What can literature do?

Here are two names: Sade, Paulhan. The first has a reputation for frenzy; the second, on the contrary, provides a sensation of order among the things of literature. Besides, would we bring them together if the second had not prefaced the first? They seem to have nothing in common except this attention: Sade lived many years in prison; Paulhan experienced even more in an office. Prison made writing a wild escape; the office made her the order of its power. “Everything happens,” writes Paulhan, “as if there existed in the world a certain mysterious balance of violence for which we have lost the taste and even the meaning. »

Prison is the other side of a situation that has its place in the office. Literature is the other side of an activity which has its place in reading. We like to imagine it the other way around: we just need to coldly observe who life depends on. Sade, who was the writer of excess, excessively illustrates this relationship; but who was Paulhan if not, on the contrary, an excessive reader? This passion even meant that the writer was forgotten for quite a long time. The reader has absolute power over the writing: one day this situation also had to be clearly illustrated.

Here then, the reader and the writer face to face, except that the reader here only takes his position to the extreme by writing, but, in this domain, knowing how to move to the other camp is the only way to see. The writer, it will be said, also knows how to get to the other side. No, it's an appearance: he reads to continue writing. He is a seducer who, in the movement of his seduction, tries to bring about the reversal which will make him go from the wrong side to the right side, from darkness to light. His whole desire is to empty into the reader's head the strange box of which he is the maker, and which is a book; he wants, through a phenomenon of incomparable expansion, that the unreality of said box occupies all the space that normally belongs to the view of reality. This invasive penetration takes place with consent, but it contains all the violence linked to the desire for possession: the writer only seeks to please the reader in order to invade him entirely.

So, from the prison which holds him against reality, the writer seeks to turn the situation around; the reader, in his office, smiles at this pretension: he takes the words from the book, drops them into his mentality, watches them do it. What is happening? And how? And why? are the only questions that interest the reader as he puts into play in this game what he has already played so many times: his own head.

“I believe,” declared Paulhan, on December 15, 1956, to the judge of the 17th criminal chamber of Paris, who would like him to condemn Sade's writing, “I believe that there is a danger there, but it is an eminently moral danger_. »

The notion of danger entails that of ordeal and underlines the violence active in the relationship between the writer and the reader. The reader, it is obvious to the judge, is in danger, but the book, and through it the writer, is also in danger. The judge is not aware of representing this danger which he nevertheless embodies; this unconsciousness makes him a mediocre reader. Paulhan is extremely aware of this: he knows, through practice, why the test is a two-way street.

The judge wants to eliminate the danger in order to serve morality. Paulhan confronts this same danger to understand how it works: he thus invents his morality, that of the reader, instead of pronouncing it while enthroned above it. The reader is not a judge, although he appears to occupy the position of one. First, he exercises power only in his own name; above all, he is only truly a reader if he creates his reading instead of referring it to a model. Paulhan's testimony before the 17th Chamber testifies to this double game, which is further intensified by the unspeakable duplicity of the reader-writer.

Paulhan's participation in the "Sade affair" just like, ten years earlier, in 1946, his preface to Misfortunes of Virtue, therefore takes another turn: they are no longer circumstances but points of reference in the movement of a necessity that it is precisely a question of clarifying.

The first difficulty today is to imagine the office of the exemplary reader, which allows Paulhan to have a global vision of present and past literature. For once, knowledge and power merge here, and what follows is this thing - undoubtedly unique - which is the literal implementation of the situation in model books, that is to say in books that can be put together and taken apart where all of the literary recipes serve a purpose that is both very personal and very general. The astonishing thing in these books is not the mastery of rhetoric, it is the process of incorporation which changes it in the writer - in the very person of the writer.

It is quite easy to imagine sadistic excess since you just have to abandon yourself to reading it. Paulhan's excessive mastery is more difficult to grasp, because it involves his erasure. It even abolishes itself to such an extent in its effect that we will probably find it inappropriate to use the word "excessive" regarding a work which avoids any excess, and which may seem to have made this choice to go against the trend of its time, all passionate about black devotions, automatism and negative rites.

