Jean Paulhan: Linguistic amputation and literary censorship

The red dragonfly,
Take off its wings,
It's a pepper seed.
Kikaku

Un grain de piment,
Mettez-lui des ailes,
C'est la libellule !
Bashô (1)

For and against a portrait of Jean Paulhan

Usage dictates that we begin to speak of Jean Paulhan by regretting, with all the complacency that attaches to this sort of feeling, that his name is so little known, and his work so poorly, that his readers protect their dilection in the complicity reserved for the happy few, and that they too often seem to draw the quincunxes of a literate Eden where literature can finally think about literature without at the same time thinking badly. The field has enough to stimulate research: a bibliography to be perfected, and therefore, no edition of truly complete works (2), an immense correspondence in the process of being classified and published, working notes in the thousands, an uncontested editorial role but the evaluation of which remains controversial because it engages our reading of an entire century of literature. Paulhan, often cited, mentioned everywhere, presents an obligatory silhouette which enhances with a little very pure gray an assembly better touched than him by glory. Incorruptible reader, pastor of poets, Paulhan will not have avoided the reputation that usually attaches to the clever: a precious, even a satrap, not to say a sadist.

At first glance, the name of Jean Paulhan hardly resonates in the spheres of encyclopedism. We can grant him the benefit of sixty years of reading, at the center of literary life, without counting - this is always understood - the readings and libraries of his father (Frédéric Paulhan) and his friends (Bernard Groethuysen), from which he benefited greatly. Projects entrusted in a letter, diaries, manuscripts in draft form, ceremonial manuscripts, printing proofs, texts offered to the friend and the publisher, uncut books, nothing written will have been refused (or spared) to Jean Paulhan.

However, we would look in vain for his concern with the organization of knowledge, with the hierarchy of disciplines, or, failing that, the affirmation of the impossibility of even locating any discipline at the center of knowledge. This very analytical heir of French thought at the end of the 19th century, so preoccupied with the classification of sciences, will hardly have paid his dues to a fashion that his youth was experiencing. This is not ignorance of things, even less disinterest in logic: knowledge does not appear to Paulhan as an object that requires to be gathered into a sum, listed in a dictionary, organized in an encyclopedia. If didactic writing is not his strong point, erudite confusion is indeed his weakness.

Not everyone around Paulhan is going in this direction. Roger Caillois, René Etiemble, Raymond Queneau, to stick, despite some trifles and some disagreements, to several names that are variously close, make a use of knowledge which rejects neither sum nor seriousness, but on the contrary seeks an encounter with a public broadened by the bookselling business. Paulhan, who is no stranger to the birth of L'Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, however declines the invitation made by Queneau to describe all French literature in a hundred pages, then, in a more modest way, only Malagasy literature, in a few pages. Previously, he had abstained from participating in Lucien Febvre's Encyclopédie française (3), even though the collaborators were often close to his usual circle, and he himself may have wished, around 1936, to get closer to the University, or even enter it, relaunching an old thesis project on the semantics of the proverb. This does not mean that Paulhan advises anyone against participating in an encyclopedic enterprise (4).

Old prejudice that is too literary, which chooses the poem or the story, but distrusts the discourse? It is not only by provocation that Paulhan advises everyone to read Jacques Delille and deplores, among other genres, the loss of didactic poetry. Collector's mania, who likes limited editions and small formats, offprints and discreet, even clandestine editions, to the point of flirting with illegality (Pascal Pia, Robert Chatté, Pauline Réage)? Paulhan refuses nothing to the Sunday poets, associates them with exceptional poets, and is delighted that Georges Braque reaches his audience or that Jean Fautrier invents multiple originals, which make the painting accessible to almost everyone. Sacrifice of a writer's work to the function of editor? It is a little vain to admire this self-sacrifice, even though the part sacrificed remains beyond our esteem and access. It is difficult to see, as he has written, what Paulhan would have written and what he did not write, if he had had all the time to write. Besides, have we ever seen a writer say that he has plenty of time to write? The essential thing is that Paulhan formed from literature, language and the mind a conception which gave rise to this sacrifice and its appearances.

Remorse for not publishing everything

Paulhan is a man of magazines. There is not one of his books that was not first published in a periodical; Since its beginnings, his professional activity has consisted of the foundation, secretariat or direction of successive journals. Four magazines welcome Jean Paulhan's training: Le Journal of Normal and Pathological Psychology, for his first regular reports - and his first emoluments at Alcan -, Le Spectateur (5) by René Martin-Guelliot, an astonishing review of logic applied to daily life, La Revue de psychology sociale by Alfred Espinas and Charles Gide, finally La Vie des Frères Marius and Ary Leblond. With La Nouvelle Revue française by Jacques Rivière, Commerce by Paul Valéry, Léon-Paul Fargue and Valery Larbaud, Mesures by Henry Church, with Bernard Groethuysen, Henri Michaux and Giuseppe Ungaretti, and more secondarily Les Nouveaux Cahiers, (by Tarde, Detuf and Denis de Rougemont), Paulhan works on his body of review doctrine. Two titles appeared underground: Résistance, official bulletin of the National Committee of Public Safety (12°1, December 15, 1940) and Les Lettres françaises with George Adam and Claude Morgan. In the post-war period, Les Cahiers de la Pléiade responded to the purification in letters, and La Nouvelle nouvelle Revue française, directed with Marcel Arland from January 1953, sought to erase the mess orchestrated by Drieu la Rochelle and above all to rebuild a tradition supported by numerous notes of literary criticism. As for old age, it provides a verification a contrario: growing old consists for Paulhan of outliving his friends and of no longer being listened to on the editorial board of La N.R.f (6).

Such a long practice of journals engages a sense which concerns the very concept of literature, and not only its circumstantial modalities. The separation of research, between literary history, history of journals, commentary on texts and reflection on the notion of literature hides transversal lines that should be brought to light. Paulhan directs La N.R.f. while writing Les Fleurs de Tarbes. The enormous work that a monthly review represents may well appear as a diversion vaguely grasped by a man still uncertain of himself and his thoughts: the pensum distracts the man from the choices from which deep down he knows he cannot escape. But it would be a contradiction to limit Revuist activity to a simple psychological determination. Paulhan's work is underpinned by a historical and intellectual intuition: the vitality of magazines since the end of the 19th century has something to do with the very notion of literature.

