very dense writing, with many erasures, corrections and additions.

Since the 1930s, Maurice Blanchot regularly devotes articles to Jean-Paul Sartre and especially to his novels. The publication of the first two volumes of the trilogy The paths of freedom was to give rise to the almost simultaneous publication of a rather short chronicle in Dimanche paysage (No. 19, October 21, 1945) and this large study, entitled "The Novels of Sartre ". This one, which goes beyond the circumscribed frame of the literary news, intends to analyze what makes the specificity of these works, namely the use of the "thesis": "One can wonder why the thesis novel has bad reputation" . Grievances seem as numerous on the side of the thesis as on the side of the novel; the theoretical affirmation complains of the adventure to which it is committed and from which it derives an additional truth. [ ... ] In a novel of this kind, we reproach the characters for being lifeless but it is "the idea" that is lifeless: it only looks like itself, it has only its own sense [ ... ] . "
Therefore, Blanchot salutes Sartre's meeting of exceptional philosophical as well as literary capacities, while underlining that it is also the fruit of his time: "It is true that fiction works are more and more besieged by theoretical aims and that theoretical works are more and more a call to problems that require a complete expression. Existentialists or not, novelists and philosophers pursue similar experiments and research [ ... ] . "
Moreover, he praises Sartre's ability to make his novels both an experience in itself and "the story of an experience" , an essential concept for Blanchot and which had emerged as one of the central themes of his first critical collection, False Pas (1943). And it is this same quality that he lends, by the way, to Simone de Beauvoir's Guest , a "remarkable work" .
Thus, at the end of a reflection which reveals the admiration of Blanchot for the Sartrean novel, and particularly for Nausea composed at the same time as his Thomas the Obscure , he concludes: "In short, could not it be possible not that the novel was much less the enemy of the thesis than it is said? "The manuscript, and multiple deletions and additions, then reflects the hesitation of Blanchot in formulating the end of his demonstration, yet clear in the finished text," This only: to respect the status of bad faith that is its morality, it to recognize a power of transformation, of crystallization by the transparency of discovery through exposure, which is its reality, and finally, having formed of its substance, existing only by its duration, to triumph by disappearing, according to the movement proper to art, to recover in affirmation and to fulfill itself in failure - which is its truth. "

The text will be repeated, with some corrections, in La Part du Feu (1949).

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