Blanchot reading Paulhan, part II

[PART II]

Poetic Justice

Clef de la poésie, published in 1944, does not offer us any kind of methodical system of interpretation such as a Poetics, but assigns itself a task both grander in its ambition and more specific in the precise object of its attention. It is worth reflecting for a while on this full title. Like other Paulhan titles - for example Petite préface à toute critique (Short Preface to All Criticism), and Essai d' introduction au projet d'une métrique universelle (Attempt at an Introduction to the Project of a Universal Metrics) - it is "modest" in exactly the way we saw "Manie" to be modest, that is, in an inherently excessive or transgressive fashion. The opening lines provide us with an assertive orientation, which is no less "modest" than the title, whose tensions are thus by no means resolved:

I'm not looking to make the least discovery, I'm only looking for a way to judge all poetic doctrines. I'm not hoping to formulate some new poetic doctrine; I'm only looking for a procedure able to test all poetic doctrines. In short, my argument is neither critical nor — by all appearances — literary. It is strictly logical. (41)

Clef de la poésie, despite the uncertainties of its title, is thus a clearly programmatic attempt to apply the rigor of logical thinking to the phenomenon of poetry, to submit it to some kind of law. Paulhan proposes to deduce such a law from what is common to all poetry, its lowest common denominator as it were. This common, unifying element or trait is that which makes poetry the least common of enterprises, what Paulhan terms "poetic mystery" ("le mystère poétique"). Poetic mystery may be as vacuous a commonplace as one could find, but it is a necessary point of departure according to Paulhan. Since what makes poetic mystery mysterious — and poetic — is that it is undefinable, the project of Clef de la poésie is the difficult one of "finding a law whose legality is founded upon mystery [dont la légalité soit celle du mystère]" as Blanchot puts it in "Le Mystère dans les lettres."

This may not be as difficult as it appears at first sight; as Paulhan says in his Essai d'introduction au projet d'une métrique universelle when discussing Valéry's constant preoccupation with a self-reflexive moment in literature (watch oneself watching oneself): "The task is not difficult: It is strictly impossible." (42) How to account for this impossibility is precisely what is at stake. Any law that applies to poetry will need to be rigorous and uncompromising in its recognition of the absolutely indefinable nature of its essence. Such a project appears futile, but it is in terms of its appearances that poetic mystery allows itself to be approached.

The very least it demands, and perhaps also the very most, if it is to function with the constancy which is the minimal requirement of a law, is that the relationship between thought and language remain stable. How this is achieved, Paulhan argues, is by making the first (and only?) principle of the law of poetic mystery one of absolute reversibility of terms:

I'm thinking now of a poetic law such that, expressing a particular relationship of sounds to meanings, and of ideas to words, it is able, without thereby losing its validity or its verisimilitude, to stand seeing its terms inverted; to stand being inverted (43).

In submitting itself to its own poetic law (it is able ... to stand being inverted"), or in giving in, immediately, to poetry's demands, this law — which is still only, it should be remembered, a hypothesis - would be true to the inconceivability of poetic mystery:

It is clear that such a law, whose formula would be double, would go further than verisimilitude [vraisemblance], to reach the truth. For want of rendering mystery directly - which is by definition impossible - it would in effect yield to this mystery: it would mime it, show it. (44)

So it is precisely because of the "vraisemblance" (verisimilitude) of its simulation of poetic mystery that this law avoids falling into the trap of actually rendering or translating poetic mystery. Since the most it could do would be to make manifest what appears as the truth of poetic mystery (its "vraisemblance"), in surrendering immediately to poetic mystery's inexpressibility, it is at least somehow truly involved in poetry's (apparent) truth.

The ambivalence of a law that is true only insofar as it appears to be true points to a generalized doubleness that is central to an un derstanding of this text. How this doubleness or bifurcation works at the level of a linguistic analysis is suggested at the very beginning of the essay when Paulhan describes the impetus for his text as "the keenest desire finally to distill some method or key, which would allow us to separate the true from the false.» (45) Paulhan continues: "I propose here to forge that key" (Je me propose ici de forger cette clef) The French expression "forger cette clef" can be read on two levels. As a "method," it is an essentially Cartesian project, and corresponds to the intention to separate the true from the false, and to reach the truth." But the verb "forger" could just as well be read as precisely an operation of making a double, or a counterfeit, of an original, something that would be "vraisemblable." In linguistic terms, the question of doubleness, and of the appearance of truth, is very much the question of figurative language. The "proper meaning" of poetic mystery would only be accessible, therefore, via the detour of a figure, and Paulhan's text, slightly reformulated, becomes an inquiry into the status of figurative language itself.

