Paulhan and his opposite
Patrick Kéchichian“From childhood to old age, from one war to another, in his reflection on language and literature or on political morality, in his dealings with writers, in his editorial responsibilities, in his exercise of criticism, in his commitments and his releases, in his loves finally, Jean Paulhan refused to stick to acquired evidence. Under every appearance, under the slightest certainty, around each word, around the slightest idea, he dug trenches, holes, galleries, abysses. And as that was not enough, he put himself at risk, in danger – that of going mad –, holding simultaneously or successively the different roles: the writer and the critic, the author and the publisher, the master and the student, the terrorist and the rhetorician, the subject and the object, the word and the idea, the speaker and the spoken, like the hammer and the anvil, the wound and the knife.
Jean Paulhan did not simplify my life. He didn't exactly shed light on this life either. But, incontestably, he made it, secretly, comical, unpredictable, sensitive, porous, fallible, laughable and dramatic: interesting in considerable, almost extravagant, proportions.
Patrick Kéchichian.
Kéchichian: Jean Paulhan, the surprised man
Extract from the article by Jean-Louis Jeannelle, December 8, 2011, Le Monde
Paulhan is the man of “mystery in letters”. (...) One of his mottos was that there is "nothing more normal and ordinary than to be constantly surprised." It is this maxim that the critic Patrick Kéchichian, former journalist at Le Monde, endeavored to follow in a very subtle portrait, Paulhan and his opposite. The supplement is an edition of his astonishing correspondence with Gaston Gallimard, from a letter of November 1919 where the publisher invited the young author of GuerrierApplied to collaborate with him, until Paulhan's death in 1968.
In the meantime, resentment had accumulated between the two men who were united by the same love of literature (this "unusual event"), and whom the defense of the Gallimard house, threatened during the Occupation and then at the Liberation, had nevertheless brought together: Jean Paulhan was, in fact, hurt that his publisher did not take more interest in his own works (which would only appear complete with a competitor, Claude Tchou). Above all, he exhausts himself in preserving the independence of the NRF. Already in 1929, he complained bitterly to Gaston Gallimard: his "authors" saw in the magazine only "one of the propaganda instruments used by the house" - among the culprits, Paul Claudel and Jules Romains, angry that the magazine did not report on their works, and making this known to the "boss".
In 1914, Jean Paulhan's father, a psychologist, hypothesized a "morality of irony" freed from any malice or disdain: an irony that "sympathy, kindness" would sometimes accompany. The idea is "optimistic but difficult to verify", notes Patrick Kéchichian, except precisely in the correspondence of Jean Paulhan, a past master in editorial diplomacy and the carving of formulas that are both clear and undecidable.
Les Fleurs de Tarbes, the great essay continued throughout his life, nevertheless provides a key to his thinking. There are two opposing poles: on the one hand, Rhetoric (which supposes that one can trust the rules and accepted and proven words); on the other, Terror (whose demand for authenticity requires denouncing every commonplace, refusing every rule). In the great quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, notes Kéchichian, Paulhan "takes a step aside" and pushes the Terror to the limit in order to reinvent Rhetoric, as it is true that there exists (this is perhaps Paulhan's secret) a "complicity of opposites".
See the article Patrick Kéchichian, Paulhan and his opposite by Massimiliano Catoni