A possessed of reality

(Afterword of Volume 3 of Complete Works, Tchou)

Sometimes men come who take hold of what had previously been thought of them, and who turn it around without ceremony. They put the sun in place of the earth, the void instead of the full, the discontinuous instead of the continuous, and say to us: “Look: isn’t it better this way?” The surprising thing is that things get better this way. Everything becomes clearer (often at the cost of a departure from reason), and heliocentrism, gravitation, quanta create an incredible world for us. There also come even bolder thinkers, who often refuse even the title of thinkers: it is, directly, against reason that they attack. At first, they have no trouble recognizing its limits. They add that its value can only be proven by reason itself, that is to say at the cost of a vicious circle that it condemns. Finally they show her floating like an island on an ocean of mystery. Far from revealing Reality to us, it only throws a faint light over it, which dazzles us very falsely. If we object to them that we have no other beacon, they reply that it is not so much a matter of seeing as of feeling, not so much of knowing as of being... They argue... But no, they do not always pursue the controversy: some get angry, others are silent, there are some who feign madness. Still others set a sort of trap for us... But it is Jean Paulhan that I would like to talk about.

The reason would already be frightening: but it is the entire mind that spoils reality for us. Ideas hide things from us just as words hide ideas from us. Fate gives us separate terms that we would like to find confused. This is a fault which is particularly noticeable to us in the field of Letters, where we precisely demand to coincide, beyond language, with an authentic and naked reality. Hence the nostalgia, coupled with revolt, which burst forth, from pre-romanticism, of a new world, of a pure thought freed from rules and words, of a consciousness finally unscathed by myths and ideas: in short, what Jean Paulhan called the Terror, by analogy to that which the same thirst for ingenuousness ignited at the same moment in History.
Let us have no doubt that Jean Paulhan was first a terrorist. Terrorist soon to be disappointed: and that's where his whole odyssey begins. It is then that the paradox is pronounced which will never leave him.
Because how can we hide the fact that the Terror, which claims to abolish all myths, is itself a myth? She prides herself on uncovering reality beneath the ideas that mask it; However, if you look closely, it is also an idea, a pure theory which cuts through reality and excludes one term in favor of the other, gratuitously. Much more: it reveals, in its very being, the paradox that it would like to resolve, since by drawing our attention to language, it highlights its defect all the better: which is to make us take for simple words the ideas that they are responsible for embodying; but also for simple ideas the things that they designate to us. Therefore aggravating the divorce at a time when she promised us, like Rimbaud, the communion of souls and bodies.
It seems that Rimbaud has come back from it. For its part, the Terror was quick to invent precepts and prohibitions. Do we not see Rousseau and his successors naively and cleverly replacing rhyme and fixed forms with torrents and seasons, geometry à la Le Nôtre with falsely wild gardens, stylish flowers with the desert and ruins? And the other Terror, the real one, invents to give itself license a whole code so rigid and so cruel that Sade, more extreme in purity and frenzy, refuses to lend a hand to it.
We know since then what the splendor and misery of Letters were, the curse of poets, enthusiasm and bad faith. How to live without laws, exist without thoughts, express yourself without language? Should we resign ourselves to the heartbreak of paradox and despair? Or is there still a solution, a wisdom, as old as all literature, which a little patience and attention would help us find again? Can we return home without losing any of the experience accumulated during the trip, find Penelope without leaving Circe?

This wisdom, truth be told, is within reach. If the paradox deepens because we think about it, the solution is simply to stop thinking about it. It's Christopher Columbus' egg: all you had to do was think about it. We see that we are falling back into the paradox. And yet... There are few examples that have exerted on Jean Paulhan a fascination equal to that of Valéry. Because Valéry was wrong. And that he made a mistake when he was going to succeed. How did he go wrong? By preferring thought and consciousness, when he had to do something else, he was already doing something else, yet incapable of recognizing his own truth. What truth?
One day, in his office, Jean Paulhan asked friends who asked him what he criticized Valéry for: “For not having worked enough,” he replied. Did he mean: “Thinking too much”? Because it is true that this tireless worker has been lulled all his life by a superb illusion: hoping to finally discover a general law of the mind, a central attitude of consciousness, finally a sort of noonday of language and thought, from which, he said, “the enterprises of knowledge and the operations of art are equally possible”. What a pure temptation, indeed, to reduce everything to thought alone! How simple everything would be if we could read like an open book in a brain that idealism would suppress! Yes. However, Mr. Teste is also a myth. Jean Paulhan has no trouble showing (as in The Gift of Languages) that such an absolute enterprise is vain and contradictory. For if it is true that the total field of our mind coincides with that of reality (since there is no thing in the world which must not, in order to exist, be felt and thought by us), it is also true that it is by means of the mind itself that we know the mind. In other words, our thought, writes Jean Paulhan, “is never given to us so whole that we do not take from it the part which allows us to observe it. So that we only consider it amputated”. A tree, a stone, presents itself to our examination objectively; but the mind, which contains everything, and itself, engages us in a game of mirrors where we are never sure not to mistake the shadow for the thing.

