Jean Paulhan and Zen
Claude ElsenText published in the tribute number of the NRf to Jean Paulhan
It was something else and much more than curiosity that Buddhism, Taoism and Zen, their confluence, inspired in Jean Paulhan. We can say that his intellectual approach, his "method" owed more to them than to Western modes of thought or philosophies. The assertion may seem risky; I would like to try to show that there is nothing arbitrary or gratuitous about it, as many passages from the countless letters that J.P. sent to his friends throughout his life attest.
From the beginning of the thirties, while he was working at Fleurs de Tarbes, he wrote to Marcel Arland:
In Ambert, I took the Tao tö king. Nothing has seemed so close, so true to me for a very long time. Nothing gives me more clearly the feeling of this void or this chaos through which the abstract idea must pass (let's put the common place) and from which we make it return at any moment...
In a letter he sent to me in 1950, in response to certain questions I had asked him about the genesis of his CausesCelebres, I read this:
I would have liked to be faithful to these words [from Lie-tseu]: Be careful not to add one more personal view to all those who are already traveling the world.
From Lie-tseu? If I put this name in square brackets, it is because afterwards J.P. himself crossed it out and replaced it with the words: from I don't know who. Was this thought of Lie-tseu like certain Chinese, Achaean, Tamil or Hopi "proverbs" which appear, as a dedication, on certain copies of his works and which his friends sometimes suspected of being invented? Whatever the case, this maxim was dear to J.P.: we find it in the introductory note of the second volume of his Complete Works, in 1967, in a barely different form (I can at least do myself this justice: it is that I have always avoided, within the limits of my strength, adding one more personal view to all those who are already running the world) we find it again among his answers to the famous “Proust questionnaire” where, this time, he cites it as his motto.
Three other of his responses to the said questionnaire support what I am saying here. To the question: “Your favorite prose authors?” J.P. responds: "Jules Renard, Lao-tseu" To the questions: "Which historical figures do you despise the most? The military action that you admire the most?" he replies: I have little taste for History. how can we be interested in what could not have happened? It is not unduly soliciting this remark to see in it the expression of a "Buddhist" indifference with regard to what is accidental, transitory, impermanent, to "what could not have happened", that is to say in fact to almost everything that makes up the history of men, the history of man and his very existence, his nature. (In his remarkable Essay on Buddhism in General and Zen in Particular, Robert Linssen writes: "The essential basic notion of Buddhism is the impermanence of the self and of all things.")
Finally, to the question: “What is your favorite occupation?” J.P. replies: Games, any games. His friends knew this well. They also knew that J.P.'s taste for play, for games, responded to a deep need in him, which André Pieyre de Mandiargues commented on better than I could (and his comments are in line with mine):
J.P. was inclined spontaneously to have fun with everything, without lightness or frivolity, but with a kind of violent seriousness that one would have called philosophical in other times and that I would be tempted to call mystical in the fashion of the Far East [...] All games, whether they were of skill or chance, popular or esoteric, fascinated him. If he cheated (as I saw him do), we had to understand that it was a second degree game that he was playing. I think that he had inherited from Zen this quite sovereign point of view which is that the material universe and the entire spiritual world are kinds of "games" where one can, if not absolutely win, at least see more clearly, by the simple movement of a few pawns.
Don't we find the same idea in these lines that a mutual friend wrote to me, a few days after J.P.'s death: _He excelled through what we called his paradoxes, in suddenly awakening our attention by barely displacing the idea that we had of beings and things? We could not describe better, if not define, in fewer words this Paulhanian "method" whose application and objective — the awakening of attention by moving the focus of this attention— singularly resemble those of Zen. Should we remember that this, above all else, is intended to be “a method of awakening” (R.F. Suzuki) and that D.T. Suzuki sees it “the means of acquiring a new spiritual point of view freed from the constraints of dualism”?
J.P. wrote to me in 1967:
The Notes on Raw Thought, which I am sending you at the same time as this note, are not complete. I'm not saying the main thing here: it's that in order to understand language a little, we need to abandon for a moment our old Aristotelian principles of identity and non-contradiction.
We were talking about proverbs above. My copy of Causes bleues bears, as a dedication, this Chinese proverb (?):
_The shoe is perfect when the foot doesn't feel it. The heart is perfect when it no longer knows how to distinguish good from evil.
