Le roman noir - Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author, 2½ pages in-8, published in the issue of 30 March 1944 of the Journal des Débats.
Complete recto-verso manuscript in very dense handwriting, containing numerous deletions, corrections and additions. This is a review published on the occasion of the reissue of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto with a preface by Paul Eluard. Accompanied by the complete typescript.
The reissue by Éditions José Corti of Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto with a preface by Paul Eluard offered Maurice Blanchot the opportunity to set out his definition of the Gothic novel, which, thanks notably to the Surrealists, was then enjoying a revival of interest: "Le roman noir ne se confond pas simplement avec la littérature fantastique. S'il fait une large part au merveilleux "de toute nature", il a pour principal objet d'émouvoir la sensibilité par les ressources de la terreur. il veut secouer l'imagination. Il l'entraîne dans un mouvement frénétique qui ne lui laisse pas de repos. Il la provoque à tout croire, hormis les dénouements heureux et les compromis agréables, par des moyens dont le caractère conventionnel augmente encore la puissance. C'est un art méthodique qui connaît sa grossiéreté et en tire souvent des effets subtils et remarquables."
Blanchot then pursues an almost political analysis of the Gothic novel—born in the age of pre-revolutionary rationalism, flourishing in the wake of 1789, before flagging under the Restoration. And he concludes: "Horace Walpole est beaucoup plus qu'un précurseur. Avec ce volume fort mince, il apparait vraiment comme l'auteur de milliers d'ouvrages qui sont nés de lui. Avec ce volume fort mince (sic), il est le plus fécond des écrivains."

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published in the "Chronique de la vie intellectuelle" of the Journal des Débats 173 articles on recently published books.
In a half-page of newspaper (approximately seven in-8 pages), the young author of Thomas l'obscur took his first steps in the field of literary criticism, inaugurating a body of 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 very first articles, Blanchot demonstrated an acuity of analysis far surpassing the literary news that occasioned their writing. Oscillating between classics and moderns, major writers and minor novelists, he laid down in his columns the foundations of a critical thought that would shape the second half of the twentieth century.
Transformed by writing and by the war, Blanchot gradually broke, in the exercise of a thought developed "in the name of the other," with the violent certainties of his youthful adherence to Maurras.
Not without paradox, he thus transformed literary criticism into a philosophical act of intellectual resistance to barbarism, at the very heart of a newspaper that was "openly maréchaliste": "Brûler un livre, en écrire, sont les deux actes entre lesquels la culture inscrit ses oscillations contraires" ("Le livre", in Journal des Débats, 20 January 1943).
In 2007, the Cahiers de la NRF, under the direction of Christophe Bident, brought together all the literary columns not yet published in volumes, accompanied by a pertinent analysis of Blanchot’s critical work: "romans, poèmes, essais donnent lieu à une réflexion singulière, toujours plus sûre de sa propre rhétorique, livrée davantage à l'écho de l'impossible ou aux sirènes de la disparition. (...) Non sans contradictions ni pas de côté, et dans la certitude fiévreuse d'une ?uvre qui commence (...) ces articles révèlent la généalogie d'un critique qui a transformé l'occasion de la chronique en nécessité de la pensée." (C. Bident).
Maurice Blanchot’s autograph manuscripts are of the utmost rarity.