Thus the lack of language turns out to constitute an existential paradox concerning the entire mind and which takes specific forms depending on the different domains. When Valéry, for example, sees in Pascal, Stendhal or La Fontaine a sort of Machiavellianism of the artisan, of the charlatanism of the versifier, he is a victim of the paradox: because this trickery only exists in the concern that he himself has with the artifices of language, and which he projects onto others. It is the paradox, undoubtedly, which is responsible for the Terror, but also which falsely shows us a foreign language or a translation more concrete or more pictorial than our language or the original text. It is to him that the supposed depth of etymology, the inevitable errors of critics, the partiality of linguists, and even the disconcerting aphorisms of professional people: mystics or painters, come back.
No area, therefore, where we escape ambiguity. Precisely: such a general law is surprising; Would it not contain in itself this Reality that we were improperly seeking in one or the other term of the report? Failing to be able to develop a clear solution to the problem, is it not appropriate to at least try to find a reason for this unreason? What if this noon the right that Valéry was looking for in reflection and pure consciousness, was in fact given to us in an instinctive adhesion, no longer in a full, impossible clarity, but in the zone of mystery which surrounds it, so that the paradox, finally embraced, itself became the remedy for the evil that it constituted and which spread terror?
It is this true conversion that the texts collected in this volume tell us about. But it is again Valéry's reflection which will introduce us, because it already announces it, to this reversal of the perspective which we could call: Paulhanian possession.

Valéry, who is far from being as intellectualist as has been said. He understands very well that Mr. Teste is an illusion. “Why is Mr. Teste impossible? — This question is his soul. It changes you into Mr. Teste.” Thus Mr. Teste has not discovered the panacea which would enable him to resolve, from the outside, the paradox: if it exists, it is because he himself is this paradox, internally, consubstantially. But it is at every moment that Valéry expresses in his work his distrust of ideas, philosophy, systems: to prefer them, precisely, this immediate and deep adhesion, which does not come without a sort of unconsciousness, without abandonment. Why did he always refuse to “explain” his poems, if not because for him they were not machines for communicating thoughts, but rather a kind of gymnasium apparatus where the reader was thrown into full exercise, into action? He was also a great swimmer who ran into the waves and came back alive. Just a glance at Rhumbs: “To throw myself into the mass and the movement, to act to the extremes, and from the nape of the neck to the toe... it is for my being the game comparable to that of love, the action where my whole body becomes all signs and all forms... Through it [the sea], I am the man I want to be. My body becomes the direct instrument of the spirit, and yet the author of all its ideas...” It is no different in dreams, which then explains the fascination they exerted on a consciousness so biased against the unconscious. And Socrates, in Eupalinos: “One must choose to be a man, or to be a spirit.” But who would want to be just a spirit?
It is no longer a question of reflecting on the world, but of possessing it by immersing oneself in it, by acting on it.
Precisely, Jean Paulhan dives where Valéry was content to gaze. Reality rediscovered, he will ask for the secret, quite the opposite of pure thought, using techniques that never fail to be disconcerting. In turn, he borrows them from the card players of his neighborhood, from the soldier who escapes from war as if from a nightmare, from the Taoists and mystics, from the cubist or informal painters. In each case, it is a question of throwing oneself boldly, a little madly, into language or into things. To rediscover, precisely, an ease similar to that of the accomplished swimmer, whom the water carries marvelously as soon as he dares to confront it. Or to replace thought with reality, and ideas with action. So, quite simply, pinching yourself to make sure you're not dreaming; and if we really dream at that moment, a sharp pain, even if imaginary, cannot fail to wake us from sleep. Or, like the Taoist master, is it appropriate to slap the disciple who comes to ask him what the deep meaning of the Doctrine is. To respond to our neighbor, and to close the discussion with an irrefutable argument: “A fact is a fact”, or “You are another.” Or again, with abstract painters, and after having broken all the mirrors and trompe-l'oeil, to imitate with large frenzied gestures, squirts and blows of tires, the acts of nature rather than its effects.
These are so many illuminations through the absurd, one could say, through mystery. The paradox is not yet resolved; rather he is integrated, married. And this, paradoxically, if each of these behaviors, far from suppressing him, accuses him. Narcissus, once he enters the water, ceases to see and desire himself: he has become his image. Thus, Jean Paulhan promises us, it is by building on the paradox that we will feel delivered from it: we will be carried by it. It is no longer up to us to try to lay siege to reality: it is reality that occupies us without firing a shot. Something “got into me”, admits the author about the shocking experiences he recounts in Le Clair et l’Obscur or Les Doleurs Imaginaires. No more thinking about our problem: it is he, now, who thinks about us. Do we want further proof? You just have to look for it in this privileged environment that constitutes language. Privileged, because the paradox is projected into him, clearly casts its shadow there. To the behavior that we have seen, it is appropriate to add one which, relating to a certain use of words, phonemes and monemes, is capable of the same illumination. This is Rhetoric.

