Œuvres complètes, Tome IV
Critique littéraire, I
Jean PaulhanThe fourth and fifth volumes of the Complete Works of Jean Paulhan present themselves as the authors' lexicon
to which the writer devoted his own text. This first volume leads from the letters A to R, that is to say from Alain to Rimbaud. It’s going from the most literary of philosophers to the most eruptive of poets. Between them, as the alphabet dictates, there are Dominique Aury and Roland Barthes, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Charles-Albert Cingria and Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Franz Hellens and Marcel Lecomte, Roger Martin du Gard, and finally Rainer Maria Rilke. To stop there would be to forget Jean Arabia and Antonin Artaud, Joe Bousquet and André Breton, Roger Caillois and René Char, Paul Éluard and Félix Fénéon, Jean Genet and Henri Michaux. And a hundred others.
Jean Paulhan only wants to know two ways of talking about literature: he speaks of the absolute or of individuals. On one side there is language, on the other there are friends. Between the two, there is no middle ground. Never, almost never, does he talk about the novel, poetry or theater, tragedy or lyricism, that is to say, intermediate notions: so many terms which would denounce the specialist.
What can we say about each one? Part of literary criticism involves the gallery of portraits, what in other times we would have called prosopography. A statement, a poem, a page of a novel are less genre exercises than testimonies and proofs of a relationship to language. A face is still a relationship to language that takes shape. A friend is an experience that requires a witness. It is not a pawn to be favored on a social chessboard, it is a relationship to language to be protected.
We will discern several generations. Alain the philosopher, Gide the descendant of ancient heroes, Valéry the spirit. Some have had their audience, others their aura. Jean Paulhan is hardly interested in those who have already had their share of glory.
Among those alive today, Pierre Oster and Michel Deguy, Jacques Roubaud and Philippe Jaccottet have benefited from his vote during literary prizes. Jean Paulhan does not always write about them. But they all have language in common and it’s about each one.
Resources
Les devoirs et les mérites de la critique selon Jean Paulhan, Patrick Kéchichian, La Croix, 2018
Editeur : Gallimard