Un roman de Jarry. Manuscrit autographe et tapuscrit signé complets

Autograph manuscript by the author, 2½ pages octavo, published in the April 13, 1944 issue of the Journal des Débats.
Complete recto-verso manuscript, in very dense handwriting, with numerous deletions, corrections and additions.
Together with the complete signed typescript.
Chronicle published on the occasion of the publication of Jarry's posthumous novel, La Dragonne.

In this chronicle devoted to Alfred Jarry and Père Ubu, Maurice Blanchot was interested in the confusion between one and the other and its consequences: « [...] on peut penser que Jarry, en s'entêtant à être le Père Ubu, a pendant sa vie gaspillé une partie de ses ressources d'écrivain et après sa mort égaré le jugement littéraire sur sa véritable valeur. » ["[...] one can think that Jarry, by persisting in being Père Ubu, wasted during his lifetime part of his resources as a writer and after his death misled literary judgment about his true value."] Yet this confusion testifies to the author's coherence: « Chez Jarry, le choix d'un masque aussi peu flatteur a un sens fort clair. Il y a d'abord une volonté de mettre à mal tout sérieux et particulièrement cette volonté même ; il n'est pas question de tracer des frontières au ridicule ; on rit d'abord de soi, on en rit parce que ce rire n'est qu'un écho du vide. Et puis ce double grotesque que l'auteur revendique comme une représentation dont il est fier, affirme sa complicité, pleine de défi, avec les travers qu'il caricature. » ["In Jarry, the choice of such an unflattering mask has a very clear meaning. There is first a will to undermine all seriousness and particularly this very will; there is no question of drawing boundaries to the ridiculous; one first laughs at oneself, one laughs at it because this laughter is only an echo of the void. And then this grotesque double that the author claims as a representation of which he is proud, affirms his complicity, full of defiance, with the flaws he caricatures."]
La Dragonne, the last work by Ubu's father that Gallimard was then publishing, would therefore surprise Blanchot for « le sérieux avec lequel Jarry a accepté son métier de romancier » ["the seriousness with which Jarry accepted his profession as novelist"], who would also praise « les soudains mouvements d'imagination poétique qui dérangent le plan » ["the sudden movements of poetic imagination that disrupt the plan"].

The only monographic text devoted by Blanchot to Jarry.

Between April 1941 and August 1944, Maurice Blanchot published 173 articles on recently published books in the "Chronique de la vie intellectuelle" of the Journal des Débats. In half a page of newspaper (about 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 acuity of analysis 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 a critical thought that would mark the second half of the 20th century. Transformed by writing and by war, Blanchot broke, through 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: "Brûler un livre, en écrire, sont les deux actes entre lesquels la culture inscrit ses oscillations contraires" ["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 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: "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 œuvre qui commence (...) ces articles révèlent la généalogie d'un critique qui a transformé l'occasion de la chronique en nécessité de la pensée." ["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.