Progress according to Paulhan

This text appeared in the special issue of the Terriers magazine, "Lectures de Jean Paulhan" in October 1984

Progress in Love Quite Slow is given as the story of a love progression, from Jeanne to Juliette, and from Juliette to Simone. The progress most obviously in question would therefore be that of the ability to seduce. However, the expression is poorly suited to this mechanical lack of knowledge which guides Jacques in success and in failure, and which he learns at times to play with. Moreover, the most interesting thing about Paulhan's story is not there, or not only there: it is that the story is itself an instrument of progress. A much less exclusive progress, and which compensates for a fundamental delay of the hero-narrator in the events he experiences. There is something here that interests those who “lack the simplest things”; those who lack a certain ease in finding their mental level, their consistency in the world. Which is to say all of us. From this point of view Progrès en amour... would be more readable as a treatise on good manners than as a romantic strategy manual. A treatise therefore, but without any of the a priori of ethics. Here, any rule of conduct is developed in the exercise of good manners that constitutes the story. Because telling is already progress. A breakthrough in Living. Morality, even if it is contrary (it is rather contradictory), only comes in addition. The day after the story.

Progrès en amour... strives to join two types of events, two kinds of concretions or vital figures which also constitute for the narrator the points where to anchor the story, and to draw it... The first, let's call them events of Living. The second, which are speech events, let us already call them Letters. This distinction is practical, even if, of course, speech events are also events of Living. Between one and the other, there is undoubtedly an “ontological” community (to speak like philosophers), but there is even more phenomenological resemblance. Their mode of appearance brings them together. In them something is configured, of existence or of discourse, in a form of absolute impersonal. In them something of subjectivity is surprised, and as if left on the edge. Their success, because they are successful events - and there begins the delay - is precisely this which closes them to the self. Sudden address, good fortune in love, happiness of expression, this is something unsurpassable that is very difficult for everyone to appropriate. If not by working towards another success, launched towards the first: the success of the story. Then, in the echo of this double event, the feeling of delay is somewhat appeased.

In Progrès en amour..., the advance of Living is not only due to a quality that would be intrinsic to it. Just as much, it comes from a lack of consistency on the part of Jacques, the hero-narrator. About the latter, we know almost everything, except that he served "further than Salonika" and that he knew women but not "on this side of the sea" (1). Jacques has only retained from his immediate past a great weakness and a periodic fever, which will return to him at the end of the adventure. From war and distant countries, he may have gained decisive knowledge, but useless in the ordinary world where he has returned, for a peaceful interlude. His memory does not open onto anything that is himself. He will not seek any foundation, any experience. In the beginnings at Velleminfroy, everything is a pretext for erasure. The simple repetition of a journey, from the camp to the Mill where Jeanne sleeps, is enough for him to doubt the path traveled - "and when I think about it I see myself in shadow". This shadow of the self - weakness in imagining but also latency in the landscape - has its counterpart in the unreality towards which it moves: "I was not pushed to so many visits by the joy I took in them, but rather by a desire that I wished for." Thus, a desire which precedes itself erodes a little of our presence, it rejects us to a form of ghostly existence.

Whatever the firmness of desire, the strength of self-presence, Living is always already emancipated from us. What Jacques formulates in these terms: “Everything happens to me as if I had found my life already too advanced.” This consideration is enough to nuance any hope of progress with irony. This is because we have to reckon with two kinds of progress. The best known is willful and clumsy. He has the slowness of effort and the virtue of learning. Proposing laborious victories over the difficulty of living, it is like the harvest of a subjective time. But it only seems to serve to make people feel the gap that separates them from the other. Because the second is a progress of Living itself, not exactly faster, more inevitable and more closed. Living is built and grows without ever returning to a primary evidence, "the simplest things", the principles of which escape. So that the complication of Living is always greater and more serious. It deepens a primary defect that no daily lesson can repair. So Jacques, like everyone else, is a powerless Achilles behind the tortoise of Living, always running, always worsening his delay.

This gap, however, does not have the effect of taking away from existence. It only opens up the space of something unrepresentable (this is, moreover, the most regular mark of what we call event). Jacques provides us with numerous testimonies of these unrepresentable events. Sometimes, he experiences its autonomy in his most immediate consciousness. Evoking moments of perfect sensual fulfillment in Velleminfroy, he finds them almost external to himself: "...eating and drinking well, loving every evening, these are things that I received and gave above myself, other than myself.." What ends is also what leaves the self on a lower level of Living. The perfection of Living eludes the imagination of oneself and even the clear awareness of others. Thus Jacques' clearest romantic success opens up the greatest representational void in him: "When I wait for Simone, the impatience I have prevents me from thinking about her. As soon as she is no longer there, I rest and think about something completely different. So that I know her poorly and cannot imagine her..." Simone's full presence falls outside of representation because, unlike Jeanne or Juliette, she is encountered in a form obviously in love. Of the three young girls, she is the only one who was seduced without calculation, without a plan. Absent, Simone is no more representable: the imagination of her arrival is as if absorbed by her own projective movement, she loses all object. We see from this everything that reality offers that is disconcerting: Living disappears there at the moment of its greatest success, marking it with a blindness which prevents its recovery. We will never know how talented or happy we were in love. We will never be able to find the secret, because this success presupposed a transparency of mind that reflection prohibits. On the other hand, we have a clear vision of our misfortunes because then the resistance of Living makes them appear clearly. Hence sometimes, during a romantic difficulty, this irruption of the other, like a mental jostling. Thus Jacques with Jeanne: "It suddenly seemed that it became a question of strength or energy, or her strength bothered me.." The unexpected body, emerging from a happy void, suddenly embarrasses and weighs.

