Elements
Jean PaulhanSINGULAR REQUIREMENTS
One writer believes himself to be a priest, another a statesman, and the third a general. Valère expects from Letters what a philosopher does not always dare to hope from philosophy: he wants to know what man can do. And Gille, what he is.
It would be enough for Claude to transform our secular society forever into a sacred world. Normand, however, demands the triumph of a new ethics, which is based on crime and wonder. “Poetry,” he said with mystery, “has its means for this.” It seems to Maure sufficient, but necessary, that the writer keeps a sinking civilization above water. I don't say anything about Alert: poetry seems so serious to him that he has decided to keep silent.
I don't know if it is true that men of letters were once content to entertain honest people. At least they said so. (We must also think of the formidable meaning that distract_ can take). The most modest among us await a religion, a morality, and the meaning of life finally revealed: there is no satisfaction of the spirit that Letters does not owe them. “And who could tolerate,” a young man asks, “not being a writer?”
— What, literature is therefore equipped to deal with such problems? — I didn't say she treated them. — So what will she ask them?
I don't know anything about it. Men may have become more demanding. It is also possible that the Letters have become less generous. Everything happens as if there was something free, joyful and perhaps strange about them, of which we have lost even the idea. No longer knowing what exactly is the benefit they owe us, we would start by demanding everything. (Thus we demand ten thousand francs in court to obtain fifty).
“But that would be the best way to be disappointed. — Precisely, we are disappointed”
GREAT HOPE, GREAT FAIL
Don't look too far for what's holding you back. Audin to esteem himself: this is the book he has just written. No sooner has Valère made a precise judgment on the poet, his means and his field of work, than he apologizes and appears embarrassed. Is it he who seems to decide in this way? No, he doesn't want to stop anyone; his fantasies are valid for him alone who writes, he says, out of weakness.
“What are you going to do,” Gille was asked, “now that your novel is finished. — I will try to forget it,” said Gille.
Claude pronounces and judges, not without letting God, nature or the stars intervene: "This stinking book... — Your criticisms, he is told... — Critics! Do you take me for a man of letters?"
Who would expect from Argon a correct idea, or only an idea? It distracts, it makes you dream; Rostand is left next to him. But Argon treats literature as a cretinizing machine, and literati as crabs. If he's not a crab, we don't see what's left of him.
I'm talking about the best. How can I make them understand that they are writing? At least, says Gille, without doing it on purpose. However, Broux the novelist apologizes for his characters who, it seems, urge him to give them life. For Alerte, he would certainly prefer to use scents, noises or images than these unpleasant words. Finally, it seems that one cannot be an honest writer if one does not feel disgust for Letters. As there was no revelation that was not expected from them, there is no contempt that it did not seem to deserve. And every young man wonders with surprise how one can tolerate being a writer.
OF DISAPPOINTED BEAUTY
Not many events occur in Letters that would delight us. It would be little if it did not seem that in advance we were denying ourselves being enchanted. Whoever calls a poem or a novel “well done” means that the work is worthless. There is no beauty that holds up if it does not have its flaw or its lesion.
What remains is the character and the surprise. Now, what literature pretends to give us in this way is only to take it back immediately. This character becomes mechanical: this usual surprise, and the opposite of a surprise. Gourmont observes that any personal work — and, he adds, there is no other — is condemned to becoming obscure if it fails; banal, if it succeeds. I don't know if the remark applies to all time; but it is particularly valid for ours, where the Letters seem victims of a revolt of their material: their means turn against them, and their language disappoints them.
It seems that to become a great writer it would be enough not to seek to write. However, if we want to discover fashionable formulas and procedures, we must ask those who profess to avoid literature.
He who seeks originality at all costs loses it; and whoever flees from it, finds it. Imagination imitates, said Gide, critical mind invents.
Montagne despises the doctrine; but his work in its rigidity has the air of rhetoric that works. Phèdre wants to be all reason and wisdom; but his novels only take on meaning from a singular whim. Prévost was told that Guenne was leaving politics to devote himself to art: “It’s a great loss for art,” replied Prévost.
Finally, nothing happens in the Letters that does not happen in reverse. The happy experience, if there is one, disperses there and remains without paths or signs.
Botzarro dreamed that he had been transported to a wild country. A native taught him all the names of animals and objects in a row. It took a day, and Botzarro was already amazed at how effortlessly he could hold them. But as he was about to speak in his turn: “No,” they told him, “each word can only be used once. But let’s start again.”
We live in this country. But we can decide to get out of it.
