How is literature possible?

There are two ways to read Les Fleurs de Tarbes by Jean Paulhan. If one is content to receive the text, to follow its instructions, to delight in the first reflection it brings, one will be rewarded with the most pleasant and exciting reading for the mind; nothing more ingenious nor more immediately satisfying for the mind than the twists and turns of judgment in the face of a certain literary conception which it regards, fascinates and annihilates at the same time; we leave this show, delighted and reassured. But after some time, doubts come; you have to think carefully; allusions hidden by their obviousness, various incidents of form, a mysterious conclusion gradually give food for thought. The book we have just approached, is it really the real work that we must read? Isn't that what it looks like? Is it only there to ironically hide another attempt, more difficult, more dangerous, whose shadows and ambition we can guess? Now we have to start reading again, but it would be vain to believe that Jean Paulhan ever reveals his secrets. It is through the discomfort that we experience, and the anxiety, that we are only authorized to enter into contact with the great problems that he studies and of which he only agrees to show the absence.
The first book, the apparent book, is devoted to the examination of the critical conception which must be called terrorist. According to this conception which has governed letters for one hundred and fifty years, literature has the duty to defend itself against common places and against these larger places which are rules, laws, figures, units. Any writer who abandons himself to clichés and conventions soon gives up on expressing his thoughts, even more on seeking virgin contacts, that freshness of the world which is the end of all art; he is the victim of words, the soul of laziness and inertness, the prey of ready-made formulas which impose their degrading power on his thought. These are obvious facts. Commonplaces betray an intelligence that is both indolent and submissive, inert and trained, dedicated to a language that it no longer guides. What criticism do we make of the man who uses the words: freedom, democracy, order without caution? He is accused of verbalism. Such is the writer who indulges in clichés. He is a prisoner of words that he no longer submits to their meaning. A secret language illness affects him to which he can only succumb.
This critical conception, which is in short that of Victor Hugo rejecting rhetoric, of Verlaine denouncing eloquence, of Rimbaud separating himself from old poetic style, which curiously reconciles Sainte-Beuve, Taine and surrealism through the humiliation it inflicts on words and the privileged role it gives to authentic thought, is so scrupulously studied by Jean Paulhan that one wonders how it will be possible for him to shake it after having given it such firm foundations. But he only needs a few remarks and, it is true, a capital discovery whose importance we discern a little later. The simplest observation proves the Terror wrong. It is not true that the use of commonplaces is a sign of laziness and even less of verbalism. Are there not writers who invent clichés, who do not submit to them but discover them and express through them what is most tender in sensitivity, most spontaneous in the imagination? Are there not others who use commonplaces, know that they use them and, far from thinking of losing the spirit of their speech, only use this language because it is too tried to hold attention and shield the meaning that it must translate? The photos are intended to go unnoticed. Language draws an invisible and absent body.
In fact, the entire accusation of the Terror is based on a singular illusion optics. It is very true that certain commonplaces have the effect of surrounding the mind with words, of imposing on it excessive worry and noise. But this evil does not occur in the author, it is the reader that it strikes, the reader who, faced with every commonplace, is obliged to ask himself: does this expression retain its native force, its original vigor? Or is it just a cliché, a big word? Here is this reader embarrassed by questions of language, caught in a network of words which no longer allow him to be at the disposal of the mind, truly in full verbalism. But can Terror conclude, as it does, that evil comes from the writer's unfortunate tendency to give in to words? It’s actually quite the opposite. How much more careful the author was with language! The reader would be less concerned. Who in writing has not been attentive to the fate of the words dooms the one who reads to have attention only for them.
This illusion discovered, Jean Paulhan can easily restore the Terror to its place, show its insufficiency and correct its excesses with the perfection he gives it. What can we criticize about commonplaces? To be a place of incomprehension, an oscillating expression, with a double meaning, not yet fixed, not commonly heard, to not be a common place. The whole problem is there. It is serious since these widespread places present themselves as perfect means of exchange and are in reality instruments of trouble and monsters of ambiguity. But the cure, too, is there. Because there would be nothing missing from these clichés if they always appeared as clichés. It is therefore enough to make the common places common and to return to their true use the rules, the figures and all other conventions which follow the same fortune. If the writer uses images, units, rhyme as appropriate, that is to say the renewed means of rhetoric, he will be able to find the impersonal and innocent language he is looking for, the only one which allows him to be what he is and to have contact with the virgin novelty of things.
