Progress in the Novel: Rather Slow

The uncertainties of the novel

What to do with Jean Paulhan's stories? It's an embarrassing question, just the way Paulhan liked them. Certainly, these stories are not widespread. But they have been collected for almost fifty years in the Tchou edition, and literary historians or poetics scholars of the novel have had time to take an interest in them. They were in no hurry to do so. There is one published thesis, which is disappointing – that of Bernard Baillaud, which remains unpublished – and a handful of articles, none of which is decisive (1). The question of Terror in literature has monopolized critical attention, to the detriment of the work and even the author: the available biographies are also not up to the task of their subject. However, these stories are not only essential for understanding Paulhan's project and his achievements: they are in themselves first-rate texts, very original, rich in meaning and emotion, worthy of an informed reader – a reader worth two.

Let us therefore try to understand why they were neglected. It seems to me that we can put forward four types of explanations: historical, generic, genetic, hermeneutic (sorry for these invasive suffixes).

History: it is difficult to fit Paulhan's stories into a history of the novel. They are also almost absent from Michel Raimond's book, La Crise du roman (2). They do not in fact fit satisfactorily into any of the paradigms which govern the representation of the history of the modern novel, neither as such, nor in a manner specific to the French novel: the description of the real world and the "illusionist" techniques which accredit it, as Maupassant's preface to 'The Novel' (3) clearly states; the representation of interior life, from the "psycho-narrative" to the flow of consciousness and the interior monologue, the dominant pole of the 1920s, and which will be extended by the "tropisms" of Sarraute; structural reflexivity, thematized since the symbolist years by Gide under the name of "mise en abyme", and which leads directly from Faux-monnayeurs to the Nouveau Roman. It is not that they are foreign to them: but they do not mark any progress forming a milestone in a historiographical construction. And above all they claim nothing for themselves; like Apollinaire or Soupault, other neglected writers, Paulhan did not produce a theory of the novel.

Difficult to locate and categorize, this corpus could be considered representative of the "trends of the contemporary novel" (4): Paulhan then neighbors Max Jacob, Salmon, Mac Orlan, Toulet, but also Morand and Proust, under the sign of "unforeseen buffoonery" – somewhere between the unobtainable fanciful school, the eccentricity of the young Malraux, and his own absurdity which has not caught on. When this news fades away, he is perceived as a bizarre object, a literary joke. Alain Bosquet comments on L’Aveuglette: "Jules Renard presides over it next to a Barbey d’Aurevilly tamed by an Anatole France who would have the perversity of a Mirbeau, whose style would be worth that of a Gide (5). " Let’s focus on Jules Renard. Paulhan pays homage to him with the presence in Lalie of a coquecigrue: Coquecigrues was the title of a collection of prose that Renard had published in 1893 (6). Much later (but just before publishing his short story at the top of the Tchou edition), he devoted a study to him in which he asserted that "Renard exerted on our prose the same sort of attraction that Rimbaud and Mallarmé had on our poets (7)". The comparison makes us jump. But Renard, after L'Écornifleur - which is a sort of naturalist counterpart to Paludes -, had undertaken from within a deconstruction of naturalism by drastically reducing the part of fiction necessary for the production of a coherent mimesis (Maupassant's "trompe-l'oeil"). Paulhan starts from this minimal, almost infra-narrative point, of Natural Stories, where the "artistic" arrangement of the data of experience is reduced to its simplest expression. It is therefore located, if I may use the expression, in a countercurrent of naturalism.

From a generic point of view, the difficulty is worse. Paulhan's stories do not adhere to any canonical form. These are not novels, and the only attempt in this direction, under the name of Anne Majorelle, is reduced to a "plan". These are not short stories: Paulhan could have renewed the genre as Morand did, but he is not attached to it. His stories are too few in number to form a genre, too long (the Warrior) or too short (the Causes Famous), too offbeat (The Blindfold, or The Bridge Crossed, which is both a novella and a sequence of dream stories). They are not firmly anchored in fiction, but rather autobiography transposed or continued by other means. The border that separates them from the essay is particularly unstable: Paulhan is a storyteller and he constantly tends to argue by this means. Jacob Cow should be an adventure story, The Flowers of Tarbes, a fable of modern life; The Interview on Miscellaneous Facts is not a story. And what is the status of Bad Subjects? But Paulhan had formulated in Jacob Cow, the most important essay given to Literature, almost a manifesto, a more radical point of view: "There is no visible difference, or gap, from the word to the sentence and from the sentence to the story. " The sentence is contemporary with Gide's speculations on the "pure novel"; it invalidates them in advance. But she also says that the story is everywhere, and that a narrative structure even determines the relationship between a word and its meaning, that which it takes or is given to it. The disappointing reflection on genre is transformed into reflection on the narrative tension involved in all mental processes related to language.

