MAULNIER Thierry (1909-1988) [AF 1964, 20e f]. - Lot 149

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  3. MAULNIER Thierry (1909-1988) [AF 1964, 20e f]. - Lot 149
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Lot n° 149
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MAULNIER Thierry (1909-1988) [AF 1964, 20e f]. - Lot 149
MAULNIER Thierry (1909-1988) [AF 1964, 20e f]. MANUSCRIT autograph signed " Thierry Maulnier ", Ce que la littérature n'est pas, [1948] ; 29 pages in 8 on pink paper. On Jean-Paul SARTRE and his essay Qu'est-ce que la littérature? The article appeared in the September 1948 issue of La Table Ronde. While praising the author's sharpness and dialectical skill, Maulnier responds to SARTRE's statement, "to write for one's time", which he calls a radical error. He speaks about the judgment of the contemporaries and that of the posterity, the risk of the profession of writer being to see the direction of its books escaping to him, even of its life... "Like so many Christian writers, I have painted evil in colors that I thought were hateful, and now readers are seduced and fascinated by these same colors. I wanted, like GIDE, to propose a demanding, difficult morality and some people allow themselves all kinds of licenses; I wanted, like Sartre, to indicate the "paths of freedom" and here are people who claim to find in my books a call to pure despair, an ethic of nihilistic indifference and decay. The misunderstanding exists in any human communication and if the writer refuses to be interested in the posterity of his book, he should also refuse to be interested in the communication with the men of his time, "there is not less distance between me and my contemporaries than between my time and the time to come". Maulnier speaks of the struggle against time that the act of writing represents, of the life and presence of a book that is not linked to that of its author or to the lives of his contemporaries, cites literary examples, takes up Sartre's comparison between a book and a fruit: "one must taste bananas and women in their freshness. But good books age less quickly [......] perhaps because they concern emotions, questions, anxieties that hardly change", and finally he concludes that "if he [Sartre] really feels the emotions of life only if the books he reads tell him about concentration camps, the lynching of negroes, of the capitalist exploitation or the communist tyranny, if all the books which were written before these dark images had come to populate our horizon, seem to him just good for the files of academics, then, here he is deprived of many joys ".
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