I never thought to ask J.P. if he knew these lines attributed to Seng-ts'an:
The perfect Way is difficult to access only for those who choose. Have neither sympathy nor antipathy and everything will be clear. By choosing you separate heaven from earth. If you want to know the face of truth, never be neither "for" nor "against": the conflict between "for" and "against" is the worst disease of the mind...
*
Evoking the personal memories we have of a deceased friend is often just an excuse to talk about ourselves. I hope that I will be spared this suspicion, my only intention here being to try to clarify certain aspects of what I called J.P.'s "method".
In 1948, having published an article entitled Homo eroticus, I received from him (we had not yet met) a laconic note:
Would you not like to give me, for the Cahiers de la Pléiade a study — a Jean Genet _for example? Perhaps you could come and spend a morning or two at my place: I will try to collect all of J.G.'s works (I will also make you a cup of coffee).
I tried in vain to show J.P. that Genet's views on eroticism were a hundred leagues from mine, that homosexuality - if I had no "moral" judgment on it - was as foreign to me, as incomprehensible as shamanism or quantum physics, nothing helped. With the irresistible kindness and tireless stubbornness that were his, J.P. overcame my resistance: he wanted a Jean Genet; he got it — and it was from there that our friendship was born. For years, I would often go to see him at his home, rue des Arènes, at the end of the morning, to share with him the coffee (or some other drink, sometimes unusual) that he prepared himself, in his bedroom-office, in the style of a rashi [ 1 ] inviting its visitor to participate at cha-no-yu [ 2 ]...
Some time later, while he was composing the summary of the Tableau de la Littérature française [ 3 ], J.P. asked me the same for a Clément Marot. Why Marot, who was nothing to me? I believe that it was to force me to discover with a new eye the unsuspected beauties (to me) in a poet that I would probably never have thought of re-reading with this look. This was J.P.'s way of forcing — gently — the hand of someone he felt locked in certain prejudices, prisoner of certain forms of thought and judgment, to lead him — almost without his knowledge — to question these prejudices, this thought, this judgment; in short, to doubt one's certainties, which are most often only unconscious conformisms, more sneaky, more tenacious sometimes than the most aggressive non-conformisms.
I rarely went to see J.P. without him showing me and sometimes giving me some unusual object — and I'm not just talking about objects created by an artist, paintings, sculptures or books. Things, like beings, fascinated him all the more, one might say, as their nature, their very being and their destination were less obvious, less self-evident. I have before my eyes one of the objects in question. It is a kind of penknife, at each end of which sixteen short blades can open into a fan, each being of slightly different shape and bearing a number engraved in the metal. Probably it is some measuring instrument — but used to measure what? The tooth spacing of a gear, as I was told? I didn't know exactly, any more than J.P. knew - at least he assured me, and I readily believe it, knowing the taste he had for these mysterious objects, without obvious practical utility and whose superiority over the famous "surrealist objects" was that they had not been designed to intrigue. I have often thought that he saw in them material koans [ 4 ], posing to the mind an insoluble enigma, an unanswerable question ("What use can it be?") and thus forcing him, at the same time, to question their nature and to renounce any rational explanation. Is this question not of the same nature as that which arises for us in front of a work of art without immediate and concerted meaning - and for example in front of these "informal" paintings for which J.P. had such a keen taste? (I can still hear him say of a painting by Fautrier hanging on the wall of his room: “Rarely has encrier put so much obstinacy into resembling a locomotive…”)
It pleased him that men, things – and ideas as well – had their secrets. He liked that this secret escaped summary interpretations, rational explanations; that there was between intelligence and words a subtle break in continuity, a gap, a rupture which cast doubt on both the powers of the first and the evidence of the second. Does Zen teach anything else?
1 - Master of Zen, in Japan. ↩
2 - Tea ceremony ↩
3 - Published in 1962 by Editions Gallimard ↩
4 - For those who are unaware, let us recall that in the practice of Zen, the koan is a subject of meditation, proposed to the disciple in the form of a seemingly absurd question or sentence ("What sound does a single hand clapping make?", "Who were you before you were yourself?", etc.). The answer or "solution" of a koan, when found, at the end and by means of sometimes long, purely intuitive reflection, attests that the disciple has opened himself to true knowledge, which is neither deductive, nor dialectical, nor rational, but must be the fruit of an "awakening" of the spirit. ↩