Blanchot reading Paulhan, part I

"Nous nous souviendrons de ces jours"
("We will remember these days")
Letter from Paulhan to Blanchot,
May 1940

[PART I]

Who said anything about Terror ?

How do we read the "encounter" in the 1940s between Jean Paulhan and Maurice Blanchot? Ever since Jeffrey Mehlman brought Blanchot's early pro-fascist journalism in the 1930s out into the open, the fate of the critical reception of Paulhan's , Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou la Terreur dans les Lettres (The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature), which first appeared in book form in 1941, has become almost inseparably linked to Blanchot's reading of it, "Comment la littérature est-elle possible?" (How is Literature Possible?)' There is little doubt that the "encounter" between Blanchot and Paulhan was an extremely significant one. Blanchor's reading of Paulhan's book (coincidentally or not, but that is the question I would ultimately like to address in this chapter) occupies a rather crucial place in the shift in Blanchot's career from being an apologist for a certain form of right-wing political ideology during the 1930s, to his more celebrated role as a fiction writer and literary critic from the 1940s onwards.

The question of the extent to which this encounter between Jean Paulhan and Maurice Blanchot was an "occasion," which allows us to interpret the transition and transformation of Blanchot's early writing career, has been addressed in ways which have led to Paulhan's texts being appropriated and reinscribed, to a number of different theoretical ends. Jeffrey Mehlman, for example, has attempted to link the timing of Blanchot's privileging of the essential silence or nothingness at the heart of the literary enterprise to Derrida's (and by extension Deconstruction's) supposed evacuation of politics and history from literature: conscious forgetting as a way of covering over its guilty origins, with Paulhan being described as one of the chief instigators of this political "amnesia." (2) Allan Stockl, in his book Agonies of the Intellectual, has read the work of both Paulhan and Blanchot within the context of a twentieth century intellectual ancestry in France going back to Durkheim. (3) One of the main difficulties in writing about this encounter has come about as a direct consequence of Mehlman's intervention. His reading of Blanchot's career is based in part on a consultation of the correspondence between Paulhan and Blanchot. When Mehlman's article appeared in French in Tel Quel in 1983, Blanchot reacted by categorically denying Mehlman's claims, and forbade any further access to his correspondence with Paulhan. Although this puts any subsequent commentary somewhat at a disadvantage, it does not really alter the thrust of my own reading. What I would like to do is to take a closer look at the "encounter" between Blanchot and Paulhan, which I take to be one of the crucial events of French twentieth century intellectual history, and to broaden its historical frame of reference beyond Blanchot's reading of Les Fleurs de Tarbes, by including Blanchot's later, and equally important essays, "Le Mystère dans les lettres" (Mystery in Literature) and "La Facilité de mourir" (The Ease of Dying). In other words, I would like to keep reading, and this act of reading on, as we shall see, will produce a new twist on the questions which both Paulhan and Blanchot engage; questions of history, of reading and writing, of their temporality, and of their occasions.

If Les Fleurs de Tarbes can be said to have a historical context, then it is in its oblique intersection with several intellectual currents of the 1930s and 1940s in France. The concept of terror had been revived in France in the 1930s thanks largely to Jean Hyppolite's Genèse et structure de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel (Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind (1946)) and Alexandre Kojève's Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel [1947]). The French "discovery" of Hegel was largely due to the courses given by Kojève during the 1930s. His anthropologized version of The Phenomenology of Mind was based on a narrative subtext to Hegel's book that went from the events of the French Revolution to the First Empire; Napoleon's march into Jena is interpreted by him as a literal "end of history." As Vincent Descombes puts it: "Kojève bequeathed to his listeners a terrorist conception of history."(4) This became an important motif in the philosophy of the period. Merleau-Ponty, for example, wrote a book entitled Humanisme et Terreur (Humanism and Terror) in defense of the Soviet Communist party, and Sartre focused on the period of terror in his analysis of the French Revolution in Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason).