This is roughly Jean Paulhan's conclusion. But, having reached this end, the reader has the choice between two possible courses of action. He can stick to this text that he heard and whose importance is enough to occupy him. Isn't everything clear now? Is there any doubt that has not been clarified? What can you ask of an author who has everything planned and who will no longer be asked for anything? Also, being attentive, this same reader will find, at the end of the work, at the moment when he is completely satisfied, a few words of retraction which worry him and force him to retrace his steps. So he rereads and little by little, convinced that behind the first assertions with which he was satisfied there is a secret that he must reach, he tries to go further, seeking by what combination he will be able to open the real book that is offered to him. He first thinks, in order to attack and if possible to dissipate the apparent text which catches his eye too much, to make some objections. There is one he can try without too much risk. What is this Terror really? How was she able to bring together so many minds that were sometimes so different, almost completely opposite? At first glance, we distinguish among the Terrorists two categories of writers who seem very far from agreeing on language. According to some, language's mission is to correctly express thought, to be its faithful interpreter, to be subject to it as to a sovereign that it recognizes. But for others, expression is only the prosaic destiny of everyday language; the true role of language is not to express but to communicate, not to translate but to be; and it would be absurd to see in him only an intermediary, a miserable agent: he has a virtue of his own that the duty of the writer is precisely to discover or restore. Here then, it seems, are two families of minds completely foreign to each other. What could they possibly have in common?
Much more probably than one would first believe. Let's return to the classical type of writers. To write for them is to express thought by means of a speech which must not monopolize attention, which must even disappear the moment it appears, which must, in any case, cast no shadow on this profound life which it reveals. Consequently, a single object for art, to bring to light the world within while keeping it intact from the gross and general illusions with which an imperfect language would offend it. But what more do all the others want, who refuse to ask literary language for the same services as practical language; and do they want it by other means? For them too, writing means expressing secret, deep thought, taking care to banish from language anything that could make it resemble an everyday language, that is to say, in short, expressing oneself through a language which is not an instrument of expression and where words cannot bring the wear and ambiguity of mundane life. The writer's mission in both cases is therefore to make known an authentic thought - a secret or truth - that too much attention to words, especially to worn-out words these days, could only endanger.
What confirms the relationship of these two kinds of spirits is the identity of their destiny. Both, carried away by the movement of their demands, end up putting language as such, literature as such, on trial, and would exhaust themselves in silence if they were not saved by a constant illusion. Of the first, Jean Paulhan clearly showed his fortune. Wanting to make language the ideal place of understanding and evidence, they are led to remove from it the commonplaces which disturb the understanding of thoughts, to extract conventional words from it, finally to drive out the words themselves and, pursuing in vain clarity in a language which would say everything without being anything, they die having achieved nothing. In short, they end up suppressing language as a means of expression precisely for having required language to be nothing other than a means of expression. As for the latter, they end up with the same hostility, because they first recognized that words were worthless to express, but that they were worth a lot to communicate. They therefore expelled from the language the words, the figures, the tricks most likely to make it resemble a means of exchange or a precise system of substitution. But this demand could only be all-consuming. If it allowed Mallarmé to restore an event value to certain terms, if it gave him the means to explore their interior space to the point of truly seeming to invent or discover them, it obliged those who came after him to reject these same terms as already corrupted by use, to reject this discovery as popularized by tradition and rendered common impurity.
It is quite obvious that in this exhausting search for a power that a single application must corrupt, in these efforts to make the opacity or banality of words disappear, language is very precisely exposed to perish. And the same can be said of literature in general. Commonplaces, objects of merciless ostracism, have as their equivalent literary conventions which seem to be worn-out rules, the rules themselves being the result of previous experiences and, as such, necessarily remaining foreign to the personal secret whose revelation they should help to reveal. The writer therefore has the duty to break with these conventions, a sort of ready-made language, more impure than the other. If he can, he must free himself from all the intermediaries that custom has fashioned and, delighting the reader, put him directly in relation with the veiled world that he wants to discover, with the secret metaphysics, the pure religion whose pursuit is his true destiny.

