Jean Paulhan theorist
Benoît Monginotan example of the fragility of humanism in the literature of the first half of the 20th century
Paulhan's approach to literature is not primarily theoretical. The question he asks is that of the transmission of this practice of the transmission of meaning that is literature. We must therefore distinguish two levels in his critical relationship to literature: its object and its project. Its object is literary transmission as it is a form of oral tradition, in a sense close to that which Meschonnic gives to this term. His project is to maintain the possibility of this transmission. For this, Paulhan opts for the Cartesian model of rational transmission, which he will nevertheless have to go beyond.
Paulhan's theoretical work therefore involves maintaining two types of humanism: (1) an anthropological humanism, definable as the transmission of a heritage of practices; (2) a Cartesian humanism: based on the correlated notions of nature (for example there is a nature of language in Paulhan) and the universal; dependent on the existence of a subject capable of constituting knowledge based on reason, which knowledge would be freed from simple adherence to common sense and would be based on the possibility of argumentative transcendence. The subject of such knowledge would therefore, one imagines, be independent of what he knows.
The problem is then to reconcile these two thoughts of transmission (oral/Cartesian). As Paulhan defines them, it seems that they are difficult to reconcile. In the first two parts of this article, I will endeavor to show how Paulhan's failure to think together about rational transmission and oral transmission paradoxically leads him to practice a critical antihumanism. In a third part, I will present the implications of Paulhan's critical research in terms of literary theory, before attempting to schematically indicate its after-effects, direct or indirect, in the second half of the 20th century. The aim of this article will be to arrive at a more worried and perhaps more critical conclusion than that of Gaëtan Picon in the pages he formerly devoted to Paulhan: “By preparing the ground for a reconciliation of man and his language, [Paulhan's thought] invites us to no longer feel as opposed the expression of human truth and the pleasure taken in the beauty of forms: rhetoric and humanism (2). »
The shipwreck of a philosophy of clarity: argumentative aporias and a crisis of rationality in Clef de la poésie
A search for clarity
There is in Paulhan a desire for clarity. In a certain way, he always tends to place himself in a situation of greater consciousness and to ensure the criteria of this consciousness. All his theoretical work is rooted here. Hence a lexicon largely borrowed from the philosophies of clarity (3) to which he attaches Valéry, admiring but circumspect. According to him, illusion, error and confusion characterize the various contemporary doctrines on language. More generally, his point is about method, in the Cartesian sense. It consists of a reorganization of knowledge starting from an indisputable, obvious point. That point remains to be determined.
Clarity is therefore the aim of his theoretical texts. It implies confidence in the possibility of distinguishing truth from falsehood. In a sense, this confidence engages both reality and the subject, and gives an almost ontological perspective to his enterprise. We can reread, for example, the beginning of Clef de la poésie:
The various investigations, the doctrines and aphorisms, the commentaries and confessions, with which we see today the poetry overwhelmed, give, in their contrariety, the most lively desire to finally identify some method or key, which will allow us to separate the true from the false (4).
Distinguishing truth from falsehood is unmistakably a philosophical, Cartesian ambition. Yet things are not that simple.
Literature as an era: the confusion of opinions
Because, if we must aim for clarity, it is because the situation requires it. Paulhan presents this situation as the reign of discord and confusion in matters of literature. In À demain, la poésie, he affirms that for more than a century poets abandoned the rules which constituted poetry as a genre and the motives which oriented it towards a thought of the community (6). There is a withdrawal there which leads to two perils:
– a communicational and social exile (L’Art pour tous by the young Mallarmé, in short); – a problem of definition: poetry seeing itself reduced to little, as if “plucked (7)”, the works can no longer seek their specificity in standards given extrinsically to the writing. This problem of definition, which can undoubtedly be presented as characteristic of the very notion of literature (8), implies a loss of reference and the risk of a certain relativism.