The idea that literature requires strict selection of texts sent to journals depends on practical evidence: there is not enough space. It does not disqualify the opposite idea, according to which any text, good or bad, already has a significant relationship with literature. Paulhan insists on the surprises of the literary vocation: literature is an event that can arise at any point in society. There is no profession, no political vision, no character that allows us to stay away from literature. The true republic of letters redistributes the cards according to its own criteria; it is heterogeneous to contemporary society.

Ideally, everything should be published. The reader does not need the prior choice of his editor. He can put the criticism's advice to good use, but he does not necessarily want this advice to be decisive with regard to publication. Reading is a very healthy activity, which in many cases consists of saving the book and its author. To the survey “Should Kafka be burned?” (7), Paulhan responds:

Paulhan identifies the good reader with “the man in the street”, elsewhere called “the first comer” or “the modest”, a true character of Paulhanian criticism. It is he who in Zola's work prefers Germinal, a bitter but healthy novel, to Fecundité, which immediately puts him off having children (9). Burn Kafka? In 1940, it was a little too reminiscent of the Berlin scenes at Bebelplatz, opposite Humboldt University, where we saw for the first time the Nazis working to burn books by Jewish authors.

Injury is done, through censorship or book burning, to the reader rather than to the author: there is a confidence that is lost there. The idea of ​​a whole, which merits publication, appears in Paulhan in the second post-war period, that is to say in a climate which, despite fatigue, brings contemporaries closer to cultural, social or political utopia:

The idea comes from a remorse (11), that of the reader in a publishing house. The reader of this type is, for most of the texts he reads, the only reader outside the author's entourage. It is he who decides, most often, that the text he reads will have no other reader than himself. For the editorial reader, publication is the exception, and refusal the norm.

Now it is not very healthy to be the only one who has read anything: “I am not one of those people who seeks to be personal.” Total publication consecrates the work of the editorial reader, since everything he has read has been accepted, but makes it useless, since he no longer carries out any sorting in the mass of manuscripts received. Paulhan dreams of being this transparent reader, who refuses nothing, and even offers everything. The response given by Gaston Gallimard does not belong to the apologue. His silence, however, does not extend to all his reasons. Paulhan continues:

The justification is generic. To publish everything is to bring to light literary genres which no longer appear in the eyes of the public because they no longer pass the publication stage. The history of genres is first and foremost the history of published genres, and takes only a tiny account of their writing. The proposal made to Gaston Gallimard therefore aims to save, if we stick for example to poetry, “epic poetry, gnomic poetry, didactic poetry, drama in verse, dithyrambic poetry and others! (12)” The generic motif is an ellipsis of many other weaker reasons: blurring of criteria, uncertainty of times, general crisis of literary notions, illegitimacy of any classification, universal equivalence of authors, freedom of expression. If it is desirable for everything to be published, it is not at all in the name of freedom of expression. Rather: the loss that editorial choices inflict on the notion of literature is more serious than the political or narcissistic wounds that authors may feel affected by. The refusal to choose, moreover purely verbal, and which encounters other forms of indecision in Paulhan, is oriented towards the idea that the reader has of what is written, it gives no authority to the prejudice which would like all choices to be censored. The editorial reader's choices distort the reader's idea of ​​literature. On the other hand, the volume which brings together all the manuscripts of the year is the only possible basis for a proven idea of ​​literature.

The service records of Jean Paulhan

Jean Paulhan can be recognized for the benefit of a constant protest, from the beginning, against the different forms of censorship that his existence caused him to encounter. In order to simplify the presentation of some of the documents available to us, we will provisionally admit that on the question of censorship, two biases, political and biographical, are operative. Outside of his mother's boarding house, Paulhan met, around 1904, more young girls, anarchists from Russia or Poland, than strict statistics would suggest. Paulhan did not stick to the libertarian marivaudage that plays out at the beginning of his intermittent journal (13). The proximity of anarchist circles, even if it does not cut the student off from the philosophical environment gathered around the Alcan house, where his father Frédéric Paulhan published, also represents an intellectual choice - which tragically comes up against the fate that the Bolsheviks reserved for this kind of ideal (14). Anarchist ideas pass through conversations, brochures and books, and the radical hostility of the libertarian milieu to any idea of ​​censorship is obvious and requires no proof. The young Paulhan is interested in Malatesta, and communicates his interest to his friend Alfred Saurel (15). The same Saurel reads two books by Kropotkin, out of aesthetic idealism, and not without reservation: At the moment I am reading Around a Life by Kropotkin and I have just finished The Conquest of Bread. The memoirs are very interesting. The rest is very beautiful... but it's so sad, the prospect of change! When the surroundings of Paris are turned into cabbage plants, it will be very boring. (16) But when it comes, in situ, to demonstrating its antimilitarism, the testimony of a good, efficient anarchist culture arouses youthful admiration (17). Another friend, Georges Riemann, who is in the process of becoming a pastor, gives a conference in Saint-Denis, for a workers' circle, on the Doukhobores, for which he requests the library of Jean Paulhan (18), to whom he later confides his immediate impressions (19). With the Doukhobores, it is an extreme political movement, nudist and incendiary, whose most brilliant activity consisted of crossing in bands some region of Russia, Crimea or Canada, naked, and setting fire, in passing, to the houses, that is to say, if possible, to the very idea of ​​property: the inhabitants thus lost their most expensive clothing. In 1930, André Gide's interest in the Doukhobores, which he associated in The Redureau Affair with the unanimity of Jules Romains, only met the preliminary interest, but without taking action, of the student Paulhan, already very informed, a quarter of a century earlier, on the forms of life against which censorship worked (20). Beyond the books, clandestinity emerges, when Riemann asks Paulhan to receive a letter in the name of “Monsieur Ch. V. Nicou / (this is my pseudonym for a day) / in the care of Jean Paulhan / 167 rue St Jacques / Paris” (21) . It was clearer in 1907, when Paulhan, before leaving for four or five days, perhaps in Belgium, asked Guillaume de Tarde to post on his behalf, in Saint-Cloud, a letter which could be the activist's alibi (22). It must be recognized However, on this point we are dependent on family tradition: Paulhan's ability to escape the police did not multiply the material evidence of his active activism. But there is indeed, through the correspondence from Saurel to Paulhan, a certain “W.”, about whom the two friends seem to have some reason to worry. From Cadiz, Saurel writes:

And when the Russian anarchists succeed in crime, Saurel approves:

No one is perfect, and not all attempts are equally successful: “If Nicolas had jumped, it would have been amazing. (25)” But still?