Experience proves it to us: language, despite its fault, lends itself to delights, to a delicious use. Alongside the desperate and thunderous Terrorists, there is no shortage of writers, even simple conversationalists, who express themselves happily, with complete serenity. Who not only say what they have to say, but experience themselves, saying it, reaching a higher, somewhat magical state, where contradictions (between matter and spirit, consciousness and the world, words and their meaning) fade away by becoming interior to us: a state that we rightly describe as poetic. However, these language festivals are not necessarily ceremonial. They can be satisfied with banalities. “Blowing is not playing,” said the checkers player, fully imbued with its importance. And all our daily clichés: it is a great consolation, and like an agreement with oneself, to be able to say, from a certain age: “We cannot be and have been.” Jean Paulhan draws from his stay in Madagascar the conclusion that the proverbs contained in the poetic tournaments called the hain-tenys and which give them their authority and the force of conviction, must, as common as they are, be reinvented in each dispute: given to the disputer both by the repertoire and by inspiration. But still, it is in the places where the play between appearance and reality, sound and meaning, is most marked, in our witticisms, our amusing stories and our puns, that we suddenly have the impression of discovering an essential and sure truth. We are exposed to the paradox, and we remain fascinated. What delighted me the other day, having read the following advertisement in a weekly:

Good pasta makes good husbands,

what was it that surrounded these husbands with poetry (I had read it wrong, and the text read, more prosaically: ... make good meals), if not the shift which obliged me to consider the same line of language both as a thing (pasta) and as an idea (the one we have about complacent husbands)? Likewise, when someone tells me that, the air of the countryside being so pure, it is very curious that no one has thought of building towns in the countryside, if I laugh, it is because I agree to the absurdity: because what could be wiser, in fact, and more poetic, than this idea of ​​going to build a town in the countryside, despite its impossibility? We see that the paradox, in such cases, is no longer perceptible to us as a defect: on the contrary, it reveals a coincidence, provoking in us the same sort of pleasure as when we see the shards of broken glass adjust so clearly to one another that the break disappears. You need smooth edges, a certain skill, exercise, a little happiness: everything which defines, in short, the ancient meaning that Jean Paulhan restored to the word Rhetoric.

It is thanks to it, he assures us, that we will be able to patiently but ingenuously put the pieces of our existence back together. Because the rules, the units, the flowers of style are not, all things considered, of a different nature than Malagasy proverbs, the common places of our conversations which contain truths which are less the fact of their meaning than that of their use, of the situation in which we use them and pronounce them. It requires patient training, if it is only habituation and mastery of the processes which will finally allow us to no longer notice them, the language doing its work on its own and thus restoring, after a careful detour, an absolute and impersonal inspiration. In the same way that love and its mysterious power cannot fail to spring forth in the context of marriages of convenience, whose narrowness and pettiness would nevertheless seem to stifle all true feeling. “If rules and genres were ever imagined, it was to assure the human spirit its full freedom, to allow it cries, and surprise, and deep singing.”
But it also requires a lot of ingenuity. And here we find both the Valerian swimmer and the fanciful behavior of painters, disputants, Taoists and mystics: in short, of all those who do not think too much. These, we remember, chased away, by sometimes inelegant means, ideas which obscured reality. The Rhetoricist, for his part, jumps headlong into language to highlight its reflections (the images) and coincide with the deep ideas. This is because reality has shifted somewhat. It is no longer present in the representations of the mind which would assure us of things and the world; on the contrary, it resides in the interval between the mind and things, in the very paradox that constitutes us. It is no longer a question, as in the terrorist or Cartesian schema, of starting from one's thought to then ensure its existence. But the Rhetoricist, who exercises paradox, speaks (and thinks) as he is. He became a paradox after recognizing that he could not overcome it. “In short,” writes Jean Paulhan, “the merit of Rhetoric could well be this: it allows itself Terror... It foresees the objection (as Terror does); but it also foresees the mind which makes the objection.” Which means that in Penelope found Circe lives again. Here, however, a difficulty arises. Because Rhetoric, different in this from philosophy or morality (which are neither philosophical nor moral), must itself be rhetorician. In other words: it changes you into Rhetoric. You were Rhetoric without knowing it, and, if you come to learn it, it is to be feared that you will no longer be. This is because it is not a theory, but a way of being and doing everything together, which entails a kind of unconsciousness, a secret, hence a kind of faith. You have to marry her with your eyes closed.
Such is the pathetic contradiction that Jean Paulhan, in his entire work, tirelessly confronts. But here he makes this contradiction the only response that can be given to the paradox. For there is no possible proof of the excellence of Rhetoric. The slightest argument, or reason, that she would provide us with, would ruin her irremediably. Rhetoric cannot be demonstrated, it must be demonstrated. We can only come together in the exercise of a language which is offered to us, in its very default, as the projection of the ignored part of the mind. Today we like to repeat a formula that Jean Paulhan once suggested to us: it is the language that speaks to us. It is therefore he who, in our place, does the proof. The “gift of tongues” is nothing other than this secret.