This relativism appears clearly in the paradox which transforms the position of the Rhetorician and that of the Terrorist into one another, and which would ultimately lead to doubting the poetic fact itself. Hence Paulhan’s observation: “The very existence of poetry becomes curiously debatable, and as if suspended (9). » Imposing a regime of clarity on this confusion will therefore save poetry from metadiscursive wanderings which risk ultimately condemning it.
However, it must be understood that the historical dimension of Paulhan's reflection is not circumstantial. His approach not only finds an opportunity there, but also, as we will see, its conditions. Indeed, if the aim of clarity is clearly stated, the method implemented is problematic, to the very extent that its starting point is cultural rather than rational. This is what we will see by analyzing the argument put in place in Key to poetry.
Key to poetry: argumentative wandering
I will try to show two things based on a reading of Key to Poetry (10): that Paulhan's argument does not achieve the transcendence of point of view that it claims; that the problem it poses comes from its ambiguous relationship to the premises of the dualist theses it contests.
That Paulhan's argument aims at rationality while being based on common sense
Paulhan's argument is entirely based on an ambiguity: the ambiguity between a rationality which would give access to criteria of transcendent judgment and as such ahistorical, and a starting point which is that of common sense. Two examples, among several, will help us understand this.
(1) First, the status of the principle theses is in question. These theses are: (a) that poetry contains a mystery; (b) that poetry obeys a law. The status of this starting point (already contradictory in itself) is problematic since, for Paulhan himself, the contradiction seems initially to be a matter of opinion. He presents it as “the most common place of vagueness and contradiction (11)”.
However, two lines later, the status of the members of the contradiction changes considerably:
If mystery is essential to poetry – as was first claimed – each poetic trait, from rhyme to spiritual exercise, should on the contrary bear the mark of this mystery, and translate it in some way. There is therefore every chance that the grammatical or scientific laws that are proposed to us will be found to be false (12).
Quite surprisingly, from then on, the mystery thesis is no longer considered a simple opinion (13). It is the basis of the method implemented by Paulhan. The commonplace becomes a premise of reasoning. At the moment when Paulhan claims to carry out a methodical investigation at the level of principles, he admits elements of opinion as principle.
However, this uncertainty as to the status of the arguments, this oscillation between doxic statement and position of principle, is recurrent. They make rationality a framework that is always half-effaced. The dualist theme which runs through all of his theoretical work is perhaps the most striking illustration of this.
(2) The opposition between Rhetoricians and Terrorists, as we know, is a dualistic opposition. But for what reason? Is it because both distinguish and oppose thought and language? Or because Paulhan himself reads all the critical thought of his time according to this distinction (14)? On the one hand, in Key to poetry, Paulhan takes into account the distinction between words and ideas (15) (even if he refrains from devaluing one in relation to the other); on the other, he affirms that the world of thought is, in the current state of things, entirely structured based on this distinction. Uncertainty therefore reigns as to the status of dualist premises: if Paulhan notes them in order to challenge them in the doctrines of his contemporaries, why would he admit them?
That the theme of mystery is, in Paulhan, an effect of dualism that he contests while basing himself on its premises
The premises of Paulhan's reasoning call for another remark. Paulhan's solution to the dualistic problem highlighted by the opposition of the classics and the romantics is well known: it posits that this opposition is erased by participation in the discourse. However, this participation is inconceivable. It changes Cartesian clarity into a mysticism of the obvious. Consciousness fades. The light becomes dark. Cartesian humanism is faltering, which is due to a capacity for perspective. The solution to anomie is another anomie, since the subject ceases to legislate there.
However, we can demonstrate that the mystery in which Paulhan would like us to participate, this mystery which allows us to resolve the doxic contradiction which he attacks, is only an effect of dualism. Indeed, if the mystery is inconceivable, it is because it defies the structures of thought. Two things are therefore necessary for there to be mystery: structures of thought, aprioristic if you like; something that challenges these structures. These two conditions are clearly set out in Key to Poetry. In the chapter entitled “Where our discovery is put to the test”, we will read, rather than a real test, an involuntary statement of the conditions of possibility of the Paulhanian problem and its resolution.
