Lot n° 345
Estimation :
8000 - 10000
EUR
Result without fees
Result
: 13 000EUR
Georges BATAILLE (1897-1962) Le Bleu du ciel.... - Lot 345 - Ferri & Associés
Georges BATAILLE (1897-1962) Le Bleu du ciel. Corrected typescript; 173 leaves in-4 (27 x 21 cm; small cracks or marginal tears in some pages, missing page 14 without loss of text).
Complete typescript of the novel, overloaded with autograph corrections and additions.
Written in 1935, but marked by an eroticism of transgression which made it difficult to publish at the time, Le Bleu du ciel was not published until 1957, by Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Georges Bataille had kept one of the typescripts drawn up in 1935 from his manuscript; it was on this that he prepared the final text of the novel.
The typescript is overloaded with corrections in black ballpoint pen, with additions between lines or in the margins. It was used for printing, as the typographical indications on the first page show.
The typescript includes the entire book: Foreword (p. 1 and 1 bis) - [Introduction] (p. 2-11 bis, on dactyl pagination [5]-15). - FIRST PART (pp. 11 ter for the title, and 12-14 on pink paper [typewritten pag. 28-30]). - PART TWO (title pag. 15). - Le Mauvais Présage (title pag. 16), the 1st page numbered 17, the remainder taking up the typewritten pagination (34-54)
(from then on, Bataille adds the pagination by hand when it is not on the typewritten page). - Les Pieds maternels (pp. 55-105). - Histoire d'Antonio (p. 106-118). - Le Bleu du ciel (p. 119-166). - The Day of the Dead (p. 167-191).
The work of correction carried out by Bataille is immense; almost every line is saturated with corrections. A few pages show more extensive reworking.
For example, Bataille adds four lines at the end of the first part (p. 14): "Happiness at the moment intoxicates me, it gets me drunk / I shout it, I sing it at the top of my lungs / In my stupid heart, idiocy sings at the top of its lungs / I TRIUMPH!" At the end of Les Pieds maternels, Bataille corrects the last paragraph, before crossing it out and writing these two paragraphs: "... Xenie, alongside me lay down... she then had the appearance of a dead woman... she was naked... she had the pale breasts of a prostitute... a cloud of soot blackened the sky... it stole in me the sky and the light... a corpse beside me, I was going to die? ... even this comedy escaped me... it was a comedy..."
The beginning of Antonio's Story is heavily edited: page 107 of the typescript is replaced by an autograph page: "A few weeks later, I had even forgotten that I had been ill. I met Michel in Barcelona. I suddenly found myself in front of him. Sitting at a table in La Criolla. Lazarus had told him that I was going to die. Michel's sentence reminded me of a painful past. And page 108 is almost entirely crossed out in blue pencil. The episodes take the narrator, Troppmann (an assassin's name), from London to Barcelona and then to Germany, in the company of three women: his mistress Dorothea, known as Dirty, a young girl Xenie, and the ugly Lazarus (in whom we can recognize his wife Sylvia, his mistress Colette Peignot, and Simone Weil). We see him destroying himself through drinking, filth, transgression, obscenity and eroticism, even to the point of necrophilia with the love scene in the mud of a cemetery; the novel ends with a parade of Hitler Youth, terrifying and obscene, "a rising tide of murder.
Let us quote the Foreword of 1957: "A little more, a little less, every man is suspended on stories, on novels, which reveal to him the multiple truth of life. Only these stories, read sometimes in trance, situate him before destiny. [...] The story that reveals the possibilities of life does not necessarily call for a moment of rage, without which its author would be blind to these
excessive possibilities. I believe it: only the suffocating, impossible ordeal gives the author the means to reach the distant vision expected by a reader weary of the close limits imposed by conventions...
"The verb to live is not so well seen, since the words viveur and faire la vie are pejorative. If one wishes to be moral, it is better to avoid all that is lively, for to choose life instead of merely staying alive is only debauchery and waste. At its simplest level, The Blue Sky reverses this prudent morality by depicting a character who spends himself to the point of death through binge drinking, all-nighters, and sex. This voluntary and systematic expenditure is a method that transforms perdition into knowledge and discovers the sky below. Faced with death, knowing that nothing escapes it, there can be no question of "salvation", so the will to lose oneself is the only enlightening one - the only one from which a new sovereignty can arise. The Blue of the Sky describes the learning process by exposing this crack in the depths of each of us, which is the ever latent presence of our own death. And this
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