Figures of Duplicity

Paulhan and Contemporary Literary Theory

I'm reading Derrida. Yes, he has a nice, subtle mind: very engaging
Letter to Francis Ponge, 14 March 1968 (1)

Max Ernst's 1924 painting "Rendez-vous der Freunde" (Rendez-vous with Friends) depicts Paulhan in a posture which will typify his paradoxical role in French intellectual history over the subsequent 40 years. Here is a young Paulhan, already as secretary of the Nouvelle Revue Française (NRF), an increasingly influential presence on the Parisian literary scene, tellingly occupying a central position amongst the French and German avant-garde painters and writers of the time, and yet not truly in any sense himself a Surrealist or Dadaist. Even though he was one of the founders of the Dadaist movement, and was certainly a friend of many of the figures who surround him in the painting, he - along with the NRF - was soon to part company with André Breton following a particularly acrimonious exchange of letters. Probably no other figure in the twentieth century was as closely in contact as Paulhan with happenings on the French literary scene, and perhaps no one as impervious as he was to the many intellectual, artistic and ideological forces which helped shape French literary history this century. To say he was at the center of the literary world from the 1920s to the 1960s is really to understate the case; as director of the NRF, and subsequently as its editor, he played a key role in defining that center, and— it may be said without exaggeration —in creating a whole generation of writers.

The reputation he earned for himself as the "grey eminence" of French literature is entirely justified. He spotted, advised, promoted, edited, published, befriended (and often became the intellectual guiding light of) many of the major French writers from this period. The list of writers with whom he was associated is as remarkable for its eclecticism as for its length. In his early years at the NRF he was already working with established writers such as Breton, Eluard, Reverdy, Aragon, Proust, Valéry, Gide, Martin du Gard and Mauriac. He went on to publish many of the "household" names of French literature; Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux, Antonin Artaud, George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jules Supervielle, Francis Ponge, Valéry Larbaud, Julien Gracq, René Etiemble, Albert Thibaudet, Roger Caillois. He was very close to a score of other half-forgotten, less familiar figures, who were nonetheless prominent writers at the time in France : Marcel Arland, René Daumal, André Suarès, Jean Grenier, Marcel Jouhandeau, Joe Bousquet, Jacques Audiberti, René Crevel, Guillaume de la Tarde, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Barbara and Henry Church, Bernard Groethuysen. Not forgetting, of course, his friendships with painters such as Braque, Picasso, Dubuffet and Fautrier. Lest this seem like merely an expansive use of name-dropping (arguably, any long-serving editor would accumulate a list of similarly indebted authors), it should be noted first of all that the names I have indicated are intended to be representative only, secondly that most of these writers also became close personal friends of Paulhan, and that he sustained a regular correspondence with them over many years (he would get up at six most mornings, and spend a few hours on his correspondence before attending to his editorial duties).

Every one who knew him has an anecdote about Paulhan. His very unacademic attitude towards literature, the lightness of his approach to even the most serious of matters, and the surprising turns and leaps of his thought, naturally steer evocations of him towards the anecdotal. People who talk about Paulhan invariably end up talking about his mystery, his modesty, his disarming playfulness, the subtle balance of contradictory traits, as if one might catch the essence of his elusive character within a fleeting manifestation of its appearance. A few "descriptions" of Paulhan should give an idea of the delicate, prismatic quality of his person as his friends experienced it :

Yet there is in him a sort of eloquence, but very fine and all flute glissandos, in this bizarre blend of politeness and silence, of reserve and coquetry, of taciturn humor and rare enthusiasm where others are concerned, of fearful goodness and quiet influence. (Roger Judrin, La Vocation transparente, p. 110)

I have always had in my mind the image of a young intellectual... his fine, nervous silhouette, his mask as enigmatic as it was affable, his rapid movements, his look that was as clear as it was impenetrable, its intelligence at times hardly bearable, seeming to go right through his interlocutor. (Robert Sebastian, NRF May 1969, p. 704)

A character who was at first exasperating. Permanently, openly, ostentatiously mischievous; not laying any traps, since he gave you a clear warning of the pitfalls. Never saying what he thought, but sometimes saying exactly the opposite, a constant love of paradox. (Roger Caillois, NRF, May 1969, p. 734)

Jean Paulhan's scruples and tactfulness have led some to accuse him... of duplicity, dissimulation, and affected mannerism. His generosity remained hidden from them, as did his brand of humor.... Whence emerged this parodic character whom he would allow to remain beside him, and whom he would sometimes use. ... (Jean Follain, NRF, May 1969, p. 714)

When interviewing you, he never failed to make you feel uncomfortable, for his words were not those of a master but of someone curious who would try to surprise you, and even to fluster you, all the while remaining extremely reserved himself. (André Dhôtel, Jean Paulhan: Qui suis-je?, p. 9)

Given the number of people who knew Paulhan, a composite picture formed from different testimonies might seem easy enough to put together. However, everyone seems to want to see in Paulhan (the man) the same enigma we find in his texts. As we shall see, Paulhan's texts both speak of mystery, and are themselves as frustratingly elusive as the mystery they attempt to approach. Most of the people who knew him seem intent on perpetuating the image of Paulhan as someone at once immediately accessible, open, generous, and secretive, shadowy, a behind-the-scenes figure, who nonetheless wielded immense power, as if he were as essentially "unreadable" as his texts.

