Letters to Marthe de Fels
Jean PaulhanSaint-John PerseMay 31, 1963
Very dear friend, excuse this strange paper. I am in the fields, and find no other. I would like to tell you this “end of the enigmas”, before writing it completely. So please give me a little patience.
It would be incredible if Perse had not known the secret I am looking for (a little painfully). Since he wrote the very work, the secret of which I seek. It would be no less incredible if he had not told us – to the extent that the thing can be said – everything he knew, that we simply have to understand. What did he say?
First of all, he is himself assailed by ambiguities, “bilingual among all bilingual things”, speaking in equivocation. But what ambiguities? Obviously, those first with which the man Alexis Léger had to deal: Asia on one side, the West on the other; power and stripping; adornment and nudity.
Further on, those that must be faced, those to which every man and particularly every poet is exposed: good versus evil (from which follow praise or blame), dream and action, spirit and matter (in our case, the idea and the word). And how can we escape so many ambiguities? Here, Perse hands us a second key.
It is, in man, this strange power of which we are not the masters – and all our reasoning and ways of seeing, all our logic would come to break – this “big girl”, whose ways differ from ours, adventurous in love with her risk even in death. In short, it’s the soul. But what is the soul?
Here, Perse hands us a third key. (No, I'm not proud of this methodical, academic look. But what! I wouldn't want to forget anything.)
When Crusoe, among men, whose smell is that of a slaughterhouse, cries over the sobbing of bells, then he reopens the Book which gives him back the joy of Heaven and the delights of Earth: behold, he is insensibly reconquered by his soul.
What a book: no it was not the Divine Comedy nor the De natura rerum that the English sailors carried in their bags. And what is the soul, according to the Bible?
Anyone who has never read the Bible, or who has read it (this is my case) lightly, encounters a surprise here: it is that the soul in this old Book is not at all – as it seems to have been for certain Greeks – a fine almond, a kernel of the spirit; nor – as many fetishists suppose – a deep recess of the body (sometimes housed in the belly, and sometimes in the penis). No, the soul does not inhabit the body, it is the body; it does not reside in the mind, it is the mind. It forms an indivisible whole where the dream does not differ from the action, nor the idea from the word. And all ambiguity is abolished there.
There are abolished, at the same time, the ambiguities which preoccupied Persia, and between which he found himself torn. That if the body, with regard to the soul, is one with the spirit, matter with thought, it will therefore be enough to submit to this soul – so that it applies the same treatment to them – these other ambiguities of dream and action (the dream relating to the spirit and the action of the body) of good and evil, of (material) power and the (spiritual) stripping of adornment and nudity. It means erasing the ambiguities, and the “melee of eagles and brambles”.
However, is it possible for us to think the soul, to form the idea of it? In short, to think of opposites as if they were one? Ah, that's another question. At least I see that it is possible to approach it through images and metaphors: the wind, the subtle movements of blood in the vessels, of breath in the lungs. To which Saint-Léger adds: the pools of lucid water, the explosive soul of the tars.
But it cannot be enough to approach it like this.
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June 1, 1963
Dear Marthe, I will continue (if I don’t bore you too much). Well, the fact is that there was no shortage of authors who held that such thinking was natural, and even desirable. It is Christ who says: “When you consider the outside for the inside, and the inside for the outside, from that day you will have entered the Kingdom.” And Lie-Tseu: “The wise man takes good for evil, and evil for good.” To which Al Junayd adds “the past for the future and the future for the past”; and the author of the Bhagavad-Gità: “the plan for the act and the act for the plan, the word for the idea and the idea for the word.” More than one remark is necessary here. First of all, it is an eminently religious or sacred thought, and it is no coincidence that we first encounter it in the Bible, and among the prophets or founders of religion: Christ, the masters of the Tao, the Sufis, the unknown authors of the Upanisads. This is not to embarrass us, if we know since Boccaccio that all authentic poetry is theology. Moreover, metaphysicians and poets do not separate themselves here from the prophets: Nicholas of Cusa, Master Eckhart, Hölderlin see in the identity of opposites the approach, and as it were already the presence, of God. It is the same God designated by the Greek word logos which means, like soul, both thought and words.
There is more: we can know how and why this kind of thinking is religious. This is because it comes from a thought – if you like, from a view of the mind much more general than any other, and strictly speaking universal, which would be called quite exactly Totality, or Unity. Many a thinker, many a poet recognizes that he pursues, through essays, stories or poems, a simplification of the world, such that opposites are no longer contrary; nor, a fortiori, the different, different. More than one epic or novel, which deals openly with love, money, adventure, secretly deals with the services that the Devil renders to God; and Evil with Good, until it merges with it. Hermes Trimégistus, Plato, Scotus Eriugena call for the fusion of man and woman in androgyny. The same fear governs all folklore in this sense: it holds that the current divisions of the world are not worthy of lasting.
