Preface to The Power of Rhetorics

Michael Syrotinski

Jean Paulhan, best known for the many editorial activities through which he encouraged and published an entire generation of French writers in the first half of the twentieth century, has never been an easy figure to accommodate within this landscape. One could speculate endlessly on the reasons for this, but it is doubtless due in large part to his legendary discretion and the sheer heterogeneity of his oeuvre, as well as the playful and elusive nature of his language. Although his own writings still remain largely unappreciated, they are at last beginning to attract the critical attention they deserve, both within and outside of France. The ongoing publication of his voluminous correspondences with many of the writers he championed has been complemented by regular re-editions, often very usefully annotated, of titles that had gone out of print, and by a number of important studies from a new generation of critics (well represented in the present volume) who have been drawn to the strange allure and power of his texts. This upward turn in fortunes is set to continue still further with the decision by Gallimard to produce a new seven volume edition of Paulhan's complete works, and with a number of forthcoming translations into English, commissioned principally by the University of Illinois Press, of some of his most significant works, including De la paille et du grain [Of Chaff and Wheat] and Les fleurs de Tarbes The Flowers of Tarbes.

This issue of Yale French Studies devoted to Paulhan is thus quite timely in many ways. The chiasmus of the title reflects the bifurcation that appears to have divided approaches to his work: he is often seen either as a "precursor of deconstruction," a critic who paved the way for the rehabilitation of rhetoric as central to the operations of literary theory, and whose own writings also dramatize the unsettling power he discerned within rhetoric; or conversely as a mysterious figure who held sway over the world of letters in the first halt of the twentieth century, and whose pivotal interventions in French literature, art, and politics provoke endless fascination. While there have been other, more heterogeneous collections of essays on Paulhan (Gallimard published a centenary volume in 1984, and there have been two Cerisy colloquia), the distinct feature of this issue is its theoretically informed, sustained reflection on the interrelation between two crucial focal points of his work: rhetoric and power. The essays presented here tease out a number of interconnected strands that offer us clues that go some way toward explaining the enduring power of Paulan as both a writer and a mythical figure. First of all by looking more closely at the ways in which, as an editor and critic, and as the director of the Nouvelle revue française, he shaped the direction French literature took during the period of perhaps its most strikingly original innovations and its profoundest transformations. This is indissociably bound up with his conceptualization of the arena of literary criticism as incessantly land necessarıly conflictual, which has direct resonances for today's more complex and heterogeneous theoretical scene. Secondly, his writings on art, his playful but incisive meditations on the relationship between language and illness, and his efforts to probe just what is at stake in the authority we grant to etymology, are seen to be different but related versions of his thinking about a certain otherness of language, and of how language can take us to its edge and beyond, whether this is formulated as the real, materiality, an event, or the singularity of an experience. Three contributions, then, explore Paulhan's subtle and original articulation of the link between language and politics, and this involves in particular looking anew at the important place that Paulhan occupies in Maurice Blanchot's thinking and intellectual itinerary. Finally, three critics engage in closer analysis of the texture and rhetoric of his fictional and imaginative writings (which are, as Blanchot has rightly pointed out, by no means limited to his extraordinary récits). The issue concludes with translations of two short but potent texts by Paulhan from either side of the Second World War, which underline the originality of his thinking about the meaning of democracy, and provide fine examples of his deceptively casual style, as well as an extremely useful entry point into his writing.

Paulhan's thoughts about the literary object, the literary act, and the Literary scene in France, as well as his influential interventions within that scene, are in a sense very straightforward, and unwaveringly consistent throughout his life. The direction of his early thinking owed much to his father, Frédéric Paulhan, a well-known philosopher in France, whose works were a blend of philosophy, linguistics, and the scientific psychology of the period. Paulhan studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne, during which time he made the acquaintance of the anarchist Jean Grave. The powerful attraction anarchism held for Paulhan would be evident later on, reappearing in the book he is most associated with, Les Fleurs de Tarbes, under the guise of what he termed literary "Terror," or the endless necessity of writing against the literature and language of one's predecessors. Between 1908 and 1910 Paulhan went to Madagascar, where he taught at the island's first French lycée. While there, he learned Malagasy, and became fascinated by the function and inexplicable power of proverbial language. He wrote a number of essays on Malagasy proverbs, a linguistic phenomenon that was eventually transformed into Terror's opposite term in Les fleurs de Tarbes, namely "Rhetoric," or conventional language, commonplaces, and literary clichés.