At this point in the examination where Jean Paulhan leads us with a barely visible but firm hand, it is permissible to make two fairly serious remarks. The first is that the conception we have come to know under the name of Terror is not just any aesthetic and critical conception; it covers almost the entire extent of the letters; she is literature, or at least its soul. The result is that when we question the Terror, refuting it or showing the consequences of its logic, it is literature itself that we question and push into nothingness. Furthermore, we are forced to note that apart from a few famous exceptions, writers of one species or the other, even the most severe and the most attached to their ambition, have renounced neither the language nor the form of their art. It’s a fact, literature exists. It continues to be, despite the inner absurdity which inhabits it, divides it and makes it truly inconceivable. There is at the heart of every writer a demon which pushes him to strike death at all literary forms, to become aware of his dignity as a writer to the extent that he breaks with language and with literature, in a word, to question in an indescribable way what he is and what he does. How, in these conditions, can literature exist? How does the writer who distinguishes himself from other men by the sole fact that he challenges the validity of language and whose job should be to prevent the formation of a written work, end up creating some literary work? How is literature possible?
To answer this question, that is to say to see how Jean Paulhan answers it, it is necessary to follow the movement which can lead to a refutation of the Terror. We have seen that some fought against language because they saw it as an imperfect means of expression and because they wanted complete perfection of intelligibility for it. Where does this ambition lead them? To the invention of a language without commonplaces, that is to say in appearance a language without ambiguity, that is to say in fact a language no longer offering common measure, completely removed from understanding. And we also saw that the others fought against language considered too complete or too perfect a means of expression and consequently as a non-literary language, and that, through their pitiless demands, their concern for an inaccessible purity, they ended up by pushing conventions, rules, genres, in a total proscription of literature, satisfied if they could make their secret perceptible outside of any literary form. But, it must now be added, these consequences - rejection of language, rejection of literature - are not the only ones to which they each indulge. Il arrive aussi, nécessairement, que leur entreprise contre les mots, leur désir de n'en pas tenir compte pour laisser tout son empire à la pensée, leur hantise d'indifférence, provoquent un souci extrême du langage dont la conséquence est le verbalisme. This is a significant inevitability, both deplorable and happy. In any case, it's a fact. Whoever wants to be absent from words at any moment or only present to those that he reinvents is constantly occupied with them, so that, of all authors, those who most keenly seek to avoid the reproach of verbalism are also the most justly exposed to this reproach. Flee language, it is chasing you, said Paulhan, Pursue language it is fleeing you. And let us think of Victor Hugo, the writer par excellence prey to words, who did everything to overcome rhetoric and said: "The poet must not write with what has been written (that is to say with the words) but with his soul and his heart."
It is the same for those who, through prodigies of asceticism, have had the illusion of deviating from all literature. Having wanted to get rid of conventions and forms, in order to directly touch the secret world and the profound metaphysics that they wanted to reveal, they were ultimately content to use this world, this secret, this metaphysics as conventions and forms which they showed with complacency and which constituted both the visible framework and the background of their works. Jean Paulhan makes decisive remarks in this regard. "Rocky castles, lights in the night, specters and dreams (for example) are... pure conventions, like rhyme and the three units, but they are conventions that we do not avoid taking for dreams and castles whereas no one has ever believed to see the three units". In other words, for this type of writer, metaphysics, religion and feelings take the place of technique and language. They are a system of expression, a literary genre, in a word literature.