The details of the program really don't matter:

Hear:

Man is weak from what he refuses to deprive himself of. Paulhan is not an etymological anarchist: for him the anarchist is not so much one who refuses power or the law (29); rather he is the one who refuses to recognize the power to move the center, to invert essence and existence, to change the truth.

This could be understood as a simple reservation. But anarchy also takes pride, in the person of Armand, in having “firmly maintained, in a world of madmen, a nobility and brilliance such that I cannot imagine any greater. (31)» Armand's death gives rise to some nostalgic memories, addressed to Roger Martin du Gard:

In 1956, it was again on the example of his anarchist friends that Paulhan based his questioning of the Committee of Intellectuals against the continuation of the war in North Africa:

Paulhan's predilection for Armand is enriched by a another meaning, less directly political: even within the libertarian movement, Armand stands out, against other individualists, by his refusal of makeup, modesty and jealousy, and by his praise of natural skin, of cohabitation love and sexual emancipation. His refusal of censorship also applies to the central question of the body (34). Whatever has been said, somewhat easily, about Paulhan's Protestantism, it is clear that the interest he has in his body, even if he values ​​certain selected elements, notably in the stories (the lips, the knees, the leg) more than he thinks of its organic totality, coincides with the early choice of a physical anarchism which prepares from afar the public forms of his passion for the Marquis de Sade. That anarchist literature struggles to renew its themes matters little: Paulhan has already learned an intellectual rather than a political lesson. Anarchism is essentialism.

Jean Grave offers a second figure of anarchist individualized. Shoemaker rue Mouffetard, he is more often cited (6 times) in the five volumes of Paulhan's complete works than the great man of the grassroots anarchists, Count Léon Tolstoy, while neither Kropotkin (35) nor Bakunin appears there, and even less Paul Brousse or Charles Malato (36). But the human face of Jean Grave seems to Paulhan more eloquent than his arguments: “Anarchy, Jean Grave taught me; he was an excellent man, as upright as he was naive, very poor indeed, very convinced. You just had to see it. The unfortunate thing was that when he gave explanations and proofs, he ceased to be convincing. (37)» Jean Grave is not an extreme anarchist: clumsy to speak, always maintaining an indulgent tone, even when discussing those (Ledot) who claim authorship of his books (he lets Élisée Reclus find the title of The Dying Society and anarchy), he nevertheless has a wooden model at home, to melt the bombs (38). Despite the reservations of Paulhan who finds him “a little weak” (39), Jean Grave remains a necessary figure, whom he visited on his bed of agony, in 1939, accompanied by his son Frédéric, so that the tradition could take place.

Even if the anti-militarist part of Paulhan's anarchy ebbed shortly before the First World War, undoubtedly provoking in him a renewal of the idea of ​​homeland (40) which prefigured the positions of the resistance from 1940 to 1944, Paulhan retained fidelity to the anarchist spirit. The Unique remains a model for a long time, if only at the cost of a shift which leads from politics to criticism (41), only in the figure embodied by Félix Fenéon, the only “man” (42), between 1883 (Rimbaud) and 1919 (Joyce), to formulate, in matters of poetry and painting, tastes that posterity retains.

The same adjectives, here applied to news items, are also suitable for the mind and language. Political violence is not exhausted in political analysis. Beyond the story to which it lends itself, it refers to the language itself. If Paulhan was able, during his anarchist period, to avoid trials and prison, the same luck did not assist him in his functions as publisher.

This first applies to the review. La Nouvelle Revue française was banned in Italy by Mussolini. The start of the Second World War aroused some reflexes from the censor, but, somewhat unexpectedly, it was a text by Henri Pourrat which made it fees (46). The edition of Sade's complete works by Jean-Jacques Pauvert provokes a trial where Paulhan, called as a witness, competes in controlled irony with the shadow of Félix Fénéon, who in 1894, during the trial of the Thirty, had placed his independence of mind very high. In 1946, a short year after the publication of three of his novels (47), the threat of a criminal trial against Henry Miller and his three publishers, Le Chêne, Denoël, Gallimard, on the complaint of a “Cartel of moral action and social”, for “indecent assault through books” was enough to mobilize Paulhan around a defense committee. Banned in the United States, Miller's work could only be fraudulently passed into England, and the French editions constitute its only place of appearance (48). By taking a position in favor of Henry Miller, Jean Paulhan does not distinguish himself from the “editorial environment”, if we accept this fraudulently sociological approximation, to which he belongs (49). The publication of Histoire d'O (50), in June 1954, was epoch-making: the book, signed “Pauline Réage”, perhaps an unintentional anagram of “Égérie Paulhan”, is worth its preface an interrogation of the social brigade, on August 5, 1955. Paulhan does not fail to recall in favor of this book, awarded at the Deux-Magots, the precedents of Liaisons Dangereuses and Letters from a Portuguese Nun:

Ordinary strategy in favor of the exception: making the norm seem extraordinary. It is not obscenity or immorality that is dangerous, but literature in its ordinary form. Should the writer be distressed by the difficulties that the writer encounters due to censorship? It turns out that Paulhan never wanted to leave a written trace of any movement of complaint or despondency on this subject. The constancy of the wise man undoubtedly has something to do with it. thing, and the abnegation of the Protestant. This would be nothing if other reasons did not prevail.

Censorship takes literature seriously

Reaction against a certain symbolist innocence? Protest against surrealist inconsistency? It is important that dreams have consequences: the title of a small collection by Paul Eluard preceded by a preface note by Jean Paulhan, has symbolic value (51). In 1927, returning from a beautiful summer in Port-Cros, when a quarrel pitted him against André Breton, and the witnesses planned for the duel, Marcel Arland and Benjamin Crémieux, were already chosen, Paulhan would undoubtedly have preferred that the thing went to the end, and that Breton did not withdraw (52). The value of a writer is measured by his ability to take literature tragically. Already the investigation, prior to the trial of the Thirty, in 1894, had brought to light certain weaknesses of the writers:

Romain Rolland does not escape this severity: consistent pacifists and effective rebels were shot, before 1917: “Yes, more than one pacifist friend of Rolland showed, in the war of 1914, a courage all the greater because he was without hope. (54)” This does not mean that those who survive them are the guilty ones, but rather that the same words did not have the same meaning, between those for whom they had fatal consequences, and those for whom they only had intellectual consequences. Conversely, part of the esteem that Jean Paulhan has for Jean Grave is justified by the anarchist's stays in prison. The most beautiful statement is the performative.

