1. Jean Paulhan as Editor and Critic
Bernard Baillaud Jean Paulhan’s Influences
Brigitte Ouvry-Vial The Double Necessity of Criticism and Self-Effacement
Martyn Cornick Jean Paulhan and the Nouvelle Revue Française
2. Rhetoric and What Really Happens
Michael Syrotinski The Rhetoric of Illness in Jean Paulhan
Carol Murphy Re-presenting the Real
Kevin Newmark On Parole
3. Rhetoric and Politics
Anna-Louise Milne The Power of Dissimulation
Laurent Jenny Paulhan, Blanchot and Le 14 juillet
Richard Rand Grave Site
4. The Power of Literature
Jean-Yves Pouilloux Faultlines
Eric Trudel “Those Who Have Fallen Silent”
Julien Dieudonné The Power of Poetics, the Poetics of Power
5. Two texts by Jean Paulhan
“A Bee”
“Democracy Calls out to the First Comer” (translated by Jennifer Bajorek)
Yale French Studies
The Power of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan's Fiction, Criticism, and Editorial ActivityBy MICHAEL SYROTINSKIYale University Press
Copyright © 2004 Yale University
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-300-10477-6Contents
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
BERNARD BAILLAUD 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 Blanchot's articles on Les fleurs de Tarbes, Paulhan wrote to Henri Pourrat: "Imagine me transported by countless observers, scientists, linguists and psychologists, whose conclusions only needed to be synthesized and made to stand together." It is as though Paulhan, despite his evasions, would never be entirely detached from the world of science. This space, if it is possible for it to assume a recognized professional or social form, is precisely that of the review editor or publisher. The editor attains the rejected ideal of the scientist.
We know that Paulhan was involved in the production of reviews well before becoming Jacques Rivire's secretary at the Nrf. Managing copy for at least two reviews formed part of his activities before 1914: Ren Martin-Guelliot's Le spectateur and douard Toulouse's Demain. We shall disregard the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique because no document exists to prove (or to suppose) that Paulhan played any other role than that of writing reviews. It is just worth noting that Frdric Paulhan published in these three journals. Apparently, Paulhan follows in his father's footsteps before, in turn, introducing him into the journals that he, Jean Paulhan, helped to edit. Among these, before 1914, only one, Le journal de psychologie, was exclusively concerned with experimental psychology, and it is precisely in this that he took no editorial role. The closer the journal was to his father, the less Paulhan took a central role; the more removed his father was from the publication-all the while remaining in the same intellectual area-the more Paulhan became involved or indispensable to its operation. From this angle Paulhan's editorial activity was a response to his father: it allowed him to construct a pattern of activity different from the one suggested to him by his father. To be an editor was not the same as to be a scientist. The job of editing a review required no training; it hardly provided any substantial remuneration. But as a response to his father, editing was a relative success.
The personality of Dr. Toulouse and the absence, hitherto, of any work on Paulhan's association with the review Demain, make it worthy of consideration. The name douard Toulouse is known to literary history as that of the compiler of a 1923 anthology, prefaced by Antonin Artaud, who did not originally wish to give his signature to this text. In 1937 in the review Mesures, Bernard Groethuysen wrote that he had consulted douard Toulouse in the matter of the "voluntarily mad" ["les fous volontaires"]. Moreover, Toulouse was director of a series for the publisher Octave Doin, the "Biblioth que internationale depsychologie exprimentale" in which Frdric Paulhan had published La volont in 1903. Initially head of the Clinic for Mental Illness at the Paris Faculty, in 1898 he embarked on a long career as the reforming clinical director of the Villejuif Asylum. He linked his laboratory of experimental psychology and mental prophylaxis to the cole des Hautes tudes, and, on 8 December 1920, founded the League of Hygiene and Mental Prophylaxis. His medical work was immense, and was aimed at repealing the law of 1838 on regulations concerning treatment of the mentally ill. This effort included the campaign against psychiatric detention, which was not justified, in his view, by clinical symptoms alone; the distancing of police and judicial interventions in the matter of mental illness; and, finally, consideration of an "open doors" system. He made it easier for women to join the staff of health centers and selected those who, during the war, were to replace tram drivers. He pleaded for the setting up of health centers specializing in mental illness along the same lines as campaigns against tuberculosis and syphilis.
Toulouse's work as a therapist crossed over easily into the literary and social domains. He saw himself as a novelist whose work was based on exact observations, and said that he had come to science through literary activity. He was young when he began a career as a drama critic for various Marseille newspapers. He was famous for having "copiously" analyzed mile Zola. Other personalities in the literary, scientific, and artistic worlds would welcome his investigations: Marcelin Berthelot, Alphonse Daudet, the Goncourts, Jules Lematre, Henri Poincar, Puvis de Chavannes, Rodin and Saint-Sans. One of his paradoxical conclusions was quoted in Le spectateur, on which Paulhan worked: endowed with the most methodical intelligence, Zola had invented a whole novelistic world; with his spontaneity, Poincar had triumphed in mathematical research. Well before Hermann Rorschach systematized the procedure by statistically standardizing normal and pathological responses, Toulouse showed ink stains to the novelist, asking him to describe the images they inspired in him. Written in very accessible language, his books are composed from articles published in Le journal and the Revue bleue, and were intended for the whole of society in order to encourage improvements in public "hygiene." Viewed in the historical context of the twentieth century, these prescriptive works are not without their ambiguities because they are concerned with psychotechnology and biotechnology. In some areas they were taken up by Alexis Carrel, a Nobel prize-winning physician who was an arch-conservative and who occupied an important position during the Vichy years, whereas the majority of the practitioners or supporters of the mental hygiene movement would be opponents of the Vichy regime. Toulouse never declared that he wished to see democracy replaced by biocracy.
