L'idylle. Première version inédite. Manuscrit autographe complet

BLANCHOT Maurice
L'Idylle [The Idyl] First unpublished version. Complete autograph manuscript N. d. [1936], 20 pages in-8: 135 x 210 mm (5 5/16 x 8 1/4 ”)
The first unpublished version of the complete autograph manuscript, written in 1936.
Very closely written with numerous erasures, corrections and additions.
“L'Idylle, a youthful work of Maurice Blanchot's published for the first time in 1947 and re-published in 1951 alongside Dernier Mot in a little volume titled Le Ressassement éternel was often called ‘an insoluble enigma'...the circumstances of its writing and publication add to its mystery. Not only were the first manuscripts lost, but the experiences it describes and the spirit that inspired its birth are also hard to penetrate.”
These observations of Vivian Liska's (in “Blanchot”, Cahiers de l'Herne 107) following on from those of Christophe Bident (Maurice Blanchot, partenaire invisible), confer upon these two first stories, which are the writer's most often re-published works, a unique place within Blanchot's oeuvre.
If Dernier Mot fits more logically into the work of the author of Thomas l'Obscur (which was a development or deconstruction of the former), L'Idylle appears to have “no connection whatsoever with Blanchot's other fiction writing, either before or after,” according to Michael Holland, a researcher and Professor of French Literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford. Holland is the author of numerous articles on Maurice Blanchot, including Avant dire: Essais sur Blanchot published in 2015 by Hermann.
An enigmatic literary piece, even within an oeuvre that is itself complicated, L'Idylle, is much more than just an account of youth. It seems also to be “an experiment without any link to, or even incompatible with, the poetry” of the work to follow (V. Liska) and the birth of the “écriture du silence”.
Thus, through its appearances in print, L'Idylle poses questions even for its own author who, in Après-coup is stumped by his own creation and exhausts himself trying to define it, having warned from his introduction on of the futility of his attempt.
First and foremost there is the question of the story's title. “L'Idylle”, the title adopted for its journal publication in 1947 is replaced, from its first edition in book form in 1951, by another title which brings together the two stories: Le Ressassement éternel. In 1983, this, in turn, was supplemented with the title of the afterword, Après-coup.
Blanchot himself asks this question in the afterword through the mediated designation (suddenly enriched with a sub-title) of this “story that seems to have been named – perhaps ironically? – ‘the Idyl', or the torment of the idea of the joyful thought.”
This title is ostensibly not present in the manuscript (which was not the case with Le Dernier Mot – cf. our catalogue for the Grand Palais in 2014), which had a clear bearing on the status of the story and the author's intentions for publication.
Needless to say, even beyond the title, it's the story itself that resists analysis, both by critics and by Blanchot himself: “it is impossible for me to know...how they were written and to what unknown need they were a response”.
The original manuscript thus appears as a primary source of information in the attempt to resolve some of the mysteries of the text. In it, one finds the elaboration of character names and the different stages of writing: expressions erased (indicated by single quotation marks) and alternatives written above...as well as long unpublished passages, deleted in the manuscript itself or left intact until publication. With the manuscript, one can analyze the development of the author's thinking through the growing precision of the manuscript, whose corrections dwindle as the pages go on, getting closer and closer to the published version. But what is most striking, like with the manuscript of Le Dernier Mot, is the presence in this original version of profoundly significant elements whose deletion would go on to contribute to the construction of a willfully aporetic work.
Blanchot's writing develops through a process of pruning. We all know how many diets Thomas l'Obscur had to go on to achieve his final figure.
In the case of L'Idylle, the cuts are even more significant because, as Blanchot notes, “as a story that says everything it has to say in being written down...it is itself the idyl.” As a result, the body of the narrative has to fall away to reveal its fundamental structure, as Michael Holland points out.
The numerous passages of the manuscript deleted in 1947 are not, therefore, traces of an unfinished version, but the revelation by an unseen hand of the definitive work.
This unseen hand largely consists of the relationship between the director and his wife Louise, the focal point of the story.
The couple's past is revealed to us and interpreted for us by various different protagonists.
The director: “at thirty, I knew the most [?] joy that a man can experience. I thought I'd suffocate to death...”
Louise: “[a significant portion deleted] the young man called to her each night from the garden, but she refused to come down...”
Piotl: “They don't have children themselves. They take their revenge on the fate that deprived them of their origins by depriving it of all continuation. They triumph over their undeserved misfortune by adding to it another, for which they are responsible...” (p. 7)
The characters are also more forthcoming on the current situation of the couple:
Page 5: “A strange party, Alexandre Akim and I argued. [Long passage deleted] Argued, do you hear?” “Is that true?” said the stranger, turning towards the director. “Yes, of course, naturally,” he replied. “There is something inexplicable about anger. You look for its cause and it's invisible; you want to know its consequences and they are without number. Fortunately, it can't hold a candle to true friendship.”
This confession of “friendship” by the director instead of the love one would expect, is a first response to the questions of Akim, one incompatible with the mystery that dominates the published version.
But the most significant part of the manuscript is undoubtedly the central passage where the warden recounts finding the couple, shortly after their marriage, at the same time dead and alive. More concrete than the published version, it has – above all – a key revelation that gives new meaning to the very title of the work.
Page 11: “I knew that something terrible had happened...I thought they were both dead...They were sitting apart, on rickety chairs [?], silent and estranged to the point where anyone might have taken them for hobos...they were utterly distant, and wanted nothing more than not to fall...”