The difficulty also lies in the fact that Paulhan refuses to provide an editorial solution to this question of genre. The assembled sets are trompe l’oeil or fall apart at the edges. The most obvious and for a long time the only one available, the small volume of "L’Imaginaire", is posthumous. The first volume Tchou, where the choices are Paulhan's, bears at the head a generic indication: Récits, followed by a title or subtitle, Les instants bien employés, which relates to all the texts (including the interview with Robert Mallet) and places them in an ethical perspective, as if narration were only the occasion or the means. On the other hand, the chronology of writing, that of publication, and the order of the published texts interfere in a way that is not easy to interpret: this is why I spoke of genetic difficulty. There were three beginnings of the Paulhanian story: that of Guerrier, the first published book; that of The Severe Recovery, the first contribution to Literature (in no. 1); that of Lalie, the oldest text, but which only appears in the Tchou edition which it inaugurates. As for Progress in Love Quite Slow, which ensures a narrative junction between the Warrior and The Severe Recovery, and therefore makes it possible to constitute a "Maast cycle", here again we have to wait for the Tchou edition to realize this; only two detached fragments had appeared, forty years before the publication of the entire text. It is a story made up of decisions, of opportunities, of forgetting, of resurgences – a confusing story to understand like life.

As for the hermeneutical difficulty, I indicate it in a word before returning to it. It is due to the fact that, as Reverdy remarked when reading The Applied Warrior, "the subject emerges only after having closed the book" (8). There is therefore a duplication: two readings of the same book or, as Blanchot of Fleurs de Tarbes would say, two books in one; we will see other examples. All the progress, it seems, is due to this second book applied to the first, as the warrior had been to the civilian, both being Jacques Maast (9). But at first, we are disoriented, as in blindman's buff: what book have we read?

Are we therefore without reference points? Not quite. Paulhan finds his place in Jean-Yves Tadié's essay on The Poetic Story (10), which is neither a history nor a theory, but the subtle thematic journey of a corpus which emerges on the fringes of naturalism and the avant-gardes. Following his example, we can envisage several significant groupings. The first is the one that Tadié retains, that is to say the covering of the fictional character by a narrator who himself is a projection or transposition of the author: displaced autobiography or, to use Cocteau's title, adventures of the imposter (this is not an ethical imposture in the sense of Bernanos, but the fictionality inherent in all personal narration). Jacques Maast is in good company here, with Giraudoux's Jérôme Bardini, Cocteau's Thomas, Aragon's Anicet, the protagonists of Soupault and Crevel; Jacques Vaché and "La confession dédaigneuse" are not far away. They form a bridge between the characters of the symbolist story (des Esseintes, Faustroll, Tityre) and the metaphysical "talkers" of Blanchot, des Forêts and Beckett. This current is itself adjoining the speculative fiction coming from Edgar Poe (and before him, Carlyle and Quincey) and of which the best representative in France, in the absence of Mallarmé's Igitur, is Monsieur Teste; at the time when he was meditating on Guerrier, after his injury, Paulhan had also copied Valéry's entire text in his own hand.

A third group is formed by writers for whom, in the words of Breton, "the marvelous is always true", that is to say for whom the fantastic is not, as Todorov thought, a splitting of interpretation, but a splitting of the world. These are Paulhan's secret neighbors: Dhôtel, who wrote the afterwords of the stories, Limbour, of whom he loved Les Vanilliers. It is here that Paulhan separates from Jules Renard. The latter's Coquecigrues are figures of language developed in a story: the big red slug on the lip of the old woman who blows her nose is her tongue, which she shoves into her palate after having swallowed her snot (11). But Lalie meets a real cockroach who has fallen into a trap, a red-skinned girl "with here and there short hair like lichen (12)". These words, coquecigrue, lady-of-the-well, man of the woods, say that the world is full of formidable things: we must pursue them (with caution) and lead our mind to them, instead of bringing them back to our disappointing reason. Likewise, in the Guerrier, the ten soldiers of the double attack: "Still running, they descend imperceptibly on the other side of the ridge. And suddenly I cannot see anything anymore: they have entered the open ground somewhere (13). " The double point is an explanation, but is it because I no longer see anything that I believe that they have penetrated into the earth, or is it because they have penetrated into the earth that I no longer see anything? Is it a trench, is it the entrance to Hell? The text does not actually say it, it simply says that they entered the earth. Suddenly, "there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only reality (14)".