My intention in this book is not to shed any particularly new light on Jean Paulhan, the person, except perhaps indirectly, as an effect of reflection or refraction. While I find Paulhan a fascinating and intriguing figure, I don't feel that I have anything to add to what has al ready been written on him in this regard, and I would refer interested readers to Roger Judrin's La Vocation transparente de Jean Paulhan, André Dhôtel's Jean Paulhan: Qui suis-je?, the May 1969 commemorative issue of the Nouvelle Revue Française, the many volumes of his correspondence now available, the excellent annotated edition of his personal writings, La Vie est pleine de choses redoutables, and the series of Cahiers Jean Paulhan published by the "Société des Lecteurs de Jean Paulhan." These biographically oriented writings, together with a flood of re-editions of Paulhan's texts, have certainly helped to increase his visibility, and to further our understanding of just how pivotal a role he played in French literary history this century. At the same time, his name has been evoked more and more frequently as a neglected precursor of contemporary literary theory in France, and he has even been referred to by one critic, Jeffrey Mehlman, as an unacknowledged ancestor to Deconstruction. My interest in Paulhan falls somewhere between literary history and literary theory, as I think neither approach to his texts does full justice to their complexity, to their startling originality, and above all to the challenges they present to the very foundations of literary study. My own attempt to come to terms with Paulhan's texts is based on the view that not enough attention has been pald to him as a writer, and that one cannot simply reduce his texts to their explicit arguments, even though this expository critical labor is both necessary and valuable in introducing one of the most refreshingly jargon-free of literary theoreticians to an anglophone readership. I see a greater attention to the language of the texts, to their poetic as well as their hermeneutic dimension, as a means to understanding more clearly not only their internal dynamics, but also their relationship to the various theoretical, artistic and historical contexts out of which they arose.

This book is thus not a book "on" Paulhan, but more a book "about" Paulhan, insofar as I situate his writing with respect to the different intellectual currents of his times. It is organized as a series of "scenes" of twentieth century French intellectual history, each forming the site of an important critical intervention on the part of Paulhan: the "literary ethnography" which developed out of the French colonial experience; the interplay between autobiography and fiction which has been a prominent feature of much French writing this century; the Sartre-Blanchot debate in the 1940s around the question "What is literature?"; the post-war literary purge and the question of the political or ethical dimension of literature; the relationship between literature and art, particularly in the context of a Cubist aesthetic; and the development of literary theory in France. The sequence of chapters follows roughly the chronological order of Paulhan's writings, but this is more a matter of convenience than anything else. My own resistance to reading Paulhan in terms of a dialectical progression is motivated by a concern to articulate more distinctly the interconnectedness of his different writings, and to respond to the ironic relationship which Paulhan himself adopts towards literary history. I thus want to put on hold the familiar narrative of the evolution of Paulhan's thought, which runs something like this : it was during his time on Madagascar, while learning Malagasy, that Paulhan first became interested in proverbs, clichés, and commonplace expressions, an interest which eventually grew into a more generalized "theory of language," most forcefully expressed in Les Fleurs de Tarbes, that informs all of his thinking on everything from politics to aesthetics to sexuality; as his thought turned more and more to mysticism, his lifelong search for the "secret of language" finally ended with the revelation of language's "triplicity" (word, sign, thing) in one of his last works, Le Don des langues (The Gift of Languages), which at last resolved the various models of "duplicity" which had always seemed to lead him up a blind alley. I see this (admittedly oversimplified) "success story" as a false evolution, which does not really address the problems raised by Paulhan's texts, and I prefer to take as more significant his own pronouncements about the failure of his thought to arrive at any kind of synthesis. Consequently, there are many of his texts I will not be considering, partly as a matter of strategic choice, partly because I feel that the best chance of correcting the received ideas, or common-places, about Paulhan which seem to be gaining ground, is to focus on a few texts, and to read them well.

Having said this, the least I could do in an introduction to a book "about" Paulhan is to provide a brief biography. Jean Paulhan was born in Nîmes in 1884, the son of Suzanne and Frédéric Paulhan. The latter was a well-known philosopher in France at the time, and one can see his influence, if only thematically, on some of Paulhan's early writings (his works were a blend of philosophy and the psychology of the period, and bore titles such as L'Activité mentale et les éléments de l'esprit [Mental Activity and the Elements of the Mind]). After studying literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne (while a student he was active in anarchist circles), Paulhan became interested in Chinese thought and language, and had planned to spend time in China, but accepted another overseas post that was offered to him in 1908, to become a teacher at the first French lycée on Madagascar. He lived there for almost three years, became fluent in Malagasy, and began to write both fiction as well as studies of Malagasy poems (hain-teny) and proverbs, the latter being the subject of a proposed thesis (The Semantics of the Proverb) under the direction of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, which he was never to complete. He married Sala Prusak in 1911, and taught Malagasy for a short while at the Ecole des Langues Orientales, then enlisted in the French army in 1914, but was wounded in St. Mard in December (an event which forms the basis of Paulhan's récit, Le Guerrier appliqué [The Diligent Soldier]). He never returned to combat, but became a driving instructor and interpreter for the Malagasy division, as well as a plane-spotter. During this time he was already beginning to establish himself, publishing his essays and récits, and making contacts with many of the most prominent intellectuals on the Parisian literary scene, Le Guerrier appliqué was particularly well received; it was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt, and earned the admiration of André Breton and Paul Eluard. Paulhan's personal life during these years was fairly turbulent. In 1916 he fell in love with Germaine Pascal, with whom he carried on a secret affair for two years before Sala found evidence of his infidelity while he was critically ill with pneumonia (this again is at the origin of one of his récits, La Guérison sévère [The Severe Recovery]). He decided to divorce Sala, who resisted tenaciously (by this time, they had two children, Pierre and Frédéric); the divorce was only made official in 1933, upon which Paulhan finally married Germaine Pascal.

