Le Paradoxe d'Aytré - Manuscrit original et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author of 16 pages in-8 published in number 9 (June 1946) of Les Temps modernes and reprinted, slightly revised, in La Part du Feu (1949).
Complete recto-verso manuscript, very densely written, with numerous deletions, corrections and additions.
Accompanied by the complete typescript with autograph corrections in black ink.

"Le Paradoxe d'Aytré" ["Aytré's Paradox"] is the first text by Maurice Blanchot that Jean-Paul Sartre published in the pages of Les Temps modernes, the spearhead of committed literature. Three others would follow until 1952 ("Le roman, œuvre de mauvaise foi" ["The Novel, a Work of Bad Faith"], "A la rencontre de Sade" ["Meeting Sade"] and "L'art, la littérature et l'expérience originelle" ["Art, Literature and Original Experience"]), all of great importance.
Continuing his reflection begun several years earlier on the writer's struggle with language and his relationship to silence (notably in his article "Le Mythe d'Oreste" ["The Myth of Orestes"]), Blanchot bases his demonstration here on Aytré qui perd l'habitude ["Aytré Who Loses the Habit"] by Jean Paulhan - a major influence - who notably provides him with the title of his article: "De ce petit récit, il ne résulte pas que la littérature ne doive logiquement commencer qu'avec le crime, ou à défaut, avec le vol. Mais qu'elle suppose un écroulement, une sorte de catastrophe initiale et le vide même que mesurent l'anxiété et le souci, c'est ce qu'on peut être tenté de voir. Or, remarquons-le, cette catastrophe ne s'exerce pas seulement sur le monde, les objets qu'on manie [...] ; elle s'étend aussi et en même temps au langage, à la possibilité des mots. C'est là le paradoxe d'Aytré." ["From this little story, it does not follow that literature should logically begin only with crime, or failing that, with theft. But that it presupposes a collapse, a sort of initial catastrophe and the very void that anxiety and worry measure, this is what one might be tempted to see. Now, let us note, this catastrophe is not exercised only on the world, the objects we handle [...]; it extends also and at the same time to language, to the possibility of words. This is Aytré's paradox."] And he adds: "L'écrivain ne débute pas toujours avec le sang d'un fait divers ou l'horreur d'un crime qui lui ferait sentir l'instabilité et le vide du monde, mais il ne peut guère songer à commencer autrement que par une certaine incapacité de parler et d'écrire, par une perte de mots, par l'absence même des moyens dont il surabonde. Ainsi lui est-il indispensable de sentir d'abord qu'il n'a rien à dire." ["The writer does not always begin with the blood of a news item or the horror of a crime that would make him feel the instability and emptiness of the world, but he can hardly think of beginning otherwise than with a certain inability to speak and write, with a loss of words, with the very absence of the means of which he has abundance. Thus it is essential for him to feel first that he has nothing to say."]
Jean Paulhan, therefore, but also Franz Kafka, Herman Melville or Stéphane Mallarmé, so many writers admired by Blanchot, confronted Aytré's paradox, silence, the collapse of language. And the critic concludes: "[...] le silence du langage créateur, ce silence qui nous fait parler, n'est pas seulement une absence de parle, mais une absence tout court, cette distance que nous mettons entre les choses et nous, et en nous-mêmes, et dans les mots, et qui fait que le langage le plus plein est aussi le plus poreux, le plus transparent, le plus nul, car il laisse infiniment fuir le creux même qu'il enferme, sorte de petit alcarazas du vide." ["[...] the silence of creative language, this silence that makes us speak, is not only an absence of speech, but an absence pure and simple, this distance that we put between things and ourselves, and within ourselves, and in words, and which makes the fullest language also the most porous, the most transparent, the most null, because it lets infinitely escape the very hollow that it encloses, a sort of small alcarazas of emptiness."]

A very beautiful text on the silence of language, published by Jean-Paul Sartre in Les Temps Modernes.