So here we are, ready to give an answer to the question: how is literature possible? In truth, by virtue of a double illusion - the illusion of some who fight against commonplaces and language by the very means which generate language and commonplaces; illusion of others who, by renouncing literary conventions or, as they say, literature, bring it back to life, in a form (metaphysics, religion, etc.) which is not its own. Now, it is from this illusion that Jean Paulhan, through a revolution that can be called Copernican, like that of Kant, proposes to draw a more precise and more rigorous literary reign. Let us note how audacious this revolution is at first glance, because ultimately it is a question of putting an end to the essential illusion which allows literature. It is a question of revealing to the writer that he only gives birth to art through a vain and blind struggle against it, that the work which he believes to have torn from common and vulgar language exists thanks to the popularization of virgin language, through an overload of impurity and degradation. There is in this discovery enough to make Rimbaud's silence fall on everyone. But, just as the fact, for man, that the world is the projection of his mind, does not destroy the world, but on the contrary ensures knowledge of it, represents its limits and specifies its meaning, so the writer, if he knows that the more he fights against commonplaces, the more he is subject to them, or if he learns that he only writes with the help of what he hates, has the chance of seeing more clearly the extent of his power and the means of his reign. In any case, instead of being unconsciously governed by words, or indirectly governed by rules (because his refusal of the rules makes him dependent on them) he will seek mastery of them. Instead of submitting to commonplaces, he will be able to make them and knowing that he cannot fight against literature, that he would only deviate from conventions to accept the constraint, he will receive the rules, not as an artificial outline indicating the path to follow and the world to discover, but as the means of his discovery and the law of his progress among the obscure where there is neither path nor trace.

We must now try to take one last step without thinking of going very far. Jean Paulhan showed that the writer, solely concerned with the thought he wants to express or communicate, and for this reason hostile to clichés and conventions, condemns himself to silence or only escapes it through a permanent illusion. He therefore invites him to give, in the conception of the work, a certain preeminence to the system of verbal expression and the understanding of a form. If you like, his Copernican revolution consists of no longer only making language revolve around thought, but of imagining another very subtle and very complex mechanism where it happens that thought, to find its authentic nature, revolves around language. Let's focus on this remark and see if we can express it differently. During the various episodes of his study, Paulhan accepted — with a complacent submission to common sense which visibly hides a trap — the traditional distinction between the sign and the thing, the word and reality. In reality, Paulhan, knowing very well how arbitrary the opposition between substance and form is and that, according to the words of Paul Valéry, what we call substance is only an impure form, brings this ambiguity into his calculations and does not seek to dissipate it. If he dissipated it, we would clearly see that by thought he means not a pure thought (every thought perceived is a first language), but a disorder of isolated words, of fragments of sentences, a first, fortuitous expression - and by language a regulated expression, the ordered system of conventions and common places. This observation therefore allows us to say that for Paulhan - at least in this secret book that we suppose to be his - thought, to return to its source, that is to say abandon the first and cowardly clothing which disguises it, must submit to clichés, conventions and the rules of language.
During an essay that he did not combine with his book, but which extends its intention, The Lady of the Mirrors, Paulhan remarks that a proper study of the translation would reveal a method for reaching authentic thought. Because this translation would make known what alteration specific to language the expression brings to thought; it would be enough to calculate what kind of change the translator necessarily imposes on the text he translates, then to imagine similar changes in the original text to ideally go back to a thought deprived of language and saved from reflection. However, according to observations often made, it appears that the almost inevitable effect of any translation is to give the impression that the translated text is more pictorial, more concrete than the language into which it is translated. The translator dissociates the stereotypes from the text, interprets them as expressive metaphors and, so as not to substitute simple abstract words (which would be another distortion), translates them as concrete and picturesque images. This is also how all reflection disguises the elusive original thought. Immediate thought, that which consciousness saw for us, with a look which decomposed it, is deprived of what we can call its stereotypes, its places, its cadence. It is false and arbitrary, impure and conventional. We only recognize our gaze. But on the other hand, if we submit it to the rules of rhetoric, if we astound attention with rhythm, rhyme and the order of numbers, we can hope to see the mind returned to its stereotypes and its places, united again with the soul from which it is separated. Thought will become pure again, a virgin and innocent contact, not away from words but in the intimacy of speech, through the operation of clichés, the only ones capable of taking it back to the anamorphoses of reflection.
We could dream of this thought which reveals itself in conventions and is saves in constraints. But that is the secret of language, like that of Jean Paulhan. It is enough to understand that the true commonplaces are words torn by lightning and that the rigors of the laws establish the absolute world of expression outside of which chance is only sleep.