Two books by Jean Paulhan

Jacob Cow, the Pirate and The Bridge Crossed

I think Mr. Jean Paulhan is worried. The desire for certainty through which all have suffered has not yet pushed him to the definitive reaction of nihilistic skepticism. He questions words, seeks reality through them, studies the dreams of three nights, and in the subtle analysis we can sense the discomfort of uncertainty. After reading Jacob Cow, we are afraid of words. To the pirate himself his name gave fear, and we each know that we are the pirate. Language, current currency (or paper currency which means pure fiction), determines values. The effigy wears out, or rather the sticker loses its freshness. We look with a curiosity which adds to their price the notes of the transatlantic banks like those children who prefer foreign stamps in their collections as if they were the most beautiful. Thus, little by little, words are despised, tarnished by having circulated too much, or even colorless in our eyes simply by the habit of seeing them. Hence the success of all exoticism. Céline admires the Kikoyou for calling our “Milky Way” “heart liana”. Mr. Jean Paulhan, who knows the importance of fragile and pretty details to show how far this love of a new formula can go, cites the example of the Chinese tailor: This tailor takes the dress of a queen to grasp the cut. "But he had no other place to store it; it was in its hut immediately pierced with moths and butterflies for the rare qualities of its fabric... with the greatest care, he transferred the various holes to the new dress, seeing some secret there. "

It is perhaps because he distrusts words that Mr. Paulhan responds to his decision to seek a friend with an abundance of dreams. Psychoanalysis has taught us to find the truth about ourselves in the language of dreams, of which each word is an image, a concrete symbol of intimate thought, while in waking life, we no longer know what is the correct expression of precise thought or simply a word, nothing more.

It is perhaps because of this desire not to find himself deceived by the tone of his externalized feelings - to achieve this, seeking to project them outside of himself, in sure formulas - that Mr. Jean Paulhan, in his hesitant and worried march towards realities, "does not feel thick". It becomes very thin to be able to pass better.

Many in the analysis appeared surgeons operating themselves on their own anesthetized bodies. The author of The Bridge Crossed is far from having put to sleep the faculty of feeling, and the tool of very fine steel awakens in every fiber of the muscle a pain that he has the courage not to say, a perfect mandarin who still knows, pretending to ignore the torment of the real world, to drink tea, to talk about the Queen's dresses or her fragile dreams.

(The University of Paris, n° 240, March 1922 - Babylone, Pauvert, 1975.)