Game won

This text appeared in the [nrf homage issue to Jean Paulhan] (nrf-hommage-a-jean-paulhan) in May 1969

Of these collective “tributes” to which we are asked to contribute and of which here, painfully, is the latest, one may wonder what is the usefulness, or, quite simply, the virtue. From the point of view of criticism, which is the one that would be most interesting, their contribution, let's not try to give ourselves any illusions about this, is very weak, if not completely zero. As for telling anecdotes to try to show that the man we loved and admired very much and whom we continue to admire and love now that he is no longer a person for us but only a work, a memory and a name, I do not believe that this is the place, despite the need there would be to make known someone as difficult to understand as Jean Paulhan. But the word "tribute", whose primary meaning is that of a promise of fidelity, has enough brilliance to please us. And I find that there is a sort of Indian beauty in this ceremonial stone brought by many writers to the tumulus of the great superior towards which they have long looked with a sort of respectful exaltation. So I will carry my small stone to the company.
Instead of difficult to understand, it is difficult to grasp, rather, that I should have written, and few of his friends will want to contradict me if I add that the first problem posed by approaching this man of unparalleled spiritual seduction was the lack of grip faced by the interlocutor. I refrain here from evoking the manner and tone, the appearance and the gait, the attire of Jean Paulhan, because it would be all too easy to direct the spotlight, once again, on the picturesque character that he pleased, not without a certain element of coquetry, to offer to the eye. But of such a character the greatest wonder was within, such that by the voice and by the pen it was manifested; the viewer had only a thin glimpse of it compared to the listener or reader. How was it, however, that one was never sure that you had not missed something of what Jean Paulhan had said, or that Jean Paulhan had not said a little less than what you had heard; how is it that when reading him, and when rereading Jean Paulhan, the impression that remains is the same? Many high-flying minds are or were ambiguous. Thus André Breton's way of thinking, as he seems to me to have understood it, could be fairly closely compared to what we know about a magnetic field placed between two poles of opposite sign. With Paulhan, as far as I remember, there were no antagonistic poles between which a tension developed, a spark burst, a back and forth occurred. Roughly, I would say that there was rather a multitude of points of attraction which created a sort of ubiquity of thought, so lively and so rapid that it always went somewhere other than where we expected it, and that it often left you in its tracks, more or less far behind it. Furthermore, out of a spirit of play and a taste for dismantling recognized systems, if Jean Paulhan's thinking admitted contraries it was to invert them straight away and to delight in the novelty of the combinations obtained. In my opinion, it is this spirit and this taste, and no others, that we can place at the origin of the very keen interest shown by Jean Paulhan in his last years in various Gnostic texts which all insist on the equivalence and identity of opposites (good and evil, high and low, hot and cold, light and darkness), on the confusion of differences and on the equalization of diversities. Jean Paulhan always seemed to me to be very demanding of his intelligence, more demanding than any other man I have known in modern times. He would have thought he was failing in honor and honesty, I am convinced, if he had not asked his thoughts to admit everything, to contain everything, and not to refuse to do anything. Through this spiritual discipline, a large number of times, he shocked, even offended, people who had formed a somewhat strict idea or image of him. If one does not constrain his thinking, it will always confuse those who are only followers or simple admirers. But Paulhan hated constraints above all, and I never saw in him, contrary to what is seen in so many writers, the slightest need to be followed, the slightest desire to be admired. The abruptness with which he freed himself from those who often showed attachment to him was masterful. The banal expression of freedom of spirit came out of platitude and was embodied in life as soon as we dealt with him; she is illustrated superbly throughout her books.
In this measured excess which was the basis of his character, Jean Paulhan, it seems to me, was curious about his own thinking no less than that of others, a bit in the same way that his curiosity was exercised on everything that his senses made known to him, with a sort of passion for dismantling and verification. Since it is through words, after early childhood, that man's thoughts are expressed, he very early acquired the habit of questioning his own words and those of others, to judge their limits as well as their capacity. Thus his attention went to lexicology and particularly to semantics; thus the comparative study of languages ​​led him to observe weaknesses and faults, which he considered with a somewhat delighted benevolence, neither more nor less than most of the perversions that men believe themselves obliged to condemn in the name of morality, if not of grammar.
Everything I have said would undoubtedly have made him a man remarkably exceptional for the originality of his behavior, for his charm and for his intelligence, if the latter had not been served by a genius of expression to which we would vainly look for a similar in contemporary France. Genius of expression (the formula is not exaggerated) which, this is not the least surprising, is manifested by the first writings of Jean Paulhan with as much brilliance as by those of his mature age. As such, stories such as Lalie and (especially) Progrès en Amour fairly slow, whose composition dates back to periods of convalescence and rest of the young soldier Paulhan, who had been injured at the start of the First World War, seem highly revealing to me. Indeed, if we believe we have understood that literary invention belongs to the domain of memory ("to write a book is to reread it", says the Mexican Elizondo), we needed the example of a few very rare modes of expression endowed with supreme grace to show us the curiously aerial movements of memory, its dives, its rises, its lateral deviations, its slowing down, its brief suspensions and its sudden accelerations. I would like to compare the prose of Progrès en Amour to the flight of a seagull, mobile whose criss-crossing defines a space and gives it a structure perceptible to the human eye. It is no different that, by the virtue of a writing which goes everywhere and touches everything without almost ever agreeing to settle down, other spaces, later, in the categories of philology, literature, plastic arts, could have been measured or, more precisely, traced, following critical incursions by Jean Paulhan. Because I must also say that this writing which amazes us with its high acrobatics has such an effectiveness that the reader (adversary or game?) rarely experiences it. “A word is stronger and comes from further away, without having been seen, than a stone or a blow,” wrote the young Paulhan in 1915. Like the player, the writer had learned early on to direct his blows. The place he has just left is a land of games won.

André Pieyre de Mandiargues