The transparent vocation of Jean Paulhan

Jean Paulhan is a difficult author, as much for his subtleties and his rigors as a stylist-grammarian as for his mysterious preferences and his exclusions in the domain of ideas. According to the author, Jean Paulhan is a grammarian "who loves rhetoric too much to be fooled by it", a critic who has "spent his life judging, as astonishing in praise as in blame and always betting". A writer who is “the master of the crossroads, the curious and scrutinizing half of Paul Valéry”.

On Malcolm de Chazal, of whom R. Judrin suggests that Jean Paulhan perhaps “invented”, on the religious dialectic of Chesterton and the enormous influence it had on him; on Laô-Tseu; on Paul Valéry; on Alain, we learn the essentials of Paulhan's tastes and ideas, brought together in formulas.

This discovery of Jean Paulhan through Roger Judrin is not easy: the author's observations arrive in sentences so rapid, so rough, so tight that the intelligence is constantly provoked and kept alert by reading this study, as attentive as it is admiring.

---