Du même genre que The Invisible Library (either known as the the Library of Imaginary Works, the Libray of Invented Works, ou the Library of Unwritten Works : barrée la mention qui vous parle le moins), les chefs-d'oeuvres disparus suscitent leurs petits cultes. Entre le Margitès attribué à Homère, le Peines d'amour gagnées de Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Won), Double Exposure de Sylvia Plath, la première version du livre deux de Ames mortes de Gogol, brûlée par leur auteur, le probable manuscrit inachevé du second roman d'Emily Brontë ainsi que tous ses écrits de jeunesse et ceux de sa soeur Anne (mon royaume pour ces quelques pages), les innombrables pièces perdues d'Eschyles et de tous ces dramaturges grecs géniaux dont ni vous ni moi ne connaîtront jamais le nom -- et pour cause --, les mémoires de Byron, un roman d'Hémingway sur le première guerre mondiale,... vous avez de quoi faire.

Sans oublier les papiers perdus de Flaubert :

In 1871, with the Prussian Army sweeping across France, a wary Gustave Flaubert buried a box full of letters - and, perhaps, other papers - in the garden of his house at Croisset, Normandy. In 1880, he died. The year after, the house was demolished. The box, as far as anyone knows, remained, and remains, beneath the soil.
Flaubert was notorious for hoarding his manuscripts, unable to discard the slightest inked scrap. What might he have buried in the box? Did it contain more on his proposed satire on socialism, or the working drafts of Harel Bey, his novel on the contemporary Orient?
More tantalisingly, might it have contained some of the copious notes he took for a novel on French society under the Second Empire? The work was schemed out after the political upheavals of 1870-71, and extant remarks suggest that the planned work would have been a counterpart to his equally dyspeptic L'Education Sentimentale, a tale that would expose "the great lie that we lived by".
Another possibility is that the box might have hidden clues to the remainder of Bouvard et Pécuchet, the bittersweet, encyclopedic, ultimately unfinished novel that occupied most of the remainder of Flaubert's life. Or - who knows? - there might be notes or drafts relating to La Spirale - the large, fantastical, metaphysical, loudmouth novel about madness that he first contemplated in the 1850s but, as far as we know, never wrote.
But the box remains buried - and is unlikely to resurface. As one biographer speculates, a treasure-trove of Flaubertiana might lie beneath the concrete dockland development of Rouen.

Ecrit par Heileen, à 21:25 dans la rubrique "Littérature générale".

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