A l'ombre du romanesque. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author of 3 and a half pages in-4 published in number 23 of November 18, 1945 of Paysage Dimanche. Complete manuscript in very dense handwriting, with numerous deletions, corrections and additions. Literary chronicle of André Dhôtel's work. The complete typescript is included.
When the apostle of silence in literature speaks of the novelist of the invisible, this produces a strange apology for a work « destinée à sauver [...] l'essence du romanesque, sa vie pure et secrète », « passionnante jusque dans sa monotonie, selon le rythme des plus belles histoires romanesques où il ne se passe rien, mais où l'imprévu est toujours imminent. » ["destined to save [...] the essence of the novelistic, its pure and secret life", "fascinating even in its monotony, according to the rhythm of the most beautiful novelistic stories where nothing happens, but where the unexpected is always imminent."]
Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published in the "Chronicle of intellectual life" of Journal des Débats 173 articles on recently published books. In half a page of newspaper (approximately seven in-8 pages), the young author of "Thomas l'obscur" takes his first steps in the field of literary criticism and thus inaugurates a theoretical work that he would later develop in his numerous essays, from "La Part du feu" to "L'Entretien infini" and "L'Écriture du désastre". From the first articles, Blanchot demonstrates an analytical acuity far exceeding the literary current events that motivate their writing. Oscillating between classics and moderns, first-rate writers and minor novelists, he establishes in his chronicles the foundations of a critical thought that would mark the second half of the 20th century. Transformed by writing and by war, Blanchot breaks, through a thought exercised "in the name of the other," with the violent Maurrassian certainties of his youth. Not without paradox, he then transforms literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism at the very heart of an "openly Maréchaliste" newspaper: "To burn a book, to write one, are the two acts between which culture inscribes its contrary oscillations" (Le Livre, In Journal des Débats, January 20, 1943). In 2007, the Cahiers de la NRF brought together under the direction of Christophe Bident all the literary chronicles not yet published in volumes with this pertinent analysis of Blanchot's critical work: "novels, poems, essays give rise to a singular reflection, always more certain of its own rhetoric, more given over to the echo of the impossible or to the sirens of disappearance. (...) Not without contradictions or sidesteps, and in the feverish certainty of a work that begins (...) these articles reveal the genealogy of a critic who transformed the occasion of the chronicle into the necessity of thought." (C. Bident). Autograph manuscripts by Maurice Blanchot are extremely rare.