The Spectator
Bernard BaillaudRené Martin-GuelliotGiovanni Vailati
Paulhan is not always the man behind the foundation. At the NRF, he comes later. In Spectateur (58 deliveries from April 1909 to June-July 1914), he put his name on the editorial board from the first issue, and then went to Madagascar, after the burial of a Chinese project. In the archeology of Spectator, there is this distant man, who teaches without much pleasure at the Tananarive high school, collects the proverbs of the Merinas, looks for gold, without official authorization, as it seems (or: documents his future lies, about Malagasy gold panning) and participates in absentia in a singular magazine.
Paulhan's training did not begin with the Malagasy stay; it does not end with him either, but continues under the aegis of René Martin (1879-1962), known as René Martin-Guelliot, born in Guéret, in the Creuse, polytechnician since October 14, 1899, left school on October 1, 1901, artillery captain in the 1920s and throughout his travels collector of costumed dolls. This one does not bear the name of director in vain. Martin-Guelliot's disagreement with the publication of Interviews on various facts (for the Society of bibliophile doctors, in 1930 - and we will not forget that for Paulhan the task of the sick is to cure their doctors), a late development of the reflections carried out in the Spectateur, signals both Paulhan's debt and the divergences relative, from one to the other, which is poorly masked by the overly tuned ending, almost in amébé chants, of the Interview on facts divers (this time in the singular), in the Gallimard edition of 1945. On this date, Paulhan won his independence, facing his father, the philosopher Frédéric Paulhan, who died in 1931, facing Martin-Guelliot, facing the NRF itself, died for a time under Drieu. In the Interview of 1945, the dialogue form, between "René Martin" and "Me", attenuates the dispute.
The title of the magazine, consciously or not, recalls another company, of English origin. The Spectator or the modern Socrates, collective project, by a society which denied being an assembly of misanthropes and preferred to see itself as a "platoon of people who reason", widely distributed in the 18th century, and of which a copy in three volumes, in a translation of 1755, later appeared in Paulhan's rotating library. René Martin-Guelliot recognized himself in Socrates, with the usual precautions - "si licet parvo" - by the non-literary turn of his mind, by his oral postulation and called himself a mathematician rather than a dialectician. But midwife if not torpedo, perhaps well. He apparently stopped writing to Paulhan after 1929, but remained in contact with him, at least until the radio broadcasts mentioned by Marcel Pareau in his letter to Paulhan of January 12, 1951. The prolific file compiled for the second volume of Fleurs de Tarbes contains several pages torn from the magazine and the five volumes of Oeuvres Complètes mention her five times. This is also a characteristic of the Spectateur team: if the intensity of an intellectual climate is measured by the durability of the relationships that are established there, the period of Spectateur was for Paulhan an essential era, located in time after the influence of his father, after the numerous contributions to the Journal of Normal and Pathological Psychology, after the stay in Madagascar, but before the war, before The Warrior applied from 1917, before the collaboration in La Vie of the brothers Ary and Marius Leblond - they are in Alcools the dedicatees of "Schinderhannes", they will later be called Leblond's brothers - before the NRF finally, it goes without saying, since there is, and longer, and more deeply than is often said, a Paulhan before the NRF. Volens nolens, there is in Paulhan a man of the 19th century, that is to say a man on whom the 19th century imposed its mental frameworks, its problems, and also its questions. French psychology before psychoanalysis, but which makes Freud read the Witz ("witty note and wit of the word", 1912), the Traumdeutung and the Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens before translation by an unsigned report from the April 1913 issue, open sociology which seeks the proximity of other disciplines, linguistics which has become an experimental science and which evacuates the old questions of the origin of languages or the universal language, all this gives the chapters of an intellectual heritage of which Paulhan, rightly or wrongly, does not deny all the articles. With The Spectator, what is it about?
René Martin-Guelliot insisted in 1912, in a letter to Paulhan, on the “monographic, clinical, exegetical character” of his review. Character was a good thing to say, and rarely have we been so keen to put commonplaces, ideas, and even the spirit itself, on a table for analysis. From this operation, the mind emerges neither rested nor bloody. Martin-Guelliot recognizes this, doubting whether it is possible, without taking a break, to read an entire issue of the Spectateur: reading a single article is in his eyes more profitable. A foreword to the first issue states that nothing is unworthy of modern thought, and that no word, no gesture is devoid of meaning. He certainly happens to use balanced language, and to situate his action between — between philosophy and common thought, between psychology and sociology, between pure logic and its regional applications. This apparent sense of balance should not deceive. Martin-Guelliot's goal is to study commonplaces, not without tension or a violent taste for the truth, but by defending himself, sometimes quite poorly, against the skepticism which claims to keep them at bay or contest them. “Observations and essays on intelligence in practice and everyday life” announce the first pages: Le Spectateur is devoted to the experimental, abstract and practical study of intelligence in everyday life, scientific work and social activity. It is not so much a question of searching for origins, of locating causes: in this sense, the etiology is not spectacular. If undoing the folds of a reasoning, an idea, a formula seems interesting, necessary to the people of Spectateur, it is not to be stupidly distressed by the stupidity surrounding it, or to stand up as a straightener of formulas. The spectator in question is interested. In a very Latin tradition, he seeks to be useful, to perfect tools, to bring to fruition an experience that the founder draws from the military, financial, rural, university worlds, to find disciples in yet other fields, notarial if necessary, without appearing Byzantine, nor renouncing the intellectual esteem of Jules de Gaultier (the man of Bovaryism), Émile Bourroux, Louis Dugas or Georges Palante. By his profession, Martin-Guelliot considers himself closer to Gustave Le Bon than to Bergson, even if he prefers the second, more attentive than the first to the daily slope of philosophy.