THE CRITICISM AND THE ELEPHANT
That critics are sometimes wrong is an observation that is commonplace. But we have not sufficiently noticed what is obstinate, systematic and almost intentional in their error. The "century of criticism" is one where every good critic misunderstands the great writers of his time: it is Fontane or Planche who overwhelm Lamartine; and Nisard, Victor Hugo. We cannot read without shame what Sainte-Beuve writes about Balzac and Baudelaire; Brunetière, by Stendhal and Flaubert; Lemaître, by Verlaine and Mallarmé; Faguet, Nerval and Zola; Lasserre, Proust and Claudel. All of them, it goes without saying, ignoring Cros, Rimbaud, Villiers, Lautréamont. When Taine wants to impose his novelist, it is Hector Malot. So on. And certainly, we can judge absurd, in itself the fashionable doctrine which distinguishes the creators from the critics - the latter only good at untying the strings of the shoes of the former. (Absurd in itself, because finally the only real difference between them, and the only gap, is for the benefit of the critic. If it is given to the creator to speak of the nightingale, of the steps on the road, and of the infinite, the critic is free to speak of the infinite, of steps, of birds - and also of the poet. If it is up to the novelist to treat of love and morals, to the critic are given morals and love — and also the novelist In short, the critic has all the creator's subjects at his disposal, plus one). Absurd, yes. But it nevertheless triumphed, if the critics for a hundred and forty years have taken nothing so much as the task of resembling the baroque and distorted image that the Terror had formed of them. They do it quite well.
We have seen how they achieve this, and by what means. If critical language carries a triple secret cipher, and such that humanity, life and just as well images or style mean, on a first level, discoveries in the order of style or humanity; but, on a second floor, clearance of everything that can mask humanity and authentic style; that is to say, in the end, the commonplaces and clichés of style and image, of humanity and life: language in its place in what it is most banal, most accepted - finally there remains for criticism, to mark that it sees itself placed before the new work which it never ceased obscurely to seek, only one resource: it is to admit its own disarray, its uncertainty, its contradiction. She forms an ideal such that she can finally recognize it only through its injustice towards her, as soon as it is realized. The error of Sainte-Beuve or Brunetière, of Lemaître or Fague is the only sort of homage that their doctrine allowed them to pay to Balzac, to Baudelaire, to Nerval, to Zola. They didn't miss it.
Fabre, when he described the effort that the sacred beetle puts in kneading the pill in which it will enclose its egg, adds curiously that the organs of this insect seemed to destin it for an entirely different activity, and that there is nothing it is naturally more adept at than kneading and kneading. “The idea came to me,” he said, “from an elephant who wanted to make lace.” So are the reviews. I want each of their constructions to be ingenious and plausible: their doctrine gradually ruins them and undermines them from within, and finally leaves them with no other testimony, in the face of authentic work, than uncertainty and contradiction. What! They wanted it in their secret. They themselves chose to be elephants.
TERROR FINDS ITS PHILOSOPHER
It is curious to observe the extent to which Begson's reflections on language — and this fragile and ever-restarting language: literature — have become true. As if we had only been waiting for them. As if we finally knew what to expect from them.
Bergson writes as follows:
"The novelist, tearing the skillfully woven web (— woven by intelligence and even more by language —) of our conventional self, shows us under this apparent logic a fundamental absurdity, under this juxtaposition of simple states an infinite penetration".
I hesitate to recognize here Balzac, Eliot, Tolstoy and the other novelists that Bergson could read. But the remark becomes admirably accurate as soon as we think of Proust or Joyce.
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Bergson readily speaks of the obstacle that words oppose to the poet, where the essential of thought vanishes without recourse: this element "confused, infinitely mobile, inappreciable, without reason, delicate and fugitive... which language cannot grasp without fixing its mobility or adapting it to its banal form".
There can be no question here of Rimbaud, Baudelaire or Mallarmé. One brings to language a magical confidence, the second reasoned, and the last mystical. Rather, we would see there the very soul of the poetry of an Apollinaire or a Fargue, with this secret desire to humiliate language - sometimes to start it again, always to be better than it.
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Bergson sees, in the critic's research, only an effort to approach as closely as possible and reproduce in oneself "as a passerby joins in a dance" the act, by which the poet or novelist "immaterial, distracted, abandoning all prejudices of form, renouncing generalities and symbols... perceives things in their original reality."