This motif was carried over into the realm of literature: Queneau's novels of the 1930s and 1940s are clearly marked by Kojève's reading of Hegel, and Sartre gave an extensive analysis of the change in the relation of the writer to society after the French Revolution in Qu'est-ce que la littérature? (What is Literature?), in particular in the section entitled "Pour qui écrit-on?" (For Whom Does One Write?).(5) Blanchot's response to Sartre's text was "Literature and the Right to Death," which takes the form of an ironic commentary on both Kojève's and Hyppolite's readings of Hegel, and is at the same time an implicit debate with Sartre on the question of the "literariness" of literature (6). Sartre's question - "What is literature?" - seems rhetorical, since he at any rate is very clear as to what literature is, or should be. It is certainly no accident that Blanchot should first take up the question, prior to Sartre's politicized promotion of committed literature, by way of Paulhan. Paulhan's entire oeuvre might be said to constitute an extended answer to this one question about the specificity of literature. Toward the beginning of Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Paulhan poses the question explicitly as "this childish question: "What is literature?' - childish, but which we spend a life-time avoiding." (7) The title of Blanchor's essay on Paulhan's book - "How is Literature Possible?" 8 —is, quite literally, a meditation on Paulhan's "childish" question.

As early as 1955 Paul de Man noted the theoretical complicity or solidarity between Paulhan and Blanchot in a configuration that included, significantly enough, Mallarmé and Hegel:

For Mallarmé, poetic nothingness assumes the form of a concrete and specific choice, one that continues to obsess him: "namely, if there is occasion to write" [à savoir, s'il y a lieu d'écrire]. Fifty years later, Maurice Blanchot entitles an article on Paulhan's Fleurs de Tarbes "How is Literature Possible?": these two names—Paulhan and Blanchot-taken together [" unis de la sorte"] —sum up a whole historical period and a present situation. (9)

In this essay, the main portion of which is a reading of Mallarmé's "Une dentelle s'abolit," de Man traces a line from Hegel chrough Mallarmé to Paulhan and Blanchot, although this trajectory is in no way intended to suggest a historical series of influences. If anything, it complicates the notion of a movement that goes from origin to derivation, since according to de Man, Mallarmé and Hegel reach similar conclusions quite independently.

The article alluded to by de Man was the first piece of literary criticism that Blanchot published outside the context of journal reviews — although this is where it first appeared (10) — and it might be said that while it was a significant event as far as Paulhan criticism goes, Blanchot owes Paulhan a certain contingent debt, one that is entirely different from the kind of gratitude felt by most of the writers whom Paulhan had helped to publish. It is certainly true that the appearance of Les Fleurs de Tarbes in 1941 was considered an event of great significance by Blanchot, and in the first of the articles in the Journal des Débats he made the claim, edited out of the subsequent versions, that Paulhan's book was one of the most important works of contemporary literary criticism.

Paulhan had been promising his book ever since he first mentioned its imminent appearance in a letter to Francis Ponge in 1925. (11) An earlier, abbreviated, version was published in serial form in the Nouvelle Revue Française from June to October 1936, but sections of it were reworked elsewhere prior to the 1941 edition, (12) The work is privileged by Paulhan himself as a kind of cornerstone, since he men- tions it almost obsessively in his correspondence from the 1920s to the 1940s, although he never produced its promised sequel, Le Don des langues (The Gift of Languages). (13) Yet Les Fleurs de Tarbes is not just an assembly of previously unconnected parts, since it also takes up questions already addressed in texts such as Jacob Cow le pirate, ou si les mots sont des signes (Jacob Cow the Pirate, or If Words are Signs), Entretien sur des faits divers (Conversation About Miscellaneous News Items), and "La rhétorique renaît de ses cendres" (Rhetoric is Reborn From Its Ashes). It analyzes, in perhaps the most extensive and elaborate manner of all of his texts, the tension which is without question the most tenacious of critical commonplaces associated with the name of Jean Paulhan; the tension between terror and rhetoric.