We could multiply the examples, but the case of Giono, quite well documented despite testimonies which, in a troubled time sometimes diverge, deserves a separate development (55). According to Paulhan, the moment of truth did not come for Giono when he published pacifist texts (56). It comes in times of war, when the prison punishes the publications of the pacifist. Prison, that's what we call taking the text seriously: Giono was arrested on September 14, 1939 - an announcement was made in the newspapers the day after. Friends, Lucien Jacques, but also Thyde Monnier, Abel Gance, André Chamson, Jean Guéhenno” (57) seek to intervene. An appeal in favor of the writer circulated among one hundred and fifty personalities: very few responded. The truth is that the file is empty, since Giono never called for insubordination. Jean Grenier notes for his part:

Silliness aside, Paulhan asks a question that despite certain appearances, casualness is excluded: what fate do the judgments we form reserve for language itself?

(The other aim of war is that pacifism has something of truth, that it is absurd to “force someone to fight who does not want to”, and that it is perhaps not “completely insane to return to professional armies.”) It is undoubtedly necessary to allow for retrospective illusion; but criticism of the interwar period was still less frequent in the fall of 1939 than after June 1940, when under other pens it lost all measure.

Charles de Gaulle is often attributed a sentence in which the name of Voltaire is enough to save Sartre from prison: it is interpreted as a distant greeting, from the general to the philosopher. But what is Voltairian insolence that would not land its author in prison? If the general refuses to imprison the philosopher, it is because the philosopher is demonetized.

Paulhan is undoubtedly an analytical intellectual, but obsessed by the question of signs and proof. This ironist would suffer greatly if he himself were not taken seriously (62). Man of letters: this is just the name of a specialist. We should know how to stick to the first of these words, as Félix Fénéon knew how to do. The sanctions that state authorities take against writers are excellent proof that the writer, renouncing the cautions and protections attached to the man of letters, knew how to be only a man (63). We must here put an end to the double license, political and biographical, which we have provisionally granted ourselves to review, moreover incompletely (64), the service records of Jean Paulhan. This is because Paulhan does not pride himself on fighting against censorship. There is nothing in him of an intellectual romantically proud to revolt against arbitrariness (65). For literature, censorship is an indicator of seriousness. The heart of censorship is elsewhere. The question of censorship does not arise in the field of history and law, but, here and elsewhere, in that of language itself.

Hain-teny and haiku: examples of the exote

Paulhan is sometimes born in Madagascar. He returned, with several notebooks of hain-teny (66) (i.e. science of language, science of words, learned words or wise words), poems with a framework of proverbs, brief texts, but organized in dialogues, and which contain, in a variable place, a proverb or a series of proverbs. The proverb identified as such reproduces its structure upstream or downstream, thus generating a series of proverbs, some true, others, sometimes, perhaps, invented. Paulhan, very attentive to his own “experience”, first saw in these hain-teny heterogeneous wholes which he compares to medieval jumble: literature gives way to the inconsistencies of intelligibility. Not every textual statement is equally intelligible. The observation of hain-teny leads to a conception of the text, defined as a reversal machine. Its dark side contributes to its authority, to its effectiveness in an exchange of arguments. The most striking arguments are not always the clearest. The mind is very easily struck by a statement which contains in itself a contradiction which is initially unnoticed. Naturally, we could stick to an allegorical reading of these hain-teny: carried by the transport of the image, there would be nothing mysterious about them. But rather than their meaning, or their poetics, Paulhan chooses to focus on their effectiveness. How come words have power? How, perhaps, is it that they are a force? Let them intimidate, and silence, at the end of the exchange, one of the two parties in presence? Paulhan's response is due to what he calls the default or chiaroscuro, or even the reversal of clarity. Sometimes, in fact, the proverb appears as the only intelligible passage of the poem, the remainder being thrown back into sonic jumble. Sometimes, on the contrary, it is the proverb which sounds like a set of sounds without any real meaning, bringing the whole poem back to meaning. When Paulhan brings to light an unknown or despised part of Malagasy literature, it is to see a divided text, and all the more effective because not everything is equally intelligible. On the one hand, the relevance of the text in argumentative exchanges depends on the division of light and dark. On the other hand, the hain-teny of consent does not mention consent, any more than the hain-teny of desire speaks of desire, or does renunciation show itself, in the hain-teny of renunciation. Generally speaking, the theme of hain-teny is constructed by Jean Paulhan in a proposed classification, but is only indicated in the text itself by the convergence, unequally felt by the reader, of the metaphors. What the text says is also what is missing in the text.

Around 1917, Paulhan became interested in another exotic form, the Japanese haiku, a poem of three lines and seventeen syllables (5+7+5). Like most French amateurs, Paulhan treats haiku as an autonomous poetic form, independent of its origin, free renga or haikai-renga. In France, the first contact with “the Japanese lyrical epigram”, to use the name of Basil Hall Chamberlain, came from Paul-Louis Couchoud, beneficiary of a travel grant offered by the patron Albert Kahn, which allowed him to stay in Japan at the time of a conflict with Russia whose “immense consequences for universal civilization” he sought. (67)” Couchoud sees the big picture:

Paulhan, in the review of Sages and poets of Asia which he gives to La Vie (70) by the Leblond brothers, was not only concerned with an exotic fixed form, practiced for ten centuries of Japanese poetry, and which allows the name of Lafcadio Hearn to come under his pen. Paulhan's perspective is, in a cautious tone, “linguistic, so to speak”. “Let the grace and ease of the story not hide it from us. It was nothing less than creating a language of emotions common to the European and the Japanese.” Language of emotions, rather than sign language: we recognize an old linguistic dream. Whether the task of poetry or story is to generate a common language, Paulhan never doubted it, from 1917 to 1968. The drama of language is also its condition: its split. Looking for a title for all the texts resulting from the failure of Fleurs de Tarbes II, Paulhan resorted to the “gift of languages”, perhaps based on an article by René Guénon (71):

Not all of Paulhan's erudition should be taken literally. In 1960, Paulhan's thought gave some authorities, literary, religious or philosophical, as guarantees of his activities - without forbidding, if necessary, invention. In 1917, scholarship led to an “effort” – to use one of the words of the time – of creation. But in both cases, and despite the biographical or historical variations, Paulhan postulates, above positive languages, a linguistic space to be created (1917) or to be found (1960), which allows you to switch from one language to another. However, this space can only be approached through collective effort. The N.R.f. of September 1920, with its “Hai-kais” pediment, will give a sketch, perhaps imperfect (73). Remorse over the choice, editorial action, composition of summaries, exotic examples: everything converges towards the amputation that language imposes on the mind. The censorship is more general, and also more intimate, than it appears at first glance.