If poetic mystery can only be approached via its appearances, or indirectly by the detour of a figure, we can only hope to achieve an authentic simulacrum of it by circumscribing its apparent "elements": on the one hand "the letter and the sign, breath, sound, everything material and outside of us," and on the other, "ideas, wishes, feelings — everything known to us through intimate experience." (46) Taking the poets themselves as his "witnesses," Paulhan finds that they fall naturally into precisely the two opposing camps which he delineates above and that, more surprisingly, they in fact coexist very harmoniously:

Now their explanations and doctrines offer a singular trait: each of them is ingenious, probable-and what's more, since they are poets, proven by the facts. But not any more than the opposite explanation also remains probable-and no less proven. (47)

A little later on, in transferring this double schema to a metaphysical, then to a political domain, Paulhan finds that positions are switched With equal case, such that Paulhan is led to conclude: "One suspects that the key, once discovered, would be valid also for domains other than literature or poetry." (48) The apparent nonchalance with which each side betrays its position allows Paulhan to speculate, as was suggested before, that a form of betrayal is necessary in poetic mystery and that it is even its most singular trait:

We saw that there was a constant trait with poetry: it is the regular flaw [défaut] which each doctrine or reason betrays when dealing with it...If I attempt less to explain this trait, or even to understand it, than to express it — to formulate it — it comes down to the following: that in poetry words and thoughts happen to be indifferent. (49)

This formulation is an absolutely crucial one in Paulhan's essay. It gathers together in its concision all of the preceding hypothetical speculation, and offers a first version of the law that the essay will elaborate. We might feel that such a perfect formulation leaves no room for mystery, which seems to be itself betrayed, and that the effacement of differences leaves us with nothing, or with the flatness of a platitude. However - and here we can understand how such a formulation is possible — it never claimed to be anything other than a platitude, or rather, it only ever claimed to simulate poetic mystery ("In which we express mystery for lack of being able to think it" (50)), it only claimed to be apparently true. It does not give us poetic mystery, which is not there to be given, but it allows it to insinuate inself as the invisible trait that only reveals itself in its appearances. It always appears as what it is not, and so the duplicity of its constant self-betrayal is the surest guarantee of its continuing effectiveness.

In a surprising move, Paulhan then goes on to pursue his argument by borrowing a system of expression from the field of mathematics, since he is concerned to satisfy both the scientific requirement of non-contradiction as well as (simultaneously) the poetic requirement of indifference. In fact only by satisfying this double requirement will it be truly a law of poetic mystery. The mathematical formula he elaborates is as follows: since the sets of oppositions which govern any expression are not made up of isolated elements, that is to say, there is always a more or less complex configuration of, for example, language and thought, sounds and meanings, Paulhan designates these sets by groups of symbols, calling them "functions," The necessarily double formula is thus:

From F(abc) it follows that F(ABC) From F(ABC) it follows that F(abc) (51)

How this is to be understood is that a bc are words for classical poets and rhetoricians, and A B C thoughts. But that for romantic poets and terrorists a bc are on the contrary ideas and A B C words" (Clef, p. 251). Filling in the double equation we get:

The function F(words) implies the function F' (ideas) (just as) The function F(ideas) implies the function F' (words)

The first half of the formula works like any scientific formula, and is even consistent with scientific precedent in assigning terms to something which is temporarily inconceivable. The second half, however, is of a different nature:

The second test, which interests me, is particular to a poetic law: it is a question of knowing whether this law remains valid despite the mystery and the transmutation of its elements: if it is likely to resist this mystery and (so to speak) soak up the obstacle. (52)

According to this double law, it makes absolutely no difference whether we go from cause to effect or from effect to cause, from thoughts to words or from words to thoughts. While the two directions are perfectly comprehensible in terms of scientific laws (the first is logical, the second is "simply" illogical), their simultaneous coexistence and interchangeability is not, and it thus fulfils the requirement of the law of poetic mystery.