That this specific trait of poetry escapes the grasp of poets (and ours), there is no reason to be surprised, if it is a trait that our mind is inherently unskilled at thinking about. Common sense and philosophers agree here. One repeats at a waste of time: “A penny is a penny”, “When it is dark, it is not day”, “A door must be open or closed. » The others, more seriously, speak of the principle of identity, of contradiction, of an excluded third: “What is, they say (in a rather enigmatic way), is. » Or: “What is not true, is false. » If we prefer: “What is words is not thought; what is thought is not words (16). » And we should simply reply perhaps to common sense, to philosophers – if the principle is indeed the one which necessarily governs each step of our mind – that it is strange that this mind nevertheless knows how to isolate it, consider it, even that we are invited to respect it. As if there existed some other state which contrasted with it and made it possible to distinguish it (17).
In this paragraph we see the conditions of the mystery. Thought is structured by the principle of contradiction. Thought is defined as being absolutely heterogeneous to language. From then on, the indifference of language and thought in the poem, their identity, is a mystery. Curious inversion of the argumentative order: mystery is the Paulhanian solution to the dualism which tears Terrorists and Rhetoricians apart. But it is also well conditioned by this dualism.
If Paulhan indicates in “Changing Reason” that the dualism he deals with is only the artificial individualization, under the effect of attention, of two elements which do not exist separately, if he thus affirms a thesis which goes beyond dualism, the fact remains that his concept of mystery remains relative to this dualism. There is not necessarily a weakness for Paulhan here. I will rather see there the circumscription of the ambiguous project that he assigns to himself: this project consists of starting from opinion to go to the very heart of what the opinion deals with. It is a question of showing how the different doxa participate, beyond their apparent diversity, in a shared evidence which brings them together, in the same Law. Paulhan seeks less the truth of what poetry is than the law which regularly opposes Rhetoricians and Terrorists, in the hope that this law is itself the essence of poetry (18). We can read here the uneasiness of an immanent thought which claims to extract itselfact itself from the contingencies of opinion, but only leads back to the ideological certainty which gives them life. An ideological certainty is confused with the essence of language.
Two trends therefore polarize Paulhan's speech. Dogmatism on one side, empiricism on the other. However, it seems that each of these positions is uncomfortable for him.
(1) The dogmatic tendency is indicated in the fact that Paulhan's thought is a thought of evidence, a thought confident in the immediacy of his intuitions. This perhaps explains why doxa, in its spontaneity in recognizing the poetic mystery, is not doubtful, by the very fact of its spontaneity. However, this dogmatism is constantly corrected by allusions to the uncertain nature of propositions firmly assumed elsewhere.
(2) The empiricist tendency would imply that the work of thought has no other element than doxa, that it is an immersed work, without hindsight. But then how can we construct the point of view responsible for identifying criteria for judgment? Paulhan's empiricism is not a skepticism which makes a law out of a regularity. Indeed, Maurice Blanchot shows how the conflict between the Letter and the Spirit, as Paulhan observes it, manifests through its regularity “something essential, a contradiction present in the language itself and of which the opposing sides of critics and writers would only be the necessary expression (19)”.
We can therefore say that the premises of Paulhan's reasoning have no legitimacy, to the extent that their status is never really clarified, to the extent that it is impossible in these matters for Paulhan to know where the judgment of truth begins, where adherence to the common place recognized as such ends. To put it another way, these premises have no real argumentative transcendence. Paulhan's dogmatism remains uncertain when his empiricism is too confident.
The question of intention
I will now address the theory of the subject involved in Paulhan's theories. It is a question of exposing two theses here: (1) the entirety of Paulhan's interrogation is an interrogation of the notion of intention; (2) this question leads to the destruction of the notion of intention. We will thus show that, paradoxically, the dissolution of the subject, in Paulhan, coincides with the heroic affirmation of subjective experience, the aim being to suggest how Paulhan's aporias lead to both the disappearance of the Cartesian subject and that of the subject of orality that we mentioned in the introduction.
