The poetic stories of Jean Paulhan

Jean-Yves Tadié's work "Le Récit Poetique" (1978) extensively evokes the stories of Jean Paulhan.

Introduction

...The unique adventure, through its varied manifestations, variations of a manifestation, which the poetic narrative traces, entails and demands a structure which, even beneath the sometimes misleading exterior of a rhapsody, has the unity, the harmony, the blend of the poem rather than the heterogeneity of the novel. If it is not the world summarized in a single word that Mallarmé wanted, he refuses the encyclopedia which was, from Balzac to Martin du Gard, the dream of novelists. The Bridge Crossed, Arcane I7, A Balcony in the Forest are constructed away from romantic sums, far from Tolstoy as well as from Thomas Mann: this is because they do not intend to explore the whole of the world but rather follow a path through the woods. Instead of making all the sounds of the earth heard, their language is secret, which to be understood or rather felt must always be repeated. The dual nature of these books means that at the moment of knowing, if not our world, at least an imaginary world, the meaning is based in a tyrannical language and that at the moment of enjoying this language the enigma of meanings rests: this is the place of the exchange between the story and the poem.

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One does not have to venture far into Paulhan's stories - the longest, those which exceed a page - to discover that they are, Lalie excepted, written in the first person: "In the country where I had served..." (Progress in love quite slow), “I had barely made the decision to look for you” (the Bridge crossed), “I seem taller than my age” (the diligent Warrior), “I have not stopped following my thoughts” (Severe Healing). Autobiographical stories? 1
Less than we say. The diligent warrior may be Paulhan, but his name is Jacques Maast, and he was eighteen years old in 1914. Aytré who loses the habit is a story written by a thief adjutant, who enshrines the travel diary of an assassin sergeant.
“Of course, the most interesting character is the one who tells the story. But you won't see it until the end." 2. The subject of Gardiens is also to know who tells. It is the existence of a narrator who gives their value to the events and the story: “Now that I look back on these adventures, which were mixed up, I am surprised that they are so simple. Their greatest quality is, without doubt, that they happened to me; it’s also the hardest to explain.” 3. The narration takes place under the sign of the split between a me-spectacle and an I-narrator, who is responsible for observation and, rather than explanation, of questioning.
The construction of Causes Famous clearly poses the problem. These twenty-one tales follow an alternating distribution between narration in the first and third person which is certainly not accidental (the first and last tale are in the first). Several of the stories call into question the identity of the narrator, both himself and another—the others: “As if I were waiting, to be satisfied, to be both the others and myself. When I saw that I persisted in taking myself for God, I renounced once and for all knowing myself.” (Surprised and delighted). The narrator's personality is without precise psychological content, without detailed physical appearance; it thus breaks with all the conventions of the genre. At the same time, since his identity is imprecise, there is no real break between the narrator and the other characters; they have the same function, but assigned to anonymity: “We never stop dreaming, since our childhood, of a man who would be all men at the same time.” 4.
This abandonment to the virtues of the negative allows Paulhan's heroes to welcome the revelation. This is even their main function: not to love, nor to make war, nor to murder, nor to be sick (despite the appearances offered by the plot of Progrès en amour, Guerrier Appliée, Aytré, Gérison Severe), but to wait for a discovery: “Thus for six months, ten months maybe. And then something happened. A sort of revelation came to me.” 5 -, this sentence from a story from 1957, moreover associated with the birth of the literary vocation, provides the model for the unfolding of all stories where the hero, who has renounced himself, sees himself fulfilled by a secret or, as Paulhan likes to say, a key; thus the young writer does not discover a subject, “but rather a key which opened (in my opinion) all subjects” 6.
The role of the narrator, like that of Aytré, is therefore to read the signs: “I recognize signs made for me” 7 -. In this story, the event hidden by the narrator (a theft) and the one hidden by Aytré (a murder) made them “lose the habit”: it is then language, through certain sick symptoms, which reveals the event, because the latter modifies the former. Killing changes the murderer's discourse and stealing allows us to understand this metamorphosis. The event would not be known if it were not for the thought, and the adjutant's account attached to the sergeant's diary. Paulhan's art is very subtle here: he pretends to recount events which could give rise to adventures (a diary of a walk through troubled Madagascar, a theft, a murder), in reality hidden and literally insignificant (Jacob Cow the pirate is not a pirate story either). What this means is the form of narration. The moment where it becomes confused - that is to say where the style of the two non-commissioned officers becomes elegant - refers to the absence of two essential acts, which will only be confessed in the last line. A fundamental gap organizes the speech of the characters, which, in a first-person narration, organizes the story.