Paulhan is careful to point out, however, that this is merely a "model law," a simulacrum, and that he is by no means sure that such a law actually exists. In fact, he admits that he could not care less whether it exists or not, and ends the essay with a triumphant declaration of success, and an invitation to the reader to test out the effectiveness of the law by applying it "to the commentaries, confidential remarks, themes and doctrines currently pertaining to poetry." (53)

Paulhan anticipates possible objections to his argument, and he does so by stating that the performance of the text has both "overtaken his argument" (dépassé mon propos), and in doing so has itself become an example of the law he is attempting to formulate: "I have proposed nothing which I have not undergone.... was the very discovery that I was making." (54) The text of Clef de la poésie is poetic to the extent that it obeys exactly the law of poetic mystery which it articulates; it functions on two registers, each absolutely distinct from the other, yet both interchangable, self-betrayıng, and coexisting in a singular, indifferent relationship. Clef de la poésie is its own primary proof, precisely because it is a poetic "event" as well as a İogical argument. But in declaring his text subject to its own law of poetic mystery, and to the illusions which always inform literary and critical endeavors, Paulhan seems to open and immediately close again an interpretive circle. We are justified in asking whether in doing so, he does not forever foreclose the possibility of considering a generically circumscribed poetics. Is he being unduly naive in forbidding himself access to an external, objective perspective?

According to Blanchot, Paulhan is the least self-deluded of critics, precisely because of the rigor of his concentration on what appears simple and commonplace. Since literature always tends to produce the same division into rhetoric and terror, Paulhan's naïveté is, as Blanchot remarks, "the least unreflective possible." (55) In subjecting his own texts to the same rigorous critical scrutiny he exercises in reading other texts, he is demonstrating that he is subject to the same illusions as other writers, and that there is no guarantee that even such obstinate attention to the simple and the commonplace allows for any greater critical distance or demystification. What is so difficult to grasp (for Paulhan too) is why he should find the self-evident so perplexing. As Blanchot says of Clef de la poésie:

The provocative nature of these remarks comes from their simplicity, and yet also from the impossibility of going beyond them. (56)

Language is, according to Paulhan, always two-faced. In his essay on Clef de la poésie Blanchot demonstrates how the metaphorical extension of this duplicity works. He shows how, for Paulhan, the side of the division which is made up of words, sounds, form, etc. is often said to correspond to the writer, and to the mouth, while the opposite side is made up of thoughts, meanings, ideas, an author, and an ear. This division of the acts of reading and writing into two opposing and mutually exclusive camps is as illusory as the irreducible separation of, say, words and thoughts, and Blanchot focuses on those rare moments of "short-circuiting" between the two. At such moments, Blanchot writes, both aspects appear simultaneously, "the whole of language, whose two sides we only make out otherwise when they are folded on top of one another, and hide one another." (57) Blanchot pushes the logic of this play of appearance and disappearance to a point where a comparison between Paulhan and Mallarmé becomes possible, and it allows for a clarification of the distinction between "ordinary" language and poetry in Clef de la poésie. If, for Paulhan, words exist in an indifferent relationship with things, for example, then they have, as Blanchot says, a triple existence. They exist in order to make the thing appear (while themselves disappearing), they reappear as deictic signs showing the thing which only exists by virtue of being called forth by the words, and they again disappear to maintain the illusion of the thing existing independently of words. From the opposite perspective, the same "short-circuiting" takes place, but inversely. In defining the project of Mallarme's poetics as the evocation, not of things but of the absence of things, ' Blanchor arrives at the following reformulation of Paulhan's law:

... words vanish from the stage to usher in the thing, but as this thing is itself nothing more than an absence, what appears in this theatre is an absence of words and an absence of things, a simultaneous void, nothing supported by nothing. (59)

Thus, by very different routes, Paulhan and Mallarmé reach a strikingly similar conception of poetry, or of poetic mystery. Mallarme's disappearing words and things leave us with an enigmatic emptiness that resembles the empty platitude of Paulhan's poetic law. Does this mean that poetry tends always towards the destruction of ordinary language? If so, we might feel doubly anxious: not only is poetry essentially empty, but once we reach this emptiness of poetry, there is no going back to "ordinary" language. This, however, is once more to presume that poetry is simply a particular form of language, and that it is accessible to cognition in the same way. Blanchot points out how absolutely different the dimensions of "poetry" and ordinary language" are, and this radical incompatibility is itself irreducible to a logic of contradiction or paradox. The strange temporality involved is now in fact familiar to us as the characteristic movement of the récit, and it also produces in Blanchot's essay a number of consequences which follow from this description of poetry. Poetry can onl appear as something inapparent; it renders language unworkable, yet is the very condition of possibility of language; and poetic mystery is absolutely hidden from sight, yet illuminates everything.