The exemplary reader sees perfectly clearly the necessity of his time, and he recognizes it by publishing, for example, in his review surrealist texts or the manifestos of the College of Sociology, but this does not prevent him from denouncing its “terror”. And who other than Paulhan put sadism at the origin of modern literature? He does so in the following passage from his preface to Misfortunes:

"... _I wonder, when I see so many writers, these days, so consciously devoted to refusing artifice and literary play in favor of an unspeakable event which we are not allowed to ignore is both erotic and frightening, anxious to take in all circumstances the opposite of Creation, and all busy seeking the sublime in the infamous, the great in the subversive, demanding moreover that every work engages and forever compromises its author following a sort of efficiency... I wonder if we should not recognize, in such extreme terror, less an invention than a memory, less an ideal than a memory and in short if our modern literature, in its part which seems to us the most alive - the most aggressive in any case -, is not entirely turned towards the past, and very precisely determined by Sade, as the tragedies of the 18th century were by Racine...

The I-wonder tone in such decisive lines is not, of course, without humor: it is the politeness of the reader when undersigning the lettre de cachet. But this long sentence is also like the labyrinth whose detours lead to the monster while avoiding it for a long time... Or to the divine! It is significant that Paulhan accumulates marks of respect and disapproval for "our modern literature, in its most living part" and that he establishes the role of Sade by comparison with, in another time, that of Racine. The continuity of the past up to the rupture is underlined in the very moment when this rupture is sent back to its distant origin. The reader sees beyond his current reading because he relates its particularity to the whole of what he has read, but it should be noted that if he qualifies as "the most living" the part of "our modern literature" determined by Sade, it is because he is not hostile to it: he is only distant from it - from a distance which is due to his position and which must also come from a disagreement touching on the very practice of writing.

Every literary work, Paulhan has repeated many times, is essentially a language machine. This machine needs energy, and there are mainly two varieties: intelligence and emotion. The choice of energy is a fundamental option. Sometimes the language machines break down; It's not serious when it happens to a writer, it is when the breakdown becomes widespread, because the era is then in the grip of a crisis of expression.

Paulhan sat in his office at the time of the first great breakdown, following the war of 1914-1918 and the bankruptcy of values ​​which, while guaranteeing the discourse of European bourgeois society, proved their emptiness by not preventing the useless massacre. This breakdown is warded off by “our modern literature” by means of an over-excitement of emotion thanks to automatic writing and the liberation of all areas where sensitivity takes precedence. Paulhan notes the immediate effectiveness of these energetic palliatives, but his knowledge as a reader allows him to see in advance their rapid consumption and their circumstantial nature. And then isn't emotional energy linked to perpetual one-upmanship? Paulhan sees confirmation of this in Sade, who was the secret inspiration of the Romantics, and he measures the extent to which “our modern literature” is in line with this model. So everything happens as if the idea came to him, facing the figure of the divine marquis, to portray the figure of the divine reader.

To a sadistically moving language machine, which moves you, what else can you oppose than a divinely intelligent language machine? Paulhan is not the anti-Sade: he is, through his duplicity as reader-writer, the only author capable of encompassing sadism itself in the most complete machine of language - a machine which draws its energy from the understanding of all forms, of all contradictions, of all tendencies.

The breakdown, despite the surrealist repairs, still threatens, and it will remain latent throughout the period. The divine reader did not choose this excessive situation, but he assumes it and with all the more ardor that it inevitably poses to his intelligence the question: what can literature? He knows that any writing which, in his time, dismisses this question is already dead.

He also feels a feeling of solidarity with the extremists who, if they are not on his side, are, in the strongest sense, part of his contemporaries.

The surrealists combined Marx and Rimbaud to “transform the world” and “change life”. It's moving. Paulhan reflects on language and the collapse of our relationship with the world. This work convinced him that there was no external remedy for the “chronic disease of expression”. In other words, he discovers that it is in the very functioning of the language machine that we must find the means of relaunching this functioning, and not by means of shocks, commotions and ignitions which revive without repairing anything. The science of language is in itself the best remedy for language diseases, which affect not only literature but society as a whole.

