Le mythe de Giraudoux. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets.

Autograph manuscript by the author, 3 quarto pages, published in issue 17 of October 7, 1945 of the newspaper Le Paysage Dimanche. Complete manuscript in very dense handwriting, with numerous deletions, corrections and additions.
Chronicle published on the occasion of the numerous studies on Giraudoux's work that appeared since his death in January 1944.
The complete typescript is included.
While the numerous references to his work in the articles of the Journal des Débats reveal Giraudoux's ascendancy over Blanchot, the latter nevertheless manifests a clear desire to free himself from this paternity. Thus he removes from Faux-Pas numerous references to Giraudoux's work (cf C. Bident, M. B. De la chronique à la théorisation). This article published in 1945 is a unique testimony to the ambivalence of feelings toward an admired master who could no longer serve as a model for his disciple, transformed by writing and war.
"Certes, un auteur, comme celui de Judith ne peut pas être un auteur de tout repos mais ce qu'il a créé est beau et ce beau n'est pas "ce qui nous désespère". Il est trop facile de voir que, quoi qu'il veuille, il ne va jamais jusqu'à compromettre en son art, l'harmonie la compréhension, la mesure. Comme une malédiction jetée sur la réalité inaccessible, il formerait un monde entièrement faux? Mais pas si faux: nous n'y perdons pas pied, nous ne cessons de nous y reconnaitre et au contraire, pour certains comme Sartre, c'est celui de la banalité même des concepts de chaque jour." ["Certainly, an author like the one who wrote Judith cannot be a restful author, but what he has created is beautiful and this beauty is not 'what drives us to despair'. It is too easy to see that, whatever he may wish, he never goes so far as to compromise in his art, harmony, understanding, measure. Like a curse cast upon inaccessible reality, would he form an entirely false world? But not so false: we do not lose our footing there, we never cease to recognize ourselves in it and on the contrary, for some like Sartre, it is that of the very banality of everyday concepts."]


Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronicle of intellectual life" of the Journal des Débats. In half a newspaper page (approximately seven octavo pages), the young author of "Thomas l'obscur" took his first steps in the field of literary criticism and thus inaugurated 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 demonstrated an analytical acuity far exceeding the literary current events that motivated their writing. Oscillating between classics and moderns, first-rate writers and minor novelists, he established in his chronicles the foundations of critical thinking that would mark the second half of the 20th century. Transformed by writing and by war, Blanchot broke, through a thought exercised "in the name of the other", with the violent Maurrassian certainties of his youth. Not without paradox, he then transformed literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism at the very heart of an "openly Maréchaliste" newspaper: "Burning a book, writing 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, ever more confident in its own rhetoric, delivered more 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.