The autonomy of Living can also be experienced in the intimacy of memory. There, in this place which seems so interior, so subjective, something is being developed above me, other than me. This is indeed the meaning of these two reflections from Jacques: I should not have delayed writing these memories: they ended, without me." And later, having seen Jeanne-du-moulin again, with whom the adventure came to an end: "It seemed to me that these last meetings took on a new meaning for me and that my memories here were not over: that they were still waiting for what would allow them to be entirely memories and to disappear." Parallel to the events of Living, memories are composed and completed according to a pace which is specific to them and owes nothing to will or effort. Whoever is attentive to oneself recognizes memory as a force for the accomplishment of reality, in no way as its reflection or its diminished trace. Nothing less imaginable, basically, than memory, because, unaccomplished, it is only tension towards a final state. And completed, it ceases to be a worry and escapes from consciousness, giving way to distraction and lightness.

The world offering unequal resistance to our efforts, and sometimes no resistance at all, even a dreamlike ease, our consciousness is also unequal, pierced with gaps in the most decisive places of Living. Every success of Living casts its shadow around. And by the success of Living, we must not mean only the aspects of existence whose favor we conventionally seek: romantic conquest, social prestige. There are also chances of success in the objective universe of detail and the insignificant: the slope of a path, the too violent sound of a clock, an apple tree loaded with fruit. Everything visible can in turn fall into it. And all that is said. And everything thinkable, and everything memorable. Entire sections of the present can disappear in their certainty. For this, it is enough for them to have been happy, that is to say, to have come at their time and in an exact disposition. Living happily discovers ever more centers of unreflection within itself. Forgetting becomes an active quality of the present, which detaches moments into absolute islands: "As I heard a clock strike, I looked at my watch, and two minutes later asked myself again if it was time to leave. I saw the time without holding it any longer. Cries, the flight of a fly took hold of me, and sent me back from one side to the other. What a strange joy: it came to seem little to me natural."

To better grasp this unrepresentable, we could resort to still other notions. Not the classic unconscious of psychoanalysts, but rather what is commonly called unconsciousness. Or this loss consubstantial with the present and incessantly produced by it. This whiteness which is born from the faults of the present and projects its blindness onto any vision of the future. Surface unconscious, if you like. Or of nature (2). It does not come from any archaic construction. It mechanically separates the immediate, thwarts learning and predictions, transfers into the waking state a dreamlike grasp of Living: fragmentary and acute, peppered with gaps and sketches, open to the multiple understandings of dreams, often stumbling upon the silent perfection of a form. Like the other, this unconscious calls for work. Isn't it necessary, in fact, to keep up with Living, to identify its levels, the massifs, the falls? There is therefore a work of the day, dedicated rather to deepening the inequality of consciousness than to repairing it. This work, the very narration of Progrès en amour... offers the example, this narration which progresses from ease to resistance of Living, and from effort to forgetting.

The narration also progresses from Letter to Letter. It is punctuated by these cores of discourse whose success has caused a stupefaction of understanding (another form of unconsciousness). The Letter, in fact, suddenly taking on substance, reserves its meaning and establishes a latency in the present. “A word is stronger and comes from further away, without being seen, than a stone or a blow.” Lalie's narrator already said. In the time when this stone flies, without yet reaching its goal, reality opens up to the unpredictable and to the effects of the Letter. Because the Letter, more than it is understood, makes itself recognized by its effects, or by its progress. - “Believe me if you want: the other day I couldn’t sleep all night,” said Georgette.” What banality in the afternoon! However, she remains attentive to Jacques. Afterwards, we drink beer, the young girls talk about themselves and Juliette draws the cards. Then, at the moment of parting: “Tonight,” said Georgette, “perhaps it’s Juliette who won’t sleep.” Evoking her friend's romantic concerns, Juliette first testifies to the insomnia of her own words. This statement that we thought was asleep in her, and without follow-up, now, unbound by intention, it rebounds into an event.