We remember the conclusion of Les Fleurs de Tarbes: “Let’s pretend I didn’t say anything.” This is because we had to somehow invent, mimic the meaning of the work. But Paulhan's entire work could end — and open — with similar words: “Let's pretend that I didn't think anything.” It is, likewise, that the paradoxical law that we have seen at play in so many areas is certainly expressible: it cannot really be thought of, reflected. In this, the key to poetry is not different from that of criticism (nor from those of aesthetics or morality, if you like). It is therefore an inconceivable key, a key that cannot be learned in advance, a way of existing that is only expressed contradictorily: such that words can be replaced by ideas, and vice versa, without it being in any way altered. And the poet and the critic find themselves invited, in their act of creation or judgment, to create for themselves this void which is at the center of every formula, this light prop which ensures the harmony of the whole, and which is rightly called, in the case of weapons as in that of violins, their soul.
This is why Jean Paulhan mockingly refuses to demonstrate anything. I had no intention, he said, of making the slightest discovery. As for my method, it consists, in each case, of assuming the problem solved. Since we are the problem, it is our own law that we discover, it is enough for us to submit to it. Thus let us embrace, from the inside, this central attitude, this meridian point which we would strive in vain to approach from the outside, if it is only the very movement by which the mind experiences and recognizes itself. But we also know what literary and stylistic “tricks” this attitude gives rise to. In them the very soul of Rhetoric lives again, if the subject of an essay also becomes its method; if its form is none other than its content; if the philosophy expressed there is the poetry experienced there; while every argument ultimately takes on the aspect of the paradox that it is supposed to enlighten us. "It happened, we read in Key to Poetry, that my key was also my experience: and I did not find only an empty formula, but in this very experience a first law which conforms to the key... I did not propose anything that I did not suffer. It is little to make a discovery: I was the very discovery that I made."

It is by plunging into the blind spot of the mind, by nestling in the heart of the essential void which both separates and cements these ambiguous realities: words, thoughts and things, that we will enter the shadowless noon of consciousness. We are going to complain about the difficulty of this somersault. But this is just a very ordinary recovery. Fables, since the Odyssey, are full of these heroes who find on returning home (in the form, for example, of a faithful wife) the mirage that they pursued in the distance. What Jean Paulhan invites us to do, after the errors of the Terror, and of all philosophies, is quite simply to recognize our good and to return home. This is why we can well raise objections to him: we can ask him, for example, why it is necessary for us to embrace ambiguity, if we are ambiguity itself; why reality is a problem, since we are real. We will worry about knowing what could possibly determine us to choose a technique which indicates precisely that there is no reason, no sufficient proof to admit it, and that we must try it. Finally, we will say that the faith that is required of us is by definition a matter of inspiration and grace. To which Jean Paulhan will happily respond that here we are once again victims of the paradox and the temptation of pure thought. For the rest, he will be content to present to us, as he is doing today, the whole of his work (which can also pass for a humorous treatise) by telling us simply, very discreetly (and this is why I am not sure I am not forcing his words a little): “This is not a war machine, nor a diving suit intended to visit the great depths, nor a secret temple reserved only for initiates. I am not introducing you into another world than yours. I only show you that this world has two aspects, and that by dint of wanting to place yourself in the light, you ended up only seeing its dark side. Don't you know, however, that we exist in happiness as in the air? Failing to go and build cities in the countryside, we can at least bring a little of the countryside into the city: the garden of Tarbes is always open to us.