Paulhan's understanding of rhetoric is, on the face of it, fairly traditional. Indeed, rhetoric for Paulhan is necessarily on the side of tradition (he also refers to it as "la Maintenance" [Fleurs , p. 183]), and it goes hand in hand with a conviction that language is in no need of change. In his Traité des figures (Treatise on Figures), a commentary on du Marsais' Traité des tropes (Treatise on Tropes), Paulhan discusses the eighteenth century obsession with classifying figures and tropes, and sees the attraction of such a stable catalogue of figures as also being the appeal of the rhetorical figure itself, which he always identifies with the commonplace ("lieu commun" in French being a more neutral and specifically linguistic term than "commonplace" in English). Les Fleurs de Tarbes, however, presents itself on a first reading as an extensive survey of an opposing tendency within literature, which Paulhan calls la Terreur.

Terrorist writers, according to Paulhan, espouse continual change and renewal, and vigorously denounce rhetoric's codification of language, its tendency to stultify the spirit and banalize human experience. Les Fleurs de Tarbes appears to support, through a long series of proofs, the Terrorist conception of literature and language. As Jean Paulhan states in a letter to Maurice Nadeau, what he was trying to do in Les Fleurs de Tarbes was not so much to elaborate a theory of literature, or to make an outspoken personal statement on the place of literature in society, but simply to collect, catalogue and "measure," almost as a statistical, quasi-scientific exercise, the critical assessments which had dominated discussions of literature over the previous 150 years or so. It should be said that these are taken mostly (although not exclusively) from French literary critics, whence the obscurity of many of the references for an anglophone readet. Paulhan finds examples of a terrorist denunciation of rhetoric in, for example, Gourmont's condemnation of "moral clichés," or Albalet's scorn for "picturesque clichés," or Flaubert's ironic Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Dictionary of Received Ideas). Later on, he invokes 19th century French critics, such as Taine (who saw Racine as "the epitome of verbosity" (le comble du verbalisme), Renan (for whom the entire classical literary tradition was "an abuse of rhetoric" (un abus de la rhétorique), or Brunerière (who was equally dismissive of Malherbe's poetry for similar reasons).

Paulhan's own argument turns around the notion of literary originality and authenticity, and of the dangerously seductive "power of words" (pouvoir des mots). He extends his discussion beyond the realm of literature, to encompass popular journalism (the clichés of the time being, for example, "ideological warfare," "the youth of today," "freedom," "popular opinion," etc.). Henri Bergson is seen by Paulhan as the most powerful "anti-verbalist" critic of the first half of the twentieth century, and is described as terror's own philosopher. Bergson's challenge to literature is "without a doubt the most serious reproach of our time: this is that the author of commonplaces gives in to the power of words, to verbalism, to the hold language has over it, and so on. " (14)

The opposition between terror and rhetoric appears, then, to polarize two conflicting ideologies of expression; the aspiration toward originality on the one hand, and on the other, the attraction to the stability of the commonplace. Paulhan's predilection for the common-place has led many commentators to think of Paulhan as a literary "conservative." It certainly seems that Paulhan's book ends up being nothing more than a scrap book of commonplaces or citations (somewhat akin to his anthology of Malagasy proverbs, or indeed his own "autobiographical" scrap books), and that he revels in exposing the naiveté of the terrorist at every turn. Despite the provocative connotations of the term terror, we will have to reserve judgment on how Paulhan situates himself with respect to its ideology. He says early on: "It's not that I find the mystical possession of the intellectual ("savant) - nor in earlier times the revolution — in the least bit contemptible. Far from it. I'm just suspicious of a revolt, or a dispossession, which comes alone so opportunely to get us out of trouble (15) It seems, thus. that it is not the ideology of terror per se which Paulhan takes to task, but rather the claims it makes for itself. We might begin by looking at the reason for Paulhan's choice of this particular term.