The question of the place occupied in the intellectual field and that of the target audience are not secondary. Le Spectateur does not adopt a scholarly form, but is delighted to be recognized by the University or the Collège de France (Camille Jullian, chair of National Antiquities), in a small magazine always proud to be cited. He does not forget the Italy of Vico or Vailati, and Italy does not forget him: contributions by Umberto Fiore on the evolution of criminal anthropology or mention in journals, L'Anima or Psiche for example. Slightly interested flavor of universality? Willingness to be read, even by representatives of the scholastic tradition? The review, which does not reject casuistry, has not chosen the same objects as ancient logics: it studies common arguments (rather than syllogisms), "ready-made formulas" (rather than received ideas), proverbs that are attributed to the people and the illusions to which the mind indulges. She is not attached to them, but pretends to distrust them. She does not lean into them, but tends to free herself from them. It is not said that she wants to fight them, as in Le Dimanche de la vie by Queneau Valentin Brû will modestly claim her wars against the Hain-Tenys Merinas. Eristics appears as an object of study (how is it that the most paradoxical arguments, even the most false, are also the most effective?), it is not directed against commonplaces. By analyzing the arguments, the review seeks to "analyze the analysis" - according to an isolexism that Paulhan, without too much plausibility, attributes to René Martin, and which we can, by its reflexive redoubling, compare to the "fool of fools" envisaged in 1912 by the director, with Paulhan's agreement. Reason is neither the origin nor the end of reasoning. On the one hand, in fact, the illusions of the mind come from its primordial chaos, where opposites mingle, and the spectator's job is to emerge from this confusion; one of the central questions of the review is this: what happens in the mind before the illusion is discovered there? On the other hand, reason leads to paradox, in an adventure where the mind is not lost. The solicitations of dreams or imagination generate boredom for the dreamer: the sequence of reason promises the mind mountains and wonders.
We can undoubtedly see in this construction an effort specific to Paulhan rather than a manifesto shared by all the authors of the review and Martin-Guelliot admitted in 1912 to Paulhan: "Our objectives are so different that we constantly need clarification [...]". Two elements, partially programmatic, however, make it possible to guide the reflection: to begin with, the collective character of the journal, and the play of pseudonyms that it entails, the (generational?) transition from pessimism to optimism to finish.
In the collective genre, Paulhan manifests a constant of which the NRF provides the most lasting example. The monopolization of the author by the responsibilities of the review serves as a distraction from the critic's prolonged reflection on language. But the critical and “revueist” plans intersect on the line of collectivity. Paulhan sees literature as a celebration, as a treatise written by several people, as a sum too, of which the summary gives the indications. The presence of Vincent Muselli, future poet of Masques and Strophes de contre-fortune, and the desire to attract authors who are not professional philosophers, but who know how to go beyond the argument of classification, alongside Guillaume de Tarde (the son of Gabriel, the sociologist of Laws of Imitation), or, if we think of the works cited in the reviews, of Van Gennep, Charles Bally, Antoine Meillet or J. Vendryes, contribute to opening the field of virtual authors, everyday authors so to speak, prefigurations perhaps of the Paulhanian "first comer", but above all proof of an elitism without titles which also applies to the reader. Those who do not feel made for philosophy, if they came to the Spectateur, would not feel isolated there, stated in 1912 a "Notice to our possible collaborators".
The opening of the journal finds its signature in the articles simply attributed to the abbreviation "Sp.", collective author to whom the editorial staff entrusts the programmatic, synthetic or plural authority texts. When Martin-Guelliot hesitates about a signature, he simply suggests to Paulhan: R.M.G., Sp; or F.C. Reading the summaries, pseudonyms seem to abound: François Carré, Adam Dürr, Jean Florence, François d'Hautefeuille (what's more, for the expression "Everything happens as if..."), L. de Hautmont ("the boring kind"). We should not always trust it: Jean Florence defended a thesis on the quarrel over crypto-Catholicism, and the appearance of the cryptonym refers after examination to a very real being: Jean Blum, translator of A Named Thursday, by Chesterton. And when Paulhan chooses to call his interlocutor in Entretiens "René Martin", does he know that he is finding the real name of the man who called himself Martin-Guelliot? Most of this story is still to be done. It remains that collective signatures break not only the solitude of the author, but also his autonomy. The contributor to a review is not a literary absolute.
We will just indicate the last element. The alternative of pessimism or optimism crosses the end of one century and the beginning of the other: Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Eduard von Hartmann. It is asked by "Martin-Guelliot", by "René Martin", in the two versions of the dialogues on news items in the form: "should we become optimistic?" Without confusing family generations and intellectual generations or increasing the effectiveness of the very notion of generation, we can see in Paulhan's journey the prolonged passage from the pessimism of his father Frédéric and his mentor Martin-Guelliot to an optimism that would be his own, or, if you like, from an inherited distrust to a distrust, more complex than simple, but finally invented, which tends towards confidence and finally affirms it. The example of the commonplace is for the author an opportunity to write that trust and distrust have the same object; constant theme, variable mental perspective. From this passage, Le Spectateur is for Paulhan a first theater.
Text published in number 55 of the magazine L'infini (Autumn 1996), reproduced with the kind permission of the author.