La Littérature selon Jean Paulhan ed. by Clarisse Barthélemy (review)

It seems that about once every decade since Jean Paulhan’s death in 1968 an important collection of essays appears that manages to capture the best of what each successive generation of new and seasoned Paulhan scholars alike has to say about his work (starting with the commemorative issue of the Nouvelle Revue française in 1969, through a couple of Cerisy colloquia, and most recently the special issue of Yale French Studies in 2004). This volume, based on a conference on ‘Jean Paulhan et l’idée de littérature’ at the IMEC in 2011, is the latest in that line, and builds on the insights of these previous publications, as well as benefiting from the ever-expanding complete works in the Gallimard Blanche series, under the peerless editorial eye of Bernard Baillaud, and of newly accessible (though sometimes still unpublished) correspondence. The essays in this volume are grouped under three broad rubrics of Paulhan as reader/editor, Paulhan as writer, and Paulhan as theoretician of literature. Many of the essays in the first section (Cornick, Alexandre, Fischbach, Tubman-Mary) probe deeper into the fascinating literary relationships that are revealed through his exchanges with writers such as Armand Petitjean, Paul Claudel, Francis Ponge, or Jules Supervielle. They all show the extent to which these exchanges helped Paulhan develop and test out his own ideas about literature, and also, in talking to writers about other writers, how much he used his epistolary activity to weave the very fabric of a literary community in France (and of which he became the ‘directeur de conscience littéraire’, p. 63) during his time at the helm of the NRF. The section on Paulhan the writer takes us back to his early writings on Malagasy proverbs, his unfinished doctoral thesis (Coustille), and his récits (Murat), where his ideas about literature were already in embryonic form. Other articles by Bartolo, Monginot, Rand, and Michelet look anew at Paulhan’s key texts, such as Les Fleurs de Tarbes or Clef de la poésie, demonstrating their continued resonance and relevance for us today. Others (Barthélemy, Milne, Sallenave) break new ground, not just by underlining his central importance to the French literary scene in the first half of the twentieth century, but by demonstrating the originality of his thinking about the idea of literature, and the literary act, which extends a long way back in literary history, and points forward to more recent, often radical theorizations. Sallenave shows us the sophistication of his philosophical reflections, and indeed their systematic nature beneath the apparent heterogeneity of his references, and, in a subtle and persuasive argument, Milne articulates this systematicity as an elusive ‘désir de loi’ (p. 278) informing Paulhan’s idea of literature, and bringing it into rich theoretical dialogue with Roland Barthes, Barbara Cassin, and Giorgio Agamben. All in all, then, this is a stimulating, insightful, and timely collection, and points to a future for Paulhan scholarship that is brighter than ever. Let us just hope we will not have to wait a decade for the next instalment.