Les Fleurs de Tarbes contains only the vaguest of allusions to the period of bloody executions of 1793 and 1794 that were carried out by the Comité de Salut Public (Committee of Public Satery), as the revolutionary government attempted to purge its enemies and hold on to the political ground it had gained. This one explicit reference occurs early on in the book, towards the end of the section entitled "Portrait de la Terreur" (The Portrait of Terror), and is worth quoting in its entirety:

We call periods of Terror those moments in the history of nations (which often follow some famine), when it suddenly seems that the State requires not the ingeniousness of systems, nor even science and technology — no-one cares about any of that - but rather an extreme purity of the soul, and the freshness of a communal innocence. Consequently citizens themselves are taken into consideration, rather than the things they do or make: the chair is forgotten in favor of the carpenter, the remedy in favor of the doctor. Yet skillfulness, knowledge and technique become suspect, as if they were covering up some lack of conviction. The representative Lebon decrees, in August 1793, that the revolutionary tribunal of Arras will begin by judging those prisoners who are "distinguished by their talent." When Hugo, Stendhal or Gourmont talk about massacres and slaughters, they are also thinking of a kind of talent: the kind which appears in flowers of rhetoric. As if the mischievous author - taking advantage of the effect already obtained by this arrangement of words, that literary device - were happy to construct, out of bits and pieces, a beauty machine, in which the beauty is no less displeasing than the machine. (16)

Terror seems to stand not so much for the historical events themselves, but synecdochally for the Revolution, or rather for a decisive turning point in French history, and more specifically in French literary history. It underlines the shift Paulhan finds in French literature from pre-Revolutionary Classicism, when writers submitted happily to the various rules imposed by traditions of genre and rhetorical composition, to Romanticism, whose "terrorism" consisted in abandoning accepted literary form in search of a more authentic, original expressiveness. In terror's violent overthrow rhetoric, the priority of language over thought is completely reversed. As Paulhan puts it in a short commentary following Les Fleurs de Tarbes:

Thus linguists and metaphysicians have at times (with the Rhetoricians) held that thoughts were derived from words, at other times (with the Romantics and the Terrorists) words from thoughts. (17)

For Paulhan, however, the rift between the two opposing concepts of literature is by no means confined to this one turbulent moment in French history, since the persistence of the antagonism between "terrorists" (writers such as Rimbaud, Apollinaire and Eluard) and "rhetoricians" (Paulhan's examples include Théophile Gautier, Valéry and Léon-Paul Fargue) is an indication that we are confronted with a question that cuts deeper than its particular, historically determined manifestations. (18)

The interest for us, as readers of Les Fleurs de Tarbes, is to see how this tension itself gets played out. According to "terrorist" writers, an excessive concern with language inhibits the potential of literature to be what it is capable of, given its infinite creative possibilities. Terror is literature that rejects literary commonplaces and conventions in an attempt to accede to pure, authentic expression (Paulhan is fond of citing Rimbaud's rejection of the "poetic old-fashionedness" (vieillerie poétique) of his literary predecessors). For Blanchot, the multitude of guises in which terror appears in Les Fleurs de Tarbes can be generally divided into two types: those who would like to bypass language altogether ("Art consequently has only one objective: to bring to light this inner world, while keeping it untouched by the crude and general illusions with which an imperfect language would dishonor it" (Faux pas, p. 95) and those who are intent on cleansing language of its impure and outworn expressions, "making sure that they rid language of everything which could make it look like ordinary language." (19)

After spending the first half of Les Fleurs de Tarbes confirming the validity of terror's arguments, Paulhan then spends the second half unmasking their futility by showing that terrorists are the victims of an optical illusion ("we only enter into contact with literature, and language itself, nowadays... thanks to a series of errors and illusions, as common as an optical illusion might be"). (20) They are in fact endlessly preoccupied with language, forever trying to bypass it, or rid it of its impurities:

For Terror depends first of all on language in this general sense: that the writer is condemned to only express any longer what a certain state of language leaves him free to express: restricted to the areas of feeling and thought in which language has not yet been overused. That's not all: no writer is more preoccupied with words than the one who is determined at every turn to get rid of them, to get away from them, or even to reinvent them [My emphasis]. (21)