Language is structured like censorship

What are journals for? To Jean Amrouche, too happy to have managed to drag Paulhan in front of a microphone, to make him talk about the homage that his Cahiers de la Pléiade pays to Saint-John Perse (74), Paulhan declares:

Banal jubilation of the negotiator who knew how to bring opponents on common ground? Post-war idealism that seeks to break with previous conflicts (75)? More profoundly, Paulhan is happy to have approached through a simple notebook - Fautrier's model assumes the childhood of the magazine - the ideal of the total publication proposed at the end of the year to Gaston Gallimard. The presence of opponents indicates that no one is missing. Despite the appearance of his infidelity to old Dada attitudes, already modified in Literature, Paulhan invents a review ideal freely inspired by Lautréamont: beautiful as the (fortuitous?) meeting, in the summary of a review... There is a reading of the summary which is not that of the texts in the summary. The good reader is not an initiate who recognizes the private quarrels and public insults behind the impassioned typographical pavement; he reads the speech that the summary makes about language. This also applies to the poetics of borrowings that Valery Larbaud dedicates “To Jean Paulhan” under the title “Le fait du prince” (76): a poem attributed by Larbaud to Charles-Marie Bonsignor (77) can only reveal its borrowings from the earlier corpus, from the Ladies of the Rocks to Emmanuel Lochac, via Dante and Marino, but he can also, "beyond the sources", "exceeding crenology", testify in favor of what Larbaud calls the "fact of the prince", of the prince of palaces if not of poets. For Larbaud, the French discoverer of Joyce, the same text is sometimes a fabric of "common forms, imitations, reminiscences, voluntary or involuntary quotations, pastiches, plagiarisms", sometimes "the presence of the new fact, of the personal contribution: the motus proprius of the Poet, the Fact of the Prince!" All the language is there in this reversal, from whatever side we claim to grasp it. The collective movement of authors is a response to the divided structure of language. Paulhan's editorial work does not escape this principle: through Jean Hytier, D. S. Mirsky or Valery Larbaud, Paulhan had his treatise on criticism written (78). Already, in Jacob Cow the Pirate, the commonplaces, provided they were not native speakers, appeared as very beautiful images:

The intelligence we have of language is also our misintelligence. The structure of language and the mind forces Paulhan to analyze short circuits (80). Accustomed, since his time at Spectateur, to open his eyes deceived by the projections of the mind, Paulhan also retraces, in the first version of Fleurs de Tarbes, published in review, the crossovers that language imposes on the reading of the most banal of commonplaces:

And if Paulhan decides to denounce the forgeries of Paul Valéry, his elder, his fellow man, it is because the Sétois dances like a quadrille, seeking

Beyond the emotional satisfaction that the reader experiences in seeing that no one is missing, the ideal Paulhanian summary is marked by a deeply divided conception of literature and language. The effort towards total summary would not be so great, if the split in language was not so deep. The refusal of censorship would not be so constant, nor so stubborn, the praise of the Sunday poets, if the language was not already structured like censorship itself. The positions that we adopt on the question of censorship do not only depend on an energy that knows how to revolt against arbitrariness: they also testify to an idea of ​​literature. Those who justify censorship or refrain from revolting against it will be reminded that it is not humanly possible to take the side of censorship. To those who enjoy inventing reading strategies that threaten to inform even supposed writing strategies, we will respond that in wanting to censor censorship we deprive literature of a weight that was precious to it. The latter, in Paulhan's eyes, are today more numerous than the former. The thoughts that justify censorship place the author at the center of the literary relationship. At the source of the writing, censorship exposes the author, but invents an innocent image. The thoughts of refusing censorship, on the other hand, locate the crux of this same relationship at a point occupied by the reader. If there is no censorship, it is the reader who is exposed, and for whom innocence is sought. With censorship, it is not only expression and its possible freedom that is at stake, but, between the author and the reader, the authority of one or the other. Politics first, literature, fine crack and pretty cut, at the end.

At the full moon
I measure myself against bashô
From my garden
Ryokan (83)

BERNARD BAILLAUD
“ALAIN” HIGH SCHOOL, ALENÇON

(Text reproduced with the kind permission of the author)

Also read by Bernard Baillaud  Notice on haiku

(NOTES)