The last feature is undoubtedly the most important: it is the reorientation of the Bildungsroman into an adventure novel, in accordance with the ideas expressed by Rivière in his 1913 essay (15) (the world of Grand Meaulnes, which Rivière had in mind, is not so far from that of Lalie and Guerrier). Paulhan's titles, The Applied Warrior, Progress in Love Quite Slow, The Severe Recovery, are a canonical expression of the idea of an apprenticeship story, but the idea of initiation or revelation, put forward by Jean-Yves Tadié and taken up by Julien Dieudonné (16), does not exactly suit them: like the Goethean idea of apprenticeship (and its deconstruction by Flaubert), it presupposes a retrospective point of view. However, as Marielle Macé shows very well, it is not so much a question of initiation as of imitation: a reversal of the idea of imitation, usually conceived as alienating, into "energetic reserve of invention (17)". The determining sources of Paulhan's thought here are the Bovaryism of Jules de Gaultier and The Laws of Imitation of Gabriel Tarde. The appeal of words and images which are already there but which must be joined, and which one must find use for oneself, here is an example whose expressions correspond exactly to this idea. The little troop set out:

But we moved forward in a strange emotion of greed and gratitude; it seemed to us that life in the trenches and our thankless application were coming to an end. However, old war images came back to us: paths, evening walks in the leaves, and above all the sound of cannon. We thus believed we were returning to order, and the roads had a great expression of beauty (18).

Isn’t this already "rediscovering the old royal road"? In any case, we recognize the deep dynamic of the adventure novel: Julien Sorel projecting himself into Napoleon, Fabrice – a diligent warrior – setting out to join him on the battlefield. It is indeed a reorientation of the dynamics of the novel, whose narrative tension becomes a construction of the possible, an "elation towards the eventual", instead of wanting to be a reconfiguration of the accomplished. I cited Gracq, undoubtedly the most direct heir of the conception of the novel formulated by Rivière, and creator in A balcony in the forest of a figure of diligent warrior in which Maast could recognize himself. The adventure novel in the ordinary sense of the term is only a model, and the path through which the reader's learning takes place: Stevenson, Conrad, Dostoyevsky show that there are multiple ways of internalizing it. Paulhan explores one of them. We realize, not without surprise, that he is in good company, especially since in this enterprise it is not necessarily fiction (Marielle Macé compares him to Sartre and Barthes). Let us provisionally conclude that, since upon closer inspection, Paulhan has his place there, it is the history of the novel in the 20th century that remains to be written.

Fairly slow progress

There is no difference, says Jacob Cow, between the word and the phrase, the sentence and the story. We can conclude that the movement of the story is formed in the use of its words and figures, and that it can be found there. I will try to do this by commenting on three of these figures: the hyperbate, which is the figure of progress; comparison, by means of which this progress can be evaluated; and amphibology. I leave the latter, which had struck certain commentators (Edmond Jaloux deplored it (19)), pending, to consider it in the broader context of the duplication of the book.

