Jean Paulhan traveler and storyteller, or the Unknown World

(Afterword of Volume I of Complete Works, Tchou)

It often seems, in current civilization, that we are detached from some ancient shore where forgotten traditions flourished, and that we have left a part of the world, as if during a migration. However, we are not disoriented, quite the contrary. In fact, we have pronounced the death of wonders, illogical ghosts and all supernatural light. We strengthen ourselves by being established in a solid knowledge of things and beings, of existence in short.
The camp, our architecture and our structures, the streams, the grass, the animals, the men, the young girls are with us. Everything is given to us in an order simpler than ever, and nothing that surrounds us surprises us. The countries we pass through even seem more and more familiar – unified or standardized. However, if no one notices anything unusual and if we remain bathed in the warmth of the camp and in our reason, one of the travelers, without moving away from the others, suddenly felt a little strange.
This traveler perhaps thought that we were far from some dreamland, but rather he suddenly felt that in this world (what world?) where we have settled under an ordinary sky, everything, every being even had become as if out of reach, and lost in an ignorance that was, so to speak, essential. Because life remains ordinary, passing, obvious, a sort of indifference has been established which confuses the traveler. Always at our tasks or our distractions, will we never know where we really are? Will we never be able to tell what happened between us? How far were we, not only from this country or that country, from this past or this future, but from everything that surrounds us, which remains present and all the more difficult to locate? We only think about holding each other close and talking, without even knowing that what could be lost is all the earth, all the light and finally ourselves. At least that is what this traveler seems to have observed. But instead of indulging in confusing reflections, why was he not satisfied with being reasoner, routine, even scholarly, or even passionate, in short given over to occupations like the others?
In fact, he did not want to detach himself from current affairs in the slightest. He applied himself to it with more zeal than anyone else. While some, from time to time, protested, got angry and then returned to their habits, he never had the desire to criticize anything. One day, as a soldier, his superiors had said to him something like: “Don’t you think these maneuvers are stupid?” But he had widened his eyes. He replied that these maneuvers were very good, very normal in fact. And they looked at him askance, and that's why he had to judge that there was something curious around him or so ordinary that it perhaps didn't make sense (or too much sense, elusive in short) and that he was really lost in a strange world.
He fought in the war and, all day long, he told himself that it was like that. He affirmed his “sympathy for the war”. It was not a question of approving, simply of noting that the war existed at that time, and of recognizing the truth of the event, willingly carrying out the necessary tasks. On this point, he also agrees with ordinary men to whom "life can seem pleasant or unpleasant depending on the day. Of this, at least, they have no doubt, that it is true, that it is even the only truth that they have at their disposal - or better, which has at their disposal and which they manage as best they can."
Nothing separates this traveler from either the men or the events, whose “absolute clarity” he even considers when they suddenly appear in the form of quite fantastic bullets or shells. The horror of war and danger, he experienced them like his companions. However, the difficult adventure, far from delivering him to some hatred or refusal, first affirmed in him this confidence in the smallest things of life almost lost, as well as in friendship, a confidence assured by the sense of duty and courage, but which goes beyond both. In short, this man who has such a strong feeling of being a stranger, we can say that he was neither more nor less than so-and-so, by any chance, since he himself put all his heart into being neither more nor less.
Let's return to our camp, or to some place where our daily and modern life is led. Death and horrors are not absent from any place, and societies and nature always contain threats to which an instinctive faith responds as best it can, which is not lacking in the worried traveler either. He always remains in sympathy. Everyone welcomes him and he knows how to welcome.
How then comes it that, being so well attuned to everything, he is suddenly tormented by a difference or a distance between him and what surrounds him? Why does he know and want to warn us that we are in a far country?
He refuses nostalgia, always placing the accomplishment of an attentive life not outside of feelings, but before feelings. He declares first of all that he does not feel “thick”, everything prohibits that he often does not know how to go about entering into a relationship with this one or that one, with this easy or distant girl. He admits to being clumsy despite his desire to conform to what is given or refused.
