La terreur à l'oeuvre: théorie, poétique et éthique chez Jean Paulhan (review)

Jean Paulhan was a major cultural authority in France from 1925 when he became director of the NRF until his death in 1968. Nevertheless he was elusive: diffident but also cagey, a maverick but conventional too, preoccupied all his life with the "mystery" of language but given to light-weight topics in his writing such as card games, clichés, etymologies, libertinage. Michael Syrotinski says he defied gravity.¹ His sheer grace startled Maurice Blanchot, suggesting to him as it did the strange easiness of the perfectly unfeasible. "La Facilité de mourir," on Paulhan, is one of Blanchot's most unforgettable essays.

Paulhan was in the Resistance, and risked his life, which didn't stop him from remaining friends with Marcel Jouhandeau—a reactionary and anti-Semite—or from graciously attending to the art education of Gerhard Heller, an official in the Nazi's Propaganda Office. He was a founding member of the clandestine Comité des Ecrivains but broke with it after France's liberation rather than condemn collaborationist authors. He wanted to defend what he called a writer's "right to be wrong."

He was permanently fascinated by the relation between words and things, sound and meaning, sign and sense. His principal work, the long essay called Les Fleurs de Tarbes ou La terreur dans les lettres, pits "rhetoric" against "terror." By "terror" Paulhan means a hostile and intransigent demand upon language, that it get its conventional figures, its solidified tropes, its clichés and expressions toutes faites out of the way of thought. For ideas ought by rights to be utterly independent of mere words. To this "terrorism" Paulhan opposes a healthy respect for language as a shared network of commonplaces, a common supply of forms and mechanisms which, so long as they are clearly recognized as such, serve thought rather well. The essay appears to convey Paulhan's taste for rhetoric, and his distaste for terror. Moreover it establishes his commitment to maintaining, among the users of any language, an active awareness of linguistic artifice and its effectiveness in the world. However, each of the two attitudes toward language which he sets forth (the rhetorician's, the terrorist's) keeps showing up in the essay where, according to any ordinary logic, its opposite ought to appear. It is this chiasmic activity, more than anything else, that animates the entire essay, and Paulhan is anything but unaware of this.

Such undecidableness is close to what Eric Trudel means by terror in the title he's chosen for his very fine book on Paulhan: La terreur à l'oeuvre. La terreur for Trudel is an unresolvable tension, an unidentifiable difference or gap, a fissure that can't ever quite be located or accounted for—between thought and language, understanding and words, truth and fiction, the literal and the figurative. Paulhan may well be constitutionally opposed to terror—understood as the demand for pure, unadulterated meaning—and this stance may well explain certain positions he took which at first seem surprising, such as his refusal to participate in purging French letters of every disgusting trace of Collaboration after the War. Trudel is nevertheless more than justified in stressing a persistent ferment in his work that won't allow it the satisfaction of consistency and grants it no peace. Trudel doesn't aim to expose Paulhan's reliance on what he rejects (terror): he doesn't take it upon himself to "deconstruct" Paulhan. Rather, he responds to the demands of Paulhan's work, and, in the spirit of Blanchot, Paulhan's finest reader—and more recently of Michael Syrotinski and Kevin Newmark—he does that work justice.

Paulhan's language, Trudel shows, cannot represent the fault between words and ideas that sets it at odds with itself (no language can); nor can the slightest of his modest studies do without that rift. Whence, as Trudel explains, la terreur à l'oeuvre and not dans l'oeuvre or mise en...