The question of language is a questioning of the notion of intention
The study of language and literature is always for Paulhan a study of the different attitudes that one can take when dealing with language or literature. This approach to language is more phenomenological than linguistic or poetic: it is a reflection on the different phenomenalizations of language and poetry20. Terror and Rhetoric are less theories of language strictly speaking than points of view on language. As Blanchot explains:
Common language is such that we cannot see it, at the same time, as a whole, from both sides. If then it does not exist less (in law), this is due to the fact that it is essentially a dialogue: it belongs to a couple, the speaker and the interlocutor, the author and the reader. […] “Author’s thoughts, reader’s words,” says Jean Paulhan; author's words, reader's thoughts (21). »
Not only are Rhetoric and Terror points of view on language, but they are points of view which highlight their intentional dimension. Because if the Rhetorician sees words and effects where the Terrorist sees thoughts and an expression, both agree on the idea that the thought is better than its expression (22). This means that they share (1) a certain linguistic instrumentalism; (2) the idea that the subject can claim independence from language (this independence makes meaning the very domain of the voluntary / this independence makes possible an awareness of language as an objectification of it). Therefore, questioning the positions of the Rhetorician and the Terrorist as Paulhan does amounts to calling into question the notions of intention and consciousness (23).
Becoming aware of language implies being unconscious of its functioning
The paradox is that this questioning presents itself as an inversion of the data of the problem. There was already at a first level a phenomenon of inversion indicated by the opposition of Rhetoricians and Terrorists. What is intention for one is an effect of language for the other (24).
But at a second level, what appears as voluntary for Rhetoric and Terror appears to Paulhan as illusion and, as such, as unconsciousness. To put it in a very baroque way, Paulhan's critical discourse presents itself as the consciousness of this unconsciousness which claims to be consciousness.
There is, however, a problem of method. Paulhan is fully aware of this. The deployment of his argument does not satisfy, at least in an expected manner, the requirements of methodical thought, as Descartes set them. The last chapter of the 1936 version of Les Fleurs de Tarbes explains this problem. This chapter is significantly titled: “Changing reason (25)”. He states that the thought experiment carried out in Les Fleurs invites us to overturn the very foundation of the Cartesian method, which stipulates that “our thought is in no way subject to or confused with its objects, but independent, to the point that we can completely trust the simple intuitions that it gives us (26)”.
Because it seeks to clarify the data of the literary problem, Paulhan's approach appears as a form of heroism of conscience. However, it must be noted that this heroism can only be expressed in terms of a destruction of consciousness as a power of retreat and mediation. The intention which establishes the antagonistic positions of Terror and Rhetoric is only an effect of clarity. It is the unconsciousness of resulting from a distorted relationship with language. Both the intention and the clarity that surrounds it are effects of metadiscourse. The subject which is based there has no other consistency than its metadiscursive activity.
Where meaning was given for Rhetoric and the Romantics as a dialectic of intention and speech, Paulhan affirms their indifference. For the Terrorist and the Rhetorician, intention (as a choice or as a decision) made the dignity or indignity of speech. For Paulhan, true consciousness of language is unconsciousness. Discourse as said stumbles upon the dazzled present of discourse as saying.
Paulhan restores the Terror that he condemns: advocating unconsciousness, he invites the silence of tautology, the semantic form of presence
We must then show how this dazzling results from a metaphysical axiology based on the notion of presence. The distinction between language and thought is based among Rhetoricians and Terrorists on the idea that self-presence is the ultimate value and that anything that deviates from it is bad (27). However, Paulhan's demonstration does not criticize this axiology. On the contrary, it affirms that self-presence is only in the silent unconsciousness of enunciation.
We can indeed state that the linguistic instrumentalism of Rhetoricians and Terrorists is a thought of presence, language being judged on the criterion of the self-presence of the subject. However, according to Henri Meschonnic, while rejecting linguistic instrumentalism, Paulhan proposes an accomplishment without remainder. The author of The Sign and the Poem thus explains that “the notion of perfection of language is the completion of pragmatism, the opposite of instrumentalism which accomplishes instrumentalism (28)”. The dualistic regret of the lost unity which all instrumentalism is imbued with is then transposed into the dream of becoming one with language.