In the rhetorical tradition, hyperbate gives rise to a double definition: on the one hand, an inversion of the order of the elements of the sentence; on the other hand, an addition to a syntactically complete expression – in accordance with the etymology which evokes the idea of "surpassing". The second is the most common and most relevant for us. The canonical example is in Horace: "Albe wills it, and Rome." We can clearly see that the addition produces an inversion (here between the verb and the subject); that it requires a syntactic reanalysis of the sentence, and a reinterpretation of its arguments, the adventitious element possibly being the most important; and that it bears the trace of an enunciative operation, as if, having finished a sentence, we realized that, for the communication to succeed, it was necessary to continue it and return to it with the same gesture. The hyperbate mark is a punctuation mark, comma, semicolon or hyphen depending on the case (among contemporaries, often the period), coupled or not with a coordinating conjunction. This is how The Applied Warrior begins: "I seem taller than my age – my name is Jacques Maast, and I am eighteen years old. " Talking about inversion supposes that we relate to a logical-grammatical model which governs the hierarchy of information. It is simpler to think that the speaker has put the most significant proposition first, that of disproportion, and that the reference on which it is based (namely what is "my age") must be introduced secondly. To understand, we must therefore progress; but to progress is also to go back: the dash indicates that the speaker is as if struck by this evidence. However, the coordination is not done directly, but with an incidental proposition, which is the declension of identity; it’s a three-step approach, a sort of hesitation-waltz. The truth value of the propositions must also be taken into account: the first can be true (that is to say capable of belief) of the author as well as of the narrator-character; the other two, if we relate them to the author, are counterfactual, we can only consider them valid through and in fiction. Hyperbate adds to the complete proposition, as if by acquisition of consciousness, the distance which separates the two interpretations of "I" – in other words, the progress from one to the other.

We could easily give dozens of examples of this figure: because what we could take for a linguistic tic is a mode of thought. Here are some of them:

It's raining, and inside too, when the water that has gathered suddenly pierces the canvas, stretched under the branches of the roof.

[The soldiers of the attack] They appear unarmed, and as thin as deer.

The day comes, even and pale, and which cannot be surprised at any moment. The snow piles up on a portcullis, and on some corpses.

Through the crevasse we could see a polished sideboard, under a hash of fabric, earth and wood, and this betrayed security (20).

I do not dwell on syntax, contenting myself with noting the way in which coordination reorganizes the hierarchy, the order and even the nature of the constituents: interposition between two coordinated members of an incised place complement; coordination of a relative to affixed adjectives themselves carried to the right of the verb, increasing the distance with the antecedent. Rather, I will emphasize the ethical dimension of these figures and the way in which they mobilize emotion. An essential point is the break with the predictable part of our representations. When we are in the "guitoune", to say that it is raining means that it is raining outside, and that we are sheltered (this is the very idea of the suave mari magno): but this antithesis does not hold, it is raining "inside too", and we are much more painfully wet. Or else coordination connects heterogeneous elements, like this world which mixes metal and flesh, the instruments of peaceful work and bodies destroyed by violence. Unlike the hendiadyin, it does not unify them poetically: it brings out the moral lesson through anaphora ("this betrayed security"); it detaches what is still there – for how long? – a living painting: thin as a deer is a cliché, but who would notice? Reading does not progress quickly, because it is forced to constant reanalysis. This way of associating man and animal, tool and flesh, we have taken for coldness, or an indifferent aestheticization. But when we look up from the book, something else emerges: we have touched the source of suffering, of indignation; we can now share it.

These examples came from Guerrier. In Progress in Love Quite Slow, the figure experiences a kind of inflection. I had spoken of a three-beat rhythm, of a slightly swaying hesitation-waltz; it is accentuated here by the repetition of the adjective, which is like a rhyme and remains in memory from one sentence to another, from one page to another:

[Jeanne] I kissed her on the lips. She left them closed, but quite thick, thick on purpose.

[Jeanne] Her hands are a little thick, so that she cannot make anything heard through them, which are also dirty from the fish – moreover always almost dirty (21).

Other more complex passages revolve around the question of the defect – a sensitive, ambiguous point, circulating from one to the other and always on the verge of overturning:

It is strange that I desire a woman, not so much in proportion as she pleases me, but the opposite, and that I can despise her a little.

Mine [Juliette] was small and a little slow; graceful, but we felt that nothing would have changed in her, if she had limped, for example (22).

In the first passage, it is the syntactic distortion that is striking: the proposition in hyperbate is coordinated neither with the preceding one, for syntactic reasons, nor with the preceding que ("in proportion as"), for semantic reasons. Everything is built on the reversal which dissociates desire and seduction; but hyperbate brings nuance, prevents us from switching from a cliché to its opposite, which would be another cliché (loving ugly women): it replaces the reversal with a gradation ("a little") and shifts the question to the social and moral level of an uncertain superiority. The second is characteristic of the hesitant pace: "slow; graceful, but"; the statement of the defect is postponed very far, and further delayed by a comma: all this for a disparaging hypothesis, immediately put into perspective ("for example").

