Yale French Studies

Yale University Press

Contents

MICHAEL SYROTINSKI Editor's Preface..........................................................................................................1I: Jean Paulhan as Editor and CriticBERNARD BAILLAUD Jean Paulhan's Influences: The Review Demain................................................................................11BRIGITTE OUVRY-VIAL The Double Necessity of Criticism and Self-Effacement: Paulhan and Fnon................................................26MARTYN CORNICK Jean Paulhan and the Nouvelle revue franaise: Literature, Politics, and the Power of Creative Editorship.....................37II: Rhetoric and What Really HappensMICHAEL SYROTINSKI The Rhetoric of Illness in Jean Paulhan...................................................................................57CAROL J. MURPHY Re-Presenting the Real: Jean Paulhan and Jean Fautrier.......................................................................71KEVIN NEWMARK On Parole: Blanchot, Saussure, Paulhan.........................................................................................87III: Rhetoric and PoliticsANNA-LOUISE MILNE The Power of Dissimulation: "When you are the only three white men ..."....................................................109LAURENT JENNY Paulhan, Blanchot, and Le 14 juillet...........................................................................................125RICHARD RAND Grave Site......................................................................................................................140IV: The Power of LiteratureJEAN-YVES POUILLOUX Fault Lines: Literature and the Experience of the Impossible.............................................................159ERIC TRUDEL "Those Who Have Fallen Silent": Keeping Literature "au secret"...................................................................173JULIEN DIEUDONN The Power of Poetics, the Poetics of Power..................................................................................189V: Two Texts by Jean PaulhanJENNIFER BAJOREK Translator's Introduction...................................................................................................207JEAN PAULHAN Democracy Calls on the First Comer..............................................................................................209JEAN PAULHAN A Bee...........................................................................................................................215

Chapter One

Jean Paulhan's Influences: The Review Demain

Commonplaces being what they are, anyone is perfectly at liberty to see an infallible strategist in Jean Paulhan. It seems to me that this all-too-natural image has been colored in two ways: first, during the 1950s and 1960s, by Paulhan's playful and complicit entourage, and, second, by a form of literary discourse that borrows from sociology and tends to treat literature as a game of strategy, as having predetermined trajectories. Paulhan's relative success comes from knowing-no doubt better than others-how to incorporate his own weaknesses into a process whose results appeared forceful and triumphant to others but not to him. Paulhan was not really a self-consciously ambitious man. Or, if he was ambitious, it is for reasons that derive from his innermost fragility. A man of power in the world of publishing, Paulhan used all his own weaknesses to great advantage. This proximity of weakness and strength, of power and non-power, of potency and impotence are all present in his character before 1914. Such was the basis of Paulhan's strategy. This dual approach taken by Paulhan specialists more or less reflects his personality: a successful son coupled with a failed scientist, a writer coupled with an editor (or vice versa). Here we shall limit ourselves to unearthing a certain approach to exercising influence.

The first intellectual figure to be set before the young Paulhan was that of the scientist (savant). This figure was his father, Frdric Paulhan, a Protestant, a Freemason, and an experimental psychologist (that is, a philosopher in the sense in which this was understood at this time), and his work was continuously published by Flix Alcan, the big name in contemporary French philosophical publishing. As a student, Jean Paulhan kept his father at a distance, all the while regretting that his father kept his distance: "But Papa is too severe. He's a scientist." The possibility of becoming a scientist was also suggested to him by friends such as Mademoiselle Sviette, who did not share his sense of irony when speaking of intellectuals: "In the future you'll be a scientist," she told him at the end of the university year 1903-1904. Paulhan would remember this trajectory that might have been his, an unrealized future whose memory he closed off by writing, at the beginning of Aytr qui perd l'habitude: "there are some days when I would like to become a scientist: especially on the customs of the Malagasy people and their language, about which I know things that no-one would guess." At the end of this narrative, such prowess results in his distancing himself from this ambition, and in a kind of valediction to science: "Ah, he too had wanted to become a scientist." It is no accident that Paulhan would publish these words in February 1921, at the precise moment and in the very place where, thanks to the Nouvelle revue franaise (hereafter Nrf), he was in the process of becoming something other than a scientist. Nothing, however, in this vocation to become a scientist was confirmed in a definitive manner. At the end of the year 1907, postponing his marriage, Paulhan left for Madagascar, at the same time opening up the possibility-soon rejected-of entering into the colonial administration. He underlined his choice as scientist by choosing as a topic of study poems in the form of proverbs; by preparing for examinations in the Malagasy language, which he studied very seriously, by successfully applying to the Academy of Madagascar, and finally by publishing his study both in Le journal asiatique and with the publisher Geuthner, that is, with an Orientalist specialist. Yet at the same time, he freed himself from his duties as a teacher, criticized the island's governor as well as all the French settlers in Madagascar, and mentioned Paul Claudel in his book, thereby leaving open the possibility of using this apparently ethnographic study for literary and poetic purposes. If, through irony, Paulhan happened to distance himself from the figure of the scientist, as far as I know it never occurred to him to confirm that he actually intended to become an artist or writer, or even a critic or editor. Paulhan hesitates, refuses, and confirms practically nothing. Yet by moving away from the scientific path, all the while maintaining his intellectual activity, he created the conditions in which to fulfill his related, albeit varied, projects: becoming a critic, an editor, a writer.

All the same, Paulhan never entirely gave up wanting to gain the approval of scientists. His ambition to write a thesis was revived several times. Even if the Nrf tended to avoid the most contemporary scientific debates, it rejected neither scientific themes nor its university readership. In December 1941, at the time he learned about Maurice...