From then on, any comment is in vain, since meaning is pure self-presence in language. Until the next setback, that is: until the next illusion. The true language, the common language, is at the same time that of violent solipsism. If each of the two illusions was relative to one of the poles of the participants in the act of communication (author/reader), true language will erase this relativity. As Blanchot explains: “For the original language, everything happens as if there had not been an author and a reader, but one and the same power of saying and reading replacing the saying and the listening (29). »
The erasure of rhetorical poles implies an erasure of doubt and hindsight, an end of interpretation, since everything takes place silently in the interior and impersonal voice of participation in meaning. Where we find the problem pointed out by Derrida in The Voice and the Phenomenon: problem of an “absolute wanting-to-hear-one-speak” where the living present of the voice always risks coinciding with the white and deadly voice of silence (30). Paulhan's rhetoric therefore thinks of the community of meaning as a communicative Dionysianism.
If Paulhan seems to be very aware of the fact that it is undoubtedly an anxiety linked to “poverty of experience (31)” which leads to the intoxication of the poetic theories of the interwar period, does he really escape it?
We are sometimes surprised that Letters these days seek less coherence and rigor than emotion, violence, tremor, and head-over-heels. But undoubtedly there was a time, which it is up to us to recall, when they were sure enough to transform without trying to move; too effective to need any effect. From which we would barely see, in so many bursts and agitation, other than remorse for lost efficiency (32).
Just as much as the surrealist experience, the “lost body” wonderfully characterizes the adherence to the discourse that Paulhan theorizes.
Implications in terms of literary theory: tranquility of a literature without contours
We can now present the theoretical impact of Paulhan's theories. We will thus mark in the form of remarks two consequences of the tottering of humanism for the idea of literature: for Paulhan, the conventionalist definition of literature is a way of evacuating the fertile problematicity of the very notion of literature; the primacy of language in the approach to literature leads to depriving literature of its rhetorical specificity, which consists of proposing a discursive exception in dialogue with ambient discourses.
The agreement as a guarantor of trust
In a certain way, Paulhan's whole problem is to find a fair relationship to meaning, to criticize the illusions of his contemporaries regarding the relationship between meaning and language. As such, there is no worry in him in the strong sense. His theoretical skepticism (what could be more skeptical than his method of confronting contradictory theses?) is not a metaphysical skepticism. It makes sense. It's about knowing how to think about it.
In this sense, the thought of the commonplace and the convention is not problematic. It does not engage in reflection on contingency, as is the case for example with Valéry when he exposes the fragments of a fiduciary theory of language. Convention in Paulhan is never thematized as a problem of meaning. There is a confidence in convention there, free from any despair. When Valéry writes in Tel Quel:
Rhyme has the great success of infuriating simple people who naively believe that there is something under the sky more important than a convention. They have the naive belief that some thought can be deeper, more lasting... than any convention...
This is not the least pleasure of rhyme, and by which it caresses the ear the least gently (33),
It’s a kind of despair that we hear. The distance is immense here with what we can read in À demain, la poésie. In this text, the disrespect for conventions testifies, according to Paulhan, to a loss of confidence in the power of poetic mystery, the observation of the rules being the sign of “boldness” and “hope (34)”. Thus the rule is “more mysterious than fantasy – because it would seem at first sight improbable that the rule would come to satisfy us (35)”. The common man who naively practices rhyme when he writes poetry is a quiet, confident man, and the best of poets (36). This is because by rule we must understand “a few sure means, for the writer, of reaching a point of accomplishment (37)”.
The primacy of language implies the erasure of the contours of literature
Second remark, there is no idea of literature in Paulhan that does not involve a philosophy of language. It is through the thought of language that he overcomes the oppositions due to problems of point of view. Indeed, the subject always being a view on language, the different subjectifications of language present themselves as different glimpses of the same substance. From where everything proceeds and to what everything returns. Thus the search for criteria of literary judgment which goes beyond conflicts of points of view always involves a notation of the linguistic nature of literature:
I stick to the banal evidence: […] literature is in any case a combination, a machine, if you prefer a monument, made of words and sentences. There is therefore every chance that we are dealing with laws of language (38).