Hyperbate can serve as a compositional principle for larger ensembles; it then plays a decisive role in the conduct of the story. Here is a typical example. The passage is based on the clear opposition between "feelings" and "ideas", underlined by the resumption of the verb "prepare"; but the hyperbate creates a strong imbalance, and the sequence of forms qu- creates a sort of cascade at the end of which appears the event – moreover negative – which had generated this whole:

Thus our ill-prepared feelings were caught off guard.

In order to make up for them, however, an abundance of ideas and reflections was being prepared within us; [hyperbate] which we clearly saw when the news broke, which was brought to us by a horseman, that the attack had been stopped (23).

The hyperbate sequence performs a sweep, first regressive and then progressive; pronominal anaphoras, impersonal or periphrastic forms of the passive, bring to the fore the function words of language, those from which Flaubert wanted to rid his sentence. Such a style produces a sort of mimesis of the cognitive operations of reading; he brings out its progressive construction in an almost didactic manner: it is an essential characteristic, whose scope extends well beyond its singularity – however remarkable.

That this reanalysis of the hyperbate has a strictly narrative stake, we see in Lalie, where she decides the outcome: around her the couple unravels, between the man who goes to work in the city and the girl who will stay in the countryside, in her world of coquecigrues (for Nicolas, from that moment on they "do not exist"), where the ovens wear masks on their faces and the wheelbarrows try to walk on the hands. The same sentence returns twice: more precisely, Lalie's sentence reaches Nicolas and hits him. The first states a refusal, but it is ambiguous and open; the second, where the comma puts a hyperbate, requires us to understand:

They both stop, and Nicolas waits. Lalie is also waiting; then, as the words come to her: "No, I don’t feel too good in the city," she replies. How slow everything has become. A word is stronger and comes from further away, without being seen, than a stone or a blow. It seems to Nicolas that he has not yet received this one. It all starts again: he sees himself there, standing on this road, as if he were a second Nicholas. And Lalie said to this Nicolas: "I don’t feel very well in the city (24). "

A hermeneutic doubling which occurs in the time separating the utterance of the sentence and its understanding, here slowed down by an almost cinematographic effect. What happens to Nicolas, this second event, shifted by the little notch of the hyperbate, is what happens to every reader of Paulhan – perhaps to every reader.

I will focus less on my second figure. Progress, understood without ideological capital letters, but in the dual sense of progress and learning, must be measured. It presupposes a comparison. Not an analogical rapprochement in the manner of Jules Renard, although there is no shortage of these "'julesrenarderies'", as Perros said, "which smell of the countryside, the hay, the attics of childhood", and which dot the stories like so many witnesses to Lalie's world: "I hear the woodworm which does not make much more noise than an idea (25). " But a quantitative comparison, like the "greater than" at the beginning of Guerrier. At the source of this text – and also in Progrès, but with the distance that there is from love to war, where the whole community is mobilized – is an obsessive question, the formula of which is a cliché: being up to the task. It takes no less than the whole story, and a wound, to join it and make it a truth. This work is punctuated by the recurring use of comparisons built around the word "level" taken in its proper sense, that of water:

It is difficult to explain the nature of the feelings that I had experienced on these two occasions [the explosion of the two pots], and what strange resemblance they took for me: it was not due to the events themselves, but to a particular quality which was, if you like, what the water of a lake can be at its level.

This misery of the torn bodies and the earth that surrounded me was so complete that it came to seem clumsy and as if intended. […] Certainly, I did not feel superior to such poverty; but precisely for this reason it appeared to me then as the effect of some benevolence or goodness of things wanting to justify me. Thus the edges of a vase would lower to the level of the water they contain (26).

This fluid mechanics is static and does not contribute to narrative tension. It is the expression of ethics. She affirms that war is not essentially other, an exception or a monstrosity, but an intensification of the experience, in the same way as illnesses and dreams: "After all, we only risk dying (27). " And for Maast, it’s just about being a man. This word experience must be referred to the experimental sciences; the level images are those of an object lesson. They seek, at least, to provide the same convincing demonstration. There come moments of surprise when the front breaks, but the work of comparison applies to it, and repairs it:

It was then that I saw five dead bodies rise suddenly on a mound. They appear so large to me at first that I do not recognize them (their size is natural similar to that of a red moon that one sees by chance above a garden wall). But, by comparing them to the stones and shell holes that surround them, I also quickly give them a human scale (28).