Paulhan counts among his friends someone who, through the excessive state to which a war wound led him, finds himself both living and representing the critical state of the time. This friend, Joe Bousquet, was injured in the spine: his body is cut off from the world and cut off from its own language since it no longer obeys it. In the tribute he paid to Bousquet after his death in 1950, Paulhan wrote: “The man in the street can forget twenty-three hours a day that he is not in the world. For the writer, every moment reminds him and every effort: every new experience._ »

Not being in the world is the capital wound. Language is supposed to heal it, but it is the first cause and it keeps reopening it. The exercise of language means that the writer always hurts himself anew, and that he cannot forget. Bousquet experiences this situation daily literally and figuratively, in his body and in his language: his writing reflects this on the spot, in a movement which, conceptually, draws on Paulhan's parallel reflection while allowing the latter to touch its reality in his own experience, at the rhythm of a weekly friendly exchange.

The sadistic remedy adds to the violence of the wound an additional wound: it whips the tired tongue just as the old libertines of the Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom multiply crimes in order to spice up desires which, in themselves, no longer excite them. Modernity and the avant-gardes spice things up in the same way when they massacre syntax or logic. Paulhan chooses the other path: that of science and the play of forms because he believes that their construction, their arrangement have mental efficiency and an expressive value.

But what does it mean to be in the world?

It is first of all to be brought back there, and such is the role of language machines, whose primary function is not to express this or that, nor to sing, nor to narrate, but to re-establish through a movement of consciousness a broken relationship, and more precisely to put us back “in” communication.

Does it work?

The sadist is very sensitive to breakdowns: he adds emotion both to remedy it and to enjoy the immediate effect. The divine reader also suffers from the breakdown, but he has confidence in the intelligence, being convinced that it will end well, by dint of articulating all the parts, by finding the opening and the momentum. It is enough for man to be human. But is he? The sadist isn't sure.

Human not human, this is perhaps the true division between those who believe in the power of the head, and those who believe in the only bestial impulse to make the thing that can no longer beat tremble.

In the Notes placed at the head of volume IV of his Works and which precede his preface to The Misfortunes of Virtue, Paulhan writes: “The old poets spoke rhymes, rhythms, syllables and words, as if wonder were self-evident. But the modern ones are about magic and more magic. As if they were afraid of losing her.”

The sadist is a sorcerer, but the more modern he becomes, the less confidence he has in his art, so he adds to it the ingredients which, precisely, make him a sadist. Paulhan, who is not modern as he is not a sorcerer, sticks to techniques and materials: "rhymes, rhythms, syllables and words", not that wonder is self-evident for him, but he knows what can produce it and under what conditions it can appear. Sadists use language only in despair of not finding a replacement for it; Paulhan knows that there is no other language than language, and he seeks to know it as much as possible in order to articulate it as practically as possible.

No doubt literature will always regret not being life; However, no living being sticks to its pure functioning as a living being, nor any language machine to its purely mechanical functioning. Paulhan begins his preface to Misfortunes with a short chapter entitled “The Secret”. What can literature do? It can only seduce by a secret - a secret that is of course internal and therefore within the reach of the reader, who will measure their intelligence by their ability to reveal it. Thus, by the way, all language machines happen to have the same engine, and the sadistic machine is subordinate to the classical machine, if only by anteriority.

The title of the preface announces: “The Marquis de Sade and his accomplice or The Revenge of Modesty”. We gradually understand that it is a story, oriented like any good story, towards the final revelation: intelligence slowly unravels all the sadistic behavior to discover that it is the mask of modesty... As for the secret, which is the supplement to this revelation, it can be summed up in a few words: Justine is not only Sade's "accomplice": she is Sade...

“Justine’s strange secret. What makes it difficult for us is not that it is unspeakable. No, it's quite the opposite, it's already named after this good Austrian novelist, who came into the world a hundred years after Sade."

Justine's secret is Sade's masochism. The language machine restarted by the divine reader dissolves perversion because its energy is intelligence. The terror was not so terrible: it was enough to understand it, and understanding it, to dismantle the danger. So, what about his descendants, which includes “our modern literature”? Paulhan does not have the cruelty to bring us back to ourselves.

Simply, logically, Happiness in slavery follows the Misfortunes of virtue. But is it through a reversal effect or through an effect of humor that we find here, regarding the behavior of O, this little incident: “Here, some fool is going to talk about masochism. I am willing, it is little more than adding to the true mystery, a false mystery, of pure language."

Intelligence is never fooled by itself. So she works in the truth without believing that she is sticking to it, or that she can reach it and fix it definitively: she knows that we no more have the end of the story than we have the final word.

Bernard Noel