“That's it?” asked Akim. “But what you're describing is...the emotion that is at the heart of every idyl, a true joy beyond words.”
“Really?” said the warden, would you call it that? I call it desperation [qualified with an adjective in quotation marks which appears to be “joyous” but which was deleted by Blanchot].
“Joyous desperation”: a paradox that was an answer, in the story, to the question of the true meaning of an idyl. It is only at the cost of suppressing this “interpretation” and all the narrative elements that lead to it that Blanchot could transform the question posed in the story into a question posed by the story.
For what the manuscript reveals is that Blanchot's account is not elliptical, structured by the absence of meaning, but is willfully filled with lacunae, developed though successive cuts to meaning.
In this obvious breaking down of the internal meaning of the narrative, one can also discern the symbolic links between elements of the story. Thus, the strangling of Akim by another inmate bore a troubling similarity to the relationship of the director to his wife in the initial version: “She wanted him to live with the hand on his throat that would squeeze hard enough to kill him.” (p. 7)
Other elements of pathos, deleted on publication, reinforce the parallel between the silent tragedy of the couple and that of the inmates: “I spit in your face”; “the whip was a metal instrument that bent and cut, penetrating under the skin, tearing it as it pulled away.” On the other hand, the complicity of the couple beyond their incomprehension finds an echo – in typical Blanchot style – in a passage that has been entirely deleted. In this passage, we find a literary connivance between the stranger and a “completely ignorant” warden who “surprises Akim in the act of reading a little book that he always had on him, written in the language of his people.”
Of the most insistent questions he is faced with in Après-coup, Blanchot particularly focuses on the one concerning the prophetic relationship of L'Idylle to history.
“Wash yourself thoroughly – we care about hygiene here...He sat on the ground and, while the water began to pour among the smoke and noise, he was overcome by nausea and passed out.” The shower scene, which is almost the opening of the story, suggests a post-Concentration Camp reading that Blanchot takes on and then rejects by turns.
A reading of the manuscript and its variations as compared to the published text may not resolve this question, but it does reorient it: “we care about hygiene here” turns out originally to have been “everyone must be clean here”; “he was overcome by nausea and passed out” was “he grew dizzy, which gave rise to a lightness of heart that made him pass out”. There are no corrections in the manuscript – the changes date therefore from the time of publication and not of writing.
From a purely literary point of view, the figure of the stranger [l'étranger] reminds one, as a forerunner, of Camus' famous character of the same name. Blanchot was one of Camus' first defenders: “the theme I recognize first of all, because Camus has made it familiar, is outlined by the first words: ‘the stranger'”. The manuscript, here, helps confirm the direct importance of this designation of the character.
Michael Holland particularly highlights these elements, which make dating the original text troublesome:
“L'Idylle, while referring to a past (1936) is nonetheless separated from it and, because of that, disoriented from it. At the same time, it marks the emergence of a narrative space for Blanchot that is completely original, in which the disaster heralded in 1936 and which became definitive from 1940 on finds in this fictional account not a mirror but a discourse that, by its very impossibility, encompasses all that the disaster signifies.”
Blanchot's insistance on setting his work in a distant, pre-apocalyptic past, from its first appearance in 1947, is hardly surprising. He does so even when inscribing the work, underlining its non-contemporary nature: “these pages, sadly so old,” he writes in the two copies of Le Ressassement éternel inscribed to his brother and sister in law, as well as his mother and sister (see our March 2015 catalogue). Note also the mysterious “sadly”.
But it was in 1983, in Après-coup, that he once more insisted at this great age at some length. “These two old texts, so old (a half a century old)”. Blanchot gives a disturbing background to this insistence: “a story from before Auschwitz. At the time that it was written, though, all stories would have been before Auschwitz”.
Thus, the evocation of the camps in an account cannot be anything other than prophetic since: “there cannot exist a narrative fiction of Auschwitz.”
Given that, what is the best way of shielding oneself from this impossibility than writing before History? That which can no longer be stated can nonetheless be predicted.
It's tempting to look for the traces in the story itself of l'Idylle, this attempt to approach the impossible present through the past. The passage in the bookshop is troubling in this sense. The bookseller offers Akim “a very old book that traces the history of the entire country”. Akim, who had wanted a “more recent” work nonetheless derives “more profit from its reading than he had expected”. If we also note that from the very first visit, the “bookseller” of the final version is, in the manuscript, “an antiquarian bookshop” and that from the passage where the rare book is lent Blanchot has deleted in the published version: “because [the book] appeared to be concerned with an era long since gone”, the idea of a fictional dating on the part of the author begins to make sense.
If confirmed, this deception would give a completely new reading of this story and indeed Blanchot's entire oeuvre.
Nonetheless, it seems to us that the manuscript cannot, given these little details, date from after the war. The manuscript largely resembles, especially in format, quality of paper and the density of Blanchot's writing, the manuscript of Le Dernier Mot, offered for sale by us in a previous catalog (and the manuscript of Dernier Mot appears to be reliably datable). However, it is not actually dated, and if the date of 1936 was made-up, it is likely that Blanchot used it from the manuscript onwards.
Detailed study of these papers, Blanchot's writing and the paper itself will doubtless allow this question, a part of the mystery of Blanchot's most enigmatic piece, to be answered once and for all.