No, this is not Sainte-Beuve, Brunetière, nor Faguet. But I recognize Thibaudet there, for whom "the ideal of the critic is to coincide with the creative spirit of the novelist". Or Charles du Bos, busy avoiding "the unconscious need for symmetry which would, by crystallizing the fluid forms of spiritual life, separate the critic from the creator whom he follows in his tracks..."
...and finally criticism as a whole, the secret of which we have grasped. As if the Terror - which finds its maneuver from the first day, Sainte-Beuve; a little later his doctrinaire, Taine; then its scholars, its collectors, its men of the world: Faguet, Schwob, Lemaître; his great inquisitors, Brunetière, Gourmont—had waited until around 1900 for his philosopher, Bergson.
THE DUC DE BRÉCÉ READS DETECTIVE NOVELS
Everyone knows that there are, these days, two literatures: the bad one, which is strictly illegible, and the good one, which cannot be read. This is what has been called (among other names) the divorce of the writer and the public.
The Library of the Dukes of Brécé, which had housed all the great books of the 18th century, received from 1800 to 1850 only Chateaubriand, Guizot, Marchangy. After 1850, two or three brochures relating to Pius XI and a panegyric of Joan of Arc. It wasn't much. Charles Maurras explains that the fault is not with the Brécés, but with the writer alone; to its anarchic declarations as to its abstruse cryptograms, where good Society finds nothing that attaches to it or interests it: nothing that it must encourage.
It may be. And yet I hardly see any enigma or cryptogram — even if it is anarchic or revolutionary — that does not first receive the support of the best society. Difficult journals appear on luxury paper; what is read on candle paper is always wise and very clear. And the Duke of Brécé are famous today for their collections of Sade manuscripts and surrealist invectives. I believe that we must look elsewhere for the reason for a divorce,
the other side of which is this: we curiously see triumphing in our days, and covering the earth, the only genre which obeys stricter rules than the tragedy of Voltaire or the ode of Malherbe. I mean this kind of novel which prohibits itself from the realm of moods, dreams, daydreams, presentiments, psychological analysis; in the characters, the metaphysician, the occultist, the member of a secret society, the great traveler, the Hindu, the Chinese, the Malay; on the level of sensitivity, the picturesque, the baroque, the excessive; of intelligence, myths, symbols, allusions — and follows, in its progress, a rigorous order to the point of presenting, from the first chapter, all the elements — characters, places, objects — of a problem, which will not be resolved until the last pages.
We readily admit, when it comes to explaining the success of the detective novel, (and the democrats first and foremost, I regret to say) that the public is stupid, and is satisfied with not much: a few murders, a crude style, an elementary psychology. But I would willingly wonder if it is not subtle to the point of experiencing — if not understanding them — the effect of the various traits and arguments that a stubborn analysis can discover, to the glory of rhetoric. In short, if he doesn't like the detective novel for what makes the detective novel the essential character.
Here is what one could say in support of this hypothesis (which I venture timidly). First of all, the detective novel, if it were well written, would undoubtedly sell no less; nor the literary novel any more, if it were poorly written. Then, it is not improbable, if the links and connections of rhetoric have the effect of taking us to a particular nature of thought, that an instinct, an intuition, warns us (without allowing us to express it) of the presence of this nature - and all the more surely since it is in fact what escapes, by nature, from language, from reflection.
They will tell me that the experience has already been done. But I wonder if it is not vitiated, more often than not, by an error of principle. In fact, there remains, in detective novels written "in the literary style", some sort of condescension which humiliates the reader no less than the author. The heart, as they say, is not in it. It's as if we had aimed for the success of the detective novel rather than its reason. But who on the contrary would fix this reason, it would probably not take more to extend to the entire Letters the outline of reconciliation, which the detective novel offers us.
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SMALL LANGUAGE INCIDENT IN THE LANGELON FAMILY
A cousin of the Langelons went to spend fifteen years of her life in Canada. When she returned, it was discovered that she spoke in proverbs, and had the rage to say at every opportunity “A word to the wise”, or “For the lack of a point...”. There was also a certain solemn way of pronouncing “hysteria”, or “bad symptom”, which brought joy to the family. The Langelons, young and old, got into the habit of saying, jokingly: “Fault of a point, like cousin Henriette”; or again: “Bad symptom, bad symptom” while nodding a little. This took on many meanings: it was said of a self-righteous and polite person, it was also said (not without irony) about a disappointment: “As Henriette says...” (the rest goes without saying). A few years later, a curious event happened.