Of course, this weakness is a common fate: “I am like everyone else: I do not continually have the certainty of leading a true life.” But he repeats it to himself often, as an exile would do, and each time he wants to communicate with his peers, it is for him a very serious and difficult matter, because this feeling of exile is also that of a dissimilarity between beings lost in their strangeness as in that of the world. In truth, the traveler we are talking about maintains a certain immediate requirement, not at all intended or determined by ideas. He cannot be satisfied with a customary agreement, he wants to go to the heart of others and the real world for an essential sharing. Everyone thinks of course: when the heart is not there... But still it is further than the heart or the hazardous emotions that he wants this sharing, further even than the mind which understands, but reasons too much and delays us. He wants the soul to reveal itself, for the understanding to be, so to speak, proof of a soul or souls that inhabit our bodies and this earth. Is this so much to ask? No, because it concerns the smallest of things, and it is a matter which concerns our simplest steps, without even having thought about the question first, as they say. For example, courting a girl is commonplace, it's instinctive. We know well what this tends to do. Exactly, it’s about being together. But it is obvious that the bodies are together and that is not enough. On the other hand, the feeling remains fragile. As for an intellectual understanding, it's miserable. There is no doubt that the soul must be involved and that no agreement can exist without recourse to what makes up the very nature of beings.
What soul? Certainly, one will say, a soul which knows, and which is not satisfied with instinct or custom, and which is not a simple and ridiculous definition of conscience either. Beyond any definition, it is the inexplicable presence. And we immediately see ourselves obliged to admit that it is a question of an absolutely unknown and secret soul, of which we cannot speak, and of which we must speak. This is the great embarrassment of the traveler, let us also say his enchantment: there is a secret, an essential shadow in beings and in nature and in himself. Such a secret is unknowable, of course, but he who knows that it exists cannot give up worrying about it.
“Who are we?” repeats the first person who comes. So this still seems very banal, but the error of the first comer is that he does not realize that he himself is a part of the mystery, that the slightest of his steps enters entirely into it, that there would be no mystery if there were not in each person an unknowable soul or this shadow that no light can break. As soon as we wanted to understand this, the world changed and divided. It is populated with resistance. Suddenly we are strangers, everything becomes strange, because it seems obvious that we are separated from other men and objects of the universe, as well as from the most inaccessible dreamlands. Mechanical communication and a few technical or fatalistic remarks are really not enough to fill our exile. What a bore no doubt and what a humiliation for our science! But it would also be our beautiful destiny to share the incredible embarrassment, the invisible secret.
It is worth going through many difficulties and taking great risks. We first notice, in this case, since the matter remains inexplicable, that the difficulty itself risks being for a long time the only illustration of the enchantment that the true exchange of mysterious thought promises us. The traveler in search of discoveries will often come back to the testimony of the failures which mark his wish:
"... Certainly, I do not doubt that I will one day discover the thought which will assure me almost at any moment of delight, the absence of boredom. I have more than one reason to think that this discovery is near. (I do not, to tell the truth, know what it will be or even if I will be able to express it.) But as long as it is not there, it must be admitted that illness, fatigue or fever - with certain surprises of the passions, which it is difficult to prepare for - in almost hold the place.”
However, there is no question of abandoning the paths of mystery, nor even of abandoning oneself. If we are first awakened by a “defect”, we must believe that this defect plays a role in history. Necessarily, we must devote ourselves to a word that prolongs beautiful desire or regret. This is where we enter literature, and where language leads the game.
It is not a language that we study from the outside, because we are never outside of our language. The traveler cannot even show the intention of seeking, as the poet says, “the place and the formula”. It must lend itself to the movements and strangeness of words or sentences, as everyone does in everyday life. But it would also be very disappointing to give in to all common ideas and see yourself trapped in a routine, theory or method. Ordered expressions and ideas make the mistake of wanting to be perfectly clear, and plunge us back into solitude without shadow or light in truth. They make us satisfied with their appearances, and make us forget life in the depths of the shadows, life, presence, first friendship, the wonder of an unknown world. Thus Jean Paulhan, to carry out his attempt, first chose to be a storyteller. The tale is a game. A serious game, Plato would have said. Above all, the author wants to admit from the outset that he is writing literature. He wants it to be this very life of course, but he refuses to claim it absolutely and he clings to the hazardous role of the man of letters. In the circumstances, the tale is the only form of expression which, at the same time, recognizes the traced paths, the dead ends, the hesitations, the circular paths, the mirages, the adventurous outcomes, the no man's land and finally perhaps some enlightening surprise in this distant country where we are thrown despite ourselves.