This, then is the crux of the dilemma facing terrorist writers, and it is described by Paulhan as a kind of blindness to the rhetorical dimension of their own enterprise. Paulhan's fondness for exposing these kinds of perceptual errors is already apparent in Entretien sur des faits divers, where he discusses a whole series of similar illusions, such as the illusion of totality (by which one deduces the whole from a part), or the illusion of a "forecast of the past" ("prévision du passé") (by which one establishes the motive, or cause, after the event or effect). Terrorists want their language to be transparent, like a window, but its inevitably refracting, distorting quality reveals it to be of necessity rhetorical. Only by virtue of a "double illusion" is literature possible for the two kinds of terror that Blanchot indicates. These illusions are necessary to save literature from extinction or paralysis, since on the one hand it would suppress language completely, and on the other, it would be constantly aware of how its "pure" language is inevitably corrupted by usage.

If, according to Paulhan, both terrorists and rhetoricians are justified in their conceptions of literature, and therefore both equally unjustified, Les Fleurs de Tarbes seems in danger of becoming an endless exchange of reproaches and rebuttals, and the reader is liable to become dizzy watching what Michel Beaujour has referred to as "the whirligig of rhetoric and terror" (le tourniquet de la Rhétorique et de la Terreur). (22) The problem is compounded in that the two sides in this exchange are in fact one and the same. What appears to some as verbalism appears to others as expressiveness. Victor Hugo, for example, is taken by post-Romantics as the most formulaic of writers, yet in his own time he was considered a revolutionary in his rejection of classical literary forms. Elsewhere, the division of thoughts and words is formulated as a distinction between an author and a reader who see things differently from either side of the divide, but this is in fact the central enigma of Les Fleurs de Tarbes; how can we tell whether an author intended his or her words to be read as common-places or as original expressions? Commonplaces thus become for Paulhan the locus of a deep-seated tension within language and literature, and far from being banal, they are, as Blanchot rightly points out, "monsters of ambiguity" (des monstres d'ambiguité) (Faux pas, p. 94). How, then, does Paulhan attempt to resolve this tension?

Paulhan's rather ingenious solution to the paradox he has just described takes the form of a revalorization (or a "reinvention") of rhetoric. From the point of view of rhetoric, the author is freed from a constant preoccupation with language precisely by submitting to the authority of commonplaces. In order to have a renewed contact with the "virgin newness of things" (nouveauté vierge des choses) (Fleurs, p. 92), writers should mutually agree to recognize clichés as clichés, and thereby institute a common, communally agreed-upon, rhetoric as a means of resolving the perplexing ambiguity that characterizes commonplaces:

Clichés will be allowed to become citizens of Literature again [pourront retrouver droit de cité dans les Lettres] the day they are at last deprived of their ambiguity, and their confusion. Now all it should require, since the confusion stems from a doubt as to their nature, is simply for us to agree, once and for all, to take them as clichés. In short, we just need to make commonplaces common... (23)

In his essay, Blanchot likens this solution of a "reinvented" rhetoric to a revolution that is both Copernican (since thought, in order to re-discover its authenticity, is made to revolve around and be dependent on the constant gravitational pull of language), and Kantian (since it involves an apperceptive awareness of the linguistic illusions according to which we are able to write). This granting of a "droit de cité" (my emphasis) to clichés makes them acceptable "citizens" of the realm of literature in that they become publicly quotable, marked by a communally recognized citationality. Paulhan often sets apart such expressions within his text precisely by marking them with italics, and is aware of similar conventions in literature. ("We should also cite those conventions of writing, the italics, the quotation marks, and the parentheses, which proliferate among romantic writers once rhetoric is abolished.") (24)