In showing his essay to have been a poetic as well as a logical text, Paulhan does not simply reassert the supremacy of poetry over science. If we at first took the rather barren mathematical formula to be a subordination of poetry to the discourse of science, the affirmation of the text as a poetic event is what makes it a poetic event. In the text's own terms, it becomes a matter of indifference whether the text is a logical argument or a poetic event. In other words, we cannot tell whether poetry is subordinated to the discourse of science, or whether science is subordinated to poetry. Indeed, this very opposition could be expressed in terms of the law of poetic mystery, giving the following double formula:

From F (poetry) it follows that F (science)
From F (science) it follows that F (poetry)

It is impossible to tell whether Clef de la poésie, which is the only evidence we have, the only place where the question can be decided, is a poetic or scientific discourse. As Blanchot puts it, Paulhan's text is:

... both a scientific and a nonscientific process, the disjunction as it were between the two, and the mind's hesitation between the latter and the former.... (60)

The question "What is ..." (Clef de la poésie, "poetic mystery," literature)?" is necessarily a question of science and one which simply does not interest poetry. Neither is poetry "interested" in something else, some more important question, since it is essentially disinterested, indifferent.

The "key" to poetry, which should have provided us with the means of distinguishing between "the false and the true," tells us only that when poetic mystery is at stake, it is impossible to tell the difference between true and false. Poetic mystery is both true and false, and neither, all at once; it is both the essence of poetry and absolutely inessential; both the impossibility of language (its ruin) and its possibility. We, as readers, are absolutely caught up in the text's impossibility. We thought we were going to read a text about poetry. It seemed to have nothing to do with poetry. But then, what is poetry? The only answer the text offers is that there is poetry when it is impossible to tell whether there is poetry or not. But is Clef de la poésie poetry? it is impossible to tell, yet this impossibility is our surest guarantee that it is poetic. Once we decide that it is poetic, however, it is no longer poetic. If it is impossible to read such a text, how did we even get this far? It is impossible to measure how far we have come in our reading, since not only was it impossible to begin reading, but it is also impossible to stop.

Which brings us back to the problem of the "ending" of Les Fleurs de Tarbes. If Stoekl's reading depended on a determined end point, which would allow for a re-reading of the relationship between Paulhan and Blanchot, I have pursued this ending by continuing to read Paulhan's own commentaries of his texts, and have followed the thread of Blanchot's reading, both of which point to the significance of what I would see as very much a "key" text of Paulhan's, Clef de la Poésie. But this is not the end of the story, since Blanchot, as if to confirm the interminability of the process of Paulhan's writing (and of our reading of Paulhan), wrote a further, crucial text on Paulhan, "The Ease of Dying," which (elliptically, but maybe deliberately so) tells us much about the relationship between Paulhan and Blanchot. (61)

NON-COINCIDENCES

"The Ease of Dying" was originally written for the 1969 issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française commemorating Paulhan's death a year earlier, and was subsequently included in L'Amitié (1972). The significance of writing on the occasion" of Paulhan's death is not lost on Blanchot, and he starts out the essay recounting the story of their friendship, in what is for Blanchot an unusually anecdotal style. As a story of friendship, however, it is presented in the barest of terms — as Blanchot says, it was a "relationship without anecdotes" - and its solemnity is accentuated by what he sees as its chance alignment with some of the watersheds of recent French history. Blanchot tells of their first encounter in May 1940, how their relations were severed in 1958 over the question of Algerian Independence, and how their planned reconciliation was thwarted by the events of May 1968.

As the essay develops, it calls to mind Blanchot's discussion of literature and revolution in "Literature and the Right to Death." Paulhan, as Blanchot notes, had a marked tendency to publish during periods of great historical change (the First and Second World Wars), when the whole of history was being put into question. The historical vacuum thereby opened up (what Blanchot calls a time outside of time") increases the chances of a kind of anonymity which is a requirement of the impersonal or neutral "rapport" which Blanchot speaks of:

... great historical changes are also destined, because of their burden of absolute visibility, and because they allow nothing bur these changes themselves to be seen, to better free up the possibility of being understood or misunderstood intimately, and without having to spell things out, the private falling silent so that the public can speak, thus finding its voice. (42)

This confusion of public and private is affirmed by Blanchot because of its potential to allow for the emergence of a different kind of intimacy, that would be neither an anecdotal relationship, nor one "without anecdotes." The "relationship" between Paulhan and Blanchot only begins, it seems, after Paulhan's death. It is surely no coincidence that only once Paulhan has died is Blanchot able to write: "I often observed that his récits — which touched me in a way I can better remember now...." ("Ease of Dying," p. 122). A few sentences earlier, quoting Paulhan's "prophetic" words in 1940, "We will remember these days," Blanchot effectively transfers their relationship to a time that is a "time outside of time," one that would escape the double bind of an anecdotal or a non-anecdotal rapport, and one in which personal friendship would be subordinated to the "rapport," or "non-rapport," of reading and writing. Indeed, what we know of their relationship is very little, and one could certainly not count Blanchor among Paulhan's vast circle of friends with whom he kept up long and unfailingly loyal correspondences.

