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Maurice BLANCHOT

Aminadab. Manuscrit original

S.n., s.l. s.d. (ca. 1941), 13,5x21cm, en feuilles.

BLANCHOT Maurice
Aminadab. Original manuscript N. d. [circa 1941], 135 x 210 mm (5 5/16 x 8 1/4 "), 348 loose leaves "Any account that is not satisfied with realistic goals requires a secret meaning whose slow exposition is linked to the peculiarities of the narration. If that meaning corresponds unambiguously to the anecdote, but can also be completely fulfilled outside it, it's an allegory. If, on the contrary, it can only be grasped through the fiction and slips away when we seek to understand it in and of itself, it's a symbol...The meaning of story is the story itself. It seems mysterious, because it says precisely all that cannot be said," (from the blurb for Aminadab, October 1942).

The complete manuscript, heavily corrected, of Maurice Blanchot's second novel, Aminadab, which was published in 1942, one year after Thomas the Obscure, to which it is a sort of sequel.
The manuscript of Aminadab is composed of 348 numbered leaves, written on the rectos. Occasionally, one finds a leaf or half a leaf interposed between two pages, of which it generally forms a draft or a partial re-writing. One can thus be part of the very process of writing by which this novel took on its final form. As a result of this process, Aminadab underwent a real process of thinning down. There is not a single page of the manuscript which does not have reworkings or cuts, which can be as long as a dozen lines. The manuscript version is thus much more padded than the final text.
A number of aspects of so-called "realist" narration are excised systematically, as if Blanchot were constantly trying to refine his narrative vision. But, more than just lightening, these cuts also bear witness to a decisive transformation of authorial intention during the course of the writing process. Was it the allegorical temptation (evoked in the blurb) with which Blanchot was struggling and of which he decided to get rid with these cuts?
Thus, at the beginning of the novel, where Thomas puts on a jacket whose simple elegance he appreciates in feeling "barely bothered by the sleeves, which were too tight at the wrists," in the published version, the manuscript version has a section one could hardly qualify as simple descriptive realism: "He was...quite curious to see if the porter would not be surprised by this attractive new suit...Not being satisfied at admiring from afar, [the porter] wanted to touch the material, and ran his hand over the inside of the suit, which he stroked gently. The pleats, above all, delighted him. He would have liked there to be pleats all over, and Thomas had to speak sharply to tear him away from this delight and prevent him from changing the order of the buttons on his waistcoat."
Blanchot systematically eliminates the psychological realism that flows through the manuscript, adopting with his own writing the same severity Thomas just showed towards the porter. Indeed, in the manuscript, Thomas (much like the porter, by the way, reduced to a simple extra), expresses feelings, states of emotion, thoughts and reflections inspired by his paradoxical situation. Many elements are systematically shortened or eliminated in the final book. Psychology and Reason are two of the important components of the early manuscript and their systematic suppression marks a significant step in Blanchot's conception of the novel.
It is in the end the act of recounting that which in every act of telling prevents one from ever reaching the final word which is put to the test in this manuscript. Blanchot must therefore "dump" the inexhaustible quantity of narration engendered by this quest for the end of things to say.
The cuts made by Blanchot in the manuscript version lay out very clearly the author's choice of sacrificing scenes and characters which could have figured in the novel but which had to be reduced or eliminated so that it did not merely go on endlessly without reaching its goal.
That goal, which was nothing less that a sort of narrative cogito ergo sum occupied Blanchot to the very end of his life as a writer.
These 348 leaves with crossings-out, repetitions, additions and various diacritical symbols eluding a decision one way or another ("...", or "x...x", or "- - -") show an author in constant dialogue with himself, and are more than mere marks of creation: they constitute the act of writing itself.
The gulf of its own narration, this manuscript of Aminadab is like the labyrinthine building in which Thomas holes up. Like his hero with the characters he meets, the author seems to question the situations and characters he creates "to find out where he is, who they are, and more broadly how all this will end," (Michael Holland in Maurice Blanchot, Archives de la fratrie, catalogue raisonné).                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
 

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