In 1921 Jacques Rivière asked Paulhan to become the secretary of the Nouvelle Revue Française, and he became its director in 1925 after Rivière's death. Many consider as the greatest years of the NRF those between 1925 and the Second World War, with Paulhan largely responsible for finding, encouraging, and editing the authors it published. During this period Paulhan established his reputation as perhaps the most influential figure in French literature, and yet his self-effacing style led him to marginalize his own writings, which consequently never achieved the kind of popular success enjoyed by his many protégés. These years were also spent painstakingly working away on what was to become his best-known text, Les Fleurs de Tarbes, ou la terreur dans les lettres (The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature), the final version of which only appeared in 1941.

During the war, Paulhan refused to continue working with the NRF once it became clear it was going to fall into the hands of collaborators (it was taken over by Drieu la Rochelle, but only lasted a few months as a collaborationist journal), and he was one of the first and most active writers to become involved in the Resistance. Here again, he played a pivotal role, founding the Resistance journal Les Lettres Françaises with Jacques Decour, and using his home to hide the printing press. He was arrested by the Gestapo, and spent a week in prison, before being released. He was a key contact for the Editions de Minuit, and helped found the Comité National des Ecrivains (National Committee of Writers), the principal organization of Resistance writers during the war, and the group which possessed the moral authority to determine the future of French literature after the Liberation. Paulhan left the group in 1946 when it adopted a policy of "purging" writers who had collaborated during the Occupation, and he took the side of the collaborators, a move which outraged many of his Resistance friends. For several years he obstinately stuck to his position in the face of quite ferocious public criticism.

This again perhaps had the effect of diverting attention from some of his major texts, which were published in the 1940s and 1950s: texts such as Clef de la poésie (Key to Poetry), which continued the theoretical reflections of Les Fleurs de Tarbes; the short fictional texts entitled Les Causes célèbres (Famous Cases); and the writings on Cubist and Modern Art, such as Braque le patron (Braque the Boss) and La Peinture cubiste (Cubist Painting). Paulhan continued as editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française (renamed the Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Française) once it reappeared in 1953. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1963, continued to write essays and articles, rewrote already published texts, and was engaged in prefacing the five volume edition of his Œuvres complètes when he died in 1968.

The Paulhan who emerges from this biographical sketch is in fact a fairly recognizable, even canonical figure, yet it does not tell us very much about his literary and intellectual achievements, nor the ways in which these relate to the various historical contexts in which they originated. Paulhan was best known as a literary critic and theoretician of language and literature, although part of the difficulty of situating his work within the linguistic and literary theory of this century is that it resists any easy assimilation by genre, or theoretical/ideological affiliation. The singularity of his work comes not from any deliberate effort by Paulhan to position and define himself alongside or against other writers, but rather from the single-mindedness with which he pursued his own "search" for what he often referred to as the "secret of language"; endlessly circling around the same configuration of elements, refusing to be drawn away from this focus by more sophisticated articulations of it; well-informed about each successive literary or theoretical movement (indeed, he was often instrumental in enabling their emergence), he was nonetheless rigorously indifferent to their appeals. This paradoxical position-being both firmly rooted within the literary community of his time, and yet impervious to its influences—accounts for two equally inadequate approaches to his work: attempts to appropriate and "translate" Paulhan's theories in terms of a given historical or theoretical continuum, and perhaps more reverential depictions of Paulhan as a kind of guru figure, who by virtue of his supreme independence was able to transcend all local, circumstantial pressures. In the following chapters I will argue for the need to take into account the "duplicity" of Paulhan's texts, and his paradoxical position within literary or intellectual history is another version of this irreducible doubleness. This produces a simultaneous conjunction and disjunction between Paulhan and his times, across a range of scenes and contexts.

How then could we characterize Paulhan as a literary critic and theorist? We would have to take into account not only his best known interventions, such as Les Fleurs de Tarbes, but also his many other modes of interaction with writers, which create a number of different critical contexts. This was largely, of course, a function of his many editorial roles, and he seemed to relish the multiplicity of forms of critical engagement offered to him by his various positions. Thus we have concise, often polemical reviews in the NRF, longer reactions within letters to texts he had read, laconic dismissals or expressions of admiration, or quite elaborate explanations of his response, detailed editorial comments to authors, references to books in the context of arguments within his own theoretical texts, and then longish studies of artists' and writers' works (though never anything as substantial as, say, Sartre's studies of Genet or Flaubert). The latter would often be texts he devoted to writers he knew personally and whom he usually had a hand in publishing (such as Paul Valéry or Joe Bousquet). These different critical media, however, did not always prevent a certain overlapping of purpose, and Paulhan himself would be uncertain at times whether his criticism had taken the most appropriate form. One of the most painful examples of this, for him, was Valéry's rather cool reaction to the initial publication in the NRF (1929), of the essays that would eventually become Un Rhétoriqueur à l'état sauvage: Valéry, ou la Littérature considérée comme un faux (A Rhetorician in a Raw State: Valéry, or Literature Considered as a Fake). Perhaps as a result of this experience, he often refrained from writing at all on the writers he felt particularly close to (for example, Marcel Arland, Francis Ponge, or Roger Caillois). We can only assume that he achieved a successful balance most of the time, since while he was engaged in the powerful critique of literary "originality" we find in Les Fleurs de Tarbes, with the dizzying condition it leaves the writer in, he was at the same time never less than totally committed to encouraging and publishing new writing. In other words, the last thing he would have wanted was to have descend on "his" writers the "silence of Rimbaud," which for Blanchot is the logical consequence of the writer's predicament in Les Fleurs de Tarbes. In any case, we find in his critical writings the same sensitivity and attention to detail he displays as an editor; there are, for example, the same precise and often surprising examples, the same lingering over the quirks of language, and above all the same sense of a transcendent criterion ("literature") by which all works are essentially measured. This by no means implies a kind of reverence for canonical texts or an elitist notion of literary style since what Paulhan understands by "literature" is never a given, but is rather the very question he spent his whole life attempting to answer.

