There are seventy-five volumes of manuscripts and corrections and four notebooks of In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, written between 1909 and 1922. Jonathan Littell wrote The Kindly Ones in 112 days, after a-year-and-a-half research in Moscow in 2001: two drafts were written on paper by pen and a third one was typed by computer. But many other writers of his generation go even further, now forgetting about paper: they write directly using a word processing program which, unless we specifically demand of it, doesn't save any trace of corrections and afterthoughts which have made literary scholars happy for centuries. Literature is becoming the eternal kingdom of final drafts.
“In destroying the possibility of memory, we are building a future where we will be no more” Pierre-Marc de Biasi, manager of Item (Institute of modern texts and manuscripts) states. The cry of alarm of this scholar of Gustav Flaubert (who is well known for his tormented drafts) is based on the statement that over the last twenty years most writers have converted to born digital manuscripts, that is to say manuscripts which were written directly by computer, so there's no trace left of the origin of their work.
For the first time since the 18th century, we are living in a time when nothing of the huge preparatory work which comes before the completed work will remain. And scholars, who have been used to analyzing the evolution of a passage by Jane Austen or Honoré de Balzac in detail, realize that in the future they won't have anything to look into to figure out how an author got to create a masterpiece of our time.
