Michel Leiris & Jean Paulhan, 1926-1962
Michel LeirisJean Paulhan“Even before being surrealist”, Michel Leiris said he was “fascinated by the kind of amusing linguistics – just as there is “amusing physics” – that the future and unpredictable academician Jean Paulhan, then author of the most discreet, outlined in his brief but substantial work, very casually, Jacob Cow the Pirate or If Words Are Signs. » Suffice to say that Leiris and Paulhan were not without “common places”: both, as writers, paid particular attention to the question of language; both were literary critics, art critics and, to varying degrees, linguists and ethnologists; both were interested in the work of Raymond Roussel, Antonin Artaud, Laure, Jean-Paul Sartre… If we discover, in this correspondence with some other subjects of complicity, apparently more futile – balls, swimming, bullfighting, travel, contemporary painting –, it is here essentially a question of the work of Leiris, of his relationships reserved for a young author, then an established writer, with the attentive editor and director of magazines that Paulhan was.
Thus, on the occasion of the publication of Mirror of bullfighting, the dialogue between the two men does he find his point of balance at the same time as of confrontation: “I find it very strong and very fair, recognizes Jean Paulhan August 25, 1939, your attempt at explanation by the beauty gang literary. Don't you think, if it is so rare these days to attack frankly the literary problem (I mean: of expression), that the cause it could well be – despite so many appearances to the contrary – that he is also the more dangerous? To this reflection from the author of Fleurs de Tarbes, Michel Leiris casts a spell: “Does the literary problem represent a real danger, That’s what I’m wondering… One of the big questions that embarrasses me for a long time is the following: where to find, in writing, something which is the equivalent of what the horns are for the work of the bullfighter? are we really justified in admitting as an equivalent of these horns any what is, for the one who expresses himself, the possibility of “tearing apart”?
Text established, presented and annotated by Louis Yvert. Collection “Correspondence
by Jean Paulhan”.
23 photographs and facsimiles n. & b, including 2 “charged portraits” of John
Paulhan and Michel Leiris by Maurice Henry. Appendices. Summary table.
Bibliography. Index of people, titles and periodicals cited.
First edition, in November 2000. Edition of 1,000 copies. Printing on
Ivory centaur 90 g., in kraft filled cover.
13 x 21.5 cm. 248 pages. ISBN: 2-912222-14-1.
Public sale price: €28.
Publisher : Claire Paulhan