The best way to approach an assessment of Paulhan's contribution to literary theory might be to consider it first of all in the light of his engagement with linguistics, since literature, in his view, is a "fatter" or "expanded" version of language ("du langage grossi"). In this light, Paulhan's interest in linguistic-based analysis, dating back to his studies of Malagasy proverbs in the early part of the century, appears very much ahead of his time, and certainly well ahead of the movement towards using linguistic categories as a tool for literary criticism, although the manner in which Paulhan does this is quite different from Jakobson's or Barthes' structural analyses, for example. Paulhan had clearly read and understood the implications of Saussurean linguistics by the time he was writing Jacob Cow, which is based on a similar rejection of language in terms of any "natural" correspondence to the world, a recognition of the arbitrary nature of the sign, and a consequent examination of its functioning as an autonomous system. He goes on to pursue this problematic in a variety of ways; as we will see, it is translated into aesthetic terms in his essays on Cubist painting, and in Alain, ou la preuve par l'étymologie (Alain, or Proof by Etymology), he questions the cratylic assumptions behind what he sees as misplaced trust in the epistemological value of etymology. As Thomas Ferenczi has noted, his study of proverbs could be an application of Saussure's findings to the analysis of phrases as well as individual words. Bur Paulhan certainly does not develop it into anything like a theory of generative grammar, and we would have to recognize the limitations of its significance for linguistic knowledge generally. As Ferenczi says:

the difficulties are hardly ever resolved, and are indeed barely even opened up and defined as problems; and even then, these problems are less posed than indicated. The status of the abstract elements which underlie the sentence are not defined, the mechanisms which ensure the creatio ity of language are not studied.?

Nonetheless, Ferenczi continues by underlining Paulban's importance as an example of the "renewal of 'discourse linguistics' now being developed (this was written in 1969) by Benvéniste, and whose repercussions are essential for the analysis of literary language."
While it is true that Paulhan's usefulness to linguistics has its limits, these limits are in a sense recognized by Paulhan, and they are self-imposed insofar as the particular enigma he was interested in pursuing was located both within language and outside of it. Paulhan's refusal to stray very far down the path of linguistics could be seen, in fact, as a recognition of its inherent limitations for his own particular intellectual focus. So even though, in Le Don des langues (The Gift of Languages), one of his final works, he was still relying terminologically on de Saussure, Bréal, Max Muller, Bloomfield, Helmslev and Bally, and although the particular combination of their ideas corresponded to the structure of Paulhan's argument, none of them taken individually provided the answer to the "secret of language" he was searching for. Linguistics as a rigorously scientific methodology would not allow him to formulate something like "poetic mystery," although its foregrounding of language as the unavoidable medium of thought and expression makes it a necessary point of departure. Paulhan thus incorporates the important insights of linguistics, but clearly, literature is the space within which the "secret of language" is enacted and where he hopes, patiently and painstakingly, as both a writer and a literary theoretician, to track it down.

One thing we can say is that Paulhan as a literary critic was neither a typical literary historian, nor an "academic" theoretician, and in this respect is close to the Barthes of Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth); just as Barthes demystified the mythology of academic discourse, so Paulhan's work was a profound questioning of the function and activity of literary criticism (reading literature becomes a radically different practice with Paulhan, as it does with Barthes, even though the paths they follow are far from parallel ones). What were his typical strategies and procedures? His studies were often an extension of his own work on language and literature (for example, Petite préface à toute critique (Short Preface to All Criticism], which starts out as a restatement of his theory of literature, and ends with his critique of Sartre's "avoidance" of the question of language). These readings of other writers' work inevitably contain a moment of reversal, insofar as Paulhan often reads them "against" themselves. This procedure is in evidence as early as his essay on Valéry, which we might look at briefly as an example.

Paulhan's point of departure is Valéry's consistent assertion that writers, such as Stendhal, Hugo, and La Fontaine, whose writing has the appearance of spontaneity and a kind of natural expressiveness, are in fact simply accumulating commonplaces of sincerity, and are thus what Valéry terms faussaires (fakers, or forgers). Paulhan quotes Valéry talking about Stendhal: "The thing that strikes me, amuses me, and even charms me in the Egotist's desire to be natural, is that it demands, and even necessarily contains a convention." (3) The first twist in Paulhan's essay is to argue that it is quite possible to read Valéry's examples as sincere: " ... as soon as one is dealing with language or expression... this expression... can at any moment show one or the other of its two opposite faces," and "Each one of Valéry's reflections could be reversed." (4) In short, Paulhan argues, there is no way of knowing whether the author intended his or her work to be "artificial" or "natural." Paulhan then goes on to show that in Valéry's own work he resolutely opts for conscious artistic construction (he is, indeed, the archetypal "rhétoriqueur" for Paulhan), but that Valéry, like anyone else, is prey to the same illusions (believing words to be thoughts, or vice versa). Paulhan's conclusion, which will become the "solution" of Les Fleurs de Tarbes, with its "reinvented" terror, is that it is the writer alone, as one aware of the paradoxical conditions of the writer's own practice, who can lay claim to "authenticity."