    1 - Jean Paulhan, "Japanese haï-kaï", La Vie, 6th year, no. 2, February 1917, p. 58-60 ↩
    2 - Jean Paulhan, Oeuvres, Paris, Circle of Precious Books, 1966-1970, 5 volumes. For all the documents (correspondence, manuscripts, typescripts and radio recordings) cited in this article, see: Paulhan Fund, IMEC, thanks to Jacqueline and Claire Paulhan, whom I also thank. ↩
    3 - Seminar "Lucien Febvre and The French Encyclopedia, IMEC May 22 and 23, 1997, proceedings to be published" ↩
    4 - See for example his letter to Franz Hellens, June 20, 1934: "It is Pierre Abraham (3 rue Dufétel Le Chesnay-Versailles (S. & O.) who is responsible for the literary part of the Encyclopédie. Besides, I write to him and tell him about you." ↩
    5 - Bernard Baillaud, "Le Spectateur", L'Infini, n° 55, autumn 1996, p. 88-92 ↩
    6 - For other values of aging, however, see: Franz Hellens, This age we call great, Brussels, Jacques Antoine, 1970, 130 p. ; frontispiece by Ianchelevici. ↩
    7 - “Should Kafka be burned?”, Action, n° 93, Friday June 14, 1946, p. 12-13 [Responses from Julien Benda, Jean Paulhan, Michel Leiris, Marcel Aymé, André Rousseaux, Claude Morgan, Jacques Brenner]. Three questions were asked: “1 - To what extent do you judge that social and political imperatives should govern the forms and themes of literary work? Do you think that the writer can say whatever he likes, without any concern other than the artistic quality of his work? 2 - What do you think of 'black' literature? Do you consider it morally harmful and socially reactionary? Do you condemn it outright, or do you believe that we should distinguish several varieties, more or less justifiable? 3 - Do you think that the literature of our time must be an 'optimistic' literature? In what sense do you understand this word? » ↩
    8 - Here, a note from the Action editorial team to protest: “We are not forgetting it at all.” ↩
    9 - The investigation of Action is just one opportunity among others: “I see that we commonly blame this or that - let's say Sartre or Zola - for the filth and the mud bath, into which he begins by plunging his heroes. Personally, I would feel rather worried about all the moral weight he is going to use in dragging them back from such a base. L’Assommoir certainly has its grandeur; he also has his weaknesses, the worst of which is that he already calls the painful Work, the overwhelming Fecundity. » Jean Paulhan, Of Straw and Grain, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, p. 36) ↩
    10 - Jean Paulhan, “Postface” to Noël Devaulx, L'Auberge Parpillon nouvelles, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 183-195 (here p. 189). ↩
    11 - M., (for Maast, alias Jean Paulhan], “ Remords ”, The universal memento Da Costa, fascicle I, Paris, Jean Aubier editor, [1949], n. p. We can bet that in this collection in three fascicles (1949-1951), whose collaborators chose the entries independently of the ordinary constraints of the scholarly encyclopedia, the term "remorse" for which Paulhan opts, already present in the young man's diary, has the value of a confession "Repentance", an undated story, but which can be located. before the First World War, confirms, in Paulhan, the insistence of fault on writing. ↩
    12 - Op. cit., p. 188. ↩
    13 - Jean Paulhan, Life is full of formidable things, autobiographical texts, edition established and annotated by Claire Paulhan, Paris, Seghers, 1989. ↩
    14 - “I had a lot of Russian friends with whom I lived on rue Mouffetard around 1905 [...]: all anarchists, almost all Jews. In 1919, not one remained alive. This is what has always made me find the Russian Revolution horrible.” Jean Paulhan to Dora Bienaimer-Rigo, Monday 16 [September 1963], Choice of letters, Paris, Gallimard, II, p. 241. ↩
    15 - Letter from Alfred Saurel to Jean Paulhan. Paulhan Fund. Errico Malatesta, Anarchie, Brüssel, Brochürenverlag des “ Wolhlstand für Alle ”, 1909, in-16, 68 p., portrait. ↩
    16 - Letter from Alfred Saurel to Jean Paulhan, n.d., “ Saturday ”. ↩
    17 - Alfred Saurel to Jean Paulhan, while both are in military service: “And we are quite anti-militarist. There is even an anarchist in my room, he is a shoemaker, he is very dark, quite pretty, gentle, and very strong, and bawdy. He yelled at the corporal yesterday because he made him carry 3 beds on his back.” Paulhan is more reserved than Saurel, on the chapter of militarism or antimilitarism. ↩
    18 - Tolstoy and the Doukhobors, historical facts collected and translated from Russian, by J.W. Bienstock, Paris, P.V. Stock publisher, “ Sociological Library,” no. 32, 1902, 284 p., portrait by P. Veriguine. ↩
    19 - Letter from Georges Riemann to Jean Paulhan, January 24 [1908]: “I have, to tell the truth, only seriously worked on the beginning, which passed, I believe, over the heads of my listeners. It is true to say that, among these workers and unemployed people who listened to me, there were quite a few, unfortunately, who looked very stupid, and were hardly capable of understanding language which was not very correct.  » ↩
    20 - André Gide, The Redureau Affair / followed by Faits divers, Paris, Librairie Gallimard, 1930, collection “ Don't judge ”, p. 143-148. ↩
    21 - Letter from Georges Riemann to Jean Paulhan [1906]. “I believe you trust me; There is absolutely nothing immoral or even compromising about this letter.” The reader would be very good if he refrained from doubting it. ↩
    22 - Letter from Jean Paulhan to Guillaume de Tarde, “Tuesday.” [December 15, 1907], Cahiers Jean Paulhan, I, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, p. 55. It could be the passing of counterfeit money. ↩
    23 - Letter from Alfred Saurel to Jean Paulhan, from Cadiz, n.d., “Mardi. ”. ↩
    24 - Letter from Alfred Saurel to Jean Paulhan, n.d. ↩
    25 - Letter from Alfred Saurel to Jean Paulhan, n.d., “Nîmes. Friday.” ↩     26 - Letter from Alfed Saurel to Jean Paulhan, n.d.. ↩
    27 - Letter to Paulhan, “Paris, August 18 / Tuesday”. ↩
    28 - “ Armand”, real name Ernest-Lucien Juin (March 26, 1872 – February 19, 1962). See Jean Paulhan, “Allocution”, O.C., t. V, p. 423-425. See also E. Armand, his life, his thoughts, his work, Paris, La Ruche Ouvrière, 1964. ↩     29 - The denial does not exhaust the whole meaning: “I have great respect for the judges and the police. I suppose they are necessary, I sometimes find them admire (I am not one of those anarchists who want the writer not to be subject to any law). But I'm not one of them." (Jean Paulhan, Of Straw and grain, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, p. 54-55) ↩
    30 - Ibid., p. 97. ↩
    31 - “Address,” p. 425. ↩
    32 - Letter from Paulhan to Roger Martin du Gard, May 1 [1953], in Choix de lettres, III, Gallimard, 1996, p. 123. ↩
