Lot n° 221
Estimation :
10000 - 12000
EUR
Result with fees
Result
: 27 280EUR
SARTRE Jean-Paul (1905-1980). - Lot 221
SARTRE Jean-Paul (1905-1980).
AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIPT, L'Engagement de Mallarmé, [ca. 1952]; 140 pages (numbered by Simone de Beauvoir 1 to 136, with 4 extra pages: 77, 90, 91, and 109), on 4-page graph paper (27 x 21 cm; slight cracks at some edges).
Important essay on Mallarmé.
According to Contat and Rybalka, Sartre wrote, around 1948-1949, nearly five hundred pages on Stéphane MALLARMÉ, of which only a few fragments remain. In 1952, at the request of Raymond Queneau, who directed the collection Les Écrivains célèbres at Mazenod, he wrote a study on Mallarmé, published in 1953 in Volume III of this collection, a text that was later reprinted in 1966 as the Preface to Mallarmé's Poems in Gallimard's "Poésie" collection. The present essay L'Engagement de Mallarmé, written in the early 1950s, was found in 1977 by Simone de Beauvoir, and published for the first time in the journal Obliques (n°18- 19) in 1979, then by Gallimard, in the collection "Arcades", in 1986, under the title Mallarmé. The lucidity and its face of shade.
In 1960, Sartre confided to Madeleine Chapsal his "sympathy" for Mallarmé and Genet, "both consciously committed [...] Mallarmé must have been very different from the image that has been given of him. He is our greatest poet. A passionate, a furious. And master of himself to the point of being able to kill himself by a simple movement of the glottis!... His commitment seems to me as total as possible: social as well as poetic ".
The manuscript is written in black or blue-black ink on the front of sheets of squared paper (page 107 is written on the back of a crossed-out text). Some leaves are incompletely filled. Written in blue ink by Simone de Beauvoir, it presents some erasures and corrections, as well as numerous passages crossed out, sometimes important. It remained unfinished. Simone de Beauvoir made some small corrections and annotations in Sartre's text; let us quote the beginning: "1848: the fall of the monarchy deprives the bourgeoisie of its "cover"; as a result, poetry loses its two traditional themes: Man and God. God first: Europe had just learned a stupefying news, today disputed by some: "God dead. Stop. Intestate". At the opening of the succession, there was panic: what did he leave behind, the Disappeared? Chances; man was one of them; deprived of the status of favor that the Divine Will guaranteed him, he sought in vain for the one that Mauriac calls "this part of the creature where God has imprinted his mark"...
This death of God upsets the literature (Sartre quotes Baudelaire and Flaubert, in particular), and, by it, the vision of the being and the language, "by the opposition of the Nothingness and the Being" (p. 18).... "In this singular moment of the literary history, the Artist does not believe in the art any more because he cannot establish it on the divine guarantee; but as this guarantee is lacking to all the universe, it is to the Art alone that he gives his faith" (p. 35)... "With Mallarmé is born a new man, reflexive and critical, tragic, whose life line is a decline. This character, whose being-for-failure does not differ essentially from the Heideggerian being-for-dying, projects himself and gathers himself, exceeds himself and totalises himself in the fulgurating drama of the incarnation and the fall, he cancels himself and exalts himself at the same time, in short he makes himself exist by the consciousness that he takes of his impossibility. Dead and resurrected, Mallarmé hands us the key of gems of his last spiritual cassette "... (p. 133). And the manuscript ends thus: "Mallarmé's first movement was the retreat of disgust and the universal condemnation of all forms of life. But, while rereading Hérodiade, he suddenly realizes that the universal negation is equivalent to the absence of negation. To deny is an act. And every act must be inserted in time and be exercised on a particular content. The negation of everything cannot pass for a destructive activity: it is the simple representation of the negative notion in general". A long passage follows: "While the Heir, taking refuge at the top of the spiral "did not dare to move", the civil servant, intact, continued to live, to go about his business; Mallarmé, exercising a profession of politeness, continued to reflect to the "bourgeois" their moral principles, their conceptions of life and the world. He understood very well this contradiction: later he will call Hérodiade "the young intellectual" and, returning on his youth, he will explain that his head, "of drunken fasts" stubbornly "followed in some haggard bonbs his pure glance up there where the eternal coldness only endures you all, oh glaciers". It is a question of perishing or of converting into work the "cold dream of contempt" where it is immobilized. It is not a question any more of deploring in silence the inanity of the word but of proferring it to plunge it back in its inanity. In short Mallarmé does not renounce the Negation. Simply he converts the negative Notion into
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