This same technique can be seen in Alain, ou la preuve par l'étymologie (Alain's etymologism is readable as paronomasia, and thus no more epistemologically reliable than mere wordplay); in "Sartre n'est pas en bons termes avec les mots" ["Sartre is not on good terms with words"], which is the last chapter of Petite préface à toute critique (Sartre devotes eighty pages of Situations I to the "the problem of language," only to say that language is a local detail of the more general question of ontology, so according to Paulhan, he never really even begins to talk about language); and in Enigmes de Perse [The Engimas of Perse] (St-John Perse, mistrustful of language's capacity to screen us from the world, does everything to write about the world's rich profusion and detail, but ends up producing poetry which is crammed full of the most precious rhetorical flourishes).

These are not to be construed, Paulhan is always careful to point out, as negative criticisms, but they are a consequence of the inevitable aporia within all writing, and as such serve as an illustration of the unavoidable illusions of all literary activity. This strategy is in fact very similar to the one which would become the hallmark of Paul de Man's critical writing from the Blindness and Insight period. By reading the explicit assertions within the work of literary critics from Georges Poulet to Jacques Derrida against the movement of their own critical writing, de Man identified the points where the explicit statements are later undone, producing a "negative insight." De Man summarized this procedure at the beginning of "The Rhetoric of Blindness":

The insight seems instead to have been gained from a negative movement that animates the critic's thought, an unstated principle that leads his language away from its asserted stand, perverting and dissolving his stated commitment to the point where it becomes emptied of substance, as if the very possibility of assertion had been put into question.S

Like Paulhan, de Man pointed to "literature" as the place where this uncertainty, and the rigorous necessity of this uncertainty, is most apparent. De Man later refined his theory, of course, into an uncompromising practice of reading which teases out the rhetorical structures in literary text, relentlessly pursuing the epistemological consequences of the negative insights it reveals, to a degree of sophistication that makes Paulhan's efforts look fairly simplistic. As we will see, however, when Paulhan's critical statements are reassessed in the light of their own literary "performances," this surface simplicity belies a work of unusual subtlety and complexity.

Just before he died, Paul de Man was beginning to work on Paulhan. What is clear is how thoroughly he had read Paulhan's texts, and he saw him as a key figure in the twentieth century's rediscovery and reorientation of the questions that had absorbed eighteenth century French language theorists such as Diderot, Du Marsais, and Condillac. De Man understood Paulhan's playful negotiation of his debt towards rhetoricians such as Du Marsais (Paulhan's Traité des figures being an ironic attempt to write a contemporary version of the rhetoric textbooks which were once widely used in French schools), but he also recognized Paulhan's awareness of the epistemological consequences of "pushing Rhetoric as far as it will go." There are without doubt a number of significant points of convergence berween Paulhan's and de Man's writings.? Although Paulhan's contributions to literary theory as a linguist are overshadowed by the likes of Jakobson, Barthes, and Benveniste, his return to Rhetoric, and particularly the use of rhetorical terminology to analyze literary texts, heralded a resurgence of interest in the rhetorical dimension of literature. Paulhan's mind was too finely attuned to the nuanced dynamics of literary texts to be interested in elaborating a typology of literary figures, and in this regard his thinking echoes that of de Man in "Semiology and Rhetoric," in which the latter describes this tendency to systematize rhetorical figures as the "grammatization of rhetoric." (8) Significantly, Paulhan often refers to himself as a "grammarian" (for example, in his Lettre aux directeurs de la Résistance [Letter to the Directors of the Resistance), although he never really explains what he means by this term, or what it might be opposed to. Is it someone who takes correct language seriously? (We know he is never "just" interested in language, and also that he never misses an opportunity for exploiting its playfulness.) Or is it merely a synonym for a rhetorician, in Paulhan's sense of the term? The very uncertainty of its reference seems almost to be an invitation by Paulhan to release the rhetorical energy of the term, and points to an opposite movement, one which de Man, symmetrically, also circumscribes very carefully in "Semiology and Rhetoric" as the "rhetorization of grammar." Just as Paulhan's texts continually dramatize the endless back-and-forth movement between terror and rhetoric, so de Man's essays inevitably pivot around the undecidable moments of tension between the literal and figural dimensions of language. As suspicious as Paulhan was of attempts to bypass language, de Man's insistence on talking not of "reference" but of a rhetoricized "referential function of language," is very much in tandem with Paulhan's descriptions of rhetoric's preempting the terrorist project. Not that in either case "reference," or even more so, the "real world," is denied, but both demonstrate that it can never exist in a state of non-linguistic innocence.

As de Man and Paulhan reflected later on the entirety of their respective critical projects, it was in both cases with a certain wry irony, as they acknowledged the inevitability of failure.? Irony, because the failure of their theories to "add up" to a final, climactic summation, or indeed to have made any dialectical progress whatsoever, was built into the theories, being in many ways their most distinctive feature, or even their condition of possibility; for Paulhan this took the form of a "law of failure" ("loi d'échec"), the inaccessibility of something like "poetic mystery" which nonetheless was the theoretical foundation for Clef de la poésie; and for de Man it was the continual pressure within his critical texts towards the illusory synthesis of limit-terms like "allegory," "parabasis," and "materiality," which were attempts precisely to articulate the moments at which reading (inevitably) breaks down, the insurmountable points of "resistance to theory." As I will suggest somewhat more speculatively in the essays on Malagasy proverbs, and on Blanchot as a reader of Paulhan, one might compare de Man's "allegory" (as a critical narrative of the deconstruction of narrative) to Paulhan's "récit" (the story of the impossibility of telling a story). Both writers thus end up privileging literature, not as a kind of elitist refuge, or as a safe haven for a "terrorist" rejection of any formal constraints (whether traditional, social, or ideological), but because of its power to continually exceed (in theoretical terms) any systematic efforts to theorize it. For both de Man and Paulhan, "literature" is thus the place both where language's rhetorical energy is most playfully exploited, and where the most serious of questions are allowed to resonate. Both writers, in different ways, measured the epistemological force of literature, saw literature and philosophy as powerfully collaborative, and assessed the destabilizing effect on discourses of knowledge from taking literature seriously.