    33 - Letter from Paulhan to Louis-René des Forêts, February 13 (1956), ibid., p. 147. ↩
    34 - Nothing that cannot be written learnedly: “The flare of a bodice, the rolling up of a dress, the flattening of a swimsuit, the nudity of the human body have nothing obscene, nothing reprehensible in itself.” (É. Armand, p. 341) ↩
    35 - Kropotkin, however, appears in the passive correspondence. See letter from Alfred Saurel to Paulhan, “Paris, Saturday 10/9” [1904 or 1905]. On Kropotkin, see: Pierre Mille, “Pierre Kropotkin”, Le Temps, 59th year, n° 21012, Thursday January 16, 1919, p. 3 and n. s., “Death of Kropotkin”, The New Era, 3rd year, no. 401, Monday January 31, 1921, p. 6. ↩
    36 - André Salmon, The Black Terror, Chronicle of anarchist action, new edition, Jean-Jacques Pauvert editor, 1959, p. 140. ↩     37 - Jean Paulhan, “Radio interview with Robert Mallet”, Complete Works, volume I, 1966, p. 306. ↩
    38 - Jean Grave, The Libertarian Movement under the 3rd Republic, Paris, Representative Works, Paris, Georges-Célestin Crès publisher, 1930. ↩     39 - Letter to Dora Bienaimer-Rigo, Monday 16 [September 1963], Choice of letters, III, Paris, Gallimard, p. 241. ↩     40 - Postcard from Riemann to Paulhan, stamped 12. 3. 13, addressed “ Villa Marie-Stella / 6, rue Daguerre / Alger. Mustapha» ↩     41 - Beyond Marcel Schwob, the symbolists' complicity in anarchy can be read as a literary choice: "Symbolism, after romanticism, once again denuded the human soul of everything that was not itself, canceled around it the influence of the real, the social and the political, restored to him his less predictable possibilities. The symbolist poet no longer even needs to shout: long live anarchy! Writing a poem is already for him an act of anarchy. Jean Cassou, “Max Jacob and freedom”, La N.R.f., 15th year, n° 175, 1" April 1928, p. 456. ↩
    42 - Jean Paulhan, “Litterateur and critic / Félix Fénéon / 'A man'”, Comœdia, March 4, 1944. Thus the boxer Arthur Cravan called Félix Fénéon: “Dear man.” ↩
    43 - Jean Paulhan, F. F. or Le Critique, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 20. ↩
    44 - According to the thesis of A Named Thursday, by Chesterton, a book that Paulhan later lent to the young Philippe Sollers. See for example Albert Thibaudet, “Reflections on Politics”, La N.R.f., 15th year, no. 175, April 1, 1928, p. 435. ↩
    45 - Ibid., p. 55. ↩
    46 - Letter to Roger Caillois, “October 7” [1939]: “Review as editions continue: the review a few days late. The only author seriously injured by censorship so far has been Pourrat, who was not known to be so dangerous. (Cahiers Jean Paulhan, n° 6, Paris, Gallimard, 1991, p. 121) Two paragraphs from the “Air du mois” (La N.R.f., LIII, n° 315, December 1939, p. 947-951) were withdrawn after censorship. We are returning them today to the reader, with the kind permission of A. and Cl. Pourrat:
«1 - 10. - Letter from V., assistant driver, confined in a village in the East: 'If this war continues like this, the tringlots will die of boredom like in a version of Virgil. It's eclogue, it's pastoral, a bowl of milk. - But that could change too quickly. - I make jokes with horseshoe nails. We take root in the country: one weeds, the other pulls out the potatoes, the third sings songs.
4 - 10. - The hardest fate is that of the young widows from the other war, those whose boys were less than seven years old at the armistice and are now the most exposed. Throughout this area, people talk about a woman from Ch., this mountain village. - A village of stones and large old pear trees whose tops turn red; a whole air of solitude, with gray fluff on the branches, nettles and horse cress in damp corners, around the fountain wells. She had raised her two sons. They are both mobilized. The allowance is being refused to her, because she has her widow's pension. But, with this pension, can she take on a servant and cultivate the land? 'I leave everything. Let the broom grow there. If my boys come back, they will find their poor property taken by the broom." ↩
    47 - Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer, trans. by Paul Rivert, preface by Henri Fluchère, Denoël; Tropic of Capricorn, trans. J.-C. Lefauve, ed. Oak; Black Spring, trans. by Paul Rivert, Gallimard, 1946, 270 p.; “Obscenity and the law of reflection”, Fontaine, October 1946; then Obscenity and the Law of Reflection, translated from English by D. Kotchoubey, Pierre Seghers, editor, 2nd quarter 1949, 30 p. For the record, see also: Jean Blanzat, “Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring by Henry Miller,” Le Littéraire, 1st year, n° 12, Saturday June 8, 1946, p. 4. ↩
    48 - André Rousseaux, “About the Henry Miller affair”, Le Littéraire, 2nd year, no. 45, Saturday February 1, 1947, p. 2 [Section: “Books”]: “I quietly declare that it is the honor of France to be thus designated for this function. When the voice of a great writer rises to proclaim immense human distress, France, by being the only one to give him the freedom to express himself which is refused to him everywhere else, is - for once, in this time - very exactly faithful to his mission. " ↩
    49 - Armand Pierhal, “Pornography and obscenity”, Le Littéraire, 1" year, n° 36, Saturday 23 November 1946 p. 1: “I doubt that there are two opinions on the subject in France, at least among writers. The writer addresses our mind and can only be subject to our moral judgment. [...] Use constraint material is, from whatever side we try to present the thing, an attack on the freedoms of the mind.  » ↩
    50 - Pauline Réage [Dominique Aury], Histoire d'O, with a preface by Jean Paulhan, “Happiness in slavery”, In Sceaux, at Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1954. See also Frédéric Badré, Paulhan le Juste, Paris, Grasset, 1996, p. 271. ↩
    51 - Paul Éluard, The Necessities of Life and the Consequences of Dreams, Paris, Au Sans Pareil, 1921. ↩
    52 - For an evocation of the duel between writers, see for example André Salmon, Souvenirs sans fin, premiere epoch (1903-1908), Paris, Gallimard, 1955, p. 294-295. ↩
    53 - Jean Paulhan, F.F. or the critic, Paris, Gallimard, 1945, p. 25. ↩
    54 - Jean Paulhan, Of Straw and Grain, Paris, Gallimard, 1948, p. 142. ↩
    55 - For a “defensive” vision, see: Pierre Citron, Jean Giono, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1990. ↩
    56 - See: Jean Giono, Refus d'obedience, Paris, Gallimard, 1937, 96 p. and Lucien Jacques, Carnets de moleskine, preface by Jean Giono, Paris, Gallimard, 1939, Coll Blanche, 274 p. ↩
    57 - For these last two names, see: Jean Follain, Agendas, 1926-1971, edition established and annotated by Claire Paulhan, Paris, Seghers, 1993, p. 74, note of October 1939. ↩