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Our method consists, sometimes of breaking up all the stories to bring together the common sentences, sometimes, as a counter-test, of presenting short monographs on a single author. This is how we would like to show how Paulhan's stories invented narration processes that represent the moment.
Paulhan's longest stories are divided into units, most of which do not exceed four or five pages. The collections of short texts (Métromania, Les Causes Célébres, L'Aveuglette) group together tales, sometimes close to prose poems, which, for some, do not reach a page. The first feature that emerges from the simple typographic presentation is the brevity of the time of the narration. At a time when European literature revealed its last great frescoes, its last moments in the glory of duration, with Proust, Joyce, Mann, Musil, here is a writer who deliberately refuses the resources of length and the abundance of history. These seductions, in the books of his great contemporaries, give the painting of society a cancerous proliferation: the great novels of 1920, despite their apparent strength, are sick books. The alternation of length and brevity is also found, at the same time, in music: Webern, after Mahler.
The story, a collection of texts, is a gathering of moments. Lalie thus experiences these sudden raptures, the cause of which remains hidden from her: “Some happiness must have happened to her. She remembers, it all started just before the moment the blue jacket showed up behind the nest. But the idea that gave her joy, she cannot find again. 8 Is happiness defined as the moment that hides an idea? The bell towers of Martinville de Paulhan?
The secret of the moment is its simplicity. A too subtle mind - the narrator - strives to know it while it always escapes him, as if time had been organized without it and it was necessary to introduce it by force, by making a series of cuts: “Everything happens to me as if I had found a life already too advanced. I would keep up to date with the things that people think are complicated, but I know that it's the simple ones that I miss, I don't want to cheat. The simplest really"... If secrecy is one of the conditions of poetry, only the simple event hides a secret, and the banal moment, the infrangible core of time.
This is the lesson of Jules Renard, who distrusted novels, because “they require “continuous development”. (However, human nature is made, as everyone can notice, of disorder, of mood swings, of contradictions)” 9. This is the lesson of Rimbaud, who also refuses this construction of events that time represents: “Now times and moments are no less incoherent, as soon as they are abandoned to themselves, than places and spaces... Thus, time deceives us no less than space; the world finds on all sides, in a great silence, its old essential incoherence" 10. The story therefore invents a form faithful to the incoherence of duration: brevity and discontinuity are the two means of trapping the only sure element of time, the problematic or upsetting minute of revelation: “It shows itself as suddenly as a rainbow” 11. A note on the Correspondance of Jules Renard is even more precise, and Paulhan seems to speak for himself: “Jules Renard is one of the three writers of the 19th century — the other two being Rimbaud and Mallarmé — who see a sacred event in literature. Precisely, in the snapshot of literature: in what is only perceived by jerks and fits into a sentence - and when I say a sentence: a simple main proposition, without the slightest subordinate. Jules Renard or the art of the elemental» 12.
Saccade: the very word of Breton. The narration agrees partially with this philosophy of time. The general brevity of the story, its division into very short fragments are not enough. It is Paulhan's syntax itself, like that of Renard, which aims to be elementary. Few subordinates, coordinators, few adjectives; simple tenses of verbs, where the present dominates (we are thinking here of his two friends, Brice Parain and Jean Grenier). The darkness is entirely semantic, and all it takes is one word. The signs then, in their particularity, cause us to lose sight of the meaning of the whole, of the structure in which they are taken: “When we begin to see the details and to wonder how things happen, the rest gets lost” 13.

