Few sorts of writing occupy a place quite so marginal as the manuscript. Who studies manuscripts nowadays? A few insatiable specialists in a given author’s work, some fastidious geneticists, a small cohort of compilers of critical editions, to be sure, but to the rest of us the manuscript is little more than a disposable curiosity. Particularly for us scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first century French literature and culture, what interest does the manuscript hold? Little if any, if our publications are any indication, a disinterest that perhaps dates back to the days of New Criticism–the days of “the text and nothing but the text”–but that still continues today: manuscript study has next-to-no place in reader-response criticism, nor in “theory,” literary or otherwise, nor in cultural studies. There’s nothing surprising in this, given our entirely proper mistrust of any notion of origin, our very justifiable dislike of the vaguely elitist tinge that hovers over manuscript study, our right and fitting preference for studying the effects of a work of literature, rather than its prehistory. In so many ways, and for such good reasons, it is so easy to behave as though the works we read and teach and analyze have no avant-textes, or at least that their manuscripts are things without force, without interest, which comes to much the same thing.

My purpose here is most emphatically not to suggest that we are wrong in this, and not to plead for some sort of reinvigoration of manuscript studies. Rather, I want only to pose a few of the questions that it becomes possible to pose if we acknowledge the avant-texte’s existence, independent of any notion of textual genesis, questions that bring to light some troublesome instabilities in our understanding of the text itself. Among these: what is a copy of a novel a copy of? How to distinguish events or entities that are “in” the novel from those that aren’t? To what extent are the words of that text necessary, fully motivated, and exhaustive of the text’s essence? If we are to accept that the events of a novel are true within the context of that novel, at what point in the writing process do they become true? And are events altered or deleted in the writing process thus false? Were they ever true? Do the events we read of in a manuscript “happen”? For that matter, do the events of a novel? And what exactly do we mean by that?

Like any marginal discourse, the manuscript poses difficult questions for and about the mainstream from which it is marginalized. In this talk I would like to explore a few of those questions and their significance. I will draw primarily on the unpublished manuscripts of Raymond Queneau, but my goal is not to talk about Queneau, nor to suggest some sort of “return to the manuscript”; rather, I only want to suggest all the disquieting things that the marginalized manuscript has to tell us about the nature of the literary object and our own tendency to take that object’s nature for granted.