Several years ago, we made a decisive encounter: that of Philippe Blanchot and his mother, Annick Blanchot, great-nephew and niece of the eminent intellectual, who have since become dear friends. Annick had carefully preserved and organized the manuscript archives that the writer had entrusted to his sister Marguerite. They placed these documents in our care, asking us to examine and enhance them — unaware at the time of their immense significance for Blanchot’s body of work.

This trust, and our work on the first manuscripts, led to another equally decisive encounter: that of Michael Holland, scholar and leading authority on the writings of Maurice Blanchot. It is largely thanks to the intellectual contribution of this new friend that we have been able, among other things, to write the following notice on Blanchot’s first novel — previously unknown and unpublished — miraculously preserved by Annick Blanchot.

The brief presentation below, as well as all the entries we have composed for the archives of Maurice Blanchot — now held at Harvard University's Houghton Library — is the result of a stimulating and enthusiastic collaboration between Annick and Philippe Blanchot, Le Feu Follet, and above all Michael Holland, to whom we owe the essential substance of the essay below (and whose full, exclusive study can be found in our Contributions section):

Maurice BLANCHOT
Manuscript and typescript of Thomas le Solitaire
1932–1940, 352 manuscript leaves written on rectos only (14 x 21 cm), with numerous autograph corrections and erasures, and 366 typewritten leaves on rectos only (21 x 27 cm) bearing extensive handwritten and typed corrections in red ink.

Exceptional and previously unknown unpublished manuscript and typescript of Maurice Blanchot’s first book, Thomas le Solitaire.

This novel predates the writing of Blanchot’s first published work, Thomas l’Obscur, and constitutes an earlier version of the story of Thomas — longer and narratively very different from the version that would appear in print in 1941 from Gallimard.

Undated, the manuscript nonetheless contains several references to contemporary events that allow us to date its composition to around 1934. It therefore corresponds to the novel evoked by his contemporaries: “We know that he is writing a first book. Kléber Haedens, who has glimpsed parts of it, tells me that Thomas l’Obscur will be a masterpiece” (À l’ombre des têtes molles, Pierre Monnier).

In reality, the novel on which Blanchot had been working since 1932 was not yet Thomas l’Obscur, but this earlier version — the existence of which had long been suspected in Blanchotian circles, though never confirmed. Since no one could say whether it bore any relation to Thomas l’Obscur, this mythical first novel was referred to under the near-identical title Le Solitaire.

“There is, for every work, an infinite number of possible variants.” This is how Maurice Blanchot introduced, in 1950, the revised version of Thomas l’Obscur.

But Thomas le Solitaire is much more than a “longer version” of Thomas l’Obscur. These “pages […] written from 1932 on” reached an initial state of completion. While they share a general structure and intent with the 1941 novel, they differ profoundly in both narrative and construction. Thomas le Solitaire is a fully realized work, as evidenced by the many corrections in the manuscript and the existence of a typescript — for Blanchot, the mark of a completed creation.
This first novel nonetheless bears witness to ongoing experiments with plot, narrative form, and style, filled with false starts and exploratory drafts that weigh various devices — some later retained in Thomas l’Obscur, others definitively abandoned.

If Thomas l’Obscur astonished its readers by its singularity — Claude Roy famously compared it to a UFO — Thomas le Solitaire first presents itself as a realist novel. In stark contrast to the spare narration that characterizes Blanchot’s later works, this early Thomas teems with events and characters, including Antoine, the hotel keeper — the focus of an entire chapter later removed from Thomas l’Obscur.

Set initially on the French Riviera in summer, Blanchot takes us to the beach, the tennis courts, the hotel dining room, and the Monte Carlo casino. Thomas observes young women bathing, and attempts to engage with some of them. We meet Geneviève, Éveline, Louise, Mme Taillegloire and Mme Renetour, and learn about the Ruffeteau family and their abandoned estate, which Thomas hopes to explore.
We encounter Desrousseaux and his failed election bid; the Guilleminet and Métadier families; Antoinette, Jeannette, Françoise, and Angéline, the housemaids. Later, the action shifts to Paris, where streets, monuments, and fashionable locales anchor the story in a recognizable world.
Whereas in Thomas l’Obscur, Thomas encounters in the crowd only “those who are possessed by a passion, an obsession…”, Thomas le Solitaire names people “leaving the Opéra, the Paramount, the Comédie-Française.” We stop before “the shop windows of Nicolas and Guerlain”; “the Gaîté-Cinéma”; “an advert for a ‘Scandale’ girdle” and “women who dress at Patou.”

Even more significant for an author marked by a profound reversal of his political convictions, this novel is grounded in an identifiable historical moment. Its characters express clear political opinions and references, which will later be replaced in Thomas l’Obscur by timeless generalities. We learn, for instance, that Thomas once believed in “the virtue of M. Thiers, the probity of Fouquet,” and that he considers “M. Lebrun, President of the Republic” to be “the most harmless of men.”
The riot in Chapter XII (later Chapter XI), stripped of detail in Thomas l’Obscur, is here clearly identified as the February 6, 1934 riot: “The riot was nearing the Élysée,” we read. “If the Republic were overthrown that evening, […] it was possible Irène might reach the Avenue Marigny […]. But the riot was crushed. […] In the decisive moment, all one could hear from the leaders was the cry: ‘Shit,’ the word of the defeated […]. Irène stepped out of the car. The mobile guards, pushing back the protestors, suddenly delivered her to the cold night, […] already disfigured, like the riot itself, before history.”