The literary work is therefore a case of language. Better, as Blanchot says, the work accomplishes language. She perfects it. Removing it from the duplication of points of view:
In the Key, we see the mystery of language redoubled for poetry by the effort it makes to free itself from it. If this mystery is the metamorphosis of meaning into word and of word into meaning, the poem, by fixing the words in a stricter matter and the meaning in a stronger consciousness, seems in fact an attempt to prevent the game of metamorphosis, seems a challenge thrown to the mystery, but this one, occurring despite so many precautions and against the powerful machine prepared to annihilate it, is all the more striking, and twice a mystery (39).
Poetry is a redoubling of language. It is the confirmation, the purest manifestation. She is subject to it. This implies a sacralization of language, its essentialization.
Language is therefore primary. Literature comes later to fix the dizziness. Two things follow from this:
(1) first that the ontological dignity of literature is maintained;
(2) then, that there is literary specificity only in the expression of language. Or, it comes down to the same thing, that there is no specificity of literature.
Thus, the maintenance of literary signs (conventions, genres) paradoxically plays against the possibility of a specific definition of literature and its heterogeneity to common discourses. The literary exception must be maintained precisely because it corresponds to common sense. It must be maintained as that which precisely deprives literature of its definition. The definition of literature here coincides with an essentialization of language. Literature, very utilitarianly, is a work of highlighting the essence of language. Ultimately, the literary is thought of as residue, to the extent that Paulhan's theory of literature is similar to a teleology.
Theories of the second half of the 20th century: Paulhan's duplicity
It is probable that the Paulhanian theory diffused throughout the second half of the 20th century. In the absence of proven influences, which would require extensive work of historical investigation, we can identify two critical trends which are strangely close to certain aspects of Paulhanian thought: one trend which focuses on the linguistic dimension of literary fact, another which emphasizes its rhetorical and communicational dimension.
Literature and language
The idea that literature can be assimilated to language gained great success in the second half of the century. This idea varies and embraces different theories of language, from structuralism to phenomenological theories of the figural.
For structuralism, literature is a case of language. Language has its own and autonomous legality. It can be studied as a structure, independently of extrinsic realities. Literature, through the exemplary communication situation it offers, is a space conducive to this study. It manifests the decontextualized essence of all language and the linguistic immanence of the play of points of view. For figural theorists, literature is a case of language. Language has a depth of designation, which is veiled by the fixation of usage. Literature manifests this depth by reintegrating mobility into the system of uses. Through the play of this mobility, it manifests the play of language by doubling it (40).
Each time, literature regains dignity through the fact that it is a privileged observatory of a sacred language. Each time too, literature is transcended towards something other than itself, and its definition depends on theories which precede it. This makes for a literature confident in its power, despite everything justified.
Rhetorical and pragmatic theories
Paulhan addresses in his theoretical texts a problem which is inseparably linked to history and literary theory. The question of the authority of the work (41). It is in fact this problem which bases the investigation into the Terror. Terror is the idea that the work has authority through its participation in something that escapes communication and therefore questioning. She bases her power in something unspeakable, in an absolute. It is a legitimization strategy.
Paulhan often links this communicational violence to romanticism. We can rightly maintain that he himself does not come out of it. That his rehabilitation of rhetoric remains caught in an absolutist thinking of literature and language. However, it seems that a movement has been launched after him. Today it leads to the theories of Jean Bessière and Dominique Maingueneau.
In a certain way, Jean Bessière is a continuation of Paulhan's thought. In Bessière (42) we find the characterizations of the work as a common place (with the difference that this common place is defined by questioning, and no longer by confidence, and the question of relevance), a critique of the romantic (terrorist) paradigm defined as literature of exceptional status (the expression is taken from Agamben, who takes it from Carl Schmitt), that is to say as literature which refuses any communicative integration, as pure tautology, dogmatic and authoritarian.
