Blanche ou l'oubli was introduced as a chronicle of 1966, with Aragon's rage to be in, to appear in the wind: "For me, the essence of the story was youth in a book where the main protagonists are not young ; the question for me was to put Gaiffier - that is, a man of my own generation - in front of the youngest generation at the same time - from twenty to twenty-five at the time the book was written - and to show at the same time as his curiosity about this generation, his loyalty, his attachment to a woman of his own (even a little younger than him), the woman of his life", Blanche, who left him eighteen years ago. It's a more complex, more meta-romantic, more circular novel than Robbe-Grillet's: Gaiffier imagines Marie-Noire's story, putting himself in the young girl's shoes, trying to understand why his wife left, and Marie-Noire in turn imagines a story in which Gaiffier intervenes: the character becomes narrator and the narrator character, so much so that it's no longer clear who's writing who.
The book is punctuated by a gap - just after Marie-Noire starts writing - a hiatus, a pause in the middle, caused by an illness - a heart attack followed by a long convalescence - of the narrator, Gaiffier, from mid-February 1966 to the end of May 1966. The novel comes to a halt, the chronicle blank, not a word written for five months, no French or international news, until July, when the narrative resumes. At the heart of the book, then, is a massive gap. Can real-life events explain this absence in Aragon's writing? There are at least three possible explanations. Firstly, the narrator's illness coincides with intense political activity on the part of the writer: on the day of the narrator's heart attack, on February 16, 1966, Aragon publishes an article in L'Humanité criticizing the Moscow trial, and then becomes actively involved in organizing the Argenteuil Central Committee. Immediately afterwards, Aragon and Elsa left Paris for a month in Florence, from where they returned in early May, and Aragon spent several months painstakingly correcting Les Communistes for the Œuvres romanesques croisées. Finally, the hiatus in the novel seems to have a reason that is more biographical than political, and very intimate: a letter from Elsa to Aragon was found, twenty years later, in 1986, when both had passed away. A letter saved, a terrible letter, a letter of accusation from the woman dispossessed by the novel about her(Blanche ou l'oubli exposes her), a letter of appeal for help addressed to a histrion, a clown (every writer is undoubtedly a clown), a letter dating from that spring of 1966. Part of this letter is to be found in the novel; the veil of fiction is transparent: Blanche transposes the most private of current events. But the novel was also shaken by two major publications of the spring of 1966, which Aragon immediately assimilated: the books by Benveniste and Foucault.