Where to start? Simply with the most ordinary ways. Is there a tree here? Well, there is a tree. Is anyone climbing the tree? So let him go up there according to his means. A young girl is met? Let us also approach the young girl according to our means. But soon the storyteller discovers his freedom.
It's not so much fantasy, nor adventure, but rather, in a curious way, analysis. Our storyteller certainly does not recognize any right to allegory, nor to the study of situations and characters, nor even to psychoanalysis. In fact, he does not want to resort to any method, he avoids innuendoes, the resonances of feelings which so easily convince, and all sorts of harmonics likely to distract the reader. It does not seek to distract, rather to attract attention. How then will he go about it if he wants to be innocent of all ideas and all trickery? It's surprisingly simple. Along the way, the storyteller notices that he or his hero is going through certain events that are not usually observed. And there he stops, using the privilege of the walker who has no specialty. He stops and details the unnoticed event which suddenly reveals itself to be complex, and where some renewal could well take its origin which brings into play the secret of the soul and of an understanding.
What kinds of events? This varies from the appearance of dream characters (dreams are an experience too) to the most vulgar encounter of a wardrobe in the dark. What is certain is that these are “bad subjects” for our romantic taste, subjects which do not develop with a lot of adventures and points of view, but on the contrary are reduced to a very rapid vision, or to an idea which suddenly confuses us. A young girl sees a fabric moving behind a bush, the fabric immediately disappears, but the very fleetingness of the appearance becomes for her the sign of a secret that she will recapture. A professor talks about the Egyptians and observes to his students: “All this could have happened to you.” And suddenly the discovery was not “very clear or very reasonable: it was that Egypt was not at all what we thought, a distant people... it was, I don't really know how, nothing other than us”.
The event is therefore affirmed by an elusive passage or by an idea which melts duration into an instantaneous vision and reverses the meaning of our approaches. What do the Egyptians matter to us? Considerably foreign without a doubt, but for that reason immediately fraternal. The paths, the developments which seemed to explain and connect countries, people and eras only separated us from them. What reduces distances, our embarrassments and our anxieties is the very distant which eliminates distance and time at once. Man is no longer a judge who studies the repertoire of ages and thoughts: he is judged, dominated, taken over by a vast nature (one might also say a supernatural one) in a fraternal impulse at the risk of a history made of ruptures and transfigurations. "... My idea was more important than me, more vast since it undoubtedly concerned me - since it contained me - but with me thousands and hundreds of thousands of boys and girls and men and women, a crowd in which I barely took up a place, where I faded away. A curious consequence followed: it was that I had not found my idea. On the contrary, it was she who had found me, after having found me, it may be, long sought.” So we become mere toys, it seems, since the only events that matter envelop us and take us away from the world and from ourselves.
But what have we ever sought if not this union with the Other? We are only defeated by the mystery by having invoked it and having played our own mystery and our life in the game, without which nothing would have happened.
However, the storyteller is not at the end of his tales. In this part between the Self and the Other, he did not give up using his patient observations.
A young girl seems inaccessible. Here is the lover who, himself, realizes that he has been too explicit, and makes himself obscure, inaccessible, not by artifice, but by recognizing the distress of his situation as a rejected suitor. And the distance is suddenly crossed between the young girl and him.