When Paulhan's name is associated openly with the emergence of literary theory, and particularly of deconstruction, the two names most often cited are those of Derrida and Blanchot. As Jeffrey Mehlman writes, "there has not perhaps been an adequate appreciation of the extent to which this grammarian's obsession with the conundra of language was pregnant with future developments," and he goes on to call Paulhan's Alain, ou la preuve par l'étymologie "a local instance of what might be called, before the letter, applied grammatology." (10)) This claim is based on three bold points of association between Paulhan and Derrida. First of all, Paulhan's call for a political "amnesty" of literary collaborators after the Second World War is said to prefigure Derrida's amnesic "forgetting" of history in, for example, his reading of Blanchot's L'arrêt de mort. Secondly, Mehlman sees an anticipation of Derrida's use of the term "undecidability" in Paulhan's interest in Abel's 1884 work On the Antithetical Sense of Primal Words, and his related analysis (in Alain, ou la preuve par l'étymologie) of the impossibility of telling whether an etymology is merely a play on words. And thirdly, the admiration of Paulhan by Gerhard Heller, the German literary attaché in Paris during the war, is taken as an early paradigm of a generalized pattern of deference to charismatic French intellectuals by outsiders, of which the American "adulation" of Derrida is the latest example. Thus Mehlman sees Paulhan's work as leading irresistibly to a full-blown Derridean practice of deconstruction: "With the transcendental signified (or etymon) generated after the fact by a tension between signifiers, the problematic later to emerge as deconstruction was already broached" ("Writing and Deference," p. 8). The rather curious conclusion, motivated by an eagerness to prove the political bankruptcy of deconstruction generally, is that Derrida's rewriting of Paulhan's concerns passes by way of a voiding of the political context which Paulhan bravely confronted, "Deconstruction as a forgetting of the perils engaged by Paulhan" ("Writing and Deference", p. 12).

As Ann Smock pointed out in her reply to Mehlman's article, the argument of the essay is constructed as a "fanciful chain of associations." (11) Indeed, Mehlman in his subsequent rejoinder falls into his own trap by acknowledging his understanding of deconstruction, which he gleefully claims to be mimicking, as simply "bricolage and/or the techniques of reinscription." (12) Just as Mehlman's reading of Lévi-Strauss and of Derrida depends on an almost caricatural, decontextualized exposition of their ideas, so the reading of Paulhan can be shown to equally superficial. As I argue in the context of the post-war literary purge, Paulhan's texts cannot simply be reduced to their explicit arguments or themes, but must be read as writing that engages and exemplifies the very problematic it elaborates. An inattentiveness to the narrative dynamic of the texts themselves inhibits an appreciation of their wit and irony, and also prohibits a casually analogical chain of associations leading from "reversibility," for example, as it operates in Paulhan's texts, to "applied grammatology", "undecidability," and "dissemination." Thus, for example, when Mehlman reads Paulhan's Fleurs de Tarbes as initiating the future of French criticism, ("what Paulhan calls clichés, what has been more generally thematized as écriture," (13) my emphasis), his reading is restricted to the provisional conclusion of Paulhan's text. There are undoubtedly interesting parallels to be drawn between a certain form of citationality in Paulhan's texts which argue for a rehabilitated rhetoric, and Derrida's own invocation of citationality within the context of his discussion of Austin's theory of performative language, in "Signature Event Context." Or between the radical ambiguity or indifference that Paulhan theorizes in, for example, Clef de la poésie, and Derrida's use, to very different philosophical ends, of irreducibly ambivalent terms like hymen and pharmakon in "La Pharmacie de Platon." If we take each term out of the context of its respective narrative, however, and yoke them together in a kind of theoretical identity parade, we stand little chance of understanding how they might truly relate to each other in any historical continuum. It is not coincidental, therefore, that Mehlman's reading of the relationship between Paulhan and Blanchot should rely for its "proof" on an equally misrepresentative decontextualization of passages from Blanchot's "The Ease of Dying" in the coda to his essay. (14) If anything, what Derrida's and Paulhan's texts have in common is precisely a skepticism towards, or an ironization of, intellectual history structured as a continuous sequence of influences, which Mehlman's argument relies upon (including, most pertinently, the claim of a direct thread connecting Paulhan to Derrida).(15)