For Dominique Maingueneau (43), the pragmatic exploration of literary communication is closely correlated with a critique of the romantic model of which Proust is, according to him, an eminent representative. The study of the constitution of discursive legitimacy gives rise to an expanded rhetoric (drawing on the resources of sociology). As with Paulhan, it is a matter of understanding how literary discourse (among others) establishes its authority, to question all authoritarianism and restore literature to the sharing of meaning and community.
The difference between these last two contemporary doctrines and that of Paulhan is undoubtedly due to the question of the absolute, to their skepticism. Current critical discourses accomplish a secularization of literature which must question us, in the same way as the veiled erasure of the subject and the tacit imposition of silence in Paulhan.
Benoit Monginot University of Toulouse II
1 Orality is the act of subjectification which allows the production of new texts. This is how we speak of the Oral Torah.
2 Gaëtan Picon, Panorama of contemporary French literature, Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 302.
3 According to his own expression in Paul Valéry or Literature considered as a fake, Brussels, Ed. Complex, 1987, p. 70.
4 Key to poetry, which allows one to distinguish truth from falsehood in any observation or doctrine affecting rhyme, rhythm, verse, the poet and poetry, Paris, Gallimard, 1944, p. 13.
5 Participation in conventions, response to expectations.
6 The epic, the legendary, etc.
7 À demain, la poésie [1947], in Complete Works, t. II, ed. Bernard Baillaud, Paris, Gallimard, 2009, p. 423.
8 Cf. Jacques Rancière, The Mute Word: essay on the contradictions of literature, Paris, Hachette literatures, 1998.
9 Key to poetry, op. cit., p. 34.
10 Here is a summary of this short work. The purpose of Clef de la poésie is as follows. Faced with the confusion of the usual characterizations of poetry, Paulhan sets out to forge a law to settle the debate. Two things first: poetry is “mystery”; poetry is law. In a sense, this is contradictory. If poetry is indeed both law and mystery, this law must be imbued with mystery. Determination of the mystery. This mystery, however inconceivable it may be, is nothing less than exceptional. It is generally experienced. Far from being an occasion of darkness, it paradoxically illuminates the world. Determination of the law in light of what has been said about the mystery. But poetry is made of words and ideas, and in such a way that words and ideas are interchangeable. Determining the law of poetry amounts for Paulhan to determining the law of this reciprocal conversion of words into ideas, of ideas into words. However, it is precisely on the question of the relationship between speech and thought that poetic doctrines oppose each other. Rhetoricians and Terrorists clash, holding here that words come from inspiration, there that inspiration comes from language. However, this opposition of doctrines disappears as soon as we observe the works, which are much less different in their effects than the theoretical dispute would have led us to suppose. From this Paulhan deduces that in the poem, the content and the form are indifferent. The dualist principle (“What is word is not thought; and what is thought is not word”), which Paulhan wrongly equates to the principle of non-contradiction (we will come back to this), falls. The law that Paulhan seeks emerges here. It is inconceivable, to the extent that, according to him, it engages in mystical paths where the principle of contradiction eclipses itself. We experience it, in a banal way, with each reading.
11 Key to poetry, op. cit., p.10.
12 Ibid.
13 This is already what Maurice Blanchot noted in “The mystery in letters”, in La Part du feu, Paris, Gallimard, 1949, p. 56: Les Fleurs de Tarbes opens with the observation of a doxa of mystery, and closes with a participation in this mystery.
14 “It’s the whole metaphysical gap, from the materialists to the idealists; politics, from fascists to democrats and from traditionalists to revolutionaries. It’s the whole debate of the letter and the spirit. Thus, in a domain closer to ours - if not the same -, sometimes we account for the name by the thing (as shroud, it is said, really renders shroud! As it was the name that the object called!) But sometimes of the thing by the name (it is not without intention that we call weasels in thirty languages: little beauties. It is to obtain from them, through the flattery of this name, gentler behavior). » Ibid., p. 31-32. This position does not seem to vary much. Indeed, in 1952, during an interview subsequently reprinted in Les Uncertitudes du langue, he again affirmed to Robert Mallet: “Yes, there are only two [doctrines]. It may be surprising but it is a fact. »
15 “In the absence of expressing the poetic mystery and even of reflecting on it, I can at least know what elements it is made of: it is thought on the one hand and language on the other, ideas and words, sense and sounds. » Key to poetry, op. cit., p. 10.
