The tales of Jean Paulhan

Critics cannot attempt to define the spirit of our time without referring to the writings of Jean Paulhan, citing his work on language, and expanding on the role of facilitator that he has continued to play for almost thirty years, composing with marvelous sureness of taste the summaries of the greatest journals of contemporary France [La Nouvelle Revue Française, Mesures, Les Cahiers de la Pléiade]. However, these same critics seem timid when approaching the work of storytelling that we owe to Jean Paulhan. Not, of course, that the reservation we see them displaying in this way is the implicit sign of hesitation or refusal. It seems that the commentators who believed they could elaborate on the new clarity that Jean Paulhan provided in the Fleurs de Tarbes on the figures of speech, which go from commonplaces to the conventions of Rhetoric, were seized with discomfort when defining the art that the same author deploys in his narrative works. If the critics were sometimes able to praise The Severe Healing, The Applied Warrior, The Guardians, it was without seeming to worry about situating in a very precise way the singularities and the novelty. Paulhan's latest work, Les CausesCelebres, visibly accentuated their dismay.

It seems that the trouble with which the commentators appear to be affected by Causes Famous comes from the fact that each of the twenty-one little perfect tales, with clear and crystalline outlines that compose them, bears the reflection of a phenomenon that the human mind shyly avoids glimpsed, due to the fact that this phenomenon is confused with its own existence, at the same time as it constitutes the source of its anxiety: contradiction. From dreams to the waking state, from reason to madness, from the conventions in accordance with which we agree to live, to those which could be their opposites, the border appears transparent, fragile, ill-defined. It is perilous to keep on its route, and to try to trace it accurately. Yet this is what Jean Paulhan does, and I imagine that it is ultimately the only mental attitude which seems to him worthy of being maintained. This inclination of mind goes hand in hand with a certain trait that he manifests in life, and which consists of considering heroism to be the only human behavior which is truly self-evident, and which does not need any justification - even less reward.

The very title of the book The Causes Famous, carries with it an ambiguity perfectly appropriate to the meaning of the pages it crowns. The author undoubtedly chose it for the ambiguity that emerges from it, and it seems that without its help, no commentator would be able to escape from it: this title refers to a quotation taken from an 18th century Physics Manual that was composed by R.P. Paulian, a distant relative of our writer: "We other physicists are in the habit of calling famous causes those of the causes that we detect, including the effect is paradoxical, or at all unexpected..."
It is a fact that the twenty-one stories that Jean Paulhan offers us have as their theme a cause whose effect is unexpected, even paradoxical. Whether it is the blindness of the hero of La bonne soiree which allows him to describe to us extraordinary landscapes in the sky, or the frigidity of Little Violette which pushes her to seek out successive adventures, the same contradiction within daily life appears, and grips us. We cannot accuse Jean Paulhan of inventing improbable or illogical situations at will to justify the equation that he wants us to glimpse: most of the facts that he reports to us are true, taken from life, or extracted from news items in the newspapers. If they are relived, rewritten by a great writer, they are in no way modified in their nature, nor stripped of their living reality. The analysis of the phenomenon of contradiction in facts and ideas allowed, as we know, Jean Paulhan to detect the masochism of Sade, and to demonstrate to us that the writers most attentive to fleeing commonplaces are ultimately led to rediscover them, and to use them when displaying the most acute originality. In Les Causes Célébres he admits to us: "He who proves me wrong attracts me. Whoever proves me right, I imagine that he has not understood me well: I do not take my side willingly."

Jean Paulhan is a man before whom it is impossible not to feel naive: in fact, who among those who know him does not approach him with convictions, biases, a system? Perhaps the one, if he exists, who knew how to stand, with completely involuntary courage, at the heart of the contradiction inherent in life... Children are, with animals, the only beings who move with perfect ease, and are not affected by any defect, in Les Causes celebrated. We now understand the deeper reason.

Paulhan's style could not fail to bear the trace of the problem that he continues to experience: it is, in its alliance of grace and harshness, the effect of a perpetually renewed miracle, thanks to which its author reconciles the contradictory necessities which seem to him to be confused with intellectual probsp;: the exposition of the theme, and the refusal to comment on it, and consequently to limit or alter its possible resonances, the staging of the characters and the desire not to attack their freedom, the orientation of the reader towards a conclusion, and the bias not to influence his choice. Hence this art of suggestion, which plays on nuances, is strengthened by what it avoids, insinuates, with a background of apparent irony, what is most dear to the master of the game.