The most alluring appeal of Les Fleurs de Tarbes is not simply its intricate argument about the nature of literature, but the manner in which this argument is narrated, and in particular the way in which it is framed by the allegory of that most communal of locations, the public garden of Tarbes. A notice ("écriteau") at the entrance to the gardens reads something like a terrorist slogan: *IT Is FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THE GARDENS [Le Jardin] CARRYING FLOWERS." (25) As the story goes, the sign was erected by the keeper of the gardens (clearly intended to be the "garden of literature") to prevent people from taking the flowers (here the flowers of rhetoric or literary commonplaces) and claiming they had brought them into the garden with them. But some visitors are determined to carry flowers and find various ways around this interdiction, which correspond to the different "alibis" that authors give when confronted with the accusation of theft; for example, they carry ever more exotic flowers (the claim to a perpetual originality), or they say that the flowers just fell into their hair from the trees (the denial of authorial responsibility). The keeper's ban fails to solve the problem, and as Paulhan explains, it is merely compounded, since the continuous ingenuity of the visitors makes it increasingly difficult to determine whether the flowers are their own or are stolen public property (in Paulhan's terms, are they commonplaces or original thoughts?). The keeper's solution is consistent with Paulhan's reinvented rhetoric, and the allegory is concluded accordingly when the sign at the entrance is changed to: "Ir Is FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THE PUBLIC GARDENS WITHOUT FLOWERS IN YOUR HANDS." (26) The addition of "public" to "jardin" in the reworded sign underlines the common agreement to read commonplaces as commonplaces; it becomes a truly public park when the visitors, too burdened with their own flowers, will not even think of stealing the public ones. The allegory could thus be said adequately to frame the "apparent" version of *Les Fleurs de Tarbes*. It follows the argument from terror's denunciation of rhetoric, through rhetoric's exposure of terror's illusions, to the reinvention of rhetoric which recovers literature's authenticity within its commonplaces.

In his book Agonies of the Intellectual, Allan Stoekl situates Paulhan's text in relation to a Durkheimian concern with the place of the sacred within Western society, and offers what is one of the most rigorous and perceptive readings to date of Les Fleurs de Tarbes, and of what he sees as Blanchot's "revision" of Paulhan. Stoekl sees Paulhan's project as part of a French tradition, going back to Durkheim, of the intellectual as an abstract rationalist. With Paulhan, the problem takes the following form: "Paulhan's strictly apolitical attempt to rehabilitate rhetoric is nothing other than a late attempt at reconciling abstract reason and sacred violence, language and that which exceeds it, in a new version of the intellectual, the Rhetorician." (27) Stockl thus correctly reads the tension between terror and rhetoric as a vicious circle of two mutually purgative forms of linguistic violence, which are then "projected" onto the political domain, as the mutual political purge of two different forms of collaboration (the argument of Paulhan's polemical Lettre aux Directeurs de la Résistance, which I will look at in more detail in the following chapter). For Stoekl the allegory of the public park in Les Fleurs de Tarbes marks the moment when the linguistic in Paulhan inevitably spills over into the social and political. Returning to the earlier 1936 NRF version of Paulhan's essay, in a section Paulhan omitted from the 1941 Gallimard edition, Stoekl astutely points to Paulhan's choice of the metaphor of the sun as the figure of the unknowable, that which cannot be seen directly, but which is the condition of the very possibility of seeing. In terms of the argument of Paulhan's book, this figure could be read as a "master cliché" or a kind of "generating matrix" that commands and controls the endless reversals and purgations of terror and rhetoric. In short, the sun as master trope is itself a trope for a master Rhetorician, Paulhan himself:

In this way, Paulhan would save the argument of Les Fleurs de Tarbes from the dilemma that he himself poses. Once again — as at the end of the "first volume" of Les Fleurs de Tarbes - Terror is subordinated to Rhetoric. The havoc it wreaks in the stable operation of the linguistic "machine" is exiled: now too it serves as a guarantee of Paulhan's project, which is nothing other than a stable knowledge of Letters. (p. 158)

This also allows Stoekl to see Paulhan's project as a political one, whose ultimate (even if unavowed) aim is to subordinate the social to the linguistic.

