Abstract
We saw four of the nine categories of lost works in the previous lesson. The last five are :
5. Unrealized works : Jean-Jacques Rousseau provides an exalted testimony to these works composed in the mind, but never put to paper, when he evokes, in his Confessions, the elation he felt, after an opera session, composing songs in his mind, or the texts he imagines during his walks. These aborted works are at the heart of Saint-Exupéry's criticism of modern civilization, when he spoke of " Mozart assassinés ", for a civilization is defined as much by the works it prevents as by those it gives birth to.
6. Published works : paradoxically, publication generates lost works, since it puts an end to the creative process. There is therefore a possibility of the work being stopped by publication. If the work is republished, the author can still intervene in it : this is what we call post-publishing genesis. In general, however, it is up to the reader to create this virtual work.
7. Neglected works : present in mental libraries, they are neglected in real libraries, often because of literary history itself (minor works by great authors/major works by non-canonical authors). Their publication can lead to a collision of eras : for example, Irène Némirovsky's Suite française, published in 2004, sixty years after the author's death, was awarded the Renaudot prize by some, and branded anti-Semitic by others.
8. Seemingly unlost works : these are works that are actually ruins, doctored, but whose missing parts or alterations are not visible as such. The texts of Greek tragedies, for example, are only a tiny part of what real tragedy was, with its political allusions, its accompanying rituals, the places in which it made sense, and so on.
9. Single-consumption works : this last category covers all works whose loss is due to their very consumption. This is particularly true of cuisine, which, however long it takes to prepare, is bound to disappear. In Babette's Feast , Karen Blixen demonstrates the memorial capacity of food, and its proximity to the power of literature.
