The Power of Rhetoric, the Rhetoric of Power: Jean Paulhan's Fiction, Criticism, and Editorial Activity (review)

Jean Paulhan remains one of twentieth-century literature's best-known undiscovered writers. The reasons for this apparent contradiction are not hard to find, for here was a writer given to indirection, modesty and self-effacement, with an absorbing passion for metamorphosis, reversibility and paradox. Partly as a result, however, in what is no doubt another paradox, Paulhan for almost half a century served as one of the most influential architects of modern French literature itself. In this wide-ranging and diverse collection of essays, happily coinciding with a new edition of Paulhan's complete works (of which so far only the first volume, devoted to Paulhan's stories, has appeared), and following in the wake of his 1998 monograph on the writer, Defying Gravity, Michael Syrotinski throws further welcome light on this pivotal figure. The papers contained here cover most aspects of Paulhan's work: his activities as a journal editor and critic both prior to and during his legendary residency at La Nouvelle Revue française, his longstanding interest in literary and other forms of rhetoric, his political activities under the Occupation and afterwards, not to mention his own output as the author of a series of often brief and deceptively slight fictional texts. In surveying these different areas, the purpose of the collection as a whole is both to bring them into closer proximity with one another, and to draw the lessons of Paulhan's work itself for contemporary literary theory by testing out some of the resources of that theory in engaging with Paulhan's writing. Particularly noteworthy in this context is Brigitte Ouvry-Vial's analysis of Paulhan's studied editorial self-effacement, as is Martyn Cornick's overview of Paulhan's editorial policy (and politics) during the 1930s, which goes some way towards explaining the success enjoyed by La Nouvelle Revue française in appealing to its disparate readership. Syrotinski, too, offers a suggestive account of the rhetoric of illness in Paulhan (there is no doubt a study to be written on the impact of the ailing body on modern French thought, as instanced, alongside Paulhan, by the writings of Blanchot, Barthes, Deleuze, and others). Between Paulhan's 'douleurs imaginaires' and the possibility and impossibility of death in Blanchot (which Blanchot himself explores in 'La Facilité de mourir', his 1969 tribute to Paulhan), the distance is not far, and both here and in the perceptive contributions of Kevin Newmark, Laurent Jenny and Eric Trudel, the reference to Blanchot is a significant one, even if at times the complexity of the relationship between the pair is sacrificed to rhetorical facility, as when Laurent Jenny, contrasting the reaction of the two men to de Gaulle's 1958 coup, offers a misleading and superficial account of Blanchot's politics that owes more to stereotype than to historical accuracy. But such, no doubt, is the power of rhetoric, which serves only to confirm that there is much still to be learned from Paulhan; it is at any event one of the strengths of this collection that it will encourage and enable new readers to return to Paulhan with greater understanding.