Paulhan does not say size, but human size. This restitution is an act of justice: restoring to the dead their human scale. Its condition, and it is also one of the forms of asceticism, is the correction brought to the immediate forms of pathos; we must refrain from any complacency towards images. Hence this exact measure, and this appearance of coldness, when heroism and horror are treated as questions of level.

The double-entry book

At the end of Fleurs de Tarbes, Paulhan considers starting his book backwards, or wonders if he should not have done so. In his report, Blanchot takes him at his word; he offers two readings of the book and, pushing his hypothesis to the point of fiction, speaks of an "apparent book" covering the "real book (29)". Even if in this case the second book is rather the work of Blanchot, we have here an essential fact, something like a key. Paulhan's stories, and all his writing, seem to give rise to a phenomenon of splitting. In certain cases, the duplication is structural: thus, The Severe Recovery contains a second story, a story of adultery; this second story is a novel by letters of which we would only have the letters (those of Simone, which protrude from Jacques' pocket, and which Juliette reads) without the text. The same goes for The Bridge Crossed: "In my little book," Paulhan said to Robert Mallet, "I noticed at the same time […] the real events of which the dream was the other side: a not very happy love story (30)"; and within the book, one dream is the "replica" of another. It may be that of the characters: adultery splits Juliette into Simone, and this adultery is consummated twice since in Progrès, Jacques slept with Simone after introducing himself to Juliette as a "timid fiancé (31)". That of events: in the Guerrier, there is a "second death of Glintz": under the bullet of the enemy, then when the mistake is known, because he died under that of a comrade (which leads to this comparison: "All the same, we also have some who shoot well (32)"); and the book ends with "The Double Attack." It can also be a reading effect. The first edition of Guerrier, says Paulhan, was loved "only by anarchists and antipatriots"; but the second, in 1930 (and in this sense it is indeed two books), "was only approved by all-out patriots and reactionaries (33)". Finally, there is this story that is too good to be true (but it is true):

A women's weekly, learning that I had completed a short novel: Progrès en amour à Ceylan, accepted it from me, without further formalities, in exchange for a fairly large sum (which would be very useful to me). Unfortunately we had to admit the exact title: this "quite slow" discouraged them. Immediately there was no longer any question of anything (34).

This doubling in Francis de Croisset, homonymy, is only the occasion; more interesting is the idea that it would be a cliché novel, a pure rhetorical object. Now Paulhan had found in Jules Renard the explicit formula for a double-entry book, comparable in its effects, he said, to the papiers collés of Braque and Picasso. It is entitled The Winegrower in his vineyard and "is made up of two superimposed common texts – one made up of commonplaces and clichés, the other of simple and raw stories (35)"; Paulhan cites one of these couples, "Hollow Hazelnuts" overcoming "The Enemy Sisters". But obviously this device is quite crude, and in his own stories, as we have already seen, Paulhan has merged the two texts into one, sliding one under the other. However, he took care to keep a record of this operation:

The rest [i.e. the sexual relationship with Simone] would have to be written in a different way, with different words, or rather something other than words.

But that's where I'm wrong. On the contrary, we must write in exactly the same way - and pretend that the passage I spoke of does not exist, but that everything follows and is woven together on the same plane. […]

So I'll say it the same way. However, we sometimes imagine, beneath the story, this effort (36).

The idea that there is a book beneath the book and that the first is the secret of the second corresponds to the very structure of Aytré; In this respect it is the most didactic of Paulhan's stories, the one where he exposes the very mechanism of the book in double part, one half of which is entirely virtual and only exists reconstructed by the reader (instead of the structure of The Severe Recovery being an embedding of the stories). He invites us to consider other episodes from this angle and to consider them – with all the risks that this entails – as symptoms. To conclude, I will give two examples.