Does Paulhan, as a kind of master Rhetorician, in fact end up "resolving" the dilemma he poses himself? I would argue that the question hinges on a reading of the allegory of the public park, and on the "ending" of Les Fleurs de Tarbes. Is the 1936 version the hidden, neglected ending? Why, however, should we stop reading there? Other "endings" point rather to an author who is never satisfied with the illusion of intellectual victory, especially when it is based on a rational mastery of the problem he is dealing with. This can be seen in the allegory of the public park: the "solution" for which it is a figure is not the end of the book (not even of the "first volume" of Les Fleurs de Tarbes), which in fact closes with the famously enigmatic retraction: "There are thus glimmers of light, visible to whoever sees them, hidden from whoever looks at them; gestures which cannot be performed without a certain negligence. [... ] Let's just say I said nothing." (28)

It seems at first to be just another example of the kind of modesty typical of Paulhan. It takes the form of a communal agreement ("Let's just say") that is phrased again as an optic metaphor. We can no more fully comprehend the solution than we can look squarely at the sun, and the negligence required could well be the passivity involved in just seeing, as opposed to the effort involved in looking. The ending seems to be an example of this kind of negligence. However, if we look at it more closely, or at any rate read it more attentively, it is a very troubling ending. How are we to read this disavowal? Is it intended to be taken literally, as an authentic expression of the author's feelings? But then how could the book be "nothing" since if it were, we would not even be able to read this final sentence? Or is it to be read rhetorically as something that is just said, a cliché, a careless throwaway remark? But then was the entire book composed in a equally negligent fashion? What are we "seeing" or "reading" when we see or read this "nothing?" In Paulhan's own terms, this final sentence is strictly unreadable. Earlier on in the book, he says that "commonplaces can be intelligent or stupid, I don't know which, and I don't see any way ever of knowing it with any rigor." (29)

This ending was in fact prepared earlier on in a moment of textual self-awareness, in a sub-section of Part III entitled "Le lecteur se voit mis en cause" (The reader is put into question). Within the text's many vacillations, it is at one level just another argument in favor of terror:

And who doesn't agree with Terrorists that the mind loses its dignity if it goes round and round a word like an animal that's tied up; if it remains stuck at this first stage when one is teaching oneself to speak; if it is more concerned with commas, rules and unities than with that which it has to say. (30)

Yet if, as Paulhan goes on to say, one were to pay attention less to the terrorist myth itself than to the way in which it has been uncovered or demystified, one will notice something rather odd: "If there is any baseness or cowardice in thinking around a word, and in thus submitting one's thought to language, you don't have to look very far to find who is at fault: we are the ones who are guilty." (31) The previous pages, according to Paulhan, were an exercise in precisely that which he had been denouncing and attempting to overcome: "We ourselves are at stake." (32)

This discovery upsets, not only the project of a communally agreed upon convention, whereby the ambiguity of clichés would be removed by marking them with quotation marks, but also the very possibility of reading (or writing) commonplaces: "it is no longer Bourget or Carco, whose thought must seem to us to be enslaved to words and phrases—but ourselves, and our thought when we read Bourget's or Carco's commonplaces. " (33) This is in fact none other than Paulhan's conclusion, that is, that terror is always already "read" by rhetoric ("We have pushed Terror as far as it will go, and discovered Rhetoric"). (34) Yet it is no longer simply a possibly naive theory about literature, but it puts the whole book into question. Is it "merely" a catalogue of citations? Do we now read these citations differently, having perhaps passed over them a little too negligently? What does it mean to read a citation? And what if the citation is invented, as are many, if not all, of the epigraphs to the chapters of Les Fleurs de Tarbes? The book is thus a performance of the very radical ambiguity that it talks about, an ambiguity that is not simply an equivocation about what the book is saying, but that suspends it between saying and doing, stating and performing, original and commonplace. As Blanchot says, "[Paulhan] factors in this equivocation, and does not attempt to dispel it." (35) How can we read the "nothing" at the end of the book, since no sooner are the means given to us (the common agreement which allows us to read) than they are taken away again?