Paulhan's ideas on language evolve through his many short, occasional essays, but also in his book reviews, and the chroniques written in the Nrf under the pseudonym Jean Guérin. His ideas are synthesized in Les fleurs de Tarbes, which scans a truly encyclopedic and eclectic range of mostly French literary references. These are all invoked, however, in order to illustrate a deceptively simple thesis: the eternally recurring conflict between "terrorists" (those who see innovation as a rejection of pre-existing models) and "rhetoricians" (those who believe creativity is only possible by working within the necessary limits of conventional forms). Even though the book is in some sense situated within the broader French intellectual context of the opposing ideological trends of abstract rationalism and a Durkheimian sacred violence, Paulhan's position with respect to these currents of thought is typically elusive. For him they are not in fact distinctly separate positions, since when pushed to their limits, they turn out to be two sides of the same (literary and linguistic) coin. As he notes, it is ultimately impossible to determine whether a given word or expression is "original" or not. This undecidability at the heart of language, and Paulhan's focus on the rhetorical dimension of literature, have led to the view of his work as prefiguring literary critics such as Gérard Genette, Roland Barthes, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. Paulhan shared with de Man a keen attention to the epistemological and ethical consequences of taking the rhetorical uncertainties of language and literature seriously, and an understanding of the impossibility of apprehending the world awhile on little-known, short-lived publications such as Demain or Le 14 juillet. But also looking at these texts and contexts through a new and unfamiliar prism, just as Paulhan himself advocated looking again at what we take for granted, thinking about the strange power of overlooked words and phrases, which are overlooked precisely because we take them to be things that go without saying, that need no attention or intellectual effort. The difficulties of transposing Paulhan into a context that has relevance for an Anglophone readership are indeed analogous to those we run up against in translating Paulhan's texts into English, since the conversational, idiomatic quality of his language has the same casual insouciance that characterizes clichés and commonplace expressions. From the very moment we enter into the transaction of a translation, we have irretrievably lost that very quality we were trying to translate. One very slight example that surfaced in the course of editing this volume (and this is all it takes, since its exemplarity is precisely in its slightness) crystallizes this whole question. I was faced with the decision of having to choose between competing English versions of Paulhan's phrase, le premier venu, which appears at crucial moments in the essays by Laurent Jenny, Brigitte Ouvry-Vial, Jean-Yves Pouilloux, and Richard Rand, as well as in Jennifer Bajorek's very fine translation of La démocratie fait appel au premier venu (1). I had to admit to my failure, or inability, to settle on one universally acceptable term, or to say one was an objectively "better" translation than the other. This has less to do, I would like to believe, with my own competence as an editor and translator than it does with the elusive power of the term itself, and the way it is used by Paulhan. It is in tact utterly resistant to translation, but it also mirrors the logic of his argument itself: its untranslatability is in a sense the whole point. What Paulhan is saying in his text is that all of the different, conflicting political positions and ideologies in France before the Second World War were "right," and to have followed any one of them to its logical conclusions would probably have prevented the war. The randomness and contingency this implies is, he argues, no bad thing, and is in fact a kind of irreducible necessity underpinning the very existence of democracy. Paulhan underlines this point in his controversial texts on the literary purge after the war, when he stresses the need for language (considered as a working model for the way any human community is bound together) to make room for a kind of arbitrary, random torce, which he terms its mystery. All linguistic encounters, in this sense, whether they be political dialogues, critical readings, carefully weighed translations, or simple greetings to passers-by, are fundamentally ethico-political acts. Read this way, the competing translations of le premier venu all happen to be equally right, to the extent that they actively engage with the resistance of Paulhan's language, and allow each particular contextual or contingent encounter to determine what comes after (2). Reading and rereading Paulhan thus not only opens up what may have seemed a reassuringly familiar literary history to its less familiar names and contexts, and not only offers us some surprising insights into how that literary history came to be written; his texts also provide us with a highly original, and quite contemporary, perspective on what it means to write history itself.

It is a rare privilege to edit a volume on one of the literary world's truly great editors, and doing so has given me a far better appreciation of just how exceptional an exponent of this art he was. I would like to thank all the contributors and translators for their commitment to the volume, and for their endless patience as the manuscript passed through the various stages of its production. I am extremely grateful to the editorial board of Yale French Studies for agreeing to publish a Paulhan issue, and would like in particular to express my warm appreciation to Alyson Waters for guiding it through from blueprint to printed page. Jacqueline Paulhan gave her permission to translate the two texts by Paulhan, and this is hereby gratefully acknowledged. Finally Willis Regier, director of the University of Illinois Press, deserves a special mention for his championing of the Paulhan cause, and for granting permission to reproduce, in modified form, the contributions by Richard Rand and Jennifer Bajorek.

A note on references. Although a new seven volume edition of Paulhan's complete works is on the way, references will largely be to the 5-volume Œuvres complètes, published by the Cercle du livre précieux, which Paulhan himself was in the process of editing up until his death in 1968. This will be abbreviated most of the time as OC, followed by the volume number in roman numerals, then the page reference. Where other, more recent, re-editions are preferred by contributors, the relevant publication details are given in the notes.

Jennifer Bajorek discusses the different nuances of this term, and the problems inherent in translating it, in a footnote to her translation at the end of the volume.
Jacques Derrida comes across Paulhan's term, possibly by happenstance, in trying to think through the concept of a "democratie à venir" (" democracy to come") in his recent text Voyous (Paris: Galilée, 2003), and also articulates it as a question of translation: "(Paulhan says somewhere, and I'm transcribing it in my terms, that to think democracy is to think le premier venu: whosoever, anybody, at the permeable border between 'who' and 'what,' a living being, a corpse and a ghost). Is le premier venu not the best way of translating 'le premier à venir' (the first one to come along)."