The first is that of Paulio, not a double of Maast but "lower half" of Paulhan (pronounced correctly, in Occitan: Paulian). Paulio tells us a second story, that of a man cheated on by his wife "no uglier than anything else", and killed in combat. He receives two letters that Maast reads to him, one where his wife loves him, the other where she sleeps with the first person who comes along. He is killed at the moment when Maast is wounded: "I suddenly see, further down, the torn bodies of Paulio, I think, and of another man: bodies without soul, without flesh even. I only see their lower half, mixed with earth and cloth (37). " They are "mixed" by the most intimate link, that of syntax: "But we, Paulio, is our only war. "

This is where amphibology comes in, taking us a step lower (I underline it):

I imagine that this war is made for Paulio, or for something in the world that resembles it, having also almost lacked belief and taste for life. As a public house allows love to those who have not been able to find it elsewhere, through shyness or indifference, it gives this gross power of life and death, which we cannot forget that we once possessed (38).

The text is not ambiguous, because there is no choice: under Paulio, there is Maast ("I"), and between them this "something". But the comparison with the public house opens up a second story within the Warrior: that of Rather slow progress in love. Because "gross power" is precisely what the narrator lacks when he finds himself alone with Jeanne, in the attic.

It is this: that it is difficult to be a man, when you think about it (likewise, to be a warrior), because the words: to be a man, to be up to the task, helplessness, are already there, and the thought of these words is enough; hence the inferiority of educated men. What we risk, in the "adventure of love", is therefore "the thought of oneself". The narrator of Progress returns from Salonika and never stops thinking about it, because he has "not had a woman on this side of the sea"39 (there is therefore no question of physical incapacity). In Salonika, in the "incessant pandering" of which Aurélien will speak, the thought of oneself is without object. It's different on this side, where with "everyone and the girls from the village 40", we are an object of comparison. At the end of the story, when Jeanne comes to join him, it is because he is preceded by his "reputation"; this time everything goes well, but he immediately worries: will he live up to this reputation? and he wishes "that a military order comes as soon as possible to snatch him from this garden of delights (41)".

This is the story that emerges from Progrès when we close the book. The narrator says it clearly: "thinking about oneself" is "the key to these stories (42)"; "at the beginning of these stories", he asks that we place "a flaw in love". So this is the secret of the book, but this secret is in no way different from the book itself; there are not two stories, nor even two ways of telling the story: but two ways of understanding it. One allows you to "follow the story"; in the other we lose it.

But just as in the reflections on the Key of poetry, the use of words like "key" or "secret" (on which the Warrior closes), but also "revelation", must be well understood. It is not an allegory, as the processes of doubling might suggest, even less of a cryptogram. If this were the case, the meaning would be fixed: we would go from the literal meaning to the figurative meaning (moral, etc.), from the enigma to its resolution. But it is quite different: when we entrust a secret, "the secret of our secrets" to a person or to a book, "we feel very well that there is another secret within us which is being reformed, a deeper secret (43)". What is at stake, in fact, is the very process of understanding in reading; and it is impossible to stop reading. However, it is not an aporia or an "impossible" in the manner of Blanchot. But the resolved question continually reforms and transforms, as the journey of Fleurs de Tarbes shows with almost unbearable acuteness. Stories, which are a representation and an imagination of experience, give rise to thought, and this thought modifies them in an incessant movement of progression, regression, comparison. The figures that I have highlighted intervene in this process and at the same time exemplify it, they develop its image. We already knew all this: this is why Paulhan's appearance has something Socratic; and yet this is what is most difficult to grasp. Studies in reading cognition proved him right, but he was far ahead of them and could not have had adequate linguistic tools. He could only work with his style.

But I have only just begun, and we have not finished with Paulhan's stories: "texts which never stop ending and beginning at the same time, looking sideways at themselves in the mirror of their dreams, at the edge of the mental sword," wrote Perros (44). They cannot be closed easily; they do not bring us peace.

Michel Murat University Paris-Sorbonne

Notes (source bibliography in French)