Recognition of the Letter presupposes a change of scenery, a wavering of the place where, ordinarily, one stands. However, for Jacques, disorientation is a native state, one would say, further aggravated by the circumstances of war. At the front, it was a question of joining a word which was on a level with the event of daily death and the total freedom which is its corollary. Everyone was therefore torn from the particular regions of their discourse and forced to share the common place. In Velleminfroy, Jacques is a soldier at rest who has plenty of time to pay attention to the particularity of speech. He enjoys this vacation of listening, born from his change of scenery. He is surprised that what for him is a closed letter, and almost an object, so clearly serves the exchange of the beings he meets. When an old man calls a drunkard "the juice of crooked wood", when the sergeant replies "I'm discussing the truth" to the cafe owner who enjoins him "not to discuss like that", when Father Renard, evoking the dangers of Martinique, concludes: "A friend who went out in pairs, he didn't come back.", it's each time the same deafening of understanding. The formal rigor of the Letter clashes sharply with its imaginary deployment: the drunkard out of the vine, the discussion heightened beyond the truth, the double friend suddenly missing. The understanding remains in an in-between space, settling into distraction, between a density of form and a semantic indefinition. The meaning of the Letter is as if thrown forward, and to be rejoined later.

Love teaches Jacques how the Letter allows one to progress in Living. Jacques, happy in love, since Simone offered herself to him, nevertheless remains dissatisfied in terms of speech. Is his fortune not lacking an authenticity of words which would guarantee its reality? He therefore undertakes to deepen Simone's words, to force her into nuances of expression which would prove the sincerity of her expression. Now, to these pressing requests, Simone responds quickly: Know that my words are all sincere and not lying." And here is Jacques again embarrassed by the irreducibility of a Letter: Simone "by the book". How can we reconcile the meaning of her words with their prepared and detached character, their borrowed tone? Jacques understands, however, that there is only an adequate response to his request. Powerless to make to hear her real sincerity, Simone had to rely on a greater dignity of expression. She had to resort to this formal stiffness, imitated from the old books, it is this very thing which justifies her detour by another word. Better, her clumsiness in the search for "beautiful sentences" (she also writes: "Perhaps I will only be a passing bird...") thus proves by default her lively presence in her words. must we sometimes use the elevation of speech to rise to it.

The happy event and the perfect Letter therefore have in common that they are far from the self. It may be that Living “happens to me” or that speech “expresses” me, but their link to me is in no way given. He is laboriously won over by my effort to gain their height. When I relax my effort and it is their distance that appears to me: their happiness seems designed to discourage me. As they become more perfect, they surround themselves with an aura of the unthought which makes them unsuitable for me in their causes, unpredictable in their effects. They call my progress towards them, and widen my delay. So are they the same kind of event? It is perhaps because he believed it too quickly that Jacques progresses so slowly. He believes he can simultaneously succeed in love and in words. But each of his successes distances him from the other. Between events of Living and events of Letter, there is in fact a necessary distance. The Letter offers the paradigm of every happy form and it is only from it that something can happen, that we can look back on good fortune. In this sense the anteriority of the Letter is irreducible, its advance over Living is certain. But this remains on an almost purely logical level. Practically, we enter into the concern of the Letter to reach something that has already happened. Or we seek, through the Letter, to give an exact form to Living, which allows it to pass, that is to say to disappear as a worry. The delay of the Letter on Living is therefore no less certain. Advances, delays, everything then becomes a question of mental accommodation. "As it happens to the man who hurts himself, and first repeats to himself to assure his courage: "You feel nothing, you have nothing." So he lies to pull himself forward. As soon as he simply wants to search for "what is there", he falls back." To progress, to pull ourselves forward from a wound which is none other, constant, than that of Living, is to accept this distance from the Letter which, precisely, allows us to rejoin it. For if it were absolutely intimate to us, would we not be closed in it and without a future?

Jacques' story is therefore, through the Letter, a progress towards Living. It shows humility and work. Of humility by all that he recognizes as distant in what is happening. Working through the trust he places in the Letter all the same. Because it is a matter of overcoming the temptation of silence at all times. Thus, the story, arriving at the moment of the first night with Simone, that is to say at the perfect happiness of Living, tries to make an ellipse: "The rest, it would be necessary to write in a different way, with different words, and rather something other than words." The desire for an expression as absolute as the event threatens to take away the very means of expression. However, the narrator corrects himself: "But that's where I'm wrong. On the contrary, he must write in exactly the same way - and pretend that the passage I spoke about does not exist, but that everything follows and is woven together on the same plane." Such then is the courage of narration: to anticipate through the Letter one's understanding of Living. And courage seems necessary at the two most extreme points of Living: where its intensity defies discourse, where its simplicity leaves one speechless. How can I account for the simple fact that I am at the heart of an event of Living? How, if not through the Letter which, at every moment of the saying, manifests this unthinkable conjunction? The Letter is suitable for the accomplishment of Living: it is the only way we have to participate in the Living that concerns us. It saves us from this constant strangeness that is the accomplishment of Living without us.

Laurent Jenny

(1) Strange geography that Paulhan offers us here, as if he were spotting a faded memory on a flat earth. Beyond Salonika, where Paulhan had hoped to be appointed in the summer of 1907, it was for him well beyond: Madagascar. There, as in the mysterious country where Jacques served, "all the windows and doors face the west." Cf. “Notebook pages”, Cahiers Jean Paulhan 2, Paris, Gallimard, p. 122.
(2) As Paulhan calls it in Key to Poetry, where he opposes the necessary obscurity of poetic mystery to that accidental of the psychoanalytic unconscious. It must be admitted that here Paulhan has a restrictive idea of the Freudian unconscious, but this could well be deliberate.