In editing the review Demain, Jean Paulhan took only a subordinate role. He was contacted by his friend Tony Dubois, who was assistant to Dr. Toulouse. In the beginning, Toulouse offered Paulhan a first "opportunity to contribute" consisting in the "editing of a few articles," leaving open the prospect of extending this role. Dubois had links with another friend of Paulhan's, Georges Sabiron, and they began a "psychological tale" that in principle gave rise to weekly meetings. He also worked on an article on Hervieu. In a letter to Paulhan, Dubois imagined his friend's future:
I'm convinced you will be a great help to people and that you'll find a world in which you'll go far. To be independent and to feel that you are independent, today you need a source of material strength. In my view the real man of intelligence today is the one who begins by ensuring a material strength that can help his mind to work. That's my frank conviction. Down with teaching!
Was Paulhan already "going far" in his involvement with Demain? His association with it has left no later trace in his work or his correspondence, and he did nothing to remember it after the death of Dubois, whose sister wrote on 13 September 1915 to tell him that she had received conflicting news as to her brother's fate. Again, on 12 November 1918, after an inquiring word from Paulhan-then in Tarbes-she could only speculate between "joyous surprise, the little happiness we forget" and "renewed grief." The second hypothesis turned out to be the right one, and the names of Tony Dubois and Georges Sabiron would join the long list of Paulhan's friends killed in the war.
From two of Dubois's letters it emerges that, following his friend's advice, Paulhan paid a visit to Toulouse before giving his impressions. But because Paulhan's letters (as far as we know) have not survived, we have to depend on this relatively unreliable mirror effect. After Paulhan's return from Madagascar, Dubois asked him to send him "a hainteny [a Malagasy poem in the form of a proverb] suitable for Demain" and to extract from his introduction a passage to be included in the review's "Notions et prjugs" [Ideas and Prejudices] section: "The best thing would be to make this introduction into a `Causerie pour tous' for us." A little later Dubois said that he was "very happy" that Paulhan had written this "Causerie" and that he had sent with it-so it seems-another text. These two articles were accepted, even though Paulhan had taken the liberty of having them typeset without sending the manuscripts to Toulouse: "Wait for me to put together the next issue," Dubois subsequently reminded him. This episode shows up the two levels of delegation operating at the review Demain, from Toulouse to Dubois and then from the latter to Paulhan; it highlights too the limitations of this delegation. During Paulhan's stay in Algiers, from November 1912 to May 1913, Dubois approach him anew: "I've been asked officially by Toulouse to ask you if you could send some notes or articles for one or other of the various sections." In 1912, under the single initial "P" a text appeared dealing with the manifestations of hysteria to be observed on the Quai d'Orsay in Paris in front of the Magic-City fairground rides. In 1913, Paulhan signed the article "Optique morale: le danger de l'opium" [A Moral Point of View: The Danger of Opium].
The review Demain went on sale in bookshops and station bookstalls. According to Dubois, its print run extended to 3,000 copies, that is, much higher than that of Le spectateur, of which Paulhan was later to say that it had seventeen subscribers. To borrow Paulhan's terminology, Demain was a "terrorist" review, which sought to protect its readers "against the sophistry and charlatanism of all parties and all dishonest undertakings." Dubois considered "introducing [into the section `Yesterday and Tomorrow'] in clear and rigid columns" a number of "bold ideas." His vocabulary was at once aggressive and medical. He wrote: "Through small and powerful doses we can tap into people's minds with revolutionary force." Hurt by not finding any mainstay other than republican bureaucracy, Dubois resorted to a terrorist analogy: "There are periods when my mind is nothing more than a little bomb with the capacity to blow up the planet, but then fortunately I tell myself that the planet isn't worth it and that it would be better to save my mind than to waste it on explosions." In this milieu of students looking for something satisfying to do, revolt vied with the instinct for survival and bourgeois integration into society. In his preface to the works of Dr. Toulouse, Artaud went one better:
There are things to be destroyed. There are distortions of thought, there are mental habits and there are vices that contaminate man's judgment when it has scarcely come into existence. We are born, we live, we die in an atmosphere of lies. Our teachers, those who were like blood brothers, were, it has to be said, not consciously but unconsciously, through their ancestral nature, bad counselors.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Yale French Studiesby MICHAEL SYROTINSKI Copyright © 2004 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
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