A patient, whose delirium makes him alien to the objects and beings around him, comes to his senses upon becoming aware of this strangeness. A young woman watches over him, and little by little he guides her towards the secret of a fault revealed by two letters written to another. Life is reborn in him and between them, as soon as (without anything being said) the exchange of the secret has been accomplished. In another story two men behaved badly towards a girl. When they come to know the fault committed by each, suddenly an understanding is affirmed and accomplished in the unspeakable. Any essential confession also remains in silence. These are exemplary fables where nothing is proven and which we never really manage to account for. We might even have believed in passing fantasies. However, a discovery has been made, whether or not the examples are debatable.
A very slight but essential discovery, because it is achieved through reflection, language and determined action, which provoke an inexpressible adventure whose secret is respected. Thus, instead of an agreement, a truth being affirmed through a succession of steps or clearly demonstrated terms, it is during a rupture, a face-to-face encounter of light and shadow, an exchange of the situations themselves, where each person replaces the other.
A discovery, Rimbaud had already proposed it. It is no longer a question of “proving the obvious”, of following a causal or final chain, of locking ourselves into structures, but of realizing the event which, suddenly, reverses the perspectives and provokes an abrupt exchange and changes us through an illumination. An accomplishment.
It is later that the drama is born.
Indeed, as soon as two thoughts, two secrets are opposed and then exchanged, the temptation is great to want an absolute fusion and to decree that once and for all the understanding is achieved, that the rule has been found. But the storyteller can never ensure this permanence that he nevertheless desires. On the other hand, the opposite temptation awaits him, that of provoking rupture and instability: it is “endless thinking” which consists of trying to bring this Self and this Other to the same level and to disunite them endlessly. In such a way that the great risk of having surprised the essential event in its rapid light will be to be torn between the desire to maintain it and the necessity of creating a new break for a new spark as lively as the first. But will the second ever be as vivid? What detours will it be necessary to use to find the original and secret law without deflowering it? Baroque, equivocation, confusion, even betrayal could enter into this game of hide and seek. These are the anxieties of Causes Célébres. Not to mention the hazards of the road.
The literary process remains, for each of us, perilous. It is not one of the least merits of Jean Paulhan to have pointed this out to us. But precisely his study continued beyond the tales and without denying the gropings will have the privilege of flourishing for having wanted first of all to be in these games and these risks nothing other than a patience faithful to the glory of an unbearable and generous mystery.
The important thing is really elsewhere than in the words or the tales: in this space carved out between the words, in the journey in the middle of a land where shadows rise, with inhabitants no less dark, along perspectives which are both in the world and outside the world, by the very fact that they are reversed in moments which defy duration.
During who knows what Anabasis, analogous to some migration towards the West, towards gold, towards science, it is certain that this ritual universe is attenuated, where human approaches evolve and are oriented in a network of limits and beliefs which break and reveal the light. We are surprised to find this mystical reality, in flashes of poignant vivacity, in a literature that is, so to speak, abandoned and which is not without regret for the Orient.
The very absence, the defect, the dark state are given as a pledge of light, not that they are the reason for light, but rather in their withdrawal giving way to a confidence which illuminates in the depth the vain imagery of words, the “objects of the world”, finally the soul and friendship. Knowing that the secret exists is already “living in God”. Not always of course. Perhaps a moment sometimes lights up a whole life. A soldier taking refuge in a house given over to the dead, and riddled with shell fire, tells himself that he is dreaming, and kicks a mirror to return to reality. "A small thing (the soldier told us), but in my eyes sacred, since it served as a support for all the rest, since everything else in a single impulse was going to be returned to me. Through this little mysterious ice, through this precious crack, shells and corpses, eclipse light, emperors, generals, scientists slipped at once. Everything had happened - at least I had the impression - as if our world found itself attached to some other, invisible world ordinarily, but whose intervention, in decisive periods, could alone save it from collapse.”
“... Our old confidence in the sequence of effects and causes is found wanting here. Rather we should think of some supernatural relationship...”
In our distant, disoriented country, a literature is emerging (more distant than all the distant places) which refuses control and which, naming the passing event, the bird or the stone, designating a nothing, sees the moment of a birth and a rebirth reappear. By her very humiliation, finding the fabulous distance, she delivers as best she can (and it is marvelous) the world to the fortune of its renewals, by which we must finally reach the land of dawn.