    58 - Jean Grenier, Sous l'Occupation, Paris, Éditions Claire Paulhan, 1997, p. 1 [Jean Guéhenno and other meetings (November 1939), p. 135-139]. ↩
    59 - Letter to André Gide, “ Le 9 Octobre” (1939), in Choix de lettres, II, Paris, Gallimard, 1992, p. 124. ↩
    60 - Letter to Armand Petitjean, “October 20” (1939), ibid. p. 127. ↩
    61 - Letter to Marcel Arland, “October 20” (1939), ibid., p. 125. ↩
    62 - The bite is real, and enters into Paulhan's reflection on the advisability of a candidacy for the French Academy: "I pass over base reasons: obviously an unexpected event, an undeserved reward - grant me that this is the case: I have never did nothing to bring me closer to the Academy, I have always done everything that could best keep me away from it - they are always amusing, pleasant. The best in life is made up of surprises. (Obviously, I would also enjoy offending those members of my family who never took me seriously.) I won't insist on that." (Letter to Gaston Gallimard, [July 19, 1946], Choice of letters, III, 1996, p. 31-32) ↩
    63 - The Sartrean formula hits the mark: “A whole man, made of all men and who is worth them all and who is worth anyone.” (Les Mots, Paris, Gallimard, 1964, last page) ↩
    64 - On the “fairly insistent interrogations” suffered by Jean Paulhan in May 1941, see J.P., “A week of secret”, Le Figaro, 118th year, n° 17, Saturday September 9, 1944, p. 3. From Buenos Aires, Roger Caillois acknowledges receipt by an unpublished letter (despite: Cahiers Jean Paulhan, n° 6, Paris, Gallimard, 1991) dated December 14, 1944: “I was moved and touched by your '8 days in secrecy' which has reached here. I had them reproduced in SUR. Your discretion and firmness were magnificent there.” The text is reproduced under the same title in Ecrivains en prison, Paris, Pierre Seghers, 1945, p. 200-208. It becomes “A week in secrecy”, Works, t. I, 1966, p. 291-297. ↩
    65 - We think of Pascal Pia: “Libertarians are basically just bad characters, powerless, lazy, the body doesn't matter, but the mind. We don't get out of mired poverty by breaking tiles. We are only rebellious when we are submissive; criticism and contradiction are there to give you the illusion of freedom.” (Jean-José Marchand, “Biography essay”, Pascal Pia, Les Lettres Nouvelles / Maurice Nadeau, 1981, p. 12) ↩
    66 - Jean Paulhan, “Les Hain-tenys merinas”, Asian Journal, vol. XIX, January-February 1912, p. 133-162; The Hain-Teny merinas, Malagasy popular poems, collected and translated by Jean Paulhan, Paris, Librairie orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1913, 461 p.; “The experience of the proverb”, Commere, notebook V, autumn 1925, p. 23-77; The Hain-teny obscure poetry, Principality of Monaco, Société de Conferences, 1930, 42 p.; “On an obscure poetry”, Commerce, notebook 1960, 219 р. XXIII, spring 1930, p. 191-260; Les Hain-tenys, Paris, Gallimard, 1939, reprint. 1960, 219 p.) ↩
    67 - Collective [Paul-Louis Couchoud, André Faure, Albert Poncin], Au fil de l'eau, s.l., 1903 [for July 1905], 30 copies; Paul-Louis Couchoud, Les Lettres, 2nd year, n° 20, September 15, 1907, p. 241-255; then Sages and poets of Asia, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1917, 1-301 p., dedicated “to my delicious master / Anatole France”. ↩
    68 - Op. cit., p. 12. ↩
    69 - Op. cit., p. 34-35. ↩
    70 - See the first note of this article, and the two texts cited in emphasis. Kikaku is a student who is too proud of his poem, in front of his master Bashô, a “fervent Buddhist”, who corrects its scope, as is natural. By a letter to Paulhan dated February 16, 1917, Paul-Louis Couchoud promised to read the study devoted to him; on the 27th, he thanks him, reading done. ↩
    71 - "René Guénon, “The gift of languages”, Les Études traditionsales, July 1939 (Paulhan received the review), reprinted in Aperçus sur l'initiation, Paris, Éditionstraditionales, 1992, p. 236-240. ↩
    72 - Transcription by me of a radio interview broadcast on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Saint-John Perse (received in December 1960). ↩
    73 - “ Hal-kaïs ”, by Paul-Louis Couchoud, Julien Vocance, Georges Sabiron, Pierre Albert-Birot, Jean-Richard Bloch, Jean Breton, Paul Eluard, Maurice Gobin, Henri Lefebvre, René Maublanc, Jean Paulhan and Albert Poncin, La N.R.f., 7th year, no. 84, new series, September 1, 1920, p. 329-345. On this summary, see my article, to be published in Il Lettore di provincia, translated from French by Renato Turci. ↩     74 - Les Cahiers de la Pléiade, “Saint-John Perse”, ↩
    75 - "No, writers are not right against each other; they are not each right alone. They are right together, and with each other; but contradicting each other, and above all contradicting each other; this one complementing the other, or blocking its holes, or bringing it back to the outdated measure [...] I say that we need them all and that the characteristic of culture is to know enough about everyone to acquire the power to grant them, in order to benefit as much as possible from their contributions.  Émile HENRIOT, “Concord between minds”, Concorde, 1st year, no. 3, Sunday November 19, 1944, p. 1 and 2 [here p. 1]. ↩
    76 - Valery Larbaud, “Le fait du prince”, La N.R.f., 21st year, n° 229, October 1, 1932, p. 539-543. ↩
    77 - Charles-Marie Bonsignor is the author of a text signed Valery Larbaud, “The Ship of Theseus”, Commerce, XXIX, winter 1932, p. 15-78. Larbaud attributes this dream of setting up to him: “A large, all white and magnificent “Bonsignor Palace” in Antsirabe...» (p. 77) - which is already, before any dedication, a gesture in the direction of Jean Paulhan, a notorious Malagasist. ↩
    78 - We will not, however, claim to have said everything, on the editorial meaning, considered in its relations with the meaning of the text and the idea of language, within the narrow limits of an article which now - already? - ends. ↩
    79 - Jean Paulhan, Jacob Cow the pirate or If words are signs, Paris, Au Sans Pareil, 1921, p. 49. ↩
    80 - “ We do not hear words directly, but according to the meaning we give them. The presence of the image in this sense reveals a delay, a breakdown in understanding - and a sort of short circuit of language. In the same way we judge writers.” Ibid., p. 51-52 ↩
    81 - Jean Paulhan, “Les Fleurs de Tarbes”, La N.R.f., 24th year, n° 274, July 1, 1936, p. 188-189. ↩
    82 - Jean Paulhan, Note on the use and performance of a valerian machine, typescript, f. 13 and 14; included in Paul Valéry or Literature Considered as a False, preface by André Berne-Joffroy, Éditions Complexe, 1987, loc. cit. p. 130-131. ↩
    83 - The 99 Haiku of Ryokan, translated from Japanese by Joan Titus-Carmel, Verdier, 1986, n.p., [haiku 79]. ↩