Jean Paulhan: The Extreme Middle
L'Incorrect, Laurent Gayard, 24 décembre 2020
If Jean Paulhan did indeed exist, he did so, it is true, in a very discreet way, to the point that the essential role he played in twentieth-century French literature is now too often forgotten.
"Jean Paulhan does not exist," proclaimed in 1963 a postcard published by a few vengeful neo-surrealists, when the acting director of La Nouvelle Revue Française decided to present his candidacy for the Académie française. Keen to disabuse his detractors and prove that he did in fact exist, Jean Paulhan acquired several dozen copies of the postcards, widely circulated them, and moreover obtained his seat at the Academy, in the chair of Pierre Benoît, who had died in 1962. If Jean Paulhan did indeed exist, he did so, it is true, in a very discreet way, to the point that the essential role he played in twentieth-century French literature is now too often forgotten.
Born in Nîmes in 1884 and dead in Neuilly in 1968, Paulhan published a good part of the great names of twentieth-century French literature during the roughly thirty years he spent at the head of the NRF, from 1925 to 1940, then from 1953 until his death; and he pushed his own career as a writer into the background. Although Le Guerrier appliqué, an account of his experience at the front, was celebrated upon publication in 1917 as one of the most brilliant texts written on the experience of war, his fictional and theoretical work, entirely devoted to the mystery of language, remained confidential and difficult to access. [...]
Paulhan paid close attention to the avant-gardes but disliked ideologues just as much as he disliked wardens: "In short, as soon as one is dealing with a baroque and manifestly absurd opinion, one can be sure it was authored by some prince of thought," he wrote in the NRF in March 1939, after being among the rare intellectuals to deplore the Munich retreat. "It is not the least curious effect of triumphant fascisms that they may throw into anxiety a democracy dazzled by so many successes, vaguely jealous, fully ready to water down its popular wine and already convinced that it has sinned through an excess of democracy." Politically, Paulhan did not hold very fixed ideas: "And I do not mind," he admitted in 1956 in his Lettre à un jeune partisan, "that in the morning I must be a democrat, in the afternoon an aristocrat, and in the evening a royalist."
If Paulhan is not far from finding that political parties remain a joke, democracy has a more serious matter to settle when, in times of crisis, it must revive its own mystique: "Democracy appeals against aristocrats - and especially against aristocrats of intelligence - to the first passer-by." Who then is this first passer-by to whom Paulhan never ceased appealing from the eve of the Second World War to his thunderous Lettre aux directeurs de la résistance in 1947? The people? Paulhan has too much honesty to pretend he can define them. The people have a thousand voices, except when party leaders pretend to give them one. So what is Paulhan's first passer-by? A king? A dictator? De Gaulle, the providential first passer-by? But this democratic first passer-by is not a party leader, Paulhan tells us. It is at once the man in the street and, between the clutter of doctrines and the pretension of ideologies, a "state of extreme middle, much closer to a secret than to a confession, to an ignorance than to a doctrine." The atavism of common sense, then, or the indescribable injunction of moral choice, which led Paulhan, like thousands of other first passers-by, to join the Resistance in order to defend a highly uncertain idea of democracy in 1940: "Democracy has its mystery, like a religion; and its secret, like poetry."
A very fragile mystery and a very uncertain religion, defended only through a strange conviction: "You can squeeze a bee in your hand until it suffocates. It will not suffocate without stinging you. It is a small thing, you say. Yes, it is a small thing. But if it did not sting you, there would long since be no more bees."