 

Equally central to Thomas le Solitaire are the many literary references scattered throughout the text by the young Blanchot. Anne reads “those romans des veillées des chaumières she hides in her room like others would hide Paris-Flirt or L’Initiation sexuelle.” Thomas has led Anne “into a novel by Zénaïde Fleuriot.” Irène, meanwhile, moves “among people who insisted on being introduced to Cocteau before reading Les Enfants terribles, and who called Christian Bérard ‘Bébé’.”

Paradoxically, this abundance of realist markers already points to Blanchot’s later search for an écriture du désastre, fully realized in the 1950 version. It is, in fact, through this excess that the young author drives the narrative of this first novel toward a dead end.

The multiplicity of characters and events — the triangular relationship between Thomas, Anne, and Irène; passing lovers like Paul, Gabriel, or Li — leads the novel nowhere in particular. Rather, it reveals by contrast the absence of a true plot, and leaves the story suspended in a perpetual present. This present endlessly recombines the three central characters, as if searching for the fissure through which time might collapse and the narrative finally reach its end.

Moreover, the overabundance of metaphor — which makes up a significant portion of the novel’s narrative substance — reveals a lyricism otherwise absent from Blanchot’s work. And yet, by their incongruity or internal dissonance, these metaphors paradoxically participate in the text’s narrative disintegration:

“Thomas suddenly found himself hurled into an enormous vat of radium, where, bombarded with elbowing and headbutting […] he was absorbing every atom of a grand life.”

“At his feet died all the forces that lead Oedipus to marry his mother, or the bankrupt to commit suicide on the very day he wins the national lottery.”

“Only butchers and normaliens who speak of poetry were left to fight.”

“That night […] when there was a ridiculous recrudescence of cancer, of arteriosclerosis in the body, of cracks in the vases…”

Though sentimental in form, Thomas le Solitaire is already, in essence, a fully Blanchotian work. Like a Tower of Babel, its narrative exhausts itself through the proliferation of language — a failure that ultimately reveals itself as the novel’s true meaning.

This biblical comparison may seem daring given the radical atheism to which Blanchot would devote his career as writer and thinker. And yet, it is precisely on the question of spirituality that this first novel diverges most sharply from the later work.

In 1934, the ending of Thomas le Solitaire was entirely different from the one found in the published version. While the conclusion of Thomas l’Obscur follows the pattern of The Spiritual Canticle by Saint John of the Cross, the ending of Thomas le Solitaire — heavily reworked — draws inspiration from the Book of Revelation. In a hymn-like finale, whose tonalities evoke Péguy or Claudel, the world and humankind meet their end:

“O avalanche of crude images from which they derive a supreme pleasure that opens them to pure joy. O irresistible river of God that plunges even into their intestines and rolls within their cavities sweet sensations. […] They have discovered that the sea, immense insipidity, this sea, living crystal, melts beneath their salt-ridden bodies. O plundered vintage now dried up, dreadful vintage drunk to the dregs. The abyss itself is dissolving. Nothingness prepares its end. The universe is lost. It is time, O Thomas, to do as men do — to tear their heads from their shoulders and scatter their limbs — to enter with them into the second death.”

This conclusion — which would require sustained exegetical effort to fully decode its enigmatic meaning — would suffice on its own to distinguish the solitary Thomas from his obscure successor. And yet, while Thomas le Solitaire cannot be seen merely as an early version of the later novel, a fundamental textual link exists between the two.

Indeed, the story Thomas reads at the beginning of Chapter IV of Thomas l’Obscur — “Thomas remained in his room reading. […] Those who entered leaned over his shoulder and read these lines: ‘He went down to the beach, he wanted to walk…’” — turns out to be a previously unpublished passage from Thomas le Solitaire. Through a covert act of quotation, Blanchot has the “obscure” Thomas read the novel of his “solitary” alter ego.

The reading of the 1941 novel thus becomes a guided reading of this twin work (“toma” in Aramaic), and Blanchot implicitly integrates into his published, completed novel the hidden genesis from which it emerged.

See the full entry and manuscript photographs

Read the complete study by Michael Holland, shared exclusively with our bookshop following his first reading of the manuscript — to date the only existing analysis of this novel, long unknown to bibliographers:

“Dear Grégory,
Here is what I’ve written about Thomas le Solitaire. It’s a bit long, I’m afraid, but this book really is extraordinary. It’s also a bit disjointed. But I’m sending it to you as is.”

Maurice Blanchot, Thomas le Solitaire, by Michael Holland, Professor at Oxford

Découvrez nos enquêtes sur les autres versions inédites de Thomas l'Obscur, issues des archives de Marguerite Blanchot :
 

• Le Mythe d'Ulysse, véritable « matrice » de Thomas le Solitaire et Thomas l'Obscur composé en 1936 et demeuré inconnu

• Deux versions courtes de Thomas l'Obscur précédant l'édition de 1950, dite "version Chapelain".

Version intermédiaire : Manuscrit et tapuscrit complet inédit constituant l'élaboration de Thomas l'Obscur à partir du tapuscrit de Thomas le Solitaire

Et les archives Maurice Blanchot :

• Maurice Blanchot, l'obscura : extraordinaire réunion de photographies de Maurice Blanchot prises dans la sphère familiale.

• Blanchot, critique littéraire : Manuscrits originaux des articles de Maurice Blanchot.

• Les dédicaces familiales de Maurice Blanchot : éditions originales de Maurice Blanchot offerts à sa mère et à sa soeur, enrichis d'un envoi autographe de l'auteur.