The man seduced by the moon

This discreet and secret traveler, whom time seeks to hide more from us, perhaps the most secret of our writers, he knows how to surprise us again, in its legend of eternal youth. Those who approached and loved him, who read with passion his short, mocking, violent texts, at the same time enlightened with such fine tenderness, such sincere compassion, those who have heard his funny bird voice, who felt his mobile, worried gaze, these cannot believe in the distance of time (in oblivion), and they would like to think of Jean Paulhan as the incarnation of eternal youth.

Yes, this is how Endymion really appears, the man seduced by the moon, as Robert Graves calls it. Dreamer above all, like lovers and night owls, but yet with this thoughtless violence, this madness which makes running behind chimeras, which leads towards the unknown, towards a new language that other men have difficulty understanding.

Jean Paulhan has this adolescent taste for exploration. For him, art, poetry are no different from other mysteries of reality. These are areas to cover, to bring back, as Cendrars wanted, the gold which makes men dream and live. Also by desire for the new, to enjoy the first of the wonder that comes with what we don't yet know. It is in the poetry that Paulhan finds this wonder, in the almost mystical words of Lautreamont, but also in the pure force of language as it is given to each at birth.

Emotion trembles behind every word

It's this Paulhan that I love and who moves me, the one who with a sort of nonchalance respectful (so as not to disturb our emotion with its fervor) gives us hear the Hain-tenys, which are the most beautiful poems in the world. gives us hear what true poetry is, not its role or its recipes aesthetic, but its strength, its power.

Paulhan's research is that of a language. If, with mockery, he takes on the tricks and artifices of "sickening" rhetoricians, as in the approximation of popular expressions, it is to better discern what the pure poetry. Emotion trembles behind every word, every image of reality, and only magic can reveal it. Make us attentive, heal us from our deafness and our short sight. What is admirable about Paulhan is like he says so much in so few words; there is something oriental (i.e. of perfect) in this impatient teenager who scans the world. Georges Perros (in the beautiful Correspondence with Paulhan) speaks well of a "Hokusai Malagasy ", and this is indeed what the light of the Hain-tenys: the violent world, in short like lightning in the night.

Paulhan's passion is also skepticism, this ironic look that he focuses on human society, on its small failings, on its major crimes. This is how I imagine Endymion's gaze, bathed in cold clarity lunar, already far from the terrestrial world, but knowing that "nothing exists simple. The truth has a part of falsehood like good perfume has a part of skatol, like mathematical men a part of absurdity_ ".

Despite his skepticism, Paulhan remains an explorer of poetry. For this, he is a man in love, the man seduced by the moon. He keeps this charm within him (the lunar magic), and it is always the passion that carries him towards others men, towards Perros, towards Thomas. Few men have shown such loyalty, others and to oneself. Loyalty to a high idea of language and literature. Loyalty to the spirit of the NRf. Fidelity to the truth, to a research. For this, like Bousquet and like Queneau, Paulhan is among us, he don't leave us. The youth of the man seduced by the moon is eternal, it makes us see the novelty and the passion, which are in us, as another world.

(The man seduced by the moon, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, Le Monde des Livres, 1984)