Les plaintes de l'ombre. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets.

Autograph manuscript by the author, 2½ pages octavo, published in the December 10, 1943 issue of the Journal des Débats. Complete manuscript in very dense handwriting, with numerous deletions, corrections and additions. Literary chronicle published on the occasion of the publication of Passage de l'homme by Marius Grout, winner of the 1943 Prix Goncourt. Accompanied by the complete typescript.
Blanchot's critique of this future Prix Goncourt winner is not gentle, although he perfectly grasps its stakes. This story whose tragic unfolding ends in a deception that creates a new faith contains, for Blanchot, an equivocal moral.
"We understand what Marius Grout seeks to show; that men cannot live without a dream of transcendence, that miracle has no need of truth [...] But [...] if men need to live an ideal that is a fable, the question arises of knowing whether after all men need to live." The question would be pure rhetoric for a modern novel, but in 1943, "the writer who accepts to treat themes where man's destiny is at stake [...] puts himself at stake, he bets himself; if he loses, he loses himself."
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 page of newspaper (approximately seven octavo 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 gathered 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 sure of 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.