16 Let us note the shift, specific to all dualism, which poses the relationship between thought and speech in terms of exclusion.
17 Key to poetry, op. cit., p. 39-40.
18 Cf. Kevin Newmark, “Saussure, Paulhan, Blanchot, on Parole”, Yale French Studies, no 106, 2004, p. 105.
19 M. Blanchot, “The mystery in letters”, art. cited, p. 50.
20 The fact that this shift is not always expressly thematized, that Paulhan continues to pose the problem of language in the mode of “what is”, undoubtedly has a lot to do with the impression of vertigo that reading his texts arouses.
21 Cf. “The mystery in letters”, art. cited, p. 53-54.
22 Cf. “Rhetoric is reborn from its ashes” [1938], in Jacob Cow the pirate, Montolieu, Deyrolle, 1997, p. 41.
23 Literature does not get along well with the notion of intention: “Literary hell is paved with intentions. It is death to the heart, said Flaubert, that we return from the masked balls of the spirit. ". Cf. “Rhetoric had its password” [1946], in Jacob Cow…, op. cit., p. 99.
24 Ibid., p. 109: “Such is the power of places that they replace, by a curious reversal, the first intentions – the naive intentions – of the poem or the drama. It is no longer the image that serves to express love; but love, the image. »
25 Cf. the “Dossier” of Fleurs de Tarbes [1941], ed. Jean-Claude Zylberstein, Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Folio-essays”, 1990, p. 247-257.
26 Which implies that clarity and distinction in thought are an effect of the work of the mind on the matter it apprehends; that the dichotomous method transforms the object of study, which in terms of language can only be grasped as everything; the progression of reasons in order, from the simplest to the most complex, turns out to be false, for lack of a primary and participatory understanding of the whole.
27 The Rhetorician, no less than the Terrorist, but in a less obvious way, seeks an increased presence: “Should we still be surprised that this spirit prides itself on a greater liveliness, a more constant presence than is common? No, if it must, in each of its operations, overturn the normal order of our thought – if it only operates, to tell the truth, at the cost of this presence and this liveliness. » Jacob Cow, op. cit., p. 111.
28 Henri Meschonnic, The Sign and the Poem, Paris, Gallimard, 1975, p. 207.
29 M. Blanchot, La Part du feu, op. cit., p. 58.
30 Jacques Derrida, The Voice and the Phenomenon, Paris, PUF, 1967, p. 115.
31 As Walter Benjamin thematized it in the same years.
32 “Rhetoric rises from its ashes”, art. cited, p. 51.
33 Paul Valéry, Tel que, t. I, Paris, Gallimard, 1941, p. 151.
34 À demain, la poésie, op. cit., p. 415.
35 Ibid., p. 424.
36 Ibid., p. 432.
37 Small preface to all criticism, in Complete Works, t. II, op. cit., p. 384.
38 Ibid., p. 375.
39 M. Blanchot, La Part du feu, op. cit., p. 58.
40 We are referring to authors like Deleuze, Lyotard, Laurent Jenny (who published in 1982 a work with a significant title: Terror and the Signs: poetics of rupture, Paris, Gallimard). In La Parole singulière (Paris, Belin, 1990), the author explicitly thematizes the function of doubling of what he calls figure, the doubling aiming to highlight a generally hidden characteristic of language.
41 It seems that he is one of the pioneers of this trend which is widely documented today.
42 Cf. What status for literature? (Paris, PUF, 2002) and Principles of literary theory (Paris, PUF, 2005).
43 We refer to The Literary Discourse: paratopy and scene of enunciation, Paris, Armand Colin, coll. “U. Letters Series”, 2004.