Although "The Ease of Dying" is devoted to Paulhan's récits, and quotes mainly from Paulhan's early fictional texts, this is, as we saw, a way for Blanchot to talk about Paulhan as a writer in general. As he says: "It is through the movement of the récit (the discontinuity of the continuous récit) that we can perhaps best understand Jean Paulhan" ("Ease of Dying." p. 123). For Blanchot the figure of this radical discontinuity (or irreversibility) is death, while the récit's continuity is guaranteed, conversely, by the play of reversals of Paulhan's texts, which Blanchot names "illness." Thus "death" and "illness" become figures of irreversibility and reversibility respectively. It might appear that "death" carries the greater theoretical burden of the two terms. But the title of the essay, "The Ease of Dying" warns of a dangerous trap; nothing could be easier than "dying," in the sense that thinking and writing can easily recuperate and accommodate its own discontinuity. Reversibility — "illness" — thus becomes in Paulhan's texts a form of endless narrative vigilance and a paradoxical guarantee of irreversibility, or "death." What the récit names, therefore, in "The Ease of Dying" is a "reading-writing" which responds to its own essential condition, that is, an experience of radical incommensurability or non-coincidence. It is, in other words, very close to the symmetrical impossibility of writing and reading which Blanchot discusses at the beginning of L'Espace littéraire. The only place, or space, or occasion, for literature is a kind of "non-place" (non-lieu); this is the "place" that Blanchot, in "The Ease of Dying," accords to the récit: "The récit alone provides the space, while taking it away, for the experience which is contrary to itself...." (The Ease of Dying, p. 137).

If writing is necessarily its own impossible occasion, how can we understand the "occasion" of the "encounter" between Paulhan and Blanchot? We could see it as one in which the logic of the récit is already at work. If the récit names an essential non-coincidence between a text and itself ("writing"), then Blanchor's critical response to Paulhan's Fleurs de Tarbes in 1941 is equally a form of reading that responds to the "unreadability" of Paulhan's text, its mysterious, inaccessible otherness. And the turn from political commentary to "reading-writing," occasioned in part by the reading of Paulhan's book, could be seen not as a forgetting of, or indifference to, the political circumstances of the time, but as the inauguration of a deeper questioning of the relationship between writing-reading, and history. "Literature and the Right to Death" points the way towards an engagement with political questions that will be implicit or explicit in Blanchot's writing henceforth, passing through precisely a critique of language's claims to immanence and transparency, and including a critique of forms of immanent (and potentially totalitarian) political ideology.

So have I fallen into the trap of a kind of immanent form of reading in proposing the relationship between Paulhan and Blanchot as a decisive and fully determined turning point in Blanchor's career? Yes and no. Shifting the focus to the récit allows us to see a logic of non-coincidence at work at the three levels of political writing (the non-coincidence of language and the world, or language as a fundamental negation of the world), literary act (writing is only truly writing if it responds to its own impossibility), and critical response (reading only occurs if it takes into account the fundamental unreadability of literature). By taking the récit as a medium of serious critical reflection, we avoid the reductive and ultimately stultifying division of writing into either politically aware or "literary" (i.e. implicitly "unpolitical").

Consequently we are "now" (in the "timeless" time of reading) in a better position to read Blanchot's opening remarks in "The Ease of Dying": "... his récits — which touched me in a way in a way I can better remember now —" (my emphasis). Consistent with the "after the fact" (après-coup) logic of the essay itself — or to quote from one of Paulhan's "causes célèbres," which Blanchot himself cites in "The Ease of Dying": "But how can we succeed in seeing at first sight things for the second time?" ("Ease of Dying," p. 137) — only "now" is Blanchot able to "read" Paulhan's récits. The essay itself replays the same logic of non-coincidence, both asking (again) the question of writing and its circumstances, and at the same time answering it in its very performance by narrating the impossibility of ever understanding the moment of their "encounter" as a "rapport." This is not to deny, of course, that there was an empirical relationship between Blanchot and Paulhan during the war, with its own history and anecdotes, that remain to be told. Although Paulhan's wartime activities were far more visible than Blanchot's, the latter's writings (critical, literary and political) have tended to eclipse the former's, for reasons that have more to do with notoriety than with any genuine critical understanding. I hope to have gone some way toward correcting this imbalance, and would like in the following chapter to look more closely not only at just what Paulhan was doing during the war, but also (following perhaps a similar "après-coup" logic) at the polemic texts he wrote after the war.