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The time narrated is therefore not continuous time. It is made of these rhythms which are “systems of moments” 14. It is here that we find the order of discourse, because “events need to be ordered in an artificial system (..) which gives them meaning and a date”. What makes the story continuous is the succession of reasons, causes and effects (or the notation of their absence). Between the events, nothing happens, but the logical sequence fills all these gaps, whether, as in the time of the chronicle, it answers the question "and after"?, or, as in the time of the plot, to "why?". And if, in Nadja, the logical sequence is completely broken because the questions asked have no answer, there still remains the succession of sentences: when time stops, the words continue.

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Jean Paulhan's stories make a different use of discontinuity. Thus “Little joys of the countryside” 15 is structured according to a double reversal: the farewell to the city, of the Parisian to the countryside, and the farewell to the countryside, of the peasant to Paris. The discovery of the countryside is the discovery of an order, through a language: “And the chimney with its sticky soot and the solitude of the winds and the water of the springs and the cries of the sun and in the night the well-organized stars, have the air of a language, which tells us what? But first that they are in their place (...). » The dry enumeration of appearances, in sentences where the independent ones dominate, and the thin use of the present indicative, continues until it is organized into a system, the key to which remains to be found, under the shock of surprise. As for the inventory of appearances, it aims to transform them into language: it is he who holds the secret.
So in “Displacements” 16 : the big city feels like an overflow, until we guess “underneath our streets, this great hollow, and this sort of organized absence, the metro, where we can at any moment empty ourselves of everything else”. The automatic devices themselves (which are similarly fascinating in the Little Guide to a Trip to Switzerland) have symbolic value, “visibly intended to give the soul the impression of lack and absurdity”. The entire appearance of the metro is reconstructed around a key, which is the void, against the overflow, as the underground is the surface, and the aerial metro itself is integrated into this structure. “For travelers who have trouble coping with prolonged emptiness, various open-air passages have been provided.” Winter sports enthusiasts can rest from their strong emotions on their way back, thanks to “the relaxing, stable, and to say the least modest air that we breathe in the metro”. It would be vain to wonder if this imaginary metro resembles the real (although Paulhan also teaches us to look): in fact, the story functions like a seesaw around a great antithesis, so that every discovery is the rhetorical discovery of the antithesis and the logical discovery of the antinomy. We see that Paulhan's poetry is not linked to metaphor, like that of Proust. The reversal can be in fact, in thought, or even based on a play on words: Lolagne finds happiness in the metro, he says to Tréméloir, by flying there; Tréméloir, who wanted to imitate him, was put in prison; he then discovers that Lolagne had the impression of floating in the air... It is not an easy joke, a banal play on words, but a story in which language is the key. It is the duplicity of signifiers which allows the reversal of the story; the speech disorder superimposes two visions of the world, so much so that the language of fiction and intrigue duplicates that of the processes of narration. Denouncing the versatility of semantics, one of Paulhan's main projects, is also to rediscover one of the great principles of poetry: ambiguity, the defeat of reason and the victory of the poem. Hence the difference between the play on words and the poetic adventure: if Lolagne flies (flies in the air) while Tréméloir flies (steals), the referent targeted by the text is no longer only language but act; the referential function of the story cannot be reduced – which would be too easy – to its metalinguistic function. A poetic adventure according to Paulhan is a play on words that the story presents as lived - a play of actions. That is to say, Paulhan's story has its laws, like the poem 17. The main of these laws, Paulhan criticizes stated several times, about authors so different that one is led to conclude that he was speaking first of all about himself. On Gide: "I don't know if it is true that there exists in each of us this pure self, this mysterious center of the spirit, inaccessible to time, where the soul merges with what it knows and humbly discovers that good and evil, destiny and freedom, thought and form, rule and emotion and of course romanticism and classicism (...) are one and the same..." 18, After recalling the universality of the principle of identity (or non-contradiction): “I suppose that it is given to certain men - and for example to Rimbaud - to admit the opposite principle: that is to say that everything is other than itself, and therefore example, to clarify, its opposite. I will also assume that such an inconceivable principle - but is it easy, is it even possible to think that A is A? — enters directly into the composition of a poem or a story (even if it means eating it from the inside)..." 19.
It seems to us that it is the very structure which organizes Paulhan's story (close in this respect to Bataille, who constantly uses the oxymoron), and that he draws his poetic force from it. In Les CausesCelebres, there is no text where A is not at the same time non-A: in “La Bonne Soirée”, “The Blind Man Sees”; “Lost pleasures” shows a child who examines the back of things and the dust on the floor, but it is precisely “seeing things as they are”. The dream of “Endless Thought” is even more revealing: believing “to have won this and lost that”, the hero experiences the positive and the negative at the same time, the addition and the gap, the thought and its opposite. We will also cite "For the first time", whose plot poses this question: "How can we manage (...) to see things at first glance for the second time?", and, more painful, "A dream in waking up", which develops the well-known theme of the hero who does not know if he has escaped his dream, since he also dreamed that he was woke up: “Is this wound to the spirit ever healed?”; “The Philosopher’s Stone”, finally, abolishes the antinomy between the animate and the inanimate, life and death. The description - rare - of the landscapes would obey the same law: "The meeting of opposing elements - low water and peaks, fixed lands and torrents - obviously had its charm" 20.