The allegory of the public gardens is thus itself "framed" by the final retraction of the book. The frame of this book now requires an allegory that takes into account the failure of the apparent allegory. So that rather than the allegory being an allegory of the text, the text itself becomes an allegory of (the impossibility of) this allegory. In Paulhan's own terms, it is figured as being caught within the very illusion it believed it was catching out. The text is framed by what it was attempting to frame, so we can never tell whether we are inside or outside the frame, and we might well wonder if this could be said to be a "figure," since it involves the failure of figuration. The framing allegory of Les Fleurs de Tarbes, far from defining literature by clearly marking the boundaries that surround the garden, makes it impossible for us to tell whether we are in the garden or not, since it is impossible to know where the flowers Paulhan hands to us have come from.

In his essay "How Is Literature Possible?" Blanchot is highly attentive to this "nothing" and to this radical unreadability. For him, the "nothing" is the reappearance and reaffirmation of the terror that Paulhan's book had so painstakingly discredited. A "reinvented" terror, to be sure, but one that testifies to the persistence of the claim of literature to authenticity and originality despite the demonstrated impossibility of this claim (since it is always preempted by rhetoric). Indeed, for Blanchot it is no less than literature's "soul" (p. 97), and its very claim to existence. Blanchor's insistence on this "reinvention" of terror takes us back to the beginning of his essay. He had started out by saying that it is possible to read Les Fleurs de Tarbes as two books: a visible one, and one that is ironically hidden by it. The second, secret book only begins to work on the reader once the "first" book has been finished, and according to Blanchot:

It is only through the uneasiness and anxiety we feel that we are authorized to communicate with the larger questions he poses, and he is prepared to show us these questions only by their absence (My emphasis) (36).

As we saw earlier on, Blanchot answers the essay's title question at one level — the level of the "apparent" book—by saying that literature is possible by virtue of the illusions which allow terror to assert itself despite its impossibility. At another level, the level that makes the reader dimly aware of the far deeper questions, literature is said to appear only through its absence. From the perspective of both terror and rhetoric, therefore, it is always already lost; we are left with a terror that can only ever be re-invented, and a rhetoric that never allows itself to be codified into any kind of literary convention. It is neither terror nor rhetoric, and both of them at the same time. Blanchot stresses that the duplicity of the two books cannot be overcome. The second book is only readable after the first book, thus confirming Paulhan's own observation in Les Fleurs de Tarbes: "The reader places this extreme presence and this obsession with words at the origin of the incriminated phrase or passage, whereas it is in fact produced for him — as happened to us- at the end of his efforts." (37) In responding to the "hidden" book of Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Blanchot truly implicates himself in the essential questions it raises, and begins to articulate concerns which will become major topoi in his later criticism. Allan Stoekl takes Blanchot's reading of Les Fleurs de Tarbes as a revision of Paulhan, insofar as the former reformulates Paulhan's essential paradox of literature as "writing on writing." As we saw in the previous chapter, this is precisely what the récit (and possibly all of Paulhan's writing) is in any case. Stoekl admits this possibility when he says in passing that Paulhan's text may well not be in need of any correction, but he does not pursue it.

The solution of the book is a necessary failure a sort of law of failure" as Paulhan calls it (38) — so that the "understanding" of this failure is not ultimately subsumed under the mastery of language, but through a kind of parody of understanding. This is how Paulhan describes it towards the end of the "Pages 'explication" (Some Explanations) where he makes the link between Les Fleurs de Tarbes and another key theoretical text (which Stoekl tellingly omits to read), Clef de la poésie (Key to Poetry): "do we need to look for even more rules in which the arbitrary predominates? This is the question adressed by Clef de la Poésie." (39) Blanchot himself begins his essay on Clef de la poésie, "Le Mystère dans les Lettres," (a title borrowed from Mallarme's famous essay of the same name) by returning to Les Fleurs de Tarbes. He calls the "nothing" at the end of the book a "strange, somewhat disorienting privilege," and clearly makes the link between the two texts by Paulhan. (40) The figure of the unknowable, factored into the equation, becomes that of "poetic mystery" (le mystère poétique).