It was because the friends and neighbors of the Langelons noticed, to their surprise, that the Langelons — who had always mocked banal phrases — had in turn begun to speak in proverbs, saying all the time: “Like Henriette...” or “For lack of a point...” The wise men recalled that Henry Monnier had become a sort of Joseph Prudhomme; Alfred Jarry, a Father Ubu. The imprudent people made a new proverb which began with: “Like a Langelon…” It is likely that they were caught in turn. And, if we think about it, the Langelons' misadventure was inevitable.
Because their first astonishment, having little experience with proverbs, was, by their own admission, due to the fact that Henriette constantly brought out her “good listener” and her “symptom” - It was (they said) manic, automatic, she repeated the same sentences all the time. However, repeating them in turn, and even with irony, about the most dissimilar events, they did not take care that they insensibly became the names of these events. Hence the gap in meaning and the irony gradually faded away. And certainly their “symptom” was not quite that of cousin Henriette: it was less serious, and one could have called it more accurately, most of the time, an appearance or false symptom. (This is how I heard them talking, on a walk, about a cloud, too light to bring rain; at home, about two knives crossed - but they were not superstitious.) It doesn't matter: from the moment the “symptom” regularly designated the appearance or the illusion, it became the name without any further irony.
Cousin Henriette later recognized that for her too the proverbs had initially been, in Canada, only irony and defense. Thus Flaubert patiently draws up a list of “received ideas” that must be avoided, and then composes his books — his language. Shyly at first, in Madame Bovary; without any further reservation, in Bouvard et Pécuchet (and we know to what extent Flaubert himself had become Bouvard). So again, Moréas patiently pursues commonplaces to the point that persecution makes them new to him... But this is pushing the Langelon proverb too far.
METAMORPHOSE OF RHETORIC
Part of the science of doctors consists of artificially returning to patients the phosphorus or lime that they have spent too much - and thus recomposing a normal man. So with rhetoricians, of whom the wisest thing we can say is that by restoring to our thought the part of links and connections, of which the gaze deprives it, they reform by artifice an authentic thought, before consciousness. If Olympio's regret, if Phèdre's desire or Athalie's argument resemble our passions and our true arguments a little more than the distorted image we take of them, it is thanks to rhymes, to the unity of time and place, to the dilemma. There is no abstract combination here, however arbitrary, which does not bring us closer to a truth - from which nothing distances us more than the spontaneous gaze, the awareness. Whoever wants to know himself, let him open a book.
I did not say that rhetoric was in the least easy to handle, or natural. And on the contrary, he is aware that his employment - and even more so his maintenance - will encounter serious difficulties.
Because rhetoric does not entirely lie to us, undoubtedly, when it promises us access to the purest of the spirit. It is also necessary to observe that they do not reach this spirit directly, but sideways and following an oblique path. Let's say better: by illusion. The process of rhetoric, as we have analyzed it, consists of throwing us into such a language embarrassment that we are forced to cling to thought. We think of other tricks of the same order. The child, whose mother orders him to go buy bread, can, if he manages to obtain from his father the order not to leave the house, find himself as free as he was earlier to go out or stay: he only has to deal with his preferences. Thus the reader, who hesitates if he comes up against a sentence arranged anew and combined for the occasion, or on the contrary naive and spontaneous, finds himself free, at the meeting of these two orders, in the apprehension of a meaning which, at least for him, has not varied.
Whoever would like, in this sense, to complete rhetoric, would quickly find themselves forced to complicate and infinitely multiply the possible orders of sentences; to constantly provoke new doubts about them (since this doubt is the very condition of accession to the idea); to vary their form indefinitely, or better to reduce this form to the most abstract expression possible; in short, to present no commonplace that is not capable of a thousand different phrases.
I say nothing that experience does not verify. While Terror, which condemns them, complacently displays its lists of commonplaces (from heady atmosphere to precocious perversity), rhetoric, which praises them, conceals its own so well that one would believe them lost. The very definitions she gives are influenced by this dissimulation, this vagueness. The place, says Vico, is every element of speech, and like the letters of which it is composed. Any phenomenon of the idea, says Aristotle. Let us understand that there is nothing that is not commonplace: modes of reasoning, methods of exposition, images, tropes, rules, and even the slightest feeling that comes to the mind of an author, everything goes there - as long as we avoid the formula and the stereotypical sentence which could not obtain the singular benefit of the doubt. But who does not see, therefore, that rhetoric is capable of progress.