Cruel tales, symbolic tales, logical tales, obscure stories, the Causes Famous at no time allow the reader to be satisfied with the plot, because it is engineered in such a way as to always pose the problem of meaning. But the meaning is not elsewhere than in the form of the story, in a contradictory experience or in the clash of two elements which cancel each other out by producing the poetic spark, an unbearable tension because it is never organized in a dialectic, a tension without overcoming or synthesis. This is also why Paulhan's essays, Entretiens sur des faits divers, Le Clair et l'obscur, ​​for example, rely on short stories to draw on them: all the work of reflection is then to resolve the enigma proposed by the story, and sometimes, far from the analysis dissolving the fiction, the mystery of it invades the essay itself, and prevents it from being resolved? 21. The absence of conclusion in essays plays the same role as the outcome in tales. The antithetical structure of the stories of Bataille, Jouve, Paulhan, at the same time as it can still be read in the smallest of their sentences, dismisses the flat, smooth, indefinite world of realism; a filter only allows rare constellations to pass through signifieds that are usually present. The conflicting organization of the text leaves the reader in suspense at the end, like so many poems; the accounts are not settled, and writing is presented - which is also indicated by the brevity of these stories - as difficult, even impossible: "I wanted to fix the states which did me so much good, to write them on paper. Alas, I was unaware of the signs, and what to fix. I couldn’t do it.” 22.

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Paulhan's stories summarize in their brevity what this chapter wanted to say about myth, symbol and dream. What struck Paulhan in language was the permanent flight of things into ideas, of ideas into words, of words back into things. But the story is the place of frozen metamorphosis. The events mentioned cannot be converted into ideas, several ideas are embodied in a word, the words refer sometimes to themselves and sometimes to the world. “Here is the chance that remains for us: it is given to man to produce – or to suffer – events, such that he cannot be completely conscious of them, and thoughts that escape his reflection – new, of course; and unforeseen events (...). But unforeseen is an understatement. We should add: surprising, unique — and perhaps: baroque.” 23.