It is a secret haunting, and a hidden thought. Because any precise expression that we would like to give would not avoid separating the spectator who judges it from the world – thereby introducing into this world a new division, even more serious – in any case as serious – as all those from which we have rid him. We don't hide it from us. It is after seven years of effort, says one, that the wise man manages to possess such a truth which condemns him to silence. And the other: whoever knows how to interpret my words will not know death. Who will know... who succeeds... this is not to say that the truth in question is easy to understand. Easy to say, it may be. (We saw it.) As for thinking about it, that's another matter. Scientists place in the human unconscious all kinds of fears, dictated by laws, morals and resentments. But here is an inevitable unconscious, which is commanded by the very condition [to the mystery, to the allusion, to the silence, touching the essential] of thought – and of which the others would be, at best, only small change.
And by what traits will the presence of such an unconscious be revealed, by what traits will it be revealed? We will be able, I imagine, to find the trace of its passage wherever some object of the world is deprived of its determinations: of its essential difference. Wherever we recognize a story without past or present – to take these examples alone – an epic without heroes, praise without reason, a speech without words, a work without an author. But it's time to return to Persia. Goodbye, dear friend. See you tomorrow at the end.
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June 2, 1963
Dear friend, perhaps you think I am too long (I do). But let me tell you what we both think. This is because Perse is a normal poet. With him poetry ceases to be sporadic, and language uncertain. He finds, without having apparently sought it, poetic delight. It forms the plan, and draws the broad outlines of a universal language: a strangely accomplished work, and suitable for crossing, without losing its virtue, the screens of various languages. As if Perse found himself placed, more than any other writer, in the true of expression. Now it still seems that this truth is accompanied in him by a knowledge, and as if by a revelation, sacred. I see Perse at the origin of a new literature, and perhaps of a new life. In short, we cannot examine with too much care – too slowly – the work of this future ancestor. I return to my puzzles.
To detect the secret, I had to divide Perse's work into various parts, and my essay into chapters corresponding to its parts. This is how I successively examined the literary genre to which it belongs – it was the epic genre; then the morals which it displays [I mean by morals in the sense of grammarians and rhetoricians, the set of feelings and approaches by which an author gains the confidence of his reader] ; finally, the very elements, words and sentences, that she assembles. Now each of the studies which followed, at first glance satisfactory and plausible, did not take long to turn into error and confusion: the epic ceased to be an epic, the praise turned into blame, the metaphor was the opposite of a metaphor: this confusion worsened from page to page, until it imposed on the entire work, further than genre, morals and passion, further even than words and sentences, a new unexpected unity. This is what the apparent meaning of this unity was.
The animation of a literary work is most often due to the play of two contrary elements, which fight each other: dream and action, good and evil; inspiration and words (which sometimes serve it and sometimes ruin it) [so many subjects equally ready to lose their natural qualities, to take on the opposite qualities]. Now it seemed in Persia that these elements were reduced to just one. His epic certainly showed us heroes, but they were heroes without dreams or plans, indifferent to success or failure: the Rains, the Snows, the Winds, the high Waterspouts on a journey. Inspiration took place in words and sentences: “My poem, says Perse, which was not written.” The praise left not the slightest room for blame. “Living things, O excellent things.” This is the apparent aspect and this is what the hidden aspect was:
This is because the chosen element happened, in one way or another, to contain the refused element. The praise was not so decisive that it did not seem to stand between good and evil at the sole whim of the writer – Jouve could write, not lightly: “Persia, poet of essential misfortune.” Nor the inspiration, so pure that it does not associate – even if it means ignoring or ignoring them – the most complex and subtle tropes. Even the snows and the rains had a soul: they came to wash the vellums, parchments and stones of the taint of language.
An unusual atmosphere ensues. Perse, who recognizes him, is surprised and seems to apologize for having become this man infested with dreams, “won by divine infection”. What infection, or what god?
What a god, what an infection, we now know, and that infection or god are the words that serve us to name a world without details or divisions, or even the opposites are one: if you prefer, an absolute world. And about this world, what do we have left to say? This can be: it is that indivisible from the front, we still have the resource of provoking it, of suffering it, in some way, of seeing it sideways. This is the task of the poet. This is perhaps the task of every man who speaks and expresses, and knows how to support the clarity of his speech with this fundamental obscurity. (Thus the masters of art say: if you want to bring light to your painting, start by putting shadows.)
Here I wonder one more thing: if everything I have just said was not so obvious that it would hardly be worth saying. Believe in all the affection of
Jean Paulhan