It would be enough for it to frankly admit its true purpose: and limit its effort to proscribing formulas, banal images, rules that are too obvious and about which no doubt is possible. That it finally demands difference and originality — not of the work alone, but of the author, who commissions the work. Or even the distraction and the absence of this author (so that the clichés, if there are still any - and which are Would you be wise to avoid them all? — could at least give rise to doubt). Pushing further — why not? — she could just as easily present, before this author, the formidable myth of an invasive language. But we have seen enough that rhetoric, as soon as it is separated from its legend, and restored to its true demands, has no other resource than to continue in Terror.
ONE SPECTATOR IS ENOUGH TO CHANGE THE SHOW
It is more or less accepted that we can look, without our gaze altering anything, at the events that surround us and accompany us: an object that falls, a tree that catches fire, water that boils. Science is at this price, and we know what difficulties await it as soon as it wants to carry out its investigations on the scale where the spectator - and the only light by which it shines - changes the spectacle by its presence. (This is how the electron sees its position or its speed altered by the luminous photon that the observer brings into play to grasp it.) But on the contrary there are objects that the gaze immediately modifies, and spectacles that cannot stand the spectator.
These are the words.
The thing is happening in the place of I don't know what haunting. Who among us has not tried looking for a long time, patiently, until it moved a little (he hoped) at a ball of cotton, a box of matches? Who among us has not tried one day to make it rain, to summon the sun, by the sole force of his gaze? This is not always admitted, I know that well. Let's say it was in childhood. But it at least leaves memories and traces.
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We know well that it is enough to pay attention to a word, to repeat it, to pursue it, to transform it: and sometimes to the point of losing its meaning, and no longer hold before our eyes anything but absurd and devoid of reason sounds. But sometimes also, more often than not, to the point of obtaining other words, sometimes close to the first and sometimes very different, which rise from this ruin. Salary can take me to salt marshes, to salt, to salt, to sale. Cemetery leads me to scimitar, to top, to earth. But a simpler word, salt or sand, may very well just decompose, no longer evoke anything of value, be lost in the sand.
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Science, seriousness, method come into play here. They decree that evocation is sometimes legal, and sometimes detestable. It may well be — and that sel (which is, they say, “etymology”) is highly recommendable, but sale (which is “pun”) absurd. But the biases of science are not ours. That if it is the current meaning of salary, it has hardly more links with salt than with sale, and a professor, Mr. Bally, was able to write an excellent work whose whole point is to establish that etymological research misleads the student about the meaning and use of the words he learns (1). Moreover, it is exactly following the same approach and by the same path that the attention paid to the word makes us discover both.
The curious point would rather be in the hope that etymological research naturally gives rise to in us. It is very appropriate to admit (I quote the scholars) that it reveals to us — or at least must one day reveal to us — the past of man and the world, our own history, the original meaning of words...
It still may be. I don't know anything about it. Everyone is free to wait for such revelations - where I at least find the trouble and the hope that this cause of etymology (like a pun) aroused in us: the effect of our attention, and of a somewhat prolonged look at the words.
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The fact remains that this singular effect lends itself to infinite variations: sometimes absurd and sometimes revealing. Sometimes which jumps out at us; and sometimes almost erased, which disperses and vanishes. The most elusive of all. Except...
There is a whole order of words - and we immediately imagine how valuable they should be to us - where this uncertain, capricious, elusive effect is constant, and as if codified. Where the pun and the etymology merge; where our gaze and our attention produce only one effect — so that this effect becomes clear, expected — but our gaze also perfectly regular, easy to grasp, easy to know.
This is the commonplace. We can clearly see that it is different to casually say point-du-jour, carte blanche, murderous pleasure, and to say them with attention. It is first of all that they are simple to those who say them like other words, and complex on the contrary to those who watch themselves say them: here, real sentences, with their links, their details, their reflections and their metaphors and there simple words, seemingly indecomposable. But there is more.
This is because negligence gives us a fact, and reflection the origin of this fact. If “I give you carte blanche” has a simple meaning, it is because there was a card to begin with, and that was white. If Pas-perdus is the name of a room, it is because we first lost our steps there. In short, the commonplace is the point in language where the attention we pay to words has a regular, constant effect on them - where this attention can therefore be seen determined from this effect, defined by this effect. Where we finally know what a look heavy with consequences carries with it.
This is undoubtedly where it comes from that all research, which relates to expression, attacks (most rightly) the commonplace. It is a shorthand language; a language, and the way we look at it.
1 - Here we should note that the etymology changes: Plato's explanations seem absurd to us today. And even those that were given, fifty years ago, of the most common French words. The etymology never ceases to be a pun in history. And the reverse.↩
Text published in the magazine Mesures, October 15, 1938 - No. 4.