The Bridge Crossed is the most difficult of Paulhan's stories. We understand the reason: it is made up of dream stories, which bring together perfectly clear events 24, and yet enigmatic, which we can only reproduce. The story is the being of the unthinkable event, the reality of the unrealizable idea, and this is why, when we think we have finished writing about it - Paulhan himself... - we always start again. Paulhan's story is close to a myth, because, unlike scientific discourse which proposes a conclusion, it treats language as an original mystery. This is the meaning of the Reception speech at the Academy. In the final analysis, Paulhan's story is a mythical story. Where does the evanescence of his heroes come from, the omnipresence of an I  moreover empty, of pure form, the fixed structure, the enigmatic character: what enigma, if not that of the origin of man, be of words? This is why many of these texts affect the shape of the itinerary. The most famous is the Guide to a short trip to Switzerland. We remember everything funny about him; we perhaps forget what is serious about it, and which is not to be a denunciation of Switzerland. The discovery which ends this journey is that of a landscape emerging, not from a cup of tea but from coffee, and which erases all the mountains and glaciers: “It was then, it was precisely then that there rose above the drop [of coffee] a small white cloud, exactly round, the size of a marble; it was then that the cloud became whiter than the snow, with a morning splendor, then, turning and as if rolling on itself, descended again... 25. In this lyrical sentence, of a very rare type in Paulhan, and which recalls certain meteorological phenomena which, in the Bible, always signal the appearance of the divine, we read the sensitive reverse of the intellectual discovery which preceded: an advertisement proclaimed: "Are you feeling quite as well as you could?" “Perhaps its author knew something that he did not say: I do not know what simple but mysterious event, which everyone suspects, but of which no one can quite speak, and it is he who compels us to live.” 26. All the art of the story is there: suggesting an original mystery by juxtaposing an idea and a cloud 27.

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    1 - See, in CausesCelebres, “A new lifestyle”, “The secret agent”, “Simple misunderstanding”, “Marie”. ↩.
    2 - L'Aveuglette, “the Guardians”: Works, Circle of the Precious Book, t. I, p. 272 ↩.
    3 - Progress in love quite slow, Works, I, p. 54 ↩.
    4 - Works, IV, p. 245 ↩.
    5 - Bad subjects, p. 285 ↩
    6 - Ibid., p.289 ↩
    7 - Works, I, p.197 ↩
    8 - Œuvres, I, Lalie, p.197 ↩
    9 - Jules Renard, Works, IV, p. 121. ↩
    10 - Arthur Rimbaud, Works, IV, p. 69-70.
    11 - Progress..., p. 51 ↩
    12 - Works, IV, p. 337. Again the "saccadic"... ↩
    13 - I, p. 18 ↩
    14 - G. Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration. ↩
    15 - La Métromania (1945); O.C., I, p. 201 ↩
    16 - Ibid., p. 204-205 ↩
    17 - Duranty, O.C., IV, 50: "The novel is the popular form of baroque art. Hence the fact that it obeys recipes (like the cinema) rather than laws (like the poem)" ↩
    18 - "André Gide", O.C., IV, 140. ↩
    19 - "Arthur Rimbaud", O.C., IV, p. 173 ↩
    20 - Little guide to a trip to Switzerland, O.C., I, 241 ↩
    21 - Le Clair et l'obscur, O.C., III, 368: "The fact to be explained served the rest as an explanation... The obscure became the reason for the light. In short, our problem had become our solution." ↩
    22 - P.-J. Jouve, la Scène Capitale, p. 260 ↩
    23 - Works, Light and Dark, p. 356 ↩
    24 - p. 97. For dreams, see M.-J. LEFEBVE, Jean Paulhan, P. 152-159: “Life, Jean Paulhan shows us, is in the indefinite movement by which we pass from one side of language and dreams to the other, to find an impossible stability.” (p. 159). It is still a matter of uniting with both the dream and the day before, to think about them contradictorily. Hence the structure of Bridge: the dream and its waking commentary. ↩
    25 - Works, I, p. 259 ↩
    26 - Works, I, p. 258 ↩
    27 - Cf. the Applied Warrior, I, p. 145: “Let me at least keep, now that I have fallen, an image, and the sign of this kind of secrets.” ↩