Nouvelles et récits. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit complets

Autograph manuscript by the author of 2 and a half octavo pages published in the April 20, 1944 issue of Journal des Débats. Complete manuscript with very dense writing, containing numerous strikethroughs, corrections and additions. Literary chronicle on the work of Claude Roy. The complete typescript is included.
This critique of La Mer à boire by Claude Roy is at once a detailed analysis of each short story and a poetic hymn to the poet's writing: "Le style de Claude Roy répond à merveille à ce jeu de nuances : il est lui aussi plein d'échos qui s'évanouissent, de mots qui se répercutent: il est libre, discipliné, tout en inventions et fidèle à la réalité qu'il décrit." ["Claude Roy's style responds marvelously to this play of nuances: it too is full of echoes that fade away, of words that reverberate: it is free, disciplined, full of inventions and faithful to the reality it describes."]

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronique de la vie intellectuelle" of Journal des Débats.
In half a page of newspaper (about 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 twentieth 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, these 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, always 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).
The autograph manuscripts of Maurice Blanchot are extremely rare.