“Where power is, words pass invisible”: Jean Paulhan’s reading pact

Laurence Côté-Fournier

Although it was written and published at a time of unprecedented upheaval in France, Les Fleurs de Tarbes, the ﬁnal version of which appeared in 1941, does not confer a priori great importance to political issues. This should hardly be surprising: Paulhan has often reiterated his lack of taste for them, particularly in the highly polarized context of the interwar period and the Second World War, favorable to radical sides and clear-cut oppositions. He also made a number of somewhat casual or polemical declarations about his own positions, as if they had little weight, affirming in a letter to Jean Grenier, in 1939, that he was “decided to leave politics to the technicians”. Nevertheless, certain passages from Fleurs de Tarbes move imperceptibly from literary concerns to political concerns and allow us to reflect on the power of rhetoric and the freedom of the reader that it puts into play through the processes it uses. It appears that Paulhan's reflection on rhetoric never really strays far from hermeneutic questions, as if it included them from the outset - rhetoric is after all an art which gives a fundamental place to the particularities of the audience to achieve its full power. This cryptic work summons the figure of the writer as much as that of the critic, as much the creator as the reader, to reflect on the division of the world of Letters between Terrorists and Rhetoricists, the central opposition of the work (..).