By abandoning the need to assign Paulhan a determined place in the history of literary theory, we in fact free up his texts for a much more productive dialogue with other writers. Since we know that Paulhan was only beginning to read Derrida in 1968, and since Derrida himself has only mentioned Paulhan in connection with de Man's wartime writing and the postwar literary purge in France, the most we can say is that they were both to some extent, but with markedly different purposes, preoccupied with questions of language, its inherent tensions, and its relationship to other disciplines. Rather than seeing Paulhan as necessarily preceding and prefiguring Derrida, for example, we can put Derrida's writing to use to articulate with greater precision the theoretical stakes in Paulhan's writing (which remain, it must be said, a good deal more implicit than they do with Derrida). As we shall see with Paulhan's De la Paille et du grain, for example, the postwar purge can be read at an empirical level as the necessary reduction of the duplicity or doubleness of France to a single essence. At the linguistic level this functions in a similar manner, insofar as most contemporary readings of Paulhan's texts are motivated by a tendency to efface the radical undecidability which is their very theoretical foundation. This act of effacement, whereby the contingent is expelled in order to consolidate the assumed priority of the essential, is itself not accidental, but is, as Derrida has argued in "La Pharmacie de Platon," part of a long and well-established philosophical tradition.(16) Derrida's focus on the radical ambivalence of pharmakon, as a disruption of the Platonic privileging of presence, points to a more generalized disruptiveness occasioned by writing. Just as Plato designates writing as a dangerous and nefarious element to be expelled, since it is essentially foreign, so there seems to be no room for Paulhan's duplicity. According to Derrida, however, it is precisely the strange, ambivalent logic of writing that opens up and makes possible the very distinction between language and presence. Paulhan's ambiguity — which is quite different from a simple semantic conflict — is from a theoretical perspective of a similar order as the ambiguity of a term like pharmakon. Similarly, we might consider Derrida's essay "La Loi du genre» (The Law of Genre), an essay devoted to the question of the law in its relation to literary genres, as extremely pertinent to thinking the double-bind of the récit, as a general term for Paulhan's writing. Derrida focuses on the unclassifiable yet absolutely necessary mark, or "trait of belonging" ("trait d'appartenance") by which any text indicates the genre to which it belongs. The strange logic of such a trait resembles the manner in which poetic mystery operates, and Derrida frames the question in the following terms: And what if there were, lodged in the very heart of the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination? And if the condition of possibility of the law were the a priori of a counter-law, an axiom of impossibility which would disrupt its meaning, order and reason?! This "axiom of impossibility" is precisely how Paulhan attempts to define the law of poetic mystery. Derrida's essay is in large part a reading of Blanchot's La Folie du jour, a text which is very much a recit in the sense that Blanchot himself uses the term to talk about Paulhan's writing. Like Clef de la poésie (for example), it is a text whose borders become undefinable, whose beginning and end are impossible to locate. Derrida describes the resulting möbius strip-like pockets and folds of the text as a "double chiasmatic invagination of the edges" ("La Loi du genre",272), such that "It is impossible to decide whether there was an event, a récit, the récit of an event, or the event of a récit."

Derrida's very explicit, rigorous and powerful critique of discourses of philosophy, or forms of philosophical thinking, involves, as does Paulhan's more subtle, suggestive critique, a shifting of priorities, taking seriously what had until recently suffered from being relegated to secondary importance (rhetoric, contingency, wring, the signifier, etc.), and tracing the effects of its reinstatement. Thus can be seen, for example, in Clef de la poésie, which sets the discourses of poetry and science in a kind of collaborative opposition.

One might pursue the notion of poetry elaborated by Paulhan in this text by mentioning the affinity between his thought and that of a figure who in many ways opened the way for theorists such as Derrida and de Man, that is, Martin Heidegger. One might, for example, consider Heidegger's readings of Hölderlin and Rilke as poets whose poetry is fundamentally concerned with its own essence, and texts such as "The Origin of the Work of Art," or the later writings where poetry becomes an essential presencing, or a founding naming, of Being. The rift between poetry and language that Paulhan examines in Clef de la poésie bears formal resemblances to Heidegger's ontic-ontological distinction, and the revelation of Being, revealed in its hiding, could be read in terms of the phenomenality of poetic mystery's duplicitous disappearance. In this respect, it does not seem accidental that Heidegger's thinking involves a powerful critique of the scientific method (Cf. for example, Was ist Metaphysik?, which contains Heidegger's famous "Die Wissenschaft will vom Nichts nichts wissen." [Science wants to know nothing of Nothingness]) and of the foundations of Western metaphysics, this critique also being implicit in Paulhan's writings. Particularly appropriate to this point of convergence between them would be Heidegger's discussion of the mathematical project as the foundation of all scientific inquiry providing the prototype, as it were, of the axiomatic character of all projects. Yet we would be wrong to see Paulhan's project as essentially continuous with a twentieth century philosophical questioning of the nature of being. Rather, as Blanchot puts it in "The Ease of Dying," Paulhan's texts engage "the suspense of being," and as such are somewhere on the borderlines of philosophy, or are between philosophy and something else, "being both a scientific and a nonscientific process, the disjunction as it were between the two, and the mind's hesitation berween the latter and the former." (18)

It is, of course, Blanchot who has been most often associated with Paulhan, and we shall see in chapter 3 the importance of the meeting between the two writers around Paulhan's pivotal text, Les Fleurs de Tarbes. One can trace the legacy of Paulhan's essay on Blanchot's subsequent thinking. The impact of Blanchot's reading of Paulhan pervades Blanchot's most important theoretical statement of the 1940s, "La Littérature et le droit à la mort" ("Literature and the Right to Death"), which begins with the proposition that "literature begins at the moment when literarure becomes a question." (19) The impossibility of writing — one can only be a writer once one has already written, so one is always either not yet or no longer a writer — is treated much more extensively in "Literature and the Right to Death," and it has its exact counterpart in the impossibility of read- ing, the Noli me legere of the opening pages of Blanchot's L'Espace littéraire,?° This bivalent impossibility is reformulated in "Le mystère dans les lettres" as the priority of poetry the impossibility of language) over language, and as the precedence of the impersonality of reading and writing over a reader and a writer. Toward the beginning of "Literature and the Right to Death," Blanchot notes that "It has been stated ("On a constaté") with surprise that the question: "What is literature?" only ever received insignificant answers." We might well identify the impersonal "on" of this sentence as Paulhan, and the anonymity of this inscription would possibly make it even more important to the essay than the many proper names which are all key points of reference for Blanchot (Mallarmé, Valéry, Sade, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Ponge, Lautréamont and Baudelaire). The final passage of "How is literature possible?" can be read - if somewhat elliptically —as a prefiguration of another central consideration of "Literature and the Right to Death." The former essay ends by reflecting on the question of how, if literature is to find anew its authenticity within its own commonplaces, one starts to read and to write:

It is enough to understand that true commonplaces are words torn apart by lightning, and that the rigors of laws found the absolute world of expression, outside of which chance is but sleep. (Faux pas, p. 101)

The invocation of fundamental laws of expression recalls Blanchot's allusion to Kant, since Paulhan's essay is clearly a critical examination, in the strongest sense of the term, of the conditions that make literature possible, and an attempt to articulate, as we will see with Clef de la poésie, something like literature's ethical imperative. That such laws should be a simultaneous founding ("the rigors of laws found the absolute world of expression," my emphasis) and tearing apart ("words torn apart by lightning," my emphasis), is entirely appropriate for Paulhan's text. Writing or reading that does not respond to this essential impossibility or non-essence of literature is said to be inattentive to its own circumstances, or to be "asleep" (" outside of which chance is but sleep"). Bur what would, or could, a literature be that is truly attentive to its own circumstances? As we learn from "Literature and the Right to Death," the way out of this "unsurmountable problem" ("problème indépassable," La Part du feu, p. 297) of the impossibility of writing is to make the circumstances of this impossibility the necessary starting point of literature. The corresponding circumstances, and contingent beginning, would hold true for reading, as a way out of the impossibility of reading, and this may well be how we should read Blanchot's "inaugural" double reading of Les Fleurs de Tarbes. De Man, Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot; these names cannot, in the current repoliticized theoretical arena, fail to evoke the specter of collaboration, and a rather unsavory past. Will Paulhan's name now be irresistibly associated with them (and by contamination, with the ideology of collaboration)? There is a danger in reading collaboration metaphorically as a kind of contamination, which then spreads metonymically to anything that happens to come into contact with it. Who, then, would be immune? Where do we stop once we set in motion the process of guilt by association? What does it mean to be infected by an ideology? If it means to stop thinking critically (or in short, to stop reading), then it would certainly contaminate the proposition itself that Paulhan's writing is thematically linked to the emergence of deconstruction.

Without wishing here to summarize the work already done on these writers' political associations, and its ramifications for their philosophical and theoretical thinking, I would like to focus for a little while on Paulhan's extremely ambivalent status. As I will demonstrate, particularly in my discussion of his texts on the postwar literary purge, it is important not only to read Paulhan's writings thematically, but also to be attentive to their doubleness or duplicity, to the "second" book hidden within the first one, to the literary performance which displaces and rewrites the critical statement. Henri Meschonnic has described this well in talking about Paulhan's language as "anti-theoretical theoretical writing ("écriture théorique anti-théorique")." [...] "His interruption of the theoretical is his writing of the theoretical. He privileged the performative, not the didactic." (21) If his anti-theoretical theory often appears as reactionary or anti-intellectual, it is precisely because of this inexorable performance of the theoretical at the expense of its explicit elaboration. Even his friends were increasingly unsympathetic to some of his outspoken views towards the end of his life; he was, for example, in favor of Algeria remaining French, argued in the 1960s that Rudolf Hess was being victimized and should be released from prison, was a great admirer of pornographic writing, and was critical of the early semiological writings of Barthes, which he saw as products of Marxist theory.

I'd like to end by looking briefly at this last criticism, since it is a significant and highly suggestive example of the need to look beyond the apparent level of Paulhan's statements. Paulhan's reaction to Barthes's Mythologies appeared in the "Chroniques" section of the NRF in July, October, and December 1955, under his pseudonym of Jean Guerin. Paulhan took Barthes to task for not adequately taking into account those aspects of society which escaped the subordination to "mythology," and suggested that his analyses were in fact merely a sophisticated form of Marxist ideological demystification. Barthes replied by accusing the NRF of undertaking a Macarthyist witchhunt, and appeared not to take Paulhan's criticism seriously (or rather, precisely to take it seriously, and not engage its playfulness).(22) To read Paulhan's question "Are you a Marxist?" as a literal question would be to take as genuine (and not ideologically overdetermined) his interest in the relationship of literature to ideology. In fact, as I suggested, we would not be unjustified in seeing a number of parallels between the two writers, especially as Barthes in his later texts such as Critique et vérité (Criticism and Truth) became increasingly interested in undoing the myths and ideologies which inhabit literature and literary criticism. Barthes's gradual disillusionment with the possibility of semiology providing an adequate method for cultural criticism was accompanied by a move towards writing, "the pleasure of the text," and as such he might be seen to be moving closer to the position which Paulhan occupied in their polemic in the 1950s. That Paulhan's thinking was already in a sense anticipating Barthes' can be seen in the theoretical essay at the end of Mythologies, "Myth Today." Barthes is anxious in this essay to somehow theorize the continuous back-and-forth movement (the "game of hide-and-seek") between the sign as referential meaning, and the sign as form (that is, an instance of a mythological operation), and in fact uses the term duplicity" to describe this ambivalence,(23) Later on in the essay, when talking about literature itself as a kind of mythical system, Barthes refers to the play between writers in search of a "pre semiological state of language," and the inexorable effects of myth's powers of re cuperation. What better description could we have of the interplay between terror and rhetoric? We have, then, a text - Mythologies - that is often taken as the inaugural or defining moment of contemporary French theory, but which has already in a sense been preempted by Paulhan's subtle articulation of the dynamics it attempts to circumscribe. It is precisely this power to disrupt, unsettle, undercut, redefine, and the constantly surprising effects of Paulhan's "naive" theory that I will be attempting to trace in this study, across a range of different literary, cultural and thematic contexts within twentieth century French intellectual history.