Julie Dieudonné, Les Récits de Jean Paulhan, Paris, Honoré Champion, 2001 ; Bernard Baillaud, La Pensée et la fiction dans les récits de Jean Paulhan, thèse de l’université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2000. Des articles, le plus riche est celui de Jean-Yves Tadié, « Paulhan narrateur ", dans Jean Paulhan le souterrain, actes du colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle, Paris, UGE, coll. « 10/18 ", 1976, p. 41-52. Celui de Jan Baetens, « "Je m’appelle Jacques Maast" " (Poétique, no 73, 1989, p. 173-184), ne tient pas les promesses de son titre. La recension du premier volume de l’édition Tchou par Georges Perros, « Le métier d’être ou les instants bien employés " (Critique, no 235, décembre 1966, p. 979-989), domine de haut cet ensemble.
Michel Raimond, La Crise du roman, Paris, José Corti, 1966.
Cet essai sur « Le roman " tient lieu de préface à Pierre et Jean (Paris, Ollendorff, 1888).
Édouard Maynial, « Les tendances du roman français contemporain, Chronique des lettres françaises, no 1, 1923, p. 5.
Référence citée dans Jean Paulhan, Œuvres complètes, t. I, éd. Bernard Baillaud, Paris, Gallimard, 2006, p. 524 (ouvrage abrégé désormais : OCG1).
Jules Renard, Coquecigrues, Paris, Ollendorff, 1893.
Jean Paulhan, « Jules Renard ", dans Œuvres complètes, t. IV, Paris, Cercle du livre précieux, 1969, p. 119 (couramment désignée comme « édition Tchou ").
[Pierre Reverdy], « Les Livres ", Nord-Sud, no 9, 1918, p. 2.
« C’est le guerrier plaqué sur le civil pacifique ", note avec perspicacité Alfred de Tarde (L’Opinion, 27 avril 1918).
J.-Y. Tadié, Le Récit poétique, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 19-21.
J. Renard, Coquecigrues, op. cit., « La limace ", p. 229-230.
OCG1, p. 72.
OCG1, p. 211.
Breton le dit dans une note du Manifeste du surréalisme, à propos du Moine de Lewis (Œuvres complètes, Paris, Gallimard, « Bibliothèque de la Pléiade ", 1989, p. 320). Notons que dans le Manifeste, il donne comme contre-exemple à l’image surréaliste la comparaison chez Jules Renard (ibid., p. 338). Sur ce point, Paulhan et Breton sont très proches, une proximité que masque trop souvent pour nous la critique de la Terreur dans les lettres.
Jacques Rivière, « Le roman d’aventure ", La NRF, no 53, mai 1913, p. 748-765 ; no 54, juin 1913, p. 914-932 ; no 55, juillet 1913, p 56-77.
J.-Y. Tadié, Le Roman poétique, op. cit., p. 20 ; Julien Dieudonné parle d’une « initiation au vivre " (Les Récits de Jean Paulhan, op. cit., p. 173).
Marielle Macé, Façons de lire, manières d’être, Paris, Gallimard, 2011, p. 206.
OCG1, p. 203.
Edmond Jaloux écrit de La Guérison sévère : « Je regrette l’obscurité de certaines phrases : obscures non pour la richesse de leur pensée, mais l’amphibologie de leur syntaxe " (Les Nouvelles littéraires, 27 juin 1925). On peut soupçonner que « richesse " et « amphibologie " sont deux manières de nommer la même chose.
OCG1, respectivement : p. 196-197, 211, 207, 171.
OCG1, respectivement : p. 98, 101.
OCG1, respectivement : p. 94, 105.
OCG1, p. 205.
OCG1, p. 81.
OCG1, p. 103.
OCG1, p. 182, 209.
OCG1, p. 201.
OCG1, p. 207.
Maurice Blanchot, « Comment la littérature est-elle possible ? ", dans Faux Pas, Paris, Gallimard, 1943, p. 92-101. Blanchot avait publié deux comptes rendus des Fleurs de Tarbes dans le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, le 21 octobre (« La terreur dans les Lettres ") et le 25 novembre 1941 (« Comment la littérature est-elle possible ? ")
Jean Paulhan, Les Incertitudes du langage, Paris, Gallimard, 1970, p. 95.
OCG1, p. 119.
OCG1, p. 184.
J. Paulhan, Les Incertitudes du langage, op. cit., p. 97-98.
Cité dans OCG1, p. 464.
J. Paulhan, « Jules Renard ", op. cit., p. 127.
OCG1, p. 128.
OCG1, p. 213 ; cit. suivante : p. 192.
OCG1, p. 195.
OCG1, p. 109, pour les trois citations.
OCG1, p. 167 (ce sont les toutes premières lignes du Guerrier).
OCG1, p. 142.
OCG1, p. 109 ; cit. suivante : p. 114.
J. Paulhan, Les Incertitudes du langage, op. cit., p. 144.
G